Book review: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
For Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years, war was like a drug. Under the spell of its elixir he was imprisoned in Sudan, expelled from Libya, ambushed in Central America and shot at in Kosovo; he has uncovered mass graves and witnessed atrocities that haunt him. He has seen fellow war correspondents who, like him, traveled from one war zone to another, had their luck run out and got killed. ''There is a part of me - maybe it is a part of many of us - that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life,'' he says. ''The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war - and very stupid once the war ended.''
Chris Hedges; War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning; 2014
Reviewed by Abraham Verghese
Then, after a decade and a half of war reporting, Hedges
hung it up. He has stepped back to reflect on the carnage he witnessed. The
result is a brilliant, thoughtful, timely and unsettling book whose greatest
merit is that it will rattle jingoists, pacifists, moralists, nihilists,
politicians and professional soldiers equally. War, Hedges finds, ''exposes the
capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us.'' We
are all culpable.
The myths we embrace in order to fight a war are unchanged
from when David Hume wrote about them in 1740: the enemy is cruel and
perfidious while we are equitable; the opposing general is a sorcerer who takes
pleasure in death while the treachery of our generals we call policy; our
cruelty we justify as an evil inseparable from war. Hedges extends this idea:
''We demonize the enemy so that our opponent is no longer human. We view
ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute goodness. Our enemies
invert our view of the world to justify their own cruelty. In most mythic wars
this is the case. Each side reduces the other to objects -- eventually in the
form of corpses.''
The myth and its attendant labels (axis of evil, Great
Satan) are useful for politicians to make the case for war and for the public
to buy into it. But politicians need to beware, Hedges says, of a war that
loses its mythic stature, as in the case of Vietnam. Then the war is doomed to fail
because it has been exposed for the organized slaughter that it is. It comes as
a surprise when Hedges discounts the notion that wars are born out of pure
ethnic or religious differences; most wars, he believes, ''are manufactured
wars, born out of the collapse of civil societies, perpetuated by fear, greed
and paranoia, and they are run by gangsters, who rise up from the bottom of
their own societies and terrorize all, including those they purport to
protect.''
Nationalism fuels wars. Nationalism warms the heart, unites
a nation and sells many flags, but its danger, according to Hedges, is that it
can devour intellectuals and social critics as readily as it does the masses.
For example, the hated military junta that ruled Argentina and killed 20,000 of
its own citizens became the savior of the nation when it invaded the Falkland
Islands. ''Labor union and opposition leaders, some of whom were still visibly
bruised from beatings, were hauled out of jail cells before cameras to repeat
what was a collective mantra: 'Las Malvinas son Argentinas.' . . . Stories of
the prowess of the Argentine military -- whose singular recent accomplishment
was the savage repression of its own people -- filled the airways.'' And ''even
in defeat,'' Hedges writes, the Argentines initially ''could not let go of the
nationalist myth.'' In times of war, all countries wind up destroying their own
culture; when the myth of war ''entices a nation to glory and sacrifice, those
who question the value of the cause and the veracity of the myths are branded
internal enemies.''
'War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning abounds with
Hedges' harrowing and terribly moving eyewitness accounts. His words are more
powerful and informative than the images network television spoon-feeds its
audience. Referring to the gulf war, Hedges deplores press complaints about
being ''used.'' The press, he says, ''wanted to be used. It saw itself as part
of the war effort. Most reporters sent to cover a war don't really want to go
near the fighting,'' and as a result there is bitter enmity between the
''hotel-room warriors'' and reporters like Hedges who venture farther afield.
But even the most intrepid reporters are guilty of the same distortion, Hedges
admits, because they too believe the myth of war. They have to. ''When you stop
believing you stop going to war.''
Freud believed all human history could be seen as a tug of
war between Eros and Thanatos, between the urge to love, to preserve, and the
urge to destroy. Hedges argues that Eros and Thanatos are intertwined at all
times; thus when a suicide bomb goes off, we witness the relatives clawing
through the onlookers to get to their dismembered loved ones. ''This love, like
death, radiates outwards. It battles Thanatos at the very moment of death's
sting. These two fundamental impulses crash like breakers into each other. . .
. Love alone fuses happiness and meaning.'' Hedges' title has to do with this
paradox: ''We believe in the nobility and heroic self-sacrifice demanded by
war, especially when we are blinded by the narcotic of war. We discover in the
communal struggle, the shared sense of meaning and purpose, a cause. War fills
our spiritual void. . . . This is a quality war shares with love, for we are,
in love, also able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security.''
The book's power accumulates not only because Hedges has
walked a path that few of us dare to tread, but because he has then dug deep,
been fearless in his questioning of himself, and he has arrived at a truth that
for him is inescapable: ''The covenant of love is such that it recognizes both
the fragility and the sanctity of the individual. It recognizes itself in the
other. It alone can save us.'' This, his personal epiphany, is difficult to
apply in any prescriptive fashion. Then again, Hedges' ultimate aim is not to
dissuade us from war -- indeed, war's seduction and inevitability and sometimes
even necessity are a recurring theme in this book; but Hedges does want us to
recognize war for what it is, so that ''we, who wield such massive force across
the globe, see within ourselves the seeds of our own obliteration.''
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