Joan Chittister Nov. 4, 2014 From Where I Stand National Catholic Reporter
The headlines are confusing. The questions they raise are even more so. For instance, we "empowered" women, right? After more than 2,000 years, the Western world finally woke up, in our time, to the astounding recognition that women, too, were human. Almost.
By 1922, most English-speaking countries, including the United States, finally allowed women to vote for political leaders. The struggle was a fierce one, and churchmen and politicians alike considered that breakdown in society to be simply the beginning of the decline. As Cardinal James Gibbons is said to have reflected, "Imagine what will happen to society when women start hanging around polling places."
And sure enough, the floodgates of immorality swung open: It wasn't long before women were allowed to own property, to work outside the home, to drive cars, to keep their own money, to get an education, to enter into legal contracts, to become "professionals" -- at first, teachers and nurses, but eventually doctors and lawyers and now bankers and engineers, astronauts and college presidents. You would think, with a record like that, that women had really arrived at a point of full adulthood, independence, moral agency and personal freedom. Yet there is another set of headlines, more powerful, more telling than the first, that expose the lie of it all.
This set of headlines -- women groped here, kidnapped there, murdered everywhere, disappeared forever, remind a woman always not to assume that she can walk down a city street in the United States and expect to get home safely, in one piece, alive. These stories remind her that however much she achieves, does, saves, earns, manages, or assumes to be her human right, her life is really not her own. It is at the eternal mercy of fraternity boys, football teams, stalkers, prowlers, sex addicts, women-hunters, and rampant testosterone.
This set of headlines talks about the domestic abuse of wives and mothers and so-called "honor killings" or pornographic humiliation women are subject to even now, even here in the United States, if she violates a man's unwritten code for a woman. Regardless of all that talk about "equality." It is only when men stand up as a class and confront other men on the subject that women can begin to hope for violence-free lives.
Men must face other men. Men must tell the male judges and male parliaments and male police departments and male servicemen and male coaches and male sports teams and male rap music and male CEOs of everything that they will no longer be silent. That they will no longer look the other direction when wife-beaters and rapists and stalkers and trash-talkers find some excuse for it in male hormones or female "provocations."
Then the dirty jokes will cease to be funny; the locker-room talk will stop being acceptable; the language you must "never use in front of your mother" will not be acceptable anywhere, including in front of other men. It all has something to do with the way fathers train their sons and conduct their own lives for them to model. It has something to do with the way coaches train their teams. It touches, too, on the way courts and colleges deal with the only crime on the books that is not really treated as a crime until it's too late -- for both the woman and the man involved.
No, this is not a woman's problem. This is not about the equality of a woman. This is about our definition of a man. This has something to do with what we really believe about the rationality, self-control and spiritual quality of men. From where I stand, for men to take it for granted that men simply "do these things" is the greatest male insult of them all. Maybe that's why football commissioners and Army generals and college presidents are failing so badly where women are concerned.
But here's the news flash of the day: Just as I was finishing this column, the local paper on Oct. 3 announced that dozens of men in a small adjoining town will "Walk a Mile in Her Shoes" -- in high heels -- to show support for women dealing with domestic abuse.
Finally. Now if men here -- men in clubs, men in parishes, men in administrative positions, men in religious ministry, men in locker rooms and bars and schools and on army bases -- will only do the same, maybe someday, women will be able to walk our streets alone, too. [Abridged]
http://ncronline.org/blogs/where-i-stand/gender-inequality-mans-problem
Monday, 24 November 2014
US drone strikes – the facts on the ground: 41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed
Spencer Ackerman in New York Guardian/UK 24 Nov. 2014
The drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida’s leader, this time in Bajaur. 8 years later, Zawahiri is still alive. 76 children and 29 adults, according to reports, are not.
Qari Hussain was a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group aligned with al-Quaida. The drones first came for Hussain years before, on 29 January 2008. Then they came on 23 June 2009, 15 January 2010, 2 October 2010 and 7 October 2010. Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm.
