What a moving piece! Thank you for sharing. The kindness you received within two Arabic societies, Palestinian & Iraqi, mirror mine, minus the harrowing times. I have lived among Palestinians, and I know with what little some families & individuals had, they graciously shared with me. Palestinian hospitality & appreciation of me by my students will always remain some of my deepest memories.
Thank you for sharing such a personal story about kindness from those who have represented in the media as the opposite. Your experience there serves to show the truth about Palestinians.
I also have fond memories of Iraq and its people when, in the late eighties, my parents decided for us to spend Greek Easter there (my dad managed a mechanical/electrical engineering company, contracted to do the engineering for new university campuses across Iraq). I remember a great children's museum in Baghdad, the fun we had at the bazaar, a picnic at a lake surrounded by a palm tree forest, Easter mass at the Orthodox church, and unfailingly kind, generous people. When a couple of years later we watched the first Gulf War unfold on TV, we all had tears in our eyes. The Iraq we knew would be no longer.
I am a Greek Cypriot, and we have our own share of invasion, occupation, and war. I went to school at Berkeley, got married, and marched against the 2003 war with my (Jewish American) husband.
Over the years I got to travel, for business and pleasure, across the Middle East, learning a little Arabic along the way and making friends for life.
We were in Haifa 8 years ago and we were lost. Nobody would give us directions for some reason. I heard Arabic coming from a cafe, we walked in, and the Palestinian owners (Israeli citizens, I'm sure), delighted at my kid-level Arabic, gave us coffee and directions.
What is happening in Palestine is nothing less than devastating. Thank you for your incredibly informed perspective, and for sharing your experiences, and the unbelievably hard lives of the Palestinian people, with us.
Thank you for this: a reminder of the aspects of humanity of which we are capable, that are a part of us, in the face of witnessing so much of the other aspects of what we do.
Chris has honestly earned the expertise with which he speaks on the Middle East situation. Robert Fisk, the great Irish journalist, had similar experiences, and spoke of the history of the Middle East with the same empathy.
That Empire has turned Islamic people into our enemies is the long standing crime responsible for what is happening now in Gaza. It's past time we asked ourselves why we find it so easy to hate, so difficult to show the human kindness Chris experienced.
What brilliance. The truth changes with time - except with love and kindness. Human kindness always remains all-powerful. Think about who our so-called allies and enemies are: constantly changing, just like Big Brother and the forces of evil want. Do not let the war mongers take our souls. Fight them with love and kindness. Be human.
Touched my heart deeply. Where is this human kindness now😪 Thank You Chris Hedges💕 your personal story is what is desperately needed... we need to rise above the hate & remember our humanity☮️💜
Chris Hedges you are as always a beacon of hope and truth.
The kindness and generosity you speak of is well known among travelers. I remember a book by Paul Theroux about traveling throughout the Mediterranean. His experience with the Israeli authorities was, like my own, quite negative, but he had great fondness for the kindness and hospitality of his Palestinian hosts.
I suppose today we’re all considered anti-semites. You know, soon we’ll have to just let them squawk and let that term be used for people who refuse to hate.
October 6th was a criminal and indefensible act, but it was about freedom, not hatred. The invasion of Gaza is driven by hatred, racism, and greed. And it is, is in so many ways, anti-semitic.
I am here because Chris Hedge's reminds me of the world of my Brother Jesus and I. I am a Jew not an Iranian. Jesus was an Aramean and I grew up where Steven Pinker grew up and had the fortune of being a wandering Aramean like my brothers in Gaza. I did not go to Harvard or the University of Chicago and know Judaism is not the religion of Empire and the world isn't Manichean and the future does not belong to Manicheans unless we want to stop evolution. America is Manichean and Jews like STEVEN PINKER understand Manicheanism is not Abrahamic. Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholicism American, and American Christian are Byzantine. Jesus was not Manichean Manicheans are not Abrahamic. We are not Utopians. Mark Twain was Abrahamic he wrote letters from Earth just like Jesus.
I was born in Montreal's Jewish Ghetto and went to Protestant schools .
I know Milton, Newton and Locke. I studied Orwell and Darwin and Twain and Jefferson and they understood the difference between Hedge's Manicheanism and the Abrahamic tradition of balance and harmony in the universe. I have always been a wandering Jew or as it is called in the 21st century wide spectrum autistic disorder. I failed Kindergarten and by the time I reached Senior high my report card said I was I lazy genius . I scored 99+_ in linguistic understanding and logic . I believe the reason I could not write was cause I wouldn't try hard enough when I really was killing myself rolling Sisyphus' rock up a hill. I once watched his Hedgiousness call Steven Pinker every foul name in His vocabulary.
Hedges is Donald TRump with a English Protestant education.
Hedges is a Manichean having no understanding of Abrahamic theology. I attended high holiday services in St Johnsbury and the Palestinians in St Johnsbury were as Protestant as Harvard's Chris Hedges.
Thomas More was more important to America than George Washington or John Adams or even John Wesley.
America is Manichean and Lord Beaverbrook was far more culpable for Gaza than that other morally bankrupt American Business School Graduate Donald Jonathan Trump.
There were no Jews in England at the time of Thomas More and Utopia is a place of the imagination.
In Montreal Thomas More Institute is a place of life long learning and discovery; in America Thomas More's Society is right wing fascist Roman Catholic NAZI propaganda Manchean legal pedants dedicated to perpetual ignorance.
I love Chris Hedges despite his being an Persian Manichean. my father was a wandering Aramean who once found refuge in Tehran. As much as Hedges rails against Steven Pinker Steven Pinker went to the same Protestant schools as Leonard Cohen, Kamala Harris and yours truly and we understand that Christianity is not an Abrahamic religion. Kamala to me is Washington's only real Jew she grew up in Montreal's Jewish ghetto next to the Jewish General Hospital and has the same accent as the wandering Aramean with which I am most familiar.
