Chris Hedges Summary
Chris Hedges is a foreign war correspondent for fifteen years and has received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. As a profound and credible journalist, he has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. Throughout this book he helps his readers understand that war is in fact a seduction to not only to those on the front line, but society as a whole, destroying everything in it’s path and takes no mercy. This book, I believe is a great read because it gives you an understanding of war differently and not as the romanticizing warfare that I believe is interpreted in today’s society. Chris Hedges does not fail to give jaw-dropping examples and anecdotes
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There is nothing great that comes from war. It is mostly filled with national myths that are, at their core racist and fed by ignorance, says Hedges. “War never creates the national security or the harmony we desire…” and that to me is a problem. We create fixated problems but come to no probable solution that satisfies each side. Is there really no way to create a median? Why is it that one person always has to win and the other is kicked to the dirt? Hedges argues that there is no way to achieve this. Maybe it’s absurd for me to think but these wars that we create need to have a more balancing outcome. Hedges says, and I agree, that, the myth of war creates each side to reduce the others to objects-eventually in the form of corpses but we are not talking about objects but people. We cannot have wars that end miserably and simply have the defeating nation pack their bags and walk away. That leaves the defeated, devastated nation to clean up and pick themselves up. They cannot. For a nation to come back to normalization from a tragedy like war is nearly impossible. There are citizens that have been stripped from everything. Everything they own, beaten by officials, and forced to live life without their loved ones. It is time that we learn from what the real reality is after war and start from there to help those grieving
There is nothing great that comes from war. It is mostly filled with national myths that are, at their core racist and fed by ignorance, says Hedges. “War never creates the national security or the harmony we desire…” and that to me is a problem. We create fixated problems but come to no probable solution that satisfies each side. Is there really no way to create a median? Why is it that one person always has to win and the other is kicked to the dirt? Hedges argues that there is no way to achieve this. Maybe it’s absurd for me to think but these wars that we create need to have a more balancing outcome. Hedges says, and I agree, that, the myth of war creates each side to reduce the others to objects-eventually in the form of corpses but we are not talking about objects but people. We cannot have wars that end miserably and simply have the defeating nation pack their bags and walk away. That leaves the defeated, devastated nation to clean up and pick themselves up. They cannot. For a nation to come back to normalization from a tragedy like war is nearly impossible. There are citizens that have been stripped from everything. Everything they own, beaten by officials, and forced to live life without their loved ones. It is time that we learn from what the real reality is after war and start from there to help those grieving