Killing Ragheads for Jesus
By Chris Hedges
January 26, 2015 "ICH"
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“American Sniper” lionizes the most
despicable aspects of U.S. society—the gun
culture, the blind adoration of the
military, the belief that we have an innate
right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate
the “lesser breeds” of the earth, a
grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes
compassion and pity, a denial of
inconvenient facts and historical truth, and
a belittling of critical thinking and
artistic expression. Many Americans,
especially white Americans trapped in a
stagnant economy and a dysfunctional
political system, yearn for the supposed
moral renewal and rigid, militarized control
the movie venerates. These passions, if
realized, will extinguish what is left of
our now-anemic open society.
The movie opens with a father
and his young son hunting a deer. The boy
shoots the animal, drops his rifle and runs
to see his kill.
“Get back here,” his
father yells. “You don’t ever leave your
rifle in the dirt.”
“Yes, sir,” the boy
answers.
“That was a helluva shot,
son,” the father says. “You got a gift. You
gonna make a fine hunter some day.”
The camera cuts to a church
interior where a congregation of white
Christians—blacks appear in this film as
often as in a Woody Allen movie—are
listening to a sermon about God’s plan for
American Christians. The film’s title
character, based on Chris Kyle, who would
become the most lethal sniper in U.S.
military history, will, it appears from the
sermon, be called upon by God to use his
“gift” to kill evildoers. The scene shifts
to the Kyle family dining room table as the
father intones in a Texas twang: “There are
three types of people in this world: sheep,
wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to
believe evil doesn’t exist in the world. And
if it ever darkened their doorstep they
wouldn’t know how to protect themselves.
Those are the sheep. And then you got
predators.”
The camera cuts to a
schoolyard bully beating a smaller boy.
“They use violence to prey
on people,” the father goes on. “They’re the
wolves. Then there are those blessed with
the gift of aggression and an overpowering
need to protect the flock. They are a rare
breed who live to confront the wolf. They
are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any
sheep in this family.”
The father lashes his belt
against the dining room table.
“I will whup your ass if
you turn into a wolf,” he says to his two
sons. “We protect our own. If someone tries
to fight you, tries to bully your little
brother, you have my permission to finish
it.”
There is no shortage of
simpletons whose minds are warped by this
belief system. We elected one of them,
George W. Bush, as president. They populate
the armed forces and the Christian right.
They watch Fox News and believe it. They
have little understanding or curiosity about
the world outside their insular communities.
They are proud of their ignorance and
anti-intellectualism. They prefer drinking
beer and watching football to reading a
book. And when they get into power—they
already control the Congress, the corporate
world, most of the media and the war
machine—their binary vision of good and evil
and their myopic self-adulation cause severe
trouble for their country. “American
Sniper,” like the big-budget feature films
pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to
exalt deformed values of militarism, racial
self-glorification and state violence, is a
piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for
the crimes of empire. That it made a
record-breaking $105.3 million over the
Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend
is a symptom of the United States’ dark
malaise.
“The movie never asks the
seminal question as to why the people of
Iraq are fighting back against us in the
very first place,” said Mikey Weinstein,
whom I reached by phone in New Mexico.
Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White
House and is a former Air Force officer, is
the head of the Military Religious Freedom
Foundation, which challenges the growing
Christian fundamentalism within the U.S.
military. “It made me physically ill with
its twisted, totally one-sided distortions
of wartime combat ethics and justice woven
into the fabric of Chris Kyle’s personal and
primal justification mantra of
‘God-Country-Family.’ It is nothing less
than an odious homage, indeed a literal
horrific hagiography to wholesale
slaughter.”
Weinstein noted that the
embrace of extreme right-wing Christian
chauvinism, or Dominionism, which calls for
the creation of a theocratic “Christian”
America, is especially acute among elite
units such as the
SEALs and the Army Special Forces.
The evildoers don’t take
long to make an appearance in the film. This
happens when television—the only way the
movie’s characters get news—announces the
1998 truck bombings of the American
embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in
which hundreds of people were killed. Chris,
now grown, and his brother, aspiring rodeo
riders, watch the news reports with outrage.
