by Chris Hedges
The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.
We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.
Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.
The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”
The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”
Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.
Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.
“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”
He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.
The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.
We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil personified.
The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.
“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.
Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.
“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Israel Represses Israelis and Congress Approves
by Stephen Zunes
It’s been two years since Israel initiated the “Operation Cast Lead” military assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. Since then, the right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has launched an unprecedented wave of intimidation against Israeli peace and human rights groups. These groups say they are “working in an increasingly hostile environment,” according to a New York Times report, and that Israeli government leaders are fostering “an atmosphere of harassment” by turning “human rights criticism into an existential threat.”
However, Congress has chosen to look the other way – and wants the executive branch to do the same.
A resolution -- sponsored by House Foreign Relations Committee Chair Howard Berman (D-CA), Middle East Subcommittee Chair Gary Ackerman (D-NY), and soon-to-be House Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) -- condemned the findings of the UN Human Rights Council report for documenting such infringements on civil liberties and other human rights violations by the Israeli government.
Included in the resolution were the words: “even though Israel is a vibrant democracy with a vigorous and free press, the report of the ‘fact-finding mission’ erroneously asserts that ‘actions of the Israeli government . . . have contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent with the government and its actions . . . is not tolerated.’” It passed the House by an overwhelming 344-36 vote.
The UNHRC fact-finding mission, led by the prominent South African jurist Richard Goldstone, is best known for documenting evidence of war crimes by both Hamas and the Israeli government. However, it also covered suppression of internal dissent both within the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and within Israel and found that “individuals and groups viewed as sources of criticism of Israel’s military operations were subjected to repression or attempted repression by the Government of Israel.”
Pattern of Abuse
In recent months, I have contacted scores of offices of Democratic members of Congress. I’ve offered them evidence that the UNHRC report accurately documented the growing intolerance of the Israeli government to legitimate dissent. Yet to this day, they stand by their vote, insisting the charges of Israeli repression were “erroneous” and denying that the repression continues.
The rightist Netanyahu government, apparently emboldened by such a broad bipartisan defense of its actions from Washington, has only increased its repression of Israeli citizens in the year since the House passed its resolution. This has included surveillance and intimidation of Israeli peace and human rights groups, with the detention for days without charge of scores of Israeli Jews attending or simply en route to peaceful protests. On December 27, for example, an Israeli court sentenced Jonathan Pollack, a leading young human rights activist, to three months in prison for being part of an “illegal assembly” –a bicycle protest against the war on Gaza.
Other Israelis speaking out have been imprisoned or otherwise censored as well. The Knesset stripped member Haneen Zoabi of her parliamentary benefits and her diplomatic passport for taking part in last summer’s humanitarian aid mission to Gaza. The government has detained Israeli community activist Ameer Makhoul – whom Amnesty International has called “a key human rights defender” and “a prisoner of conscience” – on “espionage” charges, though they have refused to make the charges public. And the government charged Israeli whistle-blower Anat Kamm, who documented illegal assassinations of Palestinian opponents by the Israeli military, with espionage and banned the Israeli press from reporting on her detention.
This past June, 25 members of Israel’s parliament introduced legislation that would ban Israeli organizations if they support universal jurisdiction for war crimes. A second bill would make it illegal to support a boycott or other sanctions against products from Israeli settlements. Prime Minister Netanyahu has also pushed for a loyalty oath, which would require prospective citizens to pledge loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish state” in an effort to exclude non-Jews and non-Zionist Jews from citizenship.
There has been a systematic McCarthyistic campaign against academic freedom. Parliamentary hearings supported by Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar have challenged the legitimacy of left-leaning professors who address Israeli human rights abuses. Membership in anti-occupation or human rights groups has been used to bar young academics from being hired.
Israeli actors, directors and playwrights who signed a petition that they would not perform in a new theater built in the West Bank settlement of Ariel have been banned from receiving government subsidies, including funding for international tours, as well as the right to perform at state venues.
Im Tirtzu, a nationalist Israeli organization, goaded on by government officials, launched a harsh billboard smear campaign against 12 human rights organizations and their funders, the New Israel Fund and the Ford Foundation. Meanwhile, right-wing thugs have assaulted prominent Israeli peace and human rights advocates with apparent acquiescence of some segments of the police.
Goldstone’s fact-finding mission also expressed concerns at the government’s threat to eliminate the tax-exempt status of human rights groups and limit their ability to receive support from abroad, noting it could have “an intimidating effect on other Israeli human rights organizations." The New York Times reported that Israeli tax authorities have repeatedly harassed such organizations as the Israeli advocacy group Gisha, which supports freedom of movement for Palestinians.
Congress Balks
Human Rights Watch and other groups have condemned such efforts to silence Israel’s vibrant civil society. But the overwhelming majority of the U.S. Congress continues to insist that such human rights organizations have no basis for such concerns.
