War is a Force that Gives us Meaning with Chris Hedges

I can assure you that what you will observe is a Sweeney uncle communication [Music] [Music] you it's a real pleasure to introduce Chris Hedges tonight as the reality of war becomes less precise and less visible in the American media we need more than ever the thinking and writing of correspondents who have seen that reality for themselves during the post-vietnam era the paths of war has run through most of the regions of the world and Chris Hedges has spent most of his adult life on that path bearing witness to wars results he spent five years in El Salvador during the 1980s moved on to Guatemala Nicaragua and Colombia saw the First Intifada on the West Bank and Gaza the civil wars in the Sudan and Yemen the uprisings in Algeria and the Punjab the Gulf War of the early 1990s the Kurdish rebellion in the region shared by Turkey and Iraq and the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo after having spent those years of filing countless reports from the front lines of these conflicts mr. hedges has distilled not just the lessons but the psychological effects of war in his remarkable book war is a force that gives us meaning the numerous and laudatory reviews have acknowledged that in the swarm of war books that have appeared since 9/11 this work stands out for the profundity of both its questions and its answers if Chris Hedges has evolved from war reporter to war philosopher he has remained nonetheless eminently practical he has recently published a second book called what every person should know about war there he asks and answers such questions as what are my chances of being wounded or killed if we go to war what do artillery shells do to you will I be afraid what will happen to my body after I die the book is written not for opinion leaders but for ordinary recruits who are attracted to wars images of glory and heroism but who know little of its reality many of you here tonight as I saw from the show of hands heard Seymour Hersh speak yesterday well where Hersh reports on the making of war policy Chris Hedges has become a reporter of war culture mr. Hirsch has asked the question how did eight or nine people seize control of American foreign policy and start a war mr. hedges asks a complimentary and perhaps more disturbing question why did 80 or 90 million people support the war why do national majorities regularly support war why is it that in similar circumstances the public will most likely support war again for commentary on these and other pressing questions please join me in giving a big Santa Barbara welcome for Chris Hedges thank you Chris and thank you very much for having me tonight I have as Chris said spend most of my adult life in war I began two decades ago covering wars in Central America and the Middle East and the Balkans where I covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo my life has been marred let me say to formed by the organized industrial violence that year after year was an intimate part of my existence I have watched young men bleed to death on lonely Central American dirt roads and cobblestone squares in Sarajevo I have looked into the eyes of mothers keening over the lifeless and mutilated bodies of their children I have stood in warehouses with rows of corpses including children and breathe death into my lungs I carry within me the ghosts of those I worked with my comrades now gone war has found me found us out again we have blundered into nations we know little about caught between bitter rivalries between competing ethnic and religious groups and we have embarked on an occupation in Iraq that is as damaging to our souls as it is to our prestige and power and security we have become tyrants to others weaker than ourselves and we believe falsely that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war once you master a people by force you depend on force for control isolation always impairs judgment and we are very isolated now in Antigone the King imposes his will without listening to those he rules and dooms himself lucida Diez wrote of Athens expanding Empire and how this Empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home the tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself the lust for war and the desire for profits led the Athenians to lose sight of democratic ideals ideals that are their legacy to us and should be our legacy to others we are fed images and slogans that perpetuate fantasies about our own invulnerability our own might our own goodness and these illusions blind us we cannot see ourselves as others see us we had fed the heart on fantasies William Butler Yeats wrote the hearts grown brutal from the fair it is 1967 in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and we have become Israel our Empire has expanded we have become pariahs and we are propelled forward not by logic or compassion or understanding but by fear we have created and live in a world where violence has become the primary form of communication and we have built an alliance against terror with REO Sharon and Vladimir Putin two men who do not shrink from gratuitous and senseless killing in the Israeli occupied territories and Chechnya and those who are not with us and few are with us now we ridicule and belittle and condemn we have become the company we keep much of the world certainly the Muslim world one-fifth of the world's population most of whom mind you are not Arab see us through