News & Politics > Interview

A FORCE THAT MOVES US:
AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS HEDGES

For full text of interview, please go to www.lornatychostup.com.

A foreign correspondent for 15 years, Chris Hedges joined the staff of the New York Times in 1990, after working for the Dallas Morning News, the Christian Science Monitor, and National Public Radio. He has covered insurgencies in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Columbia, the first and second intifadas in the West Bank and Gaza, the civil wars in the Sudan and Yemen, the uprising in Algeria and the Punjab, the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and the communist regimes in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, the Gulf War, the Kurdish rebellions in Turkey and Northern Iraq, and the war in Bosnia and Kosovo. Hedges has recently written two books about his experiences as a war correspondent, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (Public Affairs, 2002) and What Every Person Should Know about War (Free Press, 2003).

Lorna Tychostup: For me, reading these books was like taking a journey into a war zone. It was one horrifying statistic after another. You touched on a lot of things in both books. Was your purpose to scare people?

Chris Hedges: Yes, of course.

LT: Yet you acknowledge that war is inevitable.

CH: I think war is inevitable. Of course, that is something many people debate. But I do want people to be afraid of war because war is a horrifying phenomenon. The devastation that war wreaks on individuals and societies, I think, is probably something that’s not fully understood unless one goes through it. Not only the greed that it causes, but the psychological scarring that it causes, the way that it can deform and distort whole nations, and it takes generations to recover. So yes, I want people to be frightened of war. You know, I’m not a pacifist.

LT: People are annoyed about that.

CH: I know they are.

LT: They read your book and they expect you to be a pacifist.

CH: Yeah, but when you sit in Sarajevo as I did under the siege, with upwards of 2,000 Serbian shells coming into the city a day, constant sniper fire, four to five dead a day, two dozen wounded a day, and you know that Serb gunners on the heights above you want to exterminate you, you don’t sit around in those apartments and have discussions about whether or not you should be a pacifist. In fact, those kinds of discussions would provoke gales of laughter. There are, unfortunately, times when you must fight for self-preservation and self-defense. I think those are probably the only times [war] is worth fighting, unless it’s to stop genocide or atrocity. For me that’s the lesson of the Holocaust: that if you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. I think we are culpable for the genocide that took place in Rwanda. I supported the intervention in Kosovo; it was done badly of course.... I supported the intervention in Bosnia, which was also done badly. Those armed interventions are policing actions; it’s not the same as war. The tragedy of war is that war, I do believe, at times is inevitable, but of course it stunts you, scars you, perverts you, even if it’s done for, let’s call it, a legitimate reason. War is a very dangerous and powerful poison, and if you imbibe it even in self-defense, it’s still a poison.

I want to make going to war a last resort. I want people to, if they have to pick up a gun, understand that this is tragic. There are times when self-preservation requires you to employ violence. What bothers me is the kind of euphoria and excitement and myth of war that’s used to sell war to an unsuspecting public and to young kids who think that somehow this is a test of their manhood, or a rite of passage, or will ennoble them, or this kind of stuff. I want to combat this elixir, this myth where, in our own society, we somehow feel empowered by the use of violence. I think this is what took place during the war on Iraq. We watched these cable news shows where they talked about the power of these weapons and for many people, they saw it sort of an extension of, and/or an inflation of, their own personal power. It was never any understanding or recognition of what was happening on the other end of this. You know, the bodies that were being decapitated, eviscerated...the innocents, because when you send devices of that caliber, that power into residential areas, there are always innocents, including children, who die. And when war is turned into a big video arcade game, when war becomes a celebration of us, then it becomes easy to wage war for the wrong reasons, which I think we’ve been doing.

LT: Who’s responsible for that?

CH: The State puts it out, but the media is complicitous. When a nation goes to war, the press feels that it’s sort of its patriotic duty to boost morale and disseminate the message....

LT: Where does that come from? This floors me. Your book is an indictment of the press, but you don’t come right out and say it.

CH: It is an indictment of the way the press covers war and the way a national press covers war in wartime. Oh, it is very much so.

LT: You blame the public for not informing themselves enough?

CH: No, I blame the public for wanting that emotional experience and not wanting to hear the truth. But the real, the most pernicious forces are the press and the State. The State manufactures the message and the press that disseminates it, now in 24-hour news cycles, so that the State invents the language by which we speak in wartime. The clichés and the aphorisms that are used to describe the “experience”. Of course it’s not real—these clichés—and it becomes very hard to think outside the box, to think differently, especially when you have the electronic media pounding that into your head hour after hour after hour.
LT: This is what struck me about the whole premise of the book. Journalists—you all choose to go to these war zones and see the dead bodies and the bullets are flying and you’re all risking your lives, but no one is willing to take a stand... I don’t understand that.

