Chris Hedges

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
 This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (June 2008)
Chris Hedges

Born 18 September 1956 (1956-09-18) (age 52)
St. Johnsbury, Vermont, USA
Education Colgate University, B.A.
Harvard Divinity School, M. Div
Starr King School for the Ministry, PhD.
Occupation Journalist, Writer
Religious beliefs Christianity

Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont) is an American journalist and author, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.

Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a reporter for fifteen years.

Hedges was part of The New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. In 2002, he received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Christopher Lynn Hedges was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the son of a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Thomas Hedges. He graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut in 1975. He has a B.A. in English Literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where he studied under James Luther Adams. He was awarded an honorary doctorate, along with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in May 2009 from the Unitarian-Universalist seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry, in Berkeley, California.

In 1983, Hedges began his career reporting on the conflict in El Salvador. Following six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia followed by the war in Kosovo. Later, he joined the investigative team of The New York Times, based in Paris, and covered terrorism.

He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the academic year of 1998-1999, and spent a year studying classics. In addition to English, he speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows Latin and ancient Greek. He has written for numerous publications including The Nation, Foreign Affairs, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Mother Jones, New Humanist and Robert Scheer's web magazine Truthdig where he publishes a column every Monday.

Hedges was an early and vocal critic of the plan to invade and occupy Iraq. He questioned the rationale for war by the Bush administration and was critical of the early press coverage, calling it "shameful cheerleading".

On 2003-05-17, just two weeks after president George W. Bush's famous "Mission Accomplished" speech, Hedges delivered a commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, saying: "We are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security." Several hundred members of the audience booed and jeered his talk, although some applauded. Hedges' microphone was cut twice and two young men rushed the stage to try to prevent him from speaking. Hedges had to cut short his address and was escorted off campus by security officials before the ceremony was over. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal denounced Hedges for his anti-war stance. His employer, "The New York Times," criticized his statements and issued him a written reprimand for "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality." The paper's editors demanded Hedges cease speaking about the Iraq war. Hedges, refusing to accept these restrictions, left The New York Times to become a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, write books and teach.

Hedges has stated that he is not a pacifist and supports humanitarian interventions, such as those in Bosnia and Kosovo, designed to stop campaigns of genocide. He nevertheless describes war as "the most potent narcotic invented by humankind".

Hedges states that his outlook is influenced by moral writers and ethicists such as George Orwell, Samuel Johnson, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Elias Canetti and theologians such as William Stringfellow, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Abraham Heschel, and Reinhold Niebuhr.

On December 29, 2008, Hedges wrote a column for Truthdig, in which he identified himself as a socialist[1].

Hedges is married to the actress Eunice Wong and they have a child named Konrad. He has two children, Thomas and Noëlle, from a previous marriage. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

[edit] Books

[edit] War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002)

Hedges' bestselling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning draws on his experiences in various conflicts to describe the patterns and behavior of nations and individuals in wartime. The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

"War and conflict have marked most of adult life. I began covering insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then on to Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil war in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellion in southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally Kosovo. I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following the Gulf War, strafed by Russian MIG-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers, and shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments. I have seen too much of violent death. I have tasted too much of my own fear. I have painful memories that lie buried and untouched most of the time. It is never easy when they surface."

[citation needed]

[edit] What Every Person Should Know About War (2003)

Hedges is also the author of What Every Person Should Know About War, a book he worked on with several combat veterans.

From the publisher:

"Chris Hedges offers a critical -- and fascinating -- lesson in the dangerous realities of our age: a stark look at the effects of war on combatants. Utterly lacking in rhetoric or dogma, this manual relies instead on bare fact, frank description, and a spare question-and-answer format. Hedges allows U.S. military documentation of the brutalizing physical and psychological consequences of a combat to speak for itself."

[edit] Losing Moses on the Freeway (2005)

Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America was published in June 2005. The book was inspired by the Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski and his ten-part film series The Decalogue. Hedges wrote about lives, including his own, which had been consumed by one of the violations or issues raised by a commandment.

[edit] American Fascists (2007)

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America was published in January 2007. In this book, Hedges argues that the Christian fundamentalist movement emerging today in the United States resembles the early fascist movements in Italy and Germany at the beginning of the last century, and therefore constitutes a gathering threat to American democracy.

[edit] I Don't Believe in Atheists (2008)

I Don't Believe in Atheists, was published in March 2008, is a critique of what Hedges perceives as a radical mindset that rages against religion and faith. Hedges states the book was motivated by debates he had with atheist authors Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens who overly demonized religion, particularly Islam, in ways that Hedges believed were eerily similar to the thinking of Christian fundamentalists.

[edit] Collateral Damage (2008)

Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians, with Laila Al-Arian. ISBN 1568583737

From the publisher:

"In this devastating exposé of a miitary occupation gone awry, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges and journalist Laila Al-Arian reveal the terrifying reality of daily civilian life in Iraq at the hands of U.S. troops. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with combat veterans, Collateral Damage represents the largest number of named eyewitnesses from within the U.S. military to have testified on the record. These veterans, many of whom have come to oppose the war, explain the tactics and operations that have turned many Iraqis against the U.S. military.
...
"The soldiers and Marines interviewed in Collateral Damage describe the venality of a war fought largely out of view of journalists and television cameras. A stark and unflinching narrative, [it] exposes the true consequences of the war that the American government has unleashed in Iraq.

[edit] External links

[edit] Video links

[edit] Audio links

  1. ^ http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081229_why_i_am_a_socialist/
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges"
Personal tools