Why do days like today bring out the worst in disruptors?

I seriously want to know why people claim to be liberals, come to the DU and then proceed to tell us how awful we are.

No one cheers anybody's death.

End this Invasion Now.

:evilgrin:

But I do notice a lot of people signed up to DU during the week long reagasm to scold us,and did so again today.We're bad,bad people :)

Especially you forkboy. One of the worst offenders! :evilgrin:

:D

you go and dash my hopes.

I am not bad.

Quit responding to this shit!

I was kidding about us being bad people :shrug:

Happy now?

My point being, there is wwwaaaaaayyyyyyyy tttttttooooo many "DU'ers" who are posting this crap about how "oh so sorry we are" for Americans dying overseas. Well, I say not new...dying in a theatrical way is only because it makes good news.

:shrug:

Shouldn't I be tense about the end of the world? B-)

it's all for the best :)

But not Johnson, nor Nick Berg.

I gotta confess something else, too. I'm a little steamed at our "friends" in the House of Saud who seem to have this major attitude of "Eh, so what? like you're gonna DO anything to us? Does $65.90 a bbl cool you down any? Thought so, Fuckin' Infidels!"

Dutch sucked and aint worthy of the name Rex (not like me at least :) )

:7

Fuck em.

so they have something to yell about.

THAT SIG TICKER IS AN OUTRAGE! HAVE YOU NO SHAME!?

:shrug:

:headbang:

:cry: LOL............ :toast:

We need healers to get us through this.

:thumbsup:

And I'm no disruptor, but if Paul Johnson was my dad, there would be a small number of DUers whose asses I would like to kick. So, yes, Mr. Johnson is one death out of many, many, countless unnecessary deaths. And yes, this is Dubya's fault. But there is still a guy dead, a human being, publicly executed in front of the entire world.

And the way a small minority of people are reacting to his death does bother me.

about this guy, a contractor, right? and yet they don't get this outraged on morning news talk shows about the 3 dead Marines or whomever in uniform dies. It is sick that these people are treated as "heroes." I don't think they are heroic, but I'm sorry they were killed.

He's just a guy, who was kidnapped, and publicly executed. I saw this guy's family on television. His son was in his 30s, I think. Crying because his dad was captured and being threatened.

The guy wasn't a hero. But he was a dad. You know? And he had kids, and a wife who loved him. And so do our Marines and our soldiers and our sailors. And so do the Iraqis.

And all I'm saying is that some pretty evil fucks just cut off somebody's dad's head and broadcast it around the world and that some of the comments here weren't exactly sensitive to that fact, and while the people who have made those comments have the right to say them, I have the right to imagine the things I would want to do to them if that was MY dad they were talking about.

You are alive. Others aren't. Certain deaths are HYPER-NEWS.

Wonder why?

However, the implications from some DUers that this guy's death was no big thing because his death was some sort of karmic justice for him being so "greedy" (the only evidence of this that is cited is that he lived in Saudi Arabia) do tend to irritate me, and after seeing that grown man cry over his dad yesterday, my bleeding liberal heart does go out to him. And I do think about how I would feel if I were in his place.

I'll also have you know that I feel the same way about the picture in this week's Newsweek of an Iraqi boy holding this picture of his dead father at Abu Ghraib.

War is bullshit. People dying is tragic. And it does rub me the wrong way when some act like this guy dying was no big deal. It is a big deal. It's a big deal to the guy's wife, it's a big deal to his daughter and his son and it's a big deal to me.

doesn't make me feel like dismissing it as I have seen some people do (not talking about you...I haven't seen any of your posts that I'm aware of).

I think, like with Rayguns death, people are getting pissed because they know what the media is going to do to make this seem bigger and more important than any innocent Iraqi kid's death, or *thousands* of innocents kids' deaths...but some of the ways that anger is taken out might offend me as much as the media creating hyper-news. I think it's great we can comment on that.

I guess my point is that just b/c someone expresses their sadness with a few reactions on DU doesn't mean they don't have as much or more frustration with hyper news.

The Anti-Net-Nanny movement will be on your case shortly, if they haven't been already.

The same way that you apparently won't, either.

:)

:)

It's refreshing to occasionally disagree with the people on this site. One of my biggest fears is having my opinions supplied to me from others -- to not think for myself. When I agree almost all the time with stuff on this site, it makes me fear that I've become no better than a "dittohead".

