Religion & Society:
Experiencing Violence Of War: A Rational, Informed And Realistic View
Preamble:
This article is based on Bill Moyers' interviews of Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize winner foreign correspondent of the New York Times, and of Susan Sontag, a writer and activist. Mr. Hedges covered the Balkans, the Middle East, including the first Gulf War, and Central America. In his book, WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING, Chris Hedges reflects on what he calls "the myth of war", the idea of heroism, patriotism and glory in battle that doesn't necessarily match the reality of combat. He writes, "In mythic war we fight absolutes. We must vanquish darkness. It is imperative and inevitable for civilization, for the free world, that good triumph, just as Islamic militants see us as infidels whose existence corrupts the pure Islamic society they hope to build." He writes, "Mythic war reporting sells papers and boosts ratings. Real reporting, sensory reporting, does not, at least not in comparison with the boosterism we witnessed . . ." When the language of reporting propagates the myth of war, Hedges warns, the result is justification of "what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty an stupidity."
From Chris Hedge's Interview
Truth: a victim:
In an interview Dan Rather of CBS, says the U.S. media has stopped asking tough questions and he blames a climate of extraordinary patriotism. He says that fear of offending the politicians "keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions" and adds, "I do not except myself from this criticism."
Real images of war:
The General was admirably candid. Quote: "We need to condition people that this is war. People get the idea this is going to be antiseptic. Well, it's not going to be. People are going to die." Images of large numbers of civilian dead. Destroyed buildings. Panic in the corridors of hospitals.
Families that can't reach parts of the city that have been devastated and are desperate for news of their loved ones.
Is war against 'evil' justified? Is there any moral relativism there?
That ('evil') does not give you a moral justification to carry out what is, quite candidly, indiscriminate attack against civilians. That's what's going to happen when you drop this number of high explosive devices in an urban area.
A lesson from history:
At the end of the Vietnam War, we became a better country in our defeat. We asked questions about ourselves that we had not asked before. We were humbled, maybe even humiliated. We were forced to step outside of ourselves and look at us as others saw us. And it wasn't a pretty sight. But we became a better country for it.
Experiences of men and women who are going into war:
They are going to have to come face-to-face with the myth of war. The myth of heroism, the myth of patriotism. The myth of glory. All those myths that have the ability to arouse us when we're not in mortal danger. And they're going to have to confront their own mortality. And at that moment some people will be crying, some people will be vomiting. People will not speak much. Everyone will realize that from here on out, at least until the fighting ends, it will be a constant minute-by-minute battle with fear. And that sometimes fear wins. And anybody who tells you differently has never been in a war. It's not uncommon when soldiers die that they call out for their mother. And that always seems to me to cut through the absurd posturing of soldiering. The coverage (of war) - all those abstract terms that create the excitement back home become obscene to those who are in combat.
What was war made to appear?
War became entertainment. Live press conferences. And well-packaged video clips. You know this kind of stuff . . . It's the fact that they covered up death. Not only the death of our own. But the death of tens of thousands (of civilians) who were killed. They were nameless, faceless phantoms. So it was completely mythic, or mendacious narrative that was presented to us.
War as an addiction - a narcotic:
The Bible calls it, "The lust of the eye." And warns believers against it.
It's that great landscape of the grotesque. It's that power to destroy. I mean one of the most chilling things you learn in war is that human beings like to destroy. Not only other things but other human beings. And when unit discipline would break down or there was no unit discipline to begin with, you would go into a town and people's eyes were glazed over.
Victims of war:
We dehumanize the other. We fail to recognize the divinity of all human life. We (consider) our own victims are the only victims that hold worth.
The victims of the other are sort of the regrettable cost of war. There is such a moral dichotomy in war. Such a frightening dichotomy that the world becomes a tableau of black and white, good and evil.
How do we protect ourselves, defend our security, do the right thing and yet not be taken by surprise?
By having the courage to be vulnerable. By not folding in on ourselves. By not becoming like those who are arrayed against us. By not using their rhetoric and not adopting their worldview.
Doesn't power exercised with ruthlessness always win?
Power exercised with ruthlessness always is able to crush the gentle and the compassionate. But I don't believe it always wins. Thucydides wrote about the war with Sparta that, yes, raw Spartan militarism in the short-term could conquer Athens. But that beauty, art, knowledge, philosophy, would long outlive Sparta and Spartan militarism. And he consoled himself with that.
I think in the short-term, yes, violence and force can win. But in the long-term, it leaves nothing but hollowness, emptiness. It does nothing to enrich our lives or propel us forward as human beings.
Lessons of war:
That everybody or every generation seems not to listen to those who went through it before and bore witness to it. But falls again for the myth. And has to learn it through a tragedy inflicted upon their young. That war is always about betrayal. It's about betrayal of soldiers by politicians. And it's about betrayal of the young by the old.
From Susan Sontag's Interview
Is war inevitable?
What I want people to think about is how serious war is. How it is elective. It's not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather. I want people to think about what war is. And at the same time, I know it's very hard.
Sights of war:
When I see that section Nation At War, and I look at those incredible color photographs of a mother with her children cowering, and some bombardment or dead bodies or soldiers or debris or destroyed houses, day after day after day, I think, "This is extraordinary that we can be here and we're so safe.
And they're there." And that's a situation we're just going to get used to.
Politics of war:
Well, how do we get politics back into our lives? I mean, that we have a form of politics now in which we're told that our duty as citizens is to assent, to be supportive. United we stand. That's a very sinister slogan, as far as I'm concerned. So if you're a patriot, then you have to agree with the government. Well, I think I'm a patriot, or at least as patriotic as anybody who supports this war. Because I do have the interests of this country in mind when I oppose this war.
Realities of war:
Reality is that human beings are capable of the most extraordinary wickedness. And that I guess I thought one must never forget this.
These dead are supremely uninterested in the living, in those who took their lives and witnesses and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? We, this we is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through. We don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like.
We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is and how normal it becomes. Can't understand. Can't imagine. That's what every soldier, every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby stubbornly feels. And they are right.