the prism of Iraq Palestine and Chechnya and this prism is one that is igniting the dispossessed and deteriorating by the hour our security and safety the attacks on the World Trade Center illustrate that those who oppose us rather than coming from another moral universe have been schooled well in modern warfare the dramatic explosions the fireballs the victims plummeting to their deaths the collapse of the towers in Manhattan were straight out of Hollywood where else but from the industrialized world did the suicide bombers learn that huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication they have mastered the language we taught them they understand that the use of indiscriminate violence against innocence is a way to make a statement and we leave the same calling cards we delivered such incendiary messages in Vietnam Serbia Afghanistan and Iraq it was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who in the summer of 1965 defined the bombing raids that would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians north of Saigon as a means of communication to the communist regime in Hanoi the seduction of war is insidious it appears to be a way to eradicate our enemies to banished from the world of the living those who would do us harm at a time when we are afraid it gives us a false sense of power and security of course we never saw the war in Iraq the press always masks the essence of war death from public view the coverage was presented as a game as entertainment and commentators on the cable knew channels reveled in the power and might of our weaponry and by extension our own power we watched neatly packaged video clips fed to the press by the war makers and we were spared the pools of blood the agony of the dying on the other end it was clean and neat and tidy and wildly out of context there was the technological capacity to show us war we could have watched live footage of a young Iraqi soldier with his legs blown off by an anti-tank mine dying in the sand something I saw in the Persian Gulf War but such coverage would hardly boost ratings hardly make us want to wage war we were fed the myth the myth the press almost always feeds us in wartime and kept from seen there has been no more candor in Iraq or Afghanistan than there was in Vietnam but in the age of live satellite feeds the military has perfected the appearance of candor for the myth of war the myth of glory and honor sells newspapers and boost ratings real war reporting does not look at CNN Fox MSNBC nearly every embedded correspondent saw his or her mission as sustaining civilian and army morale the identification of reporters with the unit's they cover is insipid and dangerous but also usual for in war the press is always part of the problem in wartime as Senator Hiram Johnson reminded us in 1917 truth is the first casualty we have lost touch with the essence of war after our defeat in Vietnam we became a better nation we were humbled even humiliated we asked questions about ourselves we had not asked before we were forced to see ourselves as other sauce the site was not an attractive one we were forced to confront our own capacity for atrocity for evil and in this we understood not only war but ourselves but this humility is gone the good name of war has been resurrected it began under President Reagan and Grenada and Panama and culminated in the Persian Gulf War we have been led to believe in the same way the doomed empires of the late 19th century believed that our technology makes us involve all a lie sadly unmasked as I speak tonight in the streets of Baghdad war is the pornography of violence it has a dark Beauty filled with the monstrous and the grotesque the Bible calls it the lust of the eye and warns believers against it war gives us a distorted sense of self it gives us meaning it creates a feeling of comradeship that obliterates our alienation and makes us feel for perhaps the first time in our lives that we belong war allows us to rise above our small stations in life we find nobility in the cause feelings of selflessness even bliss once in a conflict the shallowness of much of our lives becomes apparent the fruitless search to find fulfillment in the acquisition of things and wealth and power is laid bare the trivia that dominates our airwaves is exposed as empty chatter war allows us to engage in lusts and passions we keep hidden in the deepest most private interiors of our fantasy life it allows us to destroy not only things but human beings in that moment of wholesale destruction we wield 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 crazed by the poisonous elixir our power to bring about the obliteration of others delivers all things including human beings become objects objects to either gratify or destroy or both almost no one is immune the contagion of the crowd sees to that force seem of all rights 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 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 youth 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 could never say I was happy in the fighting in El Salvador or Bosnia or Kosovo but I had a sense of purpose 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 this is why war at its inception always looks and feels like love the chief emotion war destroys we are tempted maybe even encouraged to reduce life to a simple search for happiness happiness however withers if there is no meaning the other temptation is to disavow the search for