CH: You do choose it and it’s a mixture of reasons. There are many motives for doing it. Some of them are dark and some of them are good. Some of it is just outrage. I don’t think there was a reporter in Sarajevo during the siege who didn’t feel that one of the reasons that they took the risks that they took everyday—and remember that 45 reporters were killed in Sarajevo, over 60 in Bosnia—took that risk because they believed that this was a crime and there should be intervention by the international community to stop the slaughter. And that was the main reason why I volunteered to go to Sarajevo, and why I stayed there and did what I did. So I think that that is a motive, but along with that motive comes this kind of adrenaline-driven lifestyle, this sense of empowerment—because in a place like Sarajevo, as the New York Times correspondent you are a pretty powerful figure. You have a suite at the Holiday Inn—of course, one side of it is sheared off by artillery shells—but you have a suite at the Holiday Inn and an armored car and a lot of money, and it becomes very hard, after you do this for many years, to return to normal life. You just feel alienated and distant and you fall into a kind of despair after the war is over. That’s why everyone, when the war was over in Bosnia, sat around and tried to figure out which war they were going to get to next—Chechnya, East Timor, you know, somewhere. So, they don’t know how to go home, it’s very hard. And because they can’t come home, it’s taken more than a few friends of mine. War reporting is much like being a firefighter or a cop or a soldier. I mean, I don’t think it’s unique to war reporting, although war reporting is probably a little more dangerous than most—I mean, not more dangerous than maybe being a soldier, but it’s certainly right up there...

LT: The brutality in knowing what you’ve experienced plugged me in immediately. It took me a long time to read these books. It’s not something you can just take in…because you told the truth. You state you know about the unwillingness of people—they don’t want to hear the truth. I don’t agree with that. I think the American public does want to know the truth.

CH: I don’t think they do. Having lived through war, [I believe that] people like that kind of euphoria that comes with belonging to the nation and having a cause and exalting yourself. And it sort of defies logic. I think there does come a time, and it may be coming to us with the bloodletting in Iraq, that people stop and begin to ask the right questions. But as long as war is one big party and winning the war is like winning the Super Bowl, [people] don’t ask questions. Not a lot of questions were being asked up until now. I really look at the Democrats and I’m appalled. Finally now, they begin to raise questions. Well, they should have been raising questions last fall. And those of us who were [raising questions] were really a tiny minority. And I think that there was a terrible moral failing.

LT: Defines “us”. Reporters? Journalists?

CH: Anybody who was out there speaking about Iraq. The numbers of people denouncing this enterprise were tiny. If you look at many of the “liberal” voices—Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens—they fell in line. Certainly the mainstream press, the columnists...Krugman, he was great. But very few. That was very disheartening too. And I think it’s because they were responding to a public that liked it. They got off on it. I don’t think they’re getting off on it now. But this is the consequence of what we’ve done, and it’s a very predictable consequence.

LT: I feel the press didn’t do their job.

CH: Well, I agree. I don’t disagree with that; I feel the press didn’t do their job. I’m not arguing with you that the mainstream media, including the New York Times, completely failed to cover the opposition—I mean completely. Because they’re out of touch—I mean they’re elitist, they’re not in touch with the grassroots. There is a significant opposition, yes, but I believe, unfortunately, having traveled all around the country, there is a huge swath of middle America that believes a lot of what it hears on Fox and MSNBC. I think that our democracy is in very grave danger because of it. I think that because we have politicians who essentially govern by polls, that’s why very, very few were willing to take this on. Wellstone, Dean, but there are not many. And that’s because their pollsters told them it wasn’t a good idea and they all fell in line. And they gave the power to Bush to wage war without, essentially, getting congressional approval. I think that was done because everybody was high on war.

LT: But all the press had to do was report the facts. There’s no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

CH: Yeah, I know, I know, I know that.

LT: It’s not a big thing. It’s not like you have to be a genius.

CH: Right, the press completely failed us, and the political opposition failed us, and we were failed in many, many ways and we’re paying for it now. I’m just telling you how the press works in wartime. I am not arguing with you; I am agreeing with you.

LT: You can blame it on the politicians, but the bottom line is, if you have a government and the government is spewing, the press should be the barrier, the filter. Where’s the filter?