Ted Koppel talks on the screen about a “war”
against the United States.
“Look what they did to
us,” Chris whispers.
He heads down to the
recruiter to sign up to be a Navy SEAL. We
get the usual boot camp scenes of green
recruits subjected to punishing ordeals to
make them become real men. In a bar scene,
an aspiring SEAL has painted a target on his
back and comrades throw darts into his skin.
What little individuality these recruits
have—and they don’t appear to have much—is
sucked out of them until they are part of
the military mass. They are unquestioningly
obedient to authority, which means, of
course, they are sheep.
We get a love story too.
Chris meets Taya in a bar. They do shots.
The movie slips, as it often does, into
clichéd dialogue.
She tells him Navy SEALs
are “arrogant, self-centered pricks who
think you can lie and cheat and do whatever
the fuck you want. I’d never date a SEAL.”
“Why would you say I’m
self-centered?” Kyle asks. “I’d lay down my
life for my country.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the greatest
country on earth and I’d do everything I can
to protect it,” he says.
She drinks too much. She
vomits. He is gallant. He helps her home.
They fall in love. Taya is later shown
watching television. She yells to Chris in
the next room.
“Oh, my God, Chris,” she
says.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“No!” she yells.
Then we hear the
television announcer: “You see the first
plane coming in at what looks like the east
side. …
Chris and Taya watch in
horror. Ominous music fills the movie’s
soundtrack. The evildoers have asked for it.
Kyle will go to Iraq to extract vengeance.
He will go to fight in a country that had
nothing to do with 9/11, a country that
columnist Thomas Friedman once said we
attacked “because we could.” The historical
record and the reality of the Middle East
don’t matter. Muslims are Muslims. And
Muslims are evildoers or, as Kyle calls
them, “savages.” Evildoers have to be
eradicated.
Chris and Taya marry. He
wears his gold Navy SEAL trident on the
white shirt under his tuxedo at the wedding.
His SEAL comrades are at the ceremony.
“Just got the call,
boys—it’s on,” an officer says at the
wedding reception.
The Navy SEALs cheer. They
drink. And then we switch to Fallujah. It is
Tour One. Kyle, now a sniper, is told
Fallujah is “the new Wild West.” This may be
the only accurate analogy in the film, given
the genocide we carried out against Native
Americans. He hears about an enemy sniper
who can do “head shots from 500 yards out.
They call him Mustafa. He was in the
Olympics.”
Kyle’s first kill is a boy
who is handed an anti-tank grenade by a
young woman in a black chador. The woman,
who expresses no emotion over the boy’s
death, picks up the grenade after the boy is
shot and moves toward U.S. Marines on
patrol. Kyle kills her too. And here we have
the template for the film and Kyle’s
best-selling autobiography, “American
Sniper.” Mothers and sisters in Iraq don’t
love their sons or their brothers. Iraqi
women breed to make little suicide bombers.
Children are miniature Osama bin Ladens. Not
one of the Muslim evildoers can be
trusted—man, woman or child. They are
beasts. They are shown in the film
identifying U.S. positions to insurgents on
their cellphones, hiding weapons under
trapdoors in their floors, planting
improvised explosive devices in roads or
strapping explosives onto themselves in
order to be suicide bombers. They are devoid
of human qualities.
“There was a kid who
barely had any hair on his balls,” Kyle says
nonchalantly after shooting the child and
the woman. He is resting on his cot with a
big Texas flag behind him on the wall.
“Mother gives him a grenade, sends him out
there to kill Marines.”
Enter The Butcher—a
fictional Iraqi character created for the
film. Here we get the most evil of the
evildoers. He is dressed in a long black
leather jacket and dispatches his victims
with an electric drill. He mutilates
children—we see an arm he cut from a child.
A local sheik offers to betray The Butcher
for $100,000. The Butcher kills the sheik.
He murders the sheik’s small son in front of
his mother with his electric drill. The
Butcher shouts: “You talk to them, you die
with them.”
