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Chris Hedges: On the Precipice of Darkness

Normalizing genocide and the new world order

16 March 2025, posted by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Today I listened to a sometimes haltingly delivered reading by the great war-reporter Chris Hedges, of his own eloquently written — indeed a masterpiece of a — speech, about where we all are heading, the depraved world that we all are heading into with an apparently increasing inevitability; a tunnel down into some foul, putrid, darkness, like none that I had ever expected or even imagined, but now realize to be the almost certain future; so, I am here presenting that video along with its printed transcript that he kindly prepared, so useful for this major literary — if not also historical — document, since his spoken delivery of it was less eloquent than his writing of it is. He has here turned this hell into a work of tragic art:

I shall give here, in the transcript, only the first 55% of it, so as to encourage readers to access Hedges’ site:

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/chris-hedges-on-the-precipice-of

The Chris Hedges Report

Chris Hedges: On the Precipice of Darkness

Normalizing genocide and the new world order.

CHRIS HEDGES

MAR 15, 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KCOl7KMx0E

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 in his book “Rise and Kill First,” 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 …

For the rest, see:

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/chris-hedges-on-the-precipice-of

For a three-minute documentary on Israel’s now-rampant thefts from West-Bank Palestinians, see:

https://www.mediasanctuary.org/event/no-other-land/ 

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.