Columns

THE MYTH OF WAR (Part Two)

by Ted Schmidt



Wars are all about chaos and catastrophes, death and suffering, and lifelong grief, which is why you should go to war only when it's absolutely unavoidable. Wars tear families apart as surely as they tear apart the flesh of those killed and wounded. Since we learned nothing from Vietnam, we are doomed to repeat its agony, this time in horrifying slow-motion in Iraq.
Bob Herbert, The New York Times, Sept. 17, 2004

Let me have a war, say I: It exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy, mull'd, deaf, sleepy, insensible: a getter of more bastard children than war is a destroyer of men.
William Shakespeare Coriolanus, Act lV scene V

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates."
Simone Weil

In my last essay I wrote that one of the highlights of my summer was reading Chris Hedge's powerful tome War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. Given the author's long experience as a war correspondent and his theological training, Hedges forced me to rethink my own attitude toward war. His close proximity to the murderers and the murdered made him confront a truth: "the rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, one I ingested for many years."

      Hedges writes of this war fascination "peddled by mythmakers" (which includes the state) as "possessing excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language and infects everything around it."

      In his introduction, the author says that his book is a call for repentance. Writing as an American, he utters a plea, "not to dissuade us from war, but to understand it. It is important that we who wield such massive force across the globe, see within ourselves the seeds of our own obliteration." He maintains that, "we were humbled in Vietnam, purged for a while of a dangerous hubris…offered a moment of grace."

      It is fascinating that Hedges, while abstaining from theology and an overtly religious worldview, does use religious language as is shown above. I see little evidence however that this "moment of grace" was seized upon by America. After all Lyndon Johnson was followed by Jimmy Carter who for political reasons refused any apology over Vietnam, then by Reagan/Bush and then the neoliberal Clinton who, with the spectre of his own lack of military credentials, did little to reverse America's formidable and bloated military budget. The less said about the appalling record of George W. Bush the better. The pride-swollen face of empire is back.

      It seems to me Hedges is correct when he says, "if the humility we gained from our defeat is not the engine which drives our response to future terrorist strikes…we are lost." As an authentically religious person, he requests "humility and compassion." On the surface this should resonate with a country widely seen as the most religious nation on earth. So far, there is no evidence that the evangelicals behind Bush and Bush himself get it. As Sojourners editor Jim Wallis asks, "How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war and pro-American"?

      Boston writer James Carroll thinks, "the reason that many Americans back Bush's "relentless destruction of a small unthreatening nation" is that the American conscience has gone numb. He suggests as long as the suffering is somewhere else the horrific cost does not register with "our 60 year history of an accidental readiness to destroy the earth, a legacy with which Americans have yet to reckon." For him "the Bush war in Iraq is only the latest in a chain of irresponsible acts of a warrior government going back to the firebombing of Tokyo. Something deeply sinful has us in its grip. We carefully nurture a spirit of detachment toward the wars we pay for. But that means we cloak ourselves in cold indifference to the unnecessary suffering of others."

The myth of war

Hedges first analyzes the myth of war, the tendency "to imbue events with meanings they do not have. We see defeats as signposts on the road to ultimate victory. We demonize the enemy so that our opponent is no longer human." The sunny optimist Ronald Reagan cared little for the poor of Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua during his presidency. They were mere blips on a radar screen which lacked any human dimension, small countries to be crushed so that America could vanquish its "Vietnam syndrome." The mighty nation which had never lost a war, had to get over its momentary embarrassment, its humiliation in the rice paddies of Vietnam. Reagan said, "America is back, and happy days are here again". The Vietnamese had already buried the two to three million non-combatant victims of this undeclared war. In Africa Hedges points out that Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader the U.S. backed in the Angolan Civil War "murdered and tortured with a barbarity that far outstripped the Taliban." Five hundred thousand dead courtesy of the man dubbed "the Abraham Lincoln of Angola" by Ronald Reagan. More needless dead on the global chessboard. Another "signpost" on the road to the ultimate defeat of "international communism."

