War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

by Chris Hedges

  During the first protest movement against Milošević in the winter of 1998, a time when nationalism should have been discredited, I visited one of the faculties occupied by the students who sought Milošević’s removal. I arrived at the front door of the Philosophy Department at Belgrade University to be stopped by several curt young men with tags on their jackets identifying them as “security.”

  Students inside who attempted to speak to me were told by the security detail that only “the committee” had the right to make statements. And when Jack Lang, former minister of culture in France, arrived at the building to express his support for the student protesters, he was escorted by young men in green fatigue jackets to a room where he was declared “an enemy of the Serbs” and ordered to leave.

  Lang had stumbled unwittingly on the virulent Serbian nationalism that colored the anti-government protests. The incident highlighted the problem that changing Serbian society did not lie in overturning the rule of one man, but in transforming a country that had come to see racist remarks as acceptable and had learned to express itself in the language of hate and nationalist crusades. The opposition to Milošević came from those who felt he had sold out the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. There was no repentance.

  “Students, professors, and many Serbs have simply switched their ideological iconography,” Obrad Savic, the head of the Belgrade Circle, a dissident group, told me. “They have shifted from a Marxist paradigm to Serbian nationalism. We have failed to build an intellectual tradition where people think for themselves. We operate only in the collective. We speak in the plural as the Serbian people. It’s frightening, especially in the young. It will take years for us to rid ourselves of this virus.”

  As fervently as Western reporters sought, as they often do, to recreate the students in their own image as democratic reformers, the student organizers mocked them. This was no democratic movement, just as the Muslim-dominated government in Sarajevo had no interest in recreating a multi-ethnic city. Serbian flags proliferated in the crowd and many sang “God Give Us Justice,” the anthem of the old Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The students requested an audience with Patriarch Pavle, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the institution that had helped give birth to the modern Serbian nationalist movement. They rejected a suggestion that they also see Belgrade’s Catholic cardinal and the mufti, the leader of the tiny Islamic community.

  The nationalist virus was the logical outcome of the destruction of the country’s educational system that began in the 1950s under Tito’s rule. Departments were purged of professors who refused to teach subjects like “Marx and Biology” and to adhere to party doctrine. Many of the best academics were blacklisted or left the country.

  Following Tito’s death in 1980, academics, freed from party dogma, reached out to Western intellectual traditions. But this was swiftly terminated with the rise of Serbian nationalism, an ideology that replaced the rigidity of dogmatic Marxism. By the mid–1980s the History Department, flush with the new orthodoxy, was exalting Byzantine culture and using it, instead of Marx, as a tool to bash Western liberal democracy. The works of Serbian nationalist writers were taught in literature classes, and Serbian philosophers, who espoused theories of racial superiority, including the idea that the Serbs were the oldest human race, dominated university classrooms.

  The war only accelerated the decline in the educational system. More than 400,000 Serbs, many of them young and talented, left the country in the first few years of the war. Academic standards fell as Milošević put party hacks in charge of schools and departments and sliced government spending for education.

  I developed a close friendship in Belgrade with Miladin Zivotić, a leading dissident during the Communist era in Yugoslavia and one of the most prominent domestic critics of Serbian involvement in the Balkan wars. He was the leader of the Belgrade Circle, a small group of intellectuals and artists who condemned the Serbian role in the wars in Bosnia and Croatia. The groups, which he helped found in 1992 and which included Yugoslavia’s best-known dissident, Milovan Djilas, tried to reach out to Muslims and Croats to create a common front against nationalist movements in the Balkans. It was often denounced by the authorities as being a tool of Serbia’s enemies.

  To register his disapproval of the siege of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs, Zivotić visited the city in 1993 to express his solidarity with those besieged by Serb forces. He was an outspoken critic of Serbia’s treatment of its ethnic minorities, especially the two million Albanians in the Kosovo region. And when nationalists began to threaten Muslims in the Sanjak region of Serbia early in the Bosnian war, he went to live with Muslim families.

  “The first act any new president of this country must do is travel to Sarejevo and beg for forgiveness, just as Willy Brandt did when he traveled to Warsaw,” Zivotić told me, referring to the West German chancellor who pursued a policy of reconciliation with the victims of German Nazism. “This is the only way we can heal ourselves.”

  Zivotić first came to prominence in 1968, when Yugoslav university students staged anti-Communist protests at the time of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. For their support of the students he and seven other philosophy professors were dismissed. He started the Free Belgrade University, which met secretly in houses and whose classes were often broken up by the police. He did not return to his University of Belgrade post until 1987, seven years after the death of Tito.

  Soon after he regained his old position, he found himself ostracized again because of his condemnation of growing Serbian nationalism. He was attacked by students and professors for being a “traitor to the Serbian people.” He retired in 1994.

  “I could not stand to go to work,” he said. “I had to listen to professors and students voice support and solidarity for these Bosnian fascists, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, in the so-called Republika Srpska. It is worse now than it was under Communism. The intellectual corruption is more pervasive and profound.”

