Chris Hedges – The Unz Review Jan 9, 2025
We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
— Stephen Miller to Jake Tapper on CNN, Jan. 5, 2026.
“He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. Such a saying may sound hard; but, after all, that’s how it is.”
— Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf
“The Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical… Fascism sees in the imperialistic spirit — i.e., in the tendency of nations to expand — a manifestation of their vitality.”
— Benito Mussolini in The Doctrine of Fascism
All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war. War will save the empire. War will resurrect past glory. War will teach an unruly world to obey. But those who bow down before the idol of war, blinded by hypermasculinity and hubris, are unaware that while idols begin by calling for the sacrifice of others, they end by demanding self-sacrifice. Ekpyrosis, the inevitable conflagration that destroys the world according to the ancient Stoics, is part of the cyclical nature of time. There is no escape. Fortuna. There is a time for individual death. There is a time for collective death. In the end, with weary citizens yearning for extinction, empires light their own funeral pyre.
Our high priests of war, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, are no different from the fools and charlatans who snuffed out empires of the past — the haughty leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the militarists in imperial Germany and the hapless court of Tsarist Russia in World War I. They were followed by the fascists in Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Adolf Hitler and the military rulers of imperial Japan in World War II.
These political entities committed collective suicide.
They drank the same fatal elixir Miller and those in the Trump White House imbibe. They too tried to use industrial violence to reshape the universe. They too considered themselves to be omnipotent. They too saw themselves in the face of the idol of war. They too demanded to be obeyed and worshiped.
Destruction to them is creation. Dissent is sedition. The world is one-dimensional. The strong versus the weak. Only our nation is great. Other nations, even allies, are dismissed with contempt.
These architects of imperial folly are buffoons and killer clowns. They are ridiculed and hated by those rooted in a reality-based world. They are followed slavishly by the desperate and the disenfranchised. The simplicity of the message is its appeal. A magic incantation will bring back the lost world, the golden age, however mythic. Reality is viewed exclusively through the lens of ultranationalism. The flip side of ultranationalism is racism.
“The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” wrote Yugoslav-Serbian novelist Danilo Kiš. “Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell — it’s other people (other nations, other tribes). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own image — as nationalists.”
These stunted human beings are unable to read others. They threaten. They terrorize. They kill. The art of power politics between nations or individuals is far beyond their tiny imaginations. They lack the intelligence — emotional and intellectual — to cope with the complex, ever-shifting sands of old and new alliances. They cannot see themselves as the world sees them.
Diplomacy is often a dark and deceptive art. It is by its nature manipulative. But it requires an understanding of other cultures and traditions. It requires getting inside the heads of adversaries and allies. For Trump and his minions, this is an impossibility.
Skillful diplomats, such as Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian Empire’s foreign minister who dominated European politics after the defeat of Napoleon, do so by crafting agreements and treaties such as the Concert of Europe and the Congress of Vienna. Metternich, no friend of liberalism, adroitly kept Europe stable until the revolutions of 1848.
I reported on Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state, as he negotiated an end to the war in Bosnia. He was bombastic and enthralled with his own celebrity. But he played the Balkan warlords off each other in the former Yugoslavia until they acquiesced to stop the fighting — with some help from NATO warplanes that pounded Serb positions on the hills around Sarajevo — and signed the Dayton Peace Accords.
Holbrooke had little regard for the diplomats who diddled in conference halls in Geneva while 100,000 people died or disappeared in Bosnia, an estimated 900,000 became refugees and 1.3 million were internally displaced. He had a loathing for military commanders who refused to take risks. He detested the Croatian, Serbian and Muslim leaders he had to corral into signing the peace accord.
Holbrooke, whose blustering style and volcanic eruptions were legendary, left bruised egos and slighted, embittered colleagues in his wake. But he knew how to cajole and mold his adversaries to his will. He was likened, in a not very flattering comparison, to Jules Cardinal Mazarin, the crafty 17th-century prelate and statesman who solidified France’s supremacy among the European powers. “He flatters, he lies, he humiliates: he is a sort of brutal and schizophrenic Mazarin,” a French diplomat told Le Figaro, of Holbrooke, during the Dayton talks.
True.
But Holbrooke, however mercurial, understood the interplay between force and diplomacy. This understanding is essential. It is why nations have diplomats. It is why great diplomats are as important as great generals.
Gangster states have no need of diplomacy. Trump and Rubio, for this reason, have gutted the State Department, along with other forms of “soft” power that achieve influence without resorting to force, including the U.S. role in the United Nations, the U.S. Agency of International Development, the U.S. Institute for Peace — renamed Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace after most of the board and staff were fired — and Voice of America.
