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| COVER STORY: Interview with Chris Hedges | January 31, 2003 |
| http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week622/hedges.html | Episode 622 |
Read more of Bob Abernethy's interview with NEW YORK TIMES reporter
Chris Hedges, author of WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING:
A: My father, who had fought in World War II, essentially became
a pacifist after the war. He was a very early opponent of the Vietnam
War and took us as children to antiwar demonstrations. He told me when
I was about 12 that, if the war was still going when I was 18 and I was
drafted, he would go to prison with me. If we visited museums, he would
never allow us to see the displays of weapons and guns. He couldn't stand
the VFW hall, partly because they drank so much there. And, of course,
I grew up in a manse, where there was no alcohol. I remember one July
Fourth parade when I was about ten, and these guys were going by in their
caps. And he said, "Never forget. Most of those guys were in the back,
fixing the trucks." So I grew up in a home where war was seen for the
abomination that it was.
On the other hand, I also grew up in a home with parents who were social
activists, so my entire childhood was colored by the civil rights movement,
the antiwar movement. When my father died in 1995, he was very involved
in the gay rights movement. And I learned, because we lived in a small
town in upstate New York, the cost of taking a moral stand -- that it
was unpopular. I mean, Martin Luther King, in the early days of the civil
rights movement, was one of the hated men in America. I felt the sting
of what it meant to stand up for what you believe in or to support a cause
that was just and, certainly at its inception, how difficult that was.
That developed, I think, a lot of anger in me -- anger at seeing my father,
whom I admired, belittled by people in our town. I also read a lot as
a teenager about the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War, and I very much
wanted that epic battle to define my own life. I used to regret as a teenager
that I had not been of age in the thirties, that I couldn't go fight fascism
like my hero George Orwell. By the time I was a divinity student, the
military dictatorships in Latin America were carrying out horrendous crimes
-- the "dirty war" in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile, the civil war in El
Salvador. When I got to El Salvador, the death squads were killing 800
to 1,000 people a month, and I felt that, as a young man, this was as
close as my generation was going to come to fighting fascism. And that
is what propelled me toward war -- not because I was any kind of a gun
nut, not because I came as a voyeur -- which some people do -- but out
of a sense of justice, out of a sense of idealism.
Q: That's why you became a war correspondent -- you wanted to do justice?
A: Yes, although I would temper that by saying that because of studying
Christian ethics, because of [reading] Reinhold Niebuhr, I was never a
utopian. I never believed that human institutions could create perfect
societies, or perhaps even just societies. I always had a very skeptical
view; I always distrusted power, no matter whose hands power was in. And
I always felt that my role was to be an outsider, to stand with the victim
-- whether that was in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas, or in El Salvador
against the military. So I never embraced liberation theology. I was always
very guarded about [it]. I mean, obviously, there were some aspects of
it that we needed to hear. But I approached it with a great deal of skepticism.
Q: Would you sum up the wars you covered, the places you were, what
happened to you?
A: I started with the war in El Salvador. I was there for five years.
I covered the conflict in Nicaragua as well. After leaving Central America,
I went to the Middle East. I took a sabbatical to study Arabic. I went
to Jerusalem just in time for the first intifadah. I covered the civil
war in the Sudan -- I traveled in from Kenya with the SPLA [Sudan People's
Liberation Army] guerrillas. I covered the civil war in Algeria, the civil
war in Yemen. I worked in the Punjab during the height of the Sikh separatist
movement -- I was there for six weeks.
I covered the Persian Gulf War. I made two incursions into the marshes
[in southeast Iraq], when Saddam Hussein was draining them, with Shiite
guerrillas in small boats from Iran. I spent weeks with Kurdish fighters
in the north on the front lines, where there was sporadic fire between
Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish guerrillas. I should add also [that] at the
end of the Persian Gulf War, I was in Basra with the Shiite rebels when
I was captured and held prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard [and] eventually
released.
In 1995, I went to Sarajevo, and that summer was one of the worst of the
war. I covered the implementation of the Dayton peace agreement and then
the war in Kosovo. War has marked most of my 15 years abroad. I've been
in ambushes. I've been strafed by MIGs, pounded by very heavy artillery
in Sarajevo -- 155 Howitzers, 90-millimeter tank rounds. I was shot at
by Serb snipers, shot at by Israeli snipers. I've seen far too much of
violent death.
Q: So now you've written about what war is. What's your conclusion?
A: The goal of the book was to portray the disease that war is and how
that disease in wartime infects and destroys individuals and societies.
