The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.
Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets. But like all prophets they are condemned and ignored for their courage. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. They know that what we are taught in school, in worship, by the press, through the entertainment industry and at home, that the melding of the state’s rhetoric with the rhetoric of religion, is empty and false.
The words these prophets speak are painful. We, as a nation, prefer to listen to those who speak from the patriotic script. We prefer to hear ourselves exalted. If veterans speak of terrible wounds visible and invisible, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax. Not our boys, we say, not them, bred in our homes, endowed with goodness and decency. For if it is easy for them to murder, what about us? And so it is simpler and more comfortable not to hear. We do not listen to the angry words that cascade forth from their lips, wishing only that they would calm down, be reasonable, get some help, and go away. We, the deformed, brand our prophets as madmen. We cast them into the desert. And this is why so many veterans are estranged and enraged. This is why so many succumb to suicide or addictions.
War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. War, from a distance, seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a small bit in the great drama of history. It promises to give us an identity as a warrior, a patriot, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits.
But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion and pain, an unchecked orgy of death. Human decency and tenderness are crushed. Those who make war work overtime to reduce love to smut, and all human beings become objects, pawns to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naively blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, come unglued. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It lets us see, although the cost is tremendous.
The Rev. William P. Mahedy, who was a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam, tells of a soldier, a former altar boy, in his book “Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets,” who says to him: “Hey, Chaplain … how come it’s a sin to hop into bed with a mama-san but it’s okay to blow away gooks out in the bush?”
“Consider the question that he and I were forced to confront on that day in a jungle clearing,” Mahedy writes. “How is it that a Christian can, with a clear conscience, spend a year in a war zone killing people and yet place his soul in jeopardy by spending a few minutes with a prostitute? If the New Testament prohibitions of sexual misconduct are to be stringently interpreted, why, then, are Jesus’ injunctions against violence not binding in the same way? In other words, what does the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ really mean?”
Military chaplains, a majority of whom are evangelical Christians, defend the life of the unborn, tout America as a Christian nation and eagerly bless the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as holy crusades. The hollowness of their morality, the staggering disconnect between the values they claim to promote, is ripped open in war.
There is a difference between killing someone who is trying to kill you and taking the life of someone who does not have the power to harm you. The first is killing. The second is murder. But in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, murder occurs far more often than killing. Families are massacred in airstrikes. Children are gunned down in blistering suppressing fire laid down in neighborhoods after an improvised explosive device goes off near a convoy. Artillery shells obliterate homes. And no one stops to look. The dead and maimed are left behind.
The utter failure of nearly all our religious institutions – whose texts are unequivocal about murder – to address the essence of war has rendered them useless. These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation.
We all have the capacity to commit evil. It takes little to unleash it. For those of us who have been to war this is the awful knowledge that is hardest to digest, the knowledge that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor-thin, that human beings find a perverse delight in destruction and death, and that few can resist the pull. At best, most of us become silent accomplices.
Wars may have to be fought to ensure survival, but they are always tragic. They always bring to the surface the worst elements of any society, those who have a penchant for violence and a lust for absolute power. They turn the moral order upside down. It was the criminal class that first organized the defense of Sarajevo. When these goons were not manning roadblocks to hold off the besieging Bosnian Serb army they were looting, raping and killing the Serb residents in the city. And those politicians who speak of war as an instrument of power, those who wage war but do not know its reality, those powerful statesmen – the Henry Kissingers, Robert McNamaras, Donald Rumsfelds, the Dick Cheneys – those who treat war as part of the great game of nations, are as amoral as the religious stooges who assist them. And when the wars are over what they have to say to us in their thick memoirs about war is also hollow, vacant and useless.
“In theological terms, war is sin,” writes Mahedy. “This has nothing to do with whether a particular war is justified or whether isolated incidents in a soldier’s war were right or wrong. The point is that war as a human enterprise is a matter of sin. It is a form of hatred for one’s fellow human beings. It produces alienation from others and nihilism, and it ultimately represents a turning away from God.”
The young soldiers and Marines do not plan or organize the war. They do not seek to justify it or explain its causes. They are taught to believe. The symbols of the nation and religion are interwoven. The will of God becomes the will of the nation. This trust is forever shattered for many in war. Soldiers in combat see the myth used to send them to war implode. They see that war is not clean or neat or noble, but venal and frightening. They see into war’s essence, which is death.
War is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians. Society’s institutions, including our religious institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked. This betrayal is so deep that many never find their way back to faith in the nation or in any god. They nurse a self-destructive anger and resentment, understandable and justified, but also crippling. Ask a combat veteran struggling to piece his or her life together about God and watch the raw vitriol and pain pour out. They have seen into the corrupt heart of America, into the emptiness of its most sacred institutions, into our staggering hypocrisy, and those of us who refuse to heed their words become complicit in the evil they denounce. Chris Hedges, who spent nearly two decades as a war correspondent for The New York Times and other newspapers, is the author of “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” due out in July. His Truthdig column appears every Monday.