happiness in order to be faithful to that which provides meaning but to live only for meaning indifferent to all happiness makes us fanatic self-righteous and cold it leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others the ancient Greeks understood the perverse attraction between love and death and war time when Achilles killed Penthesilea the queen of the Amazons in the Trojan War he fell in love with her as she expired on the battlefield he murdered love and once he murdered love he himself was doomed he courted death Aphrodite the goddess of love had an illicit affair with Ahri's the God of War who was hated by all the other gods with the exception of the god of the underworld to whom he steadily brought new souls we feel in wartime comradeship we confuse this with friendship with love there are those who will insist that the comradeship of war is loved The Ecstatic glow that makes us in war feel as one people one entity is real but this is part of wars intoxication think back on the days after the attacks of 9/11 suddenly we no longer felt alone we connected with strangers even with people we did not like we felt we belonged that we were somehow wrapped in the embrace of the nation the community in short we no longer felt alienated as this feeling dissipated in the weeks after the attack there was a kind of nostalgia for its warm glow wartime always brings with it this comradeship which is the opposite of friendship friends as Jay Glenn gray points out in his book the Warriors reflections on men in battle are predetermined friendship takes place between men and women who possess an intellectual and emotional affinity for each other and many of us will admit that we never really had a friend and even the most fortunate of us have very few but comradeship that ecstatic bliss that comes with belonging to the crowd in wartime is within our reach we can all have comrades the danger the external threat that comes when we have an enemy does not create friendship it creates comradeship and those in wartime are deceived about what they are undergoing this is why once the war ends these comrades again become strangers to us this is why after war we fall into despair in friendship there is a deepening of our sense of self we become through the friend more aware of who we are and what we are about we find ourselves in the eyes of the friend friends probe in question and challenge each other to make each more complete they draw the secrets out of us and know our inner core of being for we reach and change others and we ourselves are changed when we plunge to the depths of our inner life the depths that expose our insecurities and incompleteness those depths that often lie beyond articulation and 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 a common purpose in comradeship life is ecstatic and corporate as opposed to friendship where life is singular and individual in comradeship gray reminds us 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 this is why once the war is over once the danger that linked us together is passed these feelings are instantly extinguished Sebastien Hoffner who was a lawyer in Nazi Germany wrote of this comradeship in his book define Hitler he noted that comradeship destroys the sense of responsibility for oneself be it civilian or worse still the religious sense comradeship always sets the cultural tone at the lowest possible level accessible to everyone he wrote it cannot tolerate discussion in the chemical solution of comradeship discussion immediately takes on the colour of whining and grumbling it becomes a mortal sin comradeship admits no thoughts just mass feelings of the most primitive sort these on the other hand are inescapable to try and evade them is to put oneself beyond the pale in wartime when we feel threatened we no longer face death alone but as a group and this makes death easier to bear we a noble self-sacrifice for the other for the comrade in short we begin to worship death and this is what the God of War demands from us think finally of what it means to die for a friend it is deliberate and painful there is no ecstasy for friends dying is hard and bitter the dialogue they have and cherish will perhaps never be recreated friends do not the way comrades do love death and sacrifice to friends the prospect of death is frightening and this is why friendship or let me say love is the most potent enemy of war we do not see war in the images of war presented in films and novel nor in the mythic narratives the government and the press spins out for us we never saw war in the televised images from Iraq the war is always carefully packaged the way tobacco or liquor companies packaged their own poisons the titillation is there but in doses we can digest the reports give war a coherency and logic it never has in battle we taste a bit of wars exhilaration but are safe war from Iraq is seen through the prism of the u.s. military and it comes complete with manufactured heroes feel-good stories about our own and an enemy that is always painted as barbaric and uncivilized 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 present images of battle it is like trying to condemn pornography while showing erotic love scenes the purlins fascination with violent death always overpowers the message war is part of the modern industrial landscape indeed its tools are often the cutting edge of technology by World War one we had created ways in which thousands of people who