  He was a lonely and distraught figure. He spent his days in the offices of the Belgrade Circle headquarters, where he drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes. His was a one-man crusade against nationalist madness. He was pointedly ignored by the Serbian media, who usually only quoted him after his comments appeared in my articles in The New York Times. The student protesters who mounted demonstrations against the Milošević government never invited him to speak, preferring to listen to rants by Serbian nationalists, who fomented the war in the first place. These speakers condemned Milošević for betraying the nationalist cause. The callous indifference of the university students hurt Zivotić tremendously.

  He died of a heart attack in 1997, a year before I left the Balkans. His loss for Serbia was tremendous, for with him went one of the few remaining moral voices in the region.

  The nationalist myth often implodes with a startling ferocity. It does so after the lies and absurdities that surround it become too hard to sustain. They collapse under their own weight. The contradictions and torturous refusal to acknowledge the obvious becomes more than a society is able to bear. The collapse is usually followed by a blanket refusal, caused by shame and discomfort, to examine or acknowledge the crimes carried out in the name of nationalist cause.

  By the time British forces had landed on the Falklands and were rolling over the poorly supplied and ill-clad Argentine soldiers, the Argentine public had retreated into a mythic world that was not unfamiliar to Germans in the last days of the Third Reich. There was no hint in the national press that the Argentine forces were being defeated. It appeared that the British were losing the war. When the Argentine forces surrendered it hit the country like a tidal wave.

  Curiously, it was not that Argentines believed their own propaganda. Many told me that they understood that much what they saw and heard in their own press was a lie. They could tune in the BBC broadcasts. They knew what the British were saying about the war. But they assumed, with a mixture of gullibility and cynicism, that each side was lying.
They preferred to pick and choose. They regularly dismissed some of their own propaganda, but not the central message—that Argentina was triumphant.

  The fall of the islands sent hundreds of thousands of enraged Argentines to the Plaza de Mayo in front of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires to demand weapons to fight. Foreign reporters were attacked, their cars overturned and burned. When a group of toughs cornered me in an alley, I was spared when I told them I was German, a fabrication they bought—convinced, I suspect, by my blond hair.

  All of that rage should have been directed against the government, but instead it was turned on the foreign conspirators who were arrayed against the Argentine nation. Even in defeat, the Argentines could not let go of the nationalist myth. The next morning the government-controlled press began to explain what happened. What happened, it said, was that Argentina had been betrayed by the United States. “We can defeat one superpower,” a front-page article read, “but we can not defeat two.”

  And then, in the days after the defeat, the myth suddenly vanished. My Argentine friends picked up where they had left off, as if there never had been a war, as if the collective intoxication was nothing more than a bad dream, a drunken night of debauchery best forgotten and impolitic to mention. One felt dirty to bring it up. I woke up one morning after the surrender and I was no longer a freak. Argentines were again able to grasp reality and respond to it. The junta, whose members should have been imprisoned, especially given the downward spiral that soon beset the economy, was allowed to fade away. No one really wanted to be reminded of the whole affair.

  The novelist Marguerite Duras, who as a member of the French resistance during World War II took part in the torture of collaborators, wrote of such a moment. “Peace is visible already,” she wrote. “It’s like a great darkness falling, it’s the beginning of forgetting. You can see already . . . I went out, peace seemed imminent. I hurried back home, pursued by peace. It had suddenly struck me that there might be a future, that a foreign land was going to emerge out of this chaos where no one would wait any more.”4

  This blanket amnesia is often part of the aftermath of war. The puncturing of the nationalist myth, an event that saw the Serbs turn their back on Milošević once Kosovo was lost, does not mean, however, that the nationalist virus has been conquered. While the excesses carried out in the name of the nationalist cause are forgotten or ignored, the myth of the nation has a disturbing longevity. It lies dormant, festering in the society, nurtured by boys’ adventure stories of heroism in service to the nation, the monuments we erect to the fallen, and carefully scripted remembrances until it slowly slouches back into respectability.

  Nationalist triumphalism was shunned and discredited in America after Vietnam. We were forced to see ourselves as others saw us, and it was not always pleasant. We understood, at least for a moment, the lie. But the plague of nationalism was resurrected during the Reagan years. It became ascendant with the Persian Gulf War, when we embraced the mythic and unachievable goal of a “New World Order.” The infection of nationalism now lies unchecked and blindly accepted in the march we make as a nation towards another war, one as ill conceived as the war we lost in southeast Asia.

  3

  THE DESTRUCTION OF CULTURE

  The first casualty when war comes is truth.

  •

  SENATOR HIRAM JOHNSON

  1917

  IN WARTIME THE STATE SEEKS TO DESTROY ITS OWN culture. It is only when this destruction has been completed that the state can begin to exterminate the culture of its opponents. In times of conflict authentic culture is subversive. As the cause championed by the state comes to define national identity, as the myth of war entices a nation to glory and sacrifice, those who question the value of the cause and the veracity of the myths are branded internal enemies.

