War is an Addiction

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning By Chris Hedges Public Affairs, 2002 If your life is worth saving, and I happen to believe it is, maybe you should follow Darwin's theory, put down this newspaper, and hightail it to your nearest military recruitment office, before the war arrives on our turf. And if not, please don't claim that I did not warn you (while you still had time) that two- thirds of all wartime deaths are civilians, and only 30 percent are uniformed soldiers. Your chances of surviving a war in your homeland are much greater as a soldier than they are if you remain a civilian. Modern warfare is, by the nature of its methodology, directed against civilians. Warriors used to meet on designated fields of battle, removed so far from civilian communities that they did not even have military doctors and nurses to treat their casualties. (Government armies arranged for prostitutes to follow soldiers to battle centuries before they made a systematic plan to have nurses near battlegrounds.) Warfare was for soldiers. Civilians were caught up in the atrocity of war, but not on the overwhelming scale that modern wartime technology and tactics have produced. More than 65 million civilians have died during wartime in the last 100 years. And children represent the largest numbers in most populations, so any way you do the math, the equation is the same; modern wars are organized primarily against defenseless children. When the battles of old were finished, the civilian population was no longer in harm's way. Nowadays, after peace is declared and the soldiers go home, their weapons remain behind to maim and kill for decades. There are, for example, children starving to death as you read this, because their farmland is littered with land mines left over from wars waged years ago, making it impossible to grow food. "Ordinances left behind" by the US in Iraq include depleted uranium, i.e. radioactive chemical waste. And starvation and radioactive sickness are slow, cruel ways to die. But in the words of our spun political warmonger evangelists "collateral damage is unavoidable" during modern warfare. They got that one right. Nuclear warfare or nuclear terrorism is the epitome of this war against civilians, according to author and journalist Chris Hedges, who has spent decades reporting from the battlefields of the world. In War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, he argues that war is an addiction, fed by modern strategic mythology. And it is an addiction not fully understood even by those like himself who are drawn back to the zones of combat year after year, driven by trauma, adrenaline, and the nagging moral puzzles left behind by the emotional and intellectual paradox of combat experience. He explains: "I wrote this book not to dissuade us from war, but to understand it." His insights are disturbing, enlightening and delve beyond the symptoms of organized, violent conflict to explain the philosophical, psychological, emotional and primal disease itself. If religion is an opiate for the people, then warfare is the people's angel dust and speedball; it is the meth/crack tail of the dragon's breath we chase relentlessly, against all organic logic, ethical rhyme and human reason. Modern war enlists civilians through a language of patriotism, nationalism, racism and any other convenient "ism" in the propaganda arsenal. "A nation could find tiny specks over which to argue and establish an identity and go to war," Hedges writes. "Only when the myth is punctured, as it eventually was in Vietnam, does the press begin to report a sensory rather than a mythical matter." He points out that wars that lose their mythic stature are doomed to failure. "War is exposed for what it is–organized murder. But in mythic war we imbue events with meanings they do not have. We see defeats as signposts on the road to ultimate victory." Defeats as signposts on the road to ultimate victory. The phrase could be a sound byte from Bush's speech outlining the plan for winning the war in Iraq. The nerves touched by Hedges are found in the anatomical body of Western classics that include the Illiad and the Odyssey. The bones he lays bare are those of the bleached-white words spoken in ivory towers by lawless attorneys, deranged politicians, corporate lobbyist whores and evil religious monsters, and they lead to lifeless skeletons unearthed from mass graves in Guatemala, Bosnia, Russia, Sierra Leone and the American Wild West. (The John Wayne oilfield west so often co-opted by drugstore cowboys and television presidents like Reagan and Bush in their propaganda war against the spiritual indigenous.) "In wartime the state seeks to destroy its own culture," Hedges writes. "It is only when this destruction has been completed that the state can begin to exterminate the culture of its opponents. In times of conflict, authentic culture is subversive." He quotes from Macbeth: I am in this earthly world–where to do harm Is often laudable, to do good sometime Accounted dangerous folly. Hedges is not a pacifist and neither am I. He explains: "Even as I detest the pestilence that is war and fear its deadly addiction, even as I see it lead states and groups toward self-immolation, even as I concede that it is war that has left millions of dead and maimed across the planet, I, like most reporters in Sarajevo and Kosovo, desperately hoped for armed intervention." He believes–as do I–that "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." But he acknowledges that "the poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility." And in the end, he offers an intimate realization that "to survive as a human being is possible only through love... it does not mean we will avoid war or death... but love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures." Amen.