Peace Movement

At a moment when public opinion has shifted definitively in the anti-war direction, author Chris Hedges explains why people become peaceniks.

By Tara McKelvey Web Exclusive: 11.15.06


At first, Chris Hedges seems pretty mellow – especially for a former New York Times war correspondent. On a recent November evening, Hedges, 50, dressed in a professorial-looking checkered jacket, was drinking seltzer water in a hotel bar during Chicago’s Humanities Festival. (The theme is “War and Peace.”) But once he started talking, he sounded as angry as any anti-war protestor on the mall. Here, the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and What Every Person Should Know About War describes why war is wrong, the military misguided, and some veterans’ groups fall short of their moral duty.
In your introduction to a book called Afterwar, you write, “War, at least the mythic version, is wonderful entertainment.” How is the Iraq war being marketed?
It’s not being marketed anymore. Now that the war has gone sour, the people who sold it to us – FOX News and CNN – are ignoring it. They couldn’t get enough of it when it was great. Now that the mythic narrative of war cannot be sustained, they don’t even talk about it.
Did the same thing happen with Vietnam?
There is a gap between the mythic notion of war and the sensory vision of war. When that mythic element implodes, as it did in Vietnam, then the press is free to report it in a sensory fashion.
I guess that’s what happened when the picture of the girl running after a napalm attack -- and other photos like that -- came out.
Those pictures would not have been possible if the attitude toward the war hadn’t changed. War is heavily cleaned up.
What about the Abu Ghraib photos?
Well, Abu Ghraib is an image -- not a war. It’s a powerful one of prison, and it had a huge impact. But it had more of an impact outside our borders than inside our borders. It’s fundamentally difficult for Americans to grasp what’s being done in our name in Iraq so they prefer to look at these things as aberrations. In fact, the Abu Ghraib images are true pictures -- not only of warfare but of moral morass. And those images don’t come close to portraying the horror of war.
I’ve been reading interviews with soldiers who’ve come back from Iraq. It’s all carnage.
If you’re talking about fighting, it’s industrial slaughter. If you haven’t been to a war, it’s hard to grasp the destructive power of those weapons. There are no whole bodies after you fire those weapons. And now there are IEDs. Most people are surviving the attacks, but they’re being horribly maimed -- with half their frontal lobe gone. In war, you pick body parts out of trees. Dogs eat the corpses. That’s been true in every war I’ve covered.
People don’t know about that.
People don’t know about war.
You talk about veterans’ groups in the introduction to Afterwar. What can you tell me about them?
Veterans’ groups fall into two categories: There are the groups like Veterans Against the Iraq War. They feel deeply betrayed. And there are the right-wing, patriotic veterans’ groups that don’t want to face their complicity in evil. They go after anyone who criticizes anyone or their country with a vengeance. The first group is made up of moral giants. And the others are moral trolls.
You write about your uncle -- the one who fought in World War II.
He was in the South Pacific and was badly wounded by a mortar blast. He refused to accept his medals, and I only heard him talk about the war one time. He said, “We filled our canteens up in a stream once. When we went around the bend there were twenty-five dead Japanese in the water.” He eventually drank himself to death in a trailer. There were tens of thousands of families who had sons and fathers who were as broken as he was. They were pushed aside because they didn’t read from the patriotic script.
You’ve said most veterans -- at least ninety-four percent -- get a friendly reception when they come home even when they’ve served in an unpopular war like Vietnam. Is this true today?
I don’t think anger is the problem. I think it’s that people don’t care. The worst is that people don’t really want to see the pictures. They ask a couple questions. It’s clear they don’t want to talk about it. It increases that sense of isolation you feel, that nobody understands -- and they don’t.
Who are the greatest war reporters?
Homer is great at capturing the horror of war. If you look closely at the motivation of the Greeks -- like Achilles -- you see they’re quite willing to sacrifice their own men for petty, trivial disputes. Achilles is a figure consumed with rage. In many ways, The Iliad is a poem about rage. Achilles is referred to as a monster because he loves slaughter and death. The most humane fighter -- Hector -- is killed. Morality is irrelevant. It’s force that rules. Virgil sells us the myth about war -- a nationalist epic about the love of empire. Thucydides is great. He understands how Athens’ expanding empire led it to became a tyrant abroad and then to become a tyrant at home. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, it finally imposed on itself.
Any parallels?
Yeah. That’s exactly what we’re going through.
What about redemption -- is there any after you’ve been through war?
The enterprise of war is death. It’s as close as human beings come to pure sin. Its goals are hatred and destruction. There are no just wars. There are inevitable wars -- if you’re in Sarajevo, and the Serbs are trying to kill you, then you defend yourself. That’s the point where war becomes inevitable. But as soon as you engage in war, you embrace a terrible form of depravity. It may be a supposedly just cause -- like in World War II. But during that time, we indiscriminately bombed German cities. War’s a dirty, horrible business. Redemption comes when those who have taken human life dedicate their lives to the nurturing and protecting of human life. It’s the only way to cope with the fact that you’re a paid killer. That’s the only route possible to cope.
You can drink.
That’s not a way to redeem yourself. It is a rough landscape, though. PTSD makes it very difficult to connect with other people. You’re isolated. You can’t connect with other human beings. Dostoevsky said, “Hell is the inability to love.” A severe trauma makes it very difficult to love. You’re sort of numb.
The trauma affects reporters, too.
Trauma’s trauma. After repeated exposure to trauma, your fight-or-flight switch gets broken. And you can’t read signals anymore.
Erasmus wrote, “Sweet is war to those who do not know it.”
No soldier or marine buys the myth of war -- not after about thirty seconds of combat. All the abstract terms of honor and heroism become hollow and obscene.

Tara McKelvey is a Prospect senior editor.

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