|
October 26, 2001
Patrick
Cockburn
Northern
Alliance Attacks
US Bombing Strategy
Richard Lloyd Parry
Terrible Images
of a "Just" War
October 25, 2001
Ghassan
Andoni
Raid
on Bethlehem
N.D. Jayaprakash
From
Hiroshima to NYC
Evan Schultz
Memo
to Ashcroft:
Read Marbury
The Sunshine
Project
Assault
on the BioWeapons
Convention
Sarah
Turner
Cashing
In on Patriotism
Latin American Colloquium
on Systemology
The Meridia Manifesto
Noam Chomsky
The
New War on Terror
October 24, 2001
Michael Colby
Radioactive
Mail?
Lori Allen
Life
in an Occupied Land
During Wartime
Peter
Swire
New
Anti-Terrorism Bill
Poses Old Risks
Irina
Malenko
A
Non-Western Voice
David
Vest
Welcome
to Web Hell
Patrick Cockburn
Battle
of Mazar Gets Nasty
October 23, 2001
Steve
Perry
Anthrax,
Cipro and the Bailout of Bayer
Carl Estabrook
Just War
or
The Rule of Lawlessness?
Patrick
Cockburn
Errant
Bombs at Bagram
George
Monbiot
War
and Oil
Robert
Jensen
Crushing
Academic Dissent
October 22, 2001
Hamit
Dardagan
The
New Newspeak
Tom Turnipseed
War
on the Poor
Patrick Cockburn
Killing
Mullah Omar's Child
David
Vest
The
War on Women
Shepherd
Bliss
Advice
from a Vietnam Vet
Hani Shukrallah
Capital
Strikes Back
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published Oct. 3, 2001
8-Page Special
Issue
Aftermath
Diary
Ashcroft's Onslaught
on Civil Liberties
Ridge Long Groomed
for Cheney's Job
Those CIA Killing
Bids Never Stopped
The Not-So-Great
Mayor Giuliani
Crop Duster
Ban
Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
Laden Women
Fled Bel Air
Tom Ridge's
Vietnam
Same as Kerrey's?
A CounterPunch
Journey
to Ramallah
A Word About
God
Nostradamus
Jam-maker
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
Responses to 9/11:
Chomsky, Russell Banks,
Zinn, and Alice Walker
A Free ebook from
Seven Stories Press
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James
Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas
Valentine
Al
Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
October 26,
2001
What It Means to be Against the
War
Amid
pressure to rally behind the war effort, we are only too eager
to forget lessons from the past proving that no war is a just
war.
By Norman Madarasz
War is one of the great privileges of civilization,
quite characteristic of our own. It's a moment to join together
in a group celebration in which deep passions are allowed to
arise, the clearest of which is hate itself. War is a time for
displays of masterful reasoning and the rational perfection of
logistics. War is also the time of suffering and casualties.
By now everyone should know that the first casualty of war is
the truth.
It's never easy to figure out how truth
dies in such circumstances. At least spotting the bigot is easier.
Nor is it easy to find human victims, even through mangled and
bloodied TV body images. What we hear when we wish to listen
are the double standards set by military-speak: what has become
ours through choice will be theirs by destiny.
Anyone who speaks out in moments of tense
conflict has interests to defend. It's just that some speakers
work with the aim of seeking justice, while others put justice
to the service of seeking work. Interest in social justice vs.
corporate interests set themselves up as the frontlines of conflict,
though not of war. Amid pressure to rally behind the war effort,
we are all too eager to forget lessons of the past proving that
no war is a just war. The best-kept secret is that war takes
place for none of the reasons most stated by the majority. That's
not because being against war is the affair of a minority, though
often it has been. Rather, it's waging war that throughout history
has only benefited minorities-just say it: classes-, though the
criterion for success has been popular support.
In times of peace you often hear how
conflict is at the heart of human behavior. Yet when the real
bombs are pounding, theorists and ideologists scurry for shelter
behind sets of justifications. Isn't it odd then that such beings
of natural conflict should require so much effort to be convinced
of it?
Say that conflict is, in fact, at the
heart of human behavior. As human behavior enjoys turning the
heart to advantage, there is no dearth of those who benefit from
conflict. Whether conflict plays a stronger part in human survival
through evolution than does benevolence is a chicken-and-egg
question. While conflict may remain a dire expression of human
intellectual need, there's no mistaking war. What the general
public can only mistake is whose need war fulfills.
