Chris Hedges

The Fall of Assad and Its Implications

- The fall of Syrian president Bashar Assad marks the end of a 53-year dynasty that began with his father, fundamentally altering the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East.
- The rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, is supported by Turkey and was previously aligned with Al-Qaeda, indicating shifting alliances in the region.
- Turkey aims to prevent the establishment of an independent Kurdish state in Northern Syria, where Kurdish groups have formed an autonomous enclave.
- Israel's long-standing objective to destabilize the Syrian regime is highlighted as a potential factor in Assad's ousting, as Syria is a critical transit point for Iranian weapons and aid to Hezbollah.
- The Syrian regime has relied on support from Russia and Iran, with Russian airstrikes targeting rebel positions and Russian troops stationed in Syria, complicating the situation further.
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly celebrated Assad's removal, asserting it as a significant achievement linked to Israel's military actions against Hezbollah and Iran.
- The geopolitical significance of Syria, with its links to Iraq's oil and its strategic position connecting various regional powers, underscores the potential ramifications of Assad's fall.
- The brutal suppression of a pro-democracy movement by Assad in 2011 led to a devastating civil war, resulting in over 500,000 deaths and millions displaced.
- The future of Syria raises critical questions about the HTS's intentions regarding Iran, the potential establishment of an Islamic state, and the fate of Syria's diverse minority groups.

Geopolitical Context and Historical Roots

- The discussion traces back to the Arab Spring, where widespread protests in Syria were met with violent repression by the Assad regime, igniting a civil war.
- A pivotal meeting between then Vice President Dick Cheney and Saudi intelligence head Prince Bandar in 2006 highlighted a strategy to target Syria as a weak link in countering Iranian influence in the region.
- The U.S. invasion of Iraq was initially thought to weaken Iran but instead strengthened its regional standing, prompting a shift in strategy towards Syria.
- The U.S. has been involved in training various rebel groups in Syria, an effort that has faced significant challenges and failures over the years.
- The narrative suggests a broader geopolitical shift where the Gulf States, particularly Saudi Arabia, sought to invert the power dynamics in the Middle East, elevating Sunni influence while isolating Iran.

Current Military and Economic State of Syria

- The Syrian military is currently in a dire state, with soldiers receiving meager salaries, leading to low morale and widespread corruption within the ranks.
- The economic collapse of Syria is evident, with significant loss of industrial and agricultural capabilities due to ongoing conflict and external occupation.
- Turkey's military incursions into Syria have further complicated the situation, as they have taken control of key industrial regions, exacerbating Syria's economic woes.
- The discussion highlights the lack of resources for the Syrian Army to effectively combat various militia groups, including HTS, which are better funded and equipped.
- The potential for a resurgence of ISIS is also a concern, particularly if Kurdish forces are pressured and unable to maintain control over detained militants.

Regional and Global Ramifications

- The implications of Assad's fall extend beyond Syria, affecting neighboring countries like Lebanon and Iraq, where sectarian tensions could escalate.
- The Kurdish population in Iraq faces threats from Turkish military actions aimed at eliminating perceived terrorist threats, further complicating regional stability.
- The Gulf States, particularly Saudi Arabia, may find themselves uneasy with the rise of Islamist movements in Syria, which could undermine their own regimes.
- The potential for renewed conflict in the region poses risks to U.S. interests, particularly as the dynamics of power shift with the rise of HTS and other militant groups.
- Jordan's stability is also at risk, as it grapples with its own internal divisions and the potential influx of refugees or militant threats from Syria.

The Role of Turkey and Israel

- Turkey has played a significant role in the Syrian conflict, providing support to various rebel groups while also pursuing its own national interests against Kurdish forces.
- Israel's military operations in Syria have aimed at curtailing Iranian influence and preventing arms transfers to Hezbollah, complicating the regional security landscape.
- The relationship between Turkey and Israel has evolved, with both nations seeking to navigate their interests amidst the changing dynamics in Syria.
- The rise of HTS poses a challenge to both Turkey and Israel, as the potential establishment of an Islamic state in Syria could destabilize their borders and security.
- The economic implications of the conflict are profound, as the control of oil fields and agricultural resources remains a focal point for both regional and international actors.