never saw their attackers could die in an instant weapons that carry out this impersonal mass slaughter or beautiful they're crafted sleek and harbor within them awesome power the machines of war the planes the tanks the heavy machine guns the huge hulking howitzers and the helicopters are pieces of art I've seen them at work there are angels of death streaking through the sky I was with a unit of guerrillas in El Salvador when some Huey helicopters raced in over a lake - huh damn we hid in the ruins of an abandoned village darting from wall to wall and standing with our backs to the shattered bricks so our hunters could not see us as they pass low overhead as I looked up at these machines that were trying to kill me I found them seductive once in a conflict once we live in the midst of fighting we are moved from the abstract to the real from the mythic to the sensory no soldier after a few seconds of combat believes in the myth of war anymore and this is why wounded Marines jeer John Wayne when he visited them at a hospital in World War two when this move takes place we have nothing to do with a world not at war the world when we return to it is viewed from the end of a very long tunnel there they still believe there they do not understand we feel different wiser greater this experience is so overpowering that if we can control our fear we go back to seek it out again war is addictive indeed it is the most potent narcotic invented by humankind the first time I was in ambush was in the Salvadoran town of su Chi Toto it was a dreary has an outpost made up of stucco and mud and Waddell huts off the main road the town was surrounded by the foie de bunda Marti National Liberation Front rebels who when I arrived in El Salvador were winning the war the government forces kept a small garrison in the town although its relief columns were frequently ambushed as they amble down the small strip of asphalt surrounded by high grass it was one of the most dangerous spots in the country the rebels launched an attack to take the town a convoy of reporters in cars marked with TV and masking tape on the windshields hightailed it to the small Brij that led to the lonely stretch of road to su Chi Toto we stopped for the familiar ritual of getting high something as a print reporter who could scramble to safety I did not do but something the photographers who would stand and take pictures found a necessary balm to their nerves then we moved slowly down the road the odd round fired ahead or behind us we made it to the edge of town where we ran into rebel units now accustomed to the follies of the press on foot we move through the deserted streets the firing from the garrison became louder as we weaved our way with rebel units to the siege that had been set up then as I rounded the corner several full bursts of automatic fire rent the air bullets hit the mud wall behind me we'd open to the dirt rebels began to fire noisy rounds from their m16 assault rifles the set of cordite fill the air rebels around me were wounded and crying out in pain one died yelling in a sad cadence for his mother his desperate and final plea cutting through the absurd posturing of soldiering at first his cries haunted me soon I just wished he would be quiet the firefight seemed to go on for an eternity I cannot say how long I lay there it could have been a few minutes it could have been an hour here was war real war sensory war not the war of the movies and novels I had consumed in my youth it was horrifying confusing numbing and nothing like the myth I had been peddled I realized at once that it controlled me I would never control it in a low I made a dash across an empty square to find shelter behind a house my heart was racing adrenaline cursed through my bloodstream I was safe I made it back to the capital and like most war correspondents soon considered the experience a great cosmic joke I drank away the fear in a seedy bar in downtown San Salvador that night most people after such an experience would learn to stay away I was hooked drawn into the world of war it becomes hard to escape it perverts and destroys you it pushes you closer and closer to your own annihilation spiritual emotional and finally physical I covered the war in El Salvador from 1983 to 1988 by the end I had a nervous twitch in my face I was evacuated three times by the US Embassy because of tips that the death squads plan to kill me yet each time I came back I accepted with a grim fatalism that I would be killed in El Salvador I could not articulate why I accepted my own destruction and cannot now there came to be a part of me maybe it is a part in all of us which decided I would rather die like this then go back to the dough routine during the war in El Salvador I worked with a photographer who covered the war had a slew of close calls and then called it quits he moved to Miami and took pictures for one of the news weeklies but life in Florida was flat dull and interesting he could not adjust and soon came back from the moment he stepped off the plane it was clear he had returned to die just as there are some soldiers or war correspondents that seemed to us immortal and whose loss comes as a sobering reminder that death has no favorites there are also those in war who are locked in a grim embrace with death from which they cannot escape he was frightening to behold a walking corpse he was shot through the back in a firefight and died in less than a minute Sigmund Freud divided the forces