war is a force that gives us meaning

Podcasts

Chris Hedges and the 'Other War'(Posted on Aug 7, 2007)
http://www.truthdig.com/podcast/item/20070807_chris_hedges_and_the_other_war/
TruthDig columnist Chris Hedges talks about his landmark article in The Nation magazine, "The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness," the result of seven months of interviews with troops about their experiences in Iraq.

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Books

Hedges, Chris and Laila Al-Arian. Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians. Nation Books. 2008
Best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and journalist Laila Al-Arian spent the past year interviewing over fifty veterans to expose the patterns of the occupation in Iraq. The testimonies of these soldiers-many of who remain deeply traumatized by their experiences-uncover how the very conduct of the war and occupation have turned the American forces into agents of terror for most Iraqis.

Collateral Damage is organized around key military operations-Convoys, Checkpoints, Detentions, Raids, Suppressive Fire, and "Hearts and Minds." Military convoys traveling at tremendous speeds through towns have become trains of death. Civilians are routinely run over or shot to death. Soldiers fire upon Iraqi vehicles with impunity at checkpoints. Late-night detentions based on shoddy intelligence terrify women, traumatize children, and radicalize the young men caught in their dragnet.

These soldiers have found the moral courage to speak out about the true nature of a war that has become one long, unchecked atrocity, and has given rise to the instability, sectarian violence and chaos that we witness today in Iraq. (Amazon.com)

Hedges, Chris. I Don't Believe in Atheists. Free Press. 2008
From the New York Times bestselling author of American Fascists and the NBCC finalist for War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning comes this timely and compelling work about new atheists: those who attack religion to advance the worst of global capitalism, intolerance and imperial projects.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, has long been a courageous voice in a world where there are too few. He observes that there are two radical, polarized and dangerous sides to the debate on faith and religion in America: the fundamentalists who see religious faith as their prerogative, and the new atheists who brand all religious belief as irrational and dangerous. Both sides use faith to promote a radical agenda, while the religious majority, those with a commitment to tolerance and compassion as well as to their faith, are caught in the middle.

The new atheists, led by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, do not make moral arguments about religion. Rather, they have created a new form of fundamentalism that attempts to permeate society with ideas about our own moral superiority and the omnipotence of human reason.

I Don't Believe in Atheists critiques the radical mindset that rages against religion and faith. Hedges identifies the pillars of the new atheist belief system, revealing that the stringent rules and rigid traditions in place are as strict as those of any religious practice.

Hedges claims that those who have placed blind faith in the morally neutral disciplines of reason and science create idols in their own image -- a sin for either side of the spectrum. He makes an impassioned, intelligent case against religious and secular fundamentalism, which seeks to divide the world into those worthy of moral and intellectual consideration and those who should be condemned, silenced and eradicated. Hedges shatters the new atheists' assault against religion in America, and in doing so, makes way for new, moderate voices to join the debate. This is a book that must be read to understand the state of the battle about faith. (Amazon.com)

Mejia, Camilo and Chris Hedges. Road from ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Mejia: An Iraq War Memoir. Haymarket Books.2008
Mejia, a veteran of the Iraq conflict, became an antiwar hero when he refused to return to his unit and was court-martialed in 2004 for desertion. His memoir is a blend of compelling war narrative and dubious soapboxing. Mejia's claim to conscientious objector status, after eight years in the U.S. military, months of combat and a long campaign for a discharge, rings rather hollow. The son of prominent Nicaraguan Sandinistas, he takes a view of the insurgents' "fight for self-determination" that seems naive ("[t]here seemed to be a unity that spread through the differences among Iraqis") and his prose is laced with clunky rhetoric about "the imperial dragon that devours its own soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike for the sake of profit." Most powerful are his firsthand experiences of prisoner abuse, senseless patrols that invite insurgent attacks, discord among his demoralized comrades and their careerist officers, and the constant brutalization of Iraqis by paranoid, trigger-happy GIs. (In one incident, an irate soldier arrests an eight-year-old rock thrower, who is then beaten by a local man desperate to appease the vengeful Americans.) Those stories add up to an indelible portrait of the dirty war in the Sunni triangle and Mejia's painful confrontation with his immoral complicity in it. (Amazon.com)

