For a more detailed biography of Chris Hedges, visit the Wikipedia online resource here.

Washington Profile: To begin this interview, could you tell our readers a little bit about your background, where you grew up...

Chris Hedges: I grew up in upstate New York in a small farm town. My father was a Presbyterian minister who was a veteran of World War II… [when he] came back from the war, like a lot of veterans, he really hated war (he was in North Africa and the Middle East). He was a very early supporter of the civil rights movement, and then very involved in the anti-war movement, and then during the last 15 years of his life – he died in 1995 – he was involved in the gay-rights movement. (His youngest brother was gay, so he had a particular sensitivity to what it was like to be a gay man in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, and was one of the very few clergy in the Presbyterian Church calling for both the ordination and marriage of gays in the late 1970s.) So I came from that kind of background: deeply religious and socially active.

WPF: What led you to pursue a career in journalism and, more specifically, one covering conflicts around the world?

Chris Hedges: I went to divinity school; I didn’t study journalism. I was going to be a minister. I’d spent the first two years at seminary. (I went to Harvard Divinity School, living across the street from a housing project in Roxbury in Boston and running a church.) [I] became increasingly disenchanted with the institutional church, as well as liberal theology – all those people who liked the poor but didn’t like the smell of the poor. And that was certainly true about Harvard. At the time of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, they would all go down and pick coffee for a week, and then come back and spend the rest of the year talking about it, but they’d never get on the green-line and go over and see where human beings were being warehoused like cattle…. I think that the hubris or arrogance on the part of liberal theologians who thought they could take it upon themselves to speak on behalf of people they never met angered me deeply, and really saw me leave the church.

I had always written; I published my first story when I was 14 in a historical journal, and published my first newspaper article in a major newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, when I was in college. I was clearly a writer. But leaving social activism for journalism was hard for me; and the bridge that really helped me cross from the ministry into journalism was provided by Robert Cox, the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald during the ‘dirty war’ in Argentina, when the Argentine military ‘disappeared’ 30,000 of their own civilians. Robert would print the names of the desaparecidos, or the disappeared, on the front page of his newspaper in a box every morning above the fold. For me, that was a tremendous illustration of what great journalism is.

I went to Latin America because in the early 1980s most of Latin America was ruled by military despots: not only the junta in Argentina, but the death squads were killing between 800 and 1,000 in El Salvador, Rios Montt was in Guatemala butchering the indigenous, Pinochet was in Chile, and I thought it was as close that my generation was going to come, like my hero, George Orwell, to fighting fascism. So that’s what drew me, Latin America. For pretty much the next 20 years I was abroad. I began as a free-lance reporter, and then after a year and a half in El Salvador covering the war there, I was hired by the Dallas Morning News, was with them for five years, and then the New York Times for fifteen.

WPF: Why did you decide to write War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning at the time you did?

Chris Hedges: When I began the book there was no war. After the war in Kosovo I took a Nieman fellowship in Harvard for a year and spent a year studying classics….It was really the perfect year, because it allowed me to step outside of my own society; it freed myself from the cant of my own society. Yet, at the same time, you know, great writers, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, they certainly are dealing with the same kind of issues I was grappling with. And allowing them to reflect back on modernity, or something I found really useful. And at that point I wrote a magazine piece that began to grapple with the themes of the book. What I wanted to write was a book that explained the patterns that take place in wartime societies, what happens to individuals in societies when they go to war, because these patterns were repeated, and I probably covered half a dozen conflicts over the years and I kept seeing the same kind of patterns, the same kind of behavior, the same kind of justification for violence and killing, the same kind of intoxication, the same kind of human cruelty, the same kind of self-exaltation of nationalism, whether that was in Argentina, whether that was in Israel, the Balkans, the same disease, and so I wanted to write a book that described that disease. And also what war is, because the image people have of war, the myths we tell ourselves about war are so far from the reality of war, the reality of violence.     

WPF: In the book, you characterize war as a “potent and often lethal addiction,” but one that ultimately leads to the destruction of culture and the embrace of death over life. Why has humanity chosen time and again to follow this path of destruction, when the negative consequences of doing so are so patently clear?

Chris Hedges: Because it creates such a feeling of euphoria, especially in a modern society where people are deeply alienated, essentially solitary, often friendless; it creates a sense of belonging, a sense of empowerment (if you look back at the lead-up to the war in Iraq, on the cable news channels, it was really all about our weapons, how powerful they were and, by extension, how powerful we were). Nationalism is about self-celebration, us and them, it creates a binary world of good and evil. But, more importantly, once you engage in the project of war, you suspend human conscience. You no longer have to make moral decisions; they are made for you. Everything is justifiable morally as long as you eradicate the enemy, and what wartime leaders do is essentially give their followers or nation that moral license to kill, to engage in those very dark lusts that all of us keep hidden deep within our human heart. It is of course ultimately a form of self-destruction, if not physically, certainly spiritually. It is a narcotic, and a powerful one. Especially when you’re in as much combat as I have, where you’re getting these adrenaline rushes… You don’t relate to a world not at war, you don’t relate to people who don’t go through that experience, and after every conflict I covered was over, we all - that is, war correspondents and war journalists - fell into a very profound despair and searched for the next conflict we could cover… So, I’m in Kosovo covering the conflict there with people I knew in El Salvador from 20 years before.   

