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Chris Hedges

War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning Paperback – June 10, 2003

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As a veteran war correspondent, Chris Hedges has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. He has seen children murdered for sport in Gaza and petty thugs elevated into war heroes in the Balkans. Hedges, who is also a former divinity student, has seen war at its worst and knows too well that to those who pass through it, war can be exhilarating and even addictive: “It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.”

Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war seduces not just those on the front lines but entire societies, corrupting politics, destroying culture, and perverting the most basic human desires. Mixing hard-nosed realism with profound moral and philosophical insight, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a work of terrible power and redemptive clarity whose truths have never been more necessary.

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June 10, 2003
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Editorial Reviews

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“A brilliant, thoughtful, timely and unsettling book. . . . Abounds with Hedges’ harrowing and terribly moving eyewitness accounts . . . Powerful and informative.” – The New York Times Book Review

“The best kind of war journalism: It is bitterly poetic and ruthlessly philosophical. It sends out a powerful message to people contemplating the escalation of the ‘war against terrorism.’” –Los Angeles Times

“Chris Hedges has written a powerful book, one which bears sad witness to what veterans have long understood . . . [A] somber and timely warning to those – in any society – who would evoke the emotions of war for the pursuit of political gain.” —General Wesley K. Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, and author of Waging Modern War

“[A] powerful chronicle of modern war . . . .A persuasive call for humility and realism in the pursuit of national goals by force of arms . . . .a potent and eloquent warning.” --The New York Times

“No one is in a better position than Hedges to pronounce on the revolting things war does to everyone caught up in it. . . . A confession of rare and frightening honesty.” –Slate.com

From the Back Cover

“A brilliant, thoughtful, timely and unsettling book. . . . Abounds with Hedges’ harrowing and terribly moving eyewitness accounts . . . Powerful and informative.” – The New York Times Book Review

“The best kind of war journalism: It is bitterly poetic and ruthlessly philosophical. It sends out a powerful message to people contemplating the escalation of the ‘war against terrorism.’” –Los Angeles Times

“Chris Hedges has written a powerful book, one which bears sad witness to what veterans have long understood . . . [A] somber and timely warning to those – in any society – who would evoke the emotions of war for the pursuit of political gain.” —General Wesley K. Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, and author of Waging Modern War

“[A] powerful chronicle of modern war . . . .A persuasive call for humility and realism in the pursuit of national goals by force of arms . . . .a potent and eloquent warning.” --The New York Times

“No one is in a better position than Hedges to pronounce on the revolting things war does to everyone caught up in it. . . . A confession of rare and frightening honesty.” –Slate.com

About the Author

Chris Hedges has been a foreign correspondent for fifteen years. Currently on staff at The New York Times, he has previously worked for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and National Public Radio. He holds a master of divinity from Harvard University. He lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The Myth of War

The ethnic conflicts and insurgencies of our time, whether between Serbs and Muslims or Hutus and Tutsis, are not religious wars. 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.

Often, none of this is apparent from the outside. We are quick to accept the facile and mendacious ideological veneer that is wrapped like a mantle around the shoulders of those who prosecute the war. In part we do this to avoid intervention, to give this kind of slaughter an historical inevitability it does not have, but also because the media and most of the politicians often lack the perspective and analysis to debunk the myths served up by the opposing sides.

The United States and the West based our responses in Bosnia, or perhaps it is better to say our arguments not to respond, on such myths: the myth of the Serbian warrior who would fight to the death against overwhelming odds; the myth that the Croats, Muslims, and Serbs, who speak the same language and are nearly indistinguishable, were different people; the myth that Yugoslavia, a country that Josip Broz Tito made an important player in international affairs, had failed to give its citizens a national identity. These myths, swallowed whole, permitted us to stand by as 250,000 human beings were killed and Sarajevo spent three and a half years under siege. Although the United States finally intervened, we did so because the United Nations mission collapsed in the summer of 1995, not because of any foresight or courage on the part of the administration of President Bill Clinton.

