File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0310, message 34


Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2003 18:02:31 -0700
From: Judy <jaw-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Endless War


Paul said, or quoted:

>What do any of you really know about war? For those of you who might live
>in the US, you don't need to look as far away as Iraq to find a state of
>war. All you have to do is look south, towards Mexico.
>
>For those of you in Europe, all you have to do is look east, towards
>Chechnya or south, towards Algeria.
>
>How many of you who speak of war as if you know something about it, have
>actually ever lived in a war zone or been anywhere near one?
>
>But let's looks away from Iraq for one moment, where so many of you have
>suddenly found an social conscience and look south, towards Juarez,
>Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.


Do you imagine that a person can only look one way at a time?   Is 
that how it is for you?   Do you not wish to invest any care about 
the atrocity of the US occupation of Iraq?   As for me, i am in the 
US.   Last time I looked, my country is waging war on Afghanistan and 
Iraq, and is rattling sabers at a number of other countries.  I brace 
myself to one day soon here that my country's people have been 
accepted as "military advisors" into the Philippines conflict.  The 
victims in those countries are real enough.  What makes it especially 
gutwrenching for me is that it is MY people, MY leaders, MY tax 
contribution, and in MY name, that these wars are victimizing people 
far away from me.

These geographically distant wars are not far removed Americans 
emotionally and spiritually, and certainly not financially, as paying 
for them robs us of material resources we need here at home. 
Billions a month.  Can anyone even begin to conceive of the cost to 
not just Americans but to all people of such waste?   members of my 
society are placed in military uniforms, to go half way around the 
world and remove other peoples' governments and to war continuously 
against their people who fight for their countries' freedom from 
foreign occupation.  As time goes by, first it's just an occasional 
acquaintance, and then, increasingly, there are people i know who's 
children are soldiers permanently damaged by this war, the personal 
relationship to canon fodder.


My country's leaders manipulate my fellow citizens into believing 
this warring is righteous, necessary self defense by the good people 
agasint the evil people, and most of my fellow americans buy into 
this, fearful that if they don't support their leaders and support 
such violence against those in other countries, we here will be 
attacked by "terrorists."  To be sure, the people in New York City 
have experienced a war zone, the nature of which has been interpreted 
only by untrustworthy opportunist members of the Bush administration 
and their media cheerleaders. We don't really know what happened to 
New York or the Pentagon, but whatever it was, it was some kind of 
war.  The mother of twin girls who were classmates of my daughter, 
who i met and shared warm conversation with at Back to School night 
when they were freshmen. died on one of the hijacked planes. I think 
it was the one that crashed in Pennsylvania.  My daughter's friends 
lost their mother.  war reaches out and touches far and wide. The 
lying bush administration told our people that this was the beginning 
of the endless war on terror, deftly manipulating the fear created by 
911 and "the anthrax scare" as it's been called.  Just as fear was so 
deftly used during WWII to intern people of Japanese descent in the 
US, robbing them of untold value of their property, homes and 
businesses, dislocating and demolishing families, yes, taking people 
during the night and disappearing them, beating people, shooting them 
in the back, just as that was accomplished by using fear of war in an 
opportunist manipulative way, 911, whatever it was, has been used to 
restore opium production in Afghanistan, to place puppet governments 
in Iraq and Kabul, to get the deal for the gas and oil pipeline from 
central asia to the gulf that the Taliban refused to agree to, to 
position Americans for direct access to Iraqi resources, to position 
the American military in a place for easy waging of war on Iran, 
Somalia, Syria and others, perhaps to further Greater Israel, one 
would think given the position of Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney and others 
on Zionist Pacs and think tanks.