A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.
“Drone strikes have been sold to the American public on the claim that they’re ‘precise’. But they are only as precise as the intelligence that feeds them. There is nothing precise about intelligence that results in the deaths of 28 unknown people, including women and children, for every ‘bad guy’ the US goes after,” said Reprieve’s Jennifer Gibson, who spearheaded the group’s study.
Some 24 men specifically targeted in Pakistan resulted in the death of 874 people. All were reported in the press as “killed” on multiple occasions, meaning that numerous strikes were aimed at each of them. The vast majority of those strikes were unsuccessful. An estimated 142 children were killed in the course of pursuing those 24 men, only six of whom died in the course of drone strikes that killed their intended targets.
An analytically conservative Council on Foreign Relations tally assesses that 500 drone strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan have killed 3,674 people. As well, the data is agnostic on the validity of the named targets struck on multiple occasions being marked for death in the first place.
Like all weapons, drones will inevitably miss their targets given enough chances. But the secrecy surrounding them obscures how often misses occur and the reasons for them. Even for the 33 named targets whom the drones eventually killed – successes, by the logic of the drone strikes – another 947 people died in the process.
There are myriad problems with analyzing data from US drone strikes. Those strikes occur under a blanket of official secrecy, which means analysts must rely on local media reporting about their aftermath, with all the attendant problems besetting journalism in dangerous or denied places. Anonymous leaks to media organizations, typically citing an unnamed American, Yemeni or Pakistani official, are the only acknowledgements that the strikes actually occur, or target a particular individual.
Without the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command declassifying more information on the strikes, unofficial and imprecise information is all that is available, complicating efforts to independently verify or refute administration assurances about the impact of the drones.
A Reprieve team investigating on the ground in Pakistan turned up what it believes to be a confirmed case of mistaken identity. Someone with the same name as a terror suspect on the Obama administration’s “kill list” was killed on the third attempt by US drones. His brother was captured, interrogated and encouraged to “tell the Americans what they want to hear”: that they had in fact killed the right person. Reprieve has withheld identifying details of the family in question, making the story impossible to independently verify.
“President Obama needs to be straight with the American people about the human cost of this programme. If even his government doesn’t know who is filling the body bags every time a strike goes wrong, his claims that this is a precise programme look like nonsense, and the risk that it is in fact making us less safe looks all too real,” Gibson said. [Abridged]
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147
The drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida’s leader, this time in Bajaur. 8 years later, Zawahiri is still alive. 76 children and 29 adults, according to reports, are not.
Qari Hussain was a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group aligned with al-Quaida. The drones first came for Hussain years before, on 29 January 2008. Then they came on 23 June 2009, 15 January 2010, 2 October 2010 and 7 October 2010. Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm.
A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.
“Drone strikes have been sold to the American public on the claim that they’re ‘precise’. But they are only as precise as the intelligence that feeds them. There is nothing precise about intelligence that results in the deaths of 28 unknown people, including women and children, for every ‘bad guy’ the US goes after,” said Reprieve’s Jennifer Gibson, who spearheaded the group’s study.
Some 24 men specifically targeted in Pakistan resulted in the death of 874 people. All were reported in the press as “killed” on multiple occasions, meaning that numerous strikes were aimed at each of them. The vast majority of those strikes were unsuccessful. An estimated 142 children were killed in the course of pursuing those 24 men, only six of whom died in the course of drone strikes that killed their intended targets.
An analytically conservative Council on Foreign Relations tally assesses that 500 drone strikes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan have killed 3,674 people. As well, the data is agnostic on the validity of the named targets struck on multiple occasions being marked for death in the first place.
Like all weapons, drones will inevitably miss their targets given enough chances. But the secrecy surrounding them obscures how often misses occur and the reasons for them. Even for the 33 named targets whom the drones eventually killed – successes, by the logic of the drone strikes – another 947 people died in the process.
