[Peace-discuss] Honoring militarism

[Morton K. Brussel]

I couldn't agree more with Hedges' over all thesis, ---about memorials  
to honor the dead without pointing out what led to their deaths, or  
what the suffering really was or was about.

I toured museums, towns, and memorial graveyard parks of WWI in France  
a few years ago. I too was struck that the true ravages of that  
conflict were usually obscured by fascinating displays of war materiel  
and the recounting of the battles where valiant soldiers fought. The  
essential moral messages which Hedges emphasizes were thus concealed.  
At so many town and village cross roads were statues saying in  
essence, "Dead for the glory of France". Many statues indeed showed  
mothers weeping for their dead sons with the exclamation "No more  
war", but the causes of/reasons for their losses were inevitably hidden.

It seems to be the same in all nations---honoring militarism.  --mkb



Celebrating Slaughter: War and Collective Amnesia
by Chris Hedges
War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. The hushed  
voices, the well-tended grass, the flapping of the flags allow us to  
ignore how and why our young died. They hide the futility and waste of  
war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young  
soldiers and Marines into killers, and small villages in Vietnam or  
Afghanistan or Iraq into hellish bonfires. There are no images in  
these memorials of men or women with their guts hanging out of their  
bellies, screaming pathetically for their mothers. We do not see  
mangled corpses being shoved in body bags. There are no sights of  
children burned beyond recognition or moaning in horrible pain. There  
are no blind and deformed wrecks of human beings limping through life.  
War, by the time it is collectively remembered, is glorified and  
heavily censored.

I blame our war memorials and museums, our popular war films and  
books, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as much as George W. Bush.  
They provide the mental images and historical references to justify  
new conflicts. We equate Saddam Hussein with Adolf Hitler. We see al- 
Qaida as a representation of Nazi evil. We view ourselves as eternal  
liberators. These plastic representations of war reconfigure the past  
in light of the present. War memorials and romantic depictions of war  
are the social and moral props used to create the psychological  
conditions to wage new wars.

War memorials are quiet, still, reverential and tasteful. And, like  
church, such sanctuaries are important, but they allow us to forget  
that these men and women were used and often betrayed by those who led  
the nation into war. The memorials do not tell us that some always  
grow rich from large-scale human suffering. They do not explain that  
politicians play the great games of world power and stoke fear for  
their own advancement. They forget that young men and women in uniform  
are pawns in the hands of cynics, something Pat Tillman’s family sadly  
discovered. They do not expose the ignorance, raw ambition and greed  
that are the engine of war.

There is a burning need, one seen in the collective memory that has  
grown up around World War II and the Holocaust, to turn the horror of  
mass murder into a tribute to the triumph of the human spirit. The  
reality is too unpalatable. The human need to make sense of slaughter,  
to give it a grandeur it does not possess, permits the guilty to go  
free. The war makers—those who make the war but never pay the price of  
war—live among us. They pen thick memoirs that give sage advice. They  
are our elder statesmen, our war criminals. Henry Kissinger. Robert  
McNamara. Dick Cheney. George W. Bush. Any honest war memorial would  
have these statesmen hanging in effigy. Any honest democracy would  
place them behind bars.

Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, fought against the mendacity of  
collective memory until he took his own life. He railed against the  
human need to mask the truth of the Holocaust and war by giving it a  
false, moral narrative. He wrote that the contemporary history of the  
Third Reich could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian  
falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of  
reality.” He wondered if “we who have returned” have “been able to  
understand and make others understand our experience.” He wrote of the  
Jewish collaborator Chaim Rumkowski, who ran the Lodz ghetto on behalf  
of the Nazis, that “we are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is  
ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit.  
His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization that ‘descends  
into hell with trumpets and drums.’  ” We, like Rumkowski, “come to  
terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the  
ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death,  
and that close by the train is waiting.” We are, Levi understood,  
perpetually imprisoned within the madness of self-destruction. The  
rage of Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in Iraq, is a rage Levi  
felt. But it is a rage most of us do not understand.

A war memorial that attempted to depict the reality of war would be  
too subversive. It would condemn us and our capacity for evil. It  
would show that the line between the victim and the victimizer is  
razor-thin, that human beings, when the restraints are cut, are  
intoxicated by mass killing, and that war, rather than being noble,  
heroic and glorious, obliterates all that is tender, decent and kind.  
It would tell us that the celebration of national greatness is the  
celebration of our technological capacity to kill. It would warn us  
that war is always morally depraved, that even in “good” wars such as  
World War II all can become war criminals. We dropped the atomic bomb  
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nazis ran the death camps. But this  
narrative of war is unsettling. It does not create a collective memory  
that serves the interests of those who wage war and permit us to  
wallow in self-exaltation.

There are times—World War II and the Serb assault on Bosnia would be  
examples—when a population is pushed into a war. There are times when  
a nation must ingest the poison of violence to survive. But this  
violence always deforms and maims those who use it. My uncle, who  
drank himself to death in a trailer in Maine, fought for four years in  
the South Pacific during World War II. He and the soldiers in his unit  
never bothered taking Japanese prisoners.

The detritus of war, the old cannons and artillery pieces rolled out  
to stand near memorials, were curious and alluring objects in my  
childhood. But these displays angered my father, a Presbyterian  
minister who was in North Africa as an Army sergeant during World War  
II. The lifeless, clean and neat displays of weapons and puppets in  
uniforms were being used, he said, to purge the reality of war. These  
memorials sanctified violence. They turned the instruments of violence— 
the tanks, machine guns, rifles and airplanes—into an aesthetic of  
death.

These memorials, while they pay homage to those who made “the ultimate  
sacrifice,” dignify slaughter. They perpetuate the old lie of honor  
and glory. They set the ground for the next inferno. The myth of war  
manufactures a collective memory that ennobles the next war. The  
intimate, personal experience of violence turns those who return from  
war into internal exiles. They cannot compete against the power of the  
myth. This collective memory saturates the culture, but it is “a tale  
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges  
graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades  
a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of  
many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What  
Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The  
Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is  
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. 
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