Narrated by Eunice Wong
Text originally published 02/19/2023
Murder King - by Mr. Fish
Idolatry is the primal sin from which all other sins derive. Idols tempt us to become God. They demand the sacrifice of others in the mad quest for wealth, fame or power. But the idol always ends by requiring self-sacrifice, leaving us to perish on the blood-soaked altars we erected for others.
For empires are not murdered, they commit suicide at the feet of the idols that entrance them.
We are here today to denounce the unelected, unaccountable high priests of Empire, who funnel the bodies of millions of victims, along with trillions of our national wealth, into the bowels of our own version of the Canaanite idol, Moloch.
The political class, the media, the entertainment industry, the financiers and even religious institutions bay like wolves for the blood of Muslims or Russians or Chinese, or whoever the idol has demonized as unworthy of life. There were no rational objectives in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Somalia. There are none in Ukraine. Permanent war and industrial slaughter are their own justification. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman earn billions of dollars in profits. The vast expenditures demanded by the Pentagon are sacrosanct. The cabal of warmongering pundits, diplomats and technocrats, who smugly dodge responsibility for the array of military disasters they orchestrate, are protean, shifting adroitly with the political tides, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Julien Benda called these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.”
These pimps of war do not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every lifeless body I stood over as a reporter in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Bosnia, or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, intellectual dishonesty, sick bloodlust and delusional fantasies. They are puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the weapons manufacturers who lavishly fund their think tanks: Project for the New American Century, Foreign Policy Initiative, American Enterprise Institute, Center for a New American Security, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institute. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories of global dominance, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many they condemn to death. They are immovable props, parasites vomited up in the dying days of all empires, ready to sell us the next virtuous war against whoever they have decided is the new Hitler. The map changes. The game is the same.
Pity our prophets, those who wander the desolate landscape crying out in the darkness. Pity Julian Assange, undergoing a slow-motion execution in a high-security prison in London. He committed Empire’s fatal sin. He exposed its crimes, its machinery of death, its moral depravity.
A society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.
Some here today might like to think of themselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But what we are demanding on the political spectrum is, in fact, conservative: the restoration of the rule of law. It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning republic, be incendiary. But living in truth in a despotic system, one the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism,” is subversive.
The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious mouth pieces in the media and academia, are illegitimate. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins. Prove this truth, as Julian did, and you are crucified.
“Red Rosa now has vanished too…” Bertolt Brecht wrote of the murdered socialist Rosa Luxemburg. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.”
We have undergone a corporate coup d'état, where the poor and working men and women, half of whom lack $400 to cover an emergency expense, are reduced to chronic instability. Joblessness and food insecurity are endemic. Our communities and cities are desolate. War, financial speculation, constant surveillance and militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation are the only real concerns of the state. Even habeas corpus no longer exists. We, as citizens, are commodities to corporate systems of power, used and discarded. And the endless wars we fight overseas have spawned the wars we fight at home, as the students I teach in the New Jersey prison system are acutely aware. All empires die in the same act of self-immolation. The tyranny the Athenian empire imposed on others, Thucydides noted in his history of the Peloponnesian war, it finally imposed on itself.
To fight back, to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet from ecocide, to decry the domestic and international crimes of the ruling class, to demand justice, to live in truth, to smash the graven images, is to bear the mark of Cain.
Those in power must feel our wrath, which means constant acts of non-violent civil disobedience, social and political disruption. Organized power from below is the only power that can save us. Politics is a game of fear. It is our duty to make those in power very, very afraid.
The ruling oligarchy has us locked in its death grip. It cannot be reformed. It obscures and falsifies the truth. It is on a maniacal quest to increase its obscene wealth and unchecked power. It forces us to kneel before its false gods. And so, to quote the Queen of Hearts, metaphorically, of course, I say, “Off with their heads!”
Love that your calling out these corrupt and intellectually vacant think tanks and the weapons manufacturers who fund them. You’re writing is an inspiration to me, Mr. Hedges. Thank you for the important work you are doing to speak the truth in a world of lies.
The most awful thing about war and the cheerleading that seems to accompany it.......is the terrible silence. I know there are many who do not approve of this war or any wars for that matter, I know there are also many who know America and her history of interference around the globe...I know that a goodly number of these cynics are American.
But the MSM reports on Ukraine as if there is a consensus....as if its obvious that there will be no negotiations....as if the blame game more than makes up for the dead on both sides. And the simplicity of the reports, the lack of any contradictory perspectives create a kind of rigid boredom....a stunned disbelief that makes one reluctant to turn on any news at all.
This speech is terrifying by contrast.......because it describes vividly, the reasons for the sense of dullness and inevitability that hegemonic coverage of the war present. What is inevitable it turns out....is the death of the American military Empire....we aren't winning in the west, we are losing
And what it seems we have most lost, is our capacity to break the imperial silence. Now when I find myself yelling at the CBC newscast, for the stupidity of its war coverage, I can remember Chris Hedges' condemnation, and feel a little less alone.
Not a lot alone, but a little less. There are still too few voices raised......and none of them to be found on the traditional media. It seems it is very late. We should all be terrified. Instead, most of us seem to have lost our tongues, or else have been convinced that Putin's transgressions makes it all inevitable. Thank God for Hedges.....I just wish my friends read him.
Another excellent account of the decaying US Empire. I live in South America and it cannot come soon enough. Thank you for always speaking truth to power.
It takes courage to speak truth to power. And you have done so, once again....
Brilliant! Pure poetry, pure truth. Thank you!
I saw your speech, and your chat with Max B, on the Grayzone You Tube channel, Chris.