If the US government trully cared about the Iraqi people, they never 
would've perpetrated the sanctions on them.  Perhaps they would've 
supported the Shi'ite uprising in the south following the first gulf 
war, the uprising they encouraged and suggested they would support, 
and then left the Shi'ites out to dry, mission accomplished, the 
Baghdad regime's resources were tied up and depleted in yet another 
military demand, the putting down of outright civil rebebellion. And 
all the better, the killings by the regime of the rebels then 
provided propaganda to prove the saddam regime was somehow more evil 
and brutal than any other.   If Washington reallly cared about the 
northern Iraqis, they would not have left the Kurds hanging out to 
dry so many times throughout the 80s, encouraging them to rebel, 
implying support would be there, only to turn away from the perfectly 
understandable repression of the rebellion by the Baghdad regime, and 
to have donald Rumsfeld shake Saddam's hand at a photo op.  To hear 
it told in the US media/government, Saddam was a crazed hitleresque 
devil when he gassed the Kurds.  We don't here about how the Kurdish 
village that was gassed was assisting the Iranians in their war 
agaisnt Iraq.

What is to be expected if a group within a sovereign state activedly 
militarily supports that state's enemies in a war?  It's legtimate 
use of coercian to put down such rebellions by whatever means it 
takes.  do many americans know that this is exactly what the British 
rulers did to the Kurds in Iraq when it was they were the targets of 
Kurdish rebellion?  The British military leaders of the day (the mid 
20s) are on record as saying that the results of gassing the Kurds 
were quite delightful in their quick effectiveness.  Yet that's not 
the perspective that most people have on the story of why the US had 
to "topple Saddam."  Lies, manipulations.   Countries that don't face 
armed rebellion by groups within their own societies have the luxury 
of being able to claim governing by the rule of law and without 
brutality.  Yet look what happened when David Koresch and his people 
created an armed camp based on anti US government beliefs and goals, 
in the state of Texas, near the town of Waco.  The US government 
showed itself to be as capable as Saddam Hussein and the Taliban of 
dealing with such rebellion within its midst. A whole society of men 
women and children were incinerated by the US government. That's what 
states do.  It's considered "legitimate coercian."

But according to US mythology, what is legitimate for Americans and 
their allies is not legitimate for their chosen enemies.  Americans 
can have stockpiles of nuclear weapons, but not north korea. 
Americans can have stockpiles of any WMD you can imagine and more, 
but not Iraq.  Americans can legitimately use nuclear weapons such as 
in Hiroshima and in the now being planned "limited nuclear attacks" 
with "mini nukes" and "bunker buster nukes", but if a country named 
on the axis of evil should threaten to use nukes, they are fair game 
to be annihilated, not to mention, placed under trade and aid 
blockade and starved into deep poverty.

This is war.

Now we have the endless war on terror.  The nature of this war is 
shrouded in mystery and heavily laden in mythical meanings, and is 
the best tool for leading the country by use of fear mongering since 
the best days of the cold war when americans would support any 
atrocity anywhere out of fear that "communists" would crawl up on 
their shores and "enslave" us.  The communist threat finally lost all 
salience, and now we have the endless war on terror. Guess what? 
this IS a war zone.  Without the money taken from my paycheck, no 
such warrring would be possible.  Against my will, I am drug into 
paying for the slaughter and project of world domination.  Agaisnt my 
will and my good judgement, I am being set up to be a potential 
target of people in the countries victimized by my country who may 
need to blow up me and peolple i am personally attached to in their 
efforts to rid themselves of this very real much too real war by the 
Americans agaisnt Iraq and Afghanistan, with more wars against other 
far away people percolating on the backburner, waiting in the wings 
to be foisted on target peoples, the american people and the people 
of the world, aggaisnt their will and a gaisnt what they know is 
right, using fear mongering to sustain legtimacy as long as they can 
keep cultivating and manufacturing "terrorist threats."   Until the 
US came in, there was no "terrorist" activity in Iraq,  no exploding 
trucks, demolished buildings, and politically targetted murders. 
there was only the violence of the Iraq regime agaisnt its enemies. 
That violence should've been the target of worldwide opposition and 
of various non warring tactics to pressure the regime to respect 
human rights. In fact, according to Amnesty International, the regime 
did have concern about its image in this regard, and may have been 
workable. However, that was not the agenda of Washington.  It suited 
the US better if Saddam was brutal to his enemies, as Aemricans had 
been to the people in Waco Texas.  The  more bad PR for Saddam the 
better.  Foment rebellion agaisnt him by Kurds and southern Shi'ites, 
and his predictable response, predictable for any government facing 
such rebellion, would be useful to legtimate a war on Iraq that adds 
so much more torment to the people there.

