The North Coast times-eagle., May 01, 2002, Page 5, Image 5

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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , MAY/JUNE 2002
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whose brave but pitiful resistance against extinction was no
match for our weapons and determination to possess their
homelands. To this purpose, in addition to obliteration of any
tribe within reach, was the use of biocide, the deliberate spread
of smallpox among tribes who might more adequately defend
their territory than others.
Perhaps the past can be dismissed as irrelevant, but
we are incapable of living outside history. We are what we are
as a result of history. We are a proud and warlike nation, and
we believe our way of life is on the march, that our ideological
genes will be grafted onto the global DNA and transform the
world into our cultural replica. With virtual dissolution of our Cold
War nemesis we now surge forth as missionary warriors, intent
on eradicating evil terrorism from the world forever. Simply
settling into peaceful coexistence is not enough and has never
been. This is the 'New World Order1 — the military dominance
of world affairs by the USA.
As we parade into this New World Order we should
think about dangerous erosions to our principles of liberty and
self-determination by embracing world military supremacy, not
wholly unlike Rome's exchange of a republic for the rule of
Caesars soon after it became the world's first superpower. With
more influence than property, the USA acts as industrial civili­
zation's police force, which presumes the real job of a cop is
to not only protect the status quo but inflexibly enforce it. To
hope that democracy might successfully coexist with military
rule is to have missed the point that the United States has
functioned as a war technology and 'National Security' state
since at least World War II, and indisputably much earlier
(the Alien & Sedition Acts, for example).
Looking at history through only the bloody prism of war
is to miss much of the best of it, and distorts it — yet wars shape
nations and individuals; much of what each claims as heritage
and honor is bequeathed by war. Waging war is a nation’s most
serious business. Robert E. Lee said it was probably fortunate
war is so terrible, otherwise we might grow to love it. He had
not foreseen its possibilities as video entertainment such as
the Persian Gulf War and the airwars over Serbia, Iraq and
Afghanistan — 'smart' missiles and bombs breaking down doors
and falling through factory chimneys; high-tech stuff in which the
warriors anonymously and indiscriminately (always hotly denied)
murder strangers from the stratosphere. Most significant to the
human psyche is that nearly a century of airwarfare has made
the very sky that envelops the earth the most dangerous threat
to existence.
A people will generally support a war once it is initiated,
if for no other reason than they feel there is not much else they
can do. That support is considered essential for conducting a
war to its end in victory or defeat. In this era of the supposed
common person the focus of support is upon the average
soldier, sailor and airman(woman), who are not responsible for
the wars they fight in but make possible. Bellicose war fever is
whipped up to discourage questions of a war's purpose or cost,
and to disguise the contradiction that supporting a soldier's
warlike duty is a sure way of killing or injuring him (or her).
The enthusiastic outpouring of love and support for the
American Gl might act instead as a relentless advancing wall
that pushes troops into irreversible horror at the same time
it crushes underneath its cheering warcries any who would
conscientiously object. The soldiers feel compelled to carry
out what they see as public mandate, and in the belief that any
doubts of their own would be met with disapproval they would
do their duty at whatever cost.
Instead of the usual honors as heroes we should pity
the hallowed war dead as fools or curse them for being soldiers.
It is almost too simple, but without soldiers there would be no
wars. Without soldiers Caesar would be a scheming minor
politician, Napoleon frustratedly Napoleonic, Hitler an inferior
decorator. Soldiers kill, rape, pillage, burn, and if they are
unlucky, stupid or badly led they die. If masses of men would
not immerse themselves into armies and navies warfare would
diminish as a human affliction. All the old deceits and savage
antipathies would continue to burn in our flailing breasts but
the scale of havoc would be greatly reduced.
John Reed saw the sinister side of soldiers and
anticipated the civic consequence of military rule: "I hate
soldiers," he wrote. "I hate to see a man with a bayonet on
his rifle, who can order me off the street. I hate to belong to
an organization that is proud of being a caste of superior beings,
that is proud of killing free ideas so that it may more effectively
kill human beings."
This is not the currently popular attitude toward
members of the armed forces. It is, however an historically
accurate one. The very troops we are exhorted to love and
cherish can be turned against us, ordered to suppress dissent
and round up political activists. The chilling thought is that in
times like these, such repressive acts could have popular
support, at least initially, as happened during the Vietnam War
with the use of police and national guards. National Security is
boilerplated over the Constitution.
Vietnam taught us that a war cannot perpetually
continue without public support. That can be a provocation
for rallying around a flag and tying it with a yellow ribbon. It is
a better argument for refusing to endorse a war so that it might
quickly end or perhaps never begin. The war parties always
attempt to capture patriotism as their own, and portray dissent
against their wars as sedition and disloyalty. But dissent is
necessary. It is the true act of patriotism and a more reasonable
way to support the troops than thrusting them upon other armies.
"There is no good war and no bad peace," Benjamin
Franklin said. But peace is also defined as a period between
wars, a time to bury the dead, lick wounds, produce more and
newer weapons, sow newer crops of human fodder to continue
the genocides of their fathers.
It is difficult to separate peace from its evil twin war
— not unlike concentrating on yang without including yin.
