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The reality and the
ideal tragically clash when soldiers and Marines return home. These combat
veterans are often alienated from the world around them, a world that still
believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation. They confront the
grave, existential crisis of all who go through combat and understand that we
have no monopoly on virtue, that in war we become as barbaric and savage as
those we oppose.
This is a profound crisis
of faith. It shatters the myths, national and religious, that these young men
and women were fed before they left for Iraq. In short, they uncover the lie
they have been told. Their relationship with the nation will never be the
same. These veterans give us a true narrative of the war -- one that exposes
the vast enterprise of industrial slaughter unleashed in Iraq. They expose the
lie.
From
"Collateral Damage"
--by Chris Hedges
The People
Without History
Collateral
damage neuters the unintentional dead in war,
objectifying their nameless corpses
washing their blood from the damned
who use violence itself as the means to quell
their conscience
Objectified people without history
nameless and voiceless to the lords
who make war from perches atop pyramids
sucking the surplus of the planet
through a hole at the point of a great inverted
funnel
blendered through the objectified collateral
bodies
of the people without history
This surplus they suck
like the floating effluence of sewage settling
ponds
is the raw material of mass cultivation
an assemblage of debris called civilization
a symbolic artifice of which the lords harangue
ceaselessly
as if it were theirs
History is then the story of this accumulation
and rearranging of property
the rantings of which can never belong
to the people without history
for they are only the objects on the stage
or the stage hands in the wings
for the theater of wealth
the collateral exchanged for power
and damaged without regret
Ren Huntsinger June 3, 2008, 5:14pm
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Ecotherapy -- discovering spirit in the land, the
animals, and the people
