Discours de Chris Hedges au Sanctuary for Independent Media à Troy, dans l'État de New York, le 21 octobre 2022. Il présentait son dernier livre, intitulé “The Greatest Evil is War” (« Le plus grand mal, c'est la guerre », Seven Stories Press, 20.09.2022).
Cette condamnation sans concession de l'horreur et de l'obscénité de la guerre s'appuie sur son expérience et des entretiens, fondements d'un ouvrage qui examine les coûts cachés de la guerre et ses conséquences pour les individus, les familles, les communautés et les nations.
À la mémoire de Meghan Marohn, 1980-2022
TRANSCRIPTION (encore partielle) :
I didn't really want to write another book on war. My first one was a force that gives us meaning was not cathartic, was extremely difficult to cope with and process, but the kind of sickening euphoria over the war in Ukraine raised the familiar bile and so, I have this book here…
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Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise, by Washington, not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy thousands of NATO troops in eastern Europe, not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on Russia's border, and the refusal to implement the Minsk II peace agreement. This provocation, which includes establishing a NATO missile base 100 miles from Russia's border, was foolish and highly irresponsible. It never made geopolitical sense. The invasion of Ukraine would —I expect— never have happened if these promises had been kept, Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry, but to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine —under post Nuremberg Laws— is a criminal war of aggression.
I know the instrument of war. War is not politics by other means. It is demonic. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East Africa, and the Balkans, where I covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent, Kurt Schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone with another friend, Miguel Gil Moreno. I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and confusion. In a firefight, you are only aware of what is happening a few feet around you. You desperately, and not always successfully, struggle to figure out where the firing is coming from, and the hopes you can avoid being hit.
I have felt the helplessness and the paralyzing fear, which years later descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me wrapped in coils of terror, my heart racing, my body dripping with sweat.
I have heard the wails of those convulsed by grief as they clutch the bodies of friends and family, including children. I hear them still. It does not matter the language: Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Dinka, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Ukrainian, Russian. Death cuts through the linguistic barriers.
I know what wounds look like. Legs blown off. Heads imploded into a bloody, pulpy mass. Gaping holes and stomachs. Pools of blood. Cries of the dying, sometimes for their mothers. And the smell: the smell of death. The Supreme sacrifice made for flies and maggots.
I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police, I was taken prisoner by the Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base, in Honduras, to see if they should kill me, and again, in Basra, after the first Gulf War, never knowing if I would be executed under constant guard and, often, without food, drinking, out of mud puddles.
The primary lesson in war is that we, as distinct individuals, do not matter. We become numbers. Fodder. Objects. Life, once precious and sacred, becomes meaningless, sacrificed to the insatiable appetite of Mars. No one in wartime is exempt.
“We were expendable!”, Eugene Sledge wrote of his experiences as a Marine in the South Pacific in World War II. “It was difficult to accept. We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness. It is a humbling experience.”
The landscape of war is hallucinogenic, it defies comprehension, you have no concept of time in a firefight. A few minutes. A few hours… War, in an instant, obliterates homes and communities, all that was once familiar, and leaves behind smoldering ruins and a trauma that you carry for the rest of your life.
You cannot comprehend what you see. I have tasted enough of war, enough of my own fear, my body turned to jelly, to know that war is always evil, the purest expression of death, dressed up in patriotic cant about Liberty and Democracy, and sold to the naïve as a ticket to glory, honor, and courage. It is a toxic and seductive elixir. Those who survive, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, struggle afterwards to reinvent themselves and their universe which, on some level, will never make sense again.
War destroys all systems that sustain and nurture life-familial, economic, cultural, political, environmental, and social. Once war begins, no one, even those nominally in charge of waging war, can guess what will happen, how the war will develop, how it can drive armies and nations towards suicidal folly.
There are no good wars. None. And this includes World War II, which has been sanitized and mythologized to mendaciously celebrate American heroism, purity and goodness. If truth is the first casualty in war, ambiguity is the second. The bellicose rhetoric embraced and amplified by the American press, demonizing Vladimir Putin and elevating the Ukrainians to the status of demigods, demanding more robust military intervention along with a crippling sanctions meant to bring down Putin's government is infantile and dangerous.
The Russian media narrative is as simplistic as ours.
There were no discussions about pacifism in the basements in Sarajevo, when we were being hit with hundreds of Serbian shells a day and under constant sniper fire. It made sense to defend the city, it made sense to kill or be killed. The Bosnian Serb soldiers in the Drina Valley, Vukovar, Srebrenica had amply demonstrated their capacity for murderous rampages, including the gunning down of hundreds of soldiers and civilians and the wholesale rape of women and girls. But this did not save any of the defenders in Sarajevo from the poison of violence, the soul-destroying force that is war. I knew a Bosnian soldier who heard a sound behind a door while patrolling on the outskirts of Sarajevo. He fired a burst from his AK-47 through the door. A delay of a few seconds in combat can mean death. When he opened the door, he found the bloody remains of a 12-year-old girl. His daughter was 12. He never recovered.
