War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

As a veteran war correspondent, Chris Hedges has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. He has seen children murdered for sport in Gaza and petty thugs elevated into war heroes in the Balkans. Hedges, who is also a former divinity student, has seen war at its worst and knows too well that to those who pass through it, war can be exhilarating and even addictive: “It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.”

Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war seduces not just those on the front lines but entire societies—corrupting politics, destroying culture, and perverting basic human desires. Mixing hard-nosed realism with profound moral and philosophical insight, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning is a work of terrible power and redemptive clarity whose truths have never been more necessary.

• Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
• American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
• Death of the Liberal Class
• America: The Farewell Tour
• Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
• The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress
• Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II
• What Every Person Should Know About War
• Wages of Rebellion
• Redeployment