I had started writing at Harvard on a Nieman fellowship after I left the
war in Kosovo, but it took on a kind of urgency after 9/11. I woke up
and realized in New York that we'd all become Serbs, that all of that
flag-waving, all of that jingoism, that mass suppression of individual
conscience -- which I had seen in countries in war around the globe Š
was now part of my own society, part of where I lived. And it frightened
me.
I'm not a pacifist. Wars are always tragic, but probably inevitable; I
would think they are inevitable. I supported the intervention in Bosnia.
I supported the intervention in Kosovo. I feel that we failed as a nation
by not intervening in Rwanda. If we've learned anything from the Holocaust,
it is that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not,
you are culpable. You have blood on your hands, and we do for Rwanda.
But I also understand what war can do, especially when you fall into the
dark intoxication that war brings. That process of dehumanizing the other,
that ecstatic euphoria in wartime, that use of patriotism as a form of
self-glorification, that worshiping of the capacity to inflict violence
-- especially in a society that possesses a military as advanced as ours
-- all of those things I wanted to expose in the book, so that people
would at least understand war for the poison that it is.
Q: You call it an addiction.
A: Yes. I think for those who are in combat, it very swiftly can become
an addiction. War is its own subculture. It can create a landscape of
the grotesque that is, perhaps, unlike anything else created by human
beings. There is that rush of war. In an ambush, when danger is that present,
there is no past. There is no future. You are thrust into the present
in a way that is like a drug. I mean, even colors are brighter. War is
Zen, and that becomes a very heady way to live. We ennoble ourselves in
war, especially those of us who leap from conflict to conflict.
In Sarajevo, for instance -- when you left, you would be sitting in Paris
for four or five days [and] all you did was hunger to go back. The culture
[of war] took you over. I remember stepping outside of war zones in El
Salvador or the Balkans into peaceful environments, and the familiar had
a quality of what Freud calls "the uncanny." Everything that was familiar
seemed strange, because everything that was strange had become familiar.
I would be in a hotel in Paris or London, and it was as if I was there
physically; but, really, I was four paces back. You fly and, in a matter
of hours, you're outside a war zone. I remember it was as if I looked
at things through a tunnel. That culture takes over; you don't function
outside of it.
War is like a poison. And just as a cancer patient must at times ingest
a poison to fight off a disease, so there are times in a society when
we must ingest the poison of war to survive. But what we must understand
is that just as the disease can kill us, so can the poison. If we don't
understand what war is, how it perverts us, how it corrupts us, how it
dehumanizes us, how it ultimately invites us to our own self-annihilation,
then we can become the victim of war itself.
War is one of the most heady and intoxicating, addictive enterprises ever
created by humankind. It has an allure, a fascination, a draw that sweeps
across national lines, ethnicity, race, religion. It has perverted, corrupted,
and ultimately destroyed societies and nations across the globe. The only
way to guard against it is finally to understand what it does and how
pernicious it is and the myths and lies that we use to cover up the fact
that, at its core, war is death.
In every conflict I've covered, you reach a point -- and I think I reached
this point certainly in El Salvador -- where you feel that it's better
to live for one intoxicating, empowering moment than ever to go back to
that dull routine of daily life, and if your own death is the cost of
that, then that's a cost you're willing to accept.
That comes right out of THE ILIAD. It comes right out of Achilles. There's
a vase in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it shows a scene from the
Trojan War where Achilles is thrusting his spear into the chest of the
Queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea. The legend is that as Achilles killed
her, their eyes met, and he fell in love with her. What he was doing,
of course, was killing love. And once love was dead, there was no hope
of going back.
In THE ODYSSEY, which is really a story about recovery from war, Odysseus
goes down to the Underworld and meets Achilles and says, "You are the
greatest of the Achaeans," the hero of the Achaeans, and Achilles says,
"I'd rather be up there as a slave, as a serf hacking at clods of earth
than down here." There was an understanding in Homer that all of the myth
and the glory that was so much a part of THE ILIAD was, in fact, after
the war was over, bankrupt and empty. It's why so much of the bombastic
rhetoric, so much of the way culture is infected and destroyed -- in wartime,
we always destroy our own culture first before we go off and destroy the
culture of the other -- is so forgettable and perhaps even embarrassing
once the conflict is over.
War is like imbibing a drug. Once that drug is kicked, once that war is
over, many decisions that are made in warfare, not only what we do to
others but also what we do to ourselves, are exposed for being not only
wrong, but stupid.
Q: Does what you call "industrialized war" change any of this? What
happens when you can't see the enemy and you're using weapons of mass
destruction?
A: Since the First World War and modern, industrial slaughter, the importance
of the myth [of war] has only grown, because the myth was always a lie,
anyway. But it's even more of a lie now, where there is a very impersonal
quality to war.
