This is a first-rate piece of writing by journalist Chris Hedges; it gives you a good idea why the morally depraved war-mongers, who now constitute "mainstream" opinion in the United States, love to hate him. An excerpt (from the very beginning and very end of his essay):
The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war. The vanquished know the essence of war—death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence, as well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill with impunity.
But the words of the vanquished come later, sometimes long after the war, when grown men and women unpack the suffering they endured as children, what it was like to see their mother or father killed or taken away, or what it was like to lose their homes, their community, their security, and be discarded as human refuse. But by then few listen. The truth about war comes out, but usually too late. We are assured by the war-makers that these stories have no bearing on the glorious violent enterprise the nation is about to inaugurate. And, lapping up the myth of war and its sense of empowerment, we prefer not to look....
...
We are losing the war in Iraq. There has been a steady increase in the assaults carried out by the insurgents against coalition forces. The attacks over the past year have risen from about twenty a day to approximately 120. We are an isolated and reviled nation. We are tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. We have lost sight of our democratic ideals. Thucydides wrote of Athens' expanding empire and how this empire led it to become a tyrant abroad and then a tyrant at home. The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. If we do not confront our hubris and the lies told to justify the killing and mask the destruction carried out in our name in Iraq, if we do not grasp the moral corrosiveness of empire and occupation, if we continue to allow force and violence to be our primary form of communication, we will not so much defeat dictators like Saddam Hussein as become them.
Something curious has been going on at The New York Review of (Each Other's) Books over the last year. While most of their political commentary is still of the banal American liberal variety (meaning it remains far to the right of cosmopolitan opinion)--NYU's sometimes excruciatingly sanctimonious Tony Judt best exemplifies this genre, both its virtues and its limitations--I have noticed a handful of items, of which Hedges is the most recent, that take a more aggressive, and humane, posture. Will the The New York Review editors, and their cozy circle of friends, rediscover the courage displayed in the old days when Noam Chomsky was a regular writer? I'm not counting on it, but it's nice to see something politically sharp for a change in the Review's pages.
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