Post Modern
Blues
BOM
BING
THROUGH TO PEACE
or
Wake Me Up
When Hitler is Really
Dead
by adrien
rain burke
It's hard to tell now - those who didn't grow
up in the period immediately folowing WW2 may
even find it hard to believe - but I grew up
in a world without Hitler. Hitler, as far as
we in that naive age knew, was
dead.
Now, of course, the world is
brimming with Hitlers, and the curiosity with
which I speculate on the identity and
location of the next Hitler has replaced the
nerve-tingling anticipation with which
post-war America once awaited next year's
Buick. Would it have THREE chromium airscoops - or FOUR?
Let's see now: Qadaffi;
Noriega; Saddam Hussein; and the latest
model, Milosevic. A veritable little swarm of
budding Hitlers, each requiring some sort of
intervention somewhere. Because if we don't
stop him Here and Now, he will conquer the
world, and commit genocide (another word
vastly diluted by overuse) etc.,
etc.
Never mind that none
of this plague of Hitlers has demonstrated
both the
desire and the military capablility to
conquer
much of anything. Never mind that their
adventures are often defensive or
nonexistent. The word has been spoken, and
the word is "Hitler," and that word justifies
anything.
Never mind that we
have tolerated - and provided weapons to
monsters every bit as bloodthirsty (or more
so) than the current crop of faux fuhrers.
This time we are on the side of
angels.
Never mind that Turkey, which
in recent years has used American made
equipment to slaughter Kurds to the number of
46,000 or more, Turkey is our ally against
The Beast Milosevic. Nobody's
perfect.
Never mind that we ignored
Pol Pot's Hitlerian adventures in Cambodia
and opposed Vietnam's rescue
mission.
Never mind that we blithely
ignored the slaughter in East Timor, while we
supplied the weaponry that Indonesia required
for the job.
Never mind that we
overthrew Guatemala's elected government and
supported a regime that killed well over
50,000 indigenous people there.
This
is the real thing - the
real, honest-to-god Hitler clone that this
generation has the opportunity and the duty
to Halt! (Achtung!)
And the
incantation, the ritual intonation of
"Hitler, Hitler, Hitler" silences all
opposition, beause, like politicians,
journalists are loathe to "pacify" any new or
used Hitler.
Comedian Dick Gregory in
his autobiography explained how he came to be
a great runner: he would go to a gate with
the sign "Bad Dog" on it, and turn that
sucker loose! Because when a Bad Dog is
after you, you will run faster than you ever
thought you could, faster than anything. And,
interestingly, the sign was enough.
Many people with no dog at all have found
such a sign useful, and those who might want
to practice running like the wind aren't
going to take the time to look back to see if
there really is a Bad Dog back
there.
So these reincarnations of
Hitler are useful. These ersatz nazis make
war thinkable to a population still skeptical
after Vietnam.
And they divert the eye from the real reasons
for those wars. Qadaffi and Saddam Hussein,
vile as they may
be, earned the ire of America's establishment
more through their allocation of oil money to
their own citizenry than by their dictatorial
tendencies - however bloody. We never minded
Saddam's chemical warfare while he was
doing
it, after all, and his quarrel with
Kuwait
was legitimate: Kuwait was drilling on the
slant into an Iraqui oil field and refused to
stop. And on the virtues of Kuwait, the
"democracy" we saved - what can be said of a
state that permits the keeping of slaves in
all but name, and forbids women to drive,
much less to vote***. When these anomalies
were
pointed out to our then-current Hitler-killer
Bush, he then blustered that we must save
Saudi Arabia! Worse and worse. The
same
conditions apply in Saudi Arabia, plus a
legal system even more unfair to
women.
***FOOTNOTE: Within
hours of the
completion of this editorial, Kuwaiti women
were granted complete legal equality with
men. It's probably just a coincidence.
. . .
******FOOTNOTE: Sorry, the Kuwaiti wonen's "equality" was later rescinded - guess they don't have an Equal Rights Amendment, huh?
We did many
questionable things
in that campaign. We subborned false
testimony to convince Americans that the
Iraquis were monsters, who put incubator
babies on cold hospital floors and took the
incubators for their own inscrutable military
use.
We bombed and strafed retreating
troops and the helpless civilians who
accompanied them without mercy for days. We
buried surrendering soldiers alive and
destroyed the Iraqui's subversive sanitation
system - condemning hundreds of thousands to
disease and
death, in a country which had had a universal
modern health care system.
We never
did "get" Saddam, but
our sanctions and our bombs have killed over
a million innocent Iraquis, and we are still
condcting a quiet, little-noticed bombing
campaign - destroying out-of-the-way
villages, killing shepherds and their sheep,
who probably represent some economic threat
to us. (After all, sheep and their milk can
be eaten. Wool can be used for weaving. We
can't rest until every sign of civilization
in Iraq is snuffed out.)