There are myriad problems with analyzing data from US drone strikes. Those strikes occur under a blanket of official secrecy, which means analysts must rely on local media reporting about their aftermath, with all the attendant problems besetting journalism in dangerous or denied places. Anonymous leaks to media organizations, typically citing an unnamed American, Yemeni or Pakistani official, are the only acknowledgements that the strikes actually occur, or target a particular individual.
Without the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command declassifying more information on the strikes, unofficial and imprecise information is all that is available, complicating efforts to independently verify or refute administration assurances about the impact of the drones.
A Reprieve team investigating on the ground in Pakistan turned up what it believes to be a confirmed case of mistaken identity. Someone with the same name as a terror suspect on the Obama administration’s “kill list” was killed on the third attempt by US drones. His brother was captured, interrogated and encouraged to “tell the Americans what they want to hear”: that they had in fact killed the right person. Reprieve has withheld identifying details of the family in question, making the story impossible to independently verify.
“President Obama needs to be straight with the American people about the human cost of this programme. If even his government doesn’t know who is filling the body bags every time a strike goes wrong, his claims that this is a precise programme look like nonsense, and the risk that it is in fact making us less safe looks all too real,” Gibson said. [Abridged]
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147
Monday, 17 November 2014
Progressive Critique
by Ian Harris Otago Daily Times November 14, 2014
Every social, political and religious movement should be open to periodic self-critique. That can be uncomfortable, but the impulse towards a clear-eyed self-awareness is a sign of health, and every such movement is the better for it.
The Labour Party is in the throes of this soul-searching. The neo-liberal economic fundamentalists currently in the ascendant are not. Pope Francis has pitched his bishops into a review of the settled Catholic stance on homosexuality and remarried divorcees – and, not surprisingly, is meeting resistance. And at the other end of the spectrum, signs are that some within the Progressive Christianity movement are wondering whether their cause is quite the full package after all.
One such is Canadian Bruce Sanguin, a United Church minister, who brings a distinctive perspective to the movement he is part of. He calls it “evolutionary Christian spirituality”, in which “everything and everybody is involved in a sacred, evolutionary process – including the Christian faith”.
Reflecting on progressive audiences he has addressed in Canada and Australia, Sanguin notes that progressives generally are ageing. They have awakened to the limits of traditional Christianity, he says, “but they are still juiced by the whole modernist and postmodernist deconstruction project”. (Modernism homes in on reason, science and logic, while postmodernism blurs all the edges.)
That poses some challenges to progressive Christianity, Sanguin says. He sees five:
● The movement barely resonates with young people.
“Younger people aren’t as fascinated by all this fuss over scholarly accounts of what Jesus did and didn’t say,” he says. “They are looking for inspiration, and hear a lot of information. Many migrate to more conservative denominations who still think that Jesus is a big deal, and are increasingly integrating the justice dimension once owned by liberal Christianity.”
● Progressive Christianity seems stuck in a reactive phase – it’s against biblical literalism, homophobia, and the theology that Jesus died to atone for the sins of the world. With the movement under fire from religious conservatives, this reaction is understandable. “I suspect, though, that the way forward is to stop defending and start transcending.”
● There’s a lot of unnecessary wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Christian tradition. Progressives emphasise what they take issue with – “but our need to be relevant and to differentiate from ‘them’ often leaves us with little more to offer than secular humanism.” Sanguin adds: “I’ve felt for some time that the reduction of Christianity, or any religion, to values and virtues is not actually progressive. It’s the modernist project. We espouse taking the Bible seriously, not literally – so why not apply this to traditional doctrine? Let’s be curious, not dismissive.” During a high Lutheran service he attended, he admits that sometimes he had to “swallow hard and plug my ears”. Despite that, he was also surprised by hidden layers of meaning within the liturgy. “Over the last couple of thousand years some pretty intelligent souls got some things right,” he says. “In an evolutionary paradigm, the principle is to transcend and include.”
