Christopher Hedges: War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

our speaker war correspondent Chris Hedges believes that despite Wars devastating impact on life community and culture we are drawn to the intoxication of violence in his new book war is a force that gives us meaning he explores the myth psychology behind war dispelling the idea of wars be noble and heroic and urges renewed compassion and peace Chris Hedges has been a foreign correspondent for 15 years covering wars around the globe after we after reporting in Central America and the Middle East for the Dallas Morning News the Christian Science Monitor and NPR he joined the staff of the New York Times in 1990 going on to serve as Balkan bureau chief and Middle East bureau chief mr. hedges was part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 appeal a surprise for explanatory reporting for the papers coverage of global terrorism a graduate of Harvard University's School of divinity he is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a Nieman fellowship in 1998 and the 1999 Francis Frost would courage and journalism award welcome to Cambridge forum Chris Hedges thank you I want to talk to you today about war about the poison that war is about how it infects individuals and societies about the ways it perverts and destroys us and about how if we do not understand war and control it it can end in our own destruction just as a cancer patient must ingest a poison to fight off the disease so must we at times ingest the poison of war but this poison if we do not understand it and control us control it can kill us just as effectively as the disease itself I want to talk about the myth of war and the drug of war for war is perhaps the most potent narcotic invented by humankind it is a drug i ingested for many years from the war in El Salvador where I spent five years to the Palestinian uprising to the Persian Gulf war ordering the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq I was taken prisoner by the Iraqi war and guard to Algeria the Sudan Yemen Bosnia and Kosovo war is something I know and I pay for this keeping the horror of it the memories of it wrapped in fools a protective cloth deep inside of me I have seen too much of violent death and these memories when they rise to the surface our burdens I want to talk about the frightening idolatrous belief in our own power and superiority as a nation our belief that we have a right to determine how others should live and how the world should function about the imperial power we have become and the danger of this war is a god as the ancient Greeks and Romans knew and it's worship demands human sacrifice war always begins by calling for the sacrifice of others but it ends if we do not understand war and control it with our own self sacrifice taste enough of war or any drug and you come to believe the Stoics were right we will all consume ourselves in a vast complication the weapons of mass destruction we now possess and those arrayed against us now hunger to possess make their apocalyptic vision and ours a distinct possibility we fight an amorphous never-ending war on terror one where we have falsely come to believe that if we can kill all terrorists we can somehow rid the world of evil this simple deadly theology that we now embrace only mirrors the knee allistic vision of those that would like to rid the world of our presence we have come to believe in the same way the doomed empires did at the end of the 19th century that our military technology makes us involve or can be waged others can die but for us it can be cost free we have come to believe that war is a spectator sport this lie was perfected for us during the Persian Gulf War when the military in the press presented war not for what it is death but as a vast video arcade game those that died even our own were nameless faceless phantoms war made us feel good and because so many of us have lost touch with what war is we allow the state now to wage it with barely a murmur of protest and by the time we do understand it may be too late the seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told about war is true it does create a feeling of comradeship which obliterates our alienation and makes us for perhaps the only time in our life think we belong war allows us to rise above our small stations in life we find nobility in the cause and feelings of selflessness even bliss and at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals of the very deterioration of our domestic fabric war is a fine diversion war itself has a dark Beauty filled with a monstrous in the grotesque the Bible calls that the lust of the eye and warns believers against it war gives us a distorted sense of self it gives us meaning and once in combat the past and the future are obliterated all is one heady intoxicating present you feel every heartbeat colors are brighter your mind races ahead of itself you are aware in ways you never were before war is then and they do tell you this this is not a lie moreover war allows you to engage in lusts and passions you kept hidden in the deepest most private interiors of your fantasy life it allows you to destroy not only things but human life and in that moment of wholesale destruction you feel the power of the divine the power to revoke another person's charter to live on this earth the frenzy of this destruction and when unit discipline breaks down or there was no unit discipline to begin with frenzy as the right word sees armed bands consumed and crazed by the poisonous elixir that our power to bring about the obliteration of others always brings all things including human beings become objects in war objects to either gratify or destroy or both and almost no one is immune the contagion of the crowd sees to that force seem ovule writes is as pitiless to the man who possesses it or thinks he does as it is to its victims the second it crushes the first it intoxicates only when we are in the midst of conflict as the shallowness of much of our lives become apparent trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves and war is enticing it gives us a resolve a cause and those who have the least meaning in their lives the impoverished Palestinian refugees in Gaza the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France even the legions of lost youth that live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world are all susceptible to Wars appeal I do not miss war but I miss what it brought I can never say I was happy in the midst of the fighting in El Salvador or Bosnia or Kosovo but I had a sense of purpose of calling of meaning and this is a quality war shares with love for we are also able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security for those we love the initial selflessness of war mirrors that of love the chief emotion war ultimately destroys and this is what war often looks and feels like at its inception love the ancient Greeks understood this strange attraction between love and death in wartime when Achilles kills Penthesilea the queen of the Amazons in the Trojan War he falls in love with her as she expires on the battlefield he murders love those there are those who will insist that come the comradeship of war is love that The Ecstatic glow that makes us feel in war as one people one entity is real but this is part of roars intoxication the danger the external threat that comes when we have an enemy does not create friendship it creates comradeship in wartime for perhaps the first and only time in our lives we no longer face death alone we face death as a group and because of this death is easier to bear and those in wartime just as those who