Future Scenarios and Conflict Potential

- The discussion raises concerns about the potential for a broader conflict involving Iran, as U.S. and Israeli interests may push for military action to reassert dominance in the region.
- The likelihood of a war with Iran is perceived as high, driven by geopolitical interests rather than the actual capabilities or intentions of Iran itself.
- The potential for escalating violence in Syria could lead to humanitarian crises, with millions affected by ongoing conflict and instability.
- The fragmentation of Syria could result in a power vacuum that extremist groups may exploit, leading to further regional instability.
- The long-term outlook for Syria remains bleak, as the combination of internal strife, external pressures, and economic collapse creates an environment ripe for ongoing conflict.

Covering US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society.

About: Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, author and commentator provides compelling story telling, archive interviews & show content covering US foreign policy, economic realities and civil liberties in American society.

The American material life is taken for granted. Things just appear. There is no consideration for what country the Empire destroyed to fuel their cars, which people are earning pennies inside sweatshops for their clothes or how many children’s hands touched the lithium in their phone batteries fresh out of the mine. The U.S. Empire makes sure these realities are out of the public consciousness and only the shiny, finished products end up in the public view, no questions asked. Matt Kennard, founder of the independent investigative outlet Declassified UK, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to talk about his book, “The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire.”

Covering US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society.

The ed-tech apparatus's insidious functions are seldom discussed. The surveillance and accumulation of child data by these companies serves the ultimate goal of the industry: to make a "psychographic profile of individuals from the cradle to the grave." These companies work with intelligence agencies, law enforcement and more to "predict" student crime before it happens, "monitoring" their mental health for danger.

Covering US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society.

Ask me a question about the election and what's to come here.

Covering US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society.

Covering US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society.

Ask Chris your questions regarding the rapidly escalating conflict in the Middle East here, and feel free to leave us a super chat to help support The Chris Hedges Report.

Key Points:

1. Two-State Illusion: The concept of a two-state solution has often been a facade, masking the reality of ongoing oppression and control over Palestinian territories. This highlights the need for genuine dialogue aimed at equality rather than mere political arrangements.
2. Local vs. Global Politics: Arab regimes’ collaboration with Israel, despite public dissent, reveals a complex relationship shaped by self-interest and external pressures, emphasizing the fragility of these regimes amid rising public discontent.
3. Cultural Resistance: The importance of culture in social movements cannot be understated; historical examples show that art and expression are crucial in challenging oppressive systems and fostering solidarity.
4. Humanitarian Catastrophe: The dire conditions in Gaza are a stark reminder of the human cost of political conflicts, necessitating urgent humanitarian interventions and global awareness.
5. UN’s Role: The UN’s inability to effectively address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict demonstrates the challenges of international governance when major powers have vested interests, calling into question the efficacy of such institutions.
6. Historical Context Matters: Understanding the historical context of Israel’s formation and its impact on Palestinian lives is crucial for any meaningful resolution to the conflict, reinforcing the narrative of dispossession and resistance.
7. Escalating Conflicts: The potential for a broader Middle Eastern conflict driven by U.S. and Israeli interests poses a significant threat to global stability, raising concerns about military escalation and its consequences.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20152885

Independent, Unencumbered Analysis and Investigative Reporting, Captive to No Dogma or Faction.

Follow Chris Hedges' Reporting here: https://chrishedges.substack.com/

@ChrisLynnHedges

Our political class does not govern. It entertains. It plays its assigned role in our fictitious democracy, howling with outrage to constituents and selling them out. Only a few will call them out, such as comedian @jimmy_dore.

Watch my full interview with Jimmy now:

https://youtu.be/s2JUR9WVIq4

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Alt. link: https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=s2JUR9WVIq4

In his 2010 book, Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges wrote “The fate of the liberal class is tragic. It has been annihilated by the corporate state it supported, while it willingly silenced radical thinkers and iconoclasts who could have rescued it.”

There has been no time in American politics where this phenomenon has been more clear than today. In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, host Chris Hedges talks to comedian Jimmy Dore about his reporting at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. The pair find the event illustrative of the past few decades of liberalism in American society, namely that its entire concept is not “reality based.”

