“War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning” by Chris Hedges
This is the text that needs to be used: “War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning” by Chris Hedges
Paper details:
Section One:
On p.3 Hedges makes the startling suggestion that “the rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years.” How does Hedges support this claim? In what sense is war” a drug?” Who are its peddlers? How could something so horrific exert such power over so many people?
On p. 17 Hedges claims he believes that “the only antidote to ward off self-destruction and the indiscriminate use of force is humility, and, ultimately, compassion.” In what ways has America moved away from these values in the past decades? How can humility and compassion, individually and collectively, restrain nations or people from going to war? Why is it so difficult, and so important to feel compassion for one’s enemies? What are some of the memorable examples of compassion can illustrate this idea, either from the book or from your own understanding?
Section Two:
What distinctions does Hedges make between sensory and mythic accounts of war? Explain what Hedges means when he says (p. 20) that “the ethnic conflicts and insurgencies of our time, whether between Serbs and Muslims or Hutus and Tutsis are not religious wars …. They are manufactured wars.” engineered by gangsters who then profit through loot. What reality does the myth of war conceal? Why are such myths necessary to those who would make war? Explain, with examples, how governments, media, and even language itself are manipulated in war to perpetuate this myth. To what extent does America perpetuate this myth? Chapter One ends with a claim that is disturbing and attractive: that war and war reporting are addictive. What does this mean? Do you agree? Why or why not? What evidence can you point to support your position?
Section Three:
In Chapter Two Hedges makes the claim that nations at war are home to a “triumphalism” that revels in “shared, unquestioned communal enterprise, however morally dubious.” Hedges uses Argentina, Israel, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States as examples. Explain what he means.
Hedges argues that the “nationalist virus” in the former Yugoslavia “was the logical outcome the country’s educational system that began in the 1950s under Tito’s rule (p. 56). How was that possible? What role did nationalism play in the war that followed? How does nationalism distort and manipulate history? How might an independent and more objective educational system have prevented the war?
Section Four:
Hedges argues that art and culture are humanizing, that they teach us to respect one another, and that they are also victims of war. How does that happen? What are some examples of how in wars factions portray themselves as victims and censor art that suggests a common humanity with the enemy? What do Hedges’ frequent references to Homer, Cicero, Shakespeare, and other writers, classical and modern, add to the book? Why does he take such pains to place more recent wars in the historical context provided by such writers?
What roles do the press and schools usually play in wartime? Why does Hedges believe that in the Gulf War the press “wanted to be used” by the military? What role should the press play? How does Hedges’ own experiences as a war correspondent – the violence he has witnessed in El Salvador, Bosnia, Iraq, and elsewhere – lend weight to his arguments? What are the most compelling examples he offers to support his views? Do Hedges’ firsthand accounts make him a more trustworthy critic of war than those who have never been to battle?
Section Five:
Chapter Four notes again how war, especially in its beginnings, is exciting, marked by “collective euphoria.” The power of life and death and destruction that soldiers have is seductive and corrupting. He also writes about the relationship between sex and war, about how male soldiers often see women as much more beautiful during war than they do afterwards, and about the corrupting power that soldiers have leads them to rape and worse.
What do you understand to be the relationship between sexual perversion and war, eroticism and death? Why, in Hedges view, does war seem to unleash the basest forms of lust? How does war affect the way the body is perceived and valued? Hedges claims that war, while fostering comradeship between soldiers, does not foster genuine friendships among them. How can that be the case?
Hedges writes that, after every war, “some struggle to tell us how the ego and vanities of commanders leads to the waste of lives and needless death, how they too became tainted, but the witnesses are soon ignored.” (p. 115) How do such witnesses become tainted? Why do citizens of post-war nations prefer not to listen to such accounts? Why is it important that they be heard? What are some of these accounts from recent US wars? In what way is Hedges’ own book just such an act of witnessing
Section Six:
In this chapter Hedges writes how the end of war is a period during which “killers make frantic and often futile efforts to hide their crimes.” Memories of events are often replaced, both in individuals and in culture by myths. Without an agreement on the truth, former enemies find it even harder to reconcile after a war ends. How does the current debate over Confederate statues in the South reflect this idea? What are some other examples of situations between former enemies where there is or was a similar difficult to agree on the truth of the conflict? Any examples where there was a successful agreement?
Section Seven:
Much of Chapter Six discusses the bias of the media in a war. Starting with the first Gulf War as an example, Hedges argues that all reporters believe their country’s cause is just. “We all believe. When you stop believing, you stop going to war.” Why would this happen?
Explain what Hedges means when he claims (p. 145) that “(the) cause sanctified by the dead, cannot be questioned without dishonoring those who gave us their lives. We become enmeshed in the imposed language. When any contradiction is raised, or there is a sense that the cause is not just in an absolute sense, the doubters are attacked as apostasy.” Give some examples from our own history of when the doubters have been attacked. This moral certainty, whether it stems from a religious or a secular source, “is a kind of fundamentalism … where self doubt is minimal,” and death, the central truth of war, is often ignored by those studying and reporting on it. Why is this central truth so often ignored? Why must self-doubt be minimal?
Section Eight:
Chapter Seven is about addiction and the psychology of war. The commitment to a cause, the “awful power and rush of battle, “make drugs, often another addiction of warriors, “war’s pale substitute.” War conquers tenderness, and love is the only source of meaning that can rival it.
Explain what Freud meant when he claimed that there are two impluses, Eros and Thanatos, in each person. Describe in your own words what these are.
War mirrors love in that both involve a sense of selflessness. But war also destroys love even while it looks and feels like love. So, while meaning is necessary for happiness, not ANY meaning will do. Does America court death today so as to provide meaning to our lives? Do terrorists actions give their deaths genuine meaning?
Section Nine:
In the Introduction to the text Hedges writes that the deadly attraction of war is that ”even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living” (p.3). At the end of the book, he writes that love “alone gives us meaning that endures.” (p. 184 – 85). How does that happen? How can we ensure that love, rather than war, remains the force that gives meaning to our lives?
Further, on pp. 184-85 Hedges writes:
“To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity, and pathos of the human. And to recognize in the lives of others – even those with whom we are in conflict – a love that is like our own. It does not mean that we will avoid war or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has the power to both resist in our nature what we know we must resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as the poets remind us, is eternal.”
Explain in your own words what you think this means?
Finally, in what way is War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning relevant to the tensions between the United States and other combatants in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and to other conflicts around the world? Do you think the book has offer new and more hopeful ways of thinking about war and peace? Is so, what are they? Or are you left with a sense of despair? Why? What might Hedges say in consolation to your despair?