I hate Biden's interpretation of Mark Twain's the War Prayer. Mark Twain cursed War, he didn't celebrate the souls of the dead. What is a Jewish soul anyways it has no place to go not even Utopia? Like Twain said I believe Heaven is no Utopia it is an eternity of nothingness.
L'Chaim
It the story Louis Ginzburg relates in the story of the Evil Cities in Legends of the Bible Jewish Publication Society 1908 in his understanding of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Hell and Heaven belong only to the living.
Dr Samuel Johnson defined the words of the American Constitution
Religion is the belief in virtue and virtue is the belief in Heaven and Hell and everlasting reward and punishment and Heaven and Hell are Persian beliefs not the beliefs of wandering Arameans. Hebrew is ancient Aramean and Arabic is the Aramaic in 2023. Ask Steven Pinker.
I always loved Peter Pans but I sure hate seeing them run the universe. Whether they are named Peter Paul or Mary or even Christopher.
My friend Mary just left we discussed Christopher Columbus he was responsible for the genocide of her ancestors and in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella were were slaughtering my ancestors because it was the Christian thing to do.
Lord Beaverbrook created Gaza and he too was a Christian but like Chris he was an English Protestant and in England it was GENTILES ONLY just like Vermont when my father went to register at the inn in Burlington in 1939. My father's name was Louis just like in the SS St Louis and there was no room for Jews at the Inn so we found comfort in the stable.
I find this 30th anniversary of Voltaire's Bastards most perplexing. John Ralston Saul dedicated his book to human banality. Christopher Hedges wrote the 20th anniversary Foreword to a book dedicated to Hannah Arendt. I want to in what alternate universe Chris read Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West>) Lord Beaverbrook was a bastard he turned away the St Louis and gave Hitler an excuse for the Holocaust and he designed the Prison in Gaza and he was an English Protestant and a real Bastard.
Sir John's Bastard was Robert McNamara but Sir John was educated in English History at Cambridge and knew of McNamara. Sir John was the COO of Petrocan when it served Canadians not Americans and its CEO was a founder of the environmental movement and Canada owned its people and America ruled the world.
It has taken a couple of hours to speak softly. You never studied American history and literature you only know the propaganda. I studied America from my perspective. I studied Twain before I heard of Chris Hedges. St Johnsbury is on the road to Hartford and the Twain Museum. I was 13 when i first studied Twain's War Prayer and United States of Lyncherdom. I assume every visitor to the Chris Hedges report knows Mark Twain intimately the Twain, Mark museum is sacred to truth tellers everywhere from Moscow to Tierra Del Fuego.. It is in Hartford Connecticut where Twain wrote about baseball apple pie and motherhood and English umbrellas.
Mark Twain covered the Philippines during the Spanish American and taught Chris the art of a war correspondent during the early Gilded Age It might cost you your job but "to thine own self be true." Polonius Shakespeare was a real conservative in Elizabethan times. Today's conservatives celebrate chaos.
I don't understand how it feels to lie to the face in the mirror. Maybe an orange wig and some insanity might help me understand America.
food poisoning caused by a bacterium (botulinum) growing on improperly sterilized canned meats and other preserved foods.
I am 75 and high functioning high functioning wide wide spectrum autistic disorder. I 've been in the kitchen for 70 years and no one ever suffered from botulism from my kitchen and no one ever refused a meal.
I subscribe to Racket News and they too aren't my Messiah but I understand their truths as I do Chris Hedges' beliefs. Voltaire said "Perception is reality." I don't trust the perceptions they are NOT my reality. My father was a wandering Aramean not a Roman.
If you are old enough to understand you just won the fickle finger of fate award for Halloween. In Sherbrooke they had a foot of snow and Halloween is much bigger than Christmas and Christmas is celebrated on Black Friday. In Sherbrooke Halloween is bigger than Christmas because it doesn't snow on Halloween does it?
They don't run the snow ploughs in October. A city where even in summer traffic is a nightmare and Christmases are always white.
We Celebrate the Sacred Poutine on Valentine's Day during Poutine Week which may be all of February
We eat poutine in February even though it still tastes good in July but maybe once a twice a month. We are a sane society
In Quebec healthcare, education and welfare are human rights not privileges and a refugee is granted refuge even if illiterate and penniless.
In Quebec citizens are not fetuses citizens are not hyphenated we are not gendered, race is a fiction and religion is fantasyland worth a visit in FEbruary during the poutine festival. We gender tables and chairs people are people. That is why you must be human to translate and you must know both English and French for google translate but I was born speaking computer. I understand AI. Today if I was eight they would have me working twelve hour shifts and telling me how lucky I was to be a genius in abstract mathematics and linguistics. I am fluent in Silicon Valley and they are mad as hatters in the 19th century. I wonder if that explains Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There are metaphysicians everywhere maybe you heard of John Donne
"No man is an Island" Metaphysicians understand for Whom the Bell tolls.
I listened. I love the meditation but the singing is nauseating and mean that literally it is toxic to my ears. Two chords and the pain was excruciating. I wonder if that is why school was so painful 68 years ago.
What's going on over there - the Mid-East - dates back to Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael. It's Biblical in Judaism, Christendom and Islam. It's not going to go away as long as those three religions are around.
Three days before 9/11, Archangel Michael asked me in my sleep if I would make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity? I woke up, made the prayer. On 9/11, I was very concerned that President Bush would start another winless war overseas, like the Vietnam war. I never imagined he would start two such wars. A few days after 9/11, as I walked out of a U.S. Post Office, Michael told me, "America needs to get out of the Middle East altogether, and let Israel and Islam work it out, or fight out out, and that way learn which, if either, is God's chosen people."
