From the War Resisters League’s Judith Mahoney Pasternak, “an honest look at the challenge pacifism faces in places like the Congo”:www.warresisters.org/nva0703‑1.htm:
bq. There are those who challenge the pacifist position with such questions as, “A man with a gun is aiming it at your mother. You have a gun in your hand. What nonviolent action do you take?” Our usual answer is, “I’m a pacifist. I don’t have a gun in my hand. Next question.” But at least once in every generation — more frequently, alas, in these violence-ridden years — the challenge is a harder one to shrug off with a flip answer.
The answer of course is to stop wars before they start, by stopping the arms trade, the dictatorships, and the crushing economic reforms demanded by Western banks _before_ these forces all combine and erupt into war. Pasternak outlines four parts to a blueprint that could end much of the violence in the Congo.
I’ve always been impressed that the folks at War Resisters are willing to talk about the limits of nonviolence (see David McReynolds seven-part “Philosophy of Nonviolence”:www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php). While war is never the only option (and arguably never the best one), it’s much more effective to stop wars ten years before the bullets start flying. In each of the wars the U.S. has fought recently, we can see past U.S. policies setting up the conflict ten, twenty and thirty years ago.
The largest peace marches in the world can rarely prevent a war once the troops ships have set sail. If U.S. policy and aid hadn’t supported the “wrong” side in Iraq and Afghanistan twenty years ago, I don’t think we would have fought these current wars. Pacifists and their kin need to start asking the tough questions about the current repressive regimes the U.S. is supporting – places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – and we need to demand that building democracy is our country’s number one goal in the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations (yes, prioritize it _over_ security, so that we “don’t replace Saddam Hussein with equally repressive thugs”:www.nonviolence.org/articles/000130.php.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Monthly Archives ⇒ August 2003
U.S. taking on Hussein Strongman Role
August 24, 2003
It shouldn’t be a surprise but it makes me sick anyway. The _Washington Post_ reports that the “U.S. occupation is hiring Saddam Hussein’s ex-spies”:www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37331-2003Aug23.html.
It must be a good job market for mid-level Saddam Hussein loyalists. Back in June, we learned that the U.S. had put “ex-Iraqi generals in charge of many Iraq cities”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000027.php (at the same time the U.S. canceled promised elections). The U.S. trumpets capture of big-name Iraqi leaders like “Chemical Ali”:www.msnbc.com/news/955391.asp?vts=082120030615 but then quietly hires their assistants. The majority of the new U.S. intelligence recruits come from Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat, an agency whose name is said to inspire dread among Iraqis.
The infrastructure of Saddam Hussein’s repression apparatus is being rebuilt as a U.S. repression apparatus. The statues of Saddam Hussein go down, the “playing card” Iraqi figureheads get caught, but not much changes.
The article says that the new spy hiring is “covert” but it’s apparently no secret in Iraq. even the Iraqi Governing Council, a dummy representative body handpicked by U.S. forces, has expressed “adamant objections” to the recruitment campaign:
bq. “We’ve always criticized the procedure of recruiting from the old regime’s officers. We think it is a mistake,” Mahdi said. “We’ve told them you have some bad people in your security apparatus.”
No, the “covert” audience is the U.S. public, who might start feeling quesy about the Iraq War if they knew how easily the U.S. was slipping into Saddam Hussein’s shoes.
Insuring Violence Never ends
August 22, 2003
“Bill Hobbs”:http://hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_hobbsonline_archive.html#106139209827725521 challenged Nonviolence.org about the recent lack of condemnations of Palestinian violence. It’s a fair critique and a good question. For the record, Nonviolence.org agrees with you that bombing buses is wrong. Hamas should be condemned, thank you. Of course, Israelis building in the occupied territories is also wrong and should also be condemned. The zealots in the conflict there demand that everyone take sides, but to be pacifist means never taking the side of evil and always demanding that the third way of nonviolence be found.
The Israelis and Palestinians have so much in common. Both are a historically-persecuted people with contested claim to the land. The war between them has been largely funded and egged on by outside parties who seem to have a vested interest in the violence continuing ad infinitum. Both sides chronicle every bus bombed and bullet fired, using the outrage to rally the faithful to fresh atrocities. Blogs like Bill Hobbs’ and organizations like the International Solidarity Movement help insure that the bombings will never stop. Caught in the middle are a lot of naive kids: suicide bombers, soldiers, and activists who think just one more act of over-the-top bravery will stop the violence.
The war in Israel and Palestine will only stop when enough Israelis and Palestinians declare themselves traitors to the chants of nationalistic jingoism. We are all Israelis, we are all Palestinians. There but for the grace of God go all of us: our houses bulldozed, our loved ones killed on the way to work.
Once upon a time we in America could think that we were immune to it all; the idea that we’re all Israelis and Palestinians seemed a rhetorical stretch. But I was one of the millions who spent the night of 9/11/01 calling New York friends to see if they were safe (I was on my honeymoon and was so shaken that one of my calls was to an ex-girlfriend’s parents; my wife gracefully forgave me). On that day, we Americans were delivered the message that we too are complicit. We too must also declare ourselves traitors to our country’s war mythologies and start being honest about our historic complicity with war. As a people, Americans weren’t innocent victims at either Pearl Harbor or the World Trade Center towers (though as individuals we were, which is the point of nonviolent outrage of nationalistic violence). every blog post commemorating a victimhood, whether in New York City or Tel Aviv, supports the cause of war. I will not condemn every act of violence but I will condemn the cause of violence and I will expose the mythologies of war.