live through danger and trial as a group are deceived in comradeship about what they are undergoing this is why once the war ends once the period of trial is over these comrades again become strangers to us there it is why you see veterans pathetically trying to recreate this comradeship after the war a pitiful and fruitless activity that is usually laced with the abuse of another drug alcohol in fact comradeship is the very opposite of friendship in friendship we struggle often painfully to attain a greater sense of self we become through the friend more aware of who we are we find ourselves in a friend in comradeship the kind that comes to us and patriotic fervor there is a suppression of self awareness self knowledge self possession comrades lose their identities in wartime for the collective rush of a common cause in comradeship there are no demands on the self this is part of its appeal and one of the reasons we miss it and seek to recreate it the feeling of comradeship is one of war's many attractions friends do not the way comrades do love death and sacrifice to friends the prospect of death is frightening to lose a friend is to lose part of yourself that intimate dialog with another that may never be recreated there is no ecstatic embrace of death and friendship and this is why friendship or let me say love is the most potent enemy of war war is carefully packaged the way tobacco or liquor companies packaged their own poisons we taste a bit of wars exhilaration in the images and films novels war narratives and the press but we remain safe and in this safety we are fooled into believing that we can control war instead of the awful fact that war almost always controls and ultimately if we do not get out destroys us we can thrill in the perversity of war even as we watch films or read books that are meant to denounce war it is almost impossible to produce anti-war films or documentaries that also present images of battle it is like trying to condemn pornography while showing erotic love scenes war is a manufactured commodity it is expensive it is part of the modern industrial landscape indeed the tools are often the cutting edges of technology the machines of war the planes the tanks the heavy machine guns the huge howitzers the helicopters are pieces of art I have seen them at work they are angels of death streaking through the sky the chief institutions that peddle the myth of war are the state and the press nearly every war correspondent sees his or her mission as sustaining civilian and army morale the advent of photography and film did little to alter the incentive to boost morale for the lion war is almost always the lie of omission the blunders and senseless slaughters by our generals the ruthless murder of prisoners and innocents the horror of wounds these are not disclosed only when the myth is punctured as it was in Vietnam does the media begin to report in a sensory rather than a mythic manner and once the veil of myth is pulled back once war is seen for what it is it becomes hard to bear and hard to prosecute the first experience of war like the first high appears to make the world instantly understandable a black and white tableau of them and us war suspends thought especially self-critical thought it seems as if for the first time we were able to see clearly the fundamental questions about our own existence the meaning or meaninglessness of our place on the planet all this has laid bare even as we along with those we watch sink to the lowest depth war exposes a side of human nature that is usually masked by the unacknowledged coercion and social constraints that glue us together our cultivated conventions and little lies of civility lull us into a refined in idealistic view of ourselves but war lays all this bare war however soon rules us it lowers us to the moral depravity that plagues all addicts the business of organized violence leads us to abandon fixed and established values moral precepts we have spent a lifetime honoring our jettisoned we accept the maiming and killing of innocents as the cost of war we give up moral code for war and no class or political group is immune the reality of war takes a long time to seep into us this is because thrown into the maw of war fooled by the myths peddled by the state and the press we do not trust our own senses we speak with the words and phrases in wartime the war on terror the axis of evil showdown with Iraq but sit on the eve of a real battle and I think of American units on the night before we invaded Kuwait and you see the void of war soldiers in these moments weep vomit right last letters home although these letters are scribbled more as a precaution than a bullet from a belief all are nearly paralyzed with fright there is a morbid silence that grips a battlefield in the final moments before the shooting starts no one ever charges into battle for God country Freud divided the forces in human nature between eros that impulse within us to preserve to become close to others to conserve and the death instinct or Thanatos that impulse that works towards the annihilation of all living things including ourselves for Freud these forces were an eternal conflict he was pessimistic about ever eradicating war all human history he argued as a tug of war between these two instincts we became after our defeat in Vietnam a better country we are forced to ask questions about ourselves we had not asked before we had to confront our own capacity for evil for atrocity for terror we were humbled even humiliated and in that experience we sought to see ourselves as others sauce and it was not always a pretty sight but gradually the myth rose up again we took generous cups from the river Lethe to forget we celebrated our military prowess under the Reagan administration and this culminated in the Persian Gulf War which again made war respectable there was a constant searching war to find new perversities new forms of death when the initial flush fades a rearguard and finally futile effort to ward off the boredom of routine death addicts know this this is why we would drive into Bosnia and find bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated and mutilated it is why those slain in combat are treated as trophies belonging to the killers turned into grotesque pieces of performance art I know soldiers who to this day carry in their wallets the identity cards of men they know they killed they take them everywhere they show them to you with the imploring look of a lost child they will never understand the job of killing always leads to depravity it allows our senses to command our bodies it whips fighters into greater orgies of destruction hedonism and perversions spiral out of control those who work hard all their lives I'll reviled his dupes and fools they haunt the soup kitchens the normal order is turned upside down and bodies just as they lie scattered and immobile a few hundred yards away become tools objects to an end in the midst of slaughter the choice swiftly becomes between hate and lust when this mask of war the myth of war slips away when the rod in corruption is uncovered when the addiction turns sour and rank we feel spoiled and spent it is then that we sink into despair in the arab/israeli 1973 war almost a third of all Israeli casualties were due to psychiatric causes in the war lasted only a few days few weeks a World War 2 study determined that after 60 days of continuous combat 98% of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties and the remain that event this study found that a common trait among the 2% who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward aggressive psychopathic personalities war