[THS] !!!! Chris Hedges: War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

An excerpt from <Losing Moses on the Freeway> by Chris Hedges
some insight here too about the 'education' now being given to our college students.

pp 92-100
   
   Our lives circle back, unconsciously, sometimes consciously to our origin. I found myself in pulpits, of sorts, during the war in Iraq. I had to decide how to speak, what I was willing to risk, how far I was willing to go, what language I would employ. I remembered my father.
   On a May afternoon in 2003 in Rockford, Illinois, I stood before about 1,000 guests to deliver the commencement address at Rockford College. I knew nothing about the school, other than that its most famous and celebrated alumnus was Jane Addams, the feminist, socialist and pacifist founder of Hull House in Chicago who was excoriated for denouncing World War I. The students read her writings. But many in the crowd, and the administration, while they may have been able to honor her memory, had no stomach for honoring her ideals.
   The address, built around my book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, was a critique of the war in Iraq, one that was delivered with the hammer blows of a man who had been trained as a preacher. The mood of the crowd, indeed of much of the country, was not ready for a denunciation of the Iraqi war. President Bush had, not long before, landed on an aircraft carrier and stood in front of a banner that read "Mission Accomplished." The country was imbibing the heady brew of victory, seeing in the swift defeat of the Iraqis an empowering military and moral superiority that rendered us great and good. Arrogance and triumphalism poisoned our discourse.
   I walked to the podium at the end of the line of faculty. I wore a borrowed black robe and a borrowed academic hood. It was windy. We climbed the steps and took our seats. The graduating class sat in folding chairs in the front. The audience was behind them. There were black speaker boxes mounted on poles to broadcast the ceremony.
   When it was time for my address I walked to the podium. My left hand held down the papers so they would not be scattered by the breeze. I began:
   I want to speak to you today about war and empire.
   The killing, or at least the worst of it, is over in Iraq. Although blood will continue to spill—theirs and ours—be prepared for this. For we are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige, power and security. But this will come later as our empire expands. And in all this we become pariahs, tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. Isolation always impairs judgment, and we are very isolated now.
   We have forfeited the goodwill the empathy the world felt for us after 9/11. We have folded in on ourselves, we have severely weakened the delicate international coalitions and alliances that are vital in maintaining and promoting peace. And we are part now of a dubious troika in the war against terror with Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, two leaders who do not shrink in Palestine or Chechnya from carrying out gratuitous and senseless acts of violence. We have become the company we keep.
   The censure, and perhaps the rage, of much of the world—certainly one-fifth of the world's population which is Muslim, most of whom I will remind you are not Arab—is upon us. Look today at the fourteen people killed last night in several explosions in Casablanca. And this rage, in a world where almost fifty percent of the planet struggles on less than two dollars a day, will see us targeted. Terrorism will become a way of life. [Someone in the crowd shouts, "No!"] And when we are attacked, we will, like our allies Putin and Sharon, lash out with greater fury.
   The circle of violence is a death spiral; no one escapes. We are spinning at a speed that we may not be able to halt. As we revel in our military prowess—the sophistication of our military hardware and technology, for this is what most of the press coverage consisted of in Iraq—we lose sight of the fact that just because we have the capacity to wage war it does not give us the right to wage war. This capacity has doomed empires in the past.
   "Modern western civilization may perish," the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr warned, "because it falsely worshipped technology as a final good."
   The real injustices—the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, the brutal and corrupt dictatorships we fund in the Middle East—will mean that we will not rid the extremists who hate us with bombs. Indeed, we will swell their ranks. [Whistles.] Once you master people by force you depend on force for control. In your isolation you begin to make mistakes. ["Where were you on September eleven?"]
   Fear engenders cruelty; cruelty . . .fear, insanity, and then paralysis. [Hoots. "Who wants to listen to this jerk?"] In the center of Dante's circle the damned remained motionless. [Horns.] We have blundered into a nation we know little about and are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand. We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917. It will be a cesspool for us, as well. ["God bless America," a woman yells.] The curfews, the armed clashes with angry crowds that leave scores of Iraqi dead, the military governor, the Christian Evangelical groups who are being allowed to follow on the heels of our occupying troops to try and teach Muslims about Jesus, the occupation of the oilfields...
