I have not gotten around to reading Chris Hedges’ most recent book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press, 2007). I think maybe I’m afraid his new book will be less-than-inspiring, following the whole slew of books about the Christian Right that essentially assert that religion is inherently violent, and thus, the Christian Right is the worst manifestation of this fact. (Some books about the Christian Right buck this trend and are quite good, like Mark Lewis Taylor’s Religion, Politics and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers and American Empire.) But considering my love for his two other books, his now classic War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and his catechism question-and-answer format What Every Person Should Know About War, perhaps my fears are unfounded.
His recent article, “The Death Mask of War,” in the culture-jamming periodical Adbusters certainly has me ready to give his new book another chance. Against the apologists for the tactics of the U.S. military who claim that the military “doesn’t willfully target civilians” (have they not heard of “free fire zones?”), the award-winning war journalist (and former seminary student) Hedges tells another chilling side of the story.
An excerpt:
At one point the unit was surrounded by an angry crowd protesting the occupation. Mejia and his squad opened fire on an Iraqi holding a grenade, riddling the man’s body with bullets. Mejia checked his clip afterwards and determined that he fired 11 rounds into the young man. Units, he said, nonchalantly opened fire in crowded neighborhoods with heavy M-240 Bravo machine guns, AT-4 launchers and Mark 19s, a machine gun that spits out grenades.“The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us,” Mejia writes, “led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them.”
He watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. Mejia related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck.
“Take a picture of me and this m*****f****r,” one of the soldiers who had been in Mejia’s squad in third platoon said, putting his arm around the corpse.
The shroud fell away from the body revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.
“Damn, they really f****d you up, didn’t they!?” the soldier laughed.
[…]
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds and give them uniforms with colored ribbons on their chest for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints of war, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak and rule. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself. And this idolatry has corrupted religious institutions, not only here but in most nations, making it impossible for us to separate the will of God from the will of the state.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits – few people in pulpits have much worth listening to – but it is the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us to barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies alone that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.
“But Americans don’t do this sort of thing willingly.” Yeah, and “we do not torture” either, right?
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