Chris Hedges: On the Precipice of Darkness
By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report
This was a talk I gave at the Sanctuary for Independent Media. Thank you to them for hosting me, and allowing my team to upload this talk I gave to The Chris Hedges Report. Visit their YouTube channel, where this originally aired, here.
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Text of the talk:
My old office in Gaza is a pile of rubble. The streets around it, where I went for a coffee, ordered maftool or manakish, had a haircut, are flattened. Friends and colleagues are dead, or more often have vanished, last heard from weeks or months ago, no doubt buried somewhere under the broken slabs of concrete. The uncounted dead. In the tens perhaps hundreds of thousands.
Gaza is a wasteland of 50 million tons of rubble and debris. Rats and dogs scavenge amid the ruins and fetid pools of raw sewage. The putrid stench and contamination of decaying corpses rises from beneath the mountains of shattered concrete. There is no clean water. Little food. A severe shortage of medical services and hardly any habitable shelters. Palestinians risk death from unexploded ordnance, left behind after over 15 months of air strikes, artillery barrages, missile strikes and blasts from tank shells, and a variety of toxic substances, including pools of raw sewage and asbestos.
Hepatitis A, caused by drinking contaminated water, is rampant, as are respiratory ailments, scabies, malnutrition, starvation and the widespread nausea and vomiting caused by eating rancid food. The vulnerable, including infants and the elderly, along with the sick, face a death sentence. Some 1.9 million people have been displaced, amounting to 90 percent of the population. They live in makeshift tents, encamped amid slabs of concrete or the open air. Many have been forced to move over a dozen times. Nine in 10 homes have been destroyed or damaged. Apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, universities — Israel blew up Israa University in Gaza City in a controlled demolition — cemeteries, shops and offices have been obliterated. The unemployment rate is 80 percent and the gross domestic product has been reduced by almost 85 percent, according to an October 2024 report issued by the International Labor Organization.
Israel’s banning of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East — which estimates that clearing Gaza of the rubble left behind will take 15 years — and blockage of aid trucks into Gaza ensures that Palestinians in Gaza will never have access to basic humanitarian supplies, adequate food and services.
The United Nations Development Program estimates that it will cost between $40 billion and $50 billion to rebuild Gaza and will take, if the funds are made available, until 2040. It would be the largest post-war reconstruction effort since the end of World War Two.
Israel, supplied with billions of dollars of weapons from the U.S. Germany, Italy and the U.K., created this hell. It intends to maintain it. Gaza is to remain under siege. Gaza’s infrastructure will not be restored. Its basic services, including water treatment plants, electricity and sewer lines, will not be repaired. Its destroyed roads, bridges and farms will not be rebuilt. Desperate Palestinians will be forced to choose between living like cave dwellers, camped out amid jagged chunks of concrete, dying in droves from disease, famine, bombs and bullets, or permanent exile. These are the only options Israel offers.
Israel is convinced, probably correctly, that eventually life in the coastal strip will become so onerous and difficult, especially as Israel finds excuses to violate the ceasefire and resume armed assaults on the Palestinian population, a mass exodus will be inevitable. It has refused, even with the ceasefire in place, to permit foreign press into Gaza, a ban designed to blunt coverage of the horrendous suffering and mass death.
Stage Two of Israel’s genocide and the expansion of “Greater Israel” — which includes the seizing of more Syrian territory in the Golan Heights (as well as calls for expansion to Damascus), southern Lebanon, Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where some 40,000 Palestinians have been driven from their homes — is being cemented into place. Israeli organizations, including the far right Nachala organization, have held conferences to prepare for Jewish colonization of Gaza once Palestinians are ethnically-cleansed. Jewish-only colonies existed in Gaza for 38 years until they were dismantled in 2005.
Washington and its allies in Europe do nothing to halt the live-streamed genocide. They will do nothing to halt the wasting away of Palestinians in Gaza from hunger, disease and bombs and their eventual depopulation. They are partners in this genocide. They will remain partners until the genocide reaches its grim conclusion.
But the genocide in Gaza is only the start. The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous. These assaults will be committed, as they are in Gaza, in the name of progress, Western civilization and our supposed “virtues” to crush the aspirations of those, mostly poor people of color, who have been dehumanized and dismissed as human animals.
Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the U.S. in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The U.S. and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law.
The message this sends is clear: We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.
The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.
Israel, which as Ronen Bergman notes his book “Rise and Kill First” in has “assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” employs the Nazi Holocaust to sanctify its hereditary victimhood and justify its settler-colonial state, apartheid, campaigns of mass slaughter and Zionist version of Lebensraum.
Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, saw the Shoah, for this reason, as “an inexhaustible source of evil” which “is perpetrated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.”
Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany. Adolf Hitler, as Aimé Césaire writes in “Discourse on Colonialism,” appeared exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man.” But the Nazis, he writes, had simply applied “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”
The German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrate something fundamental about “western civilization.”
