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  • Seymour M. Hersh’in 4 Nisan 2014 tarihli “The Red Line and The Rat Line” isimli yazısının Türkçe Çevirisi
  • Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels (9 April 2014)
  • Naci Eriş: A Hero For These Times (15 November 2013)
  • MY APPEAL TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE by Admiral Türker Ertürk (Ret.)
  • The American Ambassador (20 June 2013
  • Alain Badiou--Türkiye: Gerçek Bir Tarihi İsyan Mı? (19 Haziran 2013)
  • Alain Badiou--Turkey: A Genuine Historical Riot? (19 June 2013)
  • Barricade Defense
  • Ayranı Fazla Çekince (Bekir Coşkun-30 Mayıs 2013)
  • ÜMİT UMUTU VERİR 24 Mart 2013
  • İYİ ŞEKER BAYRAMLAR!!!! AKP'DEN (19/8/2012)
  • Olympic Women (11/8/2012)
  • OBAMABALL: an open letter to the President of the United States (2 August 2012)
  • Sinatra Dedicates One to Ataturk (17 May 2012)
  • As He Lay Dying (14 May 2012)
  • Viva 19 Mayis! Haydi gel! Bizimle ol!
  • It's 19 May...Know Your Enemy! (11 May 2012)
  • I'm as mad as hell... (2 April 2012)
  • ARAB SPRING=AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
  • Happy World Women's Day in Turkey (8 March 2012)
  • My e-mail note from Barack Obama (12/19/11) and my response
  • Women's Volleyball Team-the only winners
  • MEDIA ALERT: ATATURK SOCIETIES OF THE USA AND THE UNITED KINGDOM (6 June 2011)
  • BASIN BILDIRISI: AMERİKA VE İNGİLTERE ATATÜRK DERNEKLERİ (6 Haziran 2011)
  • Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fascist
  • Ryan Interview: Kanal B, Bilmek Gerek, 28 March 2011
  • Ergenekon Headquarters (karargâh)
  • When the Nazis Came: 8 March 2011
  • Letter to President Obama: 20 Jan. 2009
  • (Türkçe) Letter to President Obama: 20 Jan. 2009
  • Letter to President Obama: 20 Oct. 2009
  • Letter to President Obama: 3 Jan. 2010
  • Letter to President Obama: 20 July 2010
  • (Türkçe) Letter to President Obama: 3 Jan. 2010
  • (Türkçe) Letter to President Obama: 20 Temmuz 2010
  • Follow-up Letter to Ambassador Francis J. Ricciardone: 12 March 2011
  • Letter to US Senator Mark Udall: 12 Feb. 2011
  • Islam, Secularism and the Battle for Turkey’s Future
  • WHAT PERCENTAGE OF US ARE STUPID? 5 October 2009
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  • Kidnapped (17/8/2012)
  • The Dead
    • AND SO PASSES A WOMAN’S LIFE IN TURKEY (21 October 2014)
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    • THERE WILL BE NO ICE CREAM IN DAMASCUS THIS LOVELY EVENING (14 June 2013)
    • IN ISTANBUL A DOORMAN DIES (31 January 2014)
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    • TO THE IRANIAN KIDS BUSTED ON EXCESSIVE HAPPINESS CHARGE BY TEHRAN’S KORANIC KOPS (22 May 2014)
    • AMERICA
    • Joe the Biden Eats the Bison (21/01/2013)
    • A poem by Etheridge Knight
    • Apprehension in the Bronx Botanical Garden
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    • A SENSE OF WHERE YOU ARE by John McFee
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  • On Peace
    • A WAR ON WARMONGERS, A “JEFFERSONIAN” REBELLION (April 4, 2016)
    • WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A SOCIALIST by Chris Hedges (21 September 2015)
    • THE YOUNG EURO CLASSIC PEACE ORCHESTRA
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    • THE NOBEL OBAMA (2 September 2013)
    • My Vote For President: 2012
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  • On West Point
    • West Point Slimed By Trump Visit
    • OBAMA VISITS WEST POINT THEN LIES, CHEATS AND STEALS (6 June 2014)
    • West Point Graduates Organize Against The War - 21 April 2006
    • Good Neighbor Senator Sessions Walls Out Mexico . . . and Robert Frost - 19 May 2006
    • Now Is The Time - 12 May 2006
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    • Guantánamo: The Subject Was Linens- 15 June 2006
    • Impeach the President of the United States - 7 October 2006
    • Election Eve Daze--Hanging in There Together - 6 November 2006
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    • George W. MacBush–Serial Murderer - 15 December 2006
    • Abolish It! - 9 Feb 2007
    • WEST POINT TO HONOR DISHONORABLE GEORGE W. BUSH >
      • On West Point, War and Pizza - 6 May 2006
  • On America
    • George Floyd opens the floodgates
    • BRONX GIRL OUSTS 10-TERM DEMOCRAT POLITICAL BOSS!
    • The United States of America: Land of internment camps
    • THIS IS AMERICA!
    • MY DISGUST AND DESPAIR ABOUT TRUMP'S SCHEME TO DESTROY THE V.A.
    • MY LETTER TO SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER , 3 February 2017
    • DONALD DEMENTIA
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    • Service Academy Graduates Against the War
    • U.S. Service Academy Graduates Oppose Bombing Syria (5 September 2013)
    • NO WAY OUT YOU NO GOOD PSEUDO-AMERICAN NEOCON NUDNIK APPARATCHIKS! CATCH ME IF YOU DARE!
    • WILLIE MAYS FOR PRESIDENT! (SEPTEMBER 24, 2016)
    • COUNT ME OUT, BERNIE! NO MORE $3 CONTRIBUTIONS! March 2, 2016
    • The atrocities of ISIS and the US wars of sociocide (26 August 2015)
    • WHAT I'VE LEARNED ABOUT U.S. FOREIGN POLICY (25 August 2015)
    • KILLING RAGHEADS FOR JESUS (By Chris Hedges) (26 January 2015)
    • The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro by Frederick Douglass
    • THOMAS PAINE, OUR CONTEMPORARY (27 May 2014)
    • JAMES SALTER
    • BEFORE A SUMMER SUN >
      • Prologue
      • 4. Teaching Bloody Instructions
      • 8. The Doctrine of Discovery
      • 11. Crazed from the Cradle
      • 15. The Necessary Ending of the American Indian
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    • The CIA and the Media
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    • Mrs. Ramsay's Wedge: A View of Woolf's "To the Lighthouse"
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  • THE ISRAELI-AMERICAN KILLING MACHINE (19 July 2014)
  • I-THE FRAME-UP (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on Trial) 8 January 2009
  • II-THE ARRAIGNMENT (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on Trial) 9 January 2009
  • III-ATATÜRK APPEARS (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on Trial) 26 January 2009
  • How Old Are You? 4 May 2009
  • On Living
    • "Art, Truth & Politics" by Harold Pinter (1930-2008)
    • The Power of Imagination (Chris Hedges-13 May 2014)
    • WE ARE ALL ONE
    • The Story of Stuff-What Needs To Be Done (10 May 2012)
    • An Arab Springtime? by Samir Amin
    • From Resistance to Revolution
  • Photographs
    • Istanbul
    • Tarlabaşı, Istanbul 2013
  • Kidnapped (17/8/2012)

