The Nation: Why We Love War

[marmar]

BLOG | Posted 02/10/2007 @ 6:44pm
Why We Love War
Jon Wiener


Drew Faust, the historian who has been named Harvard's first female president, has been praised for her "people skills," but she's also done brilliant intellectual work on a crucial question for our time: why we love war. A Civil War historian who has published five books, Faust wrote recently about why war is "history's most popular subject."

In an article published in 2004 in the journal Civil War History, Faust explores the place of war in American politics and culture today. War, she writes, "offers an authenticity and intensity of experience" missing elsewhere in modern society. It provides "a moment of truth," when soldiers and civilians alike "have to define their deeply held priorities and act on them."

Causation is typically the big issue for scholars and analysts who study war: explaining and interpreting, in a dispassionate way, why particular wars have been fought. And of course much of our current argument is about the reasons the Bush White House gave for going to war in Iraq.

But for ordinary people, Faust argues, what counts is not so much the analysis of causation, but rather the personal stories, the human drama of war. The fascination with war can be "almost pornographic in its combination of thrill and terror." But that doesn't mean the details of suffering and the tragedies of death are overlooked. Personal stories of suffering and death make war "a force that gives us meaning"--the phrase is the title of a book by award-winning war correspondent Chris Hedges. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15

[patrice]

1. So then the question becomes, "Why the heck are our lives soooooooooo

empty and meaningless that we need things like war to give us meaning?"

We are all of the time ballyhooing about this and that: God, sports, fashion, food, money, cars . . . . We have it all. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe if we had a little less, we wouldn't have this problem.

P.S. Christianity is pretty much a failure, isn't it?

[1620rock]

2. Well no, rather it's been the perversion of Christianity.

[patrice]

3. Okay, but why/how did it get perverted?

What's the point if it has no responsibility to do something about how people are making false claims in its name? Shouldn't it do more to rectify the confusion and errors? Tell people they're wrong! "Get it right or don't show up here to sing hymns with us and feel good about yourself."

[Democrats_win]

4. Emptiness is right. People are missing the inner strength to resist the war urge.

When the nation prepared to go to war in 2003, they acted like a mob. They couldn't stop their urges even when Bush said Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

Likewise, their greed is leading us to a catastrophe. Their incredible urge for more money has led them to put that ahead of our national security. The worst is yet to come.