The "peace"
we seek in our
bombing there still eludes us, though the
"enemy" is quiescent. It is as if there is
some essential
quality inherent in peace that is not
achieved by even the most persistent
bombing.
But we are after
all, dealing with Hitler.
I
suspect the reasons for our brutal treatment
of Panamanian CIA asset and drug kingpin
Noriega are deeply buried in some file we
shall never see. But the slum we bombed to
rubble one night around Christmas (Merry
Christmas!)- that was
a public act, and inevitably brought death to
thousands. But who would oppose such
necessary collateral damage when we're going
after Hitler?
Now we are bombing a
another nation back to a preindustrial state
of affairs, using bombs long outlawed for
their vicious antipersonnel effects. Cluster
bombs are not smart bombs, but they are cute
bombs. Bombs that may lie around for years,
unexploded, pretty, bright colored bombs that
look rather like toys, until a child happens
along. . . .
But no
bomb is too horrible
when you are out to get Hitler.
And strangely, with the plethora of
Hitlers on the world stage for us to vilify
and bomb and whip up the people's righteous
wrath against in recent years, Hitler has
gathered
followers. Unthinkable? Yes,but
true. In our own country, too.
It is as if the word, "Hitler," spoken again
and again in a kind of mantra invoking the
will to bomb civlians and accept the horrors
of hunger and misery that we
visit on the subjects of each new Hitler, as
if that word had a power that even our
government
can"t control.
This was
America's Century, we were once told, and
Hitler was well and truly dead. The world had
learned the lessons of war and strove for
peace with a stockpile of weapons terrible
enough to destroy all of human society -
perhaps all human life. In time, our major
rival for world domination collapsed under
the weight of their own arms expenditures and
the police state needed to sustain them. And
we were left with an arsenal without enemies,
a fortress that kept out nothing. What to do?
The new crop of Hitlers came not a
minute too soon. They kept our arms
manufaturers in business - even if some of
them are taking their plants to other
countries. They divert Americans from
demanding some dreaded "peace dividend" or a
return to a peacetime economy and way of
life. And the American Century has
- somehow - become Hitler's Century
-which is a defeat that Eisenhower, DeGaulle
and Churchill and our gallant fathers
storming their beaches never never could have
imagined.
30
<. . . it
they can do it, I can do it dept.:
"As
soon as sufficient forces are available and
the weather allows, the ground installaion of
the Yugoslav Air Force and the city of
Belgrade will be destroyed from the air by
continual day and night bombardment. When
that is completed we will subdue Yugoslavia"
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
~Adolf Hitler
SUPPORTING
THE TROOPS
By
"Doc"
Farmer
<
em>"
At the heart of warfare lies an aristocratic
willingness to brutalize, tyrranize, and
ultimately squander, the lives of the common
soldiers"
Ride of The Second
Horseman:
the birth and death of
war
Robert L. O'Connell, Oxford
University
Press
No,
I don't support the troops.
I
did support the troops 31
years ago. I was an army doctor in "VeetNam"
in 1968 - and look where it got us - no, I no
longer support the troops.
First, I
don't support anybody that drops napalm and
high explosives on people to make them want
us
to tell them what to do. Bombers are as
immoral as people who leave land mines lying
around.
Second, the troops are there
doing what they are told. I have seen no
evidence from history or from my own
experience that suggests that people who are
doing what they are told, know what they are
doing. It is not enough to do what you are
told. It is probably immoral to do what you
are told. supporting such people seems the
wrong message to send to their children. And
because they are just following orders, they
will likely do immoral acts. Like bombs and
napalm.
Third, the troops are there on
Imperial Police Duty and this in itself
deserves non-support.
Fourth, unless
things have changed in the past 30 years,
some of the troops, not a few of the troops,
are there on the off chance they might get to
find out what it is like to kill someone and
get away with it.
I would support
putting Slobodan Milosvic and Slick Willy on
the same scaffold*. One is a murdering commie
fascist gangster, and the other is a draft
dodging** warmongering lying sack of Arkansas
s--t gangster. But the slickster is ours - so
we should do it.
I would support the
troops shooting their "aristocrats" and
handing them explod-y things. That is how the
common American soldier brought the Vietnam
incursion - another Imperial War Game - to an
end. And remember, the soldier's got better
bullets and explod-y things than most of us
civilians.
I would support the troops
coming home - no more bombs or bullets, guys
and dolls.
Set up coffee houses
outside the bases, invite the troops in. Tell
them the truth: that you do not support them
or what they do. They are young and
impressionable, or they never would have
bought that line of s--t about $40,000 for
college, training for that special civilian
job, and all that respect in your
community.
Editor's notes:
*I never support capital punishment - even
for leaders - who usually out-murder private
murderers by a factor of thousands - for the
simple reason that the power over life and
death is one I would not grant any State.
**I call them
"war-resisters." -
but I do expect them to resist making war on
others when they get the power. . . .
~Adrien
HOME
