War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [63]
When those who commit crimes do so in the name of the cause, they often come to terms with the crimes through an ersatz moral relativism. Facts are trimmed, used, and become as interchangeable as opinions. The Muslims may say the Serbs shelled the marketplace in Sarajevo while the Serbs may say that the Muslims fired shells on their own citizens there to garner international support. Both opinions, if one sits in a café in Belgrade, may be valid. Both the facts and the opinions become a celebration of ignorance, and more ominously, a refusal to discredit the cause that has eaten away at one’s moral conscience.
Destruction of honest inquiry, the notion that one fact is as good as the next, is one of the most disturbing consequences of war. The prosecution of war entails lying, often on a massive scale—something most governments engage in but especially when under the duress of war. The Serbs who were eventually able to admit that atrocities were carried out in their name explained away the crimes by saying that everyone did this in war. The same was true among the elite and the military in El Salvador. All could match an atrocity carried out by our side with an atrocity carried out by the enemy. Atrocity canceled out atrocity.
Hannah Arendt noted this attitude in Germany after World War II, calling it “nihilistic relativism.” She believed it was a legacy of Nazi propaganda, which, unlike that of non-totalitarian states, was based on the concept that all facts could and would be altered and all Nazi lies should be made to appear true. Reality became a conglomerate of changing circumstances and slogans that could be true one day and false the next.4
Illusions punctuate our lives, blinding us to our own inconsistencies and repeated moral failings. But in wartime these illusions are compounded. The cause, the protection of the nation, the fight to “liberate Kuwait” or wage “a war on terrorism,” justifies the means. We dismantle our moral universe to serve the cause of war. And once it is dismantled it is nearly impossible to put it back together. It is very hard for most of us to see the justice of the other side, to admit that we too bear guilt. When we are asked to choose between truth and contentment, most of us pick contentment.
Not long after the war in Bosnia, where most human rights monitors blamed the Serbian forces for perhaps 80 percent of the war crimes, a popular film was produced in Serbian called Pretty Villages, Pretty Flames. The movie showed images of drunken Bosnian Serb militiamen burning Muslim villages, killing elderly civilians, and carting away truckloads of loot—not a version of the Bosnian war that had been acknowledged until then by many Serbs. Bosnian Serb fighters were portrayed as petty criminals, thugs, and drug addicts. This, to a populace that could still sit around and ask if it were true that Serbian forces shelled Sarajevo, was a revelation.
The film dealt for the first time with the excesses of Bosnian Serb soldiers and the lies of the Serbian nationalist leaders who fueled the war. It was seen as an opening, a frank and candid admission of what really happened. But it was also a classic example of the relativism that worried Arendt. The scramble by some German historians to paint the crimes carried out by Stalin as equivalent to the crimes carried out by Hitler absolved the Germans of responsibility, for all were guilty. And under the guise of candor, this film served the same purpose. It punctured holes in the cause of Serbian nationalism. But it went on to say that one cause was as rotten as the next, that just as the Serbs had been manipulated by their own leaders, so had the Muslims and the Croats. Not only that, the film made sure to bring Tito’s Yugoslavia and the international effort to rebuild Bosnia down to the same depraved level.
The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next