The U.S. Congress has gone on record denying – and, by implication, defending – Israeli government repression against Israeli citizens. In this resolution and previously, Congress has rationalized Israeli repression of Palestinians and Lebanese as necessary acts of “self-defense” against “terrorism.” However, this same excuse cannot justify intimidation of Israeli individuals or organizations. By including this clause in the resolution attacking the Goldstone commission report, then, a large bipartisan Congressional majority is effectively legitimizing the suppression of nonviolent peace and human rights activists in a democracy. This action constitutes a very dangerous precedent.
When Congress begins denying well-documented cases of government-backed repression of human rights activists because the country in question is nominally “a vibrant democracy with a vigorous and free press,” then it’s only a matter of time before the Democrats, along with their Republican counterparts, begin denying and defending such repression against human rights groups here in the United States as well.
Stephen Zunes, a Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst, is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He is the author, along with Jacob Mundy, of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution (Syracuse University Press).
It’s been two years since Israel initiated the “Operation Cast Lead” military assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. Since then, the right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has launched an unprecedented wave of intimidation against Israeli peace and human rights groups. These groups say they are “working in an increasingly hostile environment,” according to a New York Times report, and that Israeli government leaders are fostering “an atmosphere of harassment” by turning “human rights criticism into an existential threat.”
However, Congress has chosen to look the other way – and wants the executive branch to do the same.
A resolution -- sponsored by House Foreign Relations Committee Chair Howard Berman (D-CA), Middle East Subcommittee Chair Gary Ackerman (D-NY), and soon-to-be House Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) -- condemned the findings of the UN Human Rights Council report for documenting such infringements on civil liberties and other human rights violations by the Israeli government.
Included in the resolution were the words: “even though Israel is a vibrant democracy with a vigorous and free press, the report of the ‘fact-finding mission’ erroneously asserts that ‘actions of the Israeli government . . . have contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent with the government and its actions . . . is not tolerated.’” It passed the House by an overwhelming 344-36 vote.
The UNHRC fact-finding mission, led by the prominent South African jurist Richard Goldstone, is best known for documenting evidence of war crimes by both Hamas and the Israeli government. However, it also covered suppression of internal dissent both within the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and within Israel and found that “individuals and groups viewed as sources of criticism of Israel’s military operations were subjected to repression or attempted repression by the Government of Israel.”
Pattern of Abuse
In recent months, I have contacted scores of offices of Democratic members of Congress. I’ve offered them evidence that the UNHRC report accurately documented the growing intolerance of the Israeli government to legitimate dissent. Yet to this day, they stand by their vote, insisting the charges of Israeli repression were “erroneous” and denying that the repression continues.
The rightist Netanyahu government, apparently emboldened by such a broad bipartisan defense of its actions from Washington, has only increased its repression of Israeli citizens in the year since the House passed its resolution. This has included surveillance and intimidation of Israeli peace and human rights groups, with the detention for days without charge of scores of Israeli Jews attending or simply en route to peaceful protests. On December 27, for example, an Israeli court sentenced Jonathan Pollack, a leading young human rights activist, to three months in prison for being part of an “illegal assembly” –a bicycle protest against the war on Gaza.
Other Israelis speaking out have been imprisoned or otherwise censored as well. The Knesset stripped member Haneen Zoabi of her parliamentary benefits and her diplomatic passport for taking part in last summer’s humanitarian aid mission to Gaza. The government has detained Israeli community activist Ameer Makhoul – whom Amnesty International has called “a key human rights defender” and “a prisoner of conscience” – on “espionage” charges, though they have refused to make the charges public. And the government charged Israeli whistle-blower Anat Kamm, who documented illegal assassinations of Palestinian opponents by the Israeli military, with espionage and banned the Israeli press from reporting on her detention.
This past June, 25 members of Israel’s parliament introduced legislation that would ban Israeli organizations if they support universal jurisdiction for war crimes. A second bill would make it illegal to support a boycott or other sanctions against products from Israeli settlements. Prime Minister Netanyahu has also pushed for a loyalty oath, which would require prospective citizens to pledge loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish state” in an effort to exclude non-Jews and non-Zionist Jews from citizenship.
There has been a systematic McCarthyistic campaign against academic freedom. Parliamentary hearings supported by Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar have challenged the legitimacy of left-leaning professors who address Israeli human rights abuses. Membership in anti-occupation or human rights groups has been used to bar young academics from being hired.
Israeli actors, directors and playwrights who signed a petition that they would not perform in a new theater built in the West Bank settlement of Ariel have been banned from receiving government subsidies, including funding for international tours, as well as the right to perform at state venues.
Im Tirtzu, a nationalist Israeli organization, goaded on by government officials, launched a harsh billboard smear campaign against 12 human rights organizations and their funders, the New Israel Fund and the Ford Foundation. Meanwhile, right-wing thugs have assaulted prominent Israeli peace and human rights advocates with apparent acquiescence of some segments of the police.
