Chris Hedges: Rat je nekrofilija

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Piše: Chris Hedges za radiosarajevo.ba

Rat je nekrofilija. Ta nekrofilija ključna je za služenje u vojsci baš kao što je ključna za šminku bombaša samoubica i terorista. Nekrofilija je skrivena ispod otrcane fraze o dužnosti i bratstvu. Ona čeka u zasjedi, posebno onda kada se čini da imamo malo razloga da živimo i nimalo nade, ili onda kada je intoksikacija ratom na vrhuncu. Kada provedemo dovoljno dugo u ratu, javlja se nešto slično oslobađanju - fatalno i zavodljivo prihvatanje toga da konzumiramo dugotrajni flert sa sopstvenom destrukcijom.

Chris Hedges je bio na čelu Ureda za Balkan lista New York Times od 1995. do 1998. Hedges je prethodno radio na Bliskom Istoku, u Africi te u Centralnoj Americi. On je bio dio tima reportera koji su 2002. osvojili Pulitzerovu nagradu za izvještavanje o globalnom terorizmu; napustio je list nakon što mu je izdat formalni prijekor zbog javnog optuživanja invazije i okupacije na Irak 2003. Hedges je napisao devet knjiga, uključujući bestellere Rat je sila koja nam daje značenje (War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning), Američki fašisti: Kršćansko pravo i Rat protiv Amerike (American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America), Carstvo iluzija i smrt liberalne klase (Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class).  U junu će objaviti knjigu, u saradnji sa grafičkim umjetnikom Joe Saccom, kojeg je Hedges sreo u Bosni i Hercegovini. Knjiga će izaći pod naslovom Dani destrukcije, Dani revolta (Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt).  Hedges je također predavao na univerzitetima Columbia, New York, Princeton i Toronto.  Živi u Princetonu, u New Jerseyu.

Intimnost i smrt
U svojim memoarima o ratu i partizanima u Jugoslaviji Ratno vrijeme, Milovan Đilas je pisao o zovu smrti koji osjećaju učesnici borbe. On je stajao iznad tijela svog druga, zapovjednika Save Kovačevića i otkrio:

“…umiranje se nije činilo odvratnim ili nepravednim. Bio je to najnevjerovatniji, najuzvišeniji dio moga života. Smrt se nije činila stranom ili neželjenom. To što sam se suzdržao od toga da se slijepo zaletim u kavgu i smrt bilo je možda zbog mog osjećaja obaveze prema jedinici ili zbog podsjećanja nekog od drugova koje se odnosilo na dati zadatak. U mom sjećanju, puno puta sam se vratio u te trenutke, osjećajući jednaku intimnost sa smrću i želju za njima dok sam bio u zatvoru, pogotovo u doba mog prvog tamničenja.“

Potomak rata pomeo je Erosa. 'To' je izbrisalo profinjenost i blagost. 'To' kroz kolektivnu moć briše svu individualnost, strast, mogućnost izbora, glas pojedinca upućen masi.

„Najvažniji dio individualnog života, ono što ne može biti podvedeno pod kolektivitet, jeste ljubav“, napisao je Sebastian Haffner. „Stoga bratstvo ima specijalno oružje protiv ljubavi: bestijalnost. Svake večeri u krevetu, nakon što posao završi posljednja patrola, dešava se ritual recitiranja razvratnih pjesmica i šala. To je teško i brzo pravilo muškog bratstva i ništa nije pogrešnije od raširenog mišljenja da je ovo ventil erotskih ili seksualnih frustracija. Naprotiv, akt ljubavi ovim se čini nepoželjnim što je više moguće. Oni ga tretiraju kao da je u pitanju varenje i pražnjenje crijeva, i prave od njega objekat podrugivanja. Muškarci koji recituju nepristojne pjesme i koriste grube riječi da bi opisali dijelove ženskoga tijela zapravo poriču da su ikada imali nježna osjećanja ili da su bili u ljubavi, da su sebe učinili atraktivnim ili se ponašali blago...“

Kada pogledamo ovo, kada vidimo ovisnost onakvom kakva je, kada shvatimo sebe i kako nas je rat izopačio, život bude teško podnijeti. Jon Steele, kamerman koji je proveo godine u ratnim zonama, doživio je nervni slom u gužvi aerodroma Heathrow, vraćajući se iz Sarajeva. On je razumio stvarnost svog posla, realnost koja je sa sebe svukla visoki sjaj pravičnosti po vlastitom ubjeđenju.