ascendant wipes out love wipes out eros when we see this for what it is when we understand ourselves and how war has perverted us life becomes hard to bear John Steele a cameraman who spent years in war zones had a nervous breakdown in a crowded Heathrow Airport in 1994 after returning from Sarajevo I came back from Sarajevo he said we were in a place called snipers alley and I filmed a girl there who had been hit in the neck by a sniper's bullet I filmed her in the ambulance and only after she was dead I suddenly understood that the last thing she had seen was the reflection of the lens of the camera I was holding in front of her face this wiped me out a year after the war in Sarajevo i sat with Bosnian friends who had suffered horribly a young woman Liliana had lost her father a Serb who refused to join the besieging Serb forces around the city she had been forced a few days earlier to identify the corpse the body was lifted the water running out the sides of a rotting coffin from a small park for reburial in the central cemetery she was emigrating for Australia soon where she told me I will marry a man who has never heard of this war and raised children that will be told nothing about it nothing about the country I am from yet she and her friends all they did that afternoon was lament the days when they lived in fear in danger emaciated targeted by Serb Gunners they did not wish back the suffering and yet they admitted these may have been the fullest days of their lives they looked at me in despair I knew them when they were being pounded by hundreds of shells a day when they had no water to bathe or wash their clothes when they sat huddled in unheated darkened flats his sniper bullets thumped into the walls but what they expressed was real it was the disillusionment with a sterile futile and empty present peace had again peeled back the void that the rush of war of battle had filled once again they were as perhaps we all are alone no longer bound by the common sense of struggle no longer given the opportunity to be noble heroic no longer sure what life was about and what it meant the only antidote to war is love and although I saw much death in my life I was also a witness to loves power when a shell landed in sorry Havel it's awful explosion tore apart bodies that lay in pools of their own blood yet at the very moment of death sting mother's father's sister's brothers lovers friends tore frantically through the crowd looking for loved ones one felt radiating out from the spot these concentric waves of love and death battle each other in the leaden skies above Sarajevo of course gentle and decent people will be wiped out of course we as distinct individuals may not survive but love has the power finally to affirm what we know we must affirm and to protect what we know we must protect and the only antidote to war is this is the ability to see in the other a love even those who are enemy that is like our own love alone gives us the meaning that endures many of those I worked with as a war correspondent during the past two decades never escaped they could not break free they never saw the myth of war for what it was death that lured them into war finally consumed them they wandered from conflict to conflict by then I was back in Gaza at the start of the current Palestinian uprising I found myself pinned down on another ambush a young man about ten feet from me was shot through the chest and killed I felt none of the old rush just fear it was time to break free to let go I was lucky to get out alive Kurt schork brilliant courageous and driven could not he died in an ambush in May 2000 and Sierra Leone along with another friend Miguel Gilmore a know his entrapment his embrace of death was never mentioned at the sterile and antiseptic memorial service staged for him in Washington by the Reuters bureaucrats he often ward with everyone tiptoed around it but those of us who knew him understood that he had been consumed I had worked with Kurt for 10 years starting in northern Iraq literate funny it seems the brave are often funny he and I passed books back and forth in our struggle to make sense of the madness around us his loss as a whole that will never be filled his ashes were placed in a lion's Cemetery and sorry a vote for victims of the war I flew to sorry Havel and met the British filmmaker Dan Reid was an overcast November day we stood over the grave and downed a pint of whiskey Dan lit a candle I recited a poem by the Roman lyric poet Catullus one he had written to honor his own dead brother by strangers coasts and waters many days at sea I come here for the rites of your unworldly bringing for you the dead these last gifts of the Living and my words vain sounds for a man of dust alas my brother you have been taken from me you have been taken from me and by cold chants turned a shadow and my pain here are the foods of the old ceremony appointed long ago for the starve leans under the earth take them your brothers tears have made them wet and take into eternity my hail in my farewell it was there among a few thousand war dead that Curt belong he died because he could not free himself from war he was trying to replicate what he had found in Sarajevo but he could not war could never be new again Kurt had been in East Timor in Chechnya Sierra Leone I was sure meant nothing to him he could not let go nor could Miguel they would be the first to admit it spend long enough in war and you cannot fit in anywhere else the drug of war finally kills you it is not a new story addicts that don't kick it end up the same way it starts out like love but it is death or is the beautiful young nymph in the fairy tale that when kissed exhales the vapors of the underworld the ancient Greeks had a word for such a fate Ecch Pierrot sious it means to be consumed by a ball of fire they used it to describe heroes thank you you are joining us at Cambridge forum listening to Chris Hedges discussing does war give us meaning we're gonna ask the first question increases as we record this we are moving ever closer to war with Iraq you mentioned in your remarks how Vietnam for at least a generation of people was sort of the end of innocence in terms of the illusion of the nobility of war and that was largely due to the fact that there were tens of thousands of body bags probably coming home over those years now we fight wars where our casualties number in the dozens and that's largely due to the technological advances that we've been making and in terms of our weaponry how has technology changed our attitudes towards the acceptability of war I think we're very much you know as I mentioned briefly in a situation like the imperial powers at the end of the 19th century you know we're you know by the by by that before World War one because of the immense superiority technological superiority comes sort of the support of the aristocracy and these powers believed as well that their technology made them invulnerable of course they ended this ended in World War one and you know I just read a great book by Fred Morton on the beginning of Thunder Twilight the end of the Habsburg Empire that last year before the war and all of these powers stumbled into this mass suicide with absolutely no conception of what they were getting into the fact is we possess now in essence apocalyptic weapons and those who we are fighting are working very hard to get their hands on the same thing these weapons are along with these weapons come an apocalyptic vision and you you see I think what's what is striking about both the sort of ideology of the Islamist fundamentalist movement that that's arrayed against in ourselves is that we both speak about sanitation