I think there is plenty of fault on both sides for what is going on in Israel and Gaza today. I don't see how Hamas got so strong and dug into Gazza, without Palestinian help.
It's a shame, Britain, France, Norway, America and South America did not offer the World War II European Jewish refugees safe harbor. The Christian American right and left seem to have forgotten their country did that to those Jews back then. Had America received those Jews, maybe there would be no Israel today. Maybe a lot of wars in the Middle East would not have happened..
Oh, God, go AWAY!!! you have no idea what you’re talking about or you suffer from botulism as well. you and Mr/Ms./Mrs./Digital Moe have come out of the same septic tank as the IDF, the Mossad, Netanyahu, etc. etc. etc. You.Are.Not.Fooling.Anyone. With your BS attempting time hovering up real philosophical, soul centered thinking. What a weak ass try. Give up. If the issues weren’t so deeply a matter of real suffering, life and death, you’d be laughable. Right as of now you’re just dismissible and disgusting.
Well, I don’t back Israel. Nor do I back Hamas. What’s going on there is horrible. And as long as the 3 Abrahamic religions exist, that region will continue to be like is has been for a very long time. Hamas has laid a gruesome trap for Israel’s military. There is no good or happy outcome.
Thank you Chris. Kindness is the Dali Llama’s religion, he said. The solution is a one state solution with Truth and Reconciliation, as in South Africa: during the proceedings, a woman faced the policeman that killed her son. And she said to him “you killed my son.I need a son.I want you to be my son.” He burst into tears and assented. The minister who told us the story at a spiritual conference, said to us “you think you know forgiveness,you don’t know forgiveness until you can be like that woman”. Human beings are capable of such deep and spiritual being ness. We need more stories to tell us and give us the permission to know that happiness. That’s the only thing that will save us.
As I debate whether to continue subscribing to the Chris Hedges Report in Chris' favour for renewal .
I did my my usual metaphysical inquiry and found the guilty party in Gaza.
Lord Beaverbrook. I don't think many remember Lord Beaverbrook. He was ENGLISH and created Palestine and in 1939 he was central to Hitler's excuse for the Holocaust.
CBC TELEVISION 1960 Lord Beaverbrook and Gaza explained in under a half hour.
How insane is it to expect Lord Beaverbrook to solve the problem his idiocy caused in the first place. I was twelve when I watched this on television and je me souviens.
Does anyone else remember Brendan Behan? He wrote great plays about real Irish history and how foreign the Irish Americans were in Eire.
I remember Behan well, I still have h work, though I haven’t heard his name in a while. I suppose today his most well known play would be retitled “The LGBTQ Fellow “.
I am 75 wide spectrum autistically disordered and very highly functional and I watched lots family and friends retreat from reality and create new ancient memories. I was looking for the architect of Gaza and found Lord Beaverbrook . I've been trying to explain Ireland to America's Irish that Ireland never had a famine they had a genocide. Swift wrote his proposal before Ireland had potatoes and 2 million Irish Roman Catholics disappeared when potatoes disappeared. I doubt if more than a dozen Church of Ireland members missed a meal. Swift became head of the Church of Ireland he was an Anglican.
I grew up in Montreal. The Irish Protestants were close to the top of the totem and Irish Catholics were the base.
*I went to same Protestant schools as Kamala Harris and Leonard Cohen.
Do you remember Shaw's Pygmalion?
When I first heard Kamala speak I fell off my chair. She had a Montreal Jewish Princess accent. I checked Wikipedia and sure enough she graduated from the same school where Leonard Cohen was the leader of the Country and Western band.
Leonard Cohen's last opus was you want it darker the choir is from the Shaar Hashomayim a block up from Westmount High still the best Public High School in the Americas but English speaking not Protestant. I suspect it has more Jews , more Moslems and more Catholics than Protestants in 2023. Kamala's mother was the head of oncological research at the Jewish General Hospital the spiritual and intellectual center of our Jewish ghetto and Pierre Eliot Trudeau was our member of Parliament and Prime Minister. Justin grew up in our tiny little Jewish ghetto next to downtown Montreal.
I remember Justin when he was a baby and he certainly is not his father. He grew up in the Jewish ghetto and in middle class Jewish ghettoes education is worth much more than gold. I now live less than an hour from where Chris Hedges grew up and we are a galaxy away from Montreal in 1980.
We had the Montreal Massacre in 1989 and in 2023 race, gender and religion are fantasy and we must go into our closets to pray. We have lots of churches for sale. Sherbrooke is an hour or two drive from Lewiston Maine and the old wagon paths carry bicycles. Thursday we had a public health emergency and you called it a manhunt. A reporter from LaTribune my Daily newspaper spent the day in Lewiston just driving around and talking to people. It didn't look or sound like MSNBC.
I don't consider Montreal Jewish Princess a pejorative. My niece just gave birth and she is a Montreal Jewish Princess and she knew everything she wanted. She is am MBA in Marketing and a new Mother and money is never going to be of concern. She travelled the world. Right now however along with the joy are the family from Israel starting school in Toronto while her best man is serving in the IDF. I had many Palestinian friends but nobody I know ever returned to Gaza they spoke English, French and whatever else; they were middle class., They were fellow wandering Arameans. Nobody volunteers to spend their life in prison.
Why can I watch a tv show made 63 years ago explain that Lord Beaverbrook designed and built Gaza and we never heard his name mentioned once in the Post , the Times, FOX or MSNBC? Can you imagine just the editorial staff at the Times. You can watch the Fighting words archives and watch Russia Ukraine 1960 and nothing really changed.
I've spent far too much time in the Bible Belts. I live a few minutes from Magog and was wondering where Gog was. I have no idea who Matthew Perry was I wouldn't recognize him if someone identified him but he too lived in Montreal's Jewish ghetto with Justin Trudeau. Kamala might be a couple of years older but she and Justin crossed paths many times in Montreal's tiny Jewish ghetto..
