Chris Hedges is trying to speak out the rot he saw in decades as a front line war reporter, and detailed in his book War Is A Force that Gives Us Meaning.
War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it “the lust of the eye” and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in primal impulses we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to give or annihilate life. Armed units become crazed by the frenzy of destruction. All things, including human beings, become objects—objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.