War.
Modern authors like Der Derian, Baudrillard, and Chris Hedges strive to debunk modern myths of war. They do so from very different perspectives, but with surprisingly similar conclusions. It is clear to these authors that in a time of modern warfare, of hyper-efficient slaughter and preordained victories, the myth of war is manipulated in order to explain, excuse, and perpetuate violence on a wide scale. Critics of these authors may find them sentimental for an older, more vicious model of war, of hand-to-hand combat or religious crusades. However, these traditional forms of violence do conform to our expectations of war mythology because they script them, and these histories are often the myths that newscasters invoke when describing current conditions.
The conflicts of the past are the mythological templates for the modern, and through their very different writing styles these authors attempt to describe a distinct break between the mythological war images distributed by news media and the unromantic reality behind the term ‘collateral damage’. As Chris Hedges describes on page 21 of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning:
Most of those who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war. They would not survive if they did. Wars that lose their mythic stature for the public, such as Korea or Vietnam, are doomed to failure, for war is exposed for what it is—organized murder. But in mythic war we imbue events with meanings they do not have. We see defeats as signposts on the road to ultimate victory. We demonize the enemy so our opponent is no longer human. We view ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute goodness. Our enemies invert our view of the world to justify their own cruelty. In most mythic wars this is the case. Each side reduces the other to objects—eventually in the form of corpses.
Hedges blames the political machine and the news media for propagating the war myths that fuel unnecessary violence. News reports of military engagements are often more optimistic than history books on the same subject, perhaps because this polarization of self and other.
Baudrillard takes on extreme language to deny the modern myths of war. He goes so far as to write the controversial series of essays The Gulf War Never Took Place, citing the fact that the hyper-real spaces between violence and its representation have grown too distant to reconcile. He does not deny that violence occurred in Iraq, but he is reluctant to assign the term ‘war’ to events that we can only understand through the scope of news media and politically defined terminology. In forcing the reader to debate the Gulf War in these extreme terms he drives a wedge between what Hedges describes as war reality and war myth. He begins his title chapter with the statement, “since this war was won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like had it existed…we will never know what an American taking part with a chance of being beaten would have been like” (61). Baudrillard concludes that the reality of modern violence cannot be indexed according to the romantic terms of mythological war.
Der Derian compiles a veritable travelogue of encounters with the new virtual manifestation of war. After visiting military war games, gun shows, and seminars, he concludes by reflecting upon a photograph that calls to mind a murdered cousin. He asserts that true, physical cost of violence and loss cannot be indexed by the virtual or mythological structures in place. Der Derian finds that war can only be truly understood by the perpetrators and victims, those in direct contact with blood and loss. On a greater level, this reflects his assumptions that virtual war training seeps into and corrupts the execution of real war.
All three of these authors describe a discrepency between the reality and representation of war that disturbs them. Baudrillard dismisses the representation as entirely falsified, while Der Derian relishes in the hyper-real only to emphasize physical war in the end. One myth they all discuss is that of the "modern war", the sterile, appropriate killing that appears on our tv screens. In invoking an image of a clean Crusades, the American military presents a face of war that appears both ethically and traditionally sound. This modern, cyber-punk infused myth is as divorced from the experience of killing and death as a reading of the Illiad.
Baudrillard and Der Derian describe this falsification as a distinctly modern corruption. However, the distortion of information they describe as an artifice of modernity is very similar to Hedges’ description of the war myth. While it is true that modern mass media propagates war representations with more speed and immediacy than ever before possible, it is problematic to assume that information is received as more legitimate when it is displayed in high definition rather than represented in more traditional media. In understanding war reports as fundamentally mythic in nature Hedges avoids this static interpretation. He assigns the point of corruption with the very act of repackaging war rather than with the era-specific package.
Now that the current administration is accusing naysayers of "rewriting history", the role of breaking news in reality construction has never been more pertinent. Americans traditionally place the ideals of news and history as more reliable and legitimate than mythology or folklore, but if myth inspires the narrative of war coverage and 'history' is considered to be written in real-time, the influence of pre-packaged narratives becomes more potent. Reporting a mythologically-inspired story is like tracing against a template, it is difficult to color outside the lines and the results are pre-determined. Nobody roots against Hrothgar, Odysseus, or James Bond.