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War & Hell

DATELINE: 15 October, 2001

Transmitted by ROD AMIS

There's no better time for sackcloth and ashes, for feeling like a voice crying in the wilderness than when the flags are waving and the people around you say we need to "support our President" and seek vengeance against "Evil." WHAT or WHO is evil if not all of humanity?

Tell me you've NEVER done something you're ashamed of or -- even worse -- that if we all knew you had done would not think of you as a total cretin?

Okay, that's not murdering 5,000-plus "innocent" people. (Strange how we all become "innocent" once we're dead, but are bastards and bitches while we're in the next cubicle. Forgive my Ambrose Bierce moment, or don't.) My point is, whether you destroy one or one thousand YOU ARE EQUALLY WORTHY OF GOING TO THE PROVERBIAL HELL. That seems to be a fine point somehow lost in the current climate of mutually destructive blood-lust.

Of course, at least in the Christian faith (a good place to start when addressing yourself to a self-proclaimed "Christian Nation") killing isn't the only thing Thou shalt not do. There's other things on the list like coveting the goods of others, bearing false witness, and on and on. All of these, we've been told from pulpits all over the land, will gain us our passport straight to Hell.

Well, let's consider these propositions for a moment as we go into the "righteous" enterprise of war.

We have been raining death and a (small) bit of food on the arguably poorest and most devastated nation on earth for over a week now and proud of it. It was interesting during a press conference this week when one reporter had the gall to bring up the niggling fact that the food we are airlifting to Afghanistan is only a small portion of what that country was receiving when international aid organizations were forced to quit the country or face death themselves. Hmmn.

An interesting article on the Guardian Unlimited site from the United Kingdom, which you may not have noticed, gives a trenchant perspective from India on the shakey moral ground in which we are now asking the world to choose sides. You can read Arundhati Roy's thoughts here.

Because morality has always been a topic of some concern in these pages, one cannot but cringe at the moral underpinning that is spuriously being given to a course of action, by this nation, without any clearly defined goals accept a possible arrest of a terrorist. Beyond that,

• how much thought has been put on the consequences of bombing a(nother) sovereign state because it won't come to heel?
• What is the effect of putting the United Nations on notice that other countries should expect to be attacked, as well?
• Isn't that an arrogant position to take when talking to other members of the "community of nations?" Should we be surprised if some might take such a demand as asking them to surrender some of their own soveriegnty and join a community of toadies and sychophants, little more than client states?
• Considering the glaring litany of past geopolitical errors -- many of them made by the very presidential advisors who are administrating this "new kind of war' -- made in the name of the United States, shouldn't our level of scepticism about the decisions being taken be higher than it is?

Questions like these, though unpopular in this climate, touch to very heart of informed citizenship and sorely need to be asked and discussed more widely.

Outside of the heated rhetoric that seems a staple of the airwaves these days, are we damaging "international terrorists" by our actions, or just adding to the misery and suffering of more common (less than common by economic, educational and political standards and opportunity) people? Are we going to bring about the change in circumstances for the Afghans and other people on our list of "targets" than we did for the Kurds and Iraqis -- and then walk away and forget them as we did in that instance?

Has our economic foreign policy of "liberalization" left the average Russian people more than prey to thuggish interests in their midsts and worse off than they ever were under the Soviet bosses?

To paraphrase former President Reagan, are the Haitians better off today than they were four years ago? Eight years ago?

Troubling questions, yes, but only because they bring into question both the motives for and results of U.S. international interventions past and present. Where have our "hands" fallen in the last forty years where the people themselves who were touched would say they are better off? And how often have we left only misery and resentment in our wake? It is against the backdrop of our own very recent history that the current activity must and should be judged.

Our rhetorical pronouncements assert that we are the champions of peace, democracy and freedom. How well do our actual interventions and the regimes we have supported over the past forty years proven that claim?

Every single one of the interventions listed above was purported to support democracy and better the lives of the people involved. Every single one of the interventions listed above failed to come close to that goal. In other words, when we say we are champions, it actually begs the question "For whom other than yourselves and your own monied interests?"

That's not just a troubling question, from a moral point of view, but one that supplies its own internal indictment.

There is a benign and noble mission for American foreign policy, but thus far -- out of deep-seated cultural prejudices, out of outright ignorance of the nations involved and their languages and history, and out of plain old American arrogance --- that mission has not been fulfilled. This can be changed, but only once Americans begin to ask tough and troubling questions about their own past and present conduct.

That calls for a greater degree of courage and perseverance than bombing a Stone Age country back to the Ice Age.

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