Chris Hedges below gets the immense racism of "American
Sniper," a film which has no kind or decent portrayal of an Iraqi, man,
woman or child. They are all "savages." And the analogy
with murdering Native Americans, is, for Mr. Eastwood the director, just beneath
the surface. As Hedges relates:
"It is Tour One. Kyle, now a sniper, is told Fallujah is 'the
new Wild West.' This may be the only accurate analogy in the film, given the
genocide we carried out against Native Americans. He hears about an enemy
sniper who can do 'head shots from 500 yards out. They call him Mustafa. He was
in the Olympics.'”
"Kyle’s first kill is a boy who is handed an anti-tank
grenade by a young woman in a black chador. The woman, who expresses no emotion
over the boy’s death, picks up the grenade after the boy is shot and moves
toward U.S. Marines on patrol. Kyle kills her too. And here we have the
template for the film and Kyle’s best-selling autobiography, 'American Sniper.'
Mothers and sisters in Iraq don’t love their sons or their brothers. Iraqi
women breed to make little suicide bombers. Children are miniature Osama bin
Ladens. Not one of the Muslim evildoers can be trusted—man, woman or child.
They are beasts."
***
As Tink Tinker and Glenn Morris related to me, a Shawnee soldier was
standing with 2 others waiting at the border to invade Iraq with Bush's/Blair's
aggressors in 2003. In the heat, they had their helmets off. Trying to
shape them up for the poison gas the army had told them was coming (a fiction),
an officer ordered them to put their helmets on - probably almost as effective
as gas masks .. - and stand at attention.
"Gentlemen," he said, gesturing at the territory,
"that's Indian country." See here and and an article by Stephen Silliman,
an anthropologist, about the Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq here.
There was nothing unusual for the American military in the
analogy...
***
Tomahawk Missiles,
Operation Geronimo, Apache helicopters (the only ones used by the
government of Israel to surveil and often kill Palestinian civilians in the
Occupied Territories) - these are among the survivals of the genocide of the
the first peoples which the US government waged across the West (Minnesota
1862, the Long March of the Navajo 1863, Sand Creek 1864) and onward,
continuing a settler aggression and an ethnic cleansing which had begun with
the Pilgrims...(see Billy Stratton, Buried in Shades of Night).
***
Michael Lerner has a fine brief introduction to this piece in Tikkun,
rightly calling out Barack Obama for his continuing aggressions in the Middle
East, now the Bush-Obama wars. But this movie is Hollywood's
anti-"Selma" - see "Thoughts on the greatness of Selma, King,
black and white unity and racist patriarchs " here.
There is a long history of Christian resistance to racism, too, notably King's and John Brown's and today's Methodist Church, renouncing the
"doctrine of discovery" and taking 600 to Sand Creek to learn about
the horrors that the US government committed as well as supporting the Sand
Creek Spiritual Healing Run of the Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants.
***
While Chris Kyle, as Hedges points out, thinks of himself as a believer
in "God," there is little, in the film, to his Christianity, a mere
affirmation to a skeptical soldier that, of course, he believes. It is
more that he has a red tattoo - a Crusader cross on his arm - in the long
tradition of Christian aggression against Muslims (Kyle also says he would
shoot everyone with a Koran but those aren't his orders...).
***
If "Jesus" were a remorseless killer of nonwhites (being
nonwhite, a semite...), then of course Kyle is a "Christian"...
***
No distinction is even made between Sunni and Shia in this
film. In fact, as Hedges suggests, the Iraqis in Fallujah are depicted
all as foreign fighters and their sniper an Olympic champion (somehow this
makes him foreign, gives him airs, compared to the Texas sniper wight he price on his head who becomes
"Legend" with so many kills…). And the same goes for later
"battles" in Kyle's 4 tours down to Sadr City.
***
There are thus no good “natives.”
***
Remember the US invaded Iraq to install democracy. It
invaded Iraq to get Saddam, the oppressor (never mind that the US installed and
bankrolled Saddam)…
***
No such pretense here:
"The only good Iraqi," as General Phillip Sheridan
might have said, "is a dead Iraqi" (Sheridan Boulevard in
Denver is named for this monster...). The point of view of Kyle is: they
are all savages.