So this is kinda nice, in a really messed up kinda way.

he did not belong. He would still have his head attached to his body. I am sorry he is dead, but if you go where the danger is...you have to expect that this could happen.

on the bad side of town at 2:30 in the morning and gets anally gang raped... well, I guess she just shouldn't have been where she didn't belong. If she had just stayed where she belonged, maybe she wouldn't have been brutally violated by those six guys.

I mean, I'm sorry she got raped, but it's her own fault, right?

By the way, what is our place, as people? I mean, Paul Johnson worked in Saudi Arabia, but that's apparently "where he didn't belong". So, where DID he belong? If I go on vacation to Egypt to see the pyramids, or maybe Cyprus or (heaven forbid) Jerusalem and something like this happens to me, can I expect the same level of compassion?

it was dangerous. I am sorry he was killed...but he knew the risk.


EDIT: Americans are not well like in the Middle East right now in case you hadn't heard. Again...I am sorry he was killed it is a tragedy...but he knew the risk and accepted it.

He's been in Saudi Arabia for a decade. First of all. Not to say it was all sunshine and rainbows then either, but it's not like he just hopped the plane there a month ago.

Second, the soldiers who signed up for service did so knowing that it was dangerous. Police officers and firefighters who don their badges every day of the year do so knowing it's dangerous. Hell, every time I get behind the wheel of my car or fly in an airplane, I do so knowing its dangerous. Hopefully you don't have a "Serves them right" attitude when they die, too.

"serves him right" attitude. It is sad he died. But come on...he knew the risk.

But others tonight have.

Like I said before, even if he knew the risk (and he ought to have), that doesn't make his death any less tragic.

Dale Earnhart drove a fuckin' car at 190 miles an hour... he knew the risk, but it was still tragic that he died.

Paul Wellstone got on a small plane during an election with these Nazi fucks in office. He knew the risk, but it was still tragic that he died.

All over the country, police and firefighters die in the line of duty... knowing the risk, but still tragic.

Same with soldiers in Iraq, who knew it was risky to sign up, but went anyway only to die on the side of the road after a blast rips through their unarmored Humvee. Tragic.

Coal miners, airplane pilots, construction workers, electrical linemen, lumberjacks, convenience store clerks, bank tellers, all have somewhat risky jobs... and when they die, it's tragic.

That's what I'm saying.

His death is tragic. But again...he knew the risk. Bushco...increased the risk substantially.

of innocents in the occupied and war-torn territories of the Middle & Far East.

He knowingly worked on these weapons of death for decades while cashing lucrative paychecks for it. Your comparison to a woman "anally gang-raped" because she got lost is bankrupt because Johnson knew EXACTLY what he was doing- he didn't just take a wrong turn & end up in a dangerous situation; he helped perpetuate the violence of war.

I feel sorry for him and his family because they are human beings and all humans hurt when they lose a loved one but the man was no hero and no innocent.

Lockheed Martin is the US' largest weapons manufacturer and rivals Halliburton as the nation's #1 war profiteer. It is effing time we Americans started making moral choices about what type of work we will and won't engage in & what we will & won't support. It's also time we started accepting responsibility for those choices.

A world without war would be really fucking nice. I'd really like it if one day everyone in the whole world said, "You know what? Fuck this war bullshit. We're done. The tanks, the helicopters, the gunboats, the machine guns, the nukes? Trash em. We don't need em."

But that hasn't happened yet and until it does, there will be companies like Lockheed Martin who will hire people who will work for them so they can put food on their families and that doesn't mean that they all should have their heads chopped off.

So this guy made helicopters in Saudi Arabia, and I agree that it would have been much nicer if he was knitting sweaters or building bicycles, maybe in Omaha or Topeka or something, but he wasn't and that doesn't mean that he deserved to be killed, or that it's any less of a tragedy that he was.

Dubya said that too.

I often use that phrase to make fun of the dim son.

I'm sleepy,...see you later!

The implication that I am a Freeper disruptor because I think people could be a little more respectful toward a man who just literally had his head taken off has made me a little trigger-happy.

I don't think he "deserved" to be killed but the innocents dead from those Apache helicopters deserve it even less so I reserve my pity for them.

Employees of the weapons' manufacturers are handsomely rewarded in this life-time- especially when they go overseas to help peddle the wares. I consider it a deplorable waste of a human life when they are targetted in an effort to get them to leave the countries where our meddling is not welcomed by the people- but not a tragedy.