      The poor in Latin America similarly paid with their lives. Prophetic voices like Bishop Romero, the Jesuit martyrs, Maryknoll missionaries and thousands of catechists could hardly make their voice heard among American Catholics who were moving from the Democratic Party to the party of achievement and power, the Republicans. The Gospel of the non-violent One Jesus was ignored and sidelined. American nationalism trumped faith.

      In the late 1980's former Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic ranted for years, filling his Serbian countrymen and women with propaganda and lies before the slaughter and ethnic cleansing began. He was met in kind by the equally destructive lies of Franjo Tudjman in Croatia. People who lived in close proximity for years turned on each other in an orgy of ethnic cleansing. Each side reduced the other to caricature. In the wake of this unfolding disaster, the very weak Orthodox Church (Serbia) and the Catholic Church in Croatia were virtually as impotent as the U.S. Catholic Church was to make a difference under Reagan/Bush. In fact they worked as state propagandists further suborning the Gospel.

      The myth of war "sells and legitimizes the drug of war," Hedges writes. U.S. culture (more and more dominating Canadian airwaves) has consistently fed the masses a diet of violence in film, television and computer games. As Michael Moore pointed out in Bowling for Columbine, the U.S. is off the Richter scale in terms of violence compared to other nations. It still murders people by capital punishment as the rest of the world abandons it. As I write today Amnesty International announced the United States is the world leader in executing those under eighteen. Study after study has pointed out the correlation between violence in the media and violence in society. And war heroes, never peace heroes, are lionized in the media.

"The Nationalist is an ignoramus"

Hedges next chapter is entitled "The Plague of Nationalism." It could be summed up by Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kis's remark that "The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus. Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way…he is not interested in others, they are of no concern to him." The horrific nationalist murders of the early 1990's in Yugoslavia, a country with high educational standards was chilling to behold. Brutal thugs like Milosevic and Karadzic (a doctor, yet) manipulated Serbs, stoking hoary old nationalist myths of Serbia's supposed glory days of the fourteenth century. Taking over state television, both sides consistently inflamed the people with emotional propaganda.

      Hedges appeared traumatized by his experience in another highly educated country, Argentina. During the time of the Falklands War (1979), Hedges reported that "overwhelming pride and a sense of national solidarity swept through Buenos Aires like an electric current and a populace that had agitated for change after the Dirty War (1976) now outdid itself and lionized uniformed killers. All bowed before the state." This taught Hedges a lesson that "lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours is the yearning for a passionate cause that exalts us. It reduces the anxiety and erases the anxiety of individual consciousness." The same response took over in the United Kingdom. The war card, the time-old reference to the British bulldog and World War ll, assured Margaret Thatcher that she could count on her fellow countrymen in the hour of need. It worked every time. As the author says, "There is little that logic or fact or truth can do to alter the experience."

      Nowhere is the state myth worked more than in Israel. Hedges phrases it well: "To speak of the Israeli War of independence with many Israelis in which stateless European Jews established a country in a land that had been primarily Muslim since the seventh century, is to shout into a vast black hole. There is an emotional barrier, a desire not to tarnish the creation myth which makes it difficult for many Israeli Jews including some of the most liberal and progressive to acknowledge the profound injustice the creation of the state meant for Palestinians." For Jews, it was a glorious achievement; Arabs remember it each year as the Naqba (the catastrophe).

      One would have thought that after the disaster of the state myth of Nazism and the fall of the Third Reich in the 1945, countries would be well aware of the dangers of nationalism. But as Hedges says, this phenomenon is beyond logic. It was the exiled German theologian Paul Tillich who pointed out before leaving Nazi Germany that any political movement founded on a state myth of origin is dangerous, resulting in either external aggression (destiny) and internal oppression. While never denigrating a healthy nationalism (patriotism?), Tillich maintained it always must be subordinated to the norms of social justice, equality and international peace. If this does not happen, the result is usually xenophobia and tribalism in smaller nations (Rwanda) and the "arrogance of empire" (the U.S.) in larger ones.