***
Hedges invokes a former officer and Reagan staffer on the
dangers of this Dominionist view, widespread among Seals and in the Air Force
Academy:
"Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian
chauvinism, or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic
“Christian” America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and
the Army Special Forces."
Unsurprisingly, the real Kyle worked as Sarah Palin's bodyguard in 2008 - see here.
***
Kyle is pretty much a simpleton, as Hedges suggests. His
father told him to use guns to “protect,” and “protect” his fellow soldiers,
Americans and his wife and children, he does. Of course, his wife does
not want such protection - she wants him home - but reality, like the dread signs from the Marvel comics flying over the invaders'
armored vehicles, makes little impact on Kyle. He is hooked, as Chris
Hedges had eloquently written about in War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,
on the adrenalin producing, all-possessing drug of war, or what he refers to, less graphically, below as "the culture of war."
***
Kyle asks no questions. He has no detectable inner life and can
say nothing even to a psychologist after his return home trying to help…
***
When a fellow soldier in Fallujah asks what are they there
for?, Kyle repeats: to protect Americans against "every domino" falling between Iraq
and Texas. It is a feeble, left over Vietnam response.
***
But about Iraqis, Clint Eastwood, the director,
is also a racist simpleton.
***
Nonetheless, the film has, about Americans, a darker
message than Hedges suggests. Everyone Kyle saves, however grateful, is
with a prosthesis, shot to bits, blinded. His little brother, whom he is
shown from the first protecting, curses Iraq and the war. His wife begs
him to come home, remarks the difference as he becomes a hardened, crazed
killer – every kill he tells the psychiatrist he can justify before his “god”
(maybe in John Brennan’s/Barack Obama’s world of drones…).
The statement betrays the denial, the lie…
***
In a kind of healing, he works with wounded vets, takes them out
sharpshooting. He is a fairly good parent when he comes back (minus
trying to murder a dog at a barbecue) – he leaves his son in charge of the
women – and his wife sees the madness in the eyes of the vet he is going out to
shoot with who murders him (as Hedges points out, this happened to the real
Chris Kyle). See The New Yorker story on it, Kyle himself "In
the Crosshairs" here.
***
The film tellingly shows the shock of war on the soldiers, the injuries
and death, how is each is changed (Taya is best on this after Kyle’s first
tour…less good once he is playing with the kids) - the ptsd, the madness - and
cannot come home.
***
Unsurprisingly, Eastwood has also made a dark and telling film
about the evils of war for those who fight it, though one perverted by racism
For he especially means: those engaged to fight way off against
nonwhites. One would be hard put to be gung ho to march in Iran or
Syria, given this film – to be as much of a stick as Chris Kyle is.
***
Now Hedges misses this, although a better way to make his point
is: Eastwood does not understand or disagree with Imperial aggressions/crimes –
also a large fault – and, as Hedges insists, does not sympathize even slightly
with or recognize the humanity of the Iraqis the US was supposed to be
"saving."
Kyle only saves Americans. The film is dead,
shockingly racist toward Iraqis (Hedges means to shock by using a standard
racist epithet toward Arabs in the title - it does convey the spirit of the
movie - but he probably should have avoided it).
***
Thus, the movie glorifies racism - because Clint Eastwood
shares it - even more than it does trace, sadly, the bullets from a mad
"comrade" which cut Kyle down at 29 years old.
***
But one should also add: Iraqis were defending their
own country against highly armed, imperial invaders. They - and
least of all the US with its weaponry, planes, armored vehicles and snipers, the
aggressors under international law and morally speaking - were the ones
opposing aggression.
***
If one sympathizes with the American Revolution against
the British, why not with the Iraqis against the imperial Bush and Cheney?
***
Again, these are questions beyond Eastwood (and of
Hollywood war films, beyond even “Good Morning Vietnam” where Robin Williams
Vietnamese friend, who saves him, is of course a Vietcong…)
***
Hedges also says there are no blacks in the film (or archly
as few as in a Woody Allen movie). But that isn’t true. There are
lots of black Seals, training Kyle and even some of Kyle’s buddies, although no
black is killed or wounded. They are the backdrop to the story here in a
way they were not in Iraq or Vietnam. Hedges overstates his point, but it
is another big failing of Eastwood’s that even among Americans, only some - oh,
well, maybe Clint will do his Obama impersonation again for the new Republican
Presidential candidates - really count...