Hedges, Chris. American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. Free Press. 2007
Chris Hedges, a former Presbyterian seminarian turned journalist, warns that the radical Christian Rights Dominionism movement meets the classic definition of fascism and is a growing threat to justice and freedom in the United States. Hedgess quietly passionate reading of Chapters 1 and 10 brackets Eunice Wongs narration of the rest of the book. Hearing the authors words in his own voice lends authenticity to his arguments. Wongs more energized presentation is a satisfying counterpoint that gives listeners a distinct change of voice, tone, and pace. The two narrative styles combine in a well-balanced delivery of this controversial topic. Regardless of political or religious affiliation, listeners will not be bored. (Amazon.com)

Hedges, Chris and Associated Press. Iraq: A War. Olive Branch Press. 2006
Risking their lives, intrepid journalists and photographers have labored in often desperate conditions to bring images of war-torn Iraq to the rest of the world. Since no war in US history has had more carefully managed press coverage than this one, their more controversial and moving efforts have gone largely unreported in the United States. Now, here are the pictures Americans have not seen: An Iraqi boy trying to study with a bandaged eye; the bullet-riddled tail of a Red Crescent vehicle; American soldiers and Iraqi citizens alike praying; mass graves; brothers kneeling over dead brothers; babies in coffins; bloody body parts kept on ice. Each picture suggests the world and lives beyond the edges of the frame; together they show the true face of the US occupation of Iraq.

The Associated Press staff was recognized by the 2005 Pulitzer Prize "for its stunning series of photographs of the bloody yearlong combat inside Iraqi cities." Whether they set their sights on triumphant US soldiers relaxing in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces or on the injured Iraqi woman whose ambulance they shared, these photographers have brought home the horror and fear of war, and the reminder that we are all flesh and blood.

The Associated Press photographers featured include: Mohammad Adnan, J. Scott Applewhite, Jean-Marie Bouju, Gregorio Borgia, David Cheskin, Dan Chung, Pier Paolo Cito, D. Myles Cullen, Bassem Daham, Saurabh Das, Jerome Delay, Kevin Frayer, Sergie Grits, David Guttenfelder, Bilal Hussein, Nabil al-Jurani, Karim Kadim, Saeed Khan, Wathiq Khuzaie, Sasa Kralj, Brennan Linsley, Efrem Lukatsky, Jim MacMillan, Hussein Malla, Alaa al-Marjani, Jon Mills, Richard Mills, Hadi Mizban, Samir Mizban, Khalid Mohammed, John Moore, Muhammad Muheisen, Tony Nicoletti, Anja Niedringhaus, Kamal Osman, Andrew Parsons, Laura Rauch, Laurent Rebours, Terry Richards, Ivan Sekretarev, Bassem Tellawi, Mohammed Uraibi, Stefan Zaklin, and Alexander Zemlianichenko. (Amazon.com)

Hedges, Chris. Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America. Free Press. 2006
Why should all Americans-not just Christians and Jews-care about the Ten Commandments? Chris Hedges, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and Harvard Divinity School graduate, believes that the commandments keep us from committing evil. They hold our communities together. "They lead us to love, the essence of life," he writes.

Adapted from his series of articles for the New York Times comes these thoughtful essays on why we need these ancient laws -- and what happens when we abandon them. A Phish band groupie provides a springboard for a discussion of idolatry. A Long Island whiskey bar becomes a laboratory for understanding "You shall not bear false witness." Honoring the Sabbath, he shows through the observances of one busy family, may be the antidote to popular culture. The story of the havoc wreaked on one child's life vividly illustrates the reason for the commandment, "You shall not commit adultery." Throughout his essays, he deftly weaves his own experiences into the narrative, as well as references from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's classic book on good and evil, The Brothers Karamazov.

