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Originally Posted by Ourcrazymodern?
I don't have anything to say about (this former guy's) execution/assassination/death thing anymore. But I'd like to agree with mixedmedia again: "Downward spirals suck."
Wouldn't it be refreshing to find a visionary who could draw us towards an upward spiral?
The length of time that that might take could well outlive even this martyr business.
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Maybe there is somebody who could do it himself, or persuade the rest of us to "listen up":....
I stumbled upon him yesterday....I posted some interviews and articles he has written. He had the following to say, in the weeks immediately before the March, 2003, US invasion of Iraq.
In hindsight, his observations and predictions seem remarkably prescient, and he seems pessimistic about the trend that many in the US are embracing now....
Quote:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...8&postcount=25
INTERVIEW:
Chris Hedges
January 31, 2003 Episode no. 622
.....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.
<b>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.......</b>
........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...........
3.07.03
Politics and Economy
Transcript: Bill Moyers Talks with Chris Hedges
......The General was admirably candid. Quote: "We need to condition people that this is war. People get the idea this is going to be antiseptic. Well, it's not going to be. People are going to die."
I read those words just after finishing this book, WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING. Its author, Chris Hedges, knows about war, knows about people dying from close up experience. As a foreign correspondent for the NEW YORK TIMES, Chris Hedges covered the Balkans, the Middle East, including the first Gulf War where he was captured by the Iraqis, and Central America.
Last year he was a member of the team of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize for the NEW YORK TIMES coverage of global terrorism. Chris Hedges now writes the column, "Public Lives." He's also, by the way, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. Welcome to NOW.
HEDGES: Thank you......
......MOYERS: I heard a description of 'shock and awe' again on National Public Radio yesterday and then they came on with a report, a first-hand report from Kurds in Northern Iraq of how they had been tortured by Saddam Hussein. Cruelly, brutally, creatively tortured. Is there any kinship between what happens to civilians in a war like we're about to launch and what happens to them under the regime of a Saddam Hussein? And is there any moral relativism there?
HEDGES: Well, I don't think you can justify unleashing 3,000 precision-guided missiles in 48 hours because Saddam Hussein is a torturer, which he is. And I covered that whole withdrawal of the Iraqi forces from Northern Iraq. I was not only in the subterranean bowels of the Secret Police Headquarters where we found not only documentation but videotapes of executions. Horrible torture centers. People being— you know where the meat hooks were still sort of fastened into the ceiling of soundproofed rooms.
And then these mass graves. We were digging up as many as a thousand, 1,500 people. But that does not give you a moral justification to carry out what is, quite candidly, indiscriminate attack against civilians. That's what's going to happen when you drop this number of high explosive devices in an urban area.
MOYERS: Does the inevitability of civilian casualties make this war illegitimate?
HEDGES: Well, I think the war is illegitimate not because civilians will die. Civilians die in every conflict. It's illegitimate because the administration has not, to my mind, provided any evidence of any credible threat. And we can't go to war just because we think somebody might do something eventually.
There has to be hard intelligence. There has to be a real threat if we're going to ask our young men and women to die.....
.....MOYERS: How do you explain the phenomenon that while we venerate and mourn our own dead from say 9-11, we're curiously indifferent about those we're about to kill.
<b>HEDGES: Because we dehumanize the Other.</b> We fail to recognize the divinity of all human life. We— our own victims are the only victims that hold worth. The victims of the Other are sort of the regrettable cost of war. There is such a moral dichotomy in war. Such a frightening dichotomy that the world becomes a tableau of black and white, good and evil.
You see this in the rhetoric of the Bush Administration. They are the barbarians. I mean we begin to mirror them. You know for them we're the infidels and we call them the barbarians.
MOYERS: It happened in the Johnson Administration too. The President spoke of bringing the coonskin home.
HEDGES: Right. But that's because war is the same disease. And that's the point of the book is that it doesn't matter if I'm an Argentine or El Salvador or the occupied territories or Iraq. It's all the same sickness.
MOYERS: The world is sick too, this is a savage world, as we keep being reminded…
You do think that United States faces a threat? A threat from whatever we want to call it? That produced 9/11? You think we are at danger?
HEDGES: Yes. But not from Iraq.
MOYERS: So how do we, taking into account the moral issues that you raise…
HEDGES: Right.
MOYERS: How do we protect ourselves, defend our security, do the right thing and yet not be taken by surprise again?