war is about you know ridding the world of a bacteria and it's not about conquering a nation-state that's not what the war on terror is about it's this never-ending war and I think the subtext of this campaign to sort of wipe out terrorists is sold to us as a way of sort of wiping out evil those who are fighting us have a no less frightening kind of theology you know we call them the barbarians they call us the infidels they see us as a kind of contagion because of our culture and tradition we see them as a kind of contagion and we because we believe that our technology makes us invulnerable this lie sold to us in the Persian Gulf war in Kosovo and Bosnia I think that is why we as a nation have just been sheared like sheep in the march towards war and unfortunately every generation has to learn and new and the cost is you know many many many dead and many innocent Dead's so our technology of history is any guide does not make us unbelief is allowing us to engage in a kind of adventurism in the Middle East that I think could go horribly wrong yeah what second thanks you you also thanks you you talk in your book and you also mentioned in your comments how the media has perpetuated this myth of war as being romantic and noble and that in writing about it there are certain devices ways of phrasing images that we conjure up that sort of inevitably add to that that stereotype in your own writing how do you avoid using those conventions using those conventions yeah I think that I think that you do but when you're approaching it well because you know the the entire book is a sort of withering assault on every single myth that is sold to us about war and I've got 15 years of very concrete examples to throw at you to prove it and I think that's probably the power of it is that it's written off the ground of course from various parts around the globe birders you talked somewhat famously about Israeli soldiers luring Palestinian kids to the edges of settlements and shooting them and one I was wondering what you think the psychology of the soldiers was and - how do you think both sides can get rid of their psychosis or intoxication and how does the conflict illustrate most pointedly your main feces well you know you know robert jay lifton has expressed this more eloquently than I can but I think what what has happened in Gaza and the West Bank is very similar what happened to American soldiers in Vietnam where there's a terrible kind of frustration at trying to fight an elusive enemy and the feeling that because you're living in the midst of a hostile population everybody is the enemy and he calls these atrocity producing situations I don't think that Israeli soldiers in Gaza or the West Bank act any differently than we acted in Vietnam or that the French acted in Algeria or that any soldier acts when essentially they're living in that kind of environment the problem is that they're they you create a kind of illusion where you know even how elderly Palestinian working in a field suddenly become the enemy the enemy you can't find the enemy you have to strike and what I saw in honey Eunice was I think indicative of that where you had over loudspeakers fixed on an Israeli armored Jeep behind an electric fence they were taunting young kids were playing out in the dunes and then when they started throwing the rocks they opened fire and and there is unfortunately unit discipline on the part of the IDF in the territories is just in my mind completely collapsed when the notion that you can use live rounds from an m16 on a ten-year-old boy is inexcusable and you know anybody who's been in a conflict will knows very well that these bullets are designed to go in you the size of a dime and they come out the size of an orange they spin end over end that's how they're designed they rip your stomach out and the wounds are just absolutely horrific and so I was even I was stunned I mean that was stunning for me on the other hand I don't think that it's an uncommon response given the situation that the Israeli soldiers are in I think we responded the same way in Vietnam I think I think when anytime you're you are living in a sea of hostility like that with an enemy you can never quite grasp and then of course you're you have the frustration and anger of losing your own troops losing your own soldiers too you know there are car bombs on the side of the road and that kind of stuff and they just can't sort of get it the enemy is sort of phantom like hello as I hear you speak one word comes to mind I'll make a real quick comment and then a question that Bush is in his arrogant warped way of rushing us into the war with Iraq is making the world much less secure and bringing our country into much greater danger the word comes to mind that it's treasonous what he's doing that's it's just clear to me and my comment if is that it seems like the winds of change are blowing somewhat such that even though Wall Street Journal is beginning to come out the editorial today and a big ad the other day with businessmen on the right suggesting that he's not doing right by them what's your view of how the winds have changed you raised a very good point I am just stunned that we can talk about war as if it's a kind of precise surgery where we go in we excise Saddam Hussein and everything's neat and clean that's not so what war is war is a mess and war is chaotic and war is a blunt instrument that often makes the situation worse there are so many ways that our situation here at home that we can become so much more vulnerable and that the situation can deteriorate first of all we know that the Iraqis have weapons of mass destruction according to the CIA report that was leaked to the New York Times in that report they said they have no evidence that he's planning to use them but they believe that if he feels he's going to go down he will use them what does a Scud dropped on Tel Aviv with nerve agents do I mean what will Israeli f-16s flying over Basra do in the Middle East what will a dirty bomb wiping out an entire marine corps tank battalion do the potential for this to unravel and become messy is not only I think completely evident but that is always true once you begin employing violence that's why we should you know we periodically learn our lesson by sort of holding the hand of the CIA to do assassinations as they did in the early days in Vietnam a situation that made our situation in Vietnam worse or the 1954 coup in Iran that led finally directly to the ayatollahs once we start doing social engineering in regions and countries we don't really understand once we start employing force like this the situation usually I think becomes worse so yes I think that by going to war with Iraq our situation becomes less less secure and I I understand why the Bush administration is doing this this is about oil I hope this doesn't surprise anybody what I don't understand is how as a nation we have been so completely passive now the Congress has essentially washed their hands of this and handed this awesome power to the president that that's done to me I and I think it's because we we we do on some level believe this lie that our nation can and can wage war and it won't affect us and unfortunately by the time we wake up and realize that that is a lie there will probably be a lot of American dead going back to the first question a bit and could you comment say on the Vukovar syndrome versus the kind of phantom enemy psychology people who Kivar well the book of our syndrome comes from serb cowardice where the serbs never wanted to risk any soldiers you all know Vukovar was under siege in the same way that Sarajevo was Vukovar for three months where