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Today's
Stories
April
13, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
The Real Lessons of Vietnam
April 10
/ 12, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Greatest Radical Journalist of His Age
Patrick
Cockburn
Ambush, Kidnap, Murder: Another Day in "Post War" Iraq
Ellen Cantarow
Health Under Siege on the West Bank
Tariq Ali
Iraqi
Resistance: a New Phase
Werther
Pseudoconservatism Revisited: When God is Pro War & Other Delicacies
Robert
Fisk
Bush's War Lords to Their Critics: "Just Shut Up"
Gary Leupp
Indian Wars, Vietnam and Orientalist Fantasy
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Cont.
Jorge Mariscal
Perils of the Bootstrap
Phil Gasper
Defying Stereotypes About Death Row
Dave Zirin
Bringing the Black Freedom Struggle Into Sports: an Interview with Lee
Evans
Brandy
Baker
The Revolution is Playing at a Theater Near You
Mickey Z.
Underground Music is Free Media: an Interview with Twiin
Ali Tonak
Get Ready for the Million Worker March
Harry Browne
Asking the Wrong Question About Richard Clarke & 9/11
Gideon
Samet
The Sharonizing of America
Conn Hallinan
Remote Control Warriors
Website
of the Weekend
Taboo
Tunes
April 9,
2004
Robert
Fisk
This
War's Simple Truth: Iraqis Do Not Want Us
John L.
Hess
The
Non-Confessions of a Warrior Princess: Condi on the Stand
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Condoleezza's Condescensions
Christopher Brauchli
Holes in the Sky: Bush's Crazed Missile Defense Plan
Don Santina
Forget the Alamo!: Glorifying the Fight for Slavery in Texas
William S. Lind
The 4G Warfare Seminar, Cont.
Bill Christison
9/11
Commission is Bush's New Lapdog
Website of the Day
What We've Done to Fallujah
April 8, 2004
Wayne Madsen
Rice
(and the Record) Proves It: Bush Knew, But Failed to Act
Kurt Nimmo
Will
Bush Flatten Fallajuh?
Patrick
Cockburn
Guided
Missile; Misguided War
Laura Flanders
Steamed
Rice
Larry Everest
What Condi Rice is Hiding
Adam Federman
Sacred Capitalism Hits Russia
M. Junaid
Alam
The Iraqi Intifada Begins
Norman Solomon
The Quest for a Monopoly on Violence
Douglas
Valentine
Echoes
of Vietnam: Phoenix, Assassination and Blowback in Iraq
Website of the Day
Xispas: Chicano Art, Culture and Politics
April 7,
2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Those
Pulitzers!
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Deeper
into the Mouth of Hell: We Must Find the Exit from Iraq
Ron Jacobs
Tet
in Iraq: Closer to the Cosmic Disaster?
Patrick
Cockburn
Battles
Across Iraq: US Death Toll Mounts
Kathy Kelly
Pacification: Worth the Price?
Sonali
Kolhatkar
What Are You Doing About Afghanistan?
Rahul Mahajan
Report from Baghdad: Opening the Gates of Hell
Robert
Fisk
US Airlifts Saddam to Qatar
Mike Whitney
America Out of Iraq, Now!
Sam Hamod
Bush, Pandora's Box and the Tiger
April 6, 2004
C.G. Estabrook
Mercenaries
and Occupiers
William
Blum
The
Anti-Empire Report: the Israel Lobby
Col. Dan
Smith
The
Language of Disbelief: 1.3 Billion Still Live in War Zones
Dr. Bulent Gokay
The Coming Islamic Republic of Iraq?
Lynn Landes
Faking Democracy: Americans Don't Vote; Machines Do
Sheila Samples
What Would Royko Write?
Jason Leopold
Condi's Blind Spot: Rice Never Mentioned al-Qaeda
Mickey Z.
A Reality Show with No End in Sight
Robert
Fisk
Iraq on the Brink of Anarchy
|
April
13, 2004
A Rant
The
Bridge
By STAN GOFF
WARNING: This commentary may cause anxiety.
The United States government has initiated a
chain reaction that it can no longer control. The stalled vengeance
assault on Fallujah is merely a symptom. So is the uprising triggered
by the US closure of a Shia newspaper in Sadr City, Baghdad, followed
by gunning down the demonstrators who protested (Ah, yes, we don’t
even hear about that when they talk about the latest demon, Muqtada
al-Sadr… Memory is so short.).
