What it really means to be for this War.
by
Stephen Gowans
In his 1939 antiwar classic, Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo builds a
story around an American casualty of W.W.I. Horribly mangled in combat,
Trumbo's casualty has no arms, no legs, no eyes, no ears, no tongue. He
can't talk or hear or speak or walk or touch. Confined to a glass case, lost
in mute isolation, all he can do is breathe and eat and shit and piss...and
think.
"Take me wherever there are parliaments," he thinks, "and diets and chambers
of statesmen. I want to hear when they talk about honor and justice and
making the world safe...Let them debate...why should we take all this crap
off Germany or whoever the next Germany is. Let them talk more munitions and
airplanes and battleships and tanks and gases, why of course we've got to
have them, we can't get along without them, how in the world could we
protect the peace if we didn't have them? Let them form blocs and alliances
and mutual assistance pacts...But before they vote on them, before they give
the order for all the little guys to start killing each other, let the main
guy rap his gavel of my case and point down at me and say, here gentlemen is
the only issue before this house, and that is, are you for this thing here
or are you against it?"
Weeks after the US and Britain began bombing Afghanistan, leveling Red Cross
warehouses, destroying Red Crescent buildings, flattening hospitals, taking
out mud huts, the true nature of the war has begun to sink in.
As many as 1.5 million Afghans are on the move, according to the UN, fleeing
the bombing. Up to 7.5 million face starvation, as bombing disrupts the
humanitarian food relief efforts needed to alleviate the effects of decades
of civil war and one of the worse droughts in the country's history.
And there's carnage. If you don't turn away, it's there for you to see. The
Afghan child, maybe two or three, with the red pulpy divot taken out of the
right side of her skull, lying beside the still, lifeless body of her
brother. Had a madman driven a golf tee into the child's head, and then
swung at the ball resting atop the tee sunk into brain tissue? Did he swing
too low, driving his three iron through the child's skull, with an explosion
of blood and bits of pulpy tissue that splattered all over her mother's face
and clothes? Or was it a young American pilot, a guy who plays golf when
he's at home, who had dropped a bomb marked Made in the USA that
accomplished what a three iron could accomplish just as readily? Did the
pilot scrawl across the bomb, "To Osama bin Laden," the way World War Two
flyers used to write To Adolph Hitler on their bombs? Or did he write, "To
Mamoud, aged 2"?
For that's what war is, isn't it? It isn't a pilot giving the thumbs up, as
she waits to take off from an aircraft carrier, captured by an AP
photographer, his handiwork splashed across the front pages of newspapers
around the world to make the people back home feel good about this war of
terror that's supposed to root out terrorism. She was taking off for another
bombing run against, what? Taliban targets, or that little kid's house?
Brains sprayed across the floor, mothers weeping over little kids who got in
the way, amputated legs on the operating room floor, poor, starving,
wretched people, with what few possessions they have, trudging up a muddy
road, to get away from all the bombing, not knowing where they're going to
live, not knowing how they're going to survive, not knowing whether the jets
flying over their heads are going to make another of their infamous blunders
and unleash the fires of Hell on them, just innocents, trying to get out,
away from the devastation, and all the corpses. Oh well, that's war, shrug
the phony sages and corporate media executives and politicians back home.
That's what this war is, isn't it? It isn't Osama bin Laden, on the run,
hiding in a warren of caves high the Afghanistan mountains (or is it
somewhere in Pakistan, or maybe Albania, by now?); it's 16-year old
Assadullah, not a Taliban solider, but an ice-cream vendor, without a leg
and two of his fingers gone, blasted away when an American missile slammed
into an airport near his home. It's Trumbo's Johnny, no Mohammed, no legs,
no arms, no eyes, no mouth, no ears, lying in his glass case. Are you for
this? Or against it?
Those who are for it -- the politicians and Generals and newspaper editors
-- are afraid that more and more of us, aren't.