  Art takes on a whole new significance in wartime. War and the nationalist myth that fuels it are the purveyors of low culture—folklore, quasi-historical dramas, kitsch, sentimental doggerel, and theater and film that portray the glory of soldiers in past wars or current wars dying nobly for the homeland. This is why so little of what moves us during wartime has any currency once war is over. The songs, books, poems, and films that arouse us in war are awkward and embarrassing when the conflict ends, useful only to summon up the nostalgia of war’s comradeship.

  States at war silence their own authentic and humane culture. When this destruction is well advanced they find the lack of critical and moral restraint useful in the campaign to exterminate the culture of their opponents. By destroying authentic culture—that which allows us to question and examine ourselves and our society—the state erodes the moral fabric. It is replaced with a warped version of reality. The enemy is dehumanized; the universe starkly divided between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The cause is celebrated, often in overt religious forms, as a manifestation of divine or historical will. All is dedicated to promoting and glorifying the myth, the nation, the cause.

  The works of the writers in Serbia, such as Danilo Kiš and Milovan Djilas, were mostly unavailable during the war. It remains hard even now to find their books. In Croatia the biting satires of Miroslav Krleža, who wrote one of the most searing portraits of Balkan despots, were forgotten. Writers and artists were inconvenient. They wrote about social undercurrents that were ignored by a new crop of self-appointed nationalist historians, political scientists, and economists.

  National symbols—flags, patriotic songs, sentimental dedications—invade and take over cultural space. Art becomes infected with the platitudes of patriotism. More important, the use of a nation’s cultural resources to back up the war effort is essential to mask the contradictions and lies that mount over time in the drive to sustain war. Cultural or national symbols that do not support the crusade are often ruthlessly removed.

  In Bosnia the ethnic warlords worked hard to wipe out all the records of cohabitation between ethnic groups. The symbols of the old communist regime—one whose slogan was “Brotherhood and Unity”—were defaced or torn down. The monuments to partisan fighters who died fighting the Germans in World War II, the lists of names clearly showing a mix of ethnic groups, were blown up in Croatia. The works of Ivo Andrić, who wrote some of the most lyrical passages about a multiethnic Bosnia, were edited by the Bosnian Serbs and selectively quoted to support ethnic cleansing.

  All groups looked at themselves as victims—the Croats, the Muslims, and the Serbs. They ignored the excesses of their own and highlighted the excesses of the other in gross distortions that fueled the war. The cultivation of victimhood is essential fodder for any conflict. It is studiously crafted by the state. All cultural life is directed to broadcast the injustices carried out against us. Cultural life soon becomes little more than the drivel of agitprop. The message that the nation is good, the cause just, and the war noble is pounded into the heads of citizens in everything from late-night talk shows to morning news programs to films and popular novels. The nation is soon thrown into a trance from which it does not awake until the conflict ends. In parts of the world where the conflict remains unresolved, this trance can last for generations.

  I walked one morning a few years ago down the deserted asphalt tract that slices through the center of the world’s last divided capital, Nicosia, on the island of Cyprus. At one spot on the asphalt dividing line was a small painted triangle. For fifteen minutes each hour, Turkish troops, who control the northern part of the island, were allowed to move from their border posts and stand inside the white triangular lines. The arrangement was part of a deal laboriously negotiated by the United Nations to give Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots access to several disputed areas along the 110-mile border that separates the north from the south. The triangle was a potent reminder that once the folly of war is over, folly itself is often all that remains.

  “It’s really a game of hopscotch,” said Major Richard Nixon-Eckersall, a British peacekeeper who was escorting me. “You see, the Greek sentries, over there, c
an’t see the lines. Are the Turks inside the lines or not? A lot of rock-throwing and insults are generated over this triangle. Last year the Greeks fired off five rounds at the Turks. This is considered one of the most volatile areas along the Green Line.”

  A buffer zone along the Green Line, set up after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and patrolled by United Nations soldiers, has prevented the resumption of a civil war that began in 1963. The zone—four miles wide in spots, narrowing to just a few yards in others—cuts through farmland, mountain passes, and Nicosia itself. Many of the houses and shops in the no-man’s-land have dusty and decaying furniture and goods still stacked inside. Some doors have signs warning of booby traps. The deserted Nicosia International Airport with its gutted terminals, the seaside resort of Varosha swallowed up in thick vegetation, and the whitewashed Olympus Hotel were crumbling from neglect and inhabited by stray dogs and cats.

  The buffer zone was lined with earthworks, barbed wire, trenches, bunkers, and watchtowers manned by troops with automatic weapons. There were about 43,000 Turkish and Greek Cypriot troops, including 30,000 Turkish soldiers sent by Ankara to the island, stationed along it.

  On one side is Northern Cyprus, with one-fifth of the island’s 650,000 people and a government recognized only by Turkey. It is a dreary collection of towns and villages that look like working-class districts in Ankara or Istanbul. It suffers from constant shortages and high rates of unemployment. It is propped up by the Ankara government with an estimated $200 million a year.

  The south, by contrast, has a per capita income of $12,000 a year, equal to those of Ireland or Spain. Luxury hotels and shops selling designer clothes, bone china, and computer software nestle along tree-lined avenues.