Only the autocrats and politicians who dream of empire and global hegemony, of the god-like power that comes with wielding armies, warplanes, and fleets, along with the merchants of death, whose business floods countries with weapons, profit from war. The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe has earned Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Analytic Services, Huntington Ingalls, Humana, BAE Systems, and L3Harris billions in profits. The stoking of conflict in Ukraine will earn them billions more.
The European Union has allocated hundreds of millions of euros to purchase weapons for Ukraine. Germany will almost triple its own defense budget for 2023. The Biden Administration has asked Congress to provide over 50 billion dollars to Ukraine in weapons and aid. The permanent war economy operates outside the laws of supply and demand. It is the root of the two decade-long quagmire in the Middle East and it is the root of the conflict with Moscow. The merchants of death are Satanic. The more corpses they produce, the more their bank accounts swell. They will cash in on this conflict one that now flirts with nuclear Holocaust.
The same cabal of war mongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, decade after decade, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protein, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican party to the Democratic party and then, back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons, to liberal interventionists. Pseudo-intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery, as they sell perpetual fear and a racist world view, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence. They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state. And the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks project for The New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council, and Brookings Institution. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized, or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any Empire, including ours, leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.
I reported on the suffering, misery, and murderous rampages these shills for war engineered and funded.
My first encounter with them was in Central America. Elliot Abrams, convicted of providing misleading testimony to Congress on the Iran Contra affair, and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush, so, he could return to government to sell us the Iraq War, and Robert Kagan, director of the State Department's Public Diplomacy Office in Latin America, were propagandists for the brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as the rapists and homicidal thugs that made up the rogue Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which they illegally funded.
Their job was to discredit our reporting. They and their codery of fellow war lovers went on to push for the expansion of NATO in Central and Eastern Europe.
They are cheerleaders for the apartheid state of Israel justifying its war crimes against Palestinians and myopically conflating Israel's interests with our own.
They advocated for airstrikes in Serbia, calling for the U.S to, quote, “take out Slobodan Milošević” [Слободан Милошевић]. They were the authors of the policy to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
Robert Kagan and William Kristol, with their typical cluelessness, wrote in April [15,] 2002 that, quote, “the road that leads to real security and peace" is "the road that runs through Baghdad.” We saw how that worked out. That road led to the dissolution of Iraq, the destruction of its civilian infrastructure —including the obliteration of 18 of 20 electricity generating plants, and nearly all the water pumping and sanitation systems during a 43-day period, when 90 000 tons of bombs were rained down on the country—, the rise of radical jihadist groups throughout the region, and the proliferation of failed States.
The war in Iraq along with a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan shredded the illusion of U.S military and Global hegemony. It also inflicted on Iraqis, who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, wholesale slaughter of civilians, the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, and the ascendancy of Iran as the preeminent power in the Middle East.
They continue to call for war with Iran, with Fred Kagan stating, quote, “there is nothing we can do, short of attacking, to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons”.
They pushed for the overthrow of President Nicolas Maduro, after trying to do the same to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and they have targeted Daniel Ortega, their old nemesis in Nicaragua.
They embrace a pure blind nationalism that prohibits then from seeing the world from any perspective other than their own. They know nothing about the machinery of war, its consequences or its inevitable blowback.
They know nothing about the peoples and cultures they target for violent regeneration.
They believe in the Divine Right to impose their quote-unquote “values” on others by force, fiasco after fiasco, and now, they are stoking a war with Russia.
The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus —Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš [Данило Киш] observed —. Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The Nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that's to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell – it’s other people (other nations, other tribes). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own image – as nationalists. [A comfortable standpoint, as we noted. Fear and envy. A commitment and engagement needing no effort. Not only is hell other people, in a national key of course, but also: whatever is not mine (Serbian, Croatian, French…) is alien to me. Nationalism is an ideology of banality. As such, nationalism is a totalitarian ideology.]The Biden Administration is filled with these ignoramuses, including Joe Biden. Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, serves as Biden's Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. Anthony Blinken is the Secretary of State. Jack Sullivan is National Security advisor.
They come from this cabal of moral and intellectual trolls that includes Kimberly Kagan, the wife of Fred Kagan, who founded the Institute for the Study of War. William [Bill] Kristol, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Frum and others.
Many were once staunch Republicans or, like Nuland, served in Republican and Democratic administrations. Nuland was the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
They are united by the demand for larger and larger defense budgets and an ever expanding military. Julien Benda called these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.”
They once railed against liberal weaknesses and appeasement. But they swiftly migrated to the Democratic party rather than support Donald Trump, who showed no desire to start a conflict with Russia and who called the invasion of Iraq a big fat mistake.
Besides, as they correctly pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a fellow neocon. And liberals wonder why nearly half the electorate, who revile these arrogant unelected power brokers, as they should, voted for Trump.
These ideologues did not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every dead body I stood over in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gaza, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, their intellectual dishonesty, and their sick bloodlust.
