Chris Hedges' Speech

Have you read his remarks? Totally unfitting for a graduation ceremony they are, but they also reveal quite a bit about him and his philosophy. From here on, I will take any reporting of his with strong skepticism.

For we are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige, power, and security. But this will come later as our empire expands and in all this we become pariahs, tyrants to others weaker than ourselves. Isolation always impairs judgment and we are very isolated now.

"We will lose the war in the end ultimately because we will stand alone in fighting it. Our rational faculties are eroded due to our individuality. Isolation is to be avoided if at all possible."

We have folded in on ourselves, we have severely weakened the delicate international coalitions and alliances that are vital in maintaining and promoting peace and we are part now of a dubious troika in the war against terror with Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, two leaders who do not shrink in Palestine or Chechnya from carrying out acts of gratuitous and senseless acts of violence. We have become the company we keep.

Those who would bring violence against us don't care whether the UN is strong. Their goals are intimidation and subjugation and no amount of open discussion will change their minds. I can't comment on Putin and Chechnya, but it's considerably noteworthy that there is no mention of the reason why Sharon must use force so often in the occupied territories.

Terrorism will become a way of life, and when we are attacked we will, like our allies Putin and Sharon, lash out with greater fury. The circle of violence is a death spiral; no one escapes.

"It is pointless to fight terrorism. We must reach out to terrorists and try to understand their anger. We shouldn't reject their methods nor should we try to combat them. It just makes everyone unhappy."

The real injustices, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, the brutal and corrupt dictatorships we fund in the Middle East, will mean that we will not rid the extremists who hate us with bombs. Indeed we will swell their ranks. Once you master people by force you depend on force for control. In your isolation you begin to make mistakes.

Again, no mention of why Israel must respond with occupation and violence. I do agree entirely that we've been supporting the wrong people in the Middle East (and not just there). I don't understand his harping on being isolated. Switzerland has been neutral for much of it's recent history; is he saying they are hopelessly deluded?

Fear engenders cruelty; cruelty, fear, insanity, and then paralysis.

What twisted new-agey Manual for the Voluntarily Retarded did he pulls this bullshit from? When I fear for my financial prospects, my life during an emergency vehicle manuver, my friends' relationships, my parent's health, my pet's well-being, the threat of a terrorist strike...at no time am I coaxing any embers of cruelty to burn brighter. Nor am I slowly descending into madness and I don't recall ever (in a life that is certainly NOT devoid of fear) feeling paralysis as a result of fear. I'm quite certain I'm not the only one who thinks and acts the same way. This is just pseudo-philosophical garbage.

We have blundered into a nation we know little about and are caught between bitter rivalries and competing ethnic groups and leaders we do not understand. We are trying to transplant a modern system of politics invented in Europe characterized, among other things, by the division of earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship in a land where the belief in a secular civil government is an alien creed. Iraq was a cesspool for the British when they occupied it in 1917; it will be a cesspool for us as well.

Indeed, we are learning as we go and many mistakes have been made. For all of Iraq's faults, it has better chances of becoming a free society than most other Middle Eastern nations. Humans can adapt to nearly any situation if they value the outcome great enough. After the Hell of the decades of Ba'athist rule, I believe Iraq will pull through and end up better than before.

Shortly after this, he was interrupted and Rockford College President Paul Pribbenow spoke to the crowd about respecting the speaker. Mr. Hedges continued:

The occupation of the oil fields, the notion of the Kurds and the Shiites will listen to the demands of a centralized government in Baghdad, the same Kurds and Shiites who died by the tens of thousands in defiance of Sadaam Hussein, a man who happily butchered all of those who challenged him, and this ethnic rivalry has not gone away.

I find it almost so obvious that I shouldn't have to say it, but I will: the central government that will eventually emerge will bear no resemblance to the one whose place it took. The Kurds and the Shiites may be deep rivals but they now have a chance at changing things for the better. I'm stunned to read these words and try to understand how Mr. Hedges came to believe in them.

This is a war of liberation in Iraq, but it is a war now of liberation by Iraqis from American occupation.

Iraqis want us to get our jobs done and then get out post haste. Paradoxically, they keep demanding we do more, which requires more involvement and more power exercised, but many seem to stir against that...so what the hell do they really want? They aren't fighting us for libertation yet, you twat. If it comes to that, it will need more time and more negative events to trigger.