      September 11, 2001, has become a watershed in the United States. The question as Hedges infers, is did it teach humility? Or did it produce more blind nationalism ready to swallow George W. Bush's nonsense that "they hate us because of our freedom?" Did it force Americans to delve into their history to understand how and why the world perceives them as they do? "Year after year," Muslim writer Shahid Alam (Poverty from the Wealth of Nations) states, "Americans are kept in the dark, unaware of the actual, the real America --the only one kind seen by much of the rest of the world. This is the America that daily employs the might to mangle the lives of hundreds of millions, that pushes a globalization that devastates the economies of the Third World, that instructs and arms foreign tyrannies to terrorize their own people, that aids and abets an Israelis machine that is determined to extirpate the Palestinians." Again as I write, a Newsweek poll stated that 40 per cent of Americans still believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. What can we make of such abysmal ignorance?

War destroys culture

Hedges' third point about war is that it destroys culture. Art, usually subversive, degenerates to kitsch in the service of the state. Our best example would be the awful "realism" generated in the Soviet Union. But those of us who grew up after War II, remember the horrible propagandized film industry wallowing in sentimental doggerel and utter dishonesty. Nobody refers to wartime as periods of great art. However, it is the debilitating lying that suborns a healthy culture. The Reagan years when the U.S. was recovering from the Vietnam Syndrome gave us Sylvester Stallone's five Rambo movies, appalling hymns to violence, starring a "war wimp" who, when he had a chance to fight on an actual battlefield in Vietnam, hid out in Switzerland as a chaperone at a girls' school. Schlock like this unfortunately deforms a culture and helps create a whole worldview. Demonic is too good a word for it.

      Today, one winces at the lies told by Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush --anything to justify a war proscribed by international law and the U.S. Constitution, not to mention high ethical standards. "All is dedicated to promoting and glorifying the myth, the nation, the cause," Hedges writes. And woe betide those few who challenge the national consensus. So wounded was the United States by 9/11 that any contrarian hid below the radar line. Flags appeared everywhere and awful tribal anthems like God Bless America (and nobody else) become de rigueur at ball games. Everybody now sings from the same hymnbook: we are the noble ones, the good ones. Our cause is just and if you are not for us, you are against us. Language as Hedges states, "is reduced to code, clichés the only acceptable vocabulary." All out for the War on Terror!

The allure of heroism

"The myth of war entices us with the allure of heroism" writes Chris Hedges in his fourth chapter. Weaned on cultural lies and bankrupt state myths, working class kids, cut adrift by the ruthless savagery of neoliberal capitalism, flounder in dead end jobs. Their sole area of psychic and spiritual enlargement is the vicarious pseudo-life of sports stars and the icons of the celebrity culture. Tyler Durnan, played by Edward Norton in the insightful book and movie Fight Club, says, "We're all raised to think we'll be rock stars and celebrities and when this doesn't happen, we're pissed." The biggest Fight Club is the military and it seduces the working class with its false advertising of the macho, romantic life.

      Michael Moore, a product of working class Flint, Michigan gets it in his movies. He sees how victimized the poor are in the wealthiest culture ever known to humanity. Because post-secondary education --a virtual right in Europe-- is so expensive in the world's wealthiest country, the military provides; the only price may be your life. You will take the place of a Dick Cheney or George W. Bush who know how to use the system. And the saddest thing is that they will skillfully manipulate you into believing that you are doing something beautiful for humanity. It is nothing but the old lie Wilfred Owen wrote about in WWl -"it is sweet and lovely to die for your country."

      How unbearably sad to watch the poor hillbillies used by the American military at Abu Ghraib and the cannon fodder troops, disproportionately poor, roaring into battle in Moore's hard rock music pounding in their helmets--"burn, m'f'er burn," all pumped up to kill the "sand niggers" the name they give to Iraqis. This was the testimony given by Jeremy Hinzman, a 25-year-old war resister from South Dakota who fled to Toronto and is presently requesting landed immigrant status. All the bravado, of course, melts when they see the first casualty of one of their company.

      Chris Hedges has written a powerful secular meditation on war. War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning made me conclude that the Christian church is radically derelict in its understanding of the nonviolent Gospel. And to this I turn in my next article.

Ted Schmidt is Editor of Catholic New Times.