Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
February 28, 2013
Edmonton Public Library·Feb 28, 2013
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt: EPL presented Chris Hedges to launch Freedom to Read Week 2013 in Edmonton. Chris spoke about injustice and corporate greed in America…and argued Canada is travelling the same path.
[Q&A starts at 1:08:00]
Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His latest books are Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Death of the Liberal Class, and The World as It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
see
Tangerine Bolen: #StopNDAA Lawsuit Update + Alexa O’Brien: Mainstream Still Silent on #NDAA
Perils of the Keystone XL Pipeline Confront Obama by Ralph Nader
Obey–Film Based on Chris Hedges’ Death of the Liberal Class
NDAA: Hedges v. Obama: Did The Bill of Rights Die Today? by Jill Dalton
from the archives:
Black Bloc: The cancer of the system
John Pilger: The War You Don’t See
Finding Freedom in Handcuffs by Chris Hedges (partial transcript)
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This is probably the best version of Chris Hedge’s deeply eloquent, intellectually substantial lecture I have yet heard.
So important, so articulate and finely honed now; a great Q&A.
There is a point at which the grand socialist narrative however incisive, performs a subtle elision, and that is on the point of law itself. Hedge’s account of the progressive exponential reliance by the US government on suspect litigious process, reveals its ultimate vulnerability.
What may be assumed by force of political habit or reflex, to be “power’s” greatest strength, is actually its greatest flaw ~ because of its utter dependence on this process. Behind every facade, whether corporate, religious, social and/or political is an imperfect human agent. How that agent articulates’s their “legitimacy” is now the clinching factor that will determine public awareness of how the mutating social contract is being renegotiated; particularly now that so much open debate is conducted through the Internet.
Hedges’ Zucotti observations are absolutely crucial (in the Q&A.)
As Adam Curtis notes, the Internet frames power, but it also needs our participatory power; so we should not let ourselves be mesmerised by our own reflections; we must remember that although this communication engine may be an instrument of change; as such it is still a symbolic artifact, a product of human ingenuity.
The “language of pain” is irrelevant, since the pain of the world is so absolute; it is the “language of law” that is changing the game ~ what we concede is lawful, and how power may be limited in the exercise of such lawfulness.
If the US side of the pipeline is blocked, the pressure on Western Canada will be immense, so we must support Idle No More.
We need not only to close down the tar-sands as efficiently as possible, but more to the point, we must act to arrest and dissolve the lethal company interests that are, even right now, arranging to expand this ecocidal “technology” into Congo!