● Progressives run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sanguin says there is no religious feeling without some sense of providence or divine activity in the world. This does not require belief in a deity who intervenes directly in any given situation. If, however, progressives rule out any notion of providence they are left without any felt sense of grace – that overflowing generosity of spirit that renews and transforms. “In an evolutionary paradigm, there is a felt sense that the Whole is moving in a biased (not predetermined) trajectory toward an increase in beauty, truth and goodness.”
● The practice of progressive Christianity “pretty much comes down to justice”. While this is a strength of the movement, progressives must acknowledge that evangelical churches, many with a younger membership, have often become more radical in applying it. “If we progressives don’t have practices to help us to evolve our hearts and minds – to ‘have the mind that was in Christ Jesus’ – even our justice work will be part of the problem.”
So where to from there? Sanguin suggests that progressives need to evolve their “spiritual intelligence”, and points to rich resources within the Christian heritage, including the contribution of Christian mystics.
Clearly, the mystics’ experience cannot be lifted out of their cultural setting centuries ago and superimposed upon our own. It needs to be rethought and re-expressed in the context of our western secular culture and worldview, including new knowledge about human consciousness. But Sanguin has given some useful pointers to work on.
Every social, political and religious movement should be open to periodic self-critique. That can be uncomfortable, but the impulse towards a clear-eyed self-awareness is a sign of health, and every such movement is the better for it.
The Labour Party is in the throes of this soul-searching. The neo-liberal economic fundamentalists currently in the ascendant are not. Pope Francis has pitched his bishops into a review of the settled Catholic stance on homosexuality and remarried divorcees – and, not surprisingly, is meeting resistance. And at the other end of the spectrum, signs are that some within the Progressive Christianity movement are wondering whether their cause is quite the full package after all.
One such is Canadian Bruce Sanguin, a United Church minister, who brings a distinctive perspective to the movement he is part of. He calls it “evolutionary Christian spirituality”, in which “everything and everybody is involved in a sacred, evolutionary process – including the Christian faith”.
Reflecting on progressive audiences he has addressed in Canada and Australia, Sanguin notes that progressives generally are ageing. They have awakened to the limits of traditional Christianity, he says, “but they are still juiced by the whole modernist and postmodernist deconstruction project”. (Modernism homes in on reason, science and logic, while postmodernism blurs all the edges.)
That poses some challenges to progressive Christianity, Sanguin says. He sees five:
● The movement barely resonates with young people.
“Younger people aren’t as fascinated by all this fuss over scholarly accounts of what Jesus did and didn’t say,” he says. “They are looking for inspiration, and hear a lot of information. Many migrate to more conservative denominations who still think that Jesus is a big deal, and are increasingly integrating the justice dimension once owned by liberal Christianity.”
● Progressive Christianity seems stuck in a reactive phase – it’s against biblical literalism, homophobia, and the theology that Jesus died to atone for the sins of the world. With the movement under fire from religious conservatives, this reaction is understandable. “I suspect, though, that the way forward is to stop defending and start transcending.”
● There’s a lot of unnecessary wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Christian tradition. Progressives emphasise what they take issue with – “but our need to be relevant and to differentiate from ‘them’ often leaves us with little more to offer than secular humanism.” Sanguin adds: “I’ve felt for some time that the reduction of Christianity, or any religion, to values and virtues is not actually progressive. It’s the modernist project. We espouse taking the Bible seriously, not literally – so why not apply this to traditional doctrine? Let’s be curious, not dismissive.” During a high Lutheran service he attended, he admits that sometimes he had to “swallow hard and plug my ears”. Despite that, he was also surprised by hidden layers of meaning within the liturgy. “Over the last couple of thousand years some pretty intelligent souls got some things right,” he says. “In an evolutionary paradigm, the principle is to transcend and include.”