Look not to religion and mythology and warped versions of history to find the roots of these conflicts, but to the warlords who dominated the Balkans. It took Milosevic four years of hate propaganda and lies, pumped forth daily over the airways from Belgrade, before he got one Serb to cross the border into Bosnia and begin the murderous rampage that triggered the war. And although the war was painted from afar as a clash of rival civilizations, the primary task of Milosevic in Serbia, Franjo Tudjman in Croatia, and the other ethnic leaderships was to dismantle and silence their own intellectuals and writers of stature and replace them with second-rate, mediocre pawns willing to turn every intellectual and artistic endeavor into a piece of ethnic triumphalism and myth.

Lawrence LeShan in The Psychology of War differentiates between "mythic reality" and "sensory reality" in wartime.1 In sensory reality we see events for what they are. Most of those who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war. They would not survive if they did. Wars that lose their mythic stature for the public, such as Korea or Vietnam, are doomed to failure, for war is exposed for what it is--organized murder.

But in mythic war we 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. We view ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute goodness. Our enemies invert our view of the world to justify their own cruelty. In most mythic wars this is the case. Each side reduces the other to objects--eventually in the form of corpses.

"Force," Simone Weil wrote, "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."2

When we allow mythic reality to rule, as it almost always does in war, then there is only one solution--force. In mythic war we fight absolutes. We must vanquish darkness. It is imperative and inevitable for civilization, for the free world, that good triumph, just as Islamic militants see us as infidels whose existence corrupts the pure Islamic society they hope to build.

But the goal we seek when we embrace myth is impossible to achieve. War never creates the security or the harmony we desire, especially the harmony we briefly attain during wartime. And campaigns, such as the one in Afghanistan, become starting points for further conflicts, especially as we find that we are unable to root out terrorism or maintain the kind of solidarity that comes in the days just after a terrorist attack.

The chief institutions that disseminate the myth are the press and the state. The press has been culpable since the telegraph made possible the modern war correspondent. And starting with the Crimean War, when the first dispatches were fed by newly minted war correspondents in real time, nearly every reporter has seen his or her mission as sustaining civilian and army morale. The advent of photography and film did little to alter the incentive to boost morale, for the lie in war is almost always the lie of omission. The blunders and senseless slaughter by our generals, the execution of prisoners and innocents, and the horror of wounds are rarely disclosed, at least during a mythic war, to the public. Only when the myth is punctured, as it eventually was in Vietnam, does the press begin to report in a sensory rather than a mythic manner. But even then it is it reacting to a public that has changed its perception of war. The press usually does not lead.

Mythic war reporting sells papers and boosts ratings. Real reporting, sensory reporting, does not, at least not in comparison with the boosterism we witnessed during the Persian Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan. The coverage in the Persian Gulf War was typical. The international press willingly administered a restrictive pool system on behalf of the military under which carefully controlled groups of reporters were guided around the front lines by officers. It could have never functioned without the cooperation of the press. The press was as eager to be of service to the state during the war as most everyone else.

Such docility on the part of the press made it easier to do what governments do in wartime, indeed what governments do much of the time, and that is lie. When Iraqi troops seized the Saudi border town of Khafji, sending Saudi troops fleeing in panic, the headlong retreat was never mentioned. Two French photographers and I watched as frantic Saudi soldiers raced away from the fighting, dozens crowded on a fire truck that tore down the road. U.S. Marines were called in to push the Iraqis back. We stood on rooftops with young Marine radio operators who called in air strikes as Marine units battled Iraqi troops in the streets.

Yet back in Riyadh and Dhahran military press officers spoke about our Saudi allies defending their homeland.

The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness. It hides from view our own impotence and the ordinariness of our own leaders. By turning history into myth we transform random events into a chain of events directed by a will greater than our own, one that is determined and preordained. We are elevated above the multitude. We march toward nobility. And no society is immune.

Most national myths, at their core, are racist. They are fed by ignorance. Those individuals who understand other cultures, speak other languages, and find richness in diversity are shunted aside. Science, history, and psychology are often twisted to serve myth. And many intellectuals are willing to champion and defend absurd theories for nationalist ends.

By finding our identity and meaning in separateness the myth serves another important function: It makes communication with our opponents impossible. When the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat makes statements that call for moderation and peace he is accused by the Israelis of using words to conceal his intention to wipe out Israel. The Palestinians react in the same manner to statements by most Israeli leaders. It does not matter what they say, just as it did not matter what the Serb or Croat nationalists said to each other; the intentions of the other were predetermined by nationalist myth.