Goldstone’s fact-finding mission also expressed concerns at the government’s threat to eliminate the tax-exempt status of human rights groups and limit their ability to receive support from abroad, noting it could have “an intimidating effect on other Israeli human rights organizations." The New York Times reported that Israeli tax authorities have repeatedly harassed such organizations as the Israeli advocacy group Gisha, which supports freedom of movement for Palestinians.
Congress Balks
Human Rights Watch and other groups have condemned such efforts to silence Israel’s vibrant civil society. But the overwhelming majority of the U.S. Congress continues to insist that such human rights organizations have no basis for such concerns.
The U.S. Congress has gone on record denying – and, by implication, defending – Israeli government repression against Israeli citizens. In this resolution and previously, Congress has rationalized Israeli repression of Palestinians and Lebanese as necessary acts of “self-defense” against “terrorism.” However, this same excuse cannot justify intimidation of Israeli individuals or organizations. By including this clause in the resolution attacking the Goldstone commission report, then, a large bipartisan Congressional majority is effectively legitimizing the suppression of nonviolent peace and human rights activists in a democracy. This action constitutes a very dangerous precedent.
When Congress begins denying well-documented cases of government-backed repression of human rights activists because the country in question is nominally “a vibrant democracy with a vigorous and free press,” then it’s only a matter of time before the Democrats, along with their Republican counterparts, begin denying and defending such repression against human rights groups here in the United States as well.
Stephen Zunes, a Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst, is a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco. He is the author, along with Jacob Mundy, of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution (Syracuse University Press).
Thursday, December 23, 2010
U.S. Responsible for Human Toll of Iraq Sanctions
by Joy Gordon
Last week the U.N. Security Council voted to lift the sanctions that it imposed on Iraq 20 years ago. Vice President Joe Biden hailed the occasion as "an end to the burdensome remnants of the dark era of Saddam Hussein."
What he did not say was that the sanctions were more than burdensome. They triggered a humanitarian crisis that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, and the collapse of every system necessary to sustain human life in a modern society. And he certainly did not mention that among all the nations on the Security Council, it was the U.S. -- and the U.S. alone -- that ensured that this human damage would be massive and indiscriminate.
All of this took place within an obscure committee of the Security Council, known as the 661 Committee. Few have heard of it. But it was this committee that determined whether Iraqis would have clean water, electricity in their homes, or fuel for cars and trucks.
It was a committee that met behind closed doors, and never made its records public. Within it, the U.S. had a unique role. As the humanitarian situation in Iraq deteriorated, support for the sanctions on the Security Council began to erode. When other members of the council sought to allow critical humanitarian goods into Iraq, the U.S. vetoed them. For the first eight months of the sanctions, the U.S. would not even allow Iraq to import food. Once the committee decided to allow food, the U.S. then objected to trucks needed to deliver food and other goods, as well as irrigation equipment to increase agriculture.
The U.S. policies were extreme and relentless. The U.S. blocked refrigeration for medicines, on the grounds that refrigerators might be used to store agents for biological weapons. The U.S. blocked things as innocuous as plywood, fabric, glue and glass on the grounds that they were "inputs to industry," which might be used to rebuild Iraq's military.
The U.S. blocked child vaccines and yogurt-making equipment on the grounds that the Iraqi government might use them to make weapons of mass destruction. When Iraq tried to increase the number of small animals for meat, cheese and milk, the U.S. blocked goat and sheep vaccines, claiming that Iraq might use them as biological weapons.
The U.S. prevented Iraq from importing water tankers during a period of drought, while there were epidemic levels of sickness from drinking water unfit for human consumption. And water pipes for irrigation. And light switches, and telephones, and ambulance radios, and fire trucks, claiming that they might be used by Iraq's military.
At one point, a U.S. official came before the 661 Committee with a vial of cat litter, and informed the members, in all seriousness: "This could be used to stabilize anthrax."
No one else found the U.S. justifications to be plausible. UNMOVIC, the U.N.'s weapons inspectors, disputed many of the U.S. justifications for blocking humanitarian goods. Even Britain, the U.S.' closest ally on the Security Council, did not share the views of the U.S. Still, the U.S. rarely relented.
The U.S. insisted that these policies were aimed at Saddam Hussein. But it was obvious that they had little to do with him. Iraq's political and military leadership, and the wealthy elite, were insulated from the hardship. But the population as a whole was not.
To destroy a country's infrastructure, to reduce a nation to a pre-industrial condition and then keep it in that state, means precisely that it will be unfit to sustain human life. The reports of U.N. agencies and international organizations such as the Red Cross ensured that U.S. officials knew, with certainty, exactly what harm was being caused by U.S. policies.