● Progressives run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sanguin says there is no religious feeling without some sense of providence or divine activity in the world. This does not require belief in a deity who intervenes directly in any given situation. If, however, progressives rule out any notion of providence they are left without any felt sense of grace – that overflowing generosity of spirit that renews and transforms. “In an evolutionary paradigm, there is a felt sense that the Whole is moving in a biased (not predetermined) trajectory toward an increase in beauty, truth and goodness.”
● The practice of progressive Christianity “pretty much comes down to justice”. While this is a strength of the movement, progressives must acknowledge that evangelical churches, many with a younger membership, have often become more radical in applying it. “If we progressives don’t have practices to help us to evolve our hearts and minds – to ‘have the mind that was in Christ Jesus’ – even our justice work will be part of the problem.”
So where to from there? Sanguin suggests that progressives need to evolve their “spiritual intelligence”, and points to rich resources within the Christian heritage, including the contribution of Christian mystics.
Clearly, the mystics’ experience cannot be lifted out of their cultural setting centuries ago and superimposed upon our own. It needs to be rethought and re-expressed in the context of our western secular culture and worldview, including new knowledge about human consciousness. But Sanguin has given some useful pointers to work on.
Modern War: A True Global Health Emergency
A unique historical moment to look at global health, with a special look at Iraq after more than twenty years of war
By Claudia Lefko Common Dreams November 10, 2014
War destroys countless lives immediately, but it also destroys health systems and key social structures, turning societies once able to nurture health and save lives, into societies stripped of that ability. "It's basic and obvious, hidden in plain sight," writes Lefko.
One of the most serious problems Iraqis have been living with as a result of war and western imperialism is the disatrous decline of health and health care capacity. It has become one of those long-standing crisis that are so familiar they've become ordinary, like poverty and food insecurity. These situations, lives lived in these circumstances, become normalized—"normal" in the public view and public discourse. Even, it may seem, normal to the people directly affected. But the situation in Iraq is not normal, there is very little about life in Baghdad in the last decades that can be seen as normal.
One aspect of the health crisis is the ever-increasing cancer rate in Iraq. It has become the norm; normal is not newsworthy. Newsworthy events—ongoing violence and sectarian struggles—push cancer and health out of the headlines and out of the news altogether. And so the crisis is missing from the media and generally speaking, missing from the agenda of activists and international health organizations.
Enter ISIS and Ebola, putting health and Iraq and crisis back into the news, creating a unique opportunity to look at Iraq and Iraqis beyond the headline-grabbing topics of war and western imperialism to one that concerns daily life and impacts the very future of life in that country and in every country suffering from a natural disaster such as an epidemic or from human-made disasters such as war: health.
For some years now, prominent doctors, medical organizations and institutions such as Partners in Health (PIH) have been talking about the critical importance of "life on the ground" factors that influence health. And even more importantly, they have been initiating and implementing projects based on a holistic, human rights approach and encouraging others to do the same. PIH has been promoting support for international covenants that guarantee health as a human right, understanding that the health of individuals and communities is directly impacted by other guaranteed rights: adequate housing, education, food, social security, decent work, and "the right to the highest standard of physical and mental health."
In the background of the Ebola crisis, quietly day by day, the US and others are bombing in Iraq and Syria; no one is talking about how this will impact health or the health care system in those countries. In the case of Iraq, the question is how it will further exacerbate the already disastrous and ever-deteriorating health situation that has been developing over the last twenty four years, since the First Gulf War and UN Sanctions in 1990.
The country once had the best medical care in the Middle East. It was a modern country, with modern facilities and infrastructure. Social and economic policies supported other aspects of life that contributed to a healthy population: free and mandatory education through university, affordable housing, ample food availability and high employment, guaranteed by government subsidized jobs. Most, if not all of this is long gone. It shouldn't surprise anyone. As the famous poster said, back in the 60s, War is not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things. Another obvious truth gathering dust in closets all over the USA.