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, although he littered the country with land mines, once bombed a Red Cross-run factory making artificial legs for victims of those mines, and pummeled a rival's wife and children to death. The mayhem and blood-letting we backed in Angola were copied in many parts of Africa, including Zaire and Liberia.

The myth of war sells and legitimizes the drug of war. Once we begin to take war's heady narcotic, it creates an addiction that slowly lowers us to the moral depravity of all addicts. War's utter depravity was captured in Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida, a work that as far as is known was never performed in Shakespeare's lifetime, perhaps due to its savage indictment of war and human society. Nearly every figure in the play, including Ulysses, lies to and tries to manipulate those around him: that is the trait of most leaders, no matter what political agenda they espouse. Here, unlike Henry V, Shakespeare excoriates the established order; the play is one that debunks national myth. There are only three characters who speak about war with any sanity or truth: Pandarus, who is a lecher and a coward; Cassandra, who is deranged; and Thersites, as described by Shakespeare, "a deformed and scurrilous Greek."3 Yet Thersites' bleak view of human nature and human folly is borne out by the play's end. We are left with the realization that characters who are, by the standards of civil society, the most retrograde stand above the baseness of those who prosecute war, if only because they speak the truth.

"Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery, nothing else holds fashion," Thersites rails.4

War can be the natural outcome of brutal repression; witness Kosova or El Salvador. Or it can be manufactured by warlords intent on enrichment, as in Bosnia. It can also, although less and less, be the result of vying interests between nation-states, such as the Gulf War, fought over control of the oil fields in Kuwait. War, at times inevitable and unavoidable, is part of human society. It has been since the dawn of time--and probably will be until we are snuffed out by our own foolishness.

"We believed we were there for a high moral purpose," wrote Philip Caputo in his book on Vietnam, Rumor of War. "But somehow our idealism was lost, our morals corrupted, and the purpose forgotten."5

The employment of organized violence means one must, in fact, abandon fixed and established values. This is a truth made apparent in Troilus and Cressida. It is a truth Henry V ignores. Once war, and especially the total war that marked both the ancient and the modern way of battle, erupts, all is sacrificed before it. The myth of war is essential to justify the horrible sacrifices required in war, the destruction and the death of innocents. It can be formed only by denying the reality of war, by turning the lies, the manipulation, the inhumanness of war into the heroic ideal. Homer did this for the Greeks, Virgil for the Augustan age, and Shakespeare for the English in his history plays. But these great writers also understood what they were doing, and thus in the canon of their works come moments when war is laid bare.

Troilus, at the start of the play, states that he will not fight for Helen, a woman portrayed by Shakespeare as a mindless paramour. "It is," he says, "too starved a subject for my sword."6 Dying for this Helen, who has neither morals nor wit, is absurd. Yet I have seen men fight for even more ridiculous reasons. There was no reason for the war in Bosnia. The warring sides invented national myths and histories designed to mask the fact that Croats, Muslims, and Serbs are nearly indistinguishable. It was absurd nuances that propelled the war, invented historical wrongs, which, as in the Middle East, stretched back to dubious accounts of ancient history. I have heard Israeli settlers on the West Bank, for example, argue that Palestinian towns, towns that have been Muslim since the seventh century, belong to them because it says so in the Bible, a reminder that this sophistry extends beyond the Balkans.

The competing nationalist propaganda in Yugoslavia created a conflict in the country best equipped of all the Eastern European states to integrate with the West after the collapse of communism. Because there was no real reason to fight, there was an urgent need to swiftly turn a senseless fratricide, one organized by criminals and third-rate political leaders for power and wealth, into an orgy of killing, torture, and mass execution. This indiscriminate murder, these campaigns of ethnic cleansing, were used to create facts, as it were. The slaughter was carried out to give to these wars the justifications they lacked when they began, to fuel mutual hatred and paranoia, as well as to enrich the militias and paramilitary groups that stole and looted from their victims. Ethnic warfare is a business, and the Mercedes and mansions of the warlords in Belgrade prove it. Fighting for a Helen who is a strumpet, or Don Quixote's Dulcinea, looks noble by comparison.