in human nature between the arrows instinct the impulse we in us that propels us to become close to others to preserve and conserve and the Thanatos or death instinct the impulse that works towards the annihilation of all living things including ourselves for Freud these forces were in eternal conflict he was therefore pessimistic about eradicating war all human history he argued in civilization and its discontents is a tug of war between these two instincts taste enough of war and you come to believe the Stoics were right we will in the end all consume ourselves in a vast conflagration there is a constant search in 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 this is why we would drive into towns in Bosnia and find bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated and mutilated this is why those slain in combat are treated as trophies belonging to the killers turned into grotesque pieces of performance art I know soldiers that 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 allows our senses to command our bodies the killing whips fighters into greater orgies of destruction hedonism and perversion spirals out of control the comradeship of war actively works to stomp out all feelings of love of tenderness for love alone shields us the most important part of the individual life which cannot be subsumed in communal life is love Hoffner wrote so comradeship has its special weapon against love smut every evening in bed after the last patrol round there was the ritual reciting of lewd songs and jokes that is a hard and fast rule of male comradeship and nothing is more mistaken than the widely held opinion that this is a safety valve for frustrated erotic or sexual feelings these songs and jokes do not have an erotic arousing effect on the contrary they make the act of love appear as unappetizing as possible they treat it like digestion and defecation and make it an object of ridicule the men who recited rude songs and used coarse words for female body parts were in effect denying that they had ever had tender feelings or been in love that they had ever made themselves attractive behave gently and used sweet words for these same parts they were rough tough and above such civilised tenderness in war we deform ourselves our essence we give up individual conscience maybe even consciousness for the contagion of the crowd the rush of patriotism the belief that we must stand together as a nation in moments of extremity the normal order is turned upside down better to give yourself up to the lust of war to make a moral choice to defy wars enticement to defend love can be self-destructive but in the rise to power we always become smaller power absorbs us and once power is obtained we are its pawn as in Shakespeare's Richard the third the all-powerful prince who molded the world we fall prey to the forces we thought we had harnessed love may not always triumph but it keeps us human it offers the only chance to escape for the contagion of war perhaps it is the only antidote and there are times when remaining human is the only victory possible when the mask of war slips away and the rot and corruption is uncovered when it turns sour and rank when the myth is exposed as a fraud we feel soiled 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 a World War 2 study determined that after 60 days of continuous combat 98% of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties the study found that a common trait among the 2% who are able to endure a sustained combat was a predisposition towards aggressive psychopathic personalities during the war in El Salvador soldiers could serve in the army for three or four years or longer virtually until they psychologically or physically collapsed in garrison towns commanders ban the sale of sedatives because of the abuse by troops in this war the emotionally maimed were common I once interviewed a 19 year old Salvadoran Army sergeant who had spent five years fighting and suddenly lost his vision after his unit walked into a rebel ambush the rebels killed 11 soldiers in the firefight including his closest friend a couple dozen soldiers were wounded he was unable to see again until he was placed in the Army Hospital I have these horrible headaches he told me sitting on the edge of his bed there is shrapnel in my head I keep telling the doctors to take it out but the doctors told me he had no head wounds I saw other soldiers and other conflicts go deaf or stop speaking or simply shake without being able to stop war is necrophilia this necrophilia is central to soldiering just as it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists the necrophilia is hidden under platitudes about duty or comradeship it waits especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its pitch to be unleashed when we spend long enough in war it comes to us as a kind of release a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation with our own destruction in me Levangie Liz's memoir of the partisan war in Yugoslavia he wrote of the enticement death held for the combatants he stood over the body of his comrade the commander Sava Kovac ovitch and found dying did not seem terrible or unjust this was the most extraordinary the most exalted moment of my life death did not seem strange or undesirable that I restrained myself from charging blindly into the fray and death was perhaps due to my sense of obligation to the troops or to some comrades reminder concerning the tasks at