While Vice President Biden tells the world that the end of the sanctions means that Iraq can now move forward to a bright future, what he does not say is that in fact there was damage that was irreversible, including child deaths and stunted growth from years of malnutrition. What he also does not say is that the rest of the damage -- the collapse of the infrastructure, the terrible deterioration in industry, agriculture, electricity, health and education -- was not just due to Saddam Hussein's indifference. However much harm Saddam did to the Iraqi people, the U.S., for over a decade, made it far, far worse.
© Copyright 2010, madison.com
Joy Gordon, Ph.D., is a philosophy professor at Fairfield University. She is the author of "Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions" (Harvard University Press).
Last week the U.N. Security Council voted to lift the sanctions that it imposed on Iraq 20 years ago. Vice President Joe Biden hailed the occasion as "an end to the burdensome remnants of the dark era of Saddam Hussein."
What he did not say was that the sanctions were more than burdensome. They triggered a humanitarian crisis that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, and the collapse of every system necessary to sustain human life in a modern society. And he certainly did not mention that among all the nations on the Security Council, it was the U.S. -- and the U.S. alone -- that ensured that this human damage would be massive and indiscriminate.
All of this took place within an obscure committee of the Security Council, known as the 661 Committee. Few have heard of it. But it was this committee that determined whether Iraqis would have clean water, electricity in their homes, or fuel for cars and trucks.
It was a committee that met behind closed doors, and never made its records public. Within it, the U.S. had a unique role. As the humanitarian situation in Iraq deteriorated, support for the sanctions on the Security Council began to erode. When other members of the council sought to allow critical humanitarian goods into Iraq, the U.S. vetoed them. For the first eight months of the sanctions, the U.S. would not even allow Iraq to import food. Once the committee decided to allow food, the U.S. then objected to trucks needed to deliver food and other goods, as well as irrigation equipment to increase agriculture.
The U.S. policies were extreme and relentless. The U.S. blocked refrigeration for medicines, on the grounds that refrigerators might be used to store agents for biological weapons. The U.S. blocked things as innocuous as plywood, fabric, glue and glass on the grounds that they were "inputs to industry," which might be used to rebuild Iraq's military.
The U.S. blocked child vaccines and yogurt-making equipment on the grounds that the Iraqi government might use them to make weapons of mass destruction. When Iraq tried to increase the number of small animals for meat, cheese and milk, the U.S. blocked goat and sheep vaccines, claiming that Iraq might use them as biological weapons.
The U.S. prevented Iraq from importing water tankers during a period of drought, while there were epidemic levels of sickness from drinking water unfit for human consumption. And water pipes for irrigation. And light switches, and telephones, and ambulance radios, and fire trucks, claiming that they might be used by Iraq's military.
At one point, a U.S. official came before the 661 Committee with a vial of cat litter, and informed the members, in all seriousness: "This could be used to stabilize anthrax."
No one else found the U.S. justifications to be plausible. UNMOVIC, the U.N.'s weapons inspectors, disputed many of the U.S. justifications for blocking humanitarian goods. Even Britain, the U.S.' closest ally on the Security Council, did not share the views of the U.S. Still, the U.S. rarely relented.
The U.S. insisted that these policies were aimed at Saddam Hussein. But it was obvious that they had little to do with him. Iraq's political and military leadership, and the wealthy elite, were insulated from the hardship. But the population as a whole was not.
To destroy a country's infrastructure, to reduce a nation to a pre-industrial condition and then keep it in that state, means precisely that it will be unfit to sustain human life. The reports of U.N. agencies and international organizations such as the Red Cross ensured that U.S. officials knew, with certainty, exactly what harm was being caused by U.S. policies.
While Vice President Biden tells the world that the end of the sanctions means that Iraq can now move forward to a bright future, what he does not say is that in fact there was damage that was irreversible, including child deaths and stunted growth from years of malnutrition. What he also does not say is that the rest of the damage -- the collapse of the infrastructure, the terrible deterioration in industry, agriculture, electricity, health and education -- was not just due to Saddam Hussein's indifference. However much harm Saddam did to the Iraqi people, the U.S., for over a decade, made it far, far worse.
© Copyright 2010, madison.com
Joy Gordon, Ph.D., is a philosophy professor at Fairfield University. She is the author of "Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions" (Harvard University Press).
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Speaking Ill of ‘the Best and the Brightest’
by Robert Scheer
One of “the best and the brightest” died last week, and in Richard Holbrooke we had a perfect example of the dark mischief to which David Halberstam referred when he authored that ironic label. Holbrooke’s life marks the propensity of our elite institutions to turn out alpha leaders with simplistic world-ordering ambitions unrestrained by moral conscience or intellectual humility.
Fresh from Brown University, Holbrooke marched off as a foreign service officer to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, who were not buying it. He quickly became involved with the pacification program that herded peasants off their land into barbed-wire encampments while we bombed the surrounding areas.