“Vratio sam se iz Sarajeva“, govorio je.  “Mi smo bili na mjestu koje se zove aleja snajpera i snimao sam djevojčicu koju je u vrat pogodio metak snajpera. Snimao sam je i u bolnici, i tek nakon što je umrla, najednom sam shvatio da je posljednje što je vidjela bio odsjaj objektiva kamere koju sam držao ispred nje. To me je uništilo. Zgrabio sam kameru i počeo trčati duž aleje snajpera, snimajući, u njihovoj koži, Bosance koji su trčali od mjesta do mjesta.”

Ljiljana/Shvatiti ovisnost
Godinu dana nakon rata u Sarajevu sjedio sam sa prijateljima iz Bosne koji su mnogo propatili. Mlada žena, Ljiljana, izgubila je oca, Srbina koji je odbio da se pridruži srpskim snagama koje su opkolile grad. Nekoliko dana ranije, ona je morala da identifikuje njegov leš. Tijelo je bilo iskopano (voda se cijedila sa strana trulog kovčega) iz malog parka, kako bi se sahranilo na gradskom groblju. Ljiljana je uskoro trebala otići za Australiju – gdje će se, rekla mi je, „udati za čovjeka koji nikad nije čuo za ovaj rat i odgojiti djecu da im se nikad ne kaže ni riječi o njemu, ništa o zemlji iz koje potiče.”

Ljiljana je bila mlada. Ali rat je uzeo svoj danak. Njeni obrazi su bili udubljeni, njena kosa suha i lomljiva. Njeni zubi su se počeli raspadati, neki su bili slomljeni u šiljate komade. Ona nije imala novca za zubara; nadala se da će ih popraviti u Australiji.

A ipak, sve što su ona i njeni prijatelji radili tog poslijepodneva bilo je žaljenje za danima u kojima su živjeli gladni i u strahu, mršavi, na nišanu visokopozicioniranih srpskih artiljeraca. Nisu oni željeli da se vrati patnja, premda su, priznaju, to možda bili najispunjeniji dani njihovih života. Oni su me gledali u očaju. Znali smo se iz dana kada su na njih dnevno sipali stotine granata, kada nisu imali vode da se okupaju i da operu svoju odjeću, kada su se gomilali u hladnim stanovima dok su snajperski meci šicali vanjske zidove.

Međutim, to što su oni prikazali je bila realnost. Bilo je to razočarenje sterilnom, uzaludnom i praznom stvarnosti. Mir je opet ogolio prazninu koju je adrenalin rata, bitke, popunjavao. Još jednom, našli su se sami – kao što smo možda svi mi - nevezani zajedničkom borbom, bez mogućnosti da budemo plemeniti, heroji, više ne tako sigurni šta je to život i šta bi trebao da znači. Staro drugarstvo, kakogod bilo iskrivljeno, nestalo je s posljednjim pucnjem.

Štaviše, oni su uvidjeli da je sva ta žrtva bila za – ništa. Oni su, kao i svi mi koji smo u ratu, bili izdani. Korumpirani, stari šefovi Komunističke partije, koji su preko noći postali nacionalisti i koji su ih odveli do tog haosa, obogatili su se na njihovoj patnji te su i dalje na pozicijama moći. Stopa nezaposlenosti iznosila je 70 posto. Ovisili su o donacijama međunarodne zajednice. Shvatili su da njihov povod, nekad moderan u intelektualnim krugovima, baš kao i oni, leži zaboravljen. Nije bilo više glumaca, političara i umjetnika koji se natječu ko će ih prvi posjetiti u vrijeme primirja – činovi koji su gotovo uvijek bili na račun veličanstvene samopromocije. Oni su poznavali laži rata, parodiju sopstvenog idealizma i borbu sa razbijenim iluzijama. Pa opet, oni su to priželjkivali, ponovo. A i ja sam.