In the narratives that we spin out, we create heroes in every conflict
we cover. There is a need, a yearning for glory and heroism. So much of
it is manufactured, as any combat veteran will tell you. Heroism at that
particular moment never feels or looks quite like heroism. It certainly
never looks like it's portrayed in the myth that's spun out afterwards.
Q: Give me some examples of what happens to you or others you've seen,
as a result of addiction to war.
A: Well, ultimately, what happens is that you embrace death, because that's
what war is. War, at its most fundamental level, is death. It is necrophilia.
It is the love of death. When war begins, it looks and feels like love.
It isn't love. That's the chief emotion war destroys.
When you look at the beginning of the conflict in the Balkans, people
were ecstatic. They were in the street. They were waving their nationalist
flags. A kind of euphoria often grips a country in wartime. And war is,
of course, the very opposite of that. It is a bit like the beautiful nymph
in the fairy tale who seduces you, and then when you kiss it, it exhales
the vapors of the Underworld. War has an attraction to humankind. But
once you're in it, it very soon takes you over like a drug. War always
creates a kind of moral perversion, and that's why you see sexual perversion
so interrelated with war.
Routine death becomes boring. It's why you would go into central Bosnia
and see bodies crucified on the sides of barns, or why in El Salvador
genitals were stuffed in people's faces -- mutilation, you know, the body
as sort of trophy, the body as a kind of performance art. This is an inevitable
consequence of war. As you fall deeper and deeper into that culture, and
as it becomes harder and harder to exist outside of it, what you do is
finally embrace your own annihilation, because like any addiction, it
creates a kind of self-destruction. There is a search for that constant
first high of war that you can never re-create in any other war.
It becomes a kind of suicide. I had a very close friend, [Reuters correspondent]
Kurt Schork, who ended up in Sierra Leone in May of 2000. He was ambushed
with another friend of mine, [Spanish cameraman] Miguel Gil Morano, and
it's because they couldn't let go. They couldn't let go, and they died
because of it. And they're not alone. That was a big moment for me. Kurt
is irreplaceable. He was a remarkable man. I realized I had to stop. I
had to get out.
Q: You showed us some pictures of you at various war places. You look
happy.
A: "Happy" is not a word I would use to describe it. But I had a sense
of purpose, a sense of meaning. I had a sense of ennoblement. I think
we ennoble ourselves in war. There is a rush in war. And it's probably
very hard, if not impossible, to re-create in anything else.
I was a professional. I did it well. I learned how to do it well over
many years, and I took a great deal of pride in it. I have a lot of respect
for those people who do it even while I also recognize the very self-destructive
quality. But I think, ultimately, being in a war, while it can give you
meaning, it's probably meaning that is devoid of happiness. Real happiness
only comes through love -- not through war. And in wartime there's hardly
any love at all.
Q: Talk about the myths we tell ourselves to support war.
A: Well, that's how we understand war -- through the myth itself. Every
once in a while, that myth is punctured. Freud, in CIVILIZATION AND ITS
DISCONTENTS, writes about the forces of love, of Eros -- those forces
to preserve, to conserve -- and the forces of death, of Thanatos, that
aggressive instinct to destroy, even to destroy ourselves. For Freud,
these two things are in constant tension, which is why Freud says war
is inevitable. He doesn't believe that war will be eradicated. One [of
these forces] is always ascendant. There's a constant tug-of-war between
[them].
After the Vietnam War, we asked questions about ourselves and our nation.
It made us a better people. We were forced to step outside ourselves.
We were forced to accept our own capacity for evil, for atrocity. We struggled,
perhaps for the first time in a long time, to see ourselves as the outsider
saw us. I think this was Eros. I think Eros was ascendant at the end of
the Vietnam War.
But gradually, Thanatos or death, that love of power and that glorification,
that myth of war, rose during the Reagan years, culminating in the Persian
Gulf War, where war became not only respectable, but enjoyable -- war
as entertainment. We believed that we, a powerful nation, could wage war
and it could be cost-free. We reveled in the prowess of our military and
our weapons. Ever since the Persian Gulf War, it's death that's been ascendant.
That's what frightens me so much now.
Q: You write about war and the corruption of values -- that what's
normally bad becomes good.
A: Right. Well, you know, part of the myth of war is that war ennobles
us, and that's the lie that's sold to young people, that they must be
tested in war.
It's very hard to make antiwar films or write antiwar books, because even
if you look at a movie like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, you may recognize
how horrible war is, but at the same time, you yearn for that kind of
comradeship, which is not friendship. It's very different. You yearn to
be tested like that. That's part of the way the myth is sold to us, that
we're not finally complete human beings (of course, this is often directed
at men) until we've been through the experience of war, the maw of war.