We will pay for this, but what saddens me most is that those who will by and large pay the highest price are poor kids from Mississippi or Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job or health insurance and joined the army because it was all we offered them.

"We have failed in our duty to provide for the poor and disadvantaged, for they need our attention and resources more than anything. Since all we could offer them was a military life, they took it. They have no other options."

We have lost touch with the essence of war. Following our defeat in Vietnam we became a better nation. We were humbled, even humiliated. We asked questions about ourselves we had not asked before.

"It is better to be humble than to be proud."

War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport.

It damn sure better remain a spectator sport. Does he want every able citizen to fight in every battle?

The military and the press -- remember in wartime the press is always part of the problem -- have turned war into a vast video arcade came. Its very essence -- death -- is hidden from public view.

You are part of the problem then, Mr. Hedges, given your employment by the New York Times. Thanks for clearing that up. You are also deluded if you think the death resulting from this war has really been hidden from the public. Have you forgotten the widespread public debate over the airing of images and video of POWs, Iraqi dead, and battle? Then again, you're News Media.

Because we no longer understand war, we no longer understand that it can all go horribly wrong.

Yep. No one in the US believes we can lose a war and certainly no one acknowledges the possibilities and consequences of defeat anymore. Military planners and politicans don't factor those dimensions into their ideas and solutions. Where does Hedges get this shit?

The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true -- it does create a feeling of comradeship which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time of our life, feel we belong.

War allows us to rise above our small stations in life; we find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss.

"Since, in wartime, we aren't isolated among our fellow citizens, we feel good. Belonging becomes the primary emotional value. Remember: Isolation is a bad thing. So is selffullness."

War gives us a distorted sense of self...

This is rich coming from someone who has repeatedly made it clear he thinks the promotion of "self" is unimportant. Hedges has elevated the Group above the Individual too often to just dismiss this as a rhetorical manuver.

At this point, the crowd has gotten ansty again and is making more noise. Hedges later continues:

Think back on the days after the attacks on 9-11. Suddenly we no longer felt alone; we connected with strangers, even with people we did not like. We felt we belonged, that we were somehow wrapped in the embrace of the nation, the community; in short, we no longer felt alienated.

Ya know, after reading this, I wonder if Hedges really wouldn't mind an empire. One that would bring everyone together in an orgy of altruistic warmth and understanding.

As this feeling dissipated in the weeks after the attack, there was a kind of nostalgia for its warm glow and wartime always brings with it this comradeship, which is the opposite of friendship.

Eh? Nostalgia for a few weeks' worth of sincere unease and uncertainty? Because that's what I felt, as well as most of the people I know. Is he just making this up, or do he and his friends really think like this, like a constant church support group gone insane?

Friends are predetermined; friendship takes place between men and women who possess an intellectual and emotional affinity for each other. But comradeship -- that ecstatic bliss that comes with belonging to the crowd in wartime -- is within our reach. We can all have comrades.

"Our relationships are choosen for us. Uhm, I will devolve into meaninglessness now."

The danger of the external threat that comes when we have an enemy does not create friendship; it creates comradeship. And those in wartime are deceived about what they are undergoing. And this is why once the threat is over, once war ends, comrades again become strangers to us. This is why after war we fall into despair.

I guess I just haven't lived through enough wars to get what he's saying. See, I always thought that if someone fell into despair after a war and that despair was somehow caused by the war, it was due to the DEATH, DESTRUCTION, and INHUMANITY they experienced, rather than feeling lonely.

In friendship there is a deepening of our sense of self. We become, through the friend, more aware of who we are and what we are about; we find ourselves in the eyes of the friend. Friends probe and question and challenge each other to make each of us more complete; with comradeship, the kind that comes to us in patriotic fervor, there is a suppression of self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-possession. Comrades lose their identities in wartime for the collective rush of a common cause -- a common purpose. In comradeship there are no demands on the self. This is part of its appeal and one of the reasons we miss it and seek to recreate it. Comradeship allows us to escape the demands on the self that is part of friendship.

In wartime when we feel threatened, we no longer face death alone but as a group, and this makes death easier to bear. We ennoble self-sacrifice for the other, for the comrade; in short we begin to worship death. And this is what the god of war demands of us.

There is a real good point to be made here about his hypocrisy regarding self indentity and group indentity, but I'm too jaded after reading this to put it into words.

Posted by Drizzten at May 21, 2003 02:58 PM