<b>HEDGES: By having the courage to be vulnerable. By not folding in on ourselves. By not becoming like those who are arrayed against us. By not using their rhetoric and not adopting their worldview.
What we did after 9/11 was glorify ourselves, denigrate the others.</b> We're certainly, now at this moment, denigrating the French and the Germans who, after all, are our allies. And we created this global troika with Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon.
One fifth of the world's population, most of whom are not Arabs, look at us through the prism of Chechnya and Palestine. And yes, we certainly have to hunt down Osama bin Laden. I would like to see those who carried out 9/11, in so far as it is possible, go on trial for the crimes against humanity that they committed. But we must also begin to address the roots of that legitimate rage and anger that is against us.
It has to be a twofold battle. We are not going to stop terrorism through violence. You see that in Israel. In some ways, the best friend Hamas has is Ariel Sharon, because every time the Israelis send warplanes to bomb a refugee camp or tanks into Ramallah, it weakens and destroys that moderate center within the Palestinian community.
And essentially creates two apocalyptic visions. One on the extreme right wing of Israeli politics. And certainly one on the extreme wing of the Palestinian community. And when these apocalyptic visionaries move to the center of society, then the world becomes exceedingly dangerous. And that's what I fear. And that's what— and, but that requires us not to resort, which is a natural kind of reaction, a kind of almost knee-jerk reaction, to the use of force when force is used against us.
MOYERS: So is it enough in this kind of world just to be good?
HEDGES: Well, nobody's good. I mean we're all sinners and God loves us anyway. That's the whole point. And we live in a fallen world and it's never between the choice is never between good and evil.
The choice… or moral and immoral, as Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us. The choice is always between immoral and more immoral. And I don't think…
MOYERS: I don't think Americans feel immoral about what happened to them on 9/11. Or…
<b>HEDGES: Well, nor should they.</b>
MOYERS: Nor when listening to the report of Saddam Hussein's torture of his own people. That I don't think they feel the same way as they think he feels.
HEDGES: Well, he's a tyrant. And you know we… 9/11 is not the issue. The issue is once we unleash force of that magnitude. And I think theologians like Niebuhr would argue that we must do so and ask for forgiveness.
<b>That we, you know, when you make a choice in the world, and of course one always has to, one has to remember that there are consequences for that choice that create injustice and tragedy for others. And that's what is important to always remember and be aware of.
I think you go back and read Abraham Lincoln and he was very aware of this. And that's what made him a great leader. And in many ways a great moral philosopher.</b>
MOYERS: Can people who plan wars, presidents and generals, afford to be influenced by people like you who abhor war? Who anguish over war?
HEDGES: Well, I think any soldier that's been through combat hates war in the way that only somebody who's seen war can. It's those that lose touch with war and find it euphoric that frighten me.
MOYERS: But doesn't power exercised with ruthlessness always win?
HEDGES: Power exercised with ruthlessness always is able to crush the gentle and the compassionate. But I don't believe it always wins. Thucydides wrote about the war with Sparta that, yes, raw Spartan militarism in the short-term could conquer Athens. But that beauty, art, knowledge, philosophy, would long outlive Sparta and Spartan militarism.
And he consoled himself with that. I think in the short-term, yes, violence and force can win. But in the long-term, it leaves nothing but hollowness, emptiness. It does nothing to enrich our lives or propel us forward as human beings.
<b>MOYERS: What would you like most as — what would you most like us to be thinking about this weekend as it looks as if war is about to happen?
HEDGES: That this isn't just about the destruction of Iraq and the death of Iraqis. It's about self-destruction....</b>
MOYERS: What have you learned as a journalist covering war that we ought to know on the eve of this attack on Iraq?
HEDGES: That everybody or every generation seems to have— seems not to listen to those who went through it before and bore witness to it. But falls again for the myth. And has to learn it through a tragedy inflicted upon their young.
<b>That war is always about betrayal. It's about betrayal of soldiers by politicians. And it's about betrayal of the young by the old.</b>
MOYERS: I believe that George W. Bush tonight as you and I talk is convinced he's about to do good. A necessary act that he thinks is making a moral claim on the world. Do you believe that?
<b>HEDGES: I believe that he feels that. But I think anybody who believes that they understand the will of God and can act as an agent for God is dangerous.</b>
MOYERS: If the NEW YORK TIMES asked you to go cover the war in the next month, would you go?
HEDGES: No. No, I'm finished.
MOYERS: The book is WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING, by Chris Hedges. Thank you for being with us.
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Last edited by host; 01-06-2007 at 06:05 PM..
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