I doubt if it means anything but I understand why people believe nonsense.
Quit hijacking the thread, with your BS, long hyperbole, gobbledygook-because it says something human, about the Palestinians.Jesus Christ !!!! go take your botulism somewhere else
Anyway in Montreal The Jewish General Hospital is just below the Shrine to Brother Andre
I watched it being built while my Catholic friends didn't learn how to read. That to me is Chris Hedges. Monuments to fantasy and ignorance. My apologies I love Chris I know truth is painful but The truth can you set free. Maybe it is time to apologize to Steven Pinker. He only speaks the truth.
Today in Quebec religion, race and gender are fantasy.
Healthcare, education and welfare are rights.
We pray only in our closets and we practice what Jesus said not what Rabbis, Archbishops, Orthodox Patriarchs, Kings, Minsters of a false Gospel and Emperors tell us he said.
We build Universities for our peasants, hospitals for our homeless who need hospitals as much as our middle class. "We are CHRISTIAN and you are BYZANTINES "look round ye mighty and despair." Frankenstein was Jewish his monster is your monster. He was trying to protect us from the Villagers. Chris understands but won't remove the blindfold and see the monster is in the mirror. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, "
Look round YE mighty and despair. Percy Wollstonecraft was married to someone who would carry the name Wollstonekraft here in Quebec from birth to death.
Percy wrote a poem about Byzantium it is just east of Rome and reaches Africa Australia and the Americas.
I sure hope Captain Kirk is flying this Starship he is a wandering Aramean who went to PROTESTANT school. There are Jews and Americans . You can be a Jewish American and believe anything you want or you can be American and believe what you are told to believe by the Emperor and his mobs.
Do you remember the Prime Directive?" How unAmerican can one get?
Lord Beaverbrook Created Gaza and Guatemala and Cuba and Chile and Argentina and the downfall of Iranian enlightenment just like they ended the Enlightenmentt that began in Vilnius Lithuania in the 17 th century.
Oh yes, I also lived in Woodlawn Chicago for over a decade. Woodlawn is where Barrack Obama lost the the Democratic Primary to Bobby Rush because Obama is too conservative he is a man who calls Hyde Park home. It doesn't get much more neoliberal than Hyde Park. I met Obama before America met Obama. I think him a honourable and gracious human being. If I have but one criticism it is that he is too American.
America is a religion. I go into my closet to pray.
FFrom The Doubter Companion :A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense John Ralston Saul 1994 Viking Press
CHICAGO SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS A great centre of contemporary SCHOLASTICISM. The economists working there and produced by it are as important to the stagnation of useful thought as the Schoolmen of the University of Paris were at the height of the Middle Ages.
I visited UofC regularly in 1994 and the business school and Law school were much the same. The Education faculty was ancient history.
Also From Doubter's 1994
SCHOLASTICISM The dominant mediaeval school of teaching , inquiry, knowledge and argument. One of the enlightenment's main enemies. Scholasticism was duly defeated and destroyed. It mysteriously re-emerged at the centre of power in the second half of this century.
Thank you Chris I needed a wake up. I live in a 21st century secular humanist liberal democracy where we try to be christian in what do , not in what we say. I was thinking that it might be nice to spend a few hours in downtown St Johnsbury and pick up some books and enjoy a lunch with my partner of many years "She" was born in Gaza at the Vanderbilt Hospital in the heart of Gaza in 1938.
Like Chris I found the Palestinians warm and friendly and just like in St Johnsbury I found the local culture foreign and barbaric. I am a wandering Aramean like my brother Jesus and Jesus said the truth shall set you free.
We had a mass shooting in 1989
(In Queb3ec there is no such things as RACE, Gender and Religion. I was made welcome in Chicago Woodlawn and suburban Nashville but the people in Nashville's inner city were wary of this stranger.)
We had a mass shooting in 1989 when a gunman walked into our major engineering shool and shot a number of our best and brightest future engineers in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
The people of St Johnsbury are warm and friendly but I am a Jew and I must sleep with one eye open. I am 75 and only see with my left eye. It wasn't that long ago that St Johnsbury was Louisiana and put out its Gentiles Only signs. I know Chris remembers his childhood. Vermont was the reddest state in the Union and only saw through its right eye and then Bernie, Ben , Jerry and Paul Newman and turned Mississippi North into the healthiest, wealthiest and best educated neighbourhood in Gaza.
We used to have only Gentiles signs in Quebec I was born under anti Christian Roman/English theocracy and we have signs saying there is no such thing as gentiles, jews, males females, Islam, Christianity and Judaism because we love company and welcome the stranger.
In the Legends of the Jew Louis Ginzburg 1908 Jewish Publication Society talks about the destruction of the evil cities like Sodom and Gemorrah. In Judaism Sodom is destroyed not for its wickedness but for justifying the unjustifiable.
What a moving piece! Thank you for sharing. The kindness you received within two Arabic societies, Palestinian & Iraqi, mirror mine, minus the harrowing times. I have lived among Palestinians, and I know with what little some families & individuals had, they graciously shared with me. Palestinian hospitality & appreciation of me by my students will always remain some of my deepest memories.
Thank you for sharing such a personal story about kindness from those who have represented in the media as the opposite. Your experience there serves to show the truth about Palestinians.
I also have fond memories of Iraq and its people when, in the late eighties, my parents decided for us to spend Greek Easter there (my dad managed a mechanical/electrical engineering company, contracted to do the engineering for new university campuses across Iraq). I remember a great children's museum in Baghdad, the fun we had at the bazaar, a picnic at a lake surrounded by a palm tree forest, Easter mass at the Orthodox church, and unfailingly kind, generous people. When a couple of years later we watched the first Gulf War unfold on TV, we all had tears in our eyes. The Iraq we knew would be no longer.