they just shelled it into oblivion because they had the heavy weapons of the old Yugoslav army and they were just gonna take five shots of slimovitz and keep loading heavy shells until essentially the Muslims or the Croats gave up so that was the Vukovar this is what you're speaking about that was it was tactical and that was part of the whole myth that we got sold you know we got sold a bunch of lies about the Serbs that they would fight until the last man that you know Yugoslavs didn't have any kind of a national identity despite Josip Broz Tito's making Yugoslavia there was all sorts of stuff and and every time I was in the war and I was in the fifth Corps when they went across central Bosnia in the fall of 95 and the Serbs didn't have that artillery to back them up they fled like lemmings so that was what happened in Gokul our give a kind of reified metaphysical approach to war seems like the kind of Divinity School approach but there are many high political questions and issues involved in all of these conflicts that have to be resolved speaking again about your experience and can unis these people are not enemies these people are victims these people are under occupation illegal occupation for the past 35 years do you say that the lie of war is the lie of omission why is it that publications such as your own like the New York Times don't report the depravity of the IDF which America is supporting and making these types of actions possible why is there so much a mission in the mainstream media yeah I think the I think there is a failure in mainstream media on this issue I think the Europeans are a lot better right we force reasons that are beyond me don't station arabic-speaking reporters in Gaza or the West Bank I think the best coverage is the Israeli newspaper Haaretz with Danny Rubenstein Amira Hass was in Ramallah they speak every Danny's covered the Palestinians since 68 and I think it's I think it's a terrible terrible failing on the part of the mainstream media I would I would agree with you I mean I think my problem I think well you know I think our reporting on Israel isn't so bad but we just don't begin to uncover the kinds of nuances within Palestinian society that it is a kind of very black-and-white tableau and a very incorrect one and allows us very easily to engage in stereotypes about Palestinians that are unfair me for instance one of the things that drives me nuts is this notion that you know Palestinian children want their kids to become suicide bombers this smacks of the old story that you know the Vietnamese don't really care about the dead like we do you know I've just spent enough time you know I speak Arabic and when I cover guys I live there I don't live in Jerusalem and you know I've just been with mothers who are as bereaved and shaken as all mothers are so you know III don't i think the point you raised is a good one I mean you're right good evening I'm a physician absolutely brilliant talk more the best I've ever heard congratulations but what I and war is gonna happen we know that you can't have a half a million troops sitting there with hands on the tree it's going to happen it's inevitable but what my question is wars are civilian driven the wars are started by generals they're started by civilians right could you come in a war at its most fundamental level is about betrayal it's about betrayal of the young by the old and it's about betrayal of soldiers by politicians you notice that great poem by Kipling it's just it's Johnny this scene Johnny that and Chuck him out the brute but it's savior of his country when the guns begin to shoot I have a lot of friends in the Marine Corps because I went into Kuwait with the Marines in the Persian Gulf War and they will there a lot of more over there now although one right before he left colonel battalion commander called and asked if he said is the newspaper gonna send you and I said well I've told the newspaper I'm not going and he said good because I just wanted to let you know I wasn't gonna lift a finger to help you there the Marines of course is the essentially the shocked infantry forces will pay the price for this if we try and take the streets of Baghdad or Basra and Wars tend to be driven by politicians out of often very narrow self-interest sometimes those interests are so narrow it's just about pride and arrogance but Homer wrote all about this in the Iliad it's nothing new thanks Kristen I'd like to pick up it and expand on the question about the coverage as an aside I think that the crucial for me one of the crucial failings of the coverage in the New York Times of the palestinian-israeli conflict is that when there is Palestinian violence is it is characterized in a certain way when there is Israeli violence it is always characterized as retaliation and the retaliate er always has the moral high ground I would like you said you don't understand and I mean I'm sympathetic to what you've been saying you don't understand why we could have had the war resolution passed I think we have a tremendous tremendous failing on the part of what I call corporate media I you know people call it mainstream media I call it corporate media and I wonder if you could expand a little on some of what you've already said on what kind of a job I mean we have a we can expect I suppose a drumbeat for war from the propaganda machine of the Bush administration or any war bent administration could you talk about the ways in which the corporate media are so willingly partnering with this drumbeat so that every day when the Bush administration says the same thing they said yesterday he's gotta go it's the front page headline he's got to go every day he's got to go he's got to go and another just quick comment for your is is the comradeship that you talked about Kant that comradeship can't there be a healthy version of that comradeship in resisting this kind of March for-ward first of all you know I don't have a problem with the this term the corporate media that is essentially what most media outlets have become although not the New York Times it's still family-owned like the Washington Post but in wartime the press is always part of the problem and always has been since the Crimean War when the modern war correspondent was invented the problem is that the press in wartime sees its role is sustaining the morale of the nation and the troops of supporting the cause that's why you have you know all these newscasters with the little flags in their lapels and Dan Rather going on saying you know where do I sign up or whatever inanity he said but that that is the press and that was certainly the role of the press and the Persian Gulf War the the press the the sad fact is that in the end of course the institution that I work for is a business and mythic war sells newspapers and boosts ratings look at CNN nobody watches CNN until we go to war and it's all that flag-waving mythology that feel-good stuff that that notion that sense that you know we're empowered by our by our powerful military that's out there fighting evil all of that stuff sells and real war reporting or sensory war reporting does not so although there has been the issue you raise that the media has become dominated by a few corporations in wartime that almost doesn't make a difference in wartime those people that report honestly I'm thinking of morale the great journalists British pacifist and journalists who ended up in prison finally towards the end of the war in Britain I have stone I have stone you know forced out of his job by McCarthy and then you know ignored and reviled not only by the public but by his own ie us the press and this is a terrible terrible problem