   [At this point someone unplugs the microphone. When it is fixed, Rockford College President Paul C. Pribbenow addresses the audience: "My friends, one of the wonders of a liberal arts college is its ability and its deeply held commitment to academic freedom and the decision to listen to each other's opinions. If you wish to protest the speaker's remarks, I ask that you do it in silence, as some of you are doing in the back. That is perfectly appropriate, but he has the right to offer his opinion here, and we would like him to continue his remarks." People blow horns and boo and some applaud.]
   The occupation of the oilfields. [More boos. A woman says, "We're not going to listen. We've listened enough. You've already ruined our graduation. Don't ruin it any more, sir."] The notion that the Kurds and the Shiites will listen to the demands of a centralized government in Baghdad— the same Kurds and Shiites who died by the tens of thousands in defiance of Saddam Hussein, a man who happily butchered all of those who challenged him, and this ethnic rivalry has not gone away. The looting of Baghdad, or let me say the looting of Baghdad with the exception of the oil ministry and the interior ministry—the only two ministries we bothered protecting—is self-immolation. [More boos.]
   As someone who knows Iraq, speaks Arabic, and spent seven years in the Middle East, if the Iraqis believe rightly or wrongly that we come only for oil and occupation, they will begin a long bloody war of attrition. It is how they drove the British out. And remember that, when the Israelis invaded southern Lebanon in 1982, they were greeted by the dispossessed Shiites as liberators, but within a few months, when the Shiites saw that the Israelis had come not as liberators but as occupiers, they began to kill them. It was Israel who created Hezbollah, and it was Hezbollah that pushed Israel out of southern Lebanon.
   As William Butler Yeats wrote in "Meditations in Time of Civil War," "We had fed the heart on fantasies/ The heart's grown brutal from the fare." [Horns. "I never would have come if I knew I had to listen to this," a woman yells.]
   This is a war of liberation in Iraq, but it is a war now of liberation by Iraqis from American occupation. And if you watch closely what is happening in Iraq, if you can see it through the abysmal coverage, you can see it in the lashing out of the terrorist death squads, the murder ofshiite leaders in mosques, and the assassination of our young soldiers in the streets. It is one that will soon be joined by Islamic radicals and we are far less secure today than we were before we bumbled into Iraq. ["USA, USA," some in the crowd chant.]
   We will pay for this, but what saddens me most is that those who will, by and large, pay the highest price are poor kids from Mississippi or Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job or health insurance and joined the army because it was all we offered them. For war in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics.
   Read Antigone, when the king imposes his will without listening to those he rules, or Thucydides' history. [Heckling.] Read how Athens' expanding empire saw it become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home, how the tyranny the Athenian leadership imposed on others it finally imposed on itself.
   This, Thucydides wrote, is what doomed Athenian democracy; Athens destroyed itself. For the instrument of empire is war, and war is a poison, a poison which at times we must ingest just as a cancer patient must ingest a poison to survive. But if we do not understand the poison of war—if we do not understand how deadly that poison is—it can kill us just as surely as the disease. ["It's enough, it's enough, it's enough," a woman says.]
   We have lost touch with the essence of war. Following 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 others saw us, and the sight was not always a pretty one. We were forced to confront our own capacity for atrocity—for evil—and in this we understood not only war but more about ourselves. But that humility is gone.
   War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press—remember in wartime the press is always part of the problem—have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death—is hidden from public view.
   There was no more candor in the Persian Gulf War or the war in Afghanistan or the war in Iraq than there was in Vietnam. [Horns.] But in the age of live feeds and satellite television, the state and the military have perfected the appearance of candor. [Heckling.]
   Because we no longer understand war, we no longer understand that it can all go horribly wrong. We no longer understand that war begins by calling for the annihilation of others but ends, if we do not know when to make or maintain peace, with self-annihilation. We flirt, given the potency of modern weapons, with our own destruction. ["That's not true!"]
   The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true: it does create a feeling of comradeship, which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time of our life, feel we belong.
