The pictures of
war you aren’t supposed to seeThe pictures of
war you aren’t supposed to see
Chris Hedges
Photo caption: An Iraqi mother takes her dead son into her arms. The 6-year-old was killed on the way home from enrolling for his first year of school. Associated Press photo by Adem Hadei.
War is brutal and impersonal. It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy. In an instant, industrial warfare can kill dozens, even hundreds, of people who never see their attackers. The power of these industrial weapons is indiscriminate and staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying and crushing everyone inside. They can demolish villages and send tanks, planes and ships up in fiery blasts. For those who survive, the wounds result in terrible burns, blindness, amputation and lifelong pain and trauma. No one returns the same from such warfare.
In Peter van Agtmael’s “2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die” and Lori Grinker’s “Afterwar: Veterans From a World in Conflict,” we see pictures of war that are almost always hidden from public view. These pictures are shadows, for only those who go to and suffer from war can fully confront the visceral horror of it, but they are at least an attempt to unmask war’s savagery.
“Over ninety percent of this soldier’s body was burned when a roadside bomb hit his vehicle, igniting the fuel tank and burning two other soldiers to death,” reads the caption in Agtmael’s book next to a photograph of the bloodied body of a soldier in an operating room. “His camouflage uniform dangled over the bed, ripped open by the medics who had treated him on the helicopter. Clumps of his skin had peeled away, and what was left of it was translucent. He was in and out of consciousness, his eyes stabbing open for a few seconds. As he was lifted from the stretcher to the ER bed, he screamed ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ then ‘Put me to sleep, please put me to sleep.’ There was another photographer in the ER, and he leaned his camera over the heads of the medical staff to get an overhead shot. The soldier yelled, ‘Get that f---ing camera out of my face.’ Those were his last words.”
Most film and still images of war are shorn of the heart-pounding fear, awful stench, deafening noise and exhaustion of the battlefield. Such images turn chaos into an artful war narrative. They turn war into porn. The reality of war violence is different — senseless and useless. It leaves behind nothing but death, grief and destruction.
War’s effects are what the state and the press work hard to keep hidden. If we really saw what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of the eight schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan the last week of December and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés about liberating the women of Afghanistan or bringing freedom to the Afghan people. This is why war is carefully sanitized. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining. And the press is as guilty as Hollywood.
The wounded, the crippled and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted off stage. They are war’s refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myth of glory, honor, patriotism and heroism. The public manifesta-tions of gratitude are reserved for veterans who dutifully read from the script handed to them by the state. The veterans trotted out for viewing are those who are compliant and palatable, those we can stand to look at without horror, those who are willing to go along with the lie that war is about patriotism and is the highest good. “Thank you for your service,” we are supposed to say.
Gary Zuspann, who lives in a special enclosed environment in his parent’s home in Waco, Texas, suffering from Gulf War syndrome, speaks in Grinker’s book of feeling like “a prisoner of war” even after the war had ended. “Basically they put me on the curb and said, okay, fend for yourself,” he says in the book. “I was living in a fantasy world where I thought our government cared about us and they take care of their own. I believed it was in my contract, that if you’re maimed or wounded during your service in war, you should be taken care of. Now I’m angry.”
Despair and suicide grip survivors. More Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war than the 58,236 who were killed during it. The inhuman qualities drilled into soldiers and Marines in wartime defeat them in peacetime. On the professional killers long journey to recovery, many never readjust. They cannot connect again with wives, children, parents or friends, retreating into personal hells of self-destructive anguish and rage.
“They program you to have no emotion — like if somebody sitting next to you gets killed, you just have to carry on doing your job and shut up,” Steve Annabell, a British veteran of the Falklands War, says to Grinker. “When you leave the service, when you come back from a situation like that, there’s no button they can press to switch your emotions back on. So you walk around like a zombie.”
“To get you to join up, they do all these advertisements ... but they don’t show you getting shot at and people with their legs blown off or burning to death,” he says. “It’s just bullshit. And they never prepare you for it. They can give you all the training in the world, but it’s never the same as the real thing.”
Look beyond the nationalist cant used to justify war. Look beyond Barack Obama’s ridiculous rhetoric about finishing the job or fighting terror. Focus on the evil of war. War begins by calling for the annihilation of the others but ends ultimately in self-annihilation. It corrupts souls and mutilates bodies. It destroys homes and villages and murders children on their way to school. War is a scourge. It is a plague. It is industrial murder. And before you support war, especially the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, look into the hollow eyes of the men, women and children who know it.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who covered conflicts for two decades in Central America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. The author or co-author of a dozen books, he writes a column published every Monday on Truthdig.com. This article, edited here, was posted on January 4, 2010.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Bosnian Serb gets 30 years for genocide
SARAJEVO - Bosnia’s war crimes court jailed a former Serb officer for 30 years October 16 on a charge of genocide for killing dozens of people during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Muslims. Former army captain Milorad Trbic, 51, was found guilty of taking part in the persecution of Bosnian Muslims from the Srebrenica enclave and their detention, summary executions, burial and covering traces of the crime.
Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in the Srebrenica massacre after Bosnian Serb forces captured the enclave on July 11, 1995, in what is regarded as Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.
Trbic took part in a “joint criminal enterprise” with other Serb army officers and organized the forcible transfer of Muslims from Srebrenica between July 10 and November 30, 1995, the head of the judicial council Davorin Jukic said. Trbic supervised the detention of thousands of Muslims in several schools around Srebrenica, where they were kept in inhuman conditions, as well as transportation to the killing fields where they were executed en masse, Jukic said.
Trbic himself shot dead a group of “at least 20 Muslims” in the Grbavci school on one occasion, and a group of “at least 5 Muslims” in the Rocevici school on another occasion. He was also involved in the exhumation of victims from original mass graves and their later transfer to “secondary mass graves” to hide traces of the crime.