A tragedy is a little girl with both arms blown off or a family made homeless by Apache strikes.

I hear what you are saying about making a living but sometimes you get so sick of all this death and destruction that you draw a line and where I drew mine leaves no sympathy for people like Hammill & Johnson. It's not that I don't want to give them any, it's just that I have none left because it's all going to the innocent victims of these wars- those who are not profitting from it. There are so many of them.

And I'm not saying that you personally do/did this... but to me, a sufficient compromise would be that if a guy gets his head chopped off, and one doesn't have a lot of sympathy for him because thier sympathy is with other victims of violence, one could be silently apathetic and that would be fine.

The people I take issue with are the ones who say, essentially, "He got what he deserved."

In reality, I don't because these same people are turned into heroes and a raison d'etre for violence by the Right Wing. It's more of a pre-emptive strike to mute their propaganda.

Many of the same people who are screaming the loudest about the deplorable, embarrassing reaction to Reagan's death and stories like this one are the same ones who were unbelievably mute over the torture photos; it's hard to take their outrage seriously because it's so selective.

And as I type this... there's Bush ranting that "There's no justification for killing him. He was just doing his job." And so it begins. Again. The insidious worming into people's hearts to justify our actions.

i have raised three fine children to adulthood. i'm an adult, with opinions. some of which are harsh, cause i'm an old smart ass.

i hate war. i especially hate bushwar. this poor guy was involved in war profiteering, he knew he was in a dangerous area. yet, he put his family through this shit HIMSELF. maybe, he's just a schlub like me, i'm even older, trying to get by.

but, he was making a killing working over there, to use the pun. his family is going through this grief BECAUSE of him.

i know it's a harsh assessment, and nobody wants to admit it.

one of my posts yesterday had a smart ass headline, to sarcstically, cynically make the point that bush is making a HUUUUUGE deal about it, while no mention, or coverage of our dead sons and daughters is on the t.v. machine right now. nor is there for the

THIRTY

THOUSAND

DEAD

INNOCENT

PEOPLE

they have families. they grieve. where are they? i don't see them on my t.v. machine.

But does it have to be black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us sort of thing? I mean, can I grieve for a fallen soldier and the tortured, murdered Iraqi civilian with the same bleeding heart that grieves for a family who just watched their father's head get sliced off?

Why does it have to be one-or-the-other?

been that bad today? i did notice some of the posts that the deleted guy or gal was back...

they're trying to assuage their guilt by projecting it onto us.

So expressing their opinion means they're just claiming to be liberal? I don't get it. And I haven't seen anyone saying that others here are awful, but that they think the response is. I don't think there is anything wrong with people explaining their differing reactions/emotions/opinions on what happened today. :shrug:

Were some of these people ultra low count posters who got deleted and banned for disrupting? Or were they just low post count DUers who don't agree with some of the posts on this matter? Because I think there is a difference. I see a lot of people being slammed because they don't agree about what happened to the hostage today. I saw it happen during Reagan's death, and I'm seeing it happen today. It happened to people with both high and low counts.

If you say something on DU, it isn't immune from criticism from anybody. If you stand by what you say, and have no problem with saying it, then why do you care what anyone else thinks? If you don't agree with their criticism, then say so, but all of this name calling comes across as defensive at best, and attempting to shout down and shut out those who don't agree.

It seems so, well, draconian.

"Shame on you! You're using a man's death for political gain!" Oh, Puhleeze. Like the BFEE wasn't using the guy for political advantage from the get-go...in fact, that's the origin of my misgivings on the whole matter in the first place.

the way people get all worked up

like they ACTUALLY KNEW the guy

And they can feel it!

between AQ & SH; GW goes wacky at a press conference and his nose looks like Rudolph's; another defection from his administration (the ambassador rat that jumped ship); Raygun's family says he can't use dad's image and Nancy is a no show; talk of indictments; cell phones don't work and then, when the press is finally acting like it gives a damn and the slants are not so slanted what happens?

Some poor American is beheaded in Saudi and now we are pushed backwards when the forward momentom had just begun. The majority of the people around us are screaming nuke 'em, nuke 'em all. We know that this would not have happened if evil weed boy and his admin had not invaded and occupied a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11.