The chain reaction is far broader and deeper than the battlefield fiasco
in Iraq right now. Once brown people start to pick up guns, other brown
people follow suit. The myth of invincibility of the United States military
-- called into question even before the Bush Doctrine arrived at this
particular Iraqi cul-de-sac -- is shattered. No one is shocked. No one
is awed.
Nothing left now but plain grimy brutality. Apache helicopters are buzz-sawing
through neighborhoods with chain guns and rockets. Bombs are being released
onto mosques. The hospitals and morgues are receiving a rich harvest.
I remember a sign at the entrance of Camp Mackall in North Carolina,
where I began Special Forces training. “Rule #1: There are no
rules. Rule #2: Obey the first rule.”
The post 9/11 renewal of ground wars in Southwest Asia swept me up into
a new role. A career soldier who is a leftist; a leftist who is a retired
soldier. I became a trump card that antiwar activists could play against
the patriot-baiting of the right, so I’ve been trotted out in
front of one audience after another, from town halls to CNN, as a spokesperson
against the Bush Doctrine’s militarism.
But people transform their roles. They deviate from the scripts.
I’m a leftist who carried a gun, in a culture where what passes
for the left is terrified of guns. So people pay attention to me. In
audience after audience, I have noted that people pay attention to me.
They are engaged before I even speak, because they know that I can kill,
and that gives me an immediacy… not because I am different than
them, but because I am so very much the same. I laugh at good jokes.
I rock babies. I take an interest in the weather.
This is more than morbid fascination.
We are a culture insulated from our own basis. It is a condition of
metropolitan modernity, more so even of post-modernity. In a consumer
society, where general-purpose money has eaten away every bond of community,
where alienation -- and even narcissism -- is defined as normalcy, where
nature is seen as something apart from and below us, the very personhood
of each of us is deracinated and left to drift through the retail landscape
like a grieving banshee. Planned obsolescence applies even to our identities.
We really have no idea who pays for this privilege of superficiality,
but those billions who are doing the paying -- far out of our reified
view -- are getting a clearer idea all the time.
Of course, this culture is pure charade. We can pretend we are as disembedded
as we like, but we are invariably physical -- diaphragms heaving incessantly,
articulating gases in our guts, dissipating heat, concentrating urine,
sloughing off dead cells, yawing and eating and scratching and sleeping
and fucking and finally, dying.
Inside-Outside.
Inside this whole charade, where money “grows” and media-stunned
young women aspire to be models for Victoria’s Secret, resides
liberal hypocrisy. Outside it resides imperial militarism -- the last
refuge of capitalism as it devours its own social and material bases
like a vampire stranded alone on a desert island.
Soldiers who were raised inside this cultural charade are now outside
it, in Southwest Asia getting blood on their hands so we can have malls
and road trips and household appliances and climate control. The personhood
of soldiers (mostly male) has become a battleground, too, between masculinity
and cognitive dissonance. Warfare is the practice and masculinity is
achieved in the practice, but they are confronted now with other persons
-- people who are first reduced in the media, then defined in training
(The Enemy), then dehumanized in the word (Raghead!), then commanded
by the occupier as subjected persons, then -- if obedience is not swift
-- erased. This is where the soldier either recognizes or denies the
hypocrisy, because the fuller reality of the system is right there before
his eyes. Now he has a choice to make.
I’m talking to you, soldier, and not judging you. This is an invitation
to take back your personhood. This is an invitation to confront every
fear, breach every obstacle, take every risk; to leap over your old
self and enter into a deeper struggle.
Capitalism has to build bridges from its metropolitan hypocrisy to the
scenes of its imperial crimes, and that bridge is made with the backs
of soldiers. We have to build a bridge from the scene of the crime to
clarity.
To do that, we can’t back away from this gun-question, this whole
issue of violence.
When the guerrilla picks up the gun, the imperial soldier must pay attention.
When an alienated teenager in Columbine picks up a gun, we metropolitans
pay attention. We should.
People with guns should be taken seriously. People who have lived with
guns should be taken seriously, and they are. Some of us are not going
to be bothered with Victoria’s Secret or any of that other bullshit.
We are looking right through those mirages, right through to our animal
actuality, right through to the horror vacui of a world where people
can and do erase other people, and no deity descends to make things
right. There are no decrees from on high, and you are still responsible.
Many of my associates in the antiwar movement talk about “reaching
out” to the military. They want to convert them. They want to
transform them from robotic killing machines into Ghandians. These are
the liberals.
Soldiers don’t listen to liberals, and neither do the majority
of people. They intuit the detachment of them, their other-worldly abstraction,
their desire to have their cake and eat it too. When people are frightened
or angry, they may be confused about the source of their fear and anger,
but they know they want to be with someone who will fight. Liberals
have never learned this.