***
In the New Yorker story on the movie, the real Republican Kyle
emerges in all his frothing, porno racism and homophobia:
"Kyle and Rury had not seen each other during the decade that
Kyle was in the Navy. But they picked up where they left off, pulling pranks on
each other. Several times, Rury sneaked up Kyle’s driveway in the middle of the
night and slapped pro-Obama bumper stickers on his truck. (Kyle was a fervent
Republican.) In retaliation, Kyle pasted one on Rury’s truck that declared 'I
Love Black Cock.'"
***
And “Dirty Harry,” for all his marvelous ability as a director,
turns out to be a silly racist; this movie is, once again, Hollywood’s
counteroffering to Selma. Ava DuVernay, the black woman who directed
Selma so brilliantly and now has a vote on the awards, cannot offset the deep
racism that pervades Hollywood, even though many didn’t like this war.
And of course, even Eastwood is skeptical of its value for white
Americans.
***
Hedges rightly sees this movie as tied to a danger of emerging
fascism in the elite; he misses the continuing signs of resistance to this from
below and sometimes even, with pressure, from above (as in the Sand Creek
Spiritual Healing Run and Governor Hickenlooper's Apology on December 3rd on
the steps of the State Capitol to the Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants, as in
Black Lives Matter! which sees, as in the case of the Dream Defenders in
Florida - see here - the analogies with the Palestinians, or
the many of us who oppose American aggressions. But he marks out a
depraved ideology and a possible dark future, with powerful
backers, which must be defeated.
***
"Editor's
note: While we at Tikkun do not feel it fair to blame Christianity or imply
that all Christians somehow implicitly support the kind of Christianity that
leads some American Christians to feel that their murdering of Arabs or Muslims
is doing Jesus' work, and want to remind our readers (before reading Chris
Hedges piece below) of the many progressive Christians who join the
Network of Spiritual Progressives and other organization that oppose the US
"Strategy of Domination" and instead identify with Tikkun's Strategy
of Generosity (as manifested in our proposed Domestic and Global Marshall Plan
(please re-read it by downloading the full version at www.tikkun.org/gmp),
we do think that Hedges' powerful critique of the move American Sniper should
be read by those who are too willing to forgive the American media for its
implicit and sometimes explicit glorification of the US military. And shame on
President Obama and liberal Democrats for not having stopped (what was at first
just Bush's) war in Iraq when they had control of both houses of Congress
and the presidency 2009 and 2010, instead backing a "surge" and
providing the background and equipment that eventually led to ISIS and all its
cruel perversions and murderous ruthlessness. --Rabbi Michael Lerner
rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com
Killing Rag heads for Jesus
By Chris Hedges
January
26, 2015 " “American
Sniper” lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S.
society—the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that
we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser
breeds” of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and
pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of
critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white
Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system,
yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie
venerates. These passions, if realized, will extinguish what is left of our
now-anemic open society.
The
movie opens with a father and his young son hunting a deer. The boy shoots the
animal, drops his rifle and runs to see his kill.
“Get
back here,” his father yells. “You don’t ever leave your rifle in the dirt.”
“Yes,
sir,” the boy answers.
“That
was a helluva shot, son,” the father says. “You got a gift. You gonna make a
fine hunter some day.”
The
camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white
Christians—blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen movie—are
listening to a sermon about God’s plan for American Christians. The film’s
title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal sniper
in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be called upon by
God to use his “gift” to kill evildoers. The scene shifts to the Kyle family
dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang: “There are three
types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to
believe evil doesn’t exist in the world. And if it ever darkened their doorstep
they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then you
got predators.”
The
camera cuts to a schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy.
“They
use violence to prey on people,” the father goes on. “They’re the wolves. Then
there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to
protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They
are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any sheep in this family.”
