"Killing Ragheads for Jesus: American Sniper Caters to a Deep Sickness Rippling Through [US] Society"

Brilliant piece by Chris Hedges

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 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.....

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.

Killing Ragheads for Jesus by Chris Hedges