You see that now with the way we mythologize the Second World War and
forget the reality of the war. One of my uncles was destroyed by the war
in the South Pacific and died as an alcoholic in a trailer. My family
carried his burden from the end of the war until his death. And I don't
think my family was alone. But that's not the kind of stuff we're reading
about or hearing about now.
A: The press is always part of the problem and always has been since the
creation of the modern war correspondent in the Crimean War. There probably
is a need for myth because modern war itself is such industrial slaughter.
It is so horrible and so hard to get your head around; these massive weapons
systems can wipe out whole battalions that never even see their attacker.
There's a very impersonal quality to modern war which makes a mockery
of the notion of individual heroism.
It's important for the nation and the state to spin out the myth of war,
because it's very hard to get a nation to back war unless they believe
in these myths of glory [and] heroism. The self-exaltation that is part
of the patriotic fervor of war includes a denigration of the other. Very
swiftly the language mirrors that of your enemy. For those who are arrayed
against us, we are "the infidels." We call them "the barbarians."
What's particularly disturbing in the modern age is that the weapons we
have, and that they may soon have, are essentially apocalyptic. We have
the capacity now to destroy each other in a way that is new. We had the
tension of the Cold War, with a kind of balance. But when rogue elements
start getting these apocalyptic elements, and then we start talking about
limited use of nuclear devices -- this apocalyptic vision is part of that
rhetoric between good and evil.
One of the things that is important to remember about the rhetoric is
that there is this quality of cleansing to it, this notion that if we
go to war and kill all the terrorists, what we're really doing is cleansing.
We're getting rid of evil. And that's exceedingly dangerous because, of
course, it can never be achieved. This open-ended notion that somehow
we can create a sanitized world -- that's very similar to those who are
arrayed against us. They look at us as a corrupting influence. It isn't
a war in any conventional sense between nation-states; victory is ultimately
defined in a way that can never be achieved.
Q: What's your assessment of the possibility of war against Iraq? You
say you're not a pacifist.
A: Right. When you ask a democracy to go to war, the state is required
to give evidence to the citizens that there is a credible and real threat
against them, and that, therefore, their sons and daughters should be
put in a situation in which they could be killed. I think that is a minimum
in a democracy.
In the Persian Gulf War, you had an aggressive act by an outlaw state
-- Iraq. There's pretty strong evidence that they were massing on the
Saudi border and, knowing Saddam Hussein, he certainly would have taken
Saudi Arabia if he thought he could get it. We had no choice but to fight
the first Persian Gulf War.
This war is different. While they speak about a preemptive strike, you
can't carry out a preemptive strike if there's no evidence that Saddam
Hussein is planning to attack us. And if there is evidence, we have not
been shown it. Nor have our allies.
Not all wars are about economic interest. I don't think the intervention
in the Balkans had anything to do with economic interests. But you can't
ignore the fact that Iraq sits on the second-largest oil reserves in the
world, and we will control and determine how those resources are used
once we occupy the country.
I think the other thing that bothers me about Iraq is that once you get
into urban warfare, which I've seen close up, all of the cruise missiles
in the world don't help you. It really goes back to nineteenth-century
fighting, as we saw in Mogadishu. Given a small but determined hostile
force in the streets of Baghdad, things can get very messy, very quickly.
Because the Pentagon -- with the connivance of the press -- has sold us
this bill of goods (that we can wage war and it won't cost us anything),
I don't think we're prepared at all as a nation for the kinds of casualties
that potentially could take place. Even one dirty bomb exploded next to
a marine tank battalion -- that tank battalion isn't going to exist anymore
in a matter of seconds.
Let's hope that things go well, if they go to war. But I think potentially
it couldn't. I don't see that in a democratic state the case has been
made by which our young men and women should go into a situation where
they could be killed. Everybody talks about the low casualties in the
Persian Gulf War. Well, there were still a few hundred families who will
never be the same again, ever. They will bear the burden of the death
of their child until the day they die.
One of the things that has disturbed me so much about the coverage of
that war and since is that we ignore, in essence, what that cost. It's
why [the government] wouldn't allow the press to cover the bodies returning
to Dover [air force base], because somehow war is about death. War is
a vast video arcade game about Sidewinder missiles always hitting evil
Iraqi planes, and that is a very pernicious and dangerous lie.
Q: Why do you think the press is so complicit in that?
A: Because that mythic narrative boosts ratings and sells newspapers.
That's how William Randolph Hearst built his empire. Look at CNN. Every
time there's a war, suddenly everybody starts watching CNN. But would
they watch CNN if it was a realistic portrayal of war? I don't think so.
In the Persian Gulf War, we in the press knew how to create a narrative.