We question how it is the murderers of Johnson were caught and killed so quickly. We wonder how OBL has stayed hidden all this time. We wonder how Drudge gets his crap so fast.

It is human nature, we are hopeful, we are angry, we are scared, we are hurt, we are tired. So sometimes we don't react the way a "liberal" should. I am not perfect, I am human.

and certainly the criticism of liberals acting "badly" is par for the course I guess. But damn, after this whole Reagan thing...How Must We Behave? is ridiculous. It's just a message board. A good one, but, just a board and anyone can chime in. Mopaul is human too.

we need to take a deep breath and step away from it all (I know I do) and recharge. Mopaul is human and he has done nothing wrong. It is, as you wisely point out, an opinion board and opinions are like belly buttons, we all have one. :hug:

Rumsfeld had 'warned' people that they would fight this war with all sorts of disinformation, smoke and mirrors right before the war started. I am looking for that quote because it never fails- everytime Bush is in trouble, here comes another distraction to re-inflame the public and distract them from the real news.

Good post!

the front page. The timing is incredibly :tinfoilhat:

I still have trouble with the whole Johnson thing. I know there are conspiracy theories running rampant alleging pentagon or cia or fbi and I think it is more basic than that. Out sourcing! the mercenaries our nation has employed over there that are controlled by the wealthy and are answerable to no one.

I have worked with jerks that are like most of these crazy private security guys. They are nutso and they get the "good v. evil" stuck in their heads and see themselves as "good", they will stop at nothing to get the results they want. One poor victim sacrificed for the "good" of their cause, the righteousness of their goals, is no big deal. Add that to the money can buy you happiness=power, and they are very very scary and unstoppable.

Forgive the ignorance, but what do you mean when you say "put it with my sig line"? People refer to sig line and I never know what they are talking about. Sorry, I don't know all the capabilities/resources available yet (heck I just figured out the smilies!).

Thanks again. :+

Just go to http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_forums and click on "Options"

then select "Edit your profile"

Signature is the last option there. It's also on that page that you can select an avatar. PM me if you have any questions...

Welcome to DU :toast:

My "sig line" is the jpg "are you boycotting IAMS" & this entire paragraph. You're allowed a generous 400 characters to make an enduring statement that shows up in the footnore of all your posts...

BOYCOTT IAMS & EUKANABA What’s Wrong With Iams? - Video here

You know, the only thing I never got over in life is I took a young lady to a dance when I was in high school and she left with somebody else. And that's what the Democrats, some, have done to the black community.
We helped take you to the dance and you leave with right wingers, you leave with people that you say are swing voters, you leave with people that are antithetical to our history and antithetical to our interests. I am saying in 2004, if we take you to the party, you going home with us or we're not taking you to the party.
Al Sharpton, September 2003 Democratic Debates
http://www.ericblumrich.com/thanks.html (A+ Flash / Thanks Arcane1)
Robert Fisk\'s photos of civilian victims

I feel for Paul Johnson's family, and of course I agree that his death is tragic and disgusting.

At the same time, I feel a deep resentment for our media and our government, who anxiously display this sort of death because it fits into the propaganda. They ignore our soldiers' deaths, they certainly ignore the civilian Iraqi deaths, they even ignore the murdered Iraqi prisoners', instead focussing on dog leashes and nudity.

But when a man like Paul Johnson is killed, it's time for a '3 Minutes Hate'. We all must stop and agree on how horrible it was, and how animalistic his killers are.

It's the lack of perspective and balance that angers so many of us.

But threads are started describing decadent DUers and broad brushing us ALL.

Expect more death folks. I don't want it, but I know it's coming.

to broadbrush us all. I also don't think that having sympathy for the hostage and his family necessarily means that one isn't on our side. I do think it is a strong, emotional reaction that we're all having, which is natural. And I really hope you're wrong about more deaths coming, but I'm afraid you arne't :(

I never said sympathy for a contractor hostage equated ones views with FR.

I just think too much emphasis is placed upon this person's death....compared to the soldiers who died this week and get no coverage. It is a theatrical death. No?

I was talking about DU in general. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear about that.

:headbang:

1) I didn't lurk here very much today, but it *is* insensitive to survivors to load a heap of verbal assault on this contractor. One only need ask the question how you would feel if this had been a relative of yours.