   War allows us to rise above our small stations in life. We find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion. War, for those who enter into combat, 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. [Shouts of "Go home!" Then a man in the audience climbs to the stage and says, "Can I say a few words here?" I respond, "When I finish— yeah, when I finish."]
   Once in war, the conflict obliterates the past and the future. All is one heady intoxicating present. You feel every heartbeat in war, colors are brighter, your mind races ahead of itself
   [Boos, and the microphone is unplugged momentarily again. "Should I keep going?" I ask President Pribbenow, who responds, "It's up to you." I ask, "Do you want me to stop?" Pribbenow says, "How close are you? Why don't you bring it to a close?" More shouts of "Go home!" One person says, "It's not your graduation." Some, now weeping, begin to sing "God Bless America."]
   We feel in wartime comradeship. [Many loud boos.] We confuse this with friendship, with love. There are those who will insist that the comradeship of war is love. The exotic glow that makes us in war feel as one people, one entity, is real, but this is part of war's intoxication. [More boos.]
   Think back on the days after the attacks on nine-eleven. 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. ["Go home!"]
   As this feeling dissipated in the weeks after the attack, there was a kind of nostalgia for its warm glow. And wartime always brings with it this comradeship, which is the opposite of friendship. Friends, as J. Glenn Gray points out, are predetermined; friendship takes place between men and women who possess an intellectual and emotional affinity for each other. 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 of 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. And this is why once the threat is over, once war ends, comrades again become strangers to us. This is why, after war, we fall into despair. ["Atheist stranger!"]
   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 and question and challenge each other to make each of us more complete. In comradeship, the kind that comes to us in patriotic fervor, there is a suppression of self-awareness, self-knowledge and self-possession. [Heckling.] Comrades lose their identities in wartime for the collective rush of a common cause—a common purpose. 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. ["Go home! Go home!"] Comradeship allows us to escape the demands on the self that is part of friendship.
   In wartime when we feel threatened, we no longer face death alone but as a group, and this makes death easier to bear. We ennoble self-sacrifice for the other, for the comrade. [Boos.] In short we begin to worship death. And this is what the god of war demands of 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 whyfriendship—or, let me say love—is the most potent enemy of war. Thank you.
   [There are boos, whistles, horn blasts and a smattering of applause. "This is the most destructive thing you've ever done to this college, Dr. Pribbenow," says a woman. "You should never have allowed him to speak."]
   I sat down in the chair behind the podium. I opened a small plastic bottle of water. The awarding of the diplomas began. A heavy-set man who identified himself as the head of campus security asked me to climb off the stage and follow him. I was put in a car and driven to my hotel. I packed my bags, was handed the coat I had left in the president's office and put on a bus to Chicago.
   The event spawned a feeding frenzy among conservative commentators from Rush Limbaugh to his well-groomed counterparts  on  Fox  News.  The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial denouncing the talk. The local paper, The Rockford Register Star, reported the event with the headline Speaker Disrupts RC Graduation.
   I gave few interviews. I refused the invitations to go on television talk shows. I did not want to toss little bits of red meat into the public arena to keep the story alive.
   The New York Times, my employer, sent me a letter of reprimand, saying I had made "public remarks that could undermine public trust in the paper's impartiality." I was called into the office. It was an unpleasant moment. We all fear losing our job. We all fear insecurity. We dislike angering those above us. I am no different. But I knew what I was called to do. I had seen the cost.
   To be silent would be to betray my father, to turn my back on what he stood for, to deny his life, to dishonor his memory, to dishonor my own memory. The physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead is not the only story of resurrection in the Gospels. A few weeks after the crucifixion in Acts, two disciples, who had fled Jesus on the night of the arrest, were hauled before the authorities for preaching. This time they refused to betray Jesus. This refusal was a physical manifestation of the resurrection, of new life.
   I am not sure my father, as a distinct individual, exists in death, although I dream of him frequently. I am not sure he knows what has happened to his son. I doubt he can hear my voice, but then he does not need to. It is his own. I am my father's son. This is my inheritance. I will not squander it.