Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges confronts the nation's drift into fascism and war, urging readers to remain engaged and to fight for a better future, no matter the challenges.
"Totalitarianism," writes Chris Hedges, "demands complete conformity." Cheer for the unauthorized war, obey the deployment of federal troops to cities to squash protests, accept mass arrests and deportation of immigrants, and remain quiet while your tax money supports genocide. Can American democracy be saved? In Resistance Is a Moral Imperative, Hedges urges readers to act as if it can be. Written with the urgency and force of a manifesto, this book denounces those who aid and abet America's slide into fascism and champions those who, despite the risks, bravely expose our government's atrocities. Hedges draws on history to parse the power plays now being used to intimidate people into silence. As he exposes the new status quo, Hedges also inspires hope: even when short-term wins seem unattainable, resistance is essential. "If we do not resist," he writes, "we succumb morally and physically to the darkness." To resist-even in small acts of solidarity and defiance-is to advance the possibility of holding power accountable and building an ethical and just society for all.
The book includes chapters on:
- The current administration's criminalization of anti-fascist organizing and protest.
- The consolidation of executive power and the hollowing out of institutions such as the media, the Democratic Party, academia, and labor unions.
- Attempts to transform educational institutions into instruments of mass indoctrination.
- Attacks on historical memory and the politics of organized forgetting.
- The rise of surveillance culture and the normalization of repression.
- The folly of war with Iran
- The killing of Charlie Kirk and the rise of political violence.
- Jeffrey Epstein and the depravity of the rich and powerful.
- The demonization of those who oppose Israel-US violence in the Middle East.
- A harrowing oral history of a Holocaust survivor interviewed by the author.
- The consequences of accelerating militarization and the routinization of assassination, civilian killings, genocide, and war.
