Chris Hedges DOESN’T want you for the army in his latest polemic, The Greatest Evil is War. I’d say now’s a salient time for something like this to come out but, unfortunately, there’s always a war going on somewhere, it’s just that the Russia/Ukraine conflict happens to serve Western political interests and that’s why it’s getting front page news rather than highlighting the genocide in Yemen being enacted by Saudi Arabia (an American ally) or the horrendous things the Israelis (an American ally) are doing to the Palestinians or actual Nazi-level shit the Chinese (an important trading partner to the West) are doing to the Uyghurs, putting them in concentration camps and allegedly sterilising them, aka ethnic cleansing.
I think Chris Hedges is brilliant - the world needs more voices like his - but I won’t pretend that I was all that taken with this book. Not because I disagree with anything he has to say, but because of the opposite: I agreed with everything he had to say about the horrors of war and so it was a bit uninteresting seeing him make a lot of very obvious (to me) points without making me think of new ways about the subject.
He bookends the polemic by focusing on the Russia/Ukraine conflict, which is informative and might be enlightening to anyone who hasn’t read up on the reasons behind it, though I doubt Hedges is the only person in the media to point out that it’s ultimately because of American arms companies wanting to make a profit.
And that’s basically how I feel about the book: it’s Hedges making a lot of arguments that have been made before to an audience I can’t quite picture. Would anyone who was gung-ho for war pick up a Chris Hedges book? And for those who are Hedges fans like me, are there any likely to be pro-war?
Which isn’t to say it’s a boring read - it’s not, and it’s sometimes riveting in a morbid way. Hedges was a war correspondent for many years and recounts the atrocities he saw firsthand in Bosnia and Kosovo. He talks about “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, criticises America for its effects in the Middle East (among other areas), and focuses on the individuals whom war directly affects thanks to the reckless actions of the Pentagon and other “pimps of war”. Like the heartbreaking tale of Tomas Young, a soldier paralysed in Iraq in 2004 and who later committed suicide to escape from the unending pain of his injuries.
This isn’t a reason against it but it took me a while to get through this relatively short book because some episodes are so bleak that I needed time to get over them before moving on. I imagine reading this in one sitting or straight through quickly can only lead to profound misery at what nightmares humanity unleashes upon itself so consistently.
Still, it’s an important book for numerous reasons, not least for highlighting the sickening hypocrisies of how American society is built around war. Like the way so much foreign aid is earmarked for spending on American munitions that no doubt leads to so much of the conflict abroad, or how much of American manufacturing is tied to weapons creation. And then there are the films that propagate a heroic aspect of the military without showing you the victims of war, from the physically and mentally damaged veterans, abandoned by their government after being used, to the piles of corpses strewn around the world, most of them innocent civilians.
It’s also crucial for showing anyone thinking of joining the military a clear picture of what they’re letting themselves in for. There’s a haunting chapter on army medics tasked with dealing with the remains of US soldiers, the family members dealing with the loss of their loved ones, and extensive descriptions of wounds sustained by conflict. In this way, Hedges’ book is as relevant as another book he references, the American attorney Harold Shapiro’s 1937 book, What Every Young Man Should Know About War, which talks about the lasting effects of combat on soldiers and was, quite tellingly, banned prior to America’s involvement in WW2.
Hedges didn’t need to include a chapter on the Holocaust, even though, yes, of course it’s apropos because that was a consequence of war, I just think it’s overkill (maybe not the right word) in a book that so thoroughly dismantles any pro-war argument a reader might have.
The Greatest Evil is War is a tough read, for the subject matter, because Hedges is an excellent writer, and it’s an important book too - for me though, there’s only so much confirmation bias I can read before losing interest, and parts of the book were a struggle to get through for that alone.
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