Kyle moves on to Tour Two
after time at home with Taya, whose chief
role in the film is to complain through
tears and expletives about her husband being
away. Kyle says before he leaves: “They’re
savages. Babe, they’re fuckin’ savages.”
He and his fellow platoon
members spray-paint the white skull of the
Punisher from Marvel Comics on their
vehicles, body armor, weapons and helmets.
The motto they paint in a circle around the
skull reads: “Despite what your momma told
you … violence does solve problems.”
“And we spray-painted it
on every building and walls we could,” Kyle
wrote in his memoir, “American Sniper.” “We
wanted people to know, we’re here and we
want to fuck with you. …You see us? We’re
the people kicking your ass. Fear us because
we will kill you, motherfucker.”
The book is even more
disturbing than the film. In the film Kyle
is a reluctant warrior, one forced to do his
duty. In the book he relishes killing and
war. He is consumed by hatred of all Iraqis.
He is intoxicated by violence. He is
credited with 160 confirmed kills, but he
notes that to be confirmed a kill had to be
witnessed, “so if I shot someone in the
stomach and he managed to crawl around where
we couldn’t see him before he bled out he
didn’t count.”
Kyle insisted that every
person he shot deserved to die. His
inability to be self-reflective allowed him
to deny the fact that during the U.S.
occupation many, many innocent Iraqis were
killed, including some shot by snipers.
Snipers are used primarily to sow terror and
fear among enemy combatants. And in his
denial of reality, something former
slaveholders and former Nazis perfected to
an art after overseeing their own
atrocities, Kyle was able to cling to
childish myth rather than examine the
darkness of his own soul and his
contribution to the war crimes we carried
out in Iraq. He justified his killing with a
cloying sentimentality about his family, his
Christian faith, his fellow SEALs and his
nation. But sentimentality is not love. It
is not empathy. It is, at its core, about
self-pity and self-adulation. That the film,
like the book, swings between cruelty and
sentimentality is not accidental.
“Sentimentality, the
ostentatious parading of excessive and
spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty,
the inability to feel,”
James Baldwin reminded us. “The wet eyes
of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to
experience, his fear of life, his arid
heart; and it is always, therefore, the
signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the
mask of cruelty.”
“Savage, despicable evil,”
Kyle wrote of those he was killing from
rooftops and windows. “That’s what we were
fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of
people, myself included, called the enemy
‘savages.’… I only wish I had killed more.”
At another point he writes: “I loved killing
bad guys. … I loved what I did. I still do …
it was fun. I had the time of my life being
a SEAL.” He labels Iraqis “fanatics” and
writes “they hated us because we weren’t
Muslims.” He claims “the fanatics we fought
valued nothing but their twisted
interpretation of religion.”
“I never once fought for
the Iraqis,” he wrote of our Iraqi allies.
“I could give a flying fuck about them.”
He killed an Iraqi
teenager he claimed was an insurgent. He
watched as the boy’s mother found his body,
tore her clothes and wept. He was unmoved.
He wrote: “If you loved
them [the sons], you should have kept them
away from the war. You should have kept them
from joining the insurgency. You let them
try and kill us—what did you think would
happen to them?”
“People back home [in the
U.S.], people who haven’t been in war, at
least not that war, sometimes don’t seem to
understand how the troops in Iraq acted,” he
went on. “They’re surprised—shocked—to
discover we often joked about death, about
things we saw.”
He was investigated by the
Army for killing an unarmed civilian.
According to his memoir, Kyle, who viewed
all Iraqis as the enemy, told an Army
colonel: “I don’t shoot people with Korans.
I’d like to, but I don’t.” The investigation
went nowhere.
