The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

Acclaimed journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges is one of the great moral voices of our age. He has the rare combination of decades of experience reporting from conflict zones in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, and the erudition one would expect from a student of Christian ethics and the classics at Harvard University. He prizes the truth over news and facts. And in the pursuit of truth he has risked his career; even his life.

I never sought to be objective, he writes. How can you be objective about death squads in El Salvador, massacres in Iraq, or Serbian sniper fire that gunned down unarmed civilians including children in Sarajevo? How can you be neutral about the masters and profiteers of war who lie and dissemble to hide the crimes they commit and the profits they make? How can you be objective about human pain? And finally, how can you be objective about those who are responsible for this suffering?

The World As It Is is a collection of Hedges essays originally published by Truthdig, the Webby Award-winning progressive news website. Hedges lyrically and fearlessly dissects the most controversial issues of the day: America's wars of self-destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, the decay of American empire (at home and abroad), Israel's ghettoization of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and the failure of American liberalism. His essays draw on his extraordinary experiences as a journalist but also his conviction that the centers of power in America have been seized and hijacked by corporations, something the American media pays deference to.

Because the press is not concerned with distinguishing truth from news, because it lacks a moral compass, it has become nothing more than courtiers to the elite, shameless hedonists of power and absurd court propagandists.

Chris Hedges insists that unless we begin to stand fast around moral imperatives, ones we cannot abandon and must be willing to fight the formal systems of power to advance, we will be complicit in our self-annihilation.