A young woman I met recently was surprised by her own first encounter
with several soldiers. She is not a Nation Magazine “leftist,”
but a revolutionary young woman who recognizes that social transformation
is neither painless nor bloodless, and she has no illusions about that.
What astonished her about these young soldiers was her own recognition
that they were, like her, willing to take tremendous risks -- up to
and including the loss of their own lives -- to fight for what they
thought was right. It was the very quality that she had been seeking
from her own political allies.
She wondered aloud whether it is easier to turn a person with intellectual
clarity into a courageous person, or whether it was easier to help a
courageous person to achieve greater clarity.
“Should we be trying to make smart people into fighters, or fighters
into smart people?”
Damn good question. May have the elements of a false dichotomy, but
it’s still a good question. She is a hell of a lot closer to the
mark than those who see the military as brainwashed aneroids in need
of a religious epiphany. She knows that soldiers are not robots, and
she doesn’t want to empty them of their belligerence, which is
an appropriate attitude for our Umwelt. She wants to free them from
the bonds of their illusions. The cruelty to which these soldiers have
been inured has the potential to be turned against hypocrisy, then against
the system. Clarity is often cruel; cruelty is often clear.
The imperial soldier is constrained by the superstitions of patriotism,
and the soldier becomes a danger to power when he recognizes the speciousness
of patriotism. For now, he mimics the confident acceptance of the official
narratives, but he experiences the contradiction like a recurrent rash.
A friend of mine said that soldiers are political scientists. They are
embryonic political scientists at least, waiting for midwives... the
right questions, perhaps, or the right nightmares.
I think soldiers need to reach out to the left as well. Maybe we soldiers
have a contribution to make to your clarity. Academic leftists can talk
to you until they are blue in the face about reification -- be it the
reification that confuses the transient with the eternal, or that substitutes
the abstract for the specific. But every military leader, beginning
with a 19-year-old corporal, knows that before every task there must
be an assessment of the situation -- one that takes account of the mission,
the enemy, the population, the terrain and weather, one’s own
capacity in technology and personnel… and the time available…
as a unified and changing whole. Dialectics, anyone?
While metropolitan leftists will extol the virtues of the Vietnamese
NLF -- rightly so -- some of us saw them dying for their struggle. Their
corpses were us. We have seen ourselves as corpses. Politics doesn’t
happen in clean, well-lighted places. It happens in the sand and mud.
It happens in the rivulets of blood coursing into the edges of an Iraqi
hospital floor. It’s happening in the head of some unnamed Marine
or Green Beret or tank gunner, who is looking out over the truth of
the imperial landscape in Sadr City or Fallujah or Kut and recognizing
that he has been thrust into this drama anonymously and that he now
shares a more intimate space with his “enemy” than he ever
will with the oil companies and military contractors and politicians
who sent him here.
Ani DiFranco says, “Those who call the shots are never in the
line of fire.”
Non-violence can be an effective tactic, but so can violence. It’s
only liberal hypocrisy that denies the latter. For Iraq, it is the only
tactic. And the armed resistance in Iraq -- regardless of its methods
or ideologies -- is doing more to halt the runaway train that is global
capitalism than anything else in the world right now. (You want white
hats and heroes, go by a cinema ticket.)
We cannot imagine the sheer joy of rediscovery being felt throughout
the region right now as people see these fighters striking back at the
source of their long humiliation -- imperialism, and by extension against
imperialism’s local attack dog, Zionism.
Ghandi and King were important people, courageous people, people who
embraced non-violence as a core principle, yet that non-violence as
a tactic is what worked for them. It worked in a specific time and context.
The notion that this tactic is a generalized principle, that it can
work now, fails to account for that context. Without the Soviet Union,
warts and all, there would have been no Ghandi, and there would have
been no King. Had the struggle for credibility in the global periphery
not been engaged by the US and the USSR, non-violence would have been
suicidal. Even that struggle was based -- at the contextual end of the
road -- on the military power of the Soviet Union that stood eye-to-eye
with imperialism until it collapsed from the effort.
There is a difference between imperial thuggery and armed resistance
to imperialism, and in this era of exterminist imperialism, armed resistance
has become for more and more people the synonym of self-defense. The
occupying soldier fragments his personality with the gun. The resistance
reclaims its humanity with it.