The
father lashes his belt against the dining room table.
“I
will whup your ass if you turn into a wolf,” he says to his two sons. “We
protect our own. If someone tries to fight you, tries to bully your little
brother, you have my permission to finish it.”
There
is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We
elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed
forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have
little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular
communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. They
prefer drinking beer and watching football to reading a book. And when they get
into power—they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the
media and the war machine—their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic
self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. “American Sniper,” like
the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt
deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is
a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it
made a record-breaking $105.3 million over the
Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States’
dark malaise.
“The
movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting
back against us in the very first place,” said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached
by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is
a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious Freedom
Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism within the U.S.
military. “It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided
distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the fabric of Chris
Kyle’s personal and primal justification mantra of ‘God-Country-Family.’ It is
nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a literal horrific hagiography to
wholesale slaughter.”
Weinstein
noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian chauvinism, or
Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic “Christian” America,
is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and
the Army Special Forces.
The
evildoers don’t take long to make an appearance in the film. This happens when
television—the only way the movie’s characters get news—announces the1998 truck
bombings of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi
in which hundreds of people were killed. Chris, now grown, and his brother,
aspiring rodeo riders, watch the news reports with outrage. Ted Koppel talks on
the screen about a “war” against the United States.
“Look
what they did to us,” Chris whispers.
He
heads down to the recruiter to sign up to be a Navy SEAL. We get the usual boot
camp scenes of green recruits subjected to punishing ordeals to make them
become real men. In a bar scene, an aspiring SEAL has painted a target on his back
and comrades throw darts into his skin. What little individuality these
recruits have—and they don’t appear to have much—is sucked out of them until
they are part of the military mass. They are unquestioningly obedient to
authority, which means, of course, they are sheep.
We
get a love story too. Chris meets Taya in a bar. They do shots. The movie
slips, as it often does, into clichéd dialogue.
She
tells him Navy SEALs are “arrogant, self-centered pricks who think you can lie
and cheat and do whatever the fuck you want. I’d never date a SEAL.”
“Why
would you say I’m self-centered?” Kyle asks. “I’d lay down my life for my
country.”
“Why?”
“Because
it’s the greatest country on earth and I’d do everything I can to protect it,”
he says.
She
drinks too much. She vomits. He is gallant. He helps her home. They fall in
love. Taya is later shown watching television. She yells to Chris in the next
room.
“Oh,
my God, Chris,” she says.
“What’s
wrong?” he asks.
“No!”
she yells.
Then
we hear the television announcer: “You see the first plane coming in at what
looks like the east side. …
Chris
and Taya watch in horror. Ominous music fills the movie’s soundtrack. The
evildoers have asked for it. Kyle will go to Iraq to extract vengeance. He will
go to fight in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, a country that
columnist Thomas Friedman once said we attacked “because we could.” The
historical record and the reality of the Middle East don’t matter. Muslims are
Muslims. And Muslims are evildoers or, as Kyle calls them, “savages.” Evildoers
have to be eradicated.
Chris
and Taya marry. He wears his gold Navy SEAL trident on the white shirt under
his tuxedo at the wedding. His SEAL comrades are at the ceremony.
“Just
got the call, boys—it’s on,” an officer says at the wedding reception.
The
Navy SEALs cheer. They drink. And then we switch to Fallujah. It is Tour One.
Kyle, now a sniper, is told Fallujah is “the new Wild West.” This may be the
only accurate analogy in the film, given the genocide we carried out against
Native Americans. He hears about an enemy sniper who can do “head shots from
500 yards out. They call him Mustafa. He was in the Olympics.”
Kyle’s
first kill is a boy who is handed an anti-tank grenade by a young woman in a
black chador. The woman, who expresses no emotion over the boy’s death, picks
up the grenade after the boy is shot and moves toward U.S. Marines on patrol.
Kyle kills her too. And here we have the template for the film and Kyle’s
best-selling autobiography, “American Sniper.” Mothers and sisters in Iraq
don’t love their sons or their brothers. Iraqi women breed to make little
suicide bombers. Children are miniature Osama bin Ladens. Not one of the Muslim
evildoers can be trusted—man, woman or child. They are beasts. They are shown
in the film identifying U.S. positions to insurgents on their cellphones,
hiding weapons under trapdoors in their floors, planting improvised explosive
devices in roads or strapping explosives onto themselves in order to be suicide
bombers. They are devoid of human qualities.