Hedges believes that the commandments hold out to us the possibility of love -- and love means living for others. The commandments are guideposts that bring us back to the right path, he writes. They call us to sacrifice. Compellingly, he urges us to abandon the culture of self; to live "not by exalting our life but by being willing to lose it." (Amazon.com)

Grinker, Lori, Robert Pledge, and Chris Hedges. Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict. de.MO. 2005
Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict is a culmination of 15 years spent photographing and interviewing men, women and children who have been on the frontlines of every major conflict of the past century. It is a portrait documenting the deep physical and psychological effects on the veterans whose bodies and minds are changed forever. It is not the "politics" of a particular war that the people in this work represent, but rather a portrayal of our culture of warring and the aftermath of war in human terms.

Organized in reverse chronological order, from the most recently ended conflicts to the early part of the century, the book includes Sri Lanka, Liberia, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Israel-Palestine, El Salvador, Cambodia, Eritrea-Ethiopia, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the Falkland Islands, Vietnam, the Middle East, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Algeria, Indochina, Korea, China, World War II, Spain and World War I. (Amazon.com)

Hedges, Chris. What Every Person Should Know About War. Free Press. 2003
Acclaimed New York Times journalist and author Chris Hedges offers a critical -- and fascinating -- lesson in the dangerous realities of our age: a stark look at the effects of war on combatants. Utterly lacking in rhetoric or dogma, this manual relies instead on bare fact, frank description, and a spare question-and-answer format. Hedges allows U.S. military documentation of the brutalizing physical and psychological consequences of combat to speak for itself.

Hedges poses dozens of questions that young soldiers might ask about combat, and then answers them by quoting from medical and psychological studies.

• What are my chances of being wounded or killed if we go to war?
• What does it feel like to get shot?
• What do artillery shells do to you?
• What is the most painful way to get wounded?
• Will I be afraid?
• What could happen to me in a nuclear attack?
• What does it feel like to kill someone?
• Can I withstand torture?
• What are the long-term consequences of combat stress?
• What will happen to my body after I die?

This profound and devastating portrayal of the horrors to which we subject our armed forces stands as a ringing indictment of the glorification of war and the concealment of its barbarity. (Amazon.com)

Other Writings

All Hedges TruthDig Columns
http://www.truthdig.com/report/category/hedges/

For Palin, It’s a (Christian) Man’s World Truth Dig (September 14, 2008).
Sarah Palin may be a governor and a vice presidential candidate, but in the hyper-masculine world of the Christian right she is subservient to a male hierarchy that claims to speak for God. A cult of masculinity defines the Wasilla Assembly of God Church and the Juneau Christian Centre where she worshipped. This cult propagates a vision of the world where believers are warriors. They are taught to ready themselves to engage in a final cataclysmic clash with the forces of Satan. This cosmic struggle, infused with the language of war, death and violence, leads inevitably to the slaughter by the righteous of all non-Christians. The photos of Palin hunched over dead animals she has shot are not simply images of a woman who is a member of the National Rifle Association. They are images of a woman who believes violence against nonbelievers is ultimately part of her religious life.

FISA Bill's Real Target: What Remains of Our Open Society LA Times (July 12, 2008)
If the sweeping surveillance law signed by President Bush on Thursday -- giving the U.S. government nearly unchecked authority to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of innocent Americans -- is allowed to stand, we will have eroded one of the most important bulwarks to a free press and an open society. The new FISA Amendments Act nearly eviscerates oversight of government surveillance. It allows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review only general procedures for spying rather than individual warrants. The court will not be told specifics about who will be wiretapped, which means the law provides woefully inadequate safeguards to protect innocent people whose communications are caught up in the government's dragnet surveillance program.