Holbrooke was later so successful in the infamous CIA Phoenix program to kill Vietnamese civilians thought to be sympathetic to the Viet Cong that at the age of 24 he was brought back to Washington to work under the head of that program, R.W. Komer, on a top-level White House command to save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.
While in Washington, Holbrooke came to write a chapter of the secret Pentagon Papers study that exposed the falsehoods justifying the war. Shades of the WikiLeaks disclosures—when Daniel Ellsberg, who also worked on that report, revealed it to the world, the lies stood exposed. As Defense Secretary Robert McNamara acknowledged decades after commissioning the study, 3.5 million Indochinese died in a war that had little if anything to do with our national security. He concluded that he could indeed be judged a “war criminal,” except that appellation is reserved for leaders of lesser states, like the Serbian and Iraqi leaders whose war crimes Holbrooke would later trumpet as excuses for other U.S. wars.
Holbrooke not only failed to learn from the U.S. mistakes in Vietnam; he repeated them in working for every Democratic president to follow. When Jimmy Carter was elected, there was Holbrooke as an assistant secretary of state supporting the Islamic mujahedeen in Afghanistan, a group fighting the Soviet-backed secular government in Kabul.
Indefatigable in his hubris, Holbrooke also got Carter to support a Cambodian exile coalition based in Thailand to attempt to overthrow the Vietnamese-backed government in Cambodia that had ousted the mass murderer Pol Pot. The fact that the coalition included this man who had killed millions of his own people did not perturb Holbrooke. I have written elsewhere of Holbrooke’s arrogance in defending the U.S. backing of the coalition at a dinner at the home of legendary television producer Norman Lear; on that evening Holbrooke went off about the critical importance that a regime change in tiny Cambodia would hold for the future of civilization.
In recent years Holbrooke was influential in getting the Obama administration to commit to the folly of the U.S. surge in Afghanistan. Once again he was all about winning the hearts and minds of people who, as it appears from the WikiLeaks diplomatic memos, thought he was bonkers—as did quite a few in the U.S. military.
Throughout Holbrooke’s career, and this is the persistent theme in his fawning obituaries, there was the apologia that whatever he did, his motives could not be questioned, for after all his was a life largely of public service. But here too the elite notion of public service is on sordid display if one follows Holbrooke through the revolving platinum door from public power to business greed. After messing up Cambodia and Afghanistan during the Carter years, Holbrooke teamed up with another Democratic Party operative, James Johnson, to form the business consulting firm Public Strategies while at the same time serving as an adviser at Lehman Brothers. The two proved quite successful in the business world, selling their company to Lehman Brothers, where Holbrooke became a managing director. Johnson went on to head Fannie Mae, presiding over its reckless expansion into the subprime and Alt-A housing market.
From 2001 to 2008 Holbrooke teamed up again with Johnson to head Perseus LLC, a private equity firm. During that same period, Holbrooke became a director of AIG, the insurance company whose credit default swaps almost brought down the economy and which required a $170 billion bailout from the taxpayers.
In the New York Times obituary on the “brilliant” Mr. Holbrooke, only a single short paragraph out of 32 refers to his career in the now-troubled financial markets: “Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker on Wall Street. … At various times he was a managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and a director of the American International Group.”
The Times did not mention that Holbrooke left AIG, where he had been paid $268,000 a year plus stock options, two months before the insurer imploded. Further evidence that “the best and the brightest” had the same success with our banking system as they did in foreign policy.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.
One of “the best and the brightest” died last week, and in Richard Holbrooke we had a perfect example of the dark mischief to which David Halberstam referred when he authored that ironic label. Holbrooke’s life marks the propensity of our elite institutions to turn out alpha leaders with simplistic world-ordering ambitions unrestrained by moral conscience or intellectual humility.
Fresh from Brown University, Holbrooke marched off as a foreign service officer to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, who were not buying it. He quickly became involved with the pacification program that herded peasants off their land into barbed-wire encampments while we bombed the surrounding areas.
Holbrooke was later so successful in the infamous CIA Phoenix program to kill Vietnamese civilians thought to be sympathetic to the Viet Cong that at the age of 24 he was brought back to Washington to work under the head of that program, R.W. Komer, on a top-level White House command to save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.
While in Washington, Holbrooke came to write a chapter of the secret Pentagon Papers study that exposed the falsehoods justifying the war. Shades of the WikiLeaks disclosures—when Daniel Ellsberg, who also worked on that report, revealed it to the world, the lies stood exposed. As Defense Secretary Robert McNamara acknowledged decades after commissioning the study, 3.5 million Indochinese died in a war that had little if anything to do with our national security. He concluded that he could indeed be judged a “war criminal,” except that appellation is reserved for leaders of lesser states, like the Serbian and Iraqi leaders whose war crimes Holbrooke would later trumpet as excuses for other U.S. wars.
