War is Sin

[jose-uno]

War Is Sin
Monday 01 June 2009

by: Chris Hedges | Visit article original @ Truthdig


An American flag stands in front of a gravestone at Arlington National
Cemetery. (Photo: Getty Images)
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, who spent nearly two decades as a war correspondent
for The New York Times and other newspapers, is the author of "Empire
of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," due
out in July. His Truthdig column appears every Monday.