Godinu dana poslije, na moju adresu stigla je božićna čestitka. Bila je potpisana sa „Ljiljana iz Australije“. Nije bilo povratne adrese; za nju više nikad nisam čuo. Ali mnogi s kojima sam radio kao ratni dopisnik tokom posljednjih 20 godina nisu uspjeli pobjeći. Nisu se uspjeli osloboditi plesa smrti i lutali su od konflikta do konflikta, uvijek tragajući samo za još jednim snimkom.

Katulova elegija za Kurta Schroka
U međuvremenu, ja sam se našao u Gazi, u još jednoj zasjedi. Mladi Palestinac, udaljen 15 stopa od mene, bio je ustrijeljen u prsa i ubijen. Jeste, bio sam namamljen, ali u tom trenutku više nisam osjećao staru navalu, samo strah. Došlo je vrijeme da se oslobodim, da pustim, da prihvatim da se ništa od onog nije moglo, ne može, niti se treba vratiti. Znao sam da je gotovo... Ja sam bio sretnik koji je ostao živ.

Kurt Schork – briljantni, hrabri i posvećeni – nije se mogao odvojiti. On je poginuo u zasjedi u Sierra Leoneu, zajedno sa još jednim prijateljem, Miguel Gil Morenom. Njegovo zarobljavanje – njegovo prihvatanje Thanatosa, instinkta smrti – nije nikada spomenuto na sterilnoj i antiseptičnoj komemoraciji režiranoj za njega u Washingtonu. Svi su tokom nje hodali na vrhovima prstiju, ali mi koji smo ga poznavali, mi smo razumjeli njegovu obuzetost.

Sa Kurtom sam radio deset godina, još od sjevernog Iraka. Pismen i zabavan – čini se da su hrabri često zabavni. On i ja smo razmjenjivali knjige u nastojanju da pokušamo shvatiti smisao ludila koji nas je okruživao. Njegov gubitak je rupa koja nikad neće biti popunjena. Njegov pepeo je položen na sarajevskom groblju Lav, u čast žrtvama rata. Letio sam za Sarajevo gdje sam se sreo sa britanskim redateljem Danom Reedom.  Bio je to oblačan novembarski dan. Stajali smo iznad groba i sasuli pintu viskija. Dan je zapalio svijeću. Ja sam recitovao elegiju rimskog lirika, pjesnika Katula, koju je napisao u čast svog mrtvog brata.

„Stranim obalama i vodama, mnogim danima na moru,
Dolazim ti po obrede tvog podzemlja,
Donosim tebi, smrti, ove posljednje darove živih
I svoje riječi – prazne zvuke čovjeku i prašini.
Avaj, brate moj.
Tebe su oduzeli od mene. Tebe su oduzeli od mene.
Hladnom šansom pretvorena sjena i moj bol.
Evo trpeze drevne ceremonije, davno
Zakazane za zakržljale pod zemljom:
Uzmi ih: suze tvoga brata učinile su ih vlažnom: i uzmi
U vječnost moj pozdrav i moje zbogom.

Rat samo jednom može biti nov
I bilo je tamo, među četiri hiljade ubijenih u ratu, mjesto kojem je Kurt pripadao. On je umro jer se nije mogao osloboditi rata. On je pokušavao da ponovi ono što je našao u Sarajevu, ali nije uspio. Rat samo jednom može biti nov. Kurt je poslije bio u Istočnom Timoru i Čečeniji. Sierra Lone, siguran sam, njemu nije značio ništa. Kurt i Miguel nisu mogli pustiti. I bili su prvi koji su to priznali. Provedi dovoljno vremena u ratu - i više se nigdje drugo ne možeš uklopiti. Konačno te ubije. Ali to nije nova priča. Ona počinje kao ljubav, ali zapravo je smrt.

Rat je prelijepa mlada nimfa iz bajke kroz koju poljupcem udahnemo sve mirise podzemlja.

Drevni Grci imali su riječ za takvu sudbinu: ekpiroza.

To znači, biti obuzetom kuglom vatre. Oni su je koristili kako bi opisali heroje.

