Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [32]
“To get you to join up they do all these advertisements—they show people skiing down mountains and doing great things—but they don’t show you getting shot at and people with their legs blown off or burning to death,” he says. “They don’t show you what really happens. It’s just bullshit. And they never prepare you for it. They can give you all the training in the world, but it’s never the same as the real thing.”31
Those with whom veterans have most in common when the war is over are often those they fought.
“Nobody comes back from war the same,” says Horacio Javier Benitez, who fought the British in the Falklands and is quoted in Grinker’s book. “The person, Horacio, who was sent to war, doesn’t exist anymore. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about normal life; too much seems inconsequential. You contend with craziness and depression.
“Many who served in the Malvinas,” he says, using the Argentine name of the islands, “committed suicide, many of my friends.”32
“I miss my family,” reads graffiti captured in one of van Agtmael’s photographs. “Please God forgive the lives I took and let my family be happy if I don’t go home again.”
Next to the plea someone had drawn an arrow toward the words and written in thick, black marker: “Fag!!!”33
The disparity between what we are told or what we believe about war and war itself is so vast that those who come back are often rendered speechless. What do you say to those who advocate war as an instrument to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring democracy to Iraq? How do you tell them what war is like? How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd? How do you cope with memories of small, terrified children bleeding to death with bits of iron fragments peppered throughout their small bodies? How do you speak of war without tears?
Look beyond the nationalist cant used to justify war. Look beyond the seduction of the weapons and the pornography of violence. Look beyond Obama’s ridiculous rhetoric about finishing the job or fighting terror. Focus on the evil of war. War begins by calling for the annihilation of the Other, but ends ultimately in self-annihilation. It corrupts souls and mutilates bodies. It destroys homes and villages and murders children on their way to school. It grinds into the dirt all that is tender and beautiful and sacred. It empowers human deformities—warlords, Shiite death squads, Sunni insurgents, the Taliban, al-Qaida and our own killers—who can speak only in the despicable language of force. War is a scourge. It is a plague. It is industrial murder. And before you support war, especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, look into the hollow eyes of the men, women and children who know it.
III
Dismantling the Liberal Class
To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus
against war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanim-
ity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their
support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which
America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists,
new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with
each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the col-
lapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a
hundred million more of the world’s people. And the intellec-
tuals are not content with confirming our belligerent gesture.
They are now complacently asserting that it was they who
effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim percep-
tions of the American democratic masses. A war made delib-
erately by the intellectuals! A calm moral verdict reluctantly
passed after a penetrating study of inexorable facts! Sluggish
masses, too remote from the world conflict to be stirred, too
lacking in intellect to perceive their danger!
—RANDOLPH BOURNE, “The War and the Intellectuals,” 19171
WOODROW WILSON, escorted by a troop of cavalry because of fears of anarchist bomb attacks, left the White House on a dreary, rainy