____________________
Notes
1. LeShan, Lawrence, The Psychology of War (New York: Helios, 1992), Chapter Two.
2. Weil, Simone, 'The Iliad' or 'The Poem of Force,' (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Pamphlet, 1993), p. 11.
3. Shakespeare, William, Troilus and Cressida –"Dramatis Personae," (Boston: Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 448.
4. Ibid., Act V, sc. ii, p. 486.
5. Caputo, Philip, Rumor of War (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977), p. 345.
6. Shakespeare, William, Troilus and Cressida, (Boston: Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Act I, sc. i, p. 450.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; Reprint edition (June 10, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400034639
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400034635
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.1 x 0.6 x 8 inches

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Chris Hedges

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Chris Hedges is a cultural critic and author who was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. He reported from Latin American, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He is a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute and writes an online column for the web site Truthdig. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.

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Walter E. Kurtz

A little disorganized, but powerful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 17, 2012

Verified Purchase

Judging by the title, you might think that this books speaks in favor of war. Absolutely not! In fact, it is a very powerful condemnation of war.

The author had led an eventful life. He was a war correspondent who covered many conflicts in many parts of the world. He had seen his share of death, had many close calls and suffered human cruelty. This book is his attempt to understand the appeal of war. Despite universal condemnation of war (at least in principle), war has always been and still is a presence in human affairs. It continues to fascinate us and even attracts us. Why? If war is so wicked, why does it persist?

Sure, there are some psychopaths out there who like war because it gives them a chance to indulge their darkest desires and achieve power, but the blame cannot be solely laid at the feet of few madmen. The sad fact is that war really does have its attractive qualities.

"Truth is the first casualty of war," as the saying goes.

That is true. The rulers need to first sell war to their people. Even the most totalitarian regimes do not start war out of the blue. Elaborate propaganda operation is first mounted to convince us that the enemy is evil, or at least in some way worse than us. People with whom we had no quarrel before suddenly become our enemy. They are portrayed as wicked and inferior. Differences, no matter how small and irrelevant, are brought up time after time as evidence of their otherness. Whatever bad things a few of them did, they are used to condemn all of them as evil. Some of these differences and bad deeds are no doubt true, but propaganda exaggerates them and even manufactures more if what is out there is not enough.

At the same time, propaganda tries to convince us that we are the good guys and superior to the enemy. In other words, we are on the side of angels and they fight for Satan. In case of religious wars, this might literally be the official position.

Quite often it is not enough to say that the other side is evil and inferior. They must also pose a grave threat. After all, if they were evil and inferior, but meant us no harm, then most people would not care enough to travel over there and fight them. But if they pose a threat to us, then not only we have a right to fight them, we even have a duty to. A man has to protect his country and loved us after all.

Strangely, while individuals might resist propaganda, the masses often fall for it. There is powerful allure in accepting the propaganda. If we believe the lies, then suddenly we become heroes fighting the good fight against forces of darkness. We protect our loved ones from a wicked enemy. We see friends and neighbors support a cause and we feel the pull to join them to gain a sense of belonging. The psychological need to fit with a group and to be accepted is a powerful human desire.

For those who are directly exposed to combat, aside for the horror and fear there is also excitement. The fight or flight response kicks in and our bodies are flooded with adrenaline. Even fear has its exciting properties. How else do you explain people enjoying horror movies?

Soldiers experience intense comradeship and are often and are held as heroes. It is hard to be exposed to this kind of adoration and not have your ego flattered. Civilians feel a bond with their fellow civilians if their side is winning. If their side is losing and they are exposed to violence, this bond grows even stronger as they must together endure hardship and death.

War has its dark attractiveness, but it is also a lie. It is like heroin. It makes you feel fantastic when you are under its influence, but at the same time it is destroying you. Eventually it will leave you a pathetic, sad shadow of what you were, and then it will kill you.

War inverts values. What was once good is now bad and vice versa. Showing kindness and protecting human lives is generally speaking considered as a virtue. But in war showing kindness and protecting the lives of the people on the other side is almost a crime. War dissenters (who are essentially people who say that you should not hurt fellow human beings and look for peaceful solutions) are vilified and called traitors. They might be charged with crimes, imprisoned and even killed. On the other hand, people who kill, maim and hurt the enemy and destroy their property are made to look heroic. What before was rightfully called mass murder and criminality, now is the desired behavior.

