War, Violence, and Spiritual Death

[Catherina]

War, Violence, and Spiritual Death

by Robert C. Koehler

The easy violence of empire washes over everything. It washes into our psyches.

I'm thinking about this in connection with the juxtaposition of anniversaries this week: Martin Luther King Day; President Eisenhower's farewell address to the nation in 1961, in which he sounded the warning about the military-industrial complex; and George H.W. Bush's bombing campaign that launched the Gulf War in 1991, pounding not only Saddam (our kill ratio was 1,000-to-1) but also the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome" and America's post-modernist antipathy to war, thus re-energizing . . . the military-industrial complex.

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death," King said in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech a year before his death, sounding a warning that converged with Eisenhower's. Poke any dark corner of American life and a warning will emerge.

One memory I have about that 1991 war - that "easy" war, featuring yellow ribbons on the home front and self-congratulatory victory parades afterwards (and the war was easy only at first, of course; hundreds of thousands of vets have been battling an array of neurotoxic illnesses, known as Gulf War Syndrome, ever since) - was spotting a Xeroxed little racist cartoon posted in the employee break room at the newspaper where I was then working. The cartoon depicted U.S. fighter jets flying over caricatured Arabs riding camels. The caption read: "I'd fly 10,000 miles to smoke a camel."

Amazing, I thought. Racism is alive and well. It was driven to the margins of civil society in the 1960s, but war harbors the skulking impulses of hate and legitimizes them anew.

How could it be otherwise? Behind a smokescreen of glory, war does its business. It kills people - in huge, indifferent clumps. This can only be done by first dehumanizing them, a shockingly simple process, requiring nothing but ignorance. We hate our enemies, even if their status as enemy is sheer public relations. Once dehumanized, their right to life is subordinated to our fears and "interests." This is war. This is the politics of empire. And it asks little of its citizens beyond their racist worst.

...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/20-0

[Nihil]

1. A sobering little essay indeed.

Thanks for posting it.