in war I mean if when I covered the war in Bosnia you got a sense of what the war was like because I wasn't a Serb or Croat or Muslim you saw it for the raw slaughter that it was but if I was in the same place the same town as a Serb journalist I would suddenly feel compelled I'm not picking on Serbs across and the Muslims did the same to create that mythic narrative who was the hero what brave act what woman was saved by our gallant Serb soldiers no it's what we do it's what we all do in war I mean we turn swartz cough a fairly surly character into ulysses s grant and it was almost it is irrelevant as to who you know it could have been anyone else but we need it if it wasn't Schwarzkopf it would have been someone else we need that hero we need that icon we need all those set pieces of the myth and not only is the press terribly guilty in that sense of creating the myth which is a lie but it also uses the language and by using the language you you you don't have your capacity or what what is robbed of you is your capacity to speak in wartime there's always a hijacking of language and when your language is hijacked and you speak in the cliches in which you're given whatever disquiet you have becomes almost impossible to articulate or express but more importantly you can't communicate with the other side you see everybody as a nationalist everybody in your own vision so that you know if gasser Arafat says he wants to stop the suicide bombings you don't believe him because you know what Yasser Arafat that language becomes powerless and the only way you get peace back is by bringing language back you know you don't have peace in Cyprus you don't have peace in Bosnia what you have is the absence of war you don't have peace until you create a common narrative by which people can speak again as they did in South Africa with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that however whatever injustice occurred by allowing the killers of the apartheid regime to go free those confessions were important because they allowed people to communicate again and once you fall into the rhetoric of war the cliches of war the jingoism of war which we have already done it almost makes war itself inevitable you mentioned you mentioned war correspondents that you you've known who have died with their addiction to war and on the other hand it seems that you underwent some kind of transformation in that respect where you you felt differently about the whole experience and I was wondering if he could say something more about what changed for you in that respect well I had a couple sobering moments the loss of Kurt was one you know being you know finding myself at the age of 41 or something sprinting away from the Netzarim junction with seventeen-year-old Palestinian kids carrying bags of Molotov cocktails you know and being fired on by Israeli snipers I realized this is lunacy and that I had to stop all that said it was a very long painful and hard process because my identity was wrapped up in it I had grown to relish those that that sort of camaraderie of the war correspondent community and their people in Kosovo I covered the war with in El Salvador the rush of it part of doing that as a way of fleeing from the normal responsibilities in life it was you know it took me a few years to shake it it was very it was very hard it was not an easy process it wasn't waking up and deciding to quit thank you so much Chris I'm Thomas Michaelson and the minister of the church here you and I met in James with her Addams living room a to a comment in the question the comment is it's a brilliant analysis of war and you and your comments have crept very close to what I would see is a traditional argument for non-violence that love is the only answer and yet I haven't heard you really outwardly develop an argument for non-violence as an alternative to war and then to complicate that issue your teacher in mind James Luther Adams went to Germany in the 1930s and saw what was happening and came back to this country saying there are some purposes the full war when when a true evil exists in the world there's a place for armies in a place for military conflict and I don't know how you sort that out and I'd love it if you could respond to both sort of where are you with the classical kind of non-violence based on a philosophy of love and is there a place for military conflict well you know by temperament I'm a pacifist unfortunately because we live in a fallen world I think there are times when not only our own survival but evil presents its face to us to such an extent that we must employ violence you know as Reinhold Niebuhr said it's never a choice between moral and immoral it's a choice between immoral and more and moral I think the the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust and Elie Wiesel got this at the dedication of the Holocaust Museum is that when we have the capacity to stop genocide and we do not we are culpable we have blood on our hands for that reason I supported the intervention in Bosnia I supported the intervention in Kosovo and I feel we failed as a nation by not intervening or Rwanda where it would have been even easier to stop the genocide and because of that we have blood on our because of Rwanda there are moments and I know in the war in El Salvador when you know and I arrived in Salvador the death squads were killing 800 to a thousand people a month and this is a country essentially run like a feudal farm by ten families 50% of the Salvadoran peasants were landless they were pushed they had marched peacefully in the street and the Salvadoran army had opened fire on them they I understood why they picked up a gun at the same time I also understood that by employing that violence they were corrupting themselves and corrupting their society and Salvador today proves it with a gang violence and and Guatemala as well so violence is always an evil war is always an evil it's always tragic when it happens but sometimes it should happen and sometimes there's no alternative but even violence employed for a good cause can corrupt and pervert it you know all of the things I talked about in my book about what violence does does to you irregardless of the cause thank you so much that's another wonderful answer but it does sound to me with that answer like there's virtually no way off the track you mean whether we can engage in non-violence whether we could non-violence right well non-violence you know worked very well for Martin Luther King and Gandhi and democracies but I don't think it would have worked too well with Stalin or Hitler of course Saddam Hussein and you know you have to always measure the time in the place but always non-violence is preferable you know when you when you can appeal to something the you know the the the sort of genius of Martin Luther King of making us you know presenting our values to us and through his words and his life and his actions showing how we fail to meet those values but that in there there are societies where that isn't going to work I I've heard a couple people tonight talk about the inevitability of this war and I guess probably rationally I realize that but just everything and may resist that I don't want to believe that I don't want to accept that I think what you've said you know people in this room we're common citizens we demonstrate and write letters and send email and sign petitions but I guess I find myself thinking why why can't the people in power hear what you're saying and it just it just seems so eminently sensible and true and I wonder if you have any advice for us of what people can do that would be more more helpful in trying to resist this this