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| From: | Juan | Oct-5 6:48 pm |
| To: | ALL |
(1 of 8) | | | | 3995.1 | |
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23637.htm
Celebrating Slaughter: War and Collective Amnesia
By Chris Hedges
October 05, 2009 "Truthdig" -- War memorials and museums are temples to the god of war. The hushed voices, the well-tended grass, the flapping of the flags allow us to ignore how and why our young died. They hide the futility and waste of war. They sanitize the savage instruments of death that turn young soldiers and Marines into killers, and small villages in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq into hellish bonfires. There are no images in these memorials of men or women with their guts hanging out of their bellies, screaming pathetically for their mothers. We do not see mangled corpses being shoved in body bags. There are no sights of children burned beyond recognition or moaning in horrible pain. There are no blind and deformed wrecks of human beings limping through life. War, by the time it is collectively remembered, is glorified and heavily censored.
I blame our war memorials and museums, our popular war films and books, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as much as George W. Bush. They provide the mental images and historical references to justify new conflicts. We equate Saddam Hussein with Adolf Hitler. We see al-Qaida as a representation of Nazi evil. We view ourselves as eternal liberators. These plastic representations of war reconfigure the past in light of the present. War memorials and romantic depictions of war are the social and moral props used to create the psychological conditions to wage new wars.
War memorials are quiet, still, reverential and tasteful. And, like church, such sanctuaries are important, but they allow us to forget that these men and women were used and often betrayed by those who led the nation into war. The memorials do not tell us that some always grow rich from large-scale human suffering. They do not explain that politicians play the great games of world power and stoke fear for their own advancement. They forget that young men and women in uniform are pawns in the hands of cynics, something Pat Tillman’s family sadly discovered. They do not expose the ignorance, raw ambition and greed that are the engine of war.
There is a burning need, one seen in the collective memory that has grown up around World War II and the Holocaust, to turn the horror of mass murder into a tribute to the triumph of the human spirit. The reality is too unpalatable. The human need to make sense of slaughter, to give it a grandeur it does not possess, permits the guilty to go free. The war makers—those who make the war but never pay the price of war—live among us. They pen thick memoirs that give sage advice. They are our elder statesmen, our war criminals. Henry Kissinger. Robert McNamara. #### Cheney. George W. Bush. Any honest war memorial would have these statesmen hanging in effigy. Any honest democracy would place them behind bars.
Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, fought against the mendacity of collective memory until he took his own life. He railed against the human need to mask the truth of the Holocaust and war by giving it a false, moral narrative. He wrote that the contemporary history of the Third Reich could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wondered if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.” He wrote of the Jewish collaborator Chaim Rumkowski, who ran the Lodz ghetto on behalf of the Nazis, that “we are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums.’ ” We, like Rumkowski, “come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.” We are, Levi understood, perpetually imprisoned within the madness of self-destruction. The rage of Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in Iraq, is a rage Levi felt. But it is a rage most of us do not understand.
A war memorial that attempted to depict the reality of war would be too subversive. It would condemn us and our capacity for evil. It would show that the line between the victim and the victimizer is razor-thin, that human beings, when the restraints are cut, are intoxicated by mass killing, and that war, rather than being noble, heroic and glorious, obliterates all that is tender, decent and kind. It would tell us that the celebration of national greatness is the celebration of our technological capacity to kill. It would warn us that war is always morally depraved, that even in “good” wars such as World War II all can become war criminals. We dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Nazis ran the death camps. But this narrative of war is unsettling. It does not create a collective memory that serves the interests of those who wage war and permit us to wallow in self-exaltation.
There are times—World War II and the Serb assault on Bosnia would be examples—when a population is pushed into a war. There are times when a nation must ingest the poison of violence to survive. But this violence always deforms and maims those who use it. My uncle, who drank himself to death in a trailer in Maine, fought for four years in the South Pacific during World War II. He and the soldiers in his unit never bothered taking Japanese prisoners.
The detritus of war, the old cannons and artillery pieces rolled out to stand near memorials, were curious and alluring objects in my childhood. But these displays angered my father, a Presbyterian minister who was in North Africa as an Army sergeant during World War II. The lifeless, clean and neat displays of weapons and puppets in uniforms were being used, he said, to purge the reality of war. These memorials sanctified violence. They turned the instruments of violence—the tanks, machine guns, rifles and airplanes—into an aesthetic of death.
These memorials, while they pay homage to those who made “the ultimate sacrifice,” dignify slaughter. They perpetuate the old lie of honor and glory. They set the ground for the next inferno. The myth of war manufactures a collective memory that ennobles the next war. The intimate, personal experience of violence turns those who return from war into internal exiles. They cannot compete against the power of the myth. This collective memory saturates the culture, but it is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
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| | | | | 3995.2 in reply to 3995.1 | |
Your article expressed my feelings exactly in the evilness of war.