I am a Greek Cypriot, and we have our own share of invasion, occupation, and war. I went to school at Berkeley, got married, and marched against the 2003 war with my (Jewish American) husband.
Over the years I got to travel, for business and pleasure, across the Middle East, learning a little Arabic along the way and making friends for life.
We were in Haifa 8 years ago and we were lost. Nobody would give us directions for some reason. I heard Arabic coming from a cafe, we walked in, and the Palestinian owners (Israeli citizens, I'm sure), delighted at my kid-level Arabic, gave us coffee and directions.
What is happening in Palestine is nothing less than devastating. Thank you for your incredibly informed perspective, and for sharing your experiences, and the unbelievably hard lives of the Palestinian people, with us.
Oh, Chris!! In the midst of mayhem, thank you for this true story.
Thank you for this: a reminder of the aspects of humanity of which we are capable, that are a part of us, in the face of witnessing so much of the other aspects of what we do.
Chris has honestly earned the expertise with which he speaks on the Middle East situation. Robert Fisk, the great Irish journalist, had similar experiences, and spoke of the history of the Middle East with the same empathy.
That Empire has turned Islamic people into our enemies is the long standing crime responsible for what is happening now in Gaza. It's past time we asked ourselves why we find it so easy to hate, so difficult to show the human kindness Chris experienced.
Thank you Chris, again. As usual, you are amazing and eloquent. Your goodness and humanity shine in this dark, dark place we are in.
What brilliance. The truth changes with time - except with love and kindness. Human kindness always remains all-powerful. Think about who our so-called allies and enemies are: constantly changing, just like Big Brother and the forces of evil want. Do not let the war mongers take our souls. Fight them with love and kindness. Be human.
Wonderful, Chris! Thank you.
Touched my heart deeply. Where is this human kindness now😪 Thank You Chris Hedges💕 your personal story is what is desperately needed... we need to rise above the hate & remember our humanity☮️💜
Chris Hedges you are as always a beacon of hope and truth.
The kindness and generosity you speak of is well known among travelers. I remember a book by Paul Theroux about traveling throughout the Mediterranean. His experience with the Israeli authorities was, like my own, quite negative, but he had great fondness for the kindness and hospitality of his Palestinian hosts.
I suppose today we’re all considered anti-semites. You know, soon we’ll have to just let them squawk and let that term be used for people who refuse to hate.
October 6th was a criminal and indefensible act, but it was about freedom, not hatred. The invasion of Gaza is driven by hatred, racism, and greed. And it is, is in so many ways, anti-semitic.
Thank you Sera,
I am here because Chris Hedge's reminds me of the world of my Brother Jesus and I. I am a Jew not an Iranian. Jesus was an Aramean and I grew up where Steven Pinker grew up and had the fortune of being a wandering Aramean like my brothers in Gaza. I did not go to Harvard or the University of Chicago and know Judaism is not the religion of Empire and the world isn't Manichean and the future does not belong to Manicheans unless we want to stop evolution. America is Manichean and Jews like STEVEN PINKER understand Manicheanism is not Abrahamic. Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholicism American, and American Christian are Byzantine. Jesus was not Manichean Manicheans are not Abrahamic. We are not Utopians. Mark Twain was Abrahamic he wrote letters from Earth just like Jesus.
I was born in Montreal's Jewish Ghetto and went to Protestant schools .
I know Milton, Newton and Locke. I studied Orwell and Darwin and Twain and Jefferson and they understood the difference between Hedge's Manicheanism and the Abrahamic tradition of balance and harmony in the universe. I have always been a wandering Jew or as it is called in the 21st century wide spectrum autistic disorder. I failed Kindergarten and by the time I reached Senior high my report card said I was I lazy genius . I scored 99+_ in linguistic understanding and logic . I believe the reason I could not write was cause I wouldn't try hard enough when I really was killing myself rolling Sisyphus' rock up a hill. I once watched his Hedgiousness call Steven Pinker every foul name in His vocabulary.
Hedges is Donald TRump with a English Protestant education.
Hedges is a Manichean having no understanding of Abrahamic theology. I attended high holiday services in St Johnsbury and the Palestinians in St Johnsbury were as Protestant as Harvard's Chris Hedges.
Thomas More was more important to America than George Washington or John Adams or even John Wesley.
America is Manichean and Lord Beaverbrook was far more culpable for Gaza than that other morally bankrupt American Business School Graduate Donald Jonathan Trump.
There were no Jews in England at the time of Thomas More and Utopia is a place of the imagination.
In Montreal Thomas More Institute is a place of life long learning and discovery; in America Thomas More's Society is right wing fascist Roman Catholic NAZI propaganda Manchean legal pedants dedicated to perpetual ignorance.
I love Chris Hedges despite his being an Persian Manichean. my father was a wandering Aramean who once found refuge in Tehran. As much as Hedges rails against Steven Pinker Steven Pinker went to the same Protestant schools as Leonard Cohen, Kamala Harris and yours truly and we understand that Christianity is not an Abrahamic religion. Kamala to me is Washington's only real Jew she grew up in Montreal's Jewish ghetto next to the Jewish General Hospital and has the same accent as the wandering Aramean with which I am most familiar.
I hate Biden's interpretation of Mark Twain's the War Prayer. Mark Twain cursed War, he didn't celebrate the souls of the dead. What is a Jewish soul anyways it has no place to go not even Utopia? Like Twain said I believe Heaven is no Utopia it is an eternity of nothingness.
L'Chaim
It the story Louis Ginzburg relates in the story of the Evil Cities in Legends of the Bible Jewish Publication Society 1908 in his understanding of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Hell and Heaven belong only to the living.