The values the liberal class arguably once cherished have been completely abandoned by today’s neoliberal Democratic Party, and its contradictions ring loud and clear in everything involving Kamala Harris’s campaign to the media’s coverage of it. While on the one hand, the Democratic Party rhetorically clings to its past as the party of progressivism and inclusion, Kamala Harris boasted at the DNC about wanting to make the US military the “most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Not many people capture the hypocrisy and demise of the liberal class as well as comedian and host of The Jimmy Dore Show, Jimmy Dore. While Dore felt the 2016 DNC was an event filled with hope and revolutionary energy after the emergence of Bernie Sanders, he described this year in more unfortunate terms: “I was just surrounded by zombie, brain-dead, brainwashed delegates who didn't care. They treated going to the convention like they were going to prom.

And it was, honestly, it was downright depressing.”Once a believer in the “Bernie or Bust” movement, Dore has become more radicalized since the fall of the progressive movement within the Democratic Party. While he’s not sure any solution is possible, he believes revolution is the only answer:

“And so it's going to take a real revolution and it's going to have to look something like what happened up in Canada during COVID with the truckers and something that Christian Smalls did on Staten Island. [He] was a black guy who organized a bunch of Trump voters against the establishment [and] Amazon. And so it's going to have to come from the ground up like that. We're going to have to shut down capitalism to…have even a chance to take over our government and bring it back to the people.”

@ChrisLynnHedges

Kamala’s policy record is abysmal. Mainstream media is meant to divert your attention away from her record — a major reason why so many are falling for her vapid campaign.

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Source: https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1828129883333238908

Three months into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, the atrocities the IDF has committed against Palestinians are too numerous to name. Israel is staging a prolonged assault on the Palestinian people’s very means of existence—destroying homes, hospitals, sanitation infrastructure, food and water sources, schools, and more. To understand the genocidal campaign unfolding before our eyes, we must examine the roots of Israeli society. Israel is a settler colonial state whose existence depends on the elimination of Palestinians. Accordingly, Israel is a deeply militarized society whose citizens are raised in an environment of historical revisionism and indoctrination that whitewashes Israel’s crimes while cultivating a deep-seated racism against Palestinians. Miko Peled, former IDF Special Forces and author of The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, joins The Chris Hedges Report for a frank conversation on the distortions of history and reality at the foundations of Israeli identity.

Edit: screenshot was fixed

@ChrisLynnHedges

National strikes are the most effective weapon at bringing down any government.

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Source: https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1822358018769699035

In this first episode of the new and independent iteration of The Chris Hedges Report, Palestinian novelist Atef Abu Saif and Hedges explore Saif's experiences under siege by the Israelis in Gaza, and the meaning behind them, in a substantive and powerful conversation. Through it, the texture of the genocide and the damage it inflicts on its victims is captured, as Saif’s eloquence and vulnerability reveals the weight of the tragedy in a way only facts and data simply cannot.

Timestamps:

1. (0:00) Intro
2. (2:55) History of war in Palestine
3. (5:22) Growing up in the midst of war
4. (9:39) Arrested by Israelis and mother’s visits
5. (14:54) 2014 war in Gaza
6. (21:44) The poet Refaat Alareer
7. (34:14) Excerpt from “A Diary of Genocide”
8. (47:43) Why Atef stays in Palestine
9. (55:32) Nightmare of living in Gaza

David Hearst joins host Chris Hedges on the second episode of The Chris Hedges Report to offer a clear and direct explanation of the complexities surrounding the conflict, providing essential context on what to anticipate moving forward.

Palestinian novelist Atef Abu Saif recounts the horrors he experienced in Israel's bombardment of Gaza since Oct. 7.

Today on Real Talk, we speak to Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and author, about the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in the US elections.

We delve into why he believes we are “at the end of empire”, whether Trump or Harris would have different Gaza policies, the rise of Christian nationalism in the US, and his thoughts on Joe Biden’s presidential legacy.

Real Talk is a Middle East Eye interview show hosted by Mohamed Hashem that delves into the stories and experiences of a diverse range of guests.