We had to find a hero. Who was our hero? General Schwartzkopf. It really
didn't matter who was the general commanding our army. We would have turned
him into a hero.
In wartime, the press always views the conflict through that mythic lens.
When I reported the war in Bosnia, without that intrusion of myth, you
saw the war for the slaughter that it was. It was very unpalatable and
horrible. But if I was a Serb reporting on that conflict, or a Croat,
or a Muslim, everything that I reported would've been reported differently.
I would've created a different narrative. I would've sought out heroes.
I would've found situations that showed courage and glory and sacrifice.
And then, of course, I would've sought out the victims that were my own,
because in wartime we don't have much pity for the other -- we don't have
any pity for the other. And those victims -- our own dead -- are constantly
held up as a kind of icon. They make it impossible for us to question
the cause, because questioning the cause, we are told, is a sacrilege
against our innocent dead.
The nationalist press in any country that covers a conflict very rarely
reports that conflict honestly. I think Vietnam was different in the sense
that, while it began as a mythic enterprise, as the public turned against
it the press was freed to report it in a sensory manner -- to report war
for what it was. And then, of course, it became impossible to sustain.
But since the Crimean War, the press has always embraced this myth, because
it's what people want to hear. Those who don't write it are always shunted
to the margins; they are ignored not only by the public, but by their
own -- the press.
Q: You mentioned the Vietnam War, and you speak often about the importance
of getting the memory right. I'm thinking about the Vietnam Memorial.
A: It's important to remember that the Vietnam Memorial was not an enterprise
carried out by the government. It was carried out by veterans. Our country
has a terrible problem with Vietnam because, of course, it was a defeat.
It has been very hard for us to create a mythic narrative around the Vietnam
War. So what we choose to do is to ignore it. That was very much behind
what led Vietnam veterans to create the memorial. They raised the money
themselves, chose the design themselves. In many ways, it's an antimemorial.
I find it a very powerful and moving monument.
Q: And it's a memorial to each individual, not to the war as a whole.
A: That's right. It's not some statue of the generic, helmeted soldier
gazing off into the sky. It individualizes the losses. It's not like any
memorial I've ever seen to war, and for that reason, I find it so powerful
and so effective.
Q: I want to ask you about the role of religion and war. It's often
blamed for war. What did you find?
A: In wartime, religious institutions are usually the worst offenders.
For instance, in Bosnia the UN could get Serb, Muslim, and Croat commanders
together for a civil discussion far more easily than they could get the
religious leaders [together] -- imams and Serbian Orthodox clerics and
Catholic priests.
Religion lends itself to that kind of triumphalism, that notion of the
crusade, the purging of evil, the sanitation of dark forces by the forces
of light. Certainly within the mosque, the church, you had individuals
who stood up, but they very much ran against the institution. Many times
these institutions are called upon by the state to sanctify the cause,
and they usually are more than willing to do so.
Q: I took it that in your book you were saying that religion was not
the underlying cause of the war, but was used by those who were fighting
the war to justify what they were doing for other reasons.
A: In the war in the former Yugoslavia, religion was not the cause of
the war. First of all, most Yugoslavs had very little religious education.
I remember sitting around with a bunch of Muslim troops from the Fifth
Corps. Not only was I the only one among the group who spoke Arabic; I
soon realized I was the only one who'd ever read the Qur'an. The notion
that they were fighting for religious identity was absurd. It was part
of the myth of war.
What happened in the former Yugoslavia, and what happens in all fratricides,
is what Freud calls the "narcissism of minor difference," where you seize
on absurd differences -- you know, dialectic differences. And, of course,
religion becomes the way by which you differentiate yourself from the
other, and you suddenly say, "Serbs, or Muslims -- these are not characteristics
that they have; these are vices and we can never deal with these vices
until we purge them from our society." They don't commit crimes; they
have things inherently built into their character. I mean, it's very much
like anti-Semitism. And the only way to get rid of it is to eradicate
it, because to be a Jew, to be a Serb, to be a Muslim is to have these
qualities that destroy our civilization, and we must, therefore, destroy
them.
Once you get into that situation, which the worst kind of [situation that]
religion can back up, then you move very swiftly from the language of
violence, the language of dehumanization of the other, toward the actual
destruction of the other. We turn them into an object linguistically,
and then we turn them into an object quite literally -- a corpse.
In Bosnia, religion did not cause that war. It was warlords who often
came out of the Communist Party and the breakup of Yugoslavia, who overnight
became nationalists, who appropriated religion and used religion as a
way to prosecute the war and denigrate the other. In every case, I think
religion was used. I don't think religion was a cause.
Religion is used for differentiating warring populations the same way
ethnicity is, race is. It's one of the tools those who want to manufacture
a war use -- a very effective one. Unfortunately, within the institutional
church or the synagogue or the mosque, there are religious leaders who
are willing to go along with that enterprise.
