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One hundred thirty-one demonstrators, Chris Hedges among them, were arrested in front of the White House on Thursday. |
The speeches were over. There was a
mournful harmonica rendition of taps. The 500 protesters in Lafayette
Park in front of the White House fell silent. One hundred and thirty-one
men and women, many of them military veterans wearing old fatigues,
formed a single, silent line. Under a heavy snowfall and to the slow
beat of a drum, they walked to the White House fence. They stood there
until they were arrested.
The solemnity of that funerary march, the hush, was the hardest and most moving part of Thursday’s protest
against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It unwound the bitter
memories and images of war I keep wrapped in the thick cotton wool of
forgetfulness. I was transported in that short walk to places I do not
like to go. Strange and vivid flashes swept over me—the young soldier in
El Salvador who had been shot through the back of the head and was, as I
crouched next to him, slowly curling up in a fetal position to die; the
mutilated corpses of Kosovar Albanians in the back of a flatbed truck;
the screams of a woman, her entrails spilling out of her gaping wounds,
on the cobblestones of a Sarajevo street. My experience was not unique.
Veterans around me were back in the rice paddies and lush undergrowth of
Vietnam, the dusty roads of southern Iraq or the mountain passes of
Afghanistan. Their tears showed that. There was no need to talk. We
spoke the same wordless language. The butchery of war defies, for those
who know it, articulation.
What can I tell you about war?
War perverts and destroys you. It pushes
you closer and closer to your own annihilation—spiritual, emotional and,
finally, physical. It destroys the continuity of life, tearing apart
all systems, economic, social, environmental and political, that sustain
us as human beings. War is necrophilia. The essence of war is death.
War is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and
destruction. It is organized sadism. War fosters alienation and leads
inevitably to nihilism. It is a turning away from the sanctity of life.
And yet the mythic narratives about war
perpetuate the allure of power and violence. They perpetuate the
seductiveness of the godlike force that comes with the license to kill
with impunity. All images and narratives about war disseminated by the
state, the press, religious institutions, schools and the entertainment
industry are gross and distorted lies. The clash between the fabricated
myth about war and the truth about war leaves those of us who return
from war alienated, angry and often unable to communicate. We can’t find
the words to describe war’s reality. It is as if the wider culture
sucked the words out from us and left us to sputter incoherencies. How
can you speak meaningfully about organized murder? Anything you say is
gibberish.
The sophisticated forms of industrial killing, coupled with the amoral
decisions of politicians and military leaders who direct and fund war,
hide war’s reality from public view. But those who have been in combat
see death up close. Only their story tells the moral truth about war.
The power of the Washington march was that we all knew this story. We
had no need to use stale and hackneyed clichés about war. We grieved
together.
War, once it begins, fuels new and bizarre
perversities, innovative forms of death to ward off the boredom of
routine death. This is why we would drive into towns in Bosnia and find
bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated, burned and
mutilated. That is why those slain in combat are treated as trophies by
their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of performance art. I met
soldiers who carried in their wallets the identity cards of men they
killed. They showed them to me with the imploring look of a lost child.
We swiftly deform ourselves, our essence, in war. We give up individual
conscience—maybe even consciousness—for the contagion of the crowd and
the intoxication of violence. You survive war because you repress
emotions. You do what you have to do. And this means killing. To make a
moral choice, to defy war’s enticement, is often self-destructive. But
once the survivors return home, once the danger, adrenaline highs and
the pressure of the crowd are removed, the repressed emotions surface
with a vengeance. Fear, rage, grief and guilt leap up like snake heads
to consume lives and turn nights into long, sleepless bouts with terror.
You drink to forget.
We reached the fence. The real prisoners,
the ones who blindly serve systems of power and force, are the mandarins
inside the White House, the Congress and the Pentagon. The masters of
war are slaves to the idols of empire, power and greed, to the idols of
careers, to the dead language of interests, national security, politics
and propaganda. They kill and do not know what killing is. In the rise
to power, they became smaller. Power consumes them. Once power is
obtained they become its pawn. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III,
politicians such as Barack Obama fall prey to the forces they thought
they had harnessed. The capacity to love, to cherish and protect life,
may not always triumph, but it saves us. It keeps us human. It offers
the only chance to escape from the contagion of war. Perhaps it is the
only antidote. There are times when remaining human is the only victory
possible.
The necrophilia of war is hidden under
platitudes about honor, duty or comradeship. It waits especially in
moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in
moments when the intoxication of war is at its pitch to be unleashed.
When we spend long enough in war, it comes to us as a kind of release, a
fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation
with our own destruction. In the Arab-Israeli 1973 war, almost a third
of all Israeli casualties were due to psychiatric causes—and the war
lasted only a few days. A World War II study determined that, after 60
days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will
have become psychiatric casualties. A common trait among the 2 percent
who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward
“aggressive psychopathic personalities.” In short, if you spend enough
time in combat you go insane or you were insane to begin with. War
starts out as the annihilation of the other. War ends, if we do not free
ourselves from its grasp, in self-annihilation.
Those around me at the protest, at once
haunted and maimed by war, had freed themselves of war’s contagion. They
bore its scars. They were plagued by its demons. These crippling forces
will always haunt them. But they had returned home. They had returned
to life. They had asked for atonement. In Lafayette Park they found
grace. They had recovered within themselves the capacity for reverence.
They no longer sought to become gods, to wield the power of the divine,
the power to take life. And it is out of this new acknowledgement of
weakness, remorse for their complicity in evil and an acceptance of
human imperfection that they had found wisdom. Listen to them, if you
can hear them. They are our prophets.
The tears and grief, the halting asides,
the catch in the throat, the sudden breaking off of a sentence, is the
only language that describes war. This faltering language of pain and
atonement, even shame, was carried like great, heavy boulders by these
veterans as they tromped slowly through the snow from Lafayette Park to
the White House fence. It was carried by them as they were handcuffed,
dragged through the snow, photographed for arrest, and frog-marched into
police vans. It was carried into the frigid holding cells of a
Washington jail. If it was understood by the masters of war who build
the big guns, who build the death planes, who build all the bombs and
who hide behind walls and desks, this language would expose their masks
and chasten their hollow, empty souls. This language, bereft of words,
places its faith in physical acts of nonviolent resistance, in
powerlessness and compassion, in truth. It believes that one day it will
bring down the house of war.
As Tennyson wrote in “In Memoriam”:
Behold,
we know not anything;
I can
but trust that good shall fall
At
last—far off—at last, to all,
And
every winter change to spring.
So runs
my dream: but what am I?
An
infant crying in the night:
An
infant crying for the light:
And with
no language but a cry.
Truthdig