Diplomats in gangster states are reduced to the role of errand boys. Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop , whose primary experience in foreign affairs before 1933 was selling fake German champagne in Britain, appointed party hacks from the SA or Brownshirts — the paramilitary wing of the party — to diplomatic posts abroad. Benito Mussolini’s Foreign Minister was his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano. Mussolini — who believed that “war is to man what maternity is to woman” — later executed Ciano for disloyalty. Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steven Charles Witkoff, is a real estate developer, often accompanied on diplomatic missions by Trump’s feckless son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce quipped that fascism had created a fourth form of government, “onagrocracy,” a government by braying asses, to add to Aristotle’s traditional triumvirate of tyranny, oligarchy and democracy.
Our ruling class, Democrats and Republicans, piece by piece, dismantled democracy. In Germany and Italy, the constitutional state, as well, collapsed long before the arrival of fascism. Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease, inherited the corpse. He is making good use of it.
“I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Chalmers Johnson wrote two decades ago in his book, “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.”
He warned:
The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government — a republic — that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play — isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.
The American Empire, defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan — as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam — learns nothing. It leaps into each new military fiasco as if the previous military fiascos did not happen. It believes it needs no allies. It will rule the world.
If occupying Greenland blows up NATO, so what? If funding and arming Israel to carry out genocide and bombing Iran and Yemen alienates huge swaths of the Global South and enrages the Muslim world, who cares? If invading and kidnapping the president of Venezuela stinks of Yankee imperialism, tough! No one else matters.
Nations that stomp around the globe like King Kong infect themselves with a fatal virus.
Johnson warned that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman Republic did, we will “lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates.”
Blowback is next and with it the collapse of the crumbling edifice of the American Empire. It is an old story. Although to us, and the cabal of misfits ensconced in our version of Ubu Roi’s court, it will come as a terrible shock.
we went to war to save the under sea oil around the falklands
israel is now stealing ut
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2026/01/11/762174/Argentina-cancels-Israel-embassy-relocation-
I like Chris Hedges. People may disagree, but I think he’s an honest broker. Just misguided. What is the ’empire’ of which he speaketh? The photo – which speaketh 1000 words – suggests that the Americana empire is a reincarnation of the loathed, despised, disgraced, debunked, and utterly shamed and shunned Adolf Hitler and his Nazistical regime. (How Aryan did Hitler or Goebbels really look?)
More reasons to hate the ‘white man’. That conveniently reviled man o’ straw. See, it all began with the illusions of ‘Aryanism’ and supposed Aryanism superiority…
“Aryanism is an ideology of racial supremacy which views the supposed Aryan race as a distinct and superior racial group which is entitled to rule the rest of humanity. Initially promoted by racial theorists such as Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Aryanism reached its peak of influence in Nazi Germany…” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryanism
It has ended with every mother-lovin’ European son being tarred and feathered with the same paintbrush. Including Chris Hedges. Same paintbrush as used by IXXI-truth denying Gnome Chompskers.
What is the ‘Grand Illusion’ of which Hedges speaketh?
“Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural. And I think we are going to be part of the throes of that transformation, which must take place. Europe is not going to be the monolithic societies that they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the center of that. It’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode and Jews will be resented because of our leading role. But without that leading role, and without that transformation, Europe will not survive”.
— Barbara Lerner Spectre, founding director of Paideia, the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden
In diversity is (((our))) strength
Never mind dredging up Third Reich imagery to steer sentiment; how about cold hard facts. Hedges is part of the problem. He is the acceptable face of dissent.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Chris-Hedges/21025518
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_%26_Schuster
“In October, KKR acquired Simon & Schuster, a Big Five publisher, for $1.6 billion…”
“KKR & Co. Inc., also known as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., is an American global private equity and investment company. As of December 31, 2024, the firm had completed 770 private-equity investments with approximately $790 billion of total enterprise value. Its assets under management (AUM) and fee paying assets under management (FPAUM) were $553 billion and $446 billion, respectively.
KKR was founded in 1976 by Jerome Kohlberg Jr., and cousins Henry Kravis and George R. Roberts, all of whom had previously worked together at Bear Stearns, where they completed some of the earliest leveraged buyout transactions. Notable transactions by KKR include the 1989 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco as well as the 2007 buyout of TXU Energy, both of which, upon completion, were the largest buyouts ever to date. ”
IN WHAT UNIVERSE IS HEDGES – AN AUTHOR OF SIMON & SCHUSTER – THE VOICE OF “EVERYMAN”?
