The Silencing of Dissent on Graduation Day
By Amy Goodman and Chris Hedges

You are the author of "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning." You have reported from many war zones, you've been in Guatemala, you've been in El Salvador, you've been in Bosnia, you were in the Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, you were held by Iraqi Republican Guard. Can you talk about some of those experiences?

You know, as I looked out on the crowd, that is exactly what my book is about. It is about the suspension of individual conscience, and probably consciousness, for the contagion of the crowd for that euphoria that comes with patriotism. The tragedy is that – and I've seen it in conflict after conflict or society after society that plunges into war – with that kind of rabid nationalism comes racism and intolerance and a dehumanization of the other. And it's an emotional response. People find a kind of ecstasy, a kind of belonging, a kind of obliteration of their alienation in that patriotic fervor that always does come in war time.

As I gave my talk and I looked out on the crowd, I was essentially witnessing things that I had witnessed in the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina or in squares in Belgrade or anywhere else. Crowds, especially crowds that become hunting packs are very frightening. People chanted the kind of cliches and aphorisms and jingoes that are handed to you by the state. "God Bless America" or people were chanting "send him to France" – this kind of stuff and that kind of contagion leads ultimately to tyranny, it's very dangerous and it has to be stopped.

I've seen it in effect and take over countries. But of course, it breaks my heart when I see it in my country. That's essentially what I was looking at was in some ways a mirror of what I was trying to speak about. And I think I managed to touch upon it somewhat when I talked upon this notion of comradeship as a suppression of self awareness and self-possession to sort of follow along, locked in the embrace of a nation, or of a group, or of a national group unthinkingly, blindly. And there is a kind of undeniable euphoria in that. And that's what I was looking at.

I mean this was a visceral and an emotional reaction. Nobody really spent much time, or I didn't have much time to begin to explain the thoughts that I was getting across. And, of course, it was interpreted as anti-military which it is not. I mean, what I write about in the book and what I speak about is about war: how war is used as an instrument, the danger of war, why war should always be a last resort. What happens when we wage war without justifiable cause. What happens to ourselves? What happens to others? I mean this is the currency of the book and something I'm sort of ringing the alarm bells against. And there was a kind of symbiotic relationship between everything that I've experienced and everything that was happening in that crowd.
[more]