Napomena: Zahvaljujemo za posredovanje i pomoć Bobi Lizdek, koja je tokom rata radila kao prevodilac u štabu UNPROFOR-a, te za mnoge inostrane medijske kuće uključujući agenciju Reuters
Prijevod i obrada: Lana Ramljak, Radiosarajevo.ba 
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ENGLISH

War is necrophilia.  This necrophilia is central to soldiering just as it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists.  The necrophilia is hidden under platitudes about duty or comradeship.  It waits especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its pitch to be unleashed.  When we spend long enough in war, it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation with our own destruction.

Chris Hedges was the Balkan Bureau Chief for the New York Times form 1995 to 1998.  He had previously worked in the Middle East, Africa and Central America.  Hedges was part of the 2002 team of reporters at the paper who won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on global terrorism.  He left the paper after being issued a formal written reprimand for publicly denouncing the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.  He has written nine books including the best sellers War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class.  He will publish a book in June with the graphic artist Joe Sacco, who he met in Bosnia, called Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.  Hedges has also taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.  He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

In Milovan Djilas’ memoir Wartime about the partisan war in Yugoslavia, he wrote of the enticement death held for the combatants.  He stood over the body of his comrade, the commander Sava Kovacevic, and found:
“…dying did not seem terrible or unjust.  This was the most extraordinary, the most exalted moment of my life.  Death did not seem strange or undesirable.  That I restrained myself from charging blindly into the fray and death was perhaps due to my sense of obligation to the troops or to some comrade’s reminder concerning the tasks at hand.  In my memory, I returned to those moments many times with the same feeling of intimacy with death and desire for it while I was in prison, especially during my first incarceration.”

War ascendant wipes out Eros. It wipes out delicacy and tenderness.  It communal power seeks to render the individual obsolete, to hand all passions, all choice, all voice to the crowd.
“The most important part of the individual life, which cannot be subsumed in communal life, is love, “ Sebastian Haffner wrote.  “So comradeship has its special weapons against love: smut.  Every evening in bed, after the last patrol round, there was the ritual reciting of lewd songs and jokes.  That is the hard and fast rule of male comradeship, and nothing is more mistaken that the widely held opinion that this is a safety valve for frustrated erotic or sexual feelings.  These songs and jokes do not have an erotic, arousing effect.  On the contrary, they make the act of love appear as unappetizing as possible.  They treat it like digestion and defecation, and make it an object of ridicule.  The men who recited rude songs and used coarse words for female body parts were in effect denying that they ever had tender feelings or had been in love, that they had ever made themselves attractive, behaved gently…”

When we see this, when we see our addiction for what it is, when we understand ourselves and how war has perverted us, life becomes hard to bear.  Jon Steele, a cameraman who spent years in war zones, had a nervous breakdown in a crowded Heathrow Airport after returning from Sarajevo.  He understood the reality of his work, a reality that stripped away the self-righteous, high-octane gloss.  “I came back from Sarajevo,” he said.  “We were in a place called Sniper’s Alley, and I filmed a girl there who had been hit in the neck by a sniper’s bullet.  I filmed her in the ambulance, and only after she was dead, I suddenly understood that the last thing she had seen was the reflection of the lens of the camera I was holding in front of her.  This wiped me out.  I grabbed the camera, and started running down Sniper’s Alley, filming at knee level the Bosnians running from place to place.”

A year after the war in Sarajevo, I sat with Bosnian friends who had suffered horribly.  A young woman, Ljiljana, had lost her father, a Serb, who refused to join the besieging Serb forces around the city.  She had been forced a few days earlier to identify his corpse.  The body was lifted, the water running out o f the sides of a rotting coffin, from a small park for reburial in the central cemetery.  She was emigrating for Australia soon – where, she told me, “I will marry a man who has never heard of this war and raise children that will be told nothing about it, nothing about the country I am from.”

Ljiljana was young.  But the war had exacted a toll.  Her cheeks were hollow, her hair dry and brittle.  Her teeth were decayed and some had broken into jagged bits.  She had no money for a dentist.  She hoped to fix them in Australia.