The moral philosophers who make up the western canon – Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and John Locke – as Nicole R. Fleetwood points out, excluded enslaved and exploited people, indigenous peoples, colonized people, women of all races and the criminalized from their moral calculus. In their eyes European whiteness alone imparted modernity, moral virtue, judgment and freedom. This racist definition of personhood played a central role in justifying colonialism, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, our imperial projects and our fetish for white supremacy. So when you hear that the western canon is an imperative, ask yourself — for whom?
“In America,” the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negros do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”
The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modeled them on our Jim Crow-era segregation and discrimination laws. Our refusal to grant citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos, although they lived in the U.S. and U.S. territories, was copied to strip citizenship from Jews. Our anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage, was the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans. American jurisprudence, which determined who belonged to which race, classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry, the so called “one drop rule,” as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish.
Fascism was quite popular in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s. The Ku Klux Klan, mirroring the fascist movements sweeping through Europe, experienced a huge revival in the 1920s. Nazis were embraced by American eugenicists, who lauded the Nazi goal of racial purity, and disseminated Nazi propaganda. Charles Lindberg, who accepted a swastika medal from the Nazi Party in 1938, along with the evangelist Gerald B. Winrod’s pro—Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith, William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts (the initials SS were intentional) and the veteran-based Khaki Shirts were just a few of our openly fascist organizations.
The idea that America is a defender of democracy, liberty and human rights would come as a huge surprise to those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth” who saw their democratically elected governments subverted and overthrown by the United States in Panama (1941), Syria (1949), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Chile (1973), Honduras (2009) and Egypt (2013). And this list does not include a host of other governments that, however despotic, as was the case in South Vietnam, Indonesia or Iraq, were viewed as inimical to American interests and destroyed, in each case inflicting death and immiseration on millions.
Empire is the external expression of white supremacy.
But antisemitism alone did not lead to the Shoah. It needed the innate genocidal potential of the modern bureaucratic state.
The millions of victims of racist imperial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, the Congo and Vietnam, for this reason, are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. So are Black, Brown and Native Americans. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their western perpetrators.
Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state the far-right in the U.S. and Europe dreams of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by these proto-fascists, including Christian nationalists, because it has turned its back on humanitarian law to use indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants. Israel is not an outlier, but expresses our darkest impulses, ones being turbo-charged by the Trump administration.
I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.
Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Naftali Bennett, and Ayelet Shaked. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”
There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project, mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately, for us, the Israelis and the Palestinians these fascistic strains are ascendant.
“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”
The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far right Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazi’s blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelites. Euro-American settlers in the American colonies used the same Biblical passage to justify the genocide against Native Americans. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Those outside this magic circle, including Israeli citizens, are to be purged.
Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque – the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army – to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will become a Jewish version of Iran.
There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias who have been armed with 10,000 automatic weapons, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land is exploding.
Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the horrific violence of the state. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.
The zealots in power in Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them, killing perhaps hundreds of their own soldiers and civilians.
Israel and its western allies, James Baldwin saw, is headed towards the “terrible probability” that the dominant nations “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”
I know the killers. I met them in the dense canopies in the war in El Salvador and Nicaragua. It was there that I first heard the single, high-pitched crack of the sniper bullet. Distinct. Ominous. A sound that spreads terror. Army units I traveled with, enraged by the lethal accuracy of rebel snipers, set up heavy .50 caliber machine guns and sprayed the foliage overhead until a body, a bloodied and mangled pulp, dropped to the ground.
I saw them at work in Basra in Iraq and of course Gaza, where on a fall afternoon at the Netzarim Junction, an Israeli sniper shot dead a young man a few feet away from me. We carried his limp body up the road.
I lived with them in Sarajevo during the war. They were only a few hundred yards away, perched in high rises that looked down on the city. I witnessed their daily carnage. At dusk, I saw a Serb sniper fire a round in the gloom at an old man and his wife bent over their tiny vegetable plot. The sniper missed. She ran, haltingly, for cover. He did not. The sniper fired again. I concede the light was fading. It was hard to see. Then, the third time, the sniper killed him. This is one of those memories of war I see in my head over and over and over and do not like to talk about. I watched it from the back of the Holiday Inn, but by now I have seen it, or the shadows of it, hundreds of times.
These killers targeted me, too. They struck down colleagues and friends. I was in their sights traveling from northern Albania into Kosovo with 600 fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army, each insurgent carrying an extra AK-47 to hand off to a comrade. Three shots. That crisp crack, too familiar. The sniper must have been far away. Or maybe the sniper was a bad shot, although the bullets came close. I scrambled for cover behind a rock. My two bodyguards bent over me, panting, the green pouches strapped to their chests packed full of grenades.
I know how killers talk. The black humor. “Pint sized terrorists” they say of Palestinian children. They are proud of their skills. It gives them cachet. They cradle their weapon as if it is an extension of their body. They admire its despicable beauty. This is who they are. Their identities. Killers.