Surviving the 4th of July TruthDig (July 7, 2008)
I survive the degradation that has become America--a land that exalts itself as a bastion of freedom and liberty while it tortures human beings, stripped of their rights, in offshore penal colonies, a land that wages wars defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, a land that turns its back on its poor, its weak, its mentally ill, in a relentless drive to embrace totalitarian capitalism--because I read books. I have 5,000 of them. They line every wall of my house. And I do not own a television.

The Hedonists of Power by Chris Hedges TruthDig (June 23, 2008)
Washington has become Versailles. We are ruled, entertained and informed by courtiers. The popular media are courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are courtiers. Our pundits and experts are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games. We are being had.

The Iran Trap TruthDig (June 8, 2008)
The failure by Barack Obama to chart another course in the Middle East, to defy the Israel lobby and to denounce the Bush administration's inexorable march toward a conflict with Iran is a failure to challenge the collective insanity that has gripped the political leadership in the United States and Israel.

A Conscientious Objection TruthDig (March 23, 2008)
Those of us who oppose the war, who believe that all U.S. troops should be withdrawn and the network of permanent bases in Iraq dismantled, have only two options in the coming presidential elections--Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney. A vote for any of the Republican and Democratic candidates is a vote to perpetuate the occupation of Iraq and a lengthy and futile war of attrition with the Iraqi insurgency. You can sign on for the suicidal hundred-year war with John McCain or for the nebulous open-ended war-lite with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, or back those who reject the war. If you vote Democrat or Republican in the coming election be honest with yourself--you have voted to allow the U.S. government to continue, in some form, the campaign that needlessly kills ever more Americans and Iraqis in a conflict that has become the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history and a crime under international law.

Hands off Iran The Nation. (November 21, 2007)
I will not pay my income tax if we go to war with Iran. I realize this is a desperate and perhaps futile gesture. But an attack on Iran--which appears increasingly likely before the coming presidential election--will unleash a regional conflict of catastrophic proportions. This war, and especially Iranian retaliatory strikes on American targets, will be used to silence domestic dissent and abolish what is left of our civil liberties. It will solidify the slow-motion coup d'etat that has been under way since the 9/11 attacks. It could mean the death of the Republic.

Mutually Assured Destruction in the Middle East TruthDig (July 14, 2006)
ISRAEL'S air, land and sea blockade of Lebanon, which includes jet fighter strikes against the airport in Beirut, presages a new era in the Middle East, one in which the center has collapsed and Muslim and Jewish extremists, capable only of the language of violence, determine the parameters of existence. These strikes, like the suicide bombings carried out by Islamic militants in Iraq or Israel, expose the Ahab-like self-immolation that now inflects the region. And unless it is halted soon, unless those fueling these conflicts learn to speak another language, unless they break free from an indulgence in collective necrophilia, the Middle East will slip into a death spiral.

Evidence of Things not Seen The Nation. (May 6, 2004)
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 Press and the Myths of War The Nation. (April 3, 2003)
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.

Text of the Rockford College graduation speech
Local News RockfordMay 20, 2003
http://tomcoyner.com/GraduationSpeech.htm
Hedges is a NY Times correspondent who has been covering wars for the past 15 or 20 years. Guatemala, El Salvador, Bosnia, Iraq, Persian Gulf, etc., and speaks Arabic. Author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and someone who is long past the stage of the youthful Winston Churchill, who has been quoted as having said that there is nothing quite as exhilarating as the experience of being shot at, without result.

Amnesty International NOW Magazine, Winter 2002
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/War_Peace/War_Gives_Meaning.html
War and conflict have marked most of my adult life. I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, locked in unnerving firefights in the marshes in southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guards, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in central Bosnia, shot at by Serb snipers and shelled with deafening rounds of artillery in Sarajevo that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments. I have seen too much of violent death. I have tasted too much of my own fear. I have painful memories that lie buried most of the time. It is never easy when they surface.

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