Yet all she and her friends did that afternoon was lament the days when they lived in fear and hunger, emaciated, targeted by Serb gunners on the heights above.  They did not wish back the suffering.  And yet, they admitted, these may have been the fullest days of their lives.  They looked at me in despair.  I knew them when they were being pounded by hundreds of shells a day, when they had no water to bath in or wash their clothes, when they huddled in unheated flats as sniper bullets hit the walls outside.

But what they expressed was real.  It was the disillusionment with a sterile, futile and empty present.  Peace had again peeled back the void that the rush of war, of battle, had filled.  Once again they were – as perhaps we all are  -- alone, no longer bound by a common struggle, no longer given the opportunity to be noble, heroic, no longer sure of what life was about or what it meant.  The old comradeship, however false, had vanished with the last shot.

Moreover, they had seen that all the sacrifice had been for naught. They had been, as we all are in war, betrayed.  The corrupt old Communist Party bosses, who became nationalists overnight and got them into the mess in the first place, had grown rich off their suffering and were still in power.  There was a 70-percent unemployment rate.  They depended on handouts from the international community.  They understood that their cause, once as fashionable in certain intellectual circles as they were themselves, lay forgotten.  No longer did actors, politicians and artists scramble to come and visit during the ceasefires – acts that were almost always ones of gross self-promotion.  They knew of lie of war, the mockery of their idealism, and struggled with their shattered illusions.  And yet, they wished it all back and I did, too.

A year later, I received a Christmas card.  It was signed “Ljiljana from Australia.”  It had no return address.  I never heard from her again.  But many of those I worked with as war correspondents during the past 20 years did not escape.  They could not break free from the dance with death.  They wandered from conflict to conflict, seeking always one more hit.

By then, I was back in Gaza and found myself pinned down in another ambush.  A young Palestinian 15 feet away was shot through the chest and killed.  I had been lured back but now felt none of the old rush, just fear.  It was time to break free, to let go, to accept that none of this would or could or should return.  I knew it was over.  I was lucky to get alive.

Kurt Schork – brilliant, courageous and driven – could not let go.  He died in an ambush in Sierra Leone along with another friend, Miguel Gil Moreno.  His entrapment – his embrace of Thanatos, of the death instinct – was never mentioned in the sterile and antiseptic memorial service staged for him in Washington.  Everyone tiptoed around it.  But for those of us who knew him, we understood that he had been consumed.

I had worked with Kurt for 10 years, starting in northern Iraq.  Literate, funny – it seems the brave are often funny. He and I passed books back and forth in our struggle to make sense of the madness around us.  His loss is a hole that will never be filled.  His ashes were placed in the Lion’s Cemetery in Sarajevo for the victims of the war.  I flew to Sarajevo and met the British filmmaker, Dan Reed.  It was an overcast November day.  We stood over the grave and downed a pint of whiskey.  Dan lit a candle.  I recited a poem the Roman lyric poet, Catullus, had written to honor his dead brother.

By strangers’ costs and waters, many days at sea,
I come here for the rites of your unworlding,
Bringing for you, the dead, these last gifts of the living
And my words – vain sounds for the man of dust.
Alas, my brother,
You have been taken from me.  You have been taken from me,
By cold chance turned a shadow, and my pain.
Here are the foods of the old ceremony, appointed
Long ago for the starvelings under the earth:
Take them:  your brother’s tears have made them wet: and take
Into eternity my hail and my farewell.

It was there, among four thousand war dead, that Kurt belonged.  He died because he could not free himself from war.  He was trying to replicate what he had found in Sarajevo, but he could not.  War could never be new again.  Kurt had been in East Timor and Chechnya.  Sierra Lone, I was sure, meant nothing to him.  Kurt and Miguel could not let go.  They would be the first to admit it.  Spend long enough at war, and you cannot fit in anywhere else.  It finally kills you.  It is not a new story.  It starts out like love, but it is death.

War is the beautiful young nymph in the fairy tale that, when kissed, exhales the vapors of the underworld.

The ancient Greeks had a word for such a fate: ekpyrosis.

It means to be consumed by a ball of fire.  They used it to describe heroes.