Q: You've warned of dangers within this country that could come from
religious fundamentalism.
A: I had a great ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, James Luther
Adams. When I was a student, he was in his seventies. He told us that
when we were his age, we'd all be fighting the Christian fascists, which
we thought was rather silly then, but probably not so silly now.
Fundamentalism lends itself completely to war, because it has a dichotomy
between "us" and "them." There is a notion that the only way to salvation
is through whatever religion we happen to be, and in the fervor of that
kind of fundamentalism, we refuse to acknowledge that salvation is possible
through any other route. In a time of national distress, people always
look for those who promise what appear to be black-and-white answers,
or clear-cut solutions to the confusion around them.
One of the most important things to remember about war is that it entails
a loss of control. Suddenly, you can't control your environment. You search
for those forces that you think can help you regain control, and fundamentalists
promise the direct and divine intervention of God -- whatever god that
happens to be -- on behalf of his chosen people -- whatever chosen people
that happens to be.
There is an appeal to fanaticism or fundamentalism in times of war. We
certainly see this among the Israelis and the Palestinians, with the rise
of the fundamentalist Jewish element within Israel and certainly the rise
of fundamentalist Muslims among the Palestinians. I think that's normal
in wartime. You reach out to that kind of fundamentalism.
Q: When you were covering war, you found that the effects on you were
such that you sought out the company of people who were in love. Would
you talk about that a little bit?
A: We used to call it the "Linda Blair effect" in Bosnia. You think you've
suddenly found the one, normal person that you can have a rational conversation
with, and then after 15 minutes their head starts to spin around. It's
just amazing how almost everyone becomes infected with the rhetoric of
wartime, and they just parrot back the clichˇs they're handed. Whatever
disquiet they feel, it's as if they can't express it. They're robbed of
language.
In every conflict I've been in, the only antidote is people who find their
fulfillment, their sense of being, in love. In the Balkans, these were
often couples who had mixed marriages and, therefore, they were immune
from the rhetoric; to paint all Serbs as evil, or all Muslims as evil,
or all Croats as evil was to denigrate the spouse, to dehumanize the spouse
-- which they couldn't do. These [relationships] are always sanctuaries
-- sanctuaries that I went to in the war in Salvador. And this is something
that I've thought about years later.
It doesn't mean that they didn't become victims. It doesn't mean that
they weren't eventually wiped out. But it provided a small circle of sanity
in the midst of the insanity, where all of that rhetoric, all of that
drive for the ruthless annihilation of the other was held at bay, always
by couples, which is why, usually, when you look at people who intervene
in a town or a village to help a minority under threat, it's usually couples
-- one of whom has that kind of moral quality and knows they have to take
a moral stance, and the other who has that kind of compassion and caring
that the daily maintenance of taking care of another requires.
Q: What do you think the costs were to you of all that you saw?
A: The costs were tremendous. These are images, memories that I'll have
to carry with me for the rest of my life. There are days when they're
very, very hard to bear. I have a very hard time connecting sometimes
within the society in which I live. I certainly am ultrasensitive to the
notion of violence as entertainment. I took my son to see the LORD OF
THE RINGS movie, and I had to walk out. I couldn't watch it.
I did it far too long. I struggle with that kind of trauma and keep it
wrapped in protective wool, but it's there. And it's hard when it surfaces.
Q: Do you miss war?
A: I'm like my friends in Sarajevo. They all sat around at the end of
the war, and they didn't miss the suffering and the death; but they also
realized that this was probably the fullest moment in their life. There
was a kind of nostalgia for that, a sense of that comradeship, a sense
of that excitement. Yet that kind of lifestyle or that kind of rush can
probably never be re-created.
But, at the same time, I have no desire to go to Iraq. I don't want to
do this anymore. I don't feel the pull of it anymore.
A: By us, as a nation. I feel that sense of repentance, that understanding
that we are all in need of forgiveness (which was very much our experience
after the Vietnam War) has been lost. It's very dangerous to wage war
when you don't have that.
A call for repentance does not free us from the ethics of responsibility.
I look at pacifism in the same way, often, that I look at cynicism. There's
a way of not making moral choice, a way of running away from moral choice.
But what I worry now about the nation is that we've lost touch completely.
There's a danger that our own hubris is pushing us into adventurism and
the use of violence on a wide scale without that sense of tragedy, without
understanding that we too are sinful.
Q: You say what's going on now perhaps has in it the seeds of our own
obliteration. What do you mean?
