Myths of War
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 30 May 2010 01:00
- Written by Margie King Saphier
Readings
Excerpts from War Is the Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
“I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug. It is peddled by mythmakers – historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state – all of whom endow it with qualities it often does not possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about meaning and meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us. And this is why for many, war is so hard to discuss once it is over.
The enduring attraction of war is this: 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. There is no world outside the military unit. It alone endows worth and meaning. Soldiers rather die than betray this bond. And there is – as many veterans will tell you – a kind of love in this. War is an enticing elixir.” Pg. 3
********************
“War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow to the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good. For human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.
But war is a god, the ancient Greeks and Romans knew, and its worship demands human sacrifice. We call on the warrior to exemplify the qualities necessary to prosecute war – courage, loyalty, and sacrifice. The soldier, neglected and even shunned during peacetime, is suddenly held up as the exemplar of our highest ideals, the savior of the state. The soldier is often whom we want to become, although secretly many of us, including most soldiers, know that we can never match the ideal held out before us. That the myths are lies; that those who went before us were no more able to match the ideal than we are, is carefully hidden from public view. The tension between those who know combat, and thus know the public lie, and those who propagate the myth, usually ends with the mythmakers working to silence the witnesses of war.” Pp. 10 - 11
Sermon
{player 2010-05-30-11am-sermon.mp3}
Will Durant, the historian, wrote that in the entire history of humankind there have been only 29 years without war. So today, I want to recognize the myths of war and nationalism, and reveal how they distort and suppress the truth about the lives of soldiers and civilians during war; and finally how we as Unitarian Universalists are called to respond. This sermon is not anti-soldier or anti-war. It is a sermon in the quest for truth so hopefully we, as a nation, we are not so quick to send our young men and women into harm’s way.
I met Jon about nine months after he returned from Vietnam. Jon served two years: one year as dust-off medic making helicopter runs into the battlefield to pick up the wounded and the dead. The second year Jon was there as an intelligence officer. So he experienced craziness of battle and then the politics of war. Over the almost 40 years we’ve been married, Jon told me the same truths of which Hedges writes and the same truths the congregation heard articulated in the play, Still Life, performed here at First Parish by Jim Reynolds, Kate Svcek, and Francine Amari-Faulkner. These truths debunk the glorious myths about war. The truth is that the myths are racist and full of lies. One lie is we portray the soldiers and people whom we fight as evil, less than us; and we portray the U. S. soldier as a hero with qualities of courage, honor, loyalty, nobility, patriotism and the willingness to die for one’s country. The truth is the soldier on both side of the battle is an ordinary human being who ultimately fights to protect himself and his unit. This truth is nothing to be ashamed of. But these lies of elevated status hide the fact that just below the surface, most of us if we are put in certain circumstances are capable of acts of brutality. So these distortions of reality allow for war – which is really organized murder – to thrive in the minds and hearts of the people. It is not surprising that so many soldiers return from war suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Bob Kerrey, once a US senator who won a Medal Honor for his military service in Vietnam, led a combat mission that caused the death of 13 to 20 unarmed civilians, mostly women and children. Hedges points out that this tragic behavior of war is not an anomaly; it is how war is carried out; but and I quote “The potency of the myth (and this is so important) is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives justification to what is often nothing more than gross cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters (23).”
Before Hedges became a war correspondent, he went to Harvard Divinity School and received his M. Div. One of his professors was James Luther Adams, the Unitarian Universalist theologian and ethicist. Certainly Hedges assessment of war agrees with Luther’s assessment of history, which is to say it is tragic. Adams states:
“History is a tension of conflicts in which the tensions between the will to mutuality and the will to power appear in their most subtle and perverse forms.”
Jon read earlier, “War is a god; its worship requires human sacrifice,” and its quest is to give meaning to those who fight and/or die. War is a living example of Adams’ words.
In last year’s Memorial Day Sermon I talked about how humans are hard-wired in our evolution to be xenophobic. Therefore we need to be aware of this trait, so we don’t mindlessly act out of it. This year I am talking about humans being meaning-seeking animals. The combination of xenophobia and meaning seeking becomes lethal when they are used to justify mass killing.
In the wars of the last century – the 20th century – not less than 62 million civilians have perished, nearly 20 million more than the 43 million military personnel killed.
Obviously not all of the 43 million military personnel were U.S. Soldiers, and most of the 62 million were definitely not U. S. civilians; in fact as a nation we have lost comparatively few civilians. The tragic irony here is the United States is the major purveyor of the sale of weapons. Because of these weapon sales, the U.S. is complicit in wars in which we have no soldiers. According to the Congressional Research Service Report on Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, from 2000 to 2008, “The US government 2007 figures showed the U.S. provided nearly half of all the weapons sold to militaries in the developing world, as major arms sales to the most unstable regions -- many already engaged in conflict -- grew to the highest level in eight years.”
War is rationalized through rhetoric of nationalism. Nationalism is the myth fed to the masses to create a sense of solidarity, nobility and meaning by defining who is in the in-group and who is not. Individuals who defy these generalizations of “the other” may perform acts of altruism.
In peacetime, these acts may seem ordinary but during war, these acts take true courage and selflessness and often lead to ostracism of the one who quietly but bravely defies the myths.
