each one, a face and a family
by John at 6/13/2005 11:18:00 AM
Chris Hedges (War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War) writes in "War: Realities and Myths":
The most powerful antiwar testaments, of war and what war does to us, are those that eschew images of combat. It is the suffering of the veteran whose body and mind are changed forever because he or she served a nation that sacrificed them, the suffering of families and children caught up in the unforgiving maw of war, which begin to tell the story of war. But we are not allowed to see dead bodies, at least of our own soldiers, nor do we see the wounds that forever mark a life, the wounds that leave faces and bodies horribly disfigured by burns or shrapnel. We never watch the agony of the dying. War is made palatable. It is sanitized. We are allowed to taste war's perverse thrill, but spared from seeing war's consequences. The wounded and the dead are swiftly carted offstage. And for this I blame the press, which willingly hides from us the effects of bullets, roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, which sat at the feet of those who lied to make this war possible and dutifully reported these lies and called it journalism.
War is always about this betrayal. It is about the betrayal of the young by the old, idealists by cynics and finally soldiers by politicians. Those who pay the price, those who are maimed forever by war, however, are crumpled up and thrown away. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they bring is too painful for us to hear. We prefer the myth of war, the myth of glory, honor, patriotism and heroism, words that in the terror and brutality of combat are empty, meaningless and obscene.
Read the whole article.
I was going to end this post with a primal scream and a great big "Fuck You!" to the deluded idiots who still support this war, who purposefully mistake recognizing and lamenting the pain and death caused by this unnecessary, lost conflict for gleeful reporting of the failure of Our Dear Leader's plans. But then I started to feel sorry for those people. They aren't idiots. They are just people who have lost their integrity and honesty and decency, and they are only lashing out at the shadows of doubt they see when they are alone with their thoughts. They are motivated by fear, and most especially by the fear of being wrong, because if they are wrong, there is no one else to blame.
