War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

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Veteran war reporter Chris Hedges has written a book examining the continuing appeal of war to the human psyche. "The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation," he writes. He discusses the myths that accompany war in an interview with TomPaine.com: "Once you enter a conflict, or at the inception of a conflict, you are given a language by which you speak. The state gives you a language to speak and you can't speak outside that language or it becomes very difficult. There is no communication outside of the cliches and the jingos: 'The War on Terror,' 'Showdown With Iraq,' 'The Axis of Evil,' all of this stuff. So that whatever disquiet we feel, we no longer have the words in which to express it. ... People lose individual conscience for this huge communal enterprise. ... It will, unfortunately, take that grim harvest of dead, that ultimately those that are intoxicated with war must always swallow, for us to wake up again."