Ebola is a serious disease that demands our best attentions at this moment. But, war is also a serious disease that has been taking a toll on millions of people. In places too numerous and painful to list... Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to name a few. It also demands our best attentions. "...the present global health crisis is not primarily one of disease, but of governance," writes global health consultant Ilona Kickbush.
I am heartened by the critical work of these medical professionals and organizations. It gives us, as activists and agitated citizens, a powerful platform to stand on. Collectively, this is an important moment. In the aftermath of the huge climate change actions across the globe, we have an opportunity to create new alliances, with new possibilities. Our job is to find, maintain and maximize the connections that will aggregate our struggles in support of healthy people living on a healthy planet.
[Abridged] http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/11/10/modern-war-true-global-health-emergency
By Claudia Lefko Common Dreams November 10, 2014
War destroys countless lives immediately, but it also destroys health systems and key social structures, turning societies once able to nurture health and save lives, into societies stripped of that ability. "It's basic and obvious, hidden in plain sight," writes Lefko.
One of the most serious problems Iraqis have been living with as a result of war and western imperialism is the disatrous decline of health and health care capacity. It has become one of those long-standing crisis that are so familiar they've become ordinary, like poverty and food insecurity. These situations, lives lived in these circumstances, become normalized—"normal" in the public view and public discourse. Even, it may seem, normal to the people directly affected. But the situation in Iraq is not normal, there is very little about life in Baghdad in the last decades that can be seen as normal.
One aspect of the health crisis is the ever-increasing cancer rate in Iraq. It has become the norm; normal is not newsworthy. Newsworthy events—ongoing violence and sectarian struggles—push cancer and health out of the headlines and out of the news altogether. And so the crisis is missing from the media and generally speaking, missing from the agenda of activists and international health organizations.
Enter ISIS and Ebola, putting health and Iraq and crisis back into the news, creating a unique opportunity to look at Iraq and Iraqis beyond the headline-grabbing topics of war and western imperialism to one that concerns daily life and impacts the very future of life in that country and in every country suffering from a natural disaster such as an epidemic or from human-made disasters such as war: health.
For some years now, prominent doctors, medical organizations and institutions such as Partners in Health (PIH) have been talking about the critical importance of "life on the ground" factors that influence health. And even more importantly, they have been initiating and implementing projects based on a holistic, human rights approach and encouraging others to do the same. PIH has been promoting support for international covenants that guarantee health as a human right, understanding that the health of individuals and communities is directly impacted by other guaranteed rights: adequate housing, education, food, social security, decent work, and "the right to the highest standard of physical and mental health."
In the background of the Ebola crisis, quietly day by day, the US and others are bombing in Iraq and Syria; no one is talking about how this will impact health or the health care system in those countries. In the case of Iraq, the question is how it will further exacerbate the already disastrous and ever-deteriorating health situation that has been developing over the last twenty four years, since the First Gulf War and UN Sanctions in 1990.
The country once had the best medical care in the Middle East. It was a modern country, with modern facilities and infrastructure. Social and economic policies supported other aspects of life that contributed to a healthy population: free and mandatory education through university, affordable housing, ample food availability and high employment, guaranteed by government subsidized jobs. Most, if not all of this is long gone. It shouldn't surprise anyone. As the famous poster said, back in the 60s, War is not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things. Another obvious truth gathering dust in closets all over the USA.
Ebola is a serious disease that demands our best attentions at this moment. But, war is also a serious disease that has been taking a toll on millions of people. In places too numerous and painful to list... Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to name a few. It also demands our best attentions. "...the present global health crisis is not primarily one of disease, but of governance," writes global health consultant Ilona Kickbush.
