Chris Hedges’ powerful and National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning takes on the evils of nationalism, genocide, and the hijacking of cultural memory. Hedges, a longtime war correspondent who covered the wars in El Salvador, the Balkans, and the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli crisis, among others, lays bare the myths of war: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth-makers — historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state — all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, a chance to rise above our small stations in life.” But, at the same time, “it dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death.” Hedges points to war’s ability to raise “fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet … when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us.” He says that this is why, when war is over, it’s so hard to discuss. The ground has shifted. Words fail.
And two years after September 11, how is the ground beneath our feet? Human evil calls for a response. But how to respond without missing the mark and causing more harm than good? Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought has an answer, though some might not be completely satisfied with it. The passengers on flight 93, unlike the passengers on the other planes, had advance knowledge of the terrorists’ intent — loved ones had told them about the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. So, as far as we know, the flight 93 passengers deliberated. Then they acted with the knowledge that, though they were probably doomed, they could refuse to become instruments of evil. They made choices. As Neiman says, “we will never know how much destruction they prevented but we know they prevented some. They proved that not only do human beings have freedom; we can use it to affect a world we fear we don’t control.” 
This article appears in Tom ‘Leatherface’ Delay.