Saturday, July 18, 2009

Chris Hedges Speaks on Empire of Illusion July 20 in Berkeley: PLEASE FORWARD

Chris Hedges will discuss his major new book:


“Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”


Monday, July 20, 7:30 pm

Berkeley Hillside Club

2286 Cedar Street

Berkeley, CA


Tickets: www.brownpapertickets.com/event/71755

phone order: 800-838.3006

Pegasus Solano, Pegasus Shattuck, Pendragon, Moe’s, Diesel, Walden Pond, Modern Times

$10 advance, $12 door, benefits KPFA Radio

Information: www.kpfa.org/events or 510.848.6767x609


Chris Hedges writes a weekly column for www.Truthdig.org that is published every Monday, for which the Los Angeles Press Club just honored him as Online Journalist of the Year and Best Online Column. He is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, and has reported from more than 50 countries, while working for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He currently writes for Harper’s, New York Review of Books, Granta, Mother Jones, and Foreign Affairs. The author of the best selling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” - a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awardfor Nonfiction - Hedges received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is the author of “American Fascists,” a book on the Christian right, and “I Don’t Believe in Atheists”. In 2007 he famously debated a sodden and belligerent Christopher Hitchens in Berkeley on “Is God Great?” (often viewed on YouTube)


All periods of profound change occur in a crisis. It was a crisis that brought us the New Deal, now largely dismantled by the corporate state. It was also a crisis that gave the world Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic. We can go in either direction. Events move at the speed of light when societies and cultural assumptions break down. There are powerful forces, which have no commitment to the open society, ready to seize the moment to snuff out the last vestiges of democratic egalitarianism. Our bankrupt liberalism, which naively believes that Barack Obama is the antidote to our permanent war economy and Wall Street fraud, will either rise from its coma or be rolled over by an organized corporate elite and their right-wing lap dogs. The corporate domination of the airwaves, of most print publications and an increasing number of Internet sites means we will have to search, and search quickly, for alternative forms of communication to thwart the rise of totalitarian capitalism.” - Hedges on TruthDig



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