***
You know the “truth business” is a funny creature. Those with greatest reach have mainstream backing, nice websites, wear suits, and inhabit their own back-slapping echo chambers. These characters like Hedges are intelligent and articulate men, but for the GENUINE truth-seeker communicator it is very difficult to put out a truthful message that doesn’t require going to the trough of international capital or requiring the clicks and applause of the large half-truther “community”; a community that are often semi-literate conservatives subscribing to Zio-Christainity without cognising the disproportionate voice of Judaism in geopolitics.
This 11min video shows examples of the utter thuggery of ICE agents turned loose under Trump. They target ordinary Americans and you don’t face this kind of menace in a free society. If some of these encounters aren’t drug-fueled or ‘roid rage then they whip each other up to make conflict.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db4pYET29o8
dont forget in germany when a wheel barrow full of money could not buy a loaf of bread
Adolf Hitler put the jew bankers in the work camps
and took their stolen money and shred it with his people
he offered to help us do the same
i am ashamed of what we did
this short film exposes starmers migrants who abuse our kids
https://ntkp.substack.com/p/modernity-news-england-boils-over
LOL…
It’s like that shitflick Chris…attack of the killer clowns…
This is an unusually dumb article, if the author is too thick to see the Edomite(fake-jew) tactics, he is too dense to write anything of value. The EDOMITE/FAKE JEW Stephen Miller is peddling the same shit all his EDOMITE/FAKE JEW predecessors have, as they are a bunch of useless cowards who requires others to do their dirty work, killing raping and stealing. People are waking up and this shit-show is nearing its end.
“All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war.”
Wrong Chris — that’s where they START.
They end by playing with other phony regimes while their home nation is eaten alive by conqueror ants that they themselves invited.
For all the theatre of ICE and migrants in the USA, Trump conceded the other side’s point from the start. The farm lobby wants to keep hiring Mexicans. He said okay. The hotel motel lobby wants more families from India to run them. They can, Trump has no objection.
So as some of us said from the start — the only immigrants that will be thrown out are the stupid scufflaws who are too dumb to lay low. That means business as usual — Obama did that too.
Either domestically or globally, no society based on the Rule of Law can survive with the authority and power behind the law being subverted for special interests – which very subversion is what organized Jewry has practiced for over 2,000 in every host nation.
If we are to accept universal standards based on the God-given, intrinsic rights of everyone, then it must be the case that any methods of sustenance or advancement for one’s organization, tribe, culture or nation which incorporate any of the black arts of stealing, robbing, exploiting, plundering, lying, dishonesty, fraud, fakery, murder, blackmail, bribing, brainwashing, insider favoritism, and mass deceptions, must be ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN AND THE PERPETRATORS INDENTIFIED, EXPOSED, MADE TO PAY FOR THEIR CRIMES, DENUDED OF THEIR POWERS OVER US, AND THROWN OUT IF NECESSARY. Otherwise our world becomes more of a hell than it is, and a totalitarian nightmare ruled by these sociopaths caught up in their own exclusivity.
Dr Cooper,
“The EDOMITE/FAKE JEW Stephen Miller……”
If it’s not the Ashkenazi fake Jews, it’s the Edomite fake Jews, so who are the real Jews if it’s neither of them?
A small number of Judahites, Benjaminites and Levites, pedigree Adamites, rejected Yehshua and YHWH, preferring to live by their Tradition of the Elders, from their Babylonian Captivity.
The Jews are simply those who reject Yehshua and that’s really the bottom line. It doesn’t matter if you’re an Israelite, an Edomite, a Turkish-Mongolian Khazarian Ashkenazi, an Ethiopian, an Asian or whatever, for as long as you are one who rejects Yehshua, you are a Jew. There’s nothing fake about any Jewish identity. There simply is the Jew, who 99.99999% of them are not Pedigree Adamites, but instead mamzers (Deuteronomy 23:2).
Chris just “happens” to pop up in Beijing during the Tiananmen unrest; Berlin while the Wall is coming down, Prague when the communist government is collapsing… The list goes on and on.
The above post is in the same vein of total misdirection. Selling political / military contractor theater as real, defining events. Multipolar world, bla bla.
Sorry. All of this got old a very long time ago.
What a load of nonsense. Adolf Hitler was a man of peace. Semi-educated donkey men, taken in by Jewish lies, destroyed his work. If you learn the facts and support the truth, you may get another chance. Maybe
Hedges is directly contradicting John Quincy Adams, who is the real architect of the Monroe Doctrine. Henry Adams, Quincy’s grandson, was provost at Harvard, and wrote using the Adam’s library. He became a strong antisemite after watching the finance class up close, and cane to understand the real finance roots of Imperialism. I rate Hedges as sophomoric, not advanced thinking, and wrong, in his editorial.