When the war is over, when the lies are exposed, silence and fantasy reign supreme. As people realize the evil and foolishness in which they indulged, they become ashamed and prefer to keep quiet about it. Not only people don't want to talk about it, they prefer not to hear about it. When some few brave individuals speak out, they are ignored. When there is no way to hide the truth, the evil is excused. Atrocities committed by our own side are written off as ugly necessities of war or laid at the feet of few "bad apples". And it is quickly pointed out that the enemy committed atrocities too. Apparently, their evil justifies our evil.

But the silence is not enough. The society is faced with a problem. The old lies don't work anymore, but the truth is too painful to face. So new lies are invented. People replace old fantasy with new fantasy. Generals might say that they lost the war because politicians stabbed them in the back. Politicians might say that it was the country's allies who stabbed them in the back. Or the other side had won because they "cheated". (As if war was a sport with set rules.)

This new fantasy prevents healing on both sides, thus sowing the seeds for the next conflict. While the current generation might have learned its lessons, those lessons are not passed down to the new generation. New generations grow up believing the fantasies, and one day they will march to war.
This is, grossly, the author's thesis, although sometimes he does not lay it out as clearly. The book is written purely from heart and emotion. The impression from the text I got is that this is an emotional outburst and purging of a troubled soul. This is fine by me. It makes the book only more powerful. I have read some anti-war books in the past, but never anything so powerful.

I have only one complaint. The author grimly states that in his opinion there will always be war (I agree) and that sometimes wars are necessary. But he does not elaborate on what he would consider a justifiable war. Taking into account how strongly anti-war his book is, it would be interesting to know in what circumstances he would approve of war.

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S. Freeman

The insanity of war

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 31, 2004

Verified Purchase

Chris Hedges has written a deeply thoughtful and thought provoking book on the insanity of war. Myths and identified are exploded. Realities are presented, at times, in graphic detail.

Yet the book is an odd duck in some ways. Despite references to and quotations from the classics of literature, it is not an academic work; but neither is it a journalistic work. It is largely introspective; and in this sense, reminds me of the work of Joan Didion.

The title offends me as it asserts a truth I wish to deny. Yet, as combat veteran, having looked closely at the dead--of my brothers and of those we killed--having stared into vacant eyes looking off to some unseen horizon, I cannot deny the truth he asserts: War is a Force that gives us meaning. Fortunately, it is not the ONLY force, and needs not be THE force, as he makes clear toward the end. Indeed, a subtitle could be "Love is THE force which gives us true meaning.

I find the reviews of some of Hedges' critics rather amusing, and strongly suspect they have never worn the uniform, much less served in combat. If they did, they would realize some of their criticisms are, well, stupid.

This book, for example, is not anti-patriotic, though neither is it "patriotic", at least not in any usual sense of the word. Hedges' argument is our loyalties should not lie, at least not exclusively, not decisively, with any nation or government. Our patriotism should not be blind, nor should it be a means of manipulation. Rather, it should be grounded in love and understanding. Though Hedges does not say this specifically, I think he would agree that true patriotism entails both love of country AND love of humanity. To view our "enemies" as the epitome of evil, to present them as fanatics with no respect for human life, is to lower ourselves to the level we ascribe to them. Such false beliefs are inherently self defeating.

Cucolo does not seem to understand, as some great Americans have, that war is a narcotic, that patriotism often is used and abused by those who, themselves, have an inadequate understanding of humanity, and, therefore, inadequate respect for human life, who will sacrifice a nation's best for empire or to salve their own demented egos.

Having stood much closer to war than Cucolo probably sits to the screen showing John Wayne movies, Hemingway understood this: "There is noting sweet and fitting in dying for your country. You will die like a dog for no good reason."

John Quincy Adams also understood what Cucolo apparently does not: "And say not thou, `My country right or wrong'; nor shed thy blood for an unhallowed cause."

Real patriotism, true patriotism is far more than flying a flag outside one's home.

As Hedges argues, we are conditioned to believe war is some great cause, possessing some noble meaning that transcends us, that gives us some noble purpose in life far greater than anything we are likely to accomplish on our own, living our lives of anonymous insignificance, of "quiet desperation". War gives us the opportunity for heroics, to have our names, or at least the cause in which we served, inscribed in the annals (or should I say anals?) of history.