WPF: In War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, you often talk about “the myth of war.” What do you mean by this, and what role does the press play in creating it?

Chris Hedges: The press is always part of the problem in wartime. You can see it in [the Iraq War], but I think really if you go all the way back to the Crimean War when the modern war correspondent was invented, the press has always played the role of propagating ‘the myth.’ And by ‘the myth’ I mean our own goodness, our own empowerment…. They [the media] look for the narrative. That narrative of our troops freeing the beleaguered refugees, or the people who want freedom, the perfidious crimes of the enemy, nobility, our heroes… you saw it with the creation of heroism narratives out of Jessica Lynch or Pat Tillman, we know now both of those narratives were a lie, that’s nothing unusual, they usually are, and people feed off of that. It boosts ratings, it sells newspapers, and it always has, as long as you give that boy’s version of war. Once you start conveying the reality, the revolting and repugnant reality of war, people would be so disgusted they would turn away, and it would be very hard to wage. So what you have is a kind of self-censorship on the part of commercial interests who know – whether consciously or unconsciously, I don’t know – that the myth sells and the reality doesn’t. So the only people who end up seeing a war are the people in a war

WPF: Do you believe in the idea of a ‘just war’?

Chris Hedges: No, I don’t like the term ‘just,’ although I had to read [Thomas] Aquinas along with everybody else. I think some wars are inevitable, but wars are always tragic…. Certainly Sarajevo would be a good example, when the Serbian forces were ringing the city, dropping upwards of 2,000 shells a day, constant sniper fire a day, four to five dead a day, two-dozen wounded a day; all we had to do is look at Mostar, Vukovar, to see what would happen to us if they broke through, literally, the trench system that surrounded the city. That did not save the Bosnians in Sarajevo from the pernicious effects of violence. The first people to organize the defense of the city were the criminal class, and when they weren’t holding off the Serbs, they were looting and often executing ethnic Serbs who remained in the city… looting their apartments and killing them. So, one understands the inevitability of [war], because it was quite clear that if those lines were breached, large numbers of people would be killed and those who survived would lose their homes and be driven into… refugee camps. Sitting around having a discussion about pacifism in Sarajevo during the siege would have evoked gales of laughter. Yet, at the same time, it did not save the Sarajevans, nor did it save anyone, from the poison violence spreads.  

WPF: Do you think a day will ever arrive when war becomes a thing of the past, or is war inherently part of the human condition?

Chris Hedges: I think I agree with [Sigmund] Freud that it is inherently part of the human condition. As Freud writes, there’s a constant tension within individuals and within societies between eros, that instinct to preserve, conserve, protect, and thanatos, the death instinct, the instinct to annihilate all living things, including ourself, and that usually one of these impulses is ascendant. The tragedy is that we now live in a world that possesses apocalyptic weapons. By that, I mean weapons that can obliterate huge swaths of human society in ways that were unheard before World War II. Those who are arrayed against us, the Islamic terrorists, for instance, are soon going to have their hands on cruder versions of these weapons – dirty bombs, chemical agents – and they’ll use them. We could all end, as the stoics predicted, in a vast conflagration. I tend to look at the future as rather bleak, rather than hopeful, given human nature, and given the weapons human society has created.

WPF: The fifth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks is upon us. Given the U.S. government’s response to these unprecedented events, do you believe America is now a safer or less safe place?

Chris Hedges: It’s clearly less safe. How did they respond to the events? Well, they used them to begin an imperial project in the Middle East that has had disastrous consequences. I was in the Middle East right after 9/11, I was based in Paris, but I was covering al Qaeda for the New York Times in North Africa and in Europe. The tragedy is that those attacks had garnered us a great deal of empathy, not only in Europe, but in the Middle East as well. And even within the Arab world. If we had built on that empathy, it would have been far more effective in fighting terrorism – and I don’t like the term “war on terrorism” – terrorism is a tactic, you can’t make war on a tactic…. The way to defeat terrorist groups is to isolate them in their own societies. By invading Afghanistan and Iraq, dropping iron-fragmentation bombs all over the place, allowing Israel to drop U.S.-manufactured bombs all over Lebanon, we have been the greatest recruiting force for these militant cells, and it plays completely into their hands. So it has been a phenomenally ignorant response, culturally insensitive, and disastrous. In the United States, we go out and recruit more enemies. That’s become our foreign policy and eventually we’re going to pay for it, and we’re going to pay for it on domestic soil.     

WPF: How has the U.S. media influenced American perceptions of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, and, more generally, the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East?

Chris Hedges: They don’t cover it anymore. Initially, all these cable news shows like CNN and FOX were the centrally activist cheerleaders for the war, although all the main-stream media did, including the New York Times. Now that the war has gone sour, they pretend it doesn’t exist. The Israeli lobby has a very powerful pull here. Few Americans have much contact culturally with the Middle East, unlike Europeans, very few Arabic speakers, there’s a phenomenal ignorance about the Middle East, and our response, which I think is not ultimately in our or even Israel’s interest, is sort of ‘wipe the vermin out.’ That seems to be the U.S. foreign policy. I mean we have people in the State Department and certainly within the CIA who know the Arab world and know it well. But they certainly are not heeded or listened to by the ideologues within the Bush administration who are running Middle East policy, which really seems to be one of speaking exclusively in the language of force. This administration has been phenomenally inept at diplomacy, and probably quite consciously; they just don’t have any interest.