A: The ancient Greeks and Romans understood that war is a god, and that
war always begins by calling for the annihilation of the other. But left
unexamined or unchecked, war always ends in self-annihilation. And in
an age of apocalyptic weapons, of course, we flirt with our own destruction,
especially when those arrayed against us have their hands on apocalyptic
weapons.
To engage in conflicts like the one in Iraq, without careful and measured
study, without a clear and imminent threat, is to flirt with our own destruction.
All sorts of things could go horribly wrong with that war. Not only could
it get messy on the ground, it could bring in Israel. It could accelerate
the drive by these groups to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction
and use them, and [it could] certainly accelerate the process by which
Saddam Hussein -- who we know has them -- would give them to these groups.
The scenarios that could spin out of this conflict could ultimately be
self-destructive. As a nation, our reaction after 9/11 was to look inward
rather than outward. We folded in on ourselves. We built an alliance with
Sharon, with Putin, and these are very controversial figures in the world.
We had an opportunity to reach out, and we did not. Folding inward like
that, not examining how others view us and why, not understanding our
role in the world and then engaging in these military adventures is a
combination that could be very self-destructive.
Q: Your whole book is an effort to face the truth about war. And you
recommend again and again that we do that in this country. In the present
climate, I suspect many Americans would find your book filled with very
troubling judgments about the United States.
A: I was very conscious as I wrote the book not to denigrate the profession
of soldiering. A friend of mine, Jack Wheeler, who graduated from West
Point and was one of the forces behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
an officer in Vietnam, read it through for that reason. And he pushed
me hard. In the introduction, where I talk about how I admire the qualities
of the professional soldier, he said, "You have to name two." He was right,
and that was hard. I named Ulysses S. Grant for holding the Union together
and General Wesley Clark, who was, within the military, one of the driving
forces behind the intervention in Kosovo and Bosnia. Both [are] military
leaders I respect.
I gave a talk at West Point, and I certainly found an understanding among
the older officers who teach there, many of whom had been through Vietnam.
Just because you're a professional soldier doesn't mean you like war.
In many ways, those who have been through war hate it in a way that only
those who have been through war can hate it. Yet they know that they have
a job to do.
This isn't a book that is going to be used in peace studies programs,
necessarily. It certainly exposes the evil of war, the poison of war;
it says not only that there are nevertheless times we have to wage war,
but also that it is morally imperative for us to use violence -- certainly
in the cases of Kosovo, Sarajevo, Rwanda.
Q: And now in Iraq -- can you imagine things that would come to light,
reasons for going to war that would, in your opinion, justify it?
A: There's only one reason that would justify a war with Iraq, and that
is if there is evidence of a real threat against us by the Iraqis. If,
for instance, Saddam Hussein was building an intercontinental ballistic
missile, if he was planning to drop a crude nuclear device on New York,
then we'd have no choice. But we can only go to war when we have no choice.
And at least up until now, that evidence has not been presented to anyone
by the Bush administration.
Q: When you came back from Kosovo, you spent a year reading the classics.
What were you trying to understand?
A: I did that on the advice of James Freedman, the former president of
Dartmouth, and it was one of the smartest things I did because, of course,
Thucydides, Cicero, Virgil -- all of these great writers dealt with the
same issues. Virgil and Cicero came out of a very bloody civil war that
ended with the reign of Augustus.
I was freed from the cant of my own society and allowed to grapple with
those issues in a way that brought them into clearer focus. I saw, for
instance, in writers such as Aristotle how great minds in societies are
limited. Even though Aristotle opposed slavery, he believed that slavery
would never be eradicated. It allowed me to come back and look at our
own society and my own life in a way that I hadn't before. And then, quite
frankly, I found that a lot of the writing of Catullus, this great lyric
Roman poet, just spoke to me over hundreds of years in a very powerful
and moving way. I memorized a lot of Catullus's poems. And when I went
to visit Kurt Schork's grave in Sarajevo, I stood over it and recited
the poem that Catullus had written to his own brother who died near Troy.
It gave me a kind of continuity, a clearer understanding of who I was
and the age in which I live:
By strangers' coasts and waters, many days at sea,
I came here for the rites of your unworlding,
Bringing for you, the dead, these last gifts of the living
And my words -- vain sounds for the man of dust.
Alas, my brother,
You have been taken from me. You have been taken from me
And by cold hands turned to shadow and my pain.
Here are the foods of the old ceremony appointed
Long ago for the starvelings under the earth.
Take them. Your brother's tears have made them wet. And take
Into eternity my hail and my farewell.
Q: You think that war is hardwired into the human condition, that we
are people who inevitably and forever will go to war against each other.
But we've had serious problems in this country and in all countries. And
we have figured out a way through law and have enforced law at least to
minimize those problems. Can't we do the same thing with war?
