Has anyone been following the Chris Hedges plagiarism accusations? For what its worth, my reading is that he appears guilty as charged, and now the feeding frenzy of liberal-to-NeoCon-to-corporatists will jump in on the beat down. Now, before you react, I know some of you will be saying, 'who cares, we always kinda knew that guy was an asshole!" Ok, true, but this case is illustrative of how the system attacks it's critics.I regard Hedges as an "asshole" because he has tried to have it both ways: a well-paid journalist for a ruling class newspaper, the NY Times, and a halfway critic of the system governed by the ruling class. This apostle of nonviolence was always disturbed by activists who fought back against the brutality of the police and broke a few windows, but was always restrained about criticisms of the police. Then when he attacked anarchists as the "cancer of Occupy", I totally lost patience with him.
...because Hedges loved Occupy Wall St, he couldn't intellectually comprehend that it was anarchist theory and practice that made it successful, so when some minor property destruction happened in Oakland, he proceeded on his version of a Jihad to call anarchists, and the BB tactic, the "Cancer of Occupy", relying on some obscure blog posts which only exposed his incomprehension even more. Totally clueless. Hubris uber alles. He did a hell of a lot of damage with that hit piece, taking a small rift to national public attention, even when he got his facts completely wrong! Total asshole move from someone not even involved in the movement.However, to get to the substance of the article, the attack on Hedges came from an article published in the New Republic (which I haven't read at the time of this posting.) And here is Burnett's take on the attack in the New Republic.
...Hedges brought this on himself, and it only hurts movements that try to expose corrupt state and corporate power. If Hedges chose to acknowledge some of the "mistakes", and admit he fucked up, some kind of redemption might be possible, but he didn't choose to do that. Instead, he held "strong" and is trying unsuccessfully to weasel his way out of ANY responsibility for his actions. That's a total dick move.
Take a look at the side by side examples that Christopher Ketcham illustrates in his article, especially the Hemingway quotes, which I read as irrefutable evidence of plagiarism. The Naomi Klein, Matt Katz and Neil Postman rip offs are pretty damning. But the most damning is the careful substitutions of pronouns and prepositions in paragraphs that were clearly lifted. You don't use a fine-tuned cutting tool by accident.