In the hypermasculine culture of Israel and our own emergent fascism killers, lauded as exemplars of patriotism, are respected, rewarded, promoted. They are numb to the suffering they inflict. Maybe they enjoy it. Maybe they think they are protecting themselves, their identity, their comrades, their nation. Maybe they believe the killing is a necessary evil, a way to make sure Palestinians die before they can strike. Maybe they have surrendered their morality to the blind obedience of the military, subsumed themselves into the industrial machinery of death. Maybe they are scared to die. Maybe they want to prove to themselves and others that they are tough, they can kill. Maybe their mind is so warped that they believe killing is righteous.
They, like all killers, are intoxicated by the god-like power to revoke another person’s charter to live on this earth. They revel in the intimacy of it. They see in fine detail through the telescopic sight, the nose and mouth of their victims. The triangle of death. They hold their breath. They pull slowly, gently on the trigger. And then the pink puff. Severed spinal cord. It is over.
They are numb and cold. But it does not last. I covered war for a long time. I know, even if they do not, the next chapter of their lives. I know what happens when they leave the embrace of the military, when they are no longer a cog in these factories of death. I know the hell they enter.
It starts like this. All the skills they acquired as a killer on the outside are useless. Maybe they go back. Maybe they become a gun for hire. But this only delays the inevitable. They can run, for a while, but they cannot run forever. There will be reckoning. And it is the reckoning I will tell you about.
They will face a choice. Live the rest of their life, stunted, numb, cut off from themselves, cut off from those around them. Descend into a psychopathic fog, trapped in the absurd, interdependent lies that justify mass murder. There are killers, years later, who say they are proud of their work, who claim not a moment’s regret. But I have not been inside their nightmares. If this is the route they take they will never again truly live.
Of course, they do not talk about what they did to those around them, certainly not to their families. They are feted as heroes. But they know, even if they do not say it, that this is a lie. The numbness, usually, wears off. They look in the mirror, and if they have any shred of conscience left, their reflection disturbs you. They repress the bitterness. They escape down the rabbit hole of opioids and, like my uncle, who fought in the South Pacific in World War II, alcohol. Their intimate relationships, because they cannot feel, because they bury their self-loathing, disintegrate. This escape works. For a while. But then they go into such darkness that the stimulants used to blunt the pain begin to destroy them. And maybe that is how they die. I have known many who died like that. And I have known those who ended it quickly. A gun to the head.
I have trauma from war. But the worst trauma I do not have. The worst trauma from war is not what you saw. It is not what you experienced. The worst trauma is what you did. They have names for it. Moral injury. Perpetrator Induced Traumatic Stress. But that seems tepid given the hot, burning coals of rage, the night terrors, the despair. Those around them know something is terribly, terribly wrong. They fear this darkness. But they not let others into their labyrinth of pain.
And then, one day, they reach out for love. Love is the opposite of war. War is about death. It is about smut. It is about turning other human beings into objects, maybe sexual objects, but I also mean this literally, for war turns people into corpses. Corpses are the end products of war, what comes off its assembly line. So, they want love, but death has made a Faustian bargain. It is this. It is the hell of not being able to love. They carry this death inside them for the rest of their lives. It corrodes their souls. Yes. We have souls. They sold theirs. The cost is very, very high. It means that what they want, what they most desperately need in life, they cannot attain.
They spend days wanting to cry and not knowing why. They are consumed by guilt. They believe that because of what they did, the life a son or daughter or someone they love is in danger. Divine retribution. They tell themselves this is absurd, but they believe it anyway. They start to include little offerings of goodness to others as if these offerings will appease a vengeful god, as if these offerings will save someone they care about from harm, from death. But nothing wipes away the stain of murder.
They are overwhelmed with sorrow. Regret. Shame. Grief. Despair. Alienation. They face an existential crisis. They know that all the values they were taught to honor in school, at worship, at home, are not the values they upheld. They hate themselves. They do not say this out loud.
Shooting unarmed people is not bravery. It is not courage. It is not even war. It is a crime. It is murder. And Israel runs an open-air shooting gallery in Gaza and the West Bank as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Total impunity. Murder as sport.
It is exhausting trying to ward off these demons. Maybe they will make it. Being human again. But that will mean a life of contrition. It will mean making the crimes public. It will mean begging for forgiveness. It will mean forgiving themselves. This is very hard. It will mean orientating every aspect of their lives to nurturing life rather than extinguishing it. This is the only hope for salvation. If they do not take it, they are damned.
We must see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. We must see through the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage and comradeship. We must see through the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war. War is necrophilia. War is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. War fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence, as well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill with impunity.
The truth about war comes out, but usually too late. We are assured by the war-makers that these stories have no bearing on the glorious violent enterprise the nation is about to inaugurate. And, lapping up the myth of war and its sense of empowerment, we prefer not to look.
We must find the courage to name our darkness and repent. This willful blindness and historical amnesia, this refusal to be accountable to the rule of law, this belief that we have a right to use industrial violence to exert our will marks, I fear, the start, not the end, of campaigns of mass slaughter by the Global North against the world’s growing legions of the poor and the vulnerable. It is the curse of Cain. And it is curse we must remove before the genocide in Gaza becomes not an anomaly but the norm.