2) It *is* hugely more insensitive to put *more* importance on this man's death, which happened to be a beheading, than to recognize the emotional turmoil and abuse of thousands (THOUSANDS!) of Iraqi citizens, many of whom heard "The USA is coming", "Shock and Awe", followed by the rain of bombs for many days on end, not knowing which would would kill, or maim them indiscriminately.

3) It is incredibly naive to not recognize that the beheading act is a form of psychological warfare on the rest of the U.S., playing to our worst fears in order to drag us deeper into the conflict in the middle east, and thus gain more recruits for Islamic fundamentalists & terrorists.

to your 3) statement: who is doing the beheading?

-- but I don't.

Bush/Cheney/Haliburton/B&R all certainly benefit hugely from continuation this war, in terms of economic gain.

The terrorists gain in terms of recruits and political power.

Both have means, motive and opportunity. Schmucks like me will not figure it out tonight, nor do I have much faith in the media to undertake the kind of investigative journalism that would be needed to get a clear answer.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

You cheer death? The Dali lama does not. In fact, no one should cheer death. Why do you cheer death?

He wants his avatar back.

That's all I have to say about that.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

For calling him evil? When he says that he cheers the deaths of Americans in the Middle East? What the fuck is that about?

where as the other poster,as misguided as the post may be,attacks no DUer personally.

If it wasn't so... true.

evil fuck, right?

of the Evil Fucks.

try it,you'll see.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

but why does it deserve tombstoning?

wing nuts love to come in here and post outrageous shit to make us look bad...

didn't you catch the irony of celebrating American deaths while having a Dahli Lamai avator (sp-?)? I guarantee you that irony was intentional...

with over 500 posts I'm not ready to tombstone someone over one obviously dumb post :shrug:

If something was going to be done it would have already. Take, for example, how quickly my calling him "evil" got deleted.

:shrug:

Just being descriptive.

Seems easy enough to understand :shrug:

I couldn't come up with a word that insulted as much as someone, say, celebrating the death of every American who died in the Middle East or anything, but I did my best.

but so does the deletion of the crazy-ass post that started it, in my opinion. I see why both were deleted.

Real Life to notice this latest rash of flames and PC police work.

Lots of people I don't know die in the most horrific manners imaginable, but few get in the news. Heard much lately about kids being hacked to pieces in the Sudan or Ivory Coast? Venezuela or Columbia? The Bronx?

But, some slimy furriner hacks one, or two, heads off of an American, and all hell breaks loose.

Oh the barbarity! Oh, the humanity!

Well, yeah. It is barbaric. Maybe as barbaric as dropping a bomb on a wedding party.

But, it is a barbaric world we live in, and I don't see anybody stopping it. I see revenge and bloodlust for the killings, and calls for "justice."

More killing, and the cycle never stops.

Isn't anyone tired of this randy old script?

They ain't tired of the script! They'll do it again, and again. And Dumbo Americans will say "of course they should...so I am safe!"

the whole 'do it to make us safer' bullshit or the 'if we didn't go over there they'd come over here' nonsense makes me vomit.

It is sad and no excuse can set aside the murder. That said, how many Americans were outraged when 700, many woman and children were slain in Faluja?

I recommend this book. I get no fee for promoting it.

"War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" by Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges has been a war reporter for the past 15 years, most recently for The New York Times. His book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, is one of the most striking analyses and critiques of what happens to people and societies as they go to war to be published in many years. Writing with a clarity and tone reminiscent of Albert Camus, Hedges unravels the myths and dysfunctional nationalism that grip nations heading to war; the intoxicating effect of these causes and rhetoric; and the terrible costs that soldiers, victims and societies pay -- when the realities of war -- not the rhetoric -- are experienced. He spoke to TomPaine.com's Steven Rosenfeld.

TomPaine.com: When a country prepares for war and goes to war, there are changes in that country’s politics and culture. You write that a myth emerges -- a seductive myth as leaders spin out a cause. You write that a patriotism, a "thinly veiled form of self-worship appears." What do you mean by this myth, this cause, this patriotism and what you then say is an intoxicating result?

