This essay was first published in the Palestine Chronicles 2006 08 10
I live in comfort, far from the slaughter of innocent civilians by American made, Israeli operated gunships and rockets. I feel no grit and dust sticking to sweat, nor smell the corrosive smoke that comes from each rocket and bomb, nor the odour of blood puddled on the ground. I hear no screams of agony, nor the wailing of grief, nor the incessant roar of Israeli F-16s passing overhead, nor the angry arguments praising Hezbollah and damning the Americans and the Israelis. I see no dismembered limbs, shattered bones, stale dusty bodies with brown encrusted blood on torn and filthy clothing.
No army of refugees is streaming by my door, dazed and confused, hungry, thirsty, with absolutely nothing left in their lives, nor even the prospect of returning to anything but rubble and dust and the broken remains of a previous lifetime. I hear no mothers crying over the limp corpse that was moments before a beautiful child, while still trying to comfort another wounded, bloody dazed child. I do not see or hear the anger and fury of the survivors, enraged by the senselessness of all the death and destruction.
I do not know the generations of suffering inherited from generation to generation, from one embittered parent to their children and seemingly never ending on down to the children and grand-children, those that survive the more serious inflammations of violence that humans conveniently label as war, but are truly nothing more than eruptions of a continual gradual attack on human dignity and survival.
What I do know of war is this.
War is based on the folly, greed, immorality, and corruption of people fully unsympathetic to the individual lives, the social lives and conditions, and the larger global perspective of the ‘other’ and their environment. This war is but a smaller part of an ongoing war against the peoples of the earth who dare to dream of living in peace and harmony within their own society, unfettered by the curse of the American empire in all its many manifestations. American acts of violence against the peoples of the globe, from its inception as a child of the British Empire, have always been for the purpose of business control and the gathering of wealth to the empire’s elite and powerful.
It is an empire based on greed, the demand for ever more resources – in this case oil – for ever more markets for consumption, for ever more disenfranchised and fully subjugated labour force. It is immoral in its lies about “Freedom” and “Democracy”, values that Americans care nothing about as long as they control the resources from a compliant and willing puppet state. It is corrupt in its demands for “free markets” as the sign of full fledged democracy, as there is no democracy, no transparency, in the business and political dealings of corporate America that encompasses the government and the Pentagon as well as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, all of which operate beyond the sight and scrutiny of most countries’ governments, let alone the democratic scrutiny of the people in those countries.
It is a war based on one man’s declaration that we are in a “crusade”, that “you are either with us or against us”, that pre-emptive military action fulfills the unilateralists dreams of an unelected government cabal that calls the action above and beyond a compliant and complacent Congress and House and above and beyond an ill-informed public from a compliant and complacent media. It is a war based on “full spectrum dominance” that has yet to realize that the human spirit cannot be diminished unless it is to be totally annihilated by the use of nuclear weapons, an event that has only occurred under one government in the world, yet may be closer than is realized if this current episode of war turns even nastier against the empire. It is an event that many in the current government actually visualize as a good end to it all, a horrifying self-fulfilling prophecy to the rest of us.
It is the incredible stupidity, arrogance, and conceit of those in power in the United States that makes the continuation of this global war a realistic threat to all of us. The more the empire interferes in the lives of others, the more those lives are diminished and impoverished, the more those lives lack the basic necessities of life, the more they cannot appreciate the societal security of their own families, then the more violent the reaction becomes. The opportunity is lost to enjoy the growth of their own arts, culture, music, and civic society that arises and develops over a long stretch of peace.
The majority of the people of the world wants nothing more than to have a couple of good meals a day, clean water to drink and wash with, the protection from the environment that good affordable housing brings, reasonable working conditions with a fair wage in return for services provided, good health, good education, and the chance to enjoy their families' successes. This holds true for those within the empire, an empire that cannot properly feed, clothe, educate, and protect its own people – and certainly cannot do so by attacking others as if they were to blame for the sorrows of the homeland.
And this I know of war – it has to stop.
The answer is easy. The process to get there, having to deal with human emotions, arrogance, conceited pride, and the greed for the wealth of the world, will be long and difficult. From within the comfort of my own home, I often feel helpless to work against this medusa-like structure that has struck at so many places around the world. The least I can do, in moments of despair for the human condition, is to voice my complaint, to speak out against the atrocities that are perpetrated in the false rhetoric of “freedom” and “good governance”, noble ideals, prostituted for the use of the empire. And so I speak out…because while I truly do not know the pain of war, all deaths in war diminish all of us, and the source of this now ‘global war’ is the avarice of the American empire.