Holbrooke not only failed to learn from the U.S. mistakes in Vietnam; he repeated them in working for every Democratic president to follow. When Jimmy Carter was elected, there was Holbrooke as an assistant secretary of state supporting the Islamic mujahedeen in Afghanistan, a group fighting the Soviet-backed secular government in Kabul.
Indefatigable in his hubris, Holbrooke also got Carter to support a Cambodian exile coalition based in Thailand to attempt to overthrow the Vietnamese-backed government in Cambodia that had ousted the mass murderer Pol Pot. The fact that the coalition included this man who had killed millions of his own people did not perturb Holbrooke. I have written elsewhere of Holbrooke’s arrogance in defending the U.S. backing of the coalition at a dinner at the home of legendary television producer Norman Lear; on that evening Holbrooke went off about the critical importance that a regime change in tiny Cambodia would hold for the future of civilization.
In recent years Holbrooke was influential in getting the Obama administration to commit to the folly of the U.S. surge in Afghanistan. Once again he was all about winning the hearts and minds of people who, as it appears from the WikiLeaks diplomatic memos, thought he was bonkers—as did quite a few in the U.S. military.
Throughout Holbrooke’s career, and this is the persistent theme in his fawning obituaries, there was the apologia that whatever he did, his motives could not be questioned, for after all his was a life largely of public service. But here too the elite notion of public service is on sordid display if one follows Holbrooke through the revolving platinum door from public power to business greed. After messing up Cambodia and Afghanistan during the Carter years, Holbrooke teamed up with another Democratic Party operative, James Johnson, to form the business consulting firm Public Strategies while at the same time serving as an adviser at Lehman Brothers. The two proved quite successful in the business world, selling their company to Lehman Brothers, where Holbrooke became a managing director. Johnson went on to head Fannie Mae, presiding over its reckless expansion into the subprime and Alt-A housing market.
From 2001 to 2008 Holbrooke teamed up again with Johnson to head Perseus LLC, a private equity firm. During that same period, Holbrooke became a director of AIG, the insurance company whose credit default swaps almost brought down the economy and which required a $170 billion bailout from the taxpayers.
In the New York Times obituary on the “brilliant” Mr. Holbrooke, only a single short paragraph out of 32 refers to his career in the now-troubled financial markets: “Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker on Wall Street. … At various times he was a managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and a director of the American International Group.”
The Times did not mention that Holbrooke left AIG, where he had been paid $268,000 a year plus stock options, two months before the insurer imploded. Further evidence that “the best and the brightest” had the same success with our banking system as they did in foreign policy.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Bitter Memories of War on the Way to Jail
by Chris Hedges
The speeches were over. There was a mournful harmonica rendition of taps. The 500 protesters in Lafayette Park in front of the White House fell silent. One hundred and thirty-one men and women, many of them military veterans wearing old fatigues, formed a single, silent line. Under a heavy snowfall and to the slow beat of a drum, they walked to the White House fence. They stood there until they were arrested.
The solemnity of that funerary march, the hush, was the hardest and most moving part of Thursday’s protest against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It unwound the bitter memories and images of war I keep wrapped in the thick cotton wool of forgetfulness. I was transported in that short walk to places I do not like to go. Strange and vivid flashes swept over me—the young soldier in El Salvador who had been shot through the back of the head and was, as I crouched next to him, slowly curling up in a fetal position to die; the mutilated corpses of Kosovar Albanians in the back of a flatbed truck; the screams of a woman, her entrails spilling out of her gaping wounds, on the cobblestones of a Sarajevo street. My experience was not unique. Veterans around me were back in the rice paddies and lush undergrowth of Vietnam, the dusty roads of southern Iraq or the mountain passes of Afghanistan. Their tears showed that. There was no need to talk. We spoke the same wordless language. The butchery of war defies, for those who know it, articulation.
What can I tell you about war?
War perverts and destroys you. It pushes you closer and closer to your own annihilation—spiritual, emotional and, finally, physical. It destroys the continuity of life, tearing apart all systems, economic, social, environmental and political, that sustain us as human beings. War is necrophilia. The essence of war is death. War is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. It is organized sadism. War fosters alienation and leads inevitably to nihilism. It is a turning away from the sanctity of life.
And yet the mythic narratives about war perpetuate the allure of power and violence. They perpetuate the seductiveness of the godlike force that comes with the license to kill with impunity. All images and narratives about war disseminated by the state, the press, religious institutions, schools and the entertainment industry are gross and distorted lies. The clash between the fabricated myth about war and the truth about war leaves those of us who return from war alienated, angry and often unable to communicate. We can’t find the words to describe war’s reality. It is as if the wider culture sucked the words out from us and left us to sputter incoherencies. How can you speak meaningfully about organized murder? Anything you say is gibberish.
