.
I
want to speak to you today about war and empire.
An anti-war graduation address resulted in New York
Times reporter Chris Hedges being booed off stage.
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05/20/03: (Rock River Star) 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 two dollars 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 Sadaam 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.
We will pay for this, but what saddens me most is that those who will
by and large pay the highest price are poor kids from Mississippi or
Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job or health insurance
and joined the army because it was all we offered them. For war in the
end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of
soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics. Read Antigone,
when the king imposes his will without listening to those he rules or
Thucydides' history. Read how Athens' expanding empire saw it become a
tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. How the tyranny the Athenian
leadership imposed on others it finally imposed on itself.
This, Thucydides wrote, is what doomed Athenian democracy; Athens
destroyed itself. For the instrument of empire is war and war is a
poison, a poison which at times we must ingest just as a cancer
patient must ingest a poison to survive. But if we do not understand
the poison of war -- if we do not understand how deadly that poison is
-- it can kill us just as surely as the disease.
We have lost touch with the essence of war. Following our defeat in
Vietnam we became a better nation. We were humbled, even humiliated.
We asked questions about ourselves we had not asked before.
We were forced to see ourselves as others saw us and the sight was not
always a pretty one. We were forced to confront our own capacity for a
atrocity -- for evil -- and in this we understood not only war but
more about ourselves. But that humility is gone.
War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and
the press -- remember in wartime the press is always part of the
problem -- have turned war into a vast video arcade came. Its very
essence -- death -- is hidden from public view.
There was no more candor in the Persian Gulf War or the War in
Afghanistan or the War in Iraq than there was in Vietnam. But in the
age of live feeds and satellite television, the state and the military
have perfected the appearance of candor.
Because we no longer understand war, we no longer understand that it
can all go horribly wrong. We no longer understand that war begins by
calling for the annihilation of others but ends if we do not know when
to make or maintain peace with self-annihilation. We flirt, given the
potency of modern weapons, with our own destruction.
The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told
about it is true -- it does create a feeling of comradeship which
obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time of
our life, feel we belong.
War allows us to rise above our small stations in life; we find
nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And
at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very
deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion. War for
those who enter into combat has a dark beauty, filled with the
monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it the lust of the eye
and warns believers against it. War gives us a distorted sense of
self; it gives us meaning.
(A man in the audience says: "Can I say a few words
here?" Hedges: Yeah, when I finish.)
Once in war, the conflict obliterates the past and the future all is
one heady intoxicating present. You feel every heartbeat in war,
colors are brighter, your mind races ahead of itself. (Confusion,
microphone problems, etc.) We feel in wartime comradeship. (Boos)
We confuse this with friendship, with love. There are those who will
insist that the comradeship of war is love -- the exotic glow that
makes us in war feel as one people, one entity, is real, but this is
part of war's intoxication.
Think back on the days after the attacks on 9-11. Suddenly we no
longer felt alone; we connected with strangers, even with people we
did not like. We felt we belonged, that we were somehow wrapped in the
embrace of the nation, the community; in short, we no longer felt
alienated.
As this feeling dissipated in the weeks after the attack, there was a
kind of nostalgia for its warm glow and wartime always brings with it
this comradeship, which is the opposite of friendship. Friends are
predetermined; friendship takes place between men and women who
possess an intellectual and emotional affinity for each other. But
comradeship -- that ecstatic bliss that comes with belonging to the
crowd in wartime -- is within our reach. We can all have comrades.
The danger of the external threat that comes when we have an enemy
does not create friendship; it creates comradeship. And those in
wartime are deceived about what they are undergoing. And this is why
once the threat is over, once war ends, comrades again become
strangers to us. This is why after war we fall into despair.
In friendship there is a deepening of our sense of self. We become,
through the friend, more aware of who we are and what we are about; we
find ourselves in the eyes of the friend. Friends probe and question
and challenge each other to make each of us more complete; with
comradeship, the kind that comes to us in patriotic fervor, there is a
suppression of self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-possession.
Comrades lose their identities in wartime for the collective rush of a
common cause -- a common purpose. In comradeship there are no demands
on the self. This is part of its appeal and one of the reasons we miss
it and seek to recreate it. Comradeship allows us to escape the
demands on the self that is part of friendship.
In wartime when we feel threatened, we no longer face death alone but
as a group, and this makes death easier to bear. We ennoble
self-sacrifice for the other, for the comrade; in short we begin to
worship death. And this is what the god of war demands of us.
Think finally of what it means to die for a friend. It is deliberate
and painful; there is no ecstasy. For friends, dying is hard and
bitter. The dialogue they have and cherish will perhaps never be
recreated. Friends do not, the way comrades do, love death and
sacrifice. To friends, the prospect of death is frightening. And this
is why friendship or, let me say love, is the most potent enemy of
war. Thank you.
(Boos cheers, shouts, fog horns and the like)
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