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Bitter Memories of War on the Way to Jail by Chris Hedges

Crowding the White House Fence

Image by Collin David Anderson via Flickr

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
December 20, 2010

The speeches were over. There was a mournful harmonica rendition of taps. The 500 protesters in Lafayette Park in front of the White House fell silent. One hundred and thirty-one men and women, many of them military veterans wearing old fatigues, formed a single, silent line. Under a heavy snowfall and to the slow beat of a drum, they walked to the White House fence. They stood there until they were arrested.

[…]

via Truthdig

Copyright © 2010 Truthdig

Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including Death of the Liberal Class, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009) and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003).

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8 thoughts on “Bitter Memories of War on the Way to Jail by Chris Hedges”

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  7. Chris Hedges says ‘politicians and military leaders … direct and fund war’ — well, sort of, but usually taxpayers fund it and the rich (via their ‘systems of power and force’) benefit through imperial plunder.

    He further states, ‘The capacity to love, to cherish and protect life, may not always triumph, but it saves us. It keeps us human. It offers the only chance to escape from the contagion of war. ‘ I am all for this capacity to love, but it does not offer ‘the only chance’. Alone, it is useless. It must be organised into the building of a classless society.

    Are we forever infants crying in the night? It is one thing to accept ‘human imperfection’, but another to suggest we are helpless in the face of the human practice of war, condemned only to wordless ‘nonviolent resistance’, which clearly doesn’t work (or war would be but an unpleasant memory). Time perhaps to grow up and realise that most war is a political device created by ruling classes and adopt the Trotskyist principle that warring soldiers and workers should overthrow the officers/bosses (and the capitalist nation state) in collaboration with each other. The fact that many soldiers in the past are said to have deliberately fired over each other’s heads suggests there is some latent understanding of this idea already.

    As Marx said, the ‘only justifiable war in history’ is ‘the war of the enslaved against their enslavers’ (The Third Address, *The Civil War in France*, 1871).

  8. Throughout our lives, in our own degrees and dispositions, we all have suffered the insane justifications given to us for acts of killing. And for me, it does no healing and makes no change by “killing the perpetrators and/or actors of killing.”

    I humbly acknowledge Chris Hedges, the veterans and the others for creating and personally “walking message”–a powerful model for Right Action!

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