Nor does everyone have access to the
kind of information by which to figure out how far off one is
from the truth. Conflict may trigger your curiosity, and your
past selves may be left behind. Incisive historical analyses
often prove how painful the incision is when operating on the
denial that a war is fought on the public's behalf. Which is
why it is utterly ideological and propagandistic to claim that
those who oppose war also reject conflict.
HIPPIES,
PEACENIKS, PACIFISTS AND DOVES
Label those who oppose war as doves or
pacifists, peaceniks and hippies. But remember that the idea
of a just war is made possible by evolutions in justice, instead
of war. The chicken-and-egg question then turns to the coop:
justice, law and rights have hatched the empty shell of just
wars. But they've allowed us to justify-and that's the point.
When pushed far enough justifying dishevels any single-mindedness.
That's because arguing is inevitably set in standards of disinterested
objectivity, no matter how forced. Time tells the same facts
that are denied in the spur of patriotic passion. But there is
little time to avoid the murderous outrage exploding from the
wounds of the mighty.
The glittering history of the US since
WWII has been splattered with war. Above all, war means killing
a lot of innocent civilians. Which is why no coherent logic of
any sort accepts belief in the US as a peaceful nation. Some
journalists ask us to contemplate the actual situation, the fact
that yet again "Muslim" countries are at war. Yet when
the question of how refined our attention ought to be to spot
the specialized interests behind the scenes, silence and anger
then become the debater.
So the basic reason for being against
this war in particular has everything to do with illegal blood
shedding in general. In that sense legality on an international
scale turns into the problem-at least for the US. The "Students
of Islam" are not the first dictators our southern neighbors
and allies have supported for gain. They've done so to help destroy
the USSR in the latter's "Vietnam". They've crushed
either hands-on or remotely popular revolts that have aimed for
land and profit sharing where Northern fruit and oil companies
have dug in their stakes. Now we expect those we kept in subjection
to overthrow their own government upon the threat of a B-52´s
deadly wrath? Fanaticism is confirmed when we cannot doubt for
a second that we're right. But international law will outlast
the merciless act of bombing an entire people into submission
and outreach what an aggressor nation seeks to attain by state
punishment.
CAPITAL
PUNISHMENT ON A LARGE SCALE
Capital punishment has been rejected
in Canada on grounds that no state authority should be endowed
with the solemn right to decide over another human being's life.
The analogous argument applies to war, but how often is it upheld?
Canadians who remember once being the social conscience of the
US know how the analogy's only been flipped over in the south.
Many States do indeed hold the right to put their own citizens
to death, as the Federal State does citizens and soldiers of
other nations. This is why few in the US consider the attack
on Afghanistan as illegal. But you have to push art. 51 of the
UN charter very far, perhaps all the way to the Eurasian plateau,
to consider the US as being permanently under attack, just as
you had to during the Kosovo attack when the US used the same
clause to skirt over UN leadership. What we are seeing nowadays--and
yet again--is repetition of some of the very acts that stand
as reasons for September 11th.
Denouncing and censuring citizens who
oppose the war effort may prove the consumer's point: we're in
need of the economy, not a polity. Consumption is more propitious
to human passion than is politics, they would add. The ideals
of our nation, as well as those of our southern neighbors, were
surely built on passion, but channeled and controlled by reason.
The rise of Anglo-American culture in the 18th century gave a
new political sensibility to the need of bracing passion with
reason by enshrining the human territorial instinct into law.
Now North America's territorial instinct has been torn asunder.
Its gut has been wrenched out in a sentiment of attack not felt
on our continent since the First Nations were robbed of their
lands.
Nothing will ever be the same anymore,
sure enough, other than war itself. Indeed, things have never
been the same since the US started overthrowing democratic governments,
like Chile's on September 11, 1973. And nothing has been the
same since the murderous masquerade of the war on Iraq-it's just
that we still pretend to not know, and act like we don't care.
Then again, given the channeling of information and news during
a war-under the refrain of "the dead cannot be confirmed"-
this is no surprise. Which is why the American bombing campaign
of Afghanistan must be stopped immediately to give credible means
to international law in its search for the perpetrators of September
11 and the anthrax scare. CP
Norman Madarasz
lives in Montreal. He is editor and translator of Alain Badiou's
Manifesto
for Philosophy, published by NYU Press.
|