Chris Hedges

The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war—and very stupid once the war ended.

Slobodan Milošević went one further. He opened up the country’s prisons and armed his criminal class to fight in Bosnia.

Civil war, brutality, ideological intolerance, conspiracy, and murderous repression are part of the human condition—indeed almost the daily fare for many but a privileged minority.

ost national myths, at their core, are racist. They are fed by ignorance.

he principal religious institutions—the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church in Croatia—were willing accomplices. They were national churches and worked as propagandists for the state. The clerics, on all three sides, were a disgrace

Many of those who defy the collective psychosis of the nation are solitary figures once the wars end.

IN WARTIME THE STATE SEEKS TO DESTROY ITS OWN culture.

achieve corporate action, self-awareness and especially self-criticism must be obliterated

llusions punctuate our lives, blinding us to our own inconsistencies and repeated moral failings. But in wartime these illusions are compounded.

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.