PeaceVoice
Will we always
be this way?
Robert Koehler
(1/7) "The people do
not want war!"
These were the words that did it,
that knocked the composure out of me. I was standing at
what felt like the heart of Chicago on a January
afternoon, corner of Wabash and Wacker, next to the river
and beneath the tower known as Trump. The crowd had
swelled by this time to nearly a thousand.
I kept looking up at the letters.
They were two stories high: TRUMP. Smugly in command of
God knows what — the whole world? As their presence became
ever more unbearable, the speaker’s words suddenly pulled
me back into the present moment. They put the matter as
simply as possible. They were what brought us all down
here, clustered together in the bitter wind: the People Do
Not Want War.
There was no "unless" attached to
this statement. The raw simplicity tore me open. I burst
into tears as the wind cut through me.
This was Jan. 4. It was one of 70
protests across the country the day after Trump ordered a
drone strike that "took out" (as the media love to put it)
Iranian Major Gen. Qassim Soleimani as he was leaving the
Baghdad airport in a two-car convoy. Some dozen people
were killed in total. It was, as the world grasped in
stunned disbelief, an act of war.
And the mainstream analysis that
has spun into motion since the drone strike has mostly
been a strategic rolling of the eyeballs. Soleimani was a
bad guy, but what did the president think he was
accomplishing? A New York Times editorial, for instance,
quoted Trump’s bellicose post-strike tweet, in which he
warned Iran not to retaliate or the U.S. would start
bombing the country’s revered cultural icons, then asked:
Why was Mr. Trump’s threat on
Twitter even necessary? Wasn’t the death of General
Soleimani supposed to have stopped the threats the
president now claims America still faces? . . . Killing
General Soleimani seems to have deterred and de-escalated
nothing. Otherwise, why would the State Department have
needed to advise all Americans to leave Iraq?
War is a complex game of strategy
and tactics, politics and "interests," but here’s what the
analysts and commentators usually forget to acknowledge:
War begins with a moral compromise of incalculable
proportions. It requires participants to dehumanize a
designated enemy and commit mayhem and murder. It requires
them to set their conscience — their soul — aside and do
what they’re told, in the name of strategy, tactics and
victory. And war always creates consequences well beyond
the imaginations of its planners.
It is, ahem . . . hell. This is
not a metaphor.
For instance, Kathy Kelly of
Voices for Creative Nonviolence, my friend and peace
activist extraordinaire, who was one of the speakers at
the rally, spoke of a boy she learned about when she was
in Iraq in 2003, during the U.S. shock-and-awe bombing
campaign. The boy not only lost the rest of his family in
one of the bombing raids, he was so badly injured that a
surgeon had to remove both of the boy’s arms at his
shoulders. When the boy awoke from the surgery, so Kathy
was later told, he was so bewildered he asked, "Will I
always be this way?"
Kathy then threw the question out
to the world, asking: "Will we always be this way?"
This puts the question of war in
its appropriate context: the context of manmade hell.
Whether it is justified or unjustified, necessary or
unnecessary, war from the perspective of its victims is
hell. And an indispensable part of the global war machine
is public relations, glorifying and justifying the
violence committed by one side and relegating evil only to
the actions of the enemy.
Thus, even as the Times editorial
board questioned the credibility and perhaps the sanity of
the Trump administration’s act of war (and impeachment
diversion tactic), it remembered to describe Soleimani as
"one of the region’s most powerful and, yes, blood-soaked
military commanders." No doubt. But for some reason the
Times forgot to acknowledge the blood on the hands of the
country Trump represents: the millions of people it has
killed, maimed and displaced, the eco-devastation it has
unleashed, over the last two and a half centuries (or
simply the last two decades).
So I leave that to Brett Wilkins,
who points out that "the U.S. has exponentially more blood
on its hands than Iran," noting that it has attacked or
invaded no fewer than 22 countries since World War II. He
writes:
"Perhaps this sanguinary legacy is
why, in survey after international survey, the United
States is perennially voted the world’s greatest threat to
peace in most of the world’s nations. After Soleimani’s
assassination, Trump boasted that ‘his bloody rampage is
forever gone.’ If only the same were true of Trump. . . ."
And then there’s the racism of
American militarism, so discreetly unnoticed by the
mainstream media, which the late George Carlin blew open
three decades ago, in the wake of the first Gulf War, in a
standup routine on HBO called "Rockets and Penises in the
Persian Gulf." Rep. Ilhan Omar shared a clip on Twitter a
few days ago.
Carlin laments the country’s
vanishing jobs and increasing ineptness: "Can’t build a
decent car . . . can’t educate our young people, can’t get
health care to our old people, but we can bomb the shit
out of your country all right! Huh? Especially if your
country is full of brown people — oh we like that don’t
we? That’s our hobby! That’s our new job in the world:
bombing brown people. Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya, you
got some brown people in your country, tell them to watch
the fuck out or we’ll goddamn bomb them!"
And now, before I can even finish
this column, the war has escalated. What will happen next
is unknown. I cling to the essence of my revelation, that
people do not want war. That is to say, they don’t want
the moral compromise – the moral disconnect – of murdered
or armless children present in their consciences. They
don’t believe that victory is worth the price of hell.
At the rally, I felt a possible
future emerging. Then the moment passed. I wiped the tears
from my eyes. The people do not want war, but right now we
have almost no say in the matter. A future without war
will not be an easy birth. We must continue learning how
to become a democracy.
Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice,
is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.
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