Almost Famous
August 22, 2003
Conservative godfather of the internet Instapundit almost linked to Nonviolence.org the other day. He didn’t like our take on the enola Gay exhibit, but instead of linking directly to us so his readers could see what we had to say, he linked to Bill Hobbs’ critique. I guess Instapundit alter ego Glen Reynolds must not think his readership can handle dissenting voices. Instapundit readers who cut and pasted to get here:
- Yes, the Japanese were secretly trying to surrender before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski. The U.S. thought incinerating 150,000-some people was a good negotiating tactic, and it worked: the Japanese government to instantly agree to unconditional surrender.
- Yes, the U.S. takeover of Hawaii and the Philippines were aggressive acts to secure shipping routes in the South Pacific. In 1854, a United States warship under the command of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry sailed to Japan and forced it to sign treaties opening up its markets. The threat of Russian expansion from the West and U.S. expansion from the south and east was a large part of the reason Japan militarized in the first place. These are the kind of facts one should have when standing in the Smithsonian gazing up at Enola Gay and wondering how it ever came to be that the U.S. would drop two nuclear weapons over two heavily-populated cities.
Pentagon Movie- and Myth-Making
August 20, 2003
There’s an interesting conversation over at TalkLeft about the Pentagon’s vetting of movie scripts. One of the next movies they’re working on is a dramatization of the the already highly-embellished story of the “rescue” of Private Jessica Lynch in Iraq (one’s tempted to ask whether a movie about her could even say “Based on a True Story”).
Celebrating nuclear terror with amnesia and techno-lust
August 19, 2003
The Smithsonian Museum in Washington has “reassembled the enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945”:www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/national/19MUSe.html. Trying to avoid the controversy that accompanied a 1995 exhibition, the current museum director says this exhibit will:
bq. “focus on the technological achievements, because we are a technological museum… This plane was the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time.”
This continues the moral blindness that created the bloodiest century in human history. Instead of looking at how politics, war and technology intersected in an event that instantly killed 80,000 people, we shine up the metal and blabber on about technology. The bombing’s death count far overshadows the 3,000 deaths at the World Trade Center two years ago. If the sight of the towers collapsing is a horror we can never forget or minimize, then so too is Hiroshima’s mushroom cloud.
The only way militarism and nationalism survives is by abstracting war and ignoring the very real death, blood and tragedy. The Japanese people caught up in their country’s lust for war were victims as soon as the fighting started. Their participating in their country’s war was a result of propaganda and nationalistic fervor, the same mix that led so many Americans to support the war in Iraq.
The overwhelming majority of people killed on August 8, 1945 were people who never fired a gun. They were simply trying to stay alive in a world full of human-made terror. They were ordinary people who watched as their country’s leaders plotted and warred. Most were afraid to say no to war, to unite with pacifists around the world, or to denounce militarism wherever it existed and with whatever excuse it gave for its horror.
The roots of World War II were oil and terror: Japanese leaders attacked its neighbors to gain control of the industrial resources the home islands didn’t have. American leaders (industrial and political) had waged war against Hawaii and the Philippines for control of Pacific shipping lanes. The plotting for war started long before Pearl Harbor and involved the leaders in both countries. In a very real way, the war in Iraq is just the latest chapter in the century-long war over oil.
But history, truth and morality will all be stripped out of the Smithsonian’s new exhibit, as spokespeople for the American Legion and Air Force have declared:
bq. “As long as the enola Gay is presented in the light that it was used — to end the war and save lives — that’s fine.”
bq. “We are satisfied that it is in historical context this time and does not make comments about U.S. aggression in the Pacific.”
No, schoolchildren visiting Washington won’t learn the truth about the bombing. Another generation will be spoon-fed propaganda about its country’s greatness and goodness. Another generation will not pause to consider its country’s old sins and tragic mistakes. A typical blog entry about the Smithsonian exhibit that claims “no single plane did more to save lives in World War II”:http://www.hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_hobbsonline_archive.html#106130896137661056 . Abstract death and claim righteousness to your country, keep militarism going and keep peaceful people from uniting across national boundaries.
In Two Years, What Have We Learned?
August 18, 2003
*By Johann Christoph Arnold*
bq. “I often wonder how many more tragedies it will take before we learn to truly love each other, and before we grasp how happy we could be if we cared for those around us as well as we care for ourselves.”
Manufactured terrorist threat
August 14, 2003
The big news this week has been the foiling of a plot to smuggle ground-to-air missile from Russia into the United States. ABC News claims there’s “less in missile plot than meets the eye”:abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/World/missile030813_sting.html and goes so far as to call it a set-up. From start to finish, the plot was orchestrated as a sting operation by U.S. and Russian agents. The accused mastermind Hemant Lakhani had no Russian contacts and no history of arms smuggling. The ABC article paints him as a small-time black market importer down on his luck who thought this would be a good way of making easy money and paying off debts.
This doesn’t excuse his actions but it does change the way this we think about this whole plot. There was no arms seller. There was no terrorist user. No weapon made it by U.S. or Russian intelligence (for they were the ones who shipped it). What we do have is a two-bit middleman who talked trash abou the U.S. and offered to be a link of the arms trade. Like an idiot, Lakhani followed the bread crumbs of opportunity left for him by U.S. intelligence agencies. We now know there are people desparate enough to selll anything if the price is right (didn’t we already know that?) and that salesmen will talking trash about a potential buyer’s competitors to close a deal.
That there’s someone willing to sell missiles is indeed frightening, but it’s not worth this sort of media coverage. No terrorist was involved in all this and the only ones talking about using these weapons were U.S. agents! One has to to wonder if this is the latest “threat” all “cooked up by some White House insider”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000116.php. “Lets pose as Al Qaeda, wave lots of money in front of a desparate idiot, nail him when he grabs for it and declare it as a Al Quada plot foiled.”