The sophisticated forms of industrial killing, coupled with the amoral decisions of politicians and military leaders who direct and fund war, hide war’s reality from public view. But those who have been in combat see death up close. Only their story tells the moral truth about war. The power of the Washington march was that we all knew this story. We had no need to use stale and hackneyed clichés about war. We grieved together.
War, once it begins, fuels new and bizarre perversities, innovative forms of death to ward off the boredom of routine death. This is why we would drive into towns in Bosnia and find bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated, burned and mutilated. That is why those slain in combat are treated as trophies by their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of performance art. I met soldiers who carried in their wallets the identity cards of men they killed. They showed them to me with the imploring look of a lost child.
We swiftly deform ourselves, our essence, in war. We give up individual conscience—maybe even consciousness—for the contagion of the crowd and the intoxication of violence. You survive war because you repress emotions. You do what you have to do. And this means killing. To make a moral choice, to defy war’s enticement, is often self-destructive. But once the survivors return home, once the danger, adrenaline highs and the pressure of the crowd are removed, the repressed emotions surface with a vengeance. Fear, rage, grief and guilt leap up like snake heads to consume lives and turn nights into long, sleepless bouts with terror. You drink to forget.
We reached the fence. The real prisoners, the ones who blindly serve systems of power and force, are the mandarins inside the White House, the Congress and the Pentagon. The masters of war are slaves to the idols of empire, power and greed, to the idols of careers, to the dead language of interests, national security, politics and propaganda. They kill and do not know what killing is. In the rise to power, they became smaller. Power consumes them. Once power is obtained they become its pawn. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, politicians such as Barack Obama fall prey to the forces they thought they had harnessed. The capacity to love, to cherish and protect life, may not always triumph, but it saves us. It keeps us human. It offers the only chance to escape from the contagion of war. Perhaps it is the only antidote. There are times when remaining human is the only victory possible.
The necrophilia of war is hidden under platitudes about honor, duty or comradeship. It waits especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its pitch to be unleashed. When we spend long enough in war, it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation with our own destruction. In the Arab-Israeli 1973 war, almost a third of all Israeli casualties were due to psychiatric causes—and the war lasted only a few days. A World War II study determined that, after 60 days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties. A common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities.” In short, if you spend enough time in combat you go insane or you were insane to begin with. War starts out as the annihilation of the other. War ends, if we do not free ourselves from its grasp, in self-annihilation.
Those around me at the protest, at once haunted and maimed by war, had freed themselves of war’s contagion. They bore its scars. They were plagued by its demons. These crippling forces will always haunt them. But they had returned home. They had returned to life. They had asked for atonement. In Lafayette Park they found grace. They had recovered within themselves the capacity for reverence. They no longer sought to become gods, to wield the power of the divine, the power to take life. And it is out of this new acknowledgement of weakness, remorse for their complicity in evil and an acceptance of human imperfection that they had found wisdom. Listen to them, if you can hear them. They are our prophets.
The tears and grief, the halting asides, the catch in the throat, the sudden breaking off of a sentence, is the only language that describes war. This faltering language of pain and atonement, even shame, was carried like great, heavy boulders by these veterans as they tromped slowly through the snow from Lafayette Park to the White House fence. It was carried by them as they were handcuffed, dragged through the snow, photographed for arrest, and frog-marched into police vans. It was carried into the frigid holding cells of a Washington jail. If it was understood by the masters of war who build the big guns, who build the death planes, who build all the bombs and who hide behind walls and desks, this language would expose their masks and chasten their hollow, empty souls. This language, bereft of words, places its faith in physical acts of nonviolent resistance, in powerlessness and compassion, in truth. It believes that one day it will bring down the house of war.
As Tennyson wrote in “In Memoriam”:
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.
The speeches were over. There was a mournful harmonica rendition of taps. The 500 protesters in Lafayette Park in front of the White House fell silent. One hundred and thirty-one men and women, many of them military veterans wearing old fatigues, formed a single, silent line. Under a heavy snowfall and to the slow beat of a drum, they walked to the White House fence. They stood there until they were arrested.
The solemnity of that funerary march, the hush, was the hardest and most moving part of Thursday’s protest against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It unwound the bitter memories and images of war I keep wrapped in the thick cotton wool of forgetfulness. I was transported in that short walk to places I do not like to go. Strange and vivid flashes swept over me—the young soldier in El Salvador who had been shot through the back of the head and was, as I crouched next to him, slowly curling up in a fetal position to die; the mutilated corpses of Kosovar Albanians in the back of a flatbed truck; the screams of a woman, her entrails spilling out of her gaping wounds, on the cobblestones of a Sarajevo street. My experience was not unique. Veterans around me were back in the rice paddies and lush undergrowth of Vietnam, the dusty roads of southern Iraq or the mountain passes of Afghanistan. Their tears showed that. There was no need to talk. We spoke the same wordless language. The butchery of war defies, for those who know it, articulation.
