----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: "lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 9:50 AM Subject: Hedges
Couple of interesting pieces featuring NYT reporter Chris Hedges
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>TERENCE SMITH: Reading this book, I got the impression that you
>wrote it in a kind of a fury, and that the fury was maybe partly
>directed at yourself.
>
>CHRIS HEDGES: Yes, a fury. It was a hard book to write. Parts of the
>book were very painful to write. If there was a fury, it was a fury
>at all the lies that are used to justify war, all the myths of war
>-- all of the things we're told about war that I had to find out the
>hard way and very painfully are not true. And if there's a fury at
>that, it's the mendacity of the entire enterprise.
>
>TERENCE SMITH: There's a passage which, if you would, read to us
>that sort of addresses this. You have it there.
>
>CHRIS HEDGES: Yes. "We believe in the nobility and self-sacrifice
>demanded by war, especially when we are blinded by the narcotic of
>war. We discover in the communal struggle the shared sense of
>meaning and purpose, a cause. War fills our spiritual void. I do not
>miss war, but I miss what it brought. I can never say I was happy in
>the midst of the fighting in El Salvador or Bosnia or Kosovo, but I
>had a sense of purpose, of calling. And this is a quality war shares
>with love, for we are in love, also able to choose fealty and
>self-sacrifice over security."
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"There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the space of the play of differences. The negative is the image of difference, but a flattened and inverted image, like the candle in the eye of an ox - the eye of the dialectician dreaming of futile combat." [Gilles Deleuze-Difference & Repetition] http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0112/1446.html