It was Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of
the Earth, who said, “The native cures himself of colonial neurosis
by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils
over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself
in that he himself creates his self. Far removed from his war, we [the
privileged white metropolitans -SG] consider it as a triumph of barbarism;
but of its own volition it achieves, slowly but surely, the emancipation
of the rebel, for bit by bit it destroys in him and around him the colonial
gloom. Once begun, it is a war that gives no quarter. You may fear or
be feared; that is to say, abandon yourself to the disassociations of
a sham existence or conquer your birthright of unity. When the peasant
takes a gun in his hands, the old myths grow dim and the prohibitions
are one by one forgotten. The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his
humanity.”
As a solider, I needed this history to understand my own, and to come
to terms with my own, and to transform my own into this project. And
as a soldier, Sartre’s words, and Fanon’s, have special
meaning for me precisely because there is nothing abstract about them.
I was part of that history -- it doesn’t matter on what side;
that was a pure accident.
And so I started helping build this bridge.
Soldier, I am saying, here is the cause, here is the side of history
your grandchildren will want to see you were on. Soldier, study this
history and this movement, so your courage and your blood aren’t
sent into space like those idiotic capsules full of snapshots and mementos
for some alien life form to discover.
And to my comrades now, I have grim news from those places where soldiers
go.
You will not win with non-profits. You will not win with non-violence.
You will not win with non-committal. To win you must become effective,
and when you do, you will be attacked. Then you will fight or you will
be exterminated. You may even fight and still be exterminated. No guarantees.
We are responsible.
You will never make a revolution behind the bourgeoisie’s back,
because the bourgeoisie has eyes in the back of its panopticon head.
You will never make a revolution while the ruling class sleeps, because
it never sleeps. You will not sneak up on necessity, and no one can
evade it.
Soldiers have seen it.
That’s why they don’t listen to liberal platitudes about
morality in the abstract. They know about the power from the barrel
of the gun. It ends debates. It forces people to pay attention.
People listen to me, and I see them peering at me, trying to imagine
what I am the way people sometimes try to imagine others having sex.
I am arguing against imperialism, and I can talk about commodity fetishism
with the best of them -- because I applied myself to it with the same
rigor and intensity that I did to trauma protocols as a Special Forces
medic or marksmanship fundamentals as a sniper. Yet these audiences
can hear about imperialism from a host of others.
But there in front of them is someone who has been willing to take life
or to give it away. And they are paying attention.
Only it’s not me. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that.
I’m just a circumstance. What they are really paying attention
to is themselves, to the questions they haven’t confronted, to
the doubts that plague them about their politics, to the incessant whisper
of mortality.
And I’m paying attention to them. I study Rosa Luxemburg, Alf
Hornborg, Robert Connell, Joy James, Robin D. G. Kelley, Mao Zedong…
and I study the academic research and the social theory and science
and philosophy. Because simply understanding the final argument of the
gun is not enough. We soldiers need to understand before and after the
gun, and we need to understand -- as much as we can -- where our personhood
is rooted in social constructions and where society is rooted in the
biosphere and how there is no clear line of demarcation between biology
and symbols. We need the context.
So as a leftist I build this bridge toward my brothers and sisters under
arms. I don’t judge… I can’t.
The ultimate liberal hypocrisy is the one that shuns the soldier as
if the soldier lives in a parallel system, not recognizing that militarism
doesn’t float over history any more than the make and model of
your automobile. If you turn on your lights with a wall switch and drink
clean water from your tap, if you walk in the park, if you wear a stitch
of manufactured clothing, if you’ve shopped on a vacation overseas,
if you so much as breathe in the United States of America, you are as
much a part of the body of actually-existing imperialism as any nervous,
trigger-happy Marine killing a family at a Baghdad roadblock.
Different rooms, same house.
Deforested Haiti cooks on charcoal so you can cook with electricity.
A child in Botswana dies of AIDS so I can work on this computer. And
personal ethics will not transform this.
It’s a system, an expression of an immensely complex and dynamic
web of relationships and realities, and it will default to its basic
program -- capital accumulation -- again and again and again, until
it is destroyed.
And it will go down like a raving beast, if the reader will forgive
this metaphorical shift.
We need this bridge between the left and the military, because when
the time comes, when the hypocrisy fails at last and confronts us with
the painful reality of transformation, when the gun is all that is left
and the choice is to seize or diminish our humanity, the soldier will
need to become a revolutionary, and the revolutionary will have to become
a soldier.
The time will come when we are all participants. Most of the world already
is.
Soldier, leftist… “abandon yourself to the disassociations
of a sham existence or conquer your birthright of unity.”
Fallujah lives!
Stan
Goff is the author of Hideous Dream and Full-Spectrum Disorder.
He can be reached at: sherrynstan@earthlink.net
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