The story about the Bosnian Fejzic, a Muslim, is such a story. During the war, the Soraks, who were a Serb family living in Bosnia, had an adult married son who was taken by the Muslim police of the Bosnian government and never heard from again. Five months later the young man’s wife gave birth to a daughter. Because of the constant bombardment andthe severe food shortages, the young mother was not able to nurse her baby. But in the midst of this mayhem and destruction, a former Bosnian neighbor, Fejzic – a Muslim -, who had a cow, brought milk for the baby everyday for 10 months until the family was able leave. Fejzic fell on hard times after the war. His altruistic behavior was a reminder to the civilians of the frightening indifference they adopted toward others in order to feel at one with nationalistic messages of the government. In wartime most people are not willing to break away from this feeling of solidarity to risk discomfort, censure or violence to help neighbors. Afterwards when the fight is over, the stories of altruistic civilians can cause civilians to feel shame so they shun the few altruistic individuals.
Before any of us begin to think, “Phew! I’ll never shun an altruistic soul or I will be that altruistic soul,” Hedges warns against the vulnerability of intellectuals. Intellectuals and social critics, who often feel ostracized by society during peace, can be seduced by the feelings of solidarity of nationalism. In fact, these enthusiastic intellectuals can become dangerous in wartime as they adopt messianic and uncompromising beliefs to be put into practice. Because many Unitarian Universalists fall into the description of social critic and intellectual, I thought it important to lift up this hazard to which we may be vulnerable.
I also want to raise up those liberal individuals who stand up against nationalism – often professors, liberals, social critics, and Unitarian Universalists who are often ostracized, imprisoned, tortured, “disappeared” and killed. I think of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King’s speech April 4, 1967 at the Riverside Church in New York City in which he declared his dual citizenship to the United States and to the world community – “To the brotherhood of man.” King publicly declared his opposition to the U.S. waging an immoral war on the people of Vietnam and he urged us to move beyond “the interrelated flaws of militarism, materialism, and racism.” As a result, King lost much support by white liberals for that speech. And he was assassinated exactly one year later in Memphis, TN.
Norbert Capek was a Unitarian minister in Prague, Czechoslovakia in the 1930’s and 40’s. Because he preached against Nazism, he was sent to a concentration camp and exterminated. It is dangerous to speak truth to power and the masses, but that does not mean we should not do it.
Hedges was the son of a Presbyterian minister, the late Rev. Thomas Hedges, who taught him that compassion is the highest virtue. After Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School, he became a war correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter. For his first assignment, he went to El Salvador, to the small dusty town of Suchitoto, which was a hotbed of rebels and government troops fighting. If Suchitoto sounds familiar, it is the town where Centro Arte para la Paz is and where our young people stay when they visit. Hedges tells how he was caught between the crossfire of the rebels and the military. He writes he promised God that if God let him live, he would leave this work. Well, as Hedges reports, he lived. Thirty minutes after the fighting stopped, Hedges was hooked on the adrenalin rush of war and the exhilaration of being alive. He understands only too well that “War is an elixir.” But 15 years of reporting on wars around the world took its toll. The carnage, the decapitated and tortured bodies, the grieving family members, all began to keep Hedges awake at night. If he slept he had nightmares. The few times he was free of nightmares was when he slept in homes where the husband and wife truly loved each other. There was a quiet joy and peace in the home even though war surrounded them. This may sound extremely simplistic, but there is nothing simplistic about love and compassion. It is our highest calling.
We, as Unitarian Universalists, by virtue of our willingness to doubt, question and challenge the status quo, are in the best position to challenge the myths of war. I thank Pat Simon, a member of First Parish who works tirelessly with the Peace Alliance toward federal legislation that would help make peace-building a national priority by creating a Department of Peace to prioritize violence prevention and peace-building efforts, as well as legislation aimed at empowering community stakeholders to work with youth against violence. And I thank Al Armenti and his work with the group, Veterans for Peace.
Both Pat and Al understand that working for peace means we need to be willing to see ourselves in others as well as others in ourselves. As a nation we need to create and market images of peace.
In an interview in 2002 in the National Catholic Reporter, Hedges explains how the United States movie images of violence and explosions taught Osama bin Laden and his men how to speak to the United States in a language we would understand: Hedges explained “… huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication.”
The interviewer asked, “Had we sown the seeds of our own attack?”
Hedges answered, “We’ve not only sown the seeds, we’ve taught them how to carry out such attacks – violence as a means of communication. … They learned how we speak, and now they speak like us. That World Trade Center attack was a Hollywood director’s dream. They figured us out. We in America don’t see it because we are not sitting in a refugee camp in Gaza when an Apache helicopter provided by the United States fires a missile in the middle of the street.”
So yes, we need to work hard for a U. S. Department of Peace to at least counter-balance the U.S. Department of War. And Yes, we need to support the work of the Veterans for Peace –they more than any of us understand the myths of war.
I will conclude with Chris Hedges’ concluding words:
To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when the drums of war are 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 love in the lives of others – even those with whom we are in conflict – love that is like our own. It does not mean 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 power both to 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.
May it be so.