I so appreciated your talk / sermon. The history, the classics, and the classical delvery help me not miss church.
Thinking of that scene in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" when Freder imagines he sees workers being fed to Moloch.
Your words are medicine to the soul; and though healing is not yet possible, they sure lessen the pain. Thank you Chris Hedges
Thank you !!
THIS Is Why The Deep State Turned Against Trump – Feb. 19, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHRkTfB1prY
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1627098945359867904
Matt Taibbi -- @mtaibbi
TWITTER FILES #16 -- Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment
"The LORD, the God of their fathers, sent persistently to them by his messengers, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place. But they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets, until the wrath of the LORD rose against his people, until there was no remedy." 2Chronicles36. I pray it is not too late for us.
The only Russia expert I trust is Mark Twain. He understood and spoke and thought in Russian. The American Claimant may be the greatest American story every translated from the Russian The humour was so truthful the pain was excruciating.
I understand the outrage but this isn't about Russia and Ukraine it about me and all those like me . People like Zelenskiy who want to be themselves not the property of Washington or Moscow. We remember Iran wanted to be free and democratic so did Cuba and Venezuela and now Ukraine. I give America my Quebec driving finger some may re call it as the fickle finger of fate and as Twain said Every sane person on the planet knows what to do with Russian autocrats.
Here in Quebec we must speak French to keep our really big secret in Quebec Bernie Sanders is center right and superstitious nonsense is banned in public schools and public sanctuaries. We teach evolution in Chemistry, physics math , science, literature and sociology we teach religion as literature myth entertainment and legend.
Who among us doesn't like sacrificing their first born?
This is breathtakingly precise on every level visited, my avidly divine altruism is with all who serve in such realm. (authormichaelsampson.com)
They say I am autistic that my perceptions are somehow flawed. I don't know how to explain that a century and 15 years ago Russia was the mightiest Empire the World had ever known before the Revolution.
I was up at 5AM your time watching Vlad the Impaler. There right up front in the audience was the head of the Patriarchs assuring the faithful that God was on Dracula's side.
I never know what to say to Americans and English speaking Canadians. In Quebec this is normal conversation.
This fact checkable comment is not permitted in the Washington Post.
You are not going back far enough. I would suggest 1689 when Virginia became a democracy under the reigns of William of Orange and Mary II but but It began with the death of Elizabeth the First, Bloody Mary, Thomas More, and Henry the Eighth.
The Civil War wasn't about politics it was about religion. Politics is about compromise but in Religion even in Missouri there is no compromise.
I am 64 years of age, and I could never ever believe that Humanity is the only humanoid life in our universe, galaxy, or solar system. When you consider the fact that different dimensions exist, and people like Michio Kaku and others recognize type 1, 2 and 3 civilizations with ours being type 0, it becomes clear to me that we have been lied to about the existence of advanced life which likely is teaming in our surrounding space. So why would this be? In 1980 in Rendelsham Forest in England, Sergeant James Penniston and many others came face to face with a real triangular UFO that landed in the woods. He touched it with his hand and was immediately seeing ones and zero's in his mind. They did not go away until he wrote them on a note pad. 40 years later that Binary Code was deciphered, and one of the many notations was:"exploration of humanity for planetary advancement". That statement is profound in its implications. The fact that a UFO landed tells us there are very advanced beings among us who likely are type 3 civilizations who can manipulate atomic structures. If they can do that, there probably are millions if not billions of advanced beings in all dimensons. and both benevolent and malevolent. The Book of Enoch and the Sumerian tablets teach us of a time when malevolent beings came down and created humans to mine for gold to be used to repair the atmosphere of their planet Nibiru. Then the was a fight between the brothers regarding whether to kill off humanity or let them live. The flood was the result, but as humanity replenished itself other malevolent forces came in with abilities to clone humans and if not do soul transfers of their own life-essence, at least be able to use them as slaves at the direction of these evil forces.
And when I look at our system today and the fact that the will of the people is never served, and that there is a huge break between that will and policy that is implemented, and the constant war and conflict that never lets up, and the lack of compassion and love. It is almost as if a malevolent advanced ET force that lives much longer than humans is controlling this world. And according to many youtube sites regarding the Galactic Federation etc. they are here to help us ascend from the 3D dimension which is linear to a 5D dimension which is Quantum and Galactic, and dictated by the solar system's movement into the Dwapara Yuga a 24,000 year movement of the cycle of the solar system which brings the planet closer to Galactic center and the Central Sun where the vibratory fields are higher, and where malevolent forces cannot exist because they cannot handle these forces.
They predict that in the few coming years, the Cabal that runs the world will become more rabid and violent because they cannot ascend. Yet they continue to desire control over humanity. And when NASA and the Government deny the existence of humanoid species in the universe, to me it is a set up to make us believe there are no ET's. So in whose interest does this work? Obviously the ET's behind the Cabal in control right now. And to think this is not possible is to shoot ourselves in the foot having witnessed the rising UFO sightings and abduction reports. No real democratic government would deny the existence of ET's and UFO's unless they were infiltrated by ET's. My bet is that disclosure will awaken all to this reality, and the horrors of what it really means to humanity and the players who are really clones under the control of superior ET beings. And so Sci Fio was real all along and we have lived in the real DARK AGES of HUMANITY a time when the people wjho thought they were the top of the food chain learned they were at the bottom. When this reality becomes apparent to all, the paradigm shift will occur and those humans who have been working to experience the change will, and thosoe who have not will continue to live as they did.
That is Pithy. Any questions? Ungovernable.
https://twitter.com/AnarchySyraCLC/status/1627737720628908033?s=20