The Nation


http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030421&s=hedges

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The Press and the Myths of War
by CHRIS HEDGES

[from the April 21, 2003 issue]

In wartime the press is always part of the problem. This has been true
since the Crimean War, when William Howard Russell wrote his account of
the charge of the Light Brigade and invented the profession of the modern
war correspondent. When the nation goes to war, the press goes to war with
it. The blather on CNN or Fox or MSNBC is part of a long and sad
tradition.

The narrative we are fed about war by the state, the entertainment
industry and the press is a myth. And this myth is seductive. It empowers
and ennobles us. It boosts rating and sells newspapers--William Randolph
Hearst owed his fortune to it. It allows us to suspend individual
conscience, maybe even consciousness, for the cause. And few of us are
immune. Indeed, social critics who normally excoriate the established
order, and who also long for acceptance and acclaim, are some of the most
susceptible. It is what led a mind as great as Freud's to back, at least
at its inception, the folly of World War I. The contagion of war, of the
siren call of the nation, is so strong that most cannot resist.

War is where I have spent most of my adult life. I began covering the
insurgencies in El Salvador, where I spent five years, then went to
Guatemala and Nicaragua and Colombia, through the first intifada in the
West Bank and Gaza, the civil wars in Sudan and Yemen, the uprisings in
Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellions in southeastern Turkey and
northern Iraq, the war in Bosnia, and finally Kosovo. I have been in
ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, shot at in the
marshes of southern Iraq, imprisoned in Sudan, beaten by Saudi military
police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held prisoner for a
week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the Shiite rebellion following
the Gulf War, strafed by MIG-21s in Bosnia, fired upon by Serb snipers and
shelled for days in Sarajevo with deafening rounds of heavy artillery that
threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments. I have painful
memories that lie buried and untouched most of the time. It is never easy
when they surface.

War itself is venal, dirty, confusing and perhaps the most potent narcotic
invented by humankind. Modern industrial warfare means that most of those
who are killed never see their attackers. There is nothing glorious or
gallant about it. If we saw what wounds did to bodies, how killing is far
more like butchering an animal than the clean and neat Hollywood deaths on
the screen, it would turn our stomachs. If we saw how war turns young
people into intoxicated killers, how it gives soldiers a license to
destroy not only things but other human beings, and if we saw the perverse
thrill such destruction brings, we would be horrified and frightened. If
we understood that combat is often a constant battle with a consuming fear
we have perhaps never known, a battle that we often lose, we would find
the abstract words of war--glory, honor and patriotism--not only hollow
but obscene. If we saw the deep psychological scars of slaughter, the way
it maims and stunts those who participate in war for the rest of their
lives, we would keep our children away. Indeed, it would be hard to wage
war.

For war, when we confront it truthfully, exposes the darkness within all
of us. This darkness shatters the illusions many of us hold not only about
the human race but about ourselves. Few of us confront our own capacity
for evil, but this is especially true in wartime. And even those who
engage in combat are afterward given cups from the River Lethe to forget.
And with each swallow they imbibe the myth of war. For the myth makes war
palatable. It gives war a logic and sanctity it does not possess. It saves
us from peering into the darkest recesses of our own hearts. And this is
why we like it. It is why we clamor for myth. The myth is enjoyable, and
the press, as is true in every nation that goes to war, is only too happy
to oblige. They dish it up and we ask for more.

War as myth begins with blind patriotism, which is always thinly veiled
self-glorification. We exalt ourselves, our goodness, our decency, our
humanity, and in that self-exaltation we denigrate the other. The flip
side of nationalism is racism--look at the jokes we tell about the French.
It feels great. War as myth allows us to suspend judgment and personal
morality for the contagion of the crowd. War means we do not face death
alone. We face it as a group. And death is easier to bear because of this.
We jettison all the moral precepts we have about the murder of innocent
civilians, including children, and dismiss atrocities of war as the
regrettable cost of battle. As I write this article, hundreds of thousands
of innocent people, including children and the elderly, are trapped inside
the city of Basra in southern Iraq--a city I know well--without clean
drinking water. Many will die. But we seem, because we imbibe the myth of
war, unconcerned with the suffering of others.