Chris Hedges: Well myth is always part of the way we understand war within a society. It’s always there. But I think in a peacetime society we are at least open to other ways of looking at war. Just as patriotism is always part of the society. In wartime, the myth becomes ascendant. Patriotism, national self-glorification infects everything, including culture. That’s why you would go to symphony events and people wave flags and play the "Star Spangled Banner." In essence, it’s the destruction of culture, which is always a prerequisite in wartime. Wartime always begins with the destruction of your own culture. Once you enter a conflict, or at the inception of a conflict, you are given a language by which you speak. The state gives you a language to speak and you can’t speak outside that language or it becomes very difficult. There is no communication outside of the clichés and the jingos, "The War on Terror," "Showdown With Iraq," "The Axis of Evil," all of this stuff. So that whatever disquiet we feel, we no longer have the words in which to express it. The myth predominates. The myth, which is a lie, of course, built around glory, heroism, heroic self-sacrifice, the nobility of the nation. And it is a kind of intoxication. People lose individual conscience for this huge communal enterprise.

TP.c: You write there are different war myths -- myths that fuel conflicts. What type of myth do you see animating the discussion today in the United States as it looks at Iraq?

Hedges: Well I think the myth is remarkably similar from war zone to war zone. At least, as it pertains to how the nation that prosecutes a war looks at itself. We become the embodiment of light and goodness. We become the defenders of civilization, of all that is decent. We are more noble than others. We are braver than others. We are kinder and more compassionate than others -- that the enemy at our gate is perfidious, dark, somewhat inhuman. We turn them into two-dimensional figures. I think that’s part of the process of linguistically dehumanizing them. And in wartime, we always turn the other into an object, and often, quite literally, in the form of a corpse.

TP.c: Where are we in the United States, now, in this progression?

Hedges: Well, we’ve come frightenly far in this process. And this has been a long progression. It began at the end of the Vietnam war. The defeat in Vietnam made us a better nation and a better people. We were forced to step outside our own borders and see how other people saw us. We were forced to accept very unpleasant truths about ourselves -- our own capacity for evil. I think that that process, especially during the Reagan years, or at least that state, began to disintegrate. War once again became fun: Grenada; Panama, culminating in the Persian Gulf War. So that we’re now at a process -- Freud argues that all of life, both for the individual and within human society, is a battle between Eros, or love, and Thanatos, or the death instinct. And that one of these instincts is always ascendant, at one time or another. I think after the Vietnam war, because of the terrible costs that we paid, because of the tragedy that Vietnam was, Eros was ascendant. I think after the Persian Gulf war, where we fell in love with war -- and what is war, war is death -- Thanatos is ascendant. It will, unfortunately, take that grim harvest of dead, that ultimately those that are intoxicated with war must always swallow, for us to wake up again.

TP.c: When you say the rush to war is like a drug, how is it addictive? What void does it fill? What needs are fulfilled by this kind of rhetoric and this kind of myth-making, and this kind of political discourse, that are not otherwise accomplished in a peacetime political environment?

Hedges: Well, I think war is probably the supreme drug. War -- first of all, it is a narcotic. You can easily become addicted to it. And that’s why it’s often so hard for people who spend prolonged times in combat to return to peacetime society. There’s a huge alienation, a huge disconnection, often a longing to go back to the subculture of war. War has a very dark beauty, a kind of fascination with the grotesque. The Bible called it "the lust of the eye" and warned believers against it. War has a rush. It has a hallucinogenic quality. It has that sort of stoned-out sense of -- that zombie-like quality that comes with not enough sleep, sort of being shelled too long. I think, in many ways, there is no drug, or there are no combination of drugs that are as potent as war, and one could argue as addictive. It certainly is as addictive as any narcotic.

TomPaine.com: For people who haven’t read your reports in The New York Times, or don’t know what actually goes behind the reporting that’s gone into them, where have you been that has brought you on this course to write about this topic?

Chris Hedges: Well, I went to Seminary -- I didn’t go to journalism school. So this stretches way back to my own education, my own theological education, my study of ethics. I went to war, not because I was a gun nut, or wanted adventure, although to be honest, that was part of it. I did have a longing for that kind of epic battle that could define my life. I grew up reading everything on the Holocaust and on the Spanish Civil War, but I went as an idealist. I went to Latin America in the early ‘80s when most of these countries were ruled by pretty heinous military dictatorships. And I thought this was as close as I was going to come in my lifetime to fighting fascism. I wanted that. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand what war was. And I got caught up in the subculture, and to be honest, the addiction that war was. And I ended up over the next 15 years traveling from war zone to war zone to war zone with that fraternity of dysfunctional war correspondents who became my friends -- some of whom were killed, including my closest friend who was killed in Sierra Leone in May of 2000. So I got sucked into the kind of whirlpool that war is -- into the death instinct.