Dr Samuel Johnson defined the words of the American Constitution
Religion is the belief in virtue and virtue is the belief in Heaven and Hell and everlasting reward and punishment and Heaven and Hell are Persian beliefs not the beliefs of wandering Arameans. Hebrew is ancient Aramean and Arabic is the Aramaic in 2023. Ask Steven Pinker.
I always loved Peter Pans but I sure hate seeing them run the universe. Whether they are named Peter Paul or Mary or even Christopher.
My friend Mary just left we discussed Christopher Columbus he was responsible for the genocide of her ancestors and in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella were were slaughtering my ancestors because it was the Christian thing to do.
Lord Beaverbrook created Gaza and he too was a Christian but like Chris he was an English Protestant and in England it was GENTILES ONLY just like Vermont when my father went to register at the inn in Burlington in 1939. My father's name was Louis just like in the SS St Louis and there was no room for Jews at the Inn so we found comfort in the stable.
I find this 30th anniversary of Voltaire's Bastards most perplexing. John Ralston Saul dedicated his book to human banality. Christopher Hedges wrote the 20th anniversary Foreword to a book dedicated to Hannah Arendt. I want to in what alternate universe Chris read Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West>) Lord Beaverbrook was a bastard he turned away the St Louis and gave Hitler an excuse for the Holocaust and he designed the Prison in Gaza and he was an English Protestant and a real Bastard.
Sir John's Bastard was Robert McNamara but Sir John was educated in English History at Cambridge and knew of McNamara. Sir John was the COO of Petrocan when it served Canadians not Americans and its CEO was a founder of the environmental movement and Canada owned its people and America ruled the world.
Botulism
It has taken a couple of hours to speak softly. You never studied American history and literature you only know the propaganda. I studied America from my perspective. I studied Twain before I heard of Chris Hedges. St Johnsbury is on the road to Hartford and the Twain Museum. I was 13 when i first studied Twain's War Prayer and United States of Lyncherdom. I assume every visitor to the Chris Hedges report knows Mark Twain intimately the Twain, Mark museum is sacred to truth tellers everywhere from Moscow to Tierra Del Fuego.. It is in Hartford Connecticut where Twain wrote about baseball apple pie and motherhood and English umbrellas.
Mark Twain covered the Philippines during the Spanish American and taught Chris the art of a war correspondent during the early Gilded Age It might cost you your job but "to thine own self be true." Polonius Shakespeare was a real conservative in Elizabethan times. Today's conservatives celebrate chaos.
I don't understand how it feels to lie to the face in the mirror. Maybe an orange wig and some insanity might help me understand America.
I don't know what to say Bernadene
Leonard Cohen wrote The Song of Bernadette.
E Coli
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli
Botulism
1.
food poisoning caused by a bacterium (botulinum) growing on improperly sterilized canned meats and other preserved foods.
I am 75 and high functioning high functioning wide wide spectrum autistic disorder. I 've been in the kitchen for 70 years and no one ever suffered from botulism from my kitchen and no one ever refused a meal.
I subscribe to Racket News and they too aren't my Messiah but I understand their truths as I do Chris Hedges' beliefs. Voltaire said "Perception is reality." I don't trust the perceptions they are NOT my reality. My father was a wandering Aramean not a Roman.
If you are old enough to understand you just won the fickle finger of fate award for Halloween. In Sherbrooke they had a foot of snow and Halloween is much bigger than Christmas and Christmas is celebrated on Black Friday. In Sherbrooke Halloween is bigger than Christmas because it doesn't snow on Halloween does it?
They don't run the snow ploughs in October. A city where even in summer traffic is a nightmare and Christmases are always white.
We Celebrate the Sacred Poutine on Valentine's Day during Poutine Week which may be all of February
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/ohdio/premiere/emissions/vivement-le-retour/segments/entrevue/344249/poutine-poutineweek-france-sherbrooke-gagnant-rennes
We eat poutine in February even though it still tastes good in July but maybe once a twice a month. We are a sane society
In Quebec healthcare, education and welfare are human rights not privileges and a refugee is granted refuge even if illiterate and penniless.
In Quebec citizens are not fetuses citizens are not hyphenated we are not gendered, race is a fiction and religion is fantasyland worth a visit in FEbruary during the poutine festival. We gender tables and chairs people are people. That is why you must be human to translate and you must know both English and French for google translate but I was born speaking computer. I understand AI. Today if I was eight they would have me working twelve hour shifts and telling me how lucky I was to be a genius in abstract mathematics and linguistics. I am fluent in Silicon Valley and they are mad as hatters in the 19th century. I wonder if that explains Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There are metaphysicians everywhere maybe you heard of John Donne
"No man is an Island" Metaphysicians understand for Whom the Bell tolls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Donne
If you went to an English Protestant school you could sing No man is an Island.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19G9DNUun-Q
I listened. I love the meditation but the singing is nauseating and mean that literally it is toxic to my ears. Two chords and the pain was excruciating. I wonder if that is why school was so painful 68 years ago.
Nicely said and done, Chris.
What's going on over there - the Mid-East - dates back to Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael. It's Biblical in Judaism, Christendom and Islam. It's not going to go away as long as those three religions are around.
Three days before 9/11, Archangel Michael asked me in my sleep if I would make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity? I woke up, made the prayer. On 9/11, I was very concerned that President Bush would start another winless war overseas, like the Vietnam war. I never imagined he would start two such wars. A few days after 9/11, as I walked out of a U.S. Post Office, Michael told me, "America needs to get out of the Middle East altogether, and let Israel and Islam work it out, or fight out out, and that way learn which, if either, is God's chosen people."
I think there is plenty of fault on both sides for what is going on in Israel and Gaza today. I don't see how Hamas got so strong and dug into Gazza, without Palestinian help.