War summons up the courage ordinary men fear they lack. That "red badge of courage" shouts we ARE courageous, if not heroes. What else can we say of men willing to leave hearth and home, to kiss their loved ones good-bye, "leaving on a jet plane", not knowing if they will return again, even if in a box, gift wrapped? What greater love is there, can there be than to lay down one's life for one's country? Certainly I understand this. Why else would I have marched off--as a volunteer--to fight in a war I actively opposed, and believed (then and now) to be an illegal, immoral, "unhallowed cause"?

In his last chapter, Hedges talks of how war is a false god. Life seems more "real" in combat. Things do get distilled down to very simple terms--life and death. Soldiers, especially those standing victorious on that day's battlefield, are as gods. As one of my brothers, imprisoned after the war because he had become too addicted to the violence of war, bringing that violence home where what he did in the Nam to great praise from his commanders was unacceptable, said: "We strode the earth as gods, dispensing life and death at will." And we did.

Hedges identifies three things that stand in contrast to the false meaning of life provided by war--meaning (purposefulness) of life, happiness and love.

To those whose souls are possessed by Thanatos--as Cucolo's may be--to talk of love is to talk of weakness: Love is the sentiment of weak women; war is what MEN do. They could not be more wrong as anyone who has served in combat knows. We LOVE our brothers, even if, as Hedges argues, it is not a complete love; for it is a love forged by a false god.

Major Michael O'Donnell, himself one of those "gentle heroes (we) left behind", clearly understood this as he wrote in his poem, "Vietnam":

"Be not ashamed to say
you loved them
though you may
or may not have always."

But anyone who has lain on a battlefield with bullets, mortars, rockets crashing around surely knows, we have never felt our love for our parents, our siblings, our girlfriends or wives--not before, nor since--so completely, so intensely as those moments when we faced death in battle.

Hedges has written a profound book, full of meaning and purpose, for anyone willing to open their minds to the possibility war is an inherently insane, inherently immoral narcotic. There are no winners in war, none, only savagery and inhumanity and destruction of the soul; and we need to know this without having to learn it first hand.

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shannon

war is messy

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 28, 2023

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While I’m thankful for the author to share his experiences and views throughout the book. However, I think the whole book needs to rework. The book felt like a flooded plain from the overflowed river that we were supposed to follow. I do appreciate many statements that explain a lot about the war. It's just that the orderly is constantly mixed up and back-forth. Seems like his view is heavily focused on the Balkan War and some others too. Which made me feel too subjective. Rather than focus on overall about the war itself.

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tomomori

我らは悪である

Reviewed in Japan 🇯🇵 on November 18, 2006

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神学を学び戦場ジャーナリストの道を歩んだNYタイムズの記者が、己の職場（数々の戦場）を振り返る一冊。
タイトルは恐らくシモーヌ・ヴェイユの『イリアス』論に触発されたもの（『The Poem of Force』）。ヴェイユを初め、ハンナ・アーレント、エリアス・カネティ、フロイト、シェイクスピア等々、文学や哲学の世界から多くを引用しているところも魅力だ。
ボスニア戦争の記述が多い。民兵の跋扈する様などを読むと、統制の取れた軍隊の意義を思い知る。イスラム教徒の農夫が、孤立したセルビア人夫婦の乳幼児の為に毎日ミルクを運ぶエピソードが本書の白眉。人間の本来たる「悪意」が蔓延する中で、「善」なる者がわずかな光明となる。しかし、善は寡黙だ。この農夫はどうなったのだろう。義なる人は路傍で一人死ぬ、というのはヴェイユの言葉だったが。
本書で描かれる、戦時下で迫害を受ける知識人の姿には同情する。しかし著者は「反体制知識人」なるものに対していささかナイーブではないかという気も。反体制知識人イコール「良心」という公式を私は了解しない。
ナショナリズムとパトリオティズムを共に同種のナルシシズムであるとする作者の見方に対しては、「本来的質」への言及ならば反論はしない。しかしナルシシズムのない人間は人間ではない。我らに解脱せよとでも言うのか。この場合、質よりも量を見てもいい。現在の米国のナショナリズムと旧ユーゴで吹き荒れた民族主義の狂乱を同一視するのは短絡的ではなかろうか。米国人インテリの自罰意識か。
後半に入ると繰り返しが多く、ややダレてくる。しかし文章が美しく、安易に処方箋を提示していないところが良い本だと思う。