I am heartened by the critical work of these medical professionals and organizations. It gives us, as activists and agitated citizens, a powerful platform to stand on. Collectively, this is an important moment. In the aftermath of the huge climate change actions across the globe, we have an opportunity to create new alliances, with new possibilities. Our job is to find, maintain and maximize the connections that will aggregate our struggles in support of healthy people living on a healthy planet.
[Abridged] http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/11/10/modern-war-true-global-health-emergency
One My Lai a Month
by Robert C. Koehler Common Dreams Oct. 23, 2014
“When somebody asks, ‘Why do you do it to a gook, why do you do this to people?’ your answer is, ‘So what, they’re just gooks, they’re not people. It doesn’t make any difference what you do to them; they’re not human.’
“And this thing is built into you,” Cpl. John Geymann testified almost 44 years ago at the Winter Soldier Investigation, held in Detroit, which was sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “It’s thrust into your head from the moment you wake up in boot camp to the moment you wake up when you’re a civilian.”
The cornerstone of war is dehumanization. This was the lesson of Nam, from Operation Ranch Hand (the dumping of 18 million gallons of herbicides, including Agent Orange, on the jungles of Vietnam) to My Lai to the use of napalm to the bombing of Cambodia. And the Winter Soldier Investigation began making the dehumanization process a matter of public knowledge.
It was a stunning and groundbreaking moment in the history of war. Yet — guess what? — the three-day hearing, in which 109 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians testified about the reality of American operations in Vietnam, doesn’t show up on the “interactive timeline” of the Department of Defense-sponsored website commemorating, as per President Obama’s proclamation, the 50-year anniversary of the war.
This is no surprise, of course. The awkwardly unstated, cowardly point of the site, as well as the presidential proclamation — “they pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans” — is to “nice-ify” the ghastly war, wipe off the slime, return public consciousness to a state of unquestioning adoration of all U.S. military operations and banish “Vietnam Syndrome” from the national identity.
So what if somewhere between 2 and 3 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians were killed in it, along with 58,000 American soldiers (with, by some measures, a far greater number of vets committing suicide afterward)? A bad war is nothing but trouble for those who want to wage the next one. It took a generation before the military-industrial economy was able to launch the war on terror, which itself no longer has massive public support. Maybe restoring Vietnam to a state of false glory is part of a larger plan to make the American public proud of all its wars and, thus, more compliant about the idea of permanent war.
The Vietnam War Commemoration website is generating serious pushback, such as the Veterans for Peace “full disclosure” campaign; and a petition demanding that the tidal wave of protests against the war in the ’60s and ’70s be included as part of the war’s legacy. I agree, of course, but hasten to add that there’s far more at stake here than the accuracy of the historical record. As long-time journalist and Middle East scholar Phyllis Bennis told the New York Times, “You can’t separate this effort to justify the terrible wars of 50 years ago from the terrible wars of today.” I repeat: The cornerstone of every war is the dehumanization, a terrifying process with long-lasting and infinitely unfolding consequences. And the Vietnam War was the first in which the full horror of this process, stripped of all glory and pseudo-necessity, reached significant public awareness.
The website’s effort to undo this awareness is pathetic. In an early version, for instance, the My Lai massacre was dismissed as an “incident.” Public objection forced the website to bite the bullet and acknowledge, in its March 16, 1968 listing: “American Division kills hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.” Ho hum. It was still a good war, right? My Lai was just an aberration. But as the vets’ Winter Soldier testimony and numerous books and articles make horrifically clear, My Lai was not an aberration but situation normal: “They’re just gooks, they’re not people.”
As Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson pointed out in a 2006 article in the Los Angeles Times (“Civilian Killings Went Unpunished”), based on the examination of declassified Army files: “Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.” The documents substantiated 320 incidents of torture, abuse or mass murder of Vietnamese civilians, with many hundreds more reported but not substantiated, they wrote.
This much is clear: American soldiers were pressured from above, trained and ordered, to treat the “enemy” – including civilians, including children – as subhuman. All the carnage that followed was predictable. And as the morally injured vets home from Iraq and Afghanistan keep letting us know, it’s still the way we go to war.