They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military, but they eagerly ship young American men and women to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of Empire and American hegemony. Or, as in Ukraine, they provide the weaponry and logistical support, so ukrainians and Russians can bleed in perpetuity.
Historical time stopped for them with the end of World War II. The overthrow of democratically elected governments by the U.S during the Cold War in Indonesia, Guatemala, the Congo, Iran and Chile (where the CIA oversaw the assassination of the commander-in-chief of the army, General Renee Schneider, and president Salvador Allende), the Bay of Pigs, the atrocities and war crimes that define the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, even the disasters they manufactured in the Middle East, have disappeared into the black hole of their collective historical amnesia. American global domination, they claim, is benign, a force for good, “benevolent hegemony.”
The world, the late Charles Krauthammer insisted, welcomes “our power.” All enemies, from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, are the new Hitler. All U.S interventions are a fight for Freedom that make the world a safer place. All refusals to bomb and occupy another country are a 1938 Munich moment, a pathetic retreat from confronting evil by the new Neville Chamberlain. We do have enemies abroad. But our most dangerous enemy is within.
The warmongers build a campaign against a country such as Iraq or Russia and, then, wait for a crisis —they call it the next Pearl Harbor— to justify the unjustifiable. In 1998, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, along with a dozen other prominent neoconservatives, wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton denouncing his policy of containment in Iraq as a failure and demanding that he go to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. To continue the, quote, “course of weakness and drift,” they warned, was to “put our interests and our future at risk.” Huge majorities in Congress, Republican and Democrat, rushed to pass the Iraq Liberation Act. Few Democrats or Republicans dare to be seen as soft on National Security. The act stated that the U.S government would work to, quote, “remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein” and authorized $99 million towards that goal, some of it being used to fund Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress that would become instrumental in disseminating the fabrications and lies used to justify the Iraq War during the administration of George W. Bush.
The attacks of 9/11 gave the war party its opening, first with Afghanistan, then Iraq. Krauthammer, who knew nothing about the Muslim world, wrote, quote, “the way to tame the Arab street is not with appeasement and sweet sensitivity but with raw power and victory… The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again… is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything, psychologically above all. The psychology in the Middle East is now one of fear and deep respect for American power. Now is the time to use it.” Removing Saddam Hussein from power, Kristol crowed, would, quote, “transform the political landscape of the Middle East.”
It did, of course, but not in ways that benefited the United States.
They lust for apocalyptic global war. Fred Kagan, the brother of Robert, a military historian, wrote in 1999 that, quote, “America must be able to fight Iraq and North Korea, and also be able to fight genocide in the Balkans and elsewhere without compromising its ability to fight two major regional conflicts. And it must be able to contemplate war with China or Russia some considerable (but not infinite) time from now” [author’s emphasis].
They believe violence magically solves all disputes, even the Israel Palestine morass.
In a bizarre interview immediately after 9/11, Donald Kagan, the Yale classicist and right-wing ideologue who was the father of Robert and Fred Kagan, called, along with his son Fred, for the deployment of U.S troops in Gaza so we could, quote, “take the war to these people.”
They have long demanded the stationing of NATO troops in Ukraine, with Robert Kagan saying that “We need to not worry that the problem is our encirclement rather than Russian ambitions.”
His wife, Victoria Nuland, was outed in a leaked phone conversation in 2014 with the U.S ambassador to Ukraine, Jeffrey Pyatt, disparaging the EU and plotting to remove the lawfully elected president ViKtor Yanukovych and install compliant Ukrainian politicians in power, most of whom did eventually take power. They lobbied for U.S troops to be sent to Syria to assist quote-unquote “moderate” rebels seeking to overthrow Bashir al-Assad. Instead, the interventions spawned the Caliphate. The U.S ended up bombing the very forces they had armed, becoming Assad's de facto Air Force.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the attacks of 9/11, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Putin, like everyone else they target, only understands force. We can, they assure us, militarily bend Russia to our will.
“It is true that acting firmly in 2008 or 2014 would have meant risking conflict,” Robert Kagan wrote in Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. “But Washington is risking conflict now; Russia’s ambitions have created an inherently dangerous situation. It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small: Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world.”
In short, don't worry about going to war with Russia, Putin won't use the bomb.
I do not know if these people are stupid or cynical or both. They are the useful idiots of the War Industry. They are never dropped from the networks, they rotate in and out of power, parked in places like the Council on Foreign Relations, The Brookings Institute, before being called back into government. They are as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House as in the Bush White House. The Cold War, for them, never ended. The world remains binary, us and them, good and evil. They are never held accountable.
When one military intervention goes up in flames, they are ready to promote the next. These Doctor Strangeloves, if we don't stop them, will terminate life as we know it on the planet.
The ruling class divides the world into worthy and unworthy victims. Those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of Modern Warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed or ignored. The terror we in our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinians, Syrian, Libyans, Somalian and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war.
We —echoing the empty promises from Moscow— claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable. This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordinance and large kill zones of missiles, iron fragmentation bombs, mortar artillery, tank shells, and belt-fed machine guns.
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