The Greatest Evil Is War

by Chris Hedges

We all have the capacity to commit evil. It takes little to unleash it.

Wars may have to be fought to ensure survival, but they are always tragic. They always bring to the surface the worst elements of any society, those who have a penchant for violence and a lust for absolute power.

All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Gaza, or Vietnam, are placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls “atrocity-producing situations.”

More Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war than were killed during it.