[Abridged] http://commonwonders.com/world/one-my-lai-a-month/
“When somebody asks, ‘Why do you do it to a gook, why do you do this to people?’ your answer is, ‘So what, they’re just gooks, they’re not people. It doesn’t make any difference what you do to them; they’re not human.’
“And this thing is built into you,” Cpl. John Geymann testified almost 44 years ago at the Winter Soldier Investigation, held in Detroit, which was sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “It’s thrust into your head from the moment you wake up in boot camp to the moment you wake up when you’re a civilian.”
The cornerstone of war is dehumanization. This was the lesson of Nam, from Operation Ranch Hand (the dumping of 18 million gallons of herbicides, including Agent Orange, on the jungles of Vietnam) to My Lai to the use of napalm to the bombing of Cambodia. And the Winter Soldier Investigation began making the dehumanization process a matter of public knowledge.
It was a stunning and groundbreaking moment in the history of war. Yet — guess what? — the three-day hearing, in which 109 Vietnam veterans and 16 civilians testified about the reality of American operations in Vietnam, doesn’t show up on the “interactive timeline” of the Department of Defense-sponsored website commemorating, as per President Obama’s proclamation, the 50-year anniversary of the war.
This is no surprise, of course. The awkwardly unstated, cowardly point of the site, as well as the presidential proclamation — “they pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans” — is to “nice-ify” the ghastly war, wipe off the slime, return public consciousness to a state of unquestioning adoration of all U.S. military operations and banish “Vietnam Syndrome” from the national identity.
So what if somewhere between 2 and 3 million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians were killed in it, along with 58,000 American soldiers (with, by some measures, a far greater number of vets committing suicide afterward)? A bad war is nothing but trouble for those who want to wage the next one. It took a generation before the military-industrial economy was able to launch the war on terror, which itself no longer has massive public support. Maybe restoring Vietnam to a state of false glory is part of a larger plan to make the American public proud of all its wars and, thus, more compliant about the idea of permanent war.
The Vietnam War Commemoration website is generating serious pushback, such as the Veterans for Peace “full disclosure” campaign; and a petition demanding that the tidal wave of protests against the war in the ’60s and ’70s be included as part of the war’s legacy. I agree, of course, but hasten to add that there’s far more at stake here than the accuracy of the historical record. As long-time journalist and Middle East scholar Phyllis Bennis told the New York Times, “You can’t separate this effort to justify the terrible wars of 50 years ago from the terrible wars of today.” I repeat: The cornerstone of every war is the dehumanization, a terrifying process with long-lasting and infinitely unfolding consequences. And the Vietnam War was the first in which the full horror of this process, stripped of all glory and pseudo-necessity, reached significant public awareness.
The website’s effort to undo this awareness is pathetic. In an early version, for instance, the My Lai massacre was dismissed as an “incident.” Public objection forced the website to bite the bullet and acknowledge, in its March 16, 1968 listing: “American Division kills hundreds of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.” Ho hum. It was still a good war, right? My Lai was just an aberration. But as the vets’ Winter Soldier testimony and numerous books and articles make horrifically clear, My Lai was not an aberration but situation normal: “They’re just gooks, they’re not people.”
As Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson pointed out in a 2006 article in the Los Angeles Times (“Civilian Killings Went Unpunished”), based on the examination of declassified Army files: “Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.” The documents substantiated 320 incidents of torture, abuse or mass murder of Vietnamese civilians, with many hundreds more reported but not substantiated, they wrote.
This much is clear: American soldiers were pressured from above, trained and ordered, to treat the “enemy” – including civilians, including children – as subhuman. All the carnage that followed was predictable. And as the morally injured vets home from Iraq and Afghanistan keep letting us know, it’s still the way we go to war.
[Abridged] http://commonwonders.com/world/one-my-lai-a-month/
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