The kind of war that i have, as an american, been drug into all my 
life, has been war by powerful incredibly rich resource wasting US 
armies, against small weak poor powerless peoples, while somehow the 
leaders of America manage with smoke and mirrors to convince most 
Americans that it's the small weak people who are the terrifying 
monster, while our country is the heroic and generous courageous 
white knight, trying to make the world pure and secure, free of evil.
So i know about war.  all though the wars were half way around the 
world, my own friends and relatives were sent to fight them.  When 
they returned and we talked, i found some addicted to heroin, some 
traumatized psychologically and not able to work to supprt 
themselves, and some physically wounded, missing a limb.  All had 
lost friends in battle and had watched more than their share of 
horror.  Two of my friends' sons, friends at my job, members of the 
low paid clerical staff,of course, have sons in Baghdad. I wrote 
letters to one of them, even though i don't know him well, just 
becuase his mom has been my friend since he was about 7 years old, 
and she told me the soldiers live to get mail.  Now he's home.  He's 
very quiet now, she says.  Our other friend, her son is still there. 
He had been in the military for 19 years and was about to retire, 
he's a sergeant.  Now he is very much at risk of being killed.  I 
have to experience the unpleasant inner conflict of feeling 
compassion for these people while at the same time, hating what they 
do by giving their bodies to be used as fodder for this war against 
poeple in Afghanistan and Iraq, people who have never done us any 
harm nor intended to do us any harm, like the peasants of vietnam.

I hurt and i cry almost every day from knowing that my leaders are 
using my money and my country's people to commit atrocities and to 
dominate far away people.  It's not a new found social conscience.  I 
wish it was. I wish it was a new thing that America is suddenly using 
its terrible wealth and power to harm people in far away lands who 
would never have harmed me, yet it's done in my name and using the 
resources of my society that i have contributed to.  For almost as 
long as I can remember, i've suffered from this lonely grief, in the 
midst of a sea of americans who support the wars, believing in their 
sheep-like naivete that their US leaders have only their best 
interests at heart, and are fighting for our freedom and our 
secuirty, against demonic enemies who are out to bury and enslave us, 
to take away our way of life, our rights to have big screen TVs and 
SUVs, to watch X rated movies, to listen to rock and to wear sexually 
revealing clothes.   Most Americans I know who even bother to try to 
think at all about why we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan tell 
me that if we don't, those muslim fundamentalists will come here to 
the US and use  anthrax to bring us to submission and then, make us 
wear burqas and djabas and to pray to mecca all day, and to never be 
able to freely talk dirty again in public.  If I mention the US 
military occupation of Saudi Arabia and others, and US support of the 
Israeli occupation of Palestine, their eyes glaze over, "does not 
compute."  They think i'm just trying to confuse them so that they 
can be taken over and enslaved.  This is how war is waged, in the 
battle for public opinion in the struggle for legitimation.

War of this nature is quite real to me, over the past 40 years of my 
life. that is much too long. It has been hurting for too long, and it 
promises to get much worse before it can get better, if there is any 
hope that it can get better which is hard to see.

thank you for the opportunity to ventillate a small amount of all the 
pent up grief and anguish that i live with, my social conscience 
suddenly discovered 40 years ago.  Is it a social conscience?  My 
interests are selfish.  Like you, i want a different kind of world.
judy


>
>And I won't even speak about the rapes and murders and disappearances of
>young Mexican women working for approximately $3.00 to $4.00 dollars a day
>in US owned factories, just south of the border. Women who, on their way
>to work, get kidnapped by guys who rape them and kill them. The yound
>girls who work in the maquiladoras, the foreign-owned factories, the young
>girls who leave for work when it is still dark and often don't make it to
>work alive. No, I won't go into details, I'll spare your delicate
>sensibilities, so you can focus your high-minded thoughts on the people of
>Iraq, who no one seemed to care about as long as Saddam Hussein was
>slaughering them.
>
>So let's look away from Iraq, where you've suddenly found a social
>conscience and south towards Juarez Mexico for just a moment.

   

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