Books |
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Chris Hedges
By
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category:
Non Fiction
Chris Hedges, a New York Times reporter who has earned the equivalent of a PhD. in war, is the son of a minister who fought in World War II and then, essentially, became a pacifist. So why did Chris want to report about war? Because he was his father’s son — he wanted to be of service.
Hedges covered the war in El Salvador for five years, then moved on to the Middle East, where he learned Arabic. He reported on the civil wars in the Sudan, Algeria and Yemen. He covered the Persian Gulf War, going into marshes in southeast Iraq with Shiite guerrillas and living with Kurdish fighters. Near the end of that war, he was held prisoner — and threatened with death — by the Iraqi Republican Guard. In 1995, he went to Sarajevo; he stayed on to cover Kosovo. Over the years, he says, "I’ve been in ambushes. I’ve been strafed by MIGs, pounded by very heavy artillery in Sarajevo — 155 Howitzers, 90-millimeter tank rounds. I was shot at by Serb snipers, shot at by Israeli snipers. I’ve seen far too much of violent death."
He decided to write this book after 9/11: "I woke up and realized in New York that we’d all become Serbs, that all of that flag-waving, all of that jingoism, that mass suppression of individual conscience — which I had seen in countries in war around the globe — was now part of my own society, part of where I lived. And it frightened me."
And his book will frighten you.
It’s not an anti-war book. That would be too easy. Rather, it’s a book that attempts to explain why we love — yes, love — war. How war "forms its own culture." How it’s "a drug" that corrupts everything in its path. And — and this is the tough part — how it rips us out of "the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives" and gives us "purpose, meaning, a reason for living."
But this is absurd, you think. Not so. After the wars end, Hedges sits with people he knows well from bunkers and shelters, and listens to their stories, and hears, again and again, their nostalgia for the aliveness they used to feel when they were in mortal danger.
Another disturbing conclusion: For Hedges, war makes opponents equal. Oh, we make think "our" cause is just. We may demonize our enemy. That process is a cliche. Once we see ourselves as angels on a mission, Hedges argues, "It is only a matter of how we will carry out murder."
In the end, for Hedges, it’s very simple: "War is a god." And gods demand sacrifice. We turn against them — we see them for what they are: human sacrifice" — only when they lose their mythic stature.
In World War I, that human sacrifice was of soldiers — 500,000 British bodies were never recovered from those death-haunted front lines. By World War II, that was changing; think of Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo, the atomic bombs. Now, although governments deny it and we don’t want to admit it, war is primarily directed against civilians. Think of napalm in Vietnam, the secret bombing of Cambodia, and, of course, Iraq and Lebanon.
How do wars end? Badly. Pray that you defeat your enemy. And that your enemy really had provoked the conflict. Because "war always begins by calling for the annihilation of the other. But left unexamined or unchecked, war always ends in self-annihilation."
Those are the big ideas. The rest is stories. They’re what you’d expect from a great reporter: riveting, disgusting, often unbelievable. But, I fear, all true. All too true.
There are people who see the headlines and turn away; whatever is going on is far away, there’s nothing to do about it. Maybe they’re the lucky ones. Because the others — well, we can never get enough. We want to know it all: the how, the why. We want to smell the stink under the perfumed rhetoric, feel the suffering of the innocent, cry with the soldier whose buddy dies in his arms. And not because we are sick or sentimental. Because we identify. Because we know how easily any of those people could be us.
If you are good at turning away from war, turn away from this book. If not, read it, because it will set your mind reeling. And thinking. And that, even on topics like this, can never be a bad thing.
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