war that seems to be coming off well I think the people in power not that I'm privy to their discussions I think the people in power don't really care I think that they very much see their goal as through our military essentially dominating those parts of the world where there are resources that are advantageous to the furtherance of our own power and the maintenance of our own Imperium I think there's a real callousness and if that means the sacrifice of soldiers of our own soldiers I think they're more than willing to do it what can people do well at this point you know that our entire political system failed us in the elections because with the exception of Wellstone and a few others the Democrats never even bothered to raise it as an issue so there was a kind of moral bankruptcy within the political system for which we're all gonna pay for I mean I'm very I'm like you I'm very frustrated and I mean you do what you can and in the end you're saved by faith you have to be yes so there's a question that a lot of people use you have to fight fire with fire and my question is this if North Korea stated to Washington and they meant it and they're willing to go through if North Korea said if you in any way shape or form go into Iraq then we will shoot in and do damage to your troops in South Korea you in attack Iraq and we're going to attack South Korea where that works sir let me just talk about why I don't like this war in a democracy you can't go to war you can't ask citizens in a democracy to send their children to war if you do not share with them credible evidence that there is a threat to their own security and the security of the nation that is not a nicety that is not something that we you know should wish them to do that's fundamental to a democratic system and we live with a government that feels that it doesn't have to and I don't think they're showing it to us because they don't have it and you can't wage war because you don't like somebody especially given the scenarios that can spin out you present a hypothetical case I mean you know and having covered foreign affairs for many years there are so many nuances and changes and you know it it's if North Korea said that they were going to you know use ballistic missiles to deliver payloads of nuclear weapons on South Korea then I suppose we'd probably have no choice although I mean the irony of this is that you know we were all the time we were getting ready to go to war with Iraq there was North Korea with you know no nuclear warheads you know stockpiles of chemical and biological agents and we were giving them four billion dollars a year and helping them build their Nokia we were buying them off and I think we were buying them off because there's no oil in North Korea you know the the notion that that this is actually that this has anything to do with a real threat i I find difficult to swallow this is we are not going to war with Iraq because there is a real credible threat against us we are going to war with Iraq because we want to control the second-largest oil reserves in the world that's why we're going to war with Iraq a friend of mine today reported on a meeting with Barney Frank I don't know how many in the room are aware of the campaign that moveon.org is doing I would hope that everyone is on their email list and communicating with their Congress people and Senators and so on per their recommendations but Barney Frank said today that the only and he too is that I'm I'm most upset by the despair that I hear in this room and in your voice I I kind of can't believe that the citizens of the richest nation in the world the most comfortable lifestyle in the world let themselves to fell prey to such despair and powerlessness when we're the most powerful nation in the world this is the most grotesque sin to me we just can't let this happen we can't tell each other that there is no hope for change we can't tell each other that we can't change everything anything Barney Frank was saying this to the delegation that went met with him 9,000 meetings were held today across the country with legislators if our elected representatives feel that we will not again elect them they will change things email the Progressive Caucus members give them some courage barney frank said today write all of your friends in england because if the British population does not support this war it may not happen that was his advice I heard you mention mr. Adams he was a friend of mine who serves peanut butter sandwiches sorry this is a question that's been bugging me for a long time and it's kind of on a whim the I was thinking with what happened it's on September 11th and how it changed so much in our world and I was wondering if you had the same amount of time money and intellectual power that it took to make September 11th happened is there any way that the same amount of time money and intellectual power could be used for constructive rather than destructive purposes are you talking you don't by the people who carried out yeah I mean I know that September 11th really really wasn't carried out by that small group of people that it took years of planning a lot of money a lot of training including by the CIA but what I'm saying is that it seems that a relatively small group of people in a relatively small amount of money changed the world in a very destructive way would it be possible to change the world constructively with the same amount of money power and you know children of light and children of darkness I mean it's a constant battle Martin Luther King changed the world constructively you know but there's always going to be forces nihilistic forces that embrace violence that murder innocents I mean that that's going to always be with us and and I think one of the things you have to remember that pushes suicide bombers and Gaza in the West Bank is that they feel so closed off that this is the only way they feel they can affirm themselves and we have to give them other ways to affirm themselves besides death I think that's an important point I guess the big question is how you know how you could use those resources yeah yeah I mean I think that the the you know there's always two types of energy in the world but you know evil is never gonna go away unfortunately it's a constant battle it seems that anytime there might be a war you always have the eye which which has been called the chicken hawk can contingent which people who are all gung-ho for the war and never spent one minute in the service well that sort of sums up our government you know I think that's a big problem well you know people the people who've seen I just spent a day with a superintendent of West Point as astute two-star general and other friends of mine who went to West Point and graduated and went on to Vietnam and you know there's nothing quite like somebody who's been through war to really know what war is and how deeply you hate war and that's often professional soldiers when George or the Senate race I'm gonna interject a question here to sort of follow up on on that that line of thought Chris you obviously have a number of relationships with soldiers with people that have seen combat and those are likely many of the same people that will see combat again if we go into Iraq do you have a sense of how they feel about this more impending war well there's clearly a lot of disquiet within the military as there is interestingly enough within the intelligence community within the CIA and I think that's something that should give us all a great deal of pause when you have our intelligence services and many of our professional soldiers warning us that this is not something we want to get into