CH: Well look, for most of these, especially with these cable news networks, this is a business. It’s about ratings and it’s about entertainment. War is entertainment. And war, if it’s presented as myth and empowerment and a crusade, it’s great entertainment. And if war is presented as it really is, which is brutal and venal and perverted and sick and dirty and cruel, people don’t want to see it. CNN’s lifeblood is essentially conflict to conflict. But it’s not reporting the conflict as it is, it’s reporting the conflict as we want it to appear. Reporting the conflict as myth. This is how William Randolph Hearst built his empire—off the myth of war, creating a war, in essence.

LT: There are schools for journalism and there is an ethic about objective reporting. Does it come down to the fact that these journalists just don’t want to lose their jobs? How come they can’t fight and set up their own system?
CH: No. I don’t think it is just a job. But I think a lot of [reporters] think they should do their bit for the effort. In the Persian Gulf War the press pool system that only allowed 100 reporters and photographers to go out with the military, out of 800, was administered by the press. The military pool system in the Persian Gulf War could have never existed without the complete collusion of the press. I think they felt that...there is a kind of identification with the effort of the nation at wartime. And this has just been true since the invention of the modern war correspondent in the Crimean War. And I don’t see that any way is any different including this one. There is a long, sad, pathetic tradition of boosterism on the part of the press in wartime for 200 years. And those journalists who have the courage to speak out are very swiftly shunted to the side.

LT: So fear keeps them...

CH: I don’t think it is fear. I wish it was fear. I don’t even think they are that conscious of what they are doing. I think it’s a kind of belief that they should do it. That is their role. That they need to find that hometown hero. There is a kind of yearning for that Jessica Lynch story—which, of course, now turns out to be untrue. The press wants to report it because they want to believe it and because they know that is what their readers or their viewers want to see. And they give it to them.

LT: I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that people wouldn’t watch if they saw themselves on TV having a peace rally. That was not shown ever on TV. You don’t think the ratings coming from the under-represented population would be there?
CH: I’d love to believe you’re right, and again it’s sort of an unknowable. But having lived through a lot of societies at war, I’ve always found that the vast majority of people, certainly at war’s inception, become very swiftly intoxicated by the enterprise, even the so-called social critics and intellectuals. Those people who stand out and oppose war are often very forlorn figures. Let’s also remember that if we get hit with another terrorist attack, it’s going to be very difficult to speak out because fear has a way of propelling people toward those black-and-white, hard-line, messianic forces that promise that they can save you. This is what happened in Israel, for instance. I think that now there are the right questions being asked about the war in Iraq.
LT: Doesn’t what you just said fly in the face of the American myth? The American myth is not this frightened little child screaming for daddy to take care of him because he’s just been knocked down.

CH: I think Americans are some of the most spoiled people on the face of the Earth, having lived all over the world. Look at Americans when they go abroad. The slightest inconvenience and they fly into rages. In Cairo, all the expatriates did was sit around and complain about how Egypt wasn’t the United States. They made me sick; I wouldn’t hang out with them. America is one of the few countries where you can be a 40-year-old and have the maturity of a 12-year-old because you’re so coddled and protected and pampered. We live in a very artificial garden for the most part. Let’s face it, we live with phenomenal opulence, luxury, and wealth, and we’re quite content to live with that and think of ourselves as good people. But the only way to do it is not ask the hard questions. Not really ask or understand what was done in our name in Angola. Or Nicaragua. Or the host of other countries in the developing world that I have covered over the last two decades. We prefer to turn away and not see it. We don’t want to see it.

LT: We are now in Iraq. The press has been reporting the administration’s line that the attacks on coalition troops are coming from leftover loyalists of Saddam’s regime—Baathists, as opposed to a general unified uprising of Iraqis who want to shake off occupying forces. What do you see happening?
CH: What I see happening is, yes, I am certain there are elements [of some former Saddamists]. They are the people who have the expertise and everything else. But I think that what we are seeing is a resistance movement being built against American occupation that is just beginning to find its....Who wouldn’t be pissed off? Having spent a lot of time in the Middle East and in Iraq, I always felt that Iraqis would never accept a foreign occupying power at all. Especially Iraq. Iraq is not Egypt. There is a hardness in Iraq, and violence has always been a form of political expression in Iraq in a way that it hasn’t in Egypt. The national characteristics of Iraqis, they are harder...it just wasn’t going to work. I believed—and I think what is happening now certainly justifies my earlier predictions—that this was just going to go very badly very quickly.

LT: In both books, you set up an argument that Iraq is a worst-case scenario for war. You talk about urban fighting...

