War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [0]
GIVES US MEANING
WAR
IS A FORCE THAT
GIVES US MEANING
CHRIS HEDGES
PUBLICAFFAIRS
NEW YORK
Copyright © 2002 by Chris Hedges.
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a member of the Perseus Books Group.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hedges, Chris.
War is a force that gives us meaning / Chris Hedges.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 1-58648–049–9
1. War (Philosophy) 2. Hedges, Chris.
3. Military history, Modern—20th century. I. Title.
U 21.2 H43 2002
355.02—dc21
2002068136
FIRST EDITION
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For my father, the Rev. Thomas Hedges,
who taught me that compassion was the highest virtue,
and for the Rev. Coleman Brown,
who has never let me forget it.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1 The Myth of War
2 The Plague of Nationalism
3 The Destruction of Culture
4 The Seduction of Battle and the Perversion of War
5 The Hijacking and Recovery of Memory
6 The Cause
7 Eros and Thanatos
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
If in smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro Patria mori.
•
WILFRED OWEN
Dulce et decorum est
WAR IS A FORCE THAT
GIVES US MEANING
INTRODUCTION
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
•
PLATO
SARAJEVO IN THE SUMMER OF 1995 CAME CLOSE TO Dante’s inner circle of hell. The city, surrounded by Serb gunners on the heights above, was subjected to hundreds of shells a day, all crashing into an area twice the size of Central Park. Ninety-millimeter tank rounds and blasts fired from huge 155-millimeter howitzers set up a deadly rhythm of detonations. Multiple Katyusha rockets—whooshing overhead—burst in rapid succession; they could take down a four- or five-story apartment building in seconds, killing or wounding everyone inside. There was no running water or electricity and little to eat; most people were subsisting on a bowl of soup a day. It was possible to enter the besieged city only by driving down a dirt track on Mount Igman, one stretch directly in the line of Serb fire. The vehicles that had failed to make it lay twisted and upended in the ravine below, at times with the charred remains of their human cargo inside.
Families lived huddled in basements, and mothers, who had to make a mad dash to the common water taps set up by the United Nations, faced an excruciating choice—whether to run through the streets with their children or leave them in a building that might be rubble when they returned.
The hurling bits of iron fragmentation from exploding shells left bodies mangled, dismembered, decapitated. The other reporters and I slipped and slid in the blood and entrails thrown out by the shell blasts, heard the groans of anguish, and were, for our pains, in the sights of Serb snipers, often just a few hundred yards away. The latest victims lay with gaping wounds untended in the corridors of the hospitals that lacked antibiotics and painkillers.
When the cease-fires broke down, there would be four to five dead a day, and a dozen wounded. It