In Britain support for the war is "wobbly," as the British press puts it.
Tony Blair urges those whose support is faltering to think about how they
felt when the Twin Towers collapsed. War feeds on emotion. War needs
emotion. War demands emotion, to fog the brain, to keep people from thinking
about the essential contradiction: We're killing innocent civilians to show
that killing innocent civilians is wrong.
In Canada, the Globe and Mail tries to put some steel into the spines of
Canadians whose support for the war is flagging. It publishes the
photographs of 19 Canadians killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, under the
headline, Never to be heard from again. It won't publish the photographs of
the hundreds of Afghans killed by US and UK bombs under the same headline.
On October 31 the newspaper gives over a full page to its religion and
ethics reporter, Michael Valpy. Accompanying the article is a cartoon
depicting God giving a thumbs up to American bombers. The headlines read:
The Just War
The right to smite
If the US and its allies are to maintain the moral high ground, they must
weigh the costs of their war against its benefits, (assuming off the bat
there's a moral high ground to maintain.)
And then Valpy writes: "Those theologians who are not pacifists have
generally given the US and its allies the green light on the right to go to
war."
Buck up, Canadians. God is on our side.
Were the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin alive, he may have thundered in
retort: If God approves the war, then God, if he truly exists, must be
abolished.
Just a day before, Walter Isaascon, chairman of CNN, decided that his
reporters were focussing "too much on the casualties and hardship in
Afghanistan," and ordered CNN reporters "to make sure people understand
that when they see civilian suffering there, it's in the context of a terrorist
attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States." Rick Davis,
CNN's head of standards and practices, tells anchors to put scenes of
Afghans suffering "into context." He recommends anchors say: "The Pentagon
has repeatedly stressed that it is trying to minimize civilian casualties in
Afghanistan, even as the Taliban regime continues to harbor terrorists who
are connected to the Sept. 11 attacks that claimed thousands of innocent
lives in the US. We must keep in mind...that these US military actions are
in response to a terrorist attack that killed close to 5,000 innocent people
in the US."
In other words, because innocent people were killed in the US, it's all
right to kill innocent people in Afghanistan. Or as Foreign Affairs Minister
John Manley said, when asked about civilian casualties, "Canada would feel
that innocent people have already been hurt." Kindergarten moral reasoning.
Turn this around: Imagine Osama bin Laden remonstrating with his followers
who are uncomfortable with the deaths of innocent Americans in the New York
and Washington attacks. "The US government refuses to renounce its Middle
East policies which have led to the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis through
sanctions and have allowed the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine to
continue for over three decades, causing untold suffering for Palestinians.
Washington refuses to apologize for atomic attacks on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and for the killing of millions of civilians in South East Asia. You
have to understand that while you see civilian suffering there, it's in the context
of American foreign policy that caused enormous suffering in the Middle East
and throughout the world."
Reasoning like this was vigorously disputed when some people -- Simon
Fraser university professor Sunera Thobani, for example -- tried to explain the
Sept. 11 attacks as blow back for what she called "blood-soaked" US foreign
policy. Who was disputing the views of Thobani and others like her
vigorously? The very same people who are telling you that the suffering of
innocent Afghans has to be understood in the context of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Johnny continued, "And if they are against this, why goddam let them stand
up...and vote."
And if you are for this, then stand up and say so, too. Don't hide behind
God or the 6,000 killed in Washington and New York or John Manley's
kindergarten moral reasoning or lame aphorisms about war being terrible (so
too is terrorism -- does that excuse it?). Say you're for the killing of
innocents, because that's what you're for. Say you're for millions starving,
because that's what this war is about. And say you're for the smashed in
skull of a three year old, and for her mother weeping over her. And remember
whose support allowed it all to happen.
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Steve Gowans calls himself a radical, but others just call him contrary and
a pain-in-the-ass. He can be reached at sr.gowans@sympatico.ca.
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