HOPE
by Chris Hedges

Lafayette Park
Washington, DC
17 December 2010


—TRANSCRIPT--

Hope, from now on, will look like this.

Hope will not come in trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people. It will not be realized by chanting packaged campaign slogans or attempting to influence the democratic party. It will not come through our bankrupt liberal institutions— from the press, to the withered stump that is the labor movement.

Hope will only come now when we physically defy the violence of the state. All who resist, all who are here today, keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become an enemy of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice.

It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better. Hope is not about chanting packaged campaign slogans or trusting in the better nature of the Democratic Party. Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.

If the enemies of hope are finally victorious in this nation, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.

Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness, the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope's power. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.

Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state which saturates our airwaves with lies seeks to obliterate. Hope is what this corporate state is determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don't resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations. No. Above all do not think. Obey.

The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the privileged and the weak. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars or in our prison complexes is a form of human progress.

They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Kandehar or a child in the blighted urban pocket of our nation's capitol diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope. Those addicted to power, enthralled by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics.

Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. And this is because they kneel before the idols of greed and money.

If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. If all we accomplish today is to assure a grieving mother in Baghdad or Afghanistan, a young man or woman crippled physically and emotionally by the hammer blows of war, that he or she is not alone, our act will be successful. But hope cannot be sustained if it cannot be seen.

Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

[from W.H. Auden]
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges is the author of the bestseller American Fascists and National Book Critics Circle finalist for War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He is a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lannan Literary Fellow and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University.

His books can be found at  http://www.amazon.com/Chris-Hedges/e/B001IR1G16