hand in my memory I returned to those moments many times with the same feeling of intimacy with death and desire for it while I was in prison especially during my first incarceration war ascendant wipes out eros it wipes out delicacy and tenderness and this is why those in war swing from rank sentimentality to perversion with a little in-between when we see this when we see our addiction for what it is when we understand our 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 after returning from Sarajevo he understood the reality of his work a reality that stripped away the self-righteous high octane gloss 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 this wiped me out I grabbed the camera and started running down snipers alley filming at knee level the Bosnians running from place to place 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 his corpse the body was lifted the water running out of 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 Liliana was young but the war had exacted a toll her cheeks were hollow her hair dry and brittle her teeth were decayed and some had broken into jagged bits she had no money for a dentist she hoped to fix them in Australia yet all she and her friends did that afternoon was lament the days when they lived in fear and hunger emaciated targeted by Serb Gunners on the heights above 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 in or wash their clothes when they huddled in unheated apartments his sniper bullets hit the walls outside 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 that common sense of struggle no longer given the opportunity to be Noble no longer sure of what life was about or what it meant the old comradeship however false that allowed them to love men and women they hardly knew indeed whom they may not have liked before the war had vanished with a last shot moreover they had seen that all the sacrifice had been for naught they had been as we all are in war betrayed the corrupt old communist party bosses who became nationalists overnight and got them into the mess in the first place had grown rich off their suffering and were still in power there was a 70 percent unemployment rate they depended on handouts for from the international community they understood that their cause once as fashionable in certain intellectual circles as they were themselves they'd forgotten no longer did actors politicians and artists scramble to come and visit during the ceasefires acts there were almost always ones of gross self-promotion they knew the lie of war the mockery of their idealism and struggled with their shattered illusions and yet they wished it all back and I did too a year later I received a Christmas card it was signed Lilliana from Australia it had no return address I never heard from her again but many of those I worked with his war correspondence during the past two decades did not escape they could not break free from the dance with a death they wandered from conflict to conflict seeking always one more hit by then I was back in Gaza and found myself pinned down in another ambush a young Palestinian 15 feet away was shot through the chest and killed I had been lured back but now felt none of the old rush just fear it was time to break free to let go to accept that none of this would or could or should return I knew then that it was over I was lucky to get out alive Kurt schork brilliant courageous and driven could not let go he died in an ambush in Sierra Leone along with another friend Miguel Gil Moreno his entrapment his embrace of Thanatos of the death instinct was never mentioned in the sterile and antiseptic memorial service staged for him in Washington everyone tiptoed around it but for those of us who knew him we understood that he had been consumed I had worked with Kurt for 10 years starting in northern Iraq literate funny 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 is a hole that will never be filled his ashes were placed in the Lyons cemetery and sorry AVO for the victims of the war I flew to Sarajevo and met the British documentary filmmaker Dan Reed it was an overcast November day we stood over the grave and down a pint of whiskey Dan lit a candle I recited a poem the Roman lyric poet Catullus had written to honor his 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 the 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 brother's tears have made them wet and take into eternity my hail and my farewell it was there among a few thousand war dead that Curt belonged 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 Kurt and Miguel could not let go they would be the first to admit it spend long enough at war and you cannot fit in anywhere else it finally kills you it is not a new story it starts out like love but it is death war 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 ech Poirot sious it means to be consumed by a ball of fire and they used it to describe heroes thank you I know there are microphones if anyone has any questions you mentioned that you were finally overcome with fear and I was wondering when that why you think that finally happened to you why you were able to break away from this addiction because everybody has a finite capacity to deal with that kind of trauma and I as the years went by no longer had the emotional and physical resiliency of youth you know I think that war correspondents who do this over many many years have a harder and harder time [Music] confronting that kind