TP.c: For people here, in the states, who have never been in a war zone, can you just talk about some of the situations you put yourself into and what you saw about war that is completely counterpoint to the rhetoric about the cause.

Hedges: Well, the cause is... is always a lie. If people understood, or individuals or societies understood in sensory way what war was, they’d never do it. War is organized industrial slaughter. The good example is the Vietnam War. It began as a mythic war against communism and this kind of stuff, and -- especially when the middle class began finding their sons coming home in body bags -- people began to look at war in a very different light. It no longer was mythic. It became sensory war, i.e. we began to see war without that film, that mythic film that I think colors our vision of all violent conflicts. And then the war became impossible to prosecute. So the cause, the myth, the notion of glory -- those are lies. They’re always lies. And nations need them. Emperiums need them especially in order to get a populace to support a war. But they’re untrue.

TP.c: So, you’d be sent into the field to cover different conflicts, what would you see that would be fundamentally at odds with this -- what you’re describing as the lie?

Hedges: Well, it takes anyone in combat about 30 seconds to realize that they’ve been lied to. War, combat is nothing like it’s presented -- not only by the entertainment industry, by Hollywood, but by the press, by writers such as Cornelius Ryan or Stephen Ambrose, who just died. These are myth-makers.The press is guilty of this. The press in wartime is always part of the problem. But when you get into combat, it’s venal. It’s dirty. It’s confusing. It’s humiliating, because you feel powerless. The noise is deafening. But, most importantly, you feel fear in a way that you’ve probably never felt fear before. And anyone who spends a lot of time in combat struggles always with this terrible, terrible fear -- this deep, instinctual desire for self-preservation. And there are always times when fear rules you. In wartime, you learn you’re not the person you want to be -- or think you were. You don’t dash out under fire to save your wounded comrade. Occasionally, this happens, but most of the time you’re terrified. And that’s very, very sobering. And it’s a huge wake-up call. It shows you that the images that you’ve been fed, both about war, and that you have created for yourself, are wrong.

TP.c: Well, what do you think reporters can or should be doing that’s different?

Hedges: Well, I think the big thing is you can’t accept the language the state gives you. I mean, this is not a war in any conventional sense -- I’m talking about the "War on Terror" -- nor is it a war on terror. I think we have to dissect the clichés. Clichés are the enemy of bad writing, but also the enemy of clear thought, as George Orwell wrote. I think that’s the first thing, we have to not speak in the language in which the state gives us. Secondly, I think we have to ask the hard questions. And I think The New York Times hasn’t been bad on this. I think the Times has been pretty good, by looking at "what is it?" There was an editorial, I think in yesterday’s Times, that said, "You know, there is no hard intelligence that he has anything that he’s going to use against us, and before we go to war you have to show us." That is the proper response, and I laud the paper for printing that editorial.

TP.c: What’s so interesting is, it doesn’t get much stronger than that. Yet, on the other hand, what you write about in the book, is that a lot of people in the country who aren’t privy to details at that level, or aren’t as politically tuned in -- they want to believe that this cause is good. They trust what the president says. And there’s an appeal, as you say, in society’s march toward war that fills certain needs.

Hedges: Well, I think that’s the problem. There’s a lot that we just don’t really feel like seeing because we’re having too much fun exulting in our own military prowess and our ability to mold and shape the world in ways that we want. There is a kind of suspension of self-criticism, both as a nation and as a person that takes place in wartime. And that’s part of what removes the anxiety of normal daily living. We’re no longer required to make moral choice. Moral choice has been made for us by the state. And to question the decisions of the state is to be branded, not only a traitor, but to be pushed outside that kind of communal entity within a society that war always creates. And that’s a very difficult, lonely and painful experience. So most people, not necessarily because they’re bad people in any way, but most people find it emotionally far more convenient, but also far more pleasurable just to go along. The problem is, under poor leadership, or wandering into a war where we shouldn’t be, we can find ourselves in heaps of trouble.

http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6657

"The myth, which is a lie, of course, built around glory, heroism, heroic self-sacrifice, the nobility of the nation. And it is a kind of intoxication." Chris Hedges

And absolutely right on the money. This guy (Hedges) "gets it".

:kick::kick:

Book-marked & thank you for posting that!