Remains of more than 6,000 Srebrenica victims have been found in mass graves across eastern Bosnia but only about 3,800 bodies have been identified so far.
After the 1992-95 Bosnian war, Trbic escaped to the United States but was found guilty of breaking immigration laws. In 2005 he was handed over to the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which transferred him to Bosnia for trial in June 2007.
The court acquitted Trbic of three other counts of genocide due to lack of evidence, in a decision that angered relatives of the victims.
– edited from Reuters,
16 October 2009
PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2009
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Chris Hedges
Pulitzer prize–winner Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a war correspondent for The New York Times and other newspapers. He is the author of the bestselling “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” and the newly released “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”
The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.
Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets. But like all prophets, they are condemned and ignored for their courage. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. They know that what we are taught in school, in worship, by the press, through the entertainment industry and at home, that the melding of the state’s rhetoric with the rhetoric of religion, is empty and false.
The words these prophets speak are painful. We, as a nation, prefer to listen to those who speak from the patriotic script. We prefer to hear ourselves exalted. If veterans speak of terrible wounds visible and invisible, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax. Not our boys, we say, not them, bred in our homes, endowed with goodness and decency. For if it is easy for them to murder, what about us? And so it is simpler and more comfortable not to hear. We do not listen to the angry words that cascade forth from their lips, wishing only that they would calm down, be reasonable, get some help, and go away. We, the deformed, brand our prophets as madmen. We cast them into the desert. And this is why so many veterans are estranged and enraged. This is why so many succumb to suicide or addictions.
For full article, see: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090601_war_is_sin/
Memory, War, and the Memory of War
Louis Bickford, International Center for Transitional Justice
Memorial Day is meant to remind us of the hardship of war, and on this Memorial Day I find myself asking how we will remember the “war on terror.” What will our children’s children know about this period?
We choose in the present how future generations will remember the past. One of the great contributions of the human rights movement is showing that how we remember and memorialize trauma in the past — torture under brutal regimes in Argentina or during the apartheid era of South Africa, the evil committed during the Holocaust — can help prevent abuses in the future.
What does it mean to choose how to remember? Memories come flooding back, often unwilled, sometimes unwelcomed. The raw material of memory resembles dreams, uncontrolled and full of non-sequiturs. But consider the terrible affliction of “Funes the Memorious,” a character in a Jorge Luis Borges short story. He remembers everything, every shadow on every leaf on every tree, and he is thus immobilized and must sit in the dark to avoid sensory experience.
In real life, societies, like individuals, cannnot remember everything. We organize collective memory, purposefully or not. Imagining the future, we may choose to remember the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, more in terms of heroism than error, since that is the tendency of all nations. We may remember the irreparable loss of life of those who went to fight, and we will think about their families and the suffering they endured. Our national memory may focus on the deaths of the Americans, in the same way that our memories of Vietnam focus largely on American causalities.
Will we remember that there was a place called Abu Ghraib on the dusty outskirts of Baghdad, and that torture took place there, for which we were responsible? Will we remember that we acquiesced to a terrible policy put forward by our leaders and with the endorsement of many — Democrats, Republicans, journalists, legal scholars — that allowed for us to ignore international and American law prohibiting torture?
If we care about the future, we must, first, clarify the truth. Second, we must find ways of clearly condemning torture wherever and whenever it was committed. Third, we must take steps so that we remember our rejection of those acts. Our thinking about future memory is one way of preventing torture in the future.
We need to know the full truth, including who among us was complicit in allowing this to happen, even if it means looking inward to our own communities. Why did not more of us protest more loudly and sooner? Why did so many permit government lawyers to pervert the law for dubious ends, making a mockery out of the idea of reasonable legal interpretation?
We must engage in a serious inquiry and introspection with the goal of accountability. Journalists and scholars should continue their investigative research and analysis of what has transpired. A nonpartisan commission of inquiry should also be a part of this picture, as should the continued declassification of government documents. We should also help others transform Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other sites of torture into sites of learning for the future. Seen from the perspective of memory, fair trials of those most responsible for wrong-doing are essential. The documents produced by trials would be vital elements of a true historical record. And trials are the strongest way of representing moral condemnation of wrongful behavior.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, identified three forms of history: antiquarian, monumental, and critical. The first sees history as quaint, curious, distant and irrelevant to our current lives. The second celebrates victory, heroism and tragedy in the past as precursors to current glory. The third suggests an engagement with the memory of the past, seeing the linkages between past, present and future and seeking to understand them.
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney is seeking to convince Americans that torture was justified. It is clear that he is interested in how this period is remembered; he is speaking both to us and to our progeny. He wants the history books and national memory to validate his time in office, and he is making active attempts to guarantee that they do. He wants to create a monumental history of the period.
If former officials succeed in making us forget that there was torture and that it was contrary to our values, they will establish impunity for the present and also for the future. That must not be allowed to happen. Extreme violations of human rights in any context, including a war, are too important to forget. We want future generations to remember that we insisted on accountability for them. Those are good reasons to have Memorial Day.
Dr. Louis Bickford, a political scientist, is Director of the Memory, Memorials, and Museums program at the International Center for Transitional Justice (www.ictj.org), an international non-governmental organization with offices throughout the world. The ICTJ assists countries pursuing accountability for past mass atrocity or human rights abuse. The Center works in societies emerging from repressive rule or armed conflict, as well as in established democracies where historical injustices or systemic abuse remain unresolved.
Dr. Bickford’s essay is from The Huffington Post, where it was posted May 21, 2009, and was reprinted in PeaceMeal, May/June 2009.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
