War is a force that gives us meaning is an extraordinary book. While simply told, it is a complex and deep meditation on the nature of war and humanity. I have never read anything remotely like it, and it feels important. It is all signal, no noise. Ultimately it is a plea to engage with and understand war and what it does to us.
Pulitzer prize winning journalist Chris Hedges spent 20 years reporting from war zones in Africa, the Middle East, South America and Europe (including 15 years working for the New York Times, which he was fired from for speaking out against the war in Iraq). He has a Masters in Divinity, and brings an unflinching moral gaze. He has seen much of the worst of humanity.
Perhaps most shockingly, he is not anti-war. War may sometimes be necessary, but war does not absolve us of responsibility for our acts.
Easy takeaways: the myths we are told of war are lies. The representations in film are lies. The version of war we get in the media is a lie, one which the media is complicit in, caught up in the madness, willingly servicing the myth. Hedges describes the working and importance of those myths, about war, sacrifice and glory, and about nations; how authentic culture is destroyed and replaced by myths, the destruction of memory and reality to allow war to flourish; how those lonely voice that speak out will be ostracised and suffer for it.
The experience of war is both hideous and an ongoing peak experience, for combatants and victims alike. Facing ourselves through the experience of fear and horror reveals how little we are and grants life intensity and meaning. A madness descends as the moral norms of reality are lifted. He writes of the will to die, of reconciling oneself to a senseless death, and the struggle to operate in the normal world afterwards. This is why so many returned soldiers kill themselves. This is why so many war reporters keep going back to war, chasing their own death.
Those who rise to prominence in war are the thugs, criminals and psychos, let loose in the name of a myth, who inevitably turn from the ideal and abuse their power in the most heinous ways.
In particular he confronts that this is in all of us. That when the event descends, those with the moral character to resist are very few and far between. Normal people do unspeakable things, but the aftermath for many is being psychologically and spiritually broken. The worst crimes are often committed by the militias rather than the trained soldiers.
The sheer number and nature of the examples which casually illustrate the book is where much of the force comes in. It is genuinely disturbing. We have an educated guide through hell, who quotes the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare as readily as those who have filled mass graves.
He also speaks of how we come to terms with war and heal from it; how we wake from the madness and resume normality. The process of confronting the past, and memory, and what really happened, and digging up the mass graves which reveal the atrocities we committed. In his experience, nearly everyone in wartime is complicit.
He speaks of the way we project meaning onto conflict, pick sides, and ascribe the side we support our own image and qualities, regardless of the truth of it. He speaks of the frenetic empty sex.
The only solution, of course, is love, the dance between eros and thanatos; but most crucially, to see love in our enemy, and recognise it as the same as the love in ourselves.
Incredible, complex, powerful. A deep meditation on humanity, life, and the capacity for horror in all of us. He speaks of so much more than I have covered here.
This is a book we should all be aware of, and I suspect from this review you will know if you need to read it. If you feel the call, I recommend it extremely highly.
Hedges wrote this book in response to 9-11, a warning to his nation as it entered the madness of war. He has gone on over the last decade to write a whole bunch of really right-on seeming books dealing with the contemporary issues that need to be addressed yet which rarely are spoken of at all. Check him out.