It's a shame, Britain, France, Norway, America and South America did not offer the World War II European Jewish refugees safe harbor. The Christian American right and left seem to have forgotten their country did that to those Jews back then. Had America received those Jews, maybe there would be no Israel today. Maybe a lot of wars in the Middle East would not have happened..
Oh, God, go AWAY!!! you have no idea what you’re talking about or you suffer from botulism as well. you and Mr/Ms./Mrs./Digital Moe have come out of the same septic tank as the IDF, the Mossad, Netanyahu, etc. etc. etc. You.Are.Not.Fooling.Anyone. With your BS attempting time hovering up real philosophical, soul centered thinking. What a weak ass try. Give up. If the issues weren’t so deeply a matter of real suffering, life and death, you’d be laughable. Right as of now you’re just dismissible and disgusting.
Well, I don’t back Israel. Nor do I back Hamas. What’s going on there is horrible. And as long as the 3 Abrahamic religions exist, that region will continue to be like is has been for a very long time. Hamas has laid a gruesome trap for Israel’s military. There is no good or happy outcome.
Thank you Chris. Kindness is the Dali Llama’s religion, he said. The solution is a one state solution with Truth and Reconciliation, as in South Africa: during the proceedings, a woman faced the policeman that killed her son. And she said to him “you killed my son.I need a son.I want you to be my son.” He burst into tears and assented. The minister who told us the story at a spiritual conference, said to us “you think you know forgiveness,you don’t know forgiveness until you can be like that woman”. Human beings are capable of such deep and spiritual being ness. We need more stories to tell us and give us the permission to know that happiness. That’s the only thing that will save us.
As I debate whether to continue subscribing to the Chris Hedges Report in Chris' favour for renewal .
I did my my usual metaphysical inquiry and found the guilty party in Gaza.
Lord Beaverbrook. I don't think many remember Lord Beaverbrook. He was ENGLISH and created Palestine and in 1939 he was central to Hitler's excuse for the Holocaust.
CBC TELEVISION 1960 Lord Beaverbrook and Gaza explained in under a half hour.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1871003349
How insane is it to expect Lord Beaverbrook to solve the problem his idiocy caused in the first place. I was twelve when I watched this on television and je me souviens.
Does anyone else remember Brendan Behan? He wrote great plays about real Irish history and how foreign the Irish Americans were in Eire.
I remember Behan well, I still have h work, though I haven’t heard his name in a while. I suppose today his most well known play would be retitled “The LGBTQ Fellow “.
Thanks Sera
I am 75 wide spectrum autistically disordered and very highly functional and I watched lots family and friends retreat from reality and create new ancient memories. I was looking for the architect of Gaza and found Lord Beaverbrook . I've been trying to explain Ireland to America's Irish that Ireland never had a famine they had a genocide. Swift wrote his proposal before Ireland had potatoes and 2 million Irish Roman Catholics disappeared when potatoes disappeared. I doubt if more than a dozen Church of Ireland members missed a meal. Swift became head of the Church of Ireland he was an Anglican.
I grew up in Montreal. The Irish Protestants were close to the top of the totem and Irish Catholics were the base.
*I went to same Protestant schools as Kamala Harris and Leonard Cohen.
Do you remember Shaw's Pygmalion?
When I first heard Kamala speak I fell off my chair. She had a Montreal Jewish Princess accent. I checked Wikipedia and sure enough she graduated from the same school where Leonard Cohen was the leader of the Country and Western band.
Leonard Cohen's last opus was you want it darker the choir is from the Shaar Hashomayim a block up from Westmount High still the best Public High School in the Americas but English speaking not Protestant. I suspect it has more Jews , more Moslems and more Catholics than Protestants in 2023. Kamala's mother was the head of oncological research at the Jewish General Hospital the spiritual and intellectual center of our Jewish ghetto and Pierre Eliot Trudeau was our member of Parliament and Prime Minister. Justin grew up in our tiny little Jewish ghetto next to downtown Montreal.
I remember Justin when he was a baby and he certainly is not his father. He grew up in the Jewish ghetto and in middle class Jewish ghettoes education is worth much more than gold. I now live less than an hour from where Chris Hedges grew up and we are a galaxy away from Montreal in 1980.
We had the Montreal Massacre in 1989 and in 2023 race, gender and religion are fantasy and we must go into our closets to pray. We have lots of churches for sale. Sherbrooke is an hour or two drive from Lewiston Maine and the old wagon paths carry bicycles. Thursday we had a public health emergency and you called it a manhunt. A reporter from LaTribune my Daily newspaper spent the day in Lewiston just driving around and talking to people. It didn't look or sound like MSNBC.
I don't consider Montreal Jewish Princess a pejorative. My niece just gave birth and she is a Montreal Jewish Princess and she knew everything she wanted. She is am MBA in Marketing and a new Mother and money is never going to be of concern. She travelled the world. Right now however along with the joy are the family from Israel starting school in Toronto while her best man is serving in the IDF. I had many Palestinian friends but nobody I know ever returned to Gaza they spoke English, French and whatever else; they were middle class., They were fellow wandering Arameans. Nobody volunteers to spend their life in prison.
Why can I watch a tv show made 63 years ago explain that Lord Beaverbrook designed and built Gaza and we never heard his name mentioned once in the Post , the Times, FOX or MSNBC? Can you imagine just the editorial staff at the Times. You can watch the Fighting words archives and watch Russia Ukraine 1960 and nothing really changed.
I've spent far too much time in the Bible Belts. I live a few minutes from Magog and was wondering where Gog was. I have no idea who Matthew Perry was I wouldn't recognize him if someone identified him but he too lived in Montreal's Jewish ghetto with Justin Trudeau. Kamala might be a couple of years older but she and Justin crossed paths many times in Montreal's tiny Jewish ghetto..
