War is a Force That Gives us Meaning

by Chris Hedges

[What follows is a summary excerpt from the book's introduction. In these few paragraphs, Hedges beautifully and succinctly expresses everything I am trying to convey through this weblog. I am not putting what follows in quotes. It is all Hedges words. Please buy his book and read it cover to cover.]

War and conflict have marked most of my adult life...I have learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug...It is peddled by mythmakers --- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists and the state --- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small station in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning or meaninglessness of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us...

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent...[W]ar is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble...

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...Where else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide hijackers learn that huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered the language. They understand that the use of disproportionate violence against innocents is a way to make a statement. We leave the same calling cards.

Corpses in wartime often deliver a message...[O]n a large scale Washington uses murder and corpses to transmit its wrath. We delivered such incendiary messages in Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia and Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden has learned to speak the language of modern industrial warfare. It was Robert McNamara, the American Secretary of Defense in the summer of 1965, who defined the bombing raids that would eventually leave hundreds of thousands of civilians north of Saigon dead as means of communication to the Communist regime in Hanoi...

As the battle against terrorism continues, as terrorist attacks intrude on our lives, as we feel less and less secure, the acceptance of all methods to lash out at real and perceived enemies will distort and deform our democracy. For even as war gives meaning to sterile lives, it also promotes killers and racists.

Organized killing is done best by a disciplined, professional army. But war also empowers those with a predilection for murder...Once we sign on for war's crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of angels, once we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry out murder.

The eruption of conflict instantly reduces the headache and trivia of daily life. The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation. War,in times of malaise and desperation, is a potent distraction.

George Orwell, in 1984 wrote of the necessity of constant wars against the Other to forge a false unity among the Proles: "War had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war...The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil."

Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us...War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one...

[W]ar usually demands, by its very logic, the disabling of the enemy, often broadly defined to include civilians...While we venerate and mourn our own dead, we are curiously indifferent about those we kill. Thus killing is done in our name, killing that concerns us little, while those who kill our own are seen as having crawled out of the deepest recesses of the earth, lacking our own humanity and goodness. Our dead. Their dead. They are not the same. Our dead matters, theirs do not...

Before conflicts begin, the first people silenced --- often with violence --- are not the nationalist leaders of the opposing ethnic of religious group, who are useful in that they serve to dump gasoline on the evolving conflict. Those voices within the ethnic group or the nation that question the state's lust and need for war are targeted. These dissidents are the most dangerous. They give us an alternative language, one that refuses to define the other as "barbarian" or "evil," one that recognizes the humanity of the enemy, one that does not condone violence as a form of communication. Such voices are rarely heeded...

[D]espite all this I am not a pacifist...Even as I detest the pestilence of war and fear its deadly addiction...I, like most reporters in Sarajevo and Kosovo, desperately hoped for armed intervention. The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times that we must take this poison...We cannot succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral is perhaps less immoral...

I wrote this book not to dissuade us from war but to understand it. It is especially important that we, who wield such massive force across the globe, see within ourselves the seeds of our obliteration. We must guard against the myth of war and the drug of war that can, together, render us as blind and callous as some of those we battle...

The only antidote to ward off self-destruction and the indiscriminate use of force is humility, and ultimately, compassion. Reinhold Niebhur aptly reminded us that we must all act and then ask for forgiveness. This book is not a call for inaction. It is a call for repentance.