but yeah there's there's a lot of reticence about about embarking on this I agree with your that oil is probably the primary motivating factor for us wanting to get into Iraq but I wonder what you think of this other theory that I've heard as a Bush family Vendetta in other words I've heard that George Bush Senior was almost killed when he was in Kuwait by the Iraqis and that so this is really you know Papa Bush saying - baby Bush you go over and get that SOB because he tried to kill me I've read it but I don't know George Bush either one of them and so I can I mean III think oil is yeah I think that's pretty pretty big thank you for your words and thoughts we often think here of coos in other countries military we hear or break up within other militaries and most recently we heard of the movement by Israeli soldiers and officers I believe to say they would not Dada Dada if you have some knowledge of our military can you see that it is conceivable has there ever been anything in our history that would allow those people to challenge the commander-in-chief well we're a long way from that yet I mean you have to remember that in Israel this group the courage to resist it took them you know it's taken them several years of the Palestinian uprising in order to form the group it was also true in Lebanon that these things take a long time - there's a long period of gestation there I could see it happening but we're not anywhere near that now and the war hasn't started yes thanks for coming I read Gaza diary not too long ago I guess probably long after it was written and more recently also overwhelming force by Seymour Hersh also in The New Yorker and I thought it was a good good gave a good sense of how thing you know the chaos on the battlefield and now things can spin out of control even in that limited sphere of the immediate battle and I'd recommend it to anybody and you can find it on the web and I wondering what's your perspective on the accuracy of that article and if you want to recap it feel free and and the significance of it and also have you do you know if you worked with Seymour Hersh and you have any observations on him thank you I think he's very good I don't want to get into the intricacies of overwhelming force there's a lot quite a long debate over that story as you know but I mean I will just say in summary that I think you know he's one of the great investigative journalists in the country I admire his work a lot sort of wrap up Chris in all of your years of field reporting as you've mentioned you have seen some you know incredible atrocities I was wondering if maybe we could end this on maybe a slightly lighter note not that I think that's necessary I think it's good to carry this with us but you know could you share some of those moments of humanity that you saw you know I spend more time on this in the book than obviously I can in a short talk one always hesitates to start talking about love is the answer you know feel like the Beatles or something but in fact these small acts of love and compassion and wartime that from the outside often look and have a kind of cumulative power and weight you know most of the people who rescue Jews in Europe during the Second World War like those who rescued people from other ethnic groups in Bosnia were couples they were couples who found fulfillment in their own relationship and usually one couple was sort of the idealist took the moral stance and the other hat could carry out those sort of daily acts of compassion that requires such patience to take care of another there became a kind of completeness in the relationship and a kind of self definition in the relationship that was able to defy these false covenants of race and nationality that are handed to us in wartime indeed handed to us all the time and I would remember going into in El Salvador or in Bosnia homes of these couples and it was always a kind of sanctuary you were freed from the insanity the infection of war we used to call it in Bosnia the Linda Blair effect where we thought we'd suddenly found the one Serb who could speak to us normally and then after 15 minutes their head started to spin around just like everyone else but couples were often immune from this and there's a story in the book about a Muslim farmer in garage de which was one of the C UN safe areas that was surrounded by the Serbs in fact the people of garage 2 had a much more horrible time of it during the war than the people in Sarajevo and the Serb there were some Serbs in garage doors it was in Sarajevo and a young couple had the woman was pregnant eventually the Muslim police dragged her husband away he disappeared some we dead and she gave birth to the child she couldn't breastfeed there was no food the constant shelling they were giving the baby tea and after ten days it started to die and this illiterate farmer and rubber boots his name was Fidel Fezzik had three cows that he kept out in a in a pasture that was under sniper fire and so he would go out and milk them in the dark and sell the milk and at that time milk because there were no cows virtually was a very precious commodity and when he found out that his neighbor's child was dying he appeared one morning at the doorstep with a liter of milk for the baby and gave that baby I think for 400 and some days or 240 days or you know a long time every morning well of course everyone in the apartment block understood that the farmer was bringing milk to this serb child and in the mornings when he would come up they would open their doors and spit at him and revile him for feeding Chetnik babies and he endured it until finally the couple was able to leave garage door now I found out about this story because I was outside of garage de interviewing Serbs who had lived in garage dough about what had happened to them and there was immense anger with among the parents and the young woman over the disappearance of the husband of her husband and of their son but as they let loose this diatribe they stopped and they said but you know we can't say that all Serbs are bad I mean all Muslims are bad there are good Muslims and they told me this story I went back and found the farmer all of his cows had died his apartment was bombed out and he was living in a corridor sleeping in a corridor with about 20 other men and they were they were during the day they would pick worm-eaten apples off a tree and lay them out on a piece of newspaper and try and sell them to get something to eat and when I told him that I had met the couple the first question he asked me in the baby how's the baby that I may never meet this farmer but that girl will grow up and know that she's alive because of this Muslim man and one sees the power of that maybe not at the moment but they see it resonate and in those tiny acts of compassion one finds a sea of Hope and that's where I find hope in the particular in the smallest acts that perhaps the world considers trivial that's where hope lies for me someone about talked about despair and yes do I despair on the grand issues yes but I when I see a story like that I can't despair perhaps it's irrational you know does that change the world I don't know but it keeps me going and when you talk about hope that hope that act of love that's that's the only finally for most of us that are relatively powerless that's what God gives us to fight back thank you

Channel: GBH Forum Network

Views: 81,767

Rating: 4.6690907 out of 5

Keywords: Chris Hedges (Author), United States Of America (Country), war, Psychology (Medical Specialty), human combat, world

Id: SaX7711ZZHE

Length: 77min 55sec (4675 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 28 2014