Seeing through the lie that is war: from the nightmare of the battlefield, a warning against national self-worship - Cover Story - War Is the Force that Gives Us Meaning - Book Review

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 29, 2002 by Tom Roberts

War twists and distorts a culture and requires "a new, artificial reality." Traditional morality is abandoned. "We accept, if not condone, the maiming and killing of others as the regrettable cost of war. We operate under a new moral code."

None is immune from war's perversities, he argues. During the Central America conflicts of the 1980s, he said, those who decried American foreign policy in the region, a stance that actually propelled Hedges into his first stints as a war correspondent, often took up with equal ardor the cause of opposition forces and the utopian visions of opposition movements guilty of their own violence and human rights abuses.

All war, in his view, involves the creation of a war myth--the belief that one is superior and the demonizing of an opponent--as well as lies and the need to keep the reality of the battlefield at a distance from those consuming the war myth at home.

In modern warfare, Hedges writes, the press has been a willing partner in creating and sustaining the war myth. The one time that myth was deflated was toward the end of the Vietnam War, when the reality and futility of that conflict began to intrude on the normal routine of U.S. life via television and newspaper reports. Hedges believed that ushered in a period of national health.

"National triumphalism was shunned and discredited in America after Vietnam," he writes. "We were forced to see ourselves as others saw us, and it was not always pleasant. We understood, at least for a moment, the lie. But the plague of nationalism was resurrected during the Reagan years. It became ascendant with the Persian Gulf War, when we embraced the mythic and unachievable goal of a `New World Order.' The infection of nationalism now lies unchecked and blindly accepted in the march we make as a nation toward another war, one as ill-conceived as the war we lost in Southeast Asia."

Using Freud's division, Hedges sees two impulses at tension: Eros, that "propels us to become close to others, to preserve and conserve, and the Thanatos, or death instinct, the impulse that works towards the annihilation of all living things, including ourselves." If Eros was the overriding impulse of the culture following the Vietnam War, he believes Thanatos has taken over. We have lost our revulsion to war and now celebrate it.

Hedges makes observations and asks questions that few would dare to speak publicly. "Where else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide highjackers learn that huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered the language. They understand that the use of disproportionate violence against innocents is a way to make a statement. We leave the same calling cards."

Recalling the devastation inflicted on hapless Iraqi troops by the most sophisticated war machinery on earth, he writes: "Here there was no pillage, no warlords, no collapse of unit discipline, but the cold and brutal efficiency of industrial warfare waged by well-trained and highly organized professional soldiers. It was a potent reminder why most European states and America live in such opulence and determine the fate of so many others. We equip and train the most efficient killers on the planet."