Repost of War Is Betrayal by Chris Hedges.
by Chris Hedges
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
July 13, 2012
Image by daveeza via Flickr
This piece originally appeared in the Boston Review.
We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status, glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers and elites.
[…]
via Truthdig
Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His latest books are Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Death of the Liberal Class, and The World as It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
Copyright © 2012 Truthdig
see
Don’t Enlist, But Don’t Just Take My Word For It by Lo
Chris Hedges: Those who are most attracted to war are the most incapable of love
Chris Hedges and David Zucchino On War Reporting
Before You Enlist! (2006) (must-see)
Soldiers of Conscience: To kill or not to kill?
The Body Baggers of Iraq by Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (2004; must-see; transcript)]
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Industrial slaughter is the utterly depraved and most despicable vice of our time. Those who “wage” these unjust wars never fight them.
The true warrior is an individual who never compromises the integrity of their soul.
Any deviance can be redeemed in time, but the problem today is that those who preach redemption are the most morally bankrupt, the most soulless, who also wield the most “power.”
Thanks David, you are right.
Thank you Lynn.
It seems to me we can only conjecture what an epithet like “moral compass” can possibly mean, to those consumed by the intoxicating seductions of their grotesque power over life and death of innocents ~ that Chris Hedges and so many other highly articulate people of conscience, record with such alarming clarity these days.