“There
was a kid who barely had any hair on his balls,” Kyle says nonchalantly after
shooting the child and the woman. He is resting on his cot with a big Texas
flag behind him on the wall. “Mother gives him a grenade, sends him out there
to kill Marines.”
Enter
The Butcher—a fictional Iraqi character created for the film. Here we get the
most evil of the evildoers. He is dressed in a long black leather jacket and
dispatches his victims with an electric drill. He mutilates children—we see an
arm he cut from a child. A local sheik offers to betray The Butcher for
$100,000. The Butcher kills the sheik. He murders the sheik’s small son in
front of his mother with his electric drill. The Butcher shouts: “You talk to
them, you die with them.”
Kyle
moves on to Tour Two after time at home with Taya, whose chief role in the film
is to complain through tears and expletives about her husband being away. Kyle
says before he leaves: “They’re savages. Babe, they’re fuckin’ savages.”
He
and his fellow platoon members spray-paint the white skull of the Punisher from
Marvel Comics on their vehicles, body armor, weapons and helmets. The motto
they paint in a circle around the skull reads: “Despite what your momma told
you … violence does solve problems.”
“And
we spray-painted it on every building and walls we could,” Kyle wrote in his
memoir, “American Sniper.” “We wanted people to know, we’re here and we
want to fuck with you. …You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us
because we will kill you, motherfucker.”
The
book is even more disturbing than the film. In the film Kyle is a reluctant
warrior, one forced to do his duty. In the book he relishes killing and war. He
is consumed by hatred of all Iraqis. He is intoxicated by violence. He is
credited with 160 confirmed kills, but he notes that to be confirmed a kill had
to be witnessed, “so if I shot someone in the stomach and he managed to crawl
around where we couldn’t see him before he bled out he didn’t count.”
Kyle
insisted that every person he shot deserved to die. His inability to be
self-reflective allowed him to deny the fact that during the U.S. occupation
many, many innocent Iraqis were killed, including some shot by snipers. Snipers
are used primarily to sow terror and fear among enemy combatants. And in his
denial of reality, something former slaveholders and former Nazis perfected to
an art after overseeing their own atrocities, Kyle was able to cling to
childish myth rather than examine the darkness of his own soul and his contribution
to the war crimes we carried out in Iraq. He justified his killing with a
cloying sentimentality about his family, his Christian faith, his fellow SEALs
and his nation. But sentimentality is not love. It is not empathy. It is, at
its core, about self-pity and self-adulation. That the film, like the book,
swings between cruelty and sentimentality is not accidental.
“Sentimentality,
the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of
dishonesty, the inability to feel,” James Baldwin reminded
us. “The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his
fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret
and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”
“Savage,
despicable evil,” Kyle wrote of those he was killing from rooftops and windows.
“That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself
included, called the enemy ‘savages.’… I only wish I had killed more.” At
another point he writes: “I loved killing bad guys. … I loved what I did. I
still do … it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.” He labels
Iraqis “fanatics” and writes “they hated us because we weren’t Muslims.” He
claims “the fanatics we fought valued nothing but their twisted interpretation
of religion.”
“I
never once fought for the Iraqis,” he wrote of our Iraqi allies. “I could give
a flying fuck about them.”
He
killed an Iraqi teenager he claimed was an insurgent. He watched as the boy’s
mother found his body, tore her clothes and wept. He was unmoved.
He
wrote: “If you loved them [the sons], you should have kept them away from
the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let them
try and kill us—what did you think would happen to them?”
“People
back home [in the U.S.], people who haven’t been in war, at least not that war,
sometimes don’t seem to understand how the troops in Iraq acted,” he went on.
“They’re surprised—shocked—to discover we often joked about death, about things
we saw.”
He
was investigated by the Army for killing an unarmed civilian. According to his
memoir, Kyle, who viewed all Iraqis as the enemy, told an Army colonel: “I
don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.” The investigation
went nowhere.
