I saw this guy, Chris Hedges, on Charlie Rose and thought he was interesting. I bought his book, "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning". Here, he answers some readers' questions.

It's all about the love!

I wondered if the love Hedges suggests as an alternate path to life than war-making was a new idea for him or is part of his religious legacy flowering again? ... I do hope he will be able to share more of his thinking on what he sees as the path that turns away from war, why he called it love.
ayohn3 5/23/03 9:21am

Chris Hedges: Love is the only antidote to war, not love in the abstract but love in the particular. This does not mean that we can, through love, eradicate war. But love protects us from the contagion and euphoria of war, for in the love of the other we find a wholeness and a completeness that gives us meaning and more importantly happiness. We do not, if we have love, need to seek this outside of our relationships. Love protects us from the cruelty of war. It protects us from the racism and intolerance and drive to dehumanize the other that comes with blind patriotism. When we can see love in others, even our enemy, that is like our own, we can forgive. And in forgiveness we can create a new narrative, one that saves us from the cycle of violence. I do not see love, however, as an alternative to war. I am not a pacifist. I see it as a protection from the contagion of war and from hate and from the lust of war, all those forces that can stunt and destroy a civilized society in wartime.

What is your definition of love?
bdhpoet 5/20/03 7:49pm

Chris Hedges: God

What "acts or behaviors of love" are sufficiently intense to offset or balance war-lust (for want of a better term)?
ayohn3 5/20/03 7:42pm

Chris Hedges: The love between two people can offset the lust for war, for we will sacrifice security for those we love, just as comrades will sacrifice themselves in war. The difference is that dying for a friend or one we love is bitter and hard. It is not like dying for a comrade. There is no ecstasy in this death. Friends and lovers lose, perhaps forever, the precious dialogue that comes with love, the dialogue that touches our inner core. Friends fear death. They do not exalt in it like comrades. This is why love is the most potent antidote to war.

Why do you, Mr. Hedges, conflate love and friendship? Why do you limit the definition of friendship the kind of affinity that has traditionally been reserved for love? Why do you believe that the battlefield is not the place where such friendship could occur?
jackson_dyer 5/22/03 10:32pm

Chris Hedges: It is almost impossible in war to build or sustain love, everything around you conspires to destroy tenderness and beauty and replace it with violence and smut, all those things that turn human beings into objects. Real friendship -- and I mean the kind of friendship that happens to us a few times in our lives -- is love. Many of us, if we were honest, would admit we never had a friend. The most fortunate of us have very few. In the friend we find self-awareness, self-possession, the opposite of comradeship which is the suppression of self-awareness for the intoxication of the cause. This confusion in war between friendship and comradeship is common, but the comradeship of war is not friendship. It is not love. It is part of war's intoxication. This is why once the war is over these comrades again become strangers to us. It is why after war we fall into despair. Without the external threat to bind us as comrades, to make us feel as one entity, one people, without the cause to give us a single purpose in life, there can be no comradeship. War, especially at its inception, looks and feels like love but it is death. And so much of the worship and excitement of war and comradeship is at its core necrophilia.