I doubt if it means anything but I understand why people believe nonsense.
Quit hijacking the thread, with your BS, long hyperbole, gobbledygook-because it says something human, about the Palestinians.Jesus Christ !!!! go take your botulism somewhere else
Anyway in Montreal The Jewish General Hospital is just below the Shrine to Brother Andre
I watched it being built while my Catholic friends didn't learn how to read. That to me is Chris Hedges. Monuments to fantasy and ignorance. My apologies I love Chris I know truth is painful but The truth can you set free. Maybe it is time to apologize to Steven Pinker. He only speaks the truth.
Today in Quebec religion, race and gender are fantasy.
Healthcare, education and welfare are rights.
We pray only in our closets and we practice what Jesus said not what Rabbis, Archbishops, Orthodox Patriarchs, Kings, Minsters of a false Gospel and Emperors tell us he said.
We build Universities for our peasants, hospitals for our homeless who need hospitals as much as our middle class. "We are CHRISTIAN and you are BYZANTINES "look round ye mighty and despair." Frankenstein was Jewish his monster is your monster. He was trying to protect us from the Villagers. Chris understands but won't remove the blindfold and see the monster is in the mirror. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, "
Look round YE mighty and despair. Percy Wollstonecraft was married to someone who would carry the name Wollstonekraft here in Quebec from birth to death.
Percy wrote a poem about Byzantium it is just east of Rome and reaches Africa Australia and the Americas.
I sure hope Captain Kirk is flying this Starship he is a wandering Aramean who went to PROTESTANT school. There are Jews and Americans . You can be a Jewish American and believe anything you want or you can be American and believe what you are told to believe by the Emperor and his mobs.
Do you remember the Prime Directive?" How unAmerican can one get?
Lord Beaverbrook Created Gaza and Guatemala and Cuba and Chile and Argentina and the downfall of Iranian enlightenment just like they ended the Enlightenmentt that began in Vilnius Lithuania in the 17 th century.
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=Cabal
https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=cabalist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Vilnius
Vilnius not Rome Paris or London gave birth to the enlightenment which Rome, Paris, Vienna, London, Moscow and Istanbul/Constantinople destroyed.
Oh yes, I also lived in Woodlawn Chicago for over a decade. Woodlawn is where Barrack Obama lost the the Democratic Primary to Bobby Rush because Obama is too conservative he is a man who calls Hyde Park home. It doesn't get much more neoliberal than Hyde Park. I met Obama before America met Obama. I think him a honourable and gracious human being. If I have but one criticism it is that he is too American.
America is a religion. I go into my closet to pray.
FFrom The Doubter Companion :A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense John Ralston Saul 1994 Viking Press
CHICAGO SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS A great centre of contemporary SCHOLASTICISM. The economists working there and produced by it are as important to the stagnation of useful thought as the Schoolmen of the University of Paris were at the height of the Middle Ages.
I visited UofC regularly in 1994 and the business school and Law school were much the same. The Education faculty was ancient history.
Also From Doubter's 1994
SCHOLASTICISM The dominant mediaeval school of teaching , inquiry, knowledge and argument. One of the enlightenment's main enemies. Scholasticism was duly defeated and destroyed. It mysteriously re-emerged at the centre of power in the second half of this century.
Take your BS somewhere else
Thank you Chris I needed a wake up. I live in a 21st century secular humanist liberal democracy where we try to be christian in what do , not in what we say. I was thinking that it might be nice to spend a few hours in downtown St Johnsbury and pick up some books and enjoy a lunch with my partner of many years "She" was born in Gaza at the Vanderbilt Hospital in the heart of Gaza in 1938.
Like Chris I found the Palestinians warm and friendly and just like in St Johnsbury I found the local culture foreign and barbaric. I am a wandering Aramean like my brother Jesus and Jesus said the truth shall set you free.
We had a mass shooting in 1989
(In Queb3ec there is no such things as RACE, Gender and Religion. I was made welcome in Chicago Woodlawn and suburban Nashville but the people in Nashville's inner city were wary of this stranger.)
We had a mass shooting in 1989 when a gunman walked into our major engineering shool and shot a number of our best and brightest future engineers in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
The people of St Johnsbury are warm and friendly but I am a Jew and I must sleep with one eye open. I am 75 and only see with my left eye. It wasn't that long ago that St Johnsbury was Louisiana and put out its Gentiles Only signs. I know Chris remembers his childhood. Vermont was the reddest state in the Union and only saw through its right eye and then Bernie, Ben , Jerry and Paul Newman and turned Mississippi North into the healthiest, wealthiest and best educated neighbourhood in Gaza.
We used to have only Gentiles signs in Quebec I was born under anti Christian Roman/English theocracy and we have signs saying there is no such thing as gentiles, jews, males females, Islam, Christianity and Judaism because we love company and welcome the stranger.
In the Legends of the Jew Louis Ginzburg 1908 Jewish Publication Society talks about the destruction of the evil cities like Sodom and Gemorrah. In Judaism Sodom is destroyed not for its wickedness but for justifying the unjustifiable.
Manicheanism is Persian and most unChristian.
Bill 21 minutes away from downtown Gaza.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/bill-21
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/polytechnique-tragedy
For those that read and don't understand my English I apologize.
My only excuse is my wide spectrum autistic disorder and the genius they said I* possessed in linguistics 70 years ago.
Manicheanism the belief in a universe of B+W.
It is not the story of the good defilers of the temple.
Beautiful, Chris! I wish I cud say something in Arabic!!
Why can’t all humans coexist peacefully?! May God, Allah, Yahweh have mercy on Humanity!
You could try Hallelujah
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ozuUdabpcs
Tel Aviv
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah
Ancient Hebrew has evolved
It is all Aramean