Kyle
was given the nickname “Legend.” He got a tattoo of a Crusader cross on his
arm. “I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in red, for
blood. I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting,” he wrote. “I always will.”
Following a day of sniping, after killing perhaps as many as six people, he
would go back to his barracks to spent his time smoking Cuban Romeo y Julieta
No. 3 cigars and “playing video games, watching porn and working out.” On
leave, something omitted in the movie, he was frequently arrested for drunken
bar fights. He dismissed politicians, hated the press and disdained superior
officers, exalting only the comradeship of warriors. His memoir glorifies
white, “Christian” supremacy and war. It is an angry tirade directed against
anyone who questions the military’s elite, professional killers.
“For
some reason, a lot of people back home—not all people—didn’t accept that we
were at war,” he wrote. “They didn’t accept that war means death, violent
death, most times. A lot of people, not just politicians, wanted to impose
ridiculous fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behavior that no human
being could maintain.”
The
enemy sniper Mustafa, portrayed in the film as if he was a serial killer,
fatally wounds Kyle’s comrade Ryan “Biggles” Job. In the movie Kyle
returns to Iraq—his fourth tour—to extract revenge for Biggles’ death. This
final tour, at least in the film, centered on the killing of The Butcher and
the enemy sniper, also a fictional character. As it focuses on the dramatic duel
between hero Kyle and villain Mustafa the movie becomes ridiculously
cartoonish.
Kyle
gets Mustafa in his sights and pulls the trigger. The bullet is shown leaving
the rifle in slow motion. “Do it for Biggles,” someone says. The enemy sniper’s
head turns into a puff of blood.
“Biggles
would be proud of you,” a soldier says. “You did it, man.”
His
final tour over, Kyle leaves the Navy. As a civilian he struggles with the
demons of war and becomes, at least in the film, a model father and husband and
works with veterans who were maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He trades his
combat boots for cowboy boots.
The
real-life Kyle, as the film was in production, was shot dead at a shooting
range near Dallas on Feb. 2, 2013, along with a friend, Chad Littlefield. A
former Marine, Eddie Ray Routh, who had been suffering from PTSD and severe
psychological episodes, allegedly killed the two men and then stole Kyle’s
pickup truck. Routh will go on trial next
month. The film ends with scenes of Kyle’s funeral procession—thousands
lined the roads waving flags—and the memorial service at the Dallas Cowboys’
home stadium. It shows fellow SEALs pounding their tridents into the top of his
coffin, a custom for fallen comrades. Kyle was shot in the back and the back of
his head. Like so many people he dispatched, he never saw his killer when
the fatal shots were fired.
The
culture of war banishes the capacity for pity. It glorifies self-sacrifice and
death. It sees pain, ritual humiliation and violence as part of an initiation
into manhood. Brutal hazing, as Kyle noted in his book, was an integral part of
becoming a Navy SEAL. New SEALs would be held down and choked by senior members
of the platoon until they passed out. The culture of war idealizes only the
warrior. It belittles those who do not exhibit the warrior’s “manly” virtues.
It places a premium on obedience and loyalty. It punishes those who engage in
independent thought and demands total conformity. It elevates cruelty and
killing to a virtue. This culture, once it infects wider society, destroys all
that makes the heights of human civilization and democracy possible. The
capacity for empathy, the cultivation of wisdom and understanding, the
tolerance and respect for difference and even love are ruthlessly crushed. The
innate barbarity that war and violence breed is justified by a saccharine
sentimentality about the nation, the flag and a perverted Christianity that
blesses its armed crusaders. This sentimentality, as Baldwin wrote, masks a
terrifying numbness. It fosters an unchecked narcissism. Facts and historical
truths, when they do not fit into the mythic vision of the nation and the
tribe, are discarded. Dissent becomes treason. All opponents are godless and
subhuman. “American Sniper” caters to a deep sickness rippling through our
society. It holds up the dangerous belief that we can recover our equilibrium
and our lost glory by embracing an American fascism.
Chris
Hedges previously spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in
Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from
more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for
which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