Kyle was given the
nickname “Legend.” He got a tattoo of a
Crusader cross on his arm. “I wanted
everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it
put in red, for blood. I hated the damn
savages I’d been fighting,” he wrote. “I
always will.” Following a day of sniping,
after killing perhaps as many as six people,
he would go back to his barracks to spent
his time smoking Cuban Romeo y Julieta No. 3
cigars and “playing video games, watching
porn and working out.” On leave, something
omitted in the movie, he was frequently
arrested for drunken bar fights. He
dismissed politicians, hated the press and
disdained superior officers, exalting only
the comradeship of warriors. His memoir
glorifies white, “Christian” supremacy and
war. It is an angry tirade directed against
anyone who questions the military’s elite,
professional killers.
“For some reason, a lot of
people back home—not all people—didn’t
accept that we were at war,” he wrote. “They
didn’t accept that war means death, violent
death, most times. A lot of people, not just
politicians, wanted to impose ridiculous
fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of
behavior that no human being could
maintain.”
The enemy sniper Mustafa,
portrayed in the film as if he was a serial
killer, fatally wounds Kyle’s comrade Ryan
“Biggles” Job. In the movie Kyle returns to
Iraq—his fourth tour—to extract revenge for
Biggles’ death. This final tour, at least in
the film, centered on the killing of The
Butcher and the enemy sniper, also a
fictional character. As it focuses on the
dramatic duel between hero Kyle and villain
Mustafa the movie becomes ridiculously
cartoonish.
Kyle gets Mustafa in his
sights and pulls the trigger. The bullet is
shown leaving the rifle in slow motion. “Do
it for Biggles,” someone says. The enemy
sniper’s head turns into a puff of blood.
“Biggles would be proud of
you,” a soldier says. “You did it, man.”
His final tour over, Kyle
leaves the Navy. As a civilian he struggles
with the demons of war and becomes, at least
in the film, a model father and husband and
works with veterans who were maimed in Iraq
and Afghanistan. He trades his combat boots
for cowboy boots.
The real-life Kyle, as the
film was in production, was shot dead at a
shooting range near Dallas on Feb. 2, 2013,
along with a friend, Chad Littlefield. A
former Marine, Eddie Ray Routh, who had been
suffering from PTSD and severe psychological
episodes, allegedly killed the two men and
then stole Kyle’s pickup truck. Routh will
go on trial next month. The film ends
with scenes of Kyle’s funeral
procession—thousands lined the roads waving
flags—and the memorial service at the Dallas
Cowboys’ home stadium. It shows fellow SEALs
pounding their tridents into the top of his
coffin, a custom for fallen comrades. Kyle
was shot in the back and the back of his
head. Like so many people he dispatched, he
never saw his killer when the fatal shots
were fired.
The culture of war
banishes the capacity for pity. It glorifies
self-sacrifice and death. It sees pain,
ritual humiliation and violence as part of
an initiation into manhood. Brutal hazing,
as Kyle noted in his book, was an integral
part of becoming a Navy SEAL. New SEALs
would be held down and choked by senior
members of the platoon until they passed
out. The culture of war idealizes only the
warrior. It belittles those who do not
exhibit the warrior’s “manly” virtues. It
places a premium on obedience and loyalty.
It punishes those who engage in independent
thought and demands total conformity. It
elevates cruelty and killing to a virtue.
This culture, once it infects wider society,
destroys all that makes the heights of human
civilization and democracy possible. The
capacity for empathy, the cultivation of
wisdom and understanding, the tolerance and
respect for difference and even love are
ruthlessly crushed. The innate barbarity
that war and violence breed is justified by
a saccharine sentimentality about the
nation, the flag and a perverted
Christianity that blesses its armed
crusaders. This sentimentality, as Baldwin
wrote, masks a terrifying numbness. It
fosters an unchecked narcissism. Facts and
historical truths, when they do not fit into
the mythic vision of the nation and the
tribe, are discarded. Dissent becomes
treason. All opponents are godless and
subhuman. “American Sniper” caters to a deep
sickness rippling through our society. It
holds up the dangerous belief that we can
recover our equilibrium and our lost glory
by embracing an American fascism.
Chris Hedges previously
spent nearly two decades as a foreign
correspondent in Central America, the Middle
East, Africa and the Balkans. He has
reported from more than 50 countries and has
worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning
News and The New York Times, for which he
was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.