"Rape, mutilation, abuse, and theft are the natural outcome of a world in which force rules, in which human beings are objects"
About this Quote
Hedges writes like someone who’s watched the abyss organize itself. The line is engineered to strip comfort from the reader: these aren’t “atrocities” that happen when things go wrong, but predictable products of a system that’s working as designed. The phrase “natural outcome” is the key provocation. It denies the usual moral escape hatch - the belief that brutality is an exception caused by a few monsters, bad apples, or cultural pathology. Hedges is arguing that when force becomes the governing logic, cruelty stops being scandal and becomes infrastructure.
The list is deliberate: “rape, mutilation, abuse, and theft” moves from the intimate to the extractive, from violations of bodies to violations of property. That sequencing makes a bleak point about how domination scales. Once people are reduced to “objects,” every form of taking becomes thinkable: sex, limbs, dignity, resources. The subtext is not just anti-war in the abstract; it’s anti-dehumanization as policy, the kind that turns civilians into “collateral,” prisoners into “detainees,” and hunger into “security.”
As a journalist shaped by conflict zones and the post-9/11 security state, Hedges is also indicting language. “Force rules” isn’t only about guns; it’s about institutions that treat power as the only persuasive argument. The sentence functions like a moral diagnostic: show me where humans are spoken of as units, targets, or costs, and I’ll show you the conditions where violence doesn’t merely occur - it reproduces.
The list is deliberate: “rape, mutilation, abuse, and theft” moves from the intimate to the extractive, from violations of bodies to violations of property. That sequencing makes a bleak point about how domination scales. Once people are reduced to “objects,” every form of taking becomes thinkable: sex, limbs, dignity, resources. The subtext is not just anti-war in the abstract; it’s anti-dehumanization as policy, the kind that turns civilians into “collateral,” prisoners into “detainees,” and hunger into “security.”
As a journalist shaped by conflict zones and the post-9/11 security state, Hedges is also indicting language. “Force rules” isn’t only about guns; it’s about institutions that treat power as the only persuasive argument. The sentence functions like a moral diagnostic: show me where humans are spoken of as units, targets, or costs, and I’ll show you the conditions where violence doesn’t merely occur - it reproduces.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|
More Quotes by Chris
Add to List
