Tittel: Steps to war Undertittel: an analysis of the mechanisms causing the Israel-Hezbollah conflict to escalate Publisert år: 2009 Dokumenttype: Masteroppgave Språk … (original) (raw)
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This is a review of a radical 200-page book by a literate, war-correspondent who reviews the intoxicating effects of war on the various conflicts that he personally saw in his 15 years of the modern madness of civil wars that have broken out in Central America, the Balkans and Iraq. Hedges exposes the lies and deceits that trigger these fratricidal and ethnic conflicts that are exploited by thugs and gangsters for their personal gratifications. He knows that "War is Hell" as he has been there many times during the first half of his life. He argues that war seduces entire societies, creating fictions that the public believes and relies on to continue to support conflicts. He also describes how those who experience war may find it exhilarating and addictive. Indeed: "war's seduction and inevitability and sometimes even necessity" are a recurring theme in this book. He describes the negative impacts of war on injured societies. He convincingly proves that war is the worst human behavior that can overtake a society. As a literate intellectual, he is able to give first-hand descriptions of the immediate feelings that arise when first exposed to direct, life-threatening violence. Although he claims that he wrote the book "not to dissuade us from war but to understand it, so that Americans, who wield such massive force across the globe, see within ourselves the seeds of our own obliteration." He contrasts the visceral immediacy of existential situations with the bland, dullness of modern life that makes war so attractive an adventure for too many men. He calls on his classical education to illustrate the long history of violence that has seduced warriors and professional soldiers for far too long.
The Many Faces of War, 2019
War is about brain injuries, psychological trauma, abandonment, homelessness, suicide, the exploitation and weaponization of woman's virtues, flawed planning assumptions, ideological militarism, sexual assault and rape, and the quest for political power. The Many Faces of War confronts these issues with unfiltered emotions, voicing the horrors of war experiences through personal insights in twenty-one poignant essays. These testimonies of war do not represent the full range of war-related experiences. Nor are the full effects of war easy to understand, as they often linger for a lifetime both physically and psychologically. Yet, the authors help us understand them better through research, reflection, and day-today experiences. Further, the historians explain how conditions of contemporary warfare are not new; war trauma is timeless in spite of technological progress, rising populations, globalization, and ever-changing political narratives. War stories and testimonials are disclosed in the authentic language of the authors. The range of subjects convey the futility of trying to learn everything there is to know about human nature and warfare, reinforcing a truth that the more we learn about any subject (in this case war) the less we realize we know. Each essay opens up another Pandora's box of dirty secrets, as the authors bare their souls while leaving the reader with unanswered questions; and there is nothing wrong with discovering an unanswered question if the question is important. Raising ambiguous questions and identifying less than satisfactory answers can be the beginning of learning and growing.
Violence is a slippery concept -nonlinear, productive, destructive, and reproductive. It is mimetic, like imitative magic or homeopathy. "Like produces like," that much we know. Violence gives birth to itself. So we can rightly speak of chains, spirals, and mirrors of violence -or, as we prefer -a continuum of violence. We all know, as though by rote, that wife beaters and sexual abusers were themselves usually beaten and abused. Repressive political regimes resting on terror/fear/torture are often mimetically reproduced by the same revolutionary militants determined to overthrow them (see Bourgois, Chapter 56; Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 30; and Fanon, Chapter 58). Structural violence -the violence of poverty, hunger, social exclusion and humiliation -inevitably translates into intimate and domestic violence (Sche per-Hughes, Chapter 33; Bourgois, Chapter 37). Politically motivated torture is amplified by the symbolic violence that trails in its wake, making those who were tortured feel shame for their "weakness" in betraying their comrades under duress. Rape survivors -especially those who were violated with genocidal or sadistic political intent during civil wars (Danner, Chapter 41) often become living-dead people, refusing to speak of the unspeakable, and are often shunned or outcasted by kin and community, and even by comrades and lovers (Das, Chapter 40 and Fanon, Chapter 58).
Social Anthropology, 2010
Participants from all around the world come to train in Israeli Krav Maga (close combat) with the ‘Tour and Train’ programme. They perform exercises that aim to control close-range violence and are devised within a certain logic, and this logic is subsequently disseminated to become part of the globalised view of the war on terror. Whereas the understanding of globalised terror and its counteraction is often drawn from political statements and their interpretation, in Tour and Train ‘universal’ understandings of terror and the war on terror are constructed through practice in its own right. Krav Maga cosmology views violence as sudden, unexpected alterations in intensity. This view eliminates any specificities and replaces content with intensity, sheer somatic sensation, with relentless fighting activity within an active–passive frame that presumes that there is always a course of action to be taken, while the fighter is also a passive passenger of the flow of violence. According to this view, the ideologies behind and reasons for belligerent situations, as well as the intentions of attacker and defender, are null and void, and terror itself is the result of fortuity.