A: I think that's true within our incredibly wealthy and privileged society
and within the industrialized societies in Europe. But most of the world
doesn't live like we do. At least half of the globe lives on less than
two dollars a day. And there will always be rogue states. Eventually,
a rogue state will have the ability to use a nuclear weapon against us.
And what do we do then? How do you negotiate with North Korea? How do
you negotiate with an Iraq? You can't. There are people you can't negotiate
with. There are people that, finally, you must stand up against. It's
na•ve to say, "We can do this within our own society; therefore, we can
do this in the world," because most of the world doesn't live like we
do.
Q: What's your prescription for what we in this country should do to
minimize all the terrible things that you saw?
A: We have to change the role that we have in the world. We complain about
the Taliban, and then we all ignore the fact that we supported [rebel
leader Jonas] Savimbi in Angola for years -- a man who was responsible
for 500,000 dead, who bombed Red Cross hospitals. We have to stand back
and understand how others -- especially the poor of the world -- view
us, and why.
There are things that we do, there are governments and regimes we support
that carry out horrific injustices. We can try and stomp out terrorists,
but we will not stomp out the causes of terrorism simply through the use
of force, or by dropping iron fragmentation bombs all over Afghanistan.
I'm not saying we shouldn't go after Osama bin Laden. Of course, we should.
But that alone, in and of itself, is not going to solve our problem. If
that's all we do, it may, in fact, make it worse.
We live in a society whose opulence is staggering. I remember after the
Gulf War sitting with a bunch of poor kids in a slum in Ababa, in Cairo.
They were all Islamists. They couldn't go to school anymore, because in
the Egyptian school system, if you don't have the money to pay the teacher
what is, in essence, a bribe for tutoring you, you're not advanced. The
only dignity these people had they found in the mosque.
How did they look at the Persian Gulf War, these kids who had nothing?
They saw us, who consume 25 percent of the world's petrol, fight a war
to ensure our right to continue to consume this resource at very cheap
prices. The message that the Gulf War sent to them was, "We have everything.
And if you try and take it away from us, we'll kill you."
And I think they were right. We have to begin to sit on the steps of those
mosques and acknowledge the truth and the justice of some of these statements
and change the way we behave in the world. That doesn't mean we won't
always have to fight rogue elements and terrorists, but it will keep them
as a minority. If we continue with this very ham-fisted and self-righteous
imperialism, we're just not going to have many friends out there at all.
One fifth of the world's population, most of whom are not Arabs, looks
at us as a nation through the prism of Chechnya, Palestine. And we just
don't look very good.
Q: What do we need to do?
A: In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we need to put a brake on the
Israelis. It's not in Israel's interest to accelerate this conflict, and
it's certainly not in ours. The Europeans are better on this. I just don't
think we acknowledge the horrific suffering the Palestinians are going
through. We minimize it. We don't understand that for many of these young
kids, the only way they have left to affirm themselves is through death,
through suicide.
We have to give them other ways to affirm themselves. Until that happens,
this conflict isn't going to end. We have the power to go in there and
change things. But because everything has become subordinated to the war
on terror, we're not doing so.
Q: At the end of your book, after you have described the poison of
war and the myths around it, you come back to a very, very personal and
very traditional recommendation -- love.
A: Love is the only force that finally can counter the force of death
-- the death instinct. When shells would come into Sarajevo and at the
most horrific moment of death, when people were literally lying in pools
of their own blood dying, family members, friends, brothers, sisters,
spouses would claw through the crowds looking for their loved ones. Just
as death seemed to radiate out from that point, at the same time love
radiated out. You can't go through an experience like that and not understand
the palpable power of love, the power of that one act of reconciliation
and forgiveness -- the Muslim farmer who gives milk to the Serb baby for
200-plus days, and the way he was reviled by his neighbors. Yet, when
I interviewed the Serb couple whose baby had been saved, they could never
denigrate Muslims the way their Serb neighbors could because of that act.
What appear to be small acts of love -- in those acts are seeds of hope.
That little child may grow up in the Serb part of Bosnia, where to this
day there's terribly racist rhetoric against Muslims. And that child must
know that she is alive because of a poor Muslim farmer whom she may never
meet.
We cannot underestimate these acts that often seem minimal and small in
the face of war, but which I've come to understand are immensely powerful
and give us hope.
Q: I want to invite you to read the last paragraph from your book.
A: "To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And when
Thanatos is ascendent, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love,
to see in them all the divinity, pity and pathos of the human. And to
recognize love in the lives of others -- even those with whom we are in
conflict -- love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid
war or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive.
But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning
that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has
the power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist, and
to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as the poets remind us,
is eternal."
© 2003 Educational Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.