Yet, at the same time, we hold up our own victims. These crowds of silent
dead--our soldiers who made "the supreme sacrifice" and our innocents who
were killed in the crimes against humanity that took place on 9/11--are
trotted out to sanctify the cause and our employment of indiscriminate
violence. To question the cause is to defile the dead. Our dead count.
Their dead do not. We endow our victims, like our cause, with
righteousness. And this righteousness gives us the moral justification to
commit murder. It is an old story.

In wartime we feel a comradeship that, for many of us, makes us feel that
for the first time we belong to the nation and the group. We are fooled
into thinking that in wartime social inequalities have been obliterated.
We are fooled into feeling that, because of the threat, we care about
others and others care about us in new and powerful waves of emotion. We
are giddy. We mistake this for friendship. It is not. Comradeship, the
kind that comes to us in wartime, is about the suppression of self-
awareness, self-possession. All is laid at the feet of the god of war. And
the cost of this comradeship, certainly for soldiers, is self-sacrifice,
self-annihilation. In wartime we become necrophiliacs.

The coverage of war by the press has one consistent and pernicious theme--
the worship of our weapons and our military might. Retired officers,
breathless reporters, somber news anchors, can barely hold back their
excitement, which is perverse and--frankly, to those who do not delight in
watching us obliterate other human beings--disgusting. We are folding in
on ourselves, losing touch with the outside world, shredding our own
humanity and turning war into entertainment and a way to empower ourselves
as a nation and individuals. And none of us are untainted. It is the dirty
thrill people used to get from watching a public execution. We are
hangmen. And the excitement we feel is in direct proportion to the rage
and anger we generate around the globe. We will pay for every bomb we drop
on Iraq.

"The first casualty when war comes," Senator Hiram Johnson said in
1917, "is truth."

The reasons for war are hidden from public view. We do not speak about the
extension of American empire but democracy and ridding the world of
terrorists--read "evil"--along with weapons of mass destruction. We do not
speak of the huge corporate interests that stand to gain even as poor
young boys from Alabama, who joined the Army because this was the only way
to get health insurance and a steady job, bleed to death along the
Euphrates. We do not speak of the lies that have been told to us in the
past by this Administration--for example, the lie that Iraq was on the way
to building a nuclear bomb. We have been rendered deaf and dumb. And when
we awake, it will be too late, certainly too late to save the dead, theirs
and ours.

The embedding of several hundred journalists in military units does not
diminish the lie. These journalists do not have access to their own
transportation. They depend on the military for everything, from food to a
place to sleep. They look to the soldiers around them for protection. When
they feel the fear of hostile fire, they identify and seek to protect
those who protect them. They become part of the team. It is a natural
reaction. I have felt it.

But in that experience, these journalists become participants in the war
effort. They want to do their bit. And their bit is the dissemination of
myth, the myth used to justify war and boost the morale of the soldiers
and civilians. The lie in wartime is almost always the lie of omission.
The blunders by our generals--whom the mythmakers always portray as heroes-
-along with the rank corruption and perversion, are masked from public
view. The intoxication of killing, the mutilation of enemy dead, the
murder of civilians and the fact that war is not about what they claim is
ignored. But in wartime don't look to the press, or most of it, for truth.
The press has another purpose.

Perhaps this is not conscious. I doubt the journalists filing the hollow
reports from Iraq, in which there are images but rarely any content, are
aware of how they are being manipulated. They, like everyone else,
believe. But when they look back they will find that war is always about
betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by
politicians and of idealists by the cynical men who wield power, the ones
who rarely pay the cost of war. We pay that cost. And we will pay it again.

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