Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Hedges is equally corrosive on wartime "romance." The notion that love has anything to do with wartime's lurid, half-desperate, flesh-driven couplings is a myth: "With power reduced to such a raw level and the currency of life and death cheap, eroticism races through all relationships. There is in these encounters a frenetic lust that seeks, on some level, to replicate or augment the drug of war. It is certainly not about love, indeed love itself in wartime is hard to sustain or establish." Hedges points out that the ancient Greeks knew that love and war were lasciviously linked. The war god Ares, who was "impetuous, quarrelsome and often drunk" and who delighted only in slaughter, was hated by the other gods but loved by Aphrodite, goddess of love, with whom he had an illicit affair.
Even more subversively, Hedges debunks the myth of combat friendship. He argues that war produces comradeship -- a worthy and noble thing, but not as deep, difficult or complex as friendship. He quotes the philosopher and veteran J. Glenn Gray, who acutely noted that "the essential difference between comradeship and friendship consists, it seems to me, in a heightened awareness of the self in friendship and in the suppression of self-awareness in comradeship."
If soldiers delude themselves, their cheerleaders back home suffer from bad faith on a cosmic scale. Hedges doesn't just expose the unpleasant truth behind the claims made by wartime leaders that their cause is holy and just, and that their opponents are inhuman and evil: He denies that there often is any cause at all except the basest criminal greed. "The ethnic conflicts and insurgencies of our time, whether between Serbs and Muslims or Hutus and Tutsis, are not religious wars," he writes. "They are not clashes between cultures or civilizations, nor are they the result of ancient ethnic hatreds. They are manufactured wars, born out of the collapse of civil societies, perpetuated by fear, greed and paranoia, and they are run by gangsters, who rise up from the bottom of their own societies and terrorize all, including those they purport to protect." Because President Clinton accepted this "ancient hatreds" line -- one popularized by Robert Kaplan in his book "Balkan Ghosts," which is said to have had a profound influence on Clinton's thinking -- the U.S. failed to intervene until Slobodan Milosevic unleashed a whirlwind that claimed 250,000 lives and damaged millions more.
Not surprisingly, Hedges trains a particularly evil eye on patriotism. He recounts how the brutal and incompetent military junta in Argentina was on the verge of collapse, attacked by all sectors of society, before it invaded the Falkland Islands. The junta "instantly became the saviors of the country ... Reality was replaced with a wild and self-serving fiction, a legitimization of the worst prejudices of the masses and paranoia of the outside world ... Friends of mine, who a few days earlier had excoriated the dictatorship, now bragged about the prowess of Argentine commanders ... Overweening pride and a sense of national solidarity swept through the city like an electric current. It was as if I had woken up, like one of Kafka's characters, and found myself transformed into a huge bug. I would come to feel this way in every nation at war, including the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11."
Hedges is not a pacifist: He accepts that war is sometimes necessary, "just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live." He welcomed NATO's intervention in Kosovo. But he is so aware of its horrors, so skeptical about its justifications and so appalled by its promoters, that he cannot bring himself to defend any given war -- and certainly not the current "war on terrorism."
Hedges does not make clear exactly what he believes the United States should do in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. But he is harshly critical both of America's resurgent patriotism and the Bush administration's "war on terror." He regards both phenomena as dangerous because they are politically and morally myopic, and open the door to a retrograde, triumphalist view of war that he says Vietnam had temporarily purged from the American psyche.
Hedges argues that the American reaction to the terror attacks is dangerous because patriotic outrage, and the myth of American innocence that it rests on, prevents us from understanding the nature of the threat we face, the appropriate response and, in a deeper sense, our own responsibility. He dismisses the notion that America is innocent with a few terse sentences: "We often become as deaf and dumb as those we condemn. We too have our terrorists. The Contras in Nicaragua carried out, with funding from Washington, some of the most egregious human rights violations in Central America, yet were lauded as 'freedom fighters.' Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader the United States backed in Angola's civil war, murdered and tortured with a barbarity that far outstripped the Taliban. The rebellion Savimbi began in 1975 resulted in more than 500,000 dead. President Ronald Reagan called Savimbi the Abraham Lincoln of Angola."
The list goes on: our own "genocidal campaign against Native Americans"; our support for Israel, ignoring the "profound injustice the creation of the state of Israel meant for Palestinians"; the oil-driven Gulf War; and Vietnam, where Robert McNamara "defined the bombing raids that would ultimately leave hundreds of thousands of civilians north of Saigon dead as a means of communication to the Communist regime in Hanoi."
