Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [71]
But to repeat these simple truths, which I did repeatedly in public forums before the war began, inflicted career wounds that saw me expelled from the New York Times, one of the liberal class’s most revered institutions. My public stance against the war, repeated on national programs from Charlie Rose to NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, angered the editors who argued that, as a news reporter, I had a duty to remain neutral.
The final confrontation with the Times was sparked by events in Rockford, Illinois, at Rockford College, where I had been invited to give the 2003 commencement address. I stood before about one thousand guests in May and spoke about the war. George W. Bush, decked out in a flight suit, had landed on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln a couple of weeks before and spoken under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished.”
The address, built around my book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, was a harsh critique of empire and war. I walked to the podium at the end of the line of faculty. I wore a black academic gown and a borrowed hood with enough crimson in it to approximate my Harvard Divinity School colors. It was a windy day. I clutched the papers of my talk. The students, in the front, and the audience behind them sat in neat rows of folding chairs. There were black speakers mounted on poles to broadcast the talk.
“I want to speak to you today about war and empire,” I began.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 acts of 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.
At this point the crowd, restless and uneasy, began to mutter protests. There was a shout of “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.
There was now a chorus of whistles and hoots.
“Once you master a people by force,” I said, “you depend on force for control. In your isolation you begin to make mistakes.”
“Where were you on September