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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
New York Times reporter Chris Hedges warns the graduates of Rockford College that a warmongering America is "flirting with its own destruction" -- and gets booed off the stage.
May 22, 2003 | Editor's note: When New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges, a veteran of conflicts in Central America and the Balkans, delivered the commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Ill., on Saturday, he opened another battlefront in the war at home over America's global role. As Hedges delivered his critical remarks on America's aggressive post-9/11 foreign policy, many in the crowd reacted angrily. According to the Rockford Register Star, "Hedges' microphone was twice unplugged. Some guests shouted for him to leave, and others chanted patriotic slogans. A few tried to rush the podium, and at least one graduate tossed his cap and gown to the stage before leaving."
Rockford, a small liberal arts college in northern Illinois, is the alma mater of social activist Jane Addams.
Hedges, author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," said he was disturbed by the hostile reaction. "Watching it in my own country is heartbreaking."
Following is the full text of his commencement address.
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I want to speak to you today about war and empire.
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 good will, 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'll remind you are not Arab, is upon us. Look today at the 14 people killed last night in several explosions in Casablanca. And this rage -- in a world where almost 50 percent of the planet struggles on less than $2 a day -- will see us targeted. Terrorism will become a way of life, 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 hold. 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 worshiped 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. Once you master people by force, you depend on force for control. In your isolation you begin to make mistakes.
Fear engenders cruelty: cruelty, fear, insanity and then paralysis. In the center of Dante's circle the damned remained motionless. We have blundered into a nation we know little about and are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand. We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917; it will be a cesspool for us as well. The curfews, the armed clashes with angry crowds that leave scores of Iraqi dead, the military governor, the Christian evangelical groups who are being allowed to follow on the heels of our occupying troops to try and teach Muslims about Jesus.
Hedges stops speaking because of a disturbance in the audience. Rockford College President Paul Pribbenow takes the microphone.
"My friends, one of the wonders of a liberal arts college is its ability and its deeply held commitment to academic freedom and the decision to listen to each other's opinions. [Crowd cheers.] If you wish to protest the speaker's remarks, I ask that you do it in silence, as some of you are doing in the back. That is perfectly appropriate, but he has the right to offer his opinion here and we would like him to continue his remarks." [Fog horn blows; some cheer.]
The occupation of the oil fields, the notion of the Kurds and the Shiites will listen to the demands of a centralized government in Baghdad, the same Kurds and Shiites who died by the tens of thousands in defiance of Saddam Hussein, a man who happily butchered all of those who challenged him, and this ethnic rivalry has not gone away. The looting of Baghdad, or let me say the looting of Baghdad with the exception of the oil ministry and the interior ministry -- the only two ministries we bothered protecting -- is self immolation.
As someone who knows Iraq, speaks Arabic, and spent seven years in the Middle East, if the Iraqis believe, rightly or wrongly, that we come only for oil and occupation, that will begin a long bloody war of attrition. It is how they drove the British out -- and remember that, when the Israelis invaded southern Lebanon in 1982, they were greeted by the dispossessed Shiites as liberators. But within a few months, when the Shiites saw that the Israelis had come not as liberators but occupiers, they began to kill them. It was Israel who created Hezbollah and was Hezbollah that pushed Israel out of southern Lebanon.
As William Butler Yeats wrote in "Meditations in Times of Civil War," "We had fed the heart on fantasies/ the hearts grown brutal from the fair."
This is a war of liberation in Iraq, but it is a war now of liberation by Iraqis from American occupation. And if you watch closely what is happening in Iraq, if you can see it through the abysmal coverage, you can see it in the lashing out of the terrorist death squads, the murder of Shiite leaders in mosques, and the assassination of our young soldiers in the streets. It is one that will soon be joined by Islamic radicals, and we are far less secure today than we were before we bumbled into Iraq.