Timestamps:

1. 00:00 Intro
2. 00:57 This moment in American history
3. 06:50 Biden dropping out
4. 08:29 Kamala unpopular vice president?
5. 12:33 Media coverage of US elections
6. 18:00 Netanyahu’s Congress speech
7. 28:08 What is Biden’s legacy?
8. 38:17 Influence of third-party candidates?
9. 40:50 Hoping for a revolution?
10. 47:53 Trump & Christian nationalism
11. 56:11 America’s future

@brokenmirror33

Doubtful

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Source: https://x.com/brokenmirror33/status/1821072763785806163

@ChrisLynnHedges

Kamala Harris’s rhetorical shift on Gaza compared to Biden is nothing more than a mask to continue arming Israel’s genocide. If you want to be fooled by that, then that’s your business.

[Video, link below]

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Source: https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1820580741002260907

@ChrisLynnHedges

Why I’m not a Marxist.

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@ChrisLynnHedges

Please sign this petition demanding the immediate end to the imprisonment of the brave, nonviolent political prisoners, Cressie, Daniel, Lou, Lucia and @RogerHallamCS21, who were jailed for telling the truth and acting in resistance to continued extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal.

I call on the @attorneygeneral to recognize the petition.

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/no-prison-for-protest/

Source: https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1816580627409621494

@ChrisLynnHedges

Collective amnesia allows societies to wash their hands of their complicity, and rehabilitate those who most egregiously lied for the state.

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Source: https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1815802718486945955

"Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered. But never before have I watched as soldiers enticed children like mice into a trap and murdered them for sport."

• Christopher Hedges American journalist on assignment in Gaza

@ChrisLynnHedges

My thoughts on Biden dropping out:

Joe Biden was discarded by the same billionaire class he assiduously served throughout his political career. Barely able to stumble his way through the words on a Teleprompter and not always cognizant of what is happening around him, his billionaire supporters pulled the plug. He was their creature – he has been in federal office for 47 years - from start to finish. He was used as a foil to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries and was anointed as the candidate in 2024 in a Soviet-style primary campaign. The billionaire class will now anoint someone else. Democratic Party voters are stage props in this political farce. Donald Trump, unlike Kamala Harris or any other apparatchik the billionaire class selects as a presidential candidate, has a genuine and committed base, however fascistic.

In Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Vogelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist.

Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for this zeitgeist. They orchestrated the deindustrialization of the United States, ensuring that 30 million workers lost their jobs in mass layoffs. As I write in America, The Farewell Tour, this assault on the working class created a crisis that forced the ruling elites to devise a new political paradigm. Trumpeted by a compliant media, this paradigm shifted its focus from the common good to race, crime and law and order. Biden was at the epicenter of this paradigm shift. Those undergoing profound economic and political change were told that their suffering stemmed not from rampant militarism and corporate greed but from a threat to national integrity. The old consensus that buttressed New Deal programs and the welfare state was attacked as enabling criminal Black youth, “welfare queens” and other alleged social parasites. This opened the door to a faux populism, begun by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which supposedly championed family values, traditional morality, individual autonomy, law and order, the Christian faith and the return to a mythical past, at least for white Americans. The Democratic Party, especially under Bill Clinton and Biden, became largely indistinguishable from the establishment Republican Party to which it is now allied.

The Democratic Party refuses to accept its responsibility for the capture of democratic institutions by a rapacious oligarchy, the grotesque social inequality, the cruelty of predatory corporations and an unchecked militarism. The Democrats will anoint another amoral politician, probably Harris, to use as a mask for outsized corporate greed, the folly of endless war, the facilitation of genocide and the assault on our most basic civil liberties. The Democrats, tools of Wall Street, gave us Trump, and the 74 million people who voted for him in 2020. They look set to give us Trump again. God help us.

@JoeBiden

My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.

Source: https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1815425971643986009

@ChrisLynnHedges

The real difference between Biden’s inverted totalitarianism and Trump’s neofascism.

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Source: https://x.com/ChrisLynnHedges/status/1814794806008422522

Covering US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society.

Chris Hedges and Roger Waters discuss the absurdity, detriment and perhaps apocalyptic consequences of the Ukraine war.