What can I tell you about war?
War perverts and destroys you. It pushes you closer and closer to your own annihilation—spiritual, emotional and, finally, physical. It destroys the continuity of life, tearing apart all systems, economic, social, environmental and political, that sustain us as human beings. War is necrophilia. The essence of war is death. War is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. It is organized sadism. War fosters alienation and leads inevitably to nihilism. It is a turning away from the sanctity of life.
And yet the mythic narratives about war perpetuate the allure of power and violence. They perpetuate the seductiveness of the godlike force that comes with the license to kill with impunity. All images and narratives about war disseminated by the state, the press, religious institutions, schools and the entertainment industry are gross and distorted lies. The clash between the fabricated myth about war and the truth about war leaves those of us who return from war alienated, angry and often unable to communicate. We can’t find the words to describe war’s reality. It is as if the wider culture sucked the words out from us and left us to sputter incoherencies. How can you speak meaningfully about organized murder? Anything you say is gibberish.
The sophisticated forms of industrial killing, coupled with the amoral decisions of politicians and military leaders who direct and fund war, hide war’s reality from public view. But those who have been in combat see death up close. Only their story tells the moral truth about war. The power of the Washington march was that we all knew this story. We had no need to use stale and hackneyed clichés about war. We grieved together.
War, once it begins, fuels new and bizarre perversities, innovative forms of death to ward off the boredom of routine death. This is why we would drive into towns in Bosnia and find bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated, burned and mutilated. That is why those slain in combat are treated as trophies by their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of performance art. I met soldiers who carried in their wallets the identity cards of men they killed. They showed them to me with the imploring look of a lost child.
We swiftly deform ourselves, our essence, in war. We give up individual conscience—maybe even consciousness—for the contagion of the crowd and the intoxication of violence. You survive war because you repress emotions. You do what you have to do. And this means killing. To make a moral choice, to defy war’s enticement, is often self-destructive. But once the survivors return home, once the danger, adrenaline highs and the pressure of the crowd are removed, the repressed emotions surface with a vengeance. Fear, rage, grief and guilt leap up like snake heads to consume lives and turn nights into long, sleepless bouts with terror. You drink to forget.
We reached the fence. The real prisoners, the ones who blindly serve systems of power and force, are the mandarins inside the White House, the Congress and the Pentagon. The masters of war are slaves to the idols of empire, power and greed, to the idols of careers, to the dead language of interests, national security, politics and propaganda. They kill and do not know what killing is. In the rise to power, they became smaller. Power consumes them. Once power is obtained they become its pawn. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, politicians such as Barack Obama fall prey to the forces they thought they had harnessed. The capacity to love, to cherish and protect life, may not always triumph, but it saves us. It keeps us human. It offers the only chance to escape from the contagion of war. Perhaps it is the only antidote. There are times when remaining human is the only victory possible.
The necrophilia of war is hidden under platitudes about honor, duty or comradeship. It waits especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its pitch to be unleashed. When we spend long enough in war, it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation with our own destruction. In the Arab-Israeli 1973 war, almost a third of all Israeli casualties were due to psychiatric causes—and the war lasted only a few days. A World War II study determined that, after 60 days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties. A common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities.” In short, if you spend enough time in combat you go insane or you were insane to begin with. War starts out as the annihilation of the other. War ends, if we do not free ourselves from its grasp, in self-annihilation.
Those around me at the protest, at once haunted and maimed by war, had freed themselves of war’s contagion. They bore its scars. They were plagued by its demons. These crippling forces will always haunt them. But they had returned home. They had returned to life. They had asked for atonement. In Lafayette Park they found grace. They had recovered within themselves the capacity for reverence. They no longer sought to become gods, to wield the power of the divine, the power to take life. And it is out of this new acknowledgement of weakness, remorse for their complicity in evil and an acceptance of human imperfection that they had found wisdom. Listen to them, if you can hear them. They are our prophets.
The tears and grief, the halting asides, the catch in the throat, the sudden breaking off of a sentence, is the only language that describes war. This faltering language of pain and atonement, even shame, was carried like great, heavy boulders by these veterans as they tromped slowly through the snow from Lafayette Park to the White House fence. It was carried by them as they were handcuffed, dragged through the snow, photographed for arrest, and frog-marched into police vans. It was carried into the frigid holding cells of a Washington jail. If it was understood by the masters of war who build the big guns, who build the death planes, who build all the bombs and who hide behind walls and desks, this language would expose their masks and chasten their hollow, empty souls. This language, bereft of words, places its faith in physical acts of nonviolent resistance, in powerlessness and compassion, in truth. It believes that one day it will bring down the house of war.
As Tennyson wrote in “In Memoriam”:
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.
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