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GIEL

A Book Everyone Should Read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 15, 2022

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Now the idea of War has become very popular again it would be healthy to read Chris Hedges book. It deals with all the important matters concerning war and thankfully does not mention the strategic aspects of war that the newspapers, politicians and military people now discuss on a day to day basis. Hedges book describes at length the effect war has on the people who suffer from it and often can not escape from it. He describes vividly too how it destroys soldiers lives. At the end of a war very little is achieved except death, destruction and unhappiness.

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Lucius

Fast fünf Sterne

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on September 5, 2003

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Hedges, geisteswissenschaftlich gebildeter Harvard-Graduierter und für etwa 20 Jahre Kriegsberichterstatter der New York Times, konfrontiert uns mit einer in hohem Maße aus seinen eigenen Erfahrungen gespeisten Phänomenologie des Krieges. Er verleugnet nicht die berauschende Wirkung des Krieges auf alle, die an ihm beteiligt sind, im Gegenteil diese Wirkung ist eines der Hauptthemen in seinem Buch. Krieg ist eine der großen Erfahrungen des Menschseins. Doch zugleich wird sehr deutlich, daß dieser Rausch trotz aller Intensität am Ende hohl und schäbig ist, was stattdessen wirklich bleibt sind die Brutalität, der Schmutz, der Ekel und die gebrochenen Seelen. Vor diesem Hintergrund fand ich es wunderbar, daß Hedges dieser Welt meistens sinnloser Zerstörung (ein Pazifist ist er nicht) auf unpathetische Art mit der Liebe eine Gegenkraft gegenüberstellt und ganz am Schluß in wenigen, einfachen Worten davon spricht, daß unser Leben echte Bedeutung nicht durch den falschen Zauber des Krieges, sondern nur durch Liebe erhalten kann.
Das Buch hat seine Schwächen, gelegentlich verfällt Hedges in eine Art überdeutlichen Erklärungsmodus, der schnell ermüdend wirken kann, mitunter bleibt er für meinen Geschmack zu sehr an der Oberfläche, viele seiner Aussagen sind aus früherer Literatur bereits bekannt und seine Argumentation wirkt manchmal leicht konfus, zumindest mäandernd. In mehreren Passagen scheinen die Beispiele (Balkan, Palästina, Golf, Mittelamerika) mehr Gewicht zu gewinnen, als einem argumentierenden Text guttut. Trotzdem handelt es sich um ein wichtiges Buch. Ein ums andere Mal wird der Leser sehr klar und eindringlich mit dem konfrontiert, was Krieg für alle, die von ihm betroffen sind, bedeutet, wozu er führt und welchen Gefahren sich die Gesellschaften aussetzen, die allzu leichtfertig zum Mittel des Krieges greifen. Hedges präsentiert hier immer wieder viel Stoff zum Nachdenken. Für alle politisch Interessierten, die gerne auch mal eine allgemeinere Perspektive wählen, deshalb fast Pflichtlektüre.

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Ron

Heavy duty stuff

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 18, 2022

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Episode after episode of the most terrible war events that you will ever read. What's the moral? Just that all war is awful and has no silver lining.

If war gives you meaning, that's bc you've lost everything else.

Kindle Customer

War--- Frighteningly Horrible

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 12, 2011

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In a manner that only Chris Hedges can provide, war is described precisely for what it is; HELL. No, he does NOT say that there are never times that this is the only recourse, nor does he say that all countries should defund their security budgets. But what he does say is frighteningly horrible (and true). War is the most dehumanizing act that we commit on ourselves and while it becomes an addictive narcotic for some it is a psychologically destructive force for all others. The 'whys' of our internal impulse to wreck havoc on others remains undefined while the false national propaganda that leads us on these mercenary quests are quite evident; the irrational quest for power and control of those with whom we disagree.

Pogo was correct; "We have met the enemy and he is us.".

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War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning Paperback – June 10, 2003

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