Gilad Atzmon Palestine Think Tank Sun, 31 May 2009 10:32 UTC
As part of their racist campaign against the indigenous Palestinians, Israeli lawmakers are now insisting upon making the commemoration of the Nakba illegal. Recently a number of Israeli cabinet and Knesset Members proposed a "draft law" that would criminalize the remembrance of 1948 Palestinian holocaust (Nakba) by Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship. Interestingly enough, the Jewish state that sets its raison d’être around the remembrance of Jewish suffering is attempting to ban Palestinians from doing exactly the same with their own. As we know, Israel had wiped out every possible remnant of Palestinian existence on the ground. Palestinian villages, towns, orchards, fields and cultural assets had been erased soon after 1948. Currently, the Israeli lawmakers are taking the war against the Palestinian heritage one step further. It is not just a physical expulsion and erasure of facts on the ground, it is not just racially motivated ethnic cleansing, starvation, land confiscation, house demolition, bombing schools or spreading white phosphorous over populated neighbourhoods, from now on, Israel wants to invade the Palestinian mind. Israeli Knesset members insist upon eradicating the Palestinian collective memory. At least formally, they are trying to ban the right to remember. As Khalid Amayreh pointed out a few days ago, "one Israeli Palestinian parliamentarian compared the proposed law with an imagined promulgation by Germany of a law banning all Jewish activities commemorating the holocaust." The equation between the Nakba and the Jewish holocaust is well placed. We are talking about two racist crimes of a colossal magnitude. Yet, it is rather obvious that while Germans came collectively to terms with their past, the Jewish state is advancing into its seventh decade of denial bonded with total abuse of an innocent civilian population. In the light of the new measures of Israeli merciless brutality it is rather interesting to explore a Jewish ‘voice of reason’. The odd voice of a person who stood up against this very ludicrous draft law. Professor Ruth Gavison is such a voice. Gavison is an Israeli Law professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is also ‘the president’ of, try not to laugh, ‘The Centre of Zionist, Jewish, Liberal and Humanitarian Thought’. Last week she published an article in the highly popular Hebrew Ynet online news magazine denouncing the new proposed law. Professor Gavison believes that Zionism could be interpreted as humanist and a liberal endeavour. However, a brief scrutiny of her thoughts reveals the devastating truth, the Law professor lacks the essential comprehension of the notion of universal ethics or humanism. Her vision of justice, is rather Zionised. She, seemingly, tries to juggle some old Zionist symbolic clichés hoping that her Hebrew readers would be too bored to challenge her lame argument. Gavison is against the draft law. She rightly argues that the proposed law is, "Unjustified and foolish for misidentifying the core problem in our public life." She argues that legalism is the least appropriate route to confront the core issue. But this is more or less where Professor Gavison runs out of kindness. In spite of the promising departure, it doesn’t take too long before the Israeli law professor shows her spots. Here is Gavison on the Nakba. "It is an accepted fact that the day when the Jewish majority celebrates their independence in their own land, is the same day that symbolizes for some of the Arab minority the day of their disaster." It is indeed revealing to know that as far as Professor Gavison is concerned, it is not the Palestinians as a whole who commemorate their Nakba as a disaster but only just "some" of them. However, for Gavison, the Palestinians have themselves to blame for it and no one but themselves. "It must be remembered," says Gavison, that "it could as well be different… this day could have been a celebration for both Israelis and Palestinians who could celebrate the foundation of two national states." One may wonder at this stage, who is it exactly which Gavison is trying to fool or mislead. Surely she must know that the plan to expel the Palestinians was well imbued in the Zionist agenda from the very beginning. "The Palestinians," she continues, "stood up against the partition resolution and the consequences of this war is the fact that the Israeli state was erected on the wreckage of the Palestinian society and over the Palestinian land. Many Palestinians became refugees and a Palestinian state is yet to be established." One would expect that at this stage, the Israeli law professor who is also a ‘president’ of an institute that is there to promote an image of ‘Jewish humanism’ would come with the necessary conclusion: time is more than ripe to bring the expelled Palestinians back to their lands and homes. Do not hold your breath, Gavison is not exactly a universal humanist, she is just a Zionist one. All she really wants is to stop the current legislation that bans Palestinians from mourning. In other words, she wants to allow Palestinians to be sad so they can lament as much as they want. "Sadness is a natural feeling for people who suffer so much," acknowledges the gracious professor, "We should never deny the history, we should never ban it legally, our challenge is to confront it." One would expect that such a revelation from an alleged humanist would lead her to acknowledge the Zionist sin and even take responsibility. This is not going to happen. The president of ‘The Centre of ‘Zionist, Jewish, Liberal and Humanitarian Thought’ doesn’t fit easily into our common notion of a humanist. She is more of a Jewish tribal campaigner that tries to mould some liberal sporadic terminology to justify some relentless and crude non-ethical behaviour. Gavison doesn’t really want to bring justice to the region. All she demands is to develop an "awareness of the past, that would eventually evolve into a civilian future in which Arab and Jews live side by side," never together I guess. True, Gavison is indeed compassionate enough to let the Palestinians lament over their past. But she is clearly reluctant to take responsibility for the consequences of the Jewish national colonial apparatus. She clearly prefers to dwell on Palestinian land and even to call it "homeland" rather than giving it back to its true owner. More than the right wing Zionist zealots who brought up the sinister draft law, it is actually Professor Gavison, the so-called ‘humanist Zionist’, who embodies the true meaning of Israeli brutality and ugliness: In the name of humanist symbolism she promotes the maintenance of the Jewish nationalist crime. Professor Gavison ends her article by declaring that, "denial of the past is inappropriate, but failing to take responsibility for it is unacceptable either. We have to come with solutions that approve the right of the Jews of self determination in (part of their) homeland." I would really expect the profound ‘Zio-humanist’ professor to open our eyes so we understand once and for all what gives the Jews the right to ‘self determination’ at the expense of others. Once we understand that, we may be mature enough to let professor Gavison or any other ‘Humanist Zionist’ enlighten us so we grasp what is it in Palestine that makes it into a legitimate Jewish homeland. Reading Gavison reveals once again how devastating the truth of the matter is: Zionism and liberal Jewish thought have very little to do with humanism, ethics or universalism. If anything, Zionism and humanism are opposing concepts for the simple reason that Zionism is a racially orientated tribal philosophy and humanism aims at the universal.