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NELSON HARDING
Peace and war are joined at the hip, human perceptions that
have few parallels in nature: the rapacious wars of ants are
analogous. Somehow we co-inventors of war think we can
have life without it — which we baptize as peace.
The questions of how to end warfare are ancient but
never as popular as promoting it. The very few who raise the
issue of abolishing war have through the centuries been
imprisoned, exiled or executed. At the very least they have
been ostracized. Pacifism exudes an odor of weakness and
appeasement, and pacifists are accused of being agents of an
enemy or are dismissed as dupes. Pacifists are themselves in
conflict. The central most agonizing question is whether some
principles are worth the risk of annihilation. Human life and
possibly all organic existence is conceivably so rare in the
universe that its loss as a result of conflict over abstract
principles peculiar to a point in time would be more intolerable
than the loss of those principles, which, human in origin, would
just as surely be evaporated in a holocaust. "What difference
does it make to the dead," Gandhi said, "whether the mad
destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or
the holy name of liberty or democracy?"
Solutions to warfare have been ambiguous, insipid and
often ridiculous Most pacifists agree that the only end to warfare
will be a world state of some form, but One World theories range
from a loose federation of states not unlike the United Nations
with the exception that its laws would be binding, to naked
utopias and other worldly Edens, or more ominously, Orwellian
or Huxlean nightmares of rigid authority and mind control
(as well as perpetual war) Most solutions acknowledge the
necessity of alternatives to warfare to engage its immense
energies. William James suggested in 1914, the year World
War 1 began, that there should be a "moral equivalent to
warfare," and though his idea that society exhibit the pomp and
circumstance of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta was rather silly
(but not out of context with his pompous era), he also thought
that "so long as the anti-militarists propose no substitute...no
moral equivalent to war. . the duties, penalties and sanctions
pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to
touch the military minded "
That is precisely the point. Militarism rules the planet.
Military values are taught at every level of education and are
incorporated in the root systems of societal values. Militarism is
the antithesis of liberty and democracy and its justice is based
on obedience and servitude. The economies of most nations are
poured into war machines that posture as defensive instruments
and world leaders blackmail their populations with terror, force
them to surrender their lives and their children's futures, their
wealth and liberties if they possess either, to the gross appetites
and deadly illusions of military power. Nightmares of doom are
disguised as dreamworlds of prosperity.
Armageddon is the place for the last battle at the end
of the world. Almost all religions and myths prophesize a final
conflict or cataclysm that will terminate human life, and our
history has propelled us to the savage frontier of our most
primitive fears Military castes have been as irresponsible
as priests in exhorting doom — they speak of themselves as
guardians of peace but prepare the methods for the final combat
which is, after all, the shrine of their profession. "War is to a
man what childbirth is to a woman," Benito Mussolini was fond
of saying.
Putting an end to warfare will not end human conflict
or greed, but war should be put aside as a toy of our youth.
The ancient assumption that war weeds out the weak, unfit and
unlucky to insure strengthened future generations has been
disproved by the enormous and indiscriminately devastating
wars of the 20th Century. A general who commanded the largest
armies in history and who as President of the USA warned the
world of the sinister and possibly obliterative consequences of
the military/industrial mafia, Dwight Eisenhower once said that
"People want peace so much that one of these days government
had better get out of the way and let them have it."
The United States commemorates its war dead on
Memorial Day, which is at the end of May. It would be the proper
occasion to pierce the illusions and deceptions and remember
that the hallowed dead would bitterly protest being used to kill
others, and to take note of something written by Boris Van: "The
day when nobody comes back from a war it will be because war
has at last been properly organized."
History's dark glare shines on an Earth too fragile for the
titanic clashes of its past. Humanity, however, responds quicker
to hatred and opportunity than to peace for its own sake, and
never are these traits more well represented than through a
war's victors arguing over the spoils of a defeated nation
Civilizations have profited immensely from wars, and warfare
has progressed civilization's expanse and technologies. Yet war
has also turned out the lights of civilization. Humanity has been
set back centuries by its predilection for war — long periods
of decline and retrogression Generations denied opportunities
of learning and rebuilding. Interminable cycles of darkness
Human antipathy does not go away easily or for very
long Old hatreds scab over only briefly and soon re-erupt
Someone somewhere covets something possessed by a
neighbor — land, wealth, power. An insurgency plans an assault
or ambush Terrorists target innocents. A newly established
nuclear power readies to flex it on an old enemy. Big war stuff
trickles down from defunct Cold War arsenals into the grubby
little hands of schoolchildren who arm themselves in the manner
of gunfighters or gangsters.
Peace loving peoples commit genocide upon rivals.
Large parts of the world act as laundries for ethnic cleansing
Countries or persons publicly declare themselves as pacifist
yet act as vicious as attack dogs Peace is not on the earth but
a few feet under it for millions who are slaughtered by fellow
humans for reasons peripheral and perishable
'With them in hell," wrote Wilfred Own, regarded the
best poet of World War 1 (and perhaps the best war poet ever),
killed a week before Armistice:
“the sorrowful dark of hell
Whose world is but the trembling of a flare
And heaven but as the highway for a shell "