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Sadly this speaking of the truth about war (article below) comes not from our bishops and church leaders but from a former NY Times correspondent and now author. It compels me to To make Peace by stopping the teaching of war.
1 June 2009 / TruthDig.com
by Chris Hedges
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 writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges
graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two
decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the
author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us
Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His
most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the
Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.
