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 Photo from www.stopwar.org.uk Clearing the Fog of Endless War By ERIC FRANCIS
He is still alive. He was a young man at the time John F. Kennedy poached him from the top leadership of the Ford Motor Co. to head the nation's military, truly one of the best and the brightest whose arrogance, deceit and errors of judgment created the quarter-century Vietnam disaster. He pretty much tells all: how the war was based on lies (the Tonkien Gulf Incident that sparked the war, for example, he admits was a pure fraud), he explains how those lies were told, how the futility of the situation was ignored, and how, ultimately, close to 60,000 men and women of the U.S. military service were killed, along with three million Vietnamese and countless Laotians and Cambodians. In 1964, the time the U.S. went full-throttle into the war, our country had defeated Adolph Hitler just 19 years earlier, ending a massive genocide in Europe that killed some 14 million people. We were the leaders of the so-called free world, and with that freedom we casually harvested the lives of our young men, and sent them halfway around the world equipped with machine guns, bombers, chemical weapons, fire bombs, land mines and much other equipment of death, and turned them loose on people we did not know and did not understand and really had nothing against. The United States of America, financed by money taken from the paychecks of its citizens, bombed these countries for a decade (after a previous decade of instigating war through military 'advisors'), sprayed 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T contaminated with dioxin on pristine forests and villages and the people in them, dumped burning jellied gasoline called napalm onto human beings, and basically raped and murdered in a seemingly endless firestorm that in fact continued long after we left the region. You would think we'd get it. Today these atrocities continue in Iraq. The dioxin has been replaced by depleted uranium. The bombs are more sophisticated. The troops are older, and more of them are women. Little else is different. Much like the Bush administration bombed and occupied Iraq on the notion that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and involved with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Johnson and McNamara bombed Vietnam on the notion that if the tiny country in Southeast Asia fell to the Communists, freedom around the world was threatened. This was called the Domino Theory. If one country falls, then they all will fall one after the next, until the whole world will be Communist. With Iraq, we were promised more World Trade Center attacks if we did not commit mass murder. Both the excuse to bomb Vietnam and the excuse to bomb Iraq were lies. In the 1950s, Vietnam, for example, pleaded with the United States (in particular, President Dwight Eisenhower) for assistance in becoming a true Democratic state, but Eisenhower would have nothing of it. Vietnam was not a Communist country and had no desire to be one. The lies were pretenses placed on top of an agenda that had nothing to do with the preservation of freedom, but a great deal to do with the sickness of our society. Part of that sickness involves who controls the flow of information and disinformation. Vietnam was created by lies repeated in places like Time magazine, which in the mid-Sixties had an impressive reputation for lying about anything that happened in Asia, and which enforced an anticommunist agenda on the political community on pain of being skewered in a medium that was every bit as powerful as television is today. Part of the sickness involves a deep need to believe lies that paint a picture of the world that justifies how we live in this country. On some level, we know that our lifestyle is essentially the product of endless war. Part of the sickness is about greed. One thing that Vietnam and Iraq have in common is how expensive they are. That money goes somewhere: into the pockets of defense contractors and, before that, into the accounts of banks who hold the money and profit immensely by doing so. There is a poem from the Vietnam era called War Profit Litany by Allen Ginsberg that more or less sketches out the whole picture, conveying quite artfully how cold the accounting procedure is. People suffer and die; profits aggregate. Now, greed is nothing new, and neither are lies. The difference today is that we should know better. Any person who can read or type can access the history of Vietnam in 1/42nd of a second by asking Google. In fact, many of us do know better. But as time goes on, we in the Western world seem to be drawn further from our instincts and turned against ourselves evermore cleverly. To give one example, a vast population within America is on antidepressants, which are essentially drugs that shut down the central nervous system. The CNS is what we use to feel, and to access the intelligence of our bodies. Antidepressants 'take the edge off' and that edge is exactly what we need to sort out reality, and to feel strongly enough to do something about it. Speaking of having one's instinctual resources stripped away, I might as well mention Abstinence Only sex education. This is the pinnacle of Christianity -- an agenda forced on the public school system that says one must abstain from sex until monogamous heterosexual marriage. This has been taught in 49 states for a generation, effectively shutting down sexual awareness as a cultural reality. Sexual awareness actually has very little to do with sex, or rather, it goes a lot further, being a kind of reactor core of the personality. When sex shuts down, so too does common sense, emotion, and the desire to live. Add to that the fact of having been raised on vicious television, movies extolling the excellence of space warfare and sugar. Add to that another factor: the ongoing abuse of fear as a social control device. Fear is so pervasive, within us and around us, that we don't even see it and we barely feel it. Add to that religion that feeds hatred, bigotry and preaches a doctrine based on the idea that the world is about to end, and which spreads its influence into every non-religious institution. Add to that a formula for family that yields as its fruit little other than pain for most of the people who attempt to practice it. Add to that the sense, based on a state of near-constant war, that the world is about to end. We know on some level that the constant feeding of war is about ignoring the real problems of our world: climate change that appears to be coming on a lot faster than anyone but Earth scientists believed possible; a water crisis that is threatening to make water into the next oil, for which wars are fought; toxins spreading throughout the food chain faster than anyone can comprehend; and many others. Given these factors, is it possible to live in anything but toxic households? Is it possible to cope any way but by denial? Sure it's possible, with a lot of work, and awareness and love, and it seems to be a slim chance, so one must be a gambler, too. Healing is possible, I believe, only when a household's resources are devoted to the purpose, and when emotional health is given a priority place on the agenda of life. We would also need to take the same mission into our business environments, weaving little communities of sanity in the places where we spend so much time working. I'm aware that I may be mixing up cause and effect. Sick households, that is, ones where violence, anger and neglect dominate the agenda (and often this is quite subtle), may be the very factors necessitating obsession over shutdown drugs, sexual ignorance and absorbing constant murder and betrayal from television. They make good distractions, and they also feed that apocalyptic sense of being consumed by sickness -- the sense that there's no use, it's not worth it. Once you're onto that scent, you need all the reassurance you can get that nothing really matters anyway. If you feel that kind of futility, it's a good place to start your healing process: you are, after all, alive. You have some power over whether your life gets better or worse, or at least some substantial influence. It would be really great to see the people of America pour out into the streets and make an effort to end the war in Iraq. It would be fabulous to see us burn up the phone lines, the DSL connections and our private homepages with information and pleas for compassion for the children of Iraq, who make up half the population of that country. But at this point, I don't think it's particularly likely, given the extent to which we simply expect the world to be the way it is, and expect it on a cellular level because this is the world into which we were born. I don't think it's likely, as well, because so many of us are so cut off from our anger. None of this presents an encouraging picture. Yet none of it is anything that many, many individual people have not worked their way through and beyond: though always with the help of family, friends, therapists, or community. Taken on the individual level, these are serious problems, but they are certainly problems with solutions, and those solutions will eventually add up to individual progress, more sane families and the creation of communities. We can, any time we like, make choices of conscience and choices to heal our lives. The first decision is about whether to feast at the table of death or the table of life. To make that decision, we need to see the choice for what it is. In the fog of constant war, it's not always easy, but if we look, we will see it's possible. ++ |