CH: Oh, it is the worst-case scenario. It is horrible because all the cruise missiles in the world won’t help you when you want to take a city block. It becomes very frustrating—the Israelis go through this on the West Bank—when you have this elusive enemy that melts into the woodwork. It is what Robert J. Lipton calls “atrocity producing situations,” where because you can’t find your enemy, because you live in a hostile populace, everybody becomes the enemy. So that you end up with a situation where you murder the woman in the rice patty as somehow revenge for that booby trap that was set off in your unit three days before. That is certainly what has happened in Gaza, between the Israelis and the Palestinians. You lash out at everyone like a wounded animal. And in that, of course, you only fuel the violence, further isolate yourself, and set the groundwork for the indiscriminate abuse, if not murder, of innocents.

LT: According to your books, that is pretty much who get killed in war.

CH: That is pretty much who get killed in war. Innocents.

LT: Civilian deaths outnumber military deaths...

CH: Look at modern warfare like the Balkans. The percentages are staggering. It’s in the book, I can’t remember.

LT: You write, “In the wars of the 1990s, civilian deaths constituted between 75 to 90 percent of all war deaths.”

CH: The number is huge. That is mostly who die. In the war in Iraq, who died? It was mostly civilians.

LT: But no one cares. We don’t get that statistic.

CH: Right. We all talk about the scars of Vietnam, but do we talk about the two million Vietnamese who were killed in the war? No. Nations always care about their own and have pity for their own and seem to be phenomenally indifferent and callous toward the “other”.

LT: In my experience, reporters want to do the stories about the peace movement, about the war…

CH: I think that is true, on a ground level. Let’s not be naive about who runs these corporations—Viacom, GE, Disney. It is news as entertainment. War is entertainment and stories are judged on their entertainment value, not on their worth, not on the value of the story itself. I think that the Times, for all its tepidness, is still a good paper. They will run stuff based on its news value, not on its entertainment value. But now the networks are completely corrupted. Not only just the cable networks, which are just trash TV, but even CBS, NBC, ABC. And that is a change. When I began 20 years ago, these people all had bureaus abroad; their correspondents, say in Central America, spoke Spanish; they went out, they reported a story, they produced a three-to-five-minute piece. That’s all gone. It has vanished.

TV reporters were really reporters. They tend to be restricted by that 22-minute format, but they reported, produced real stories. Now they don’t report anymore. It’s all chat—it’s garbage. And that corruption has seeped into papers. There are still a few good papers. I wish they had a little more backbone.
LT: Which publications would you suggest to our readers?

CH: I think you’d better read the foreign press. The British press, unfortunately, is way ahead of us. I read the French press. I read Le Monde. You have to search out more alternatives. You have Harper’s—Harper’s magazine is amazing. I have problems with the Nation. I like the Nation, but it tends to be too much rhetoric. Harper’s still reports. The Atlantic is useless. The New Yorker, with the exception of Sy Hersh, doesn’t have much bite to it. You have to make an effort. Those people who care—you can find it. But you just have to make more effort to find it.

LT: Are you done now, with the war reporting?

CH: Yeah, I’m done now. Well, I am going to Israel in 10 days. But I am done with war reporting.

LT: Are you in a state of denial?

CH: I don’t know. I have to admit that I am going, but I also have to tell you I am done with war reporting.

LT: What are you going to do in Israel?

CH: I am going to do a story on the [barrier wall in the West Bank] for Harper’s.

LT: You say the attraction of war, despite its destruction and carnage, gives us meaning, gives our lives purpose.

CH: It’s not real meaning, it’s the illusion of meaning. Ultimately, there is no meaning in it at all. The only thing that gives you meaning is love, in any ultimate and real sense. But people seek to find meaning through war. They are betrayed.

LT: Or betray themselves?

CH: Yeah. Or they’re betrayed by war itself. By the belief that they can find meaning for that experience. Because they can’t.

LT: You write: “The ethnic conflicts and insurgencies of our time, whether Serbs and Muslims, or Hutus and Tutsis, are not religious wars. They are not clashes between cultures or civilizations, nor are they the result of ancient ethnic hatreds. They are manufactured wars, born out of the collapse of civil societies, perpetuated by fear, greed, and paranoia, and they are run by gangsters, who rise up from the bottom of their own societies and terrorize all, including those they purport to protect.”

Who are today’s “gangsters”?

CH: [Silence]

LT: Right now we are involved in a war. Who are today’s gangsters?

CH: I’m going to pass on that question.