of trauma but they don't know any other way to live they can't let go and I think they're you know we used to say there's always two kinds of war correspondents who get killed those that are green and don't know what they're doing and those that have hung around too long and gets sloppy and so I think for me it was all of that said it was a long process of disengagement because I think it was very much like an addiction that lifestyle and I had to learn a new way to live which which was difficult and hard and the lure of going back was always there and it you know it killed two friends of mine in Iraq Elizabeth knew fern Michael Kelly Curtin I used to speak all the time about this but Kurt couldn't let go it's very hard to let go as you said there are many like Freud who believe that war is something that's inherently built into humanity and cannot be removed and therefore war is inevitable on the other hand Jakob Bronk offski says in the ascent of man that war is a cultural invention something that has been invented consciously by man that it is it is organized theft and that it is conceivable that it can be cured by cultural means can you comment on those two positions I think one of the things that people who have not lived in a war culture have a hard time understanding is how whole societies can act in a way that almost guarantees their own annihilation that the euphoria and the excitement and the intoxication of the crowd can propel a society over the cliff and I think when we think about war we have to stop thinking about war in rational logical terms and begin to deal with what I think are those very dark impulses that can lead a society to almost quite consciously and willingly destroy itself and I think that some of those impulses are circulating within our own society at the moment you've explained very well the attraction addiction to war by someone who's been in it the current war mongers haven't been involved in war so what's going on with with them are they addicted as as you and your friends were well I think that the the the addiction comes from people who've been in violent conflict that you know the landscape and the experience of war is is so unlike anything else I mean it it you know in the span of a 24-hour period it can recreate probably every drug high known to mankind either because you're zipped up on adrenaline or zonked out with no sleep and in a zombie-like state or viewing a battlefield scene of such powerful and grotesque images that it looks hallucinogenic and it's when you when you spend a long time in war you're so alienated from a society not at war that you rush back into it this is what I and my fellow war correspondents did for years and years so that however debilitating and difficult it was for instance in the siege in Sarajevo when we would get out when I would go to Paris there was something in me that that that wanted desperately to get back into the city back in an environment which I had become accustomed to living in back with people who at least understood a wartime state and what I was experiencing because I just couldn't relate outside that that that wartime culture thank you very much that was quite vivid and perfectly horrifying one thing I'm a little bit confused about is you talk about your own addiction to war and I can understand how that could happen but I'm I'm not clear on whether you're trying to say that that's what happens to everybody who goes you talk about the survivors being the aggressive Psychopaths and I don't really think that that's likely to be you but I don't understand whether you mean that that also affected the people who break down form or is this addiction happening to all the young men and women who are in Iraq is this what would happen to me if I were in a war I think that it's not contradictory to hate war I think many of us who covered war hated war viscerally and deeply yet at the same time be constantly drawn to it I think that you know I went into war you know I first I graduated from seminary and went to Central America at the time of the military dictatorships in Latin America because I felt it was as close as my generation was going to come to fighting fascism so I went into war as an idealist but I got perverted and deformed and caught up in the culture of war and I think that when you spend a long time in that culture you know around that kind of trauma you can't walk away unaffected everybody of course is affected at different levels but it is possible to be physically and even emotionally maimed by war yet want to go back it creates I mean it is war you know war Zen I mean it it thrusts you into the present in a way that you never were before I mean colors are brighter it is it has a powerful attraction a powerful allure and and I think with all of its horror sometimes we don't realize how seductive that a lure is [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Applause] Oh

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 77,801

Rating: 4.8424869 out of 5

Keywords: Chris, Hedges, Bosnia, El, Salvador, Israel, war, conflict

Id: B2SaM8RJ30c

Length: 59min 37sec (3577 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 24 2008

Reddit Comments

[u/OblivionGenesis]

Up front honesty about re-posting shows good etiquette. Good post too

[u/[deleted]]

I can't stand this guy. Hyperbolic, fire-and-brimstone rhetoric delivered with a Martin Luther King, Jr. intonation.

Now please, shower me with your downvotes.