One looks behind the motives of war and it seems to be totally about power, ambition, and greed.
It is sanitised, weasel words are uttered, the dead are glorified. Young lives wasted.
Where were the 'weapons of mass destruction'?
We do nothing about Robert Mugabwe and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe groaning and dieing. We do nothing. Why not? No profit in that.
But what do we do? How can it be stopped.
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| | | | | 3995.3 in reply to 3995.1 | |
Juan,
here are a couple of visuals that complete what this article has offered in words.
This film by Dalton Trumbo should be required viewing of all who are thinking of entering the military.
When will we ever learn?
Kelly |
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| | | | | 3995.4 in reply to 3995.2 | |
To All, really!
I've been away for sometime now, away from this computer, this internet, this instant access to human doing affairs where oh so many appear to me to be stuck in.....the outer world and not their inner world.
Some anonymous person wrote, spoke, uttered a marvelous truth and it goes like this:
Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become your character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Albert Einstein is quoted for having said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
We all need to remember to be grounded in who we are, that dimension of ourselves that we neglect, where the opposite of fear, hate, war, greed, and all those negative aspects are preventing so many from enjoying THEIR LIVES!
Respectfully,
Stausch |
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| From: | Juan | Oct-23 12:18 am |
| To: | amber unread |
(5 of 8) | | | | 3995.5 in reply to 3995.2 | |
Hi Amber,
You asked; "But what do we do? How can it be stopped?" The answer is this; Unless we expend the effort to understand what's being done to us as the collective, We-the-People, by our government, the propaganda of patriotisim will continue to be as palatable as mom's apple pie.
Several of my posts are an attempt to address this malaise amongst the unwashed masses of our nation. But I'm up against a powerful adversary with unlimited power, that has totally disregarded one of the creeds it professes to believe in; Thy Shall Not Kill.
Below are some of the posts I've sent addressing the problem as I see it; 3998.18, 3992.37 Unless you read each and every message on this board, you'd see any of them.
http://forums.prospero.com/sp-bishopspong/messages?msg=4002.7
http://forums.prospero.com/sp-bishopspong/messages?msg=4002.8
4005.1
4005.3
The Juanster |
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| From: | Juan | Oct-23 12:42 am |
| To: | KLATU unread |
(6 of 8) | | | | 3995.6 in reply to 3995.3 | |
Hi Kelly,
As I related to Amber; Until we understand what has been done to us, this will continue. The explaination of two terms are at the bottom of it all. I've written to you about both. The meaning and ramifications of Mortmain, and Adhesion Contracts. 3992.37, the explaination of Mortmain is in this post; 3998.18
As the Owner, the Property can be utilized as he so desires. The alternative, Leave the Country.
The Juanster |
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| | | | | 3995.7 in reply to 3995.6 | |
I've read everything you and Kelley have posted, and viewed all the videos. I cannot comment as "it is too much to bear." I've felt this way all my life, even the atrocities from the Bible that I could never understand. I've lost a son to suicide as a result of post traumatic stress. Just today someone sent me an email on the Holocaust suggesting we pass it on, less future generations will forget. How does one get around "supporting" the troops, etc. but by the same token hating every bit of war. Judith |
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| | | | | 3995.8 in reply to 3995.7 | |
Hi "J",
I never imagined you would read all of theses extensive post, Thanks.
What we both,Kelly and I, have tried to convey is the extent of the Illusion we.ve functioned under for nigh 2-1/2 centuries. That We-the-People were not the persons viewed as the sovereigns of this nation in The Constitution, but of the majority populas that were/are still viewed as Sub Human and the dregs of the old countries' Elite ruling societies. Most of us are the progeny of those who were dumped here to make money for the Elites of the ol'countries. The ones that never considered their situation bad enough to leave and come to America, produced those who are stll there.
We've ran through a gammute of issues in this thread that all adhere to a common theme; Minority Rule and how it's still being perpetrated. Contained here is one solution;4016.2
WAR and Religion being two arms of the same lying Corporate beast, is one legged. It tells one lie and must prop that one up with another lie, or the whole entity tumbles. Remember the reason for leaving Afghanistan and attacking Iraq? WMDs.
Imagine this; what if irrefutable evidence was presented to the military currently in Iraq, that they were lied into this war and they laid down their arms and refused to fight anymore for Corporate America's goal of a one world government? This is a contingency that Bush and Company prepared for, a private well paid army to step in and fill the gap; Black-Water and those of it's ilk are Corporate Jackbooted thugs paid for by our tax dollars. Corporate Personhood, to protect it's self will go to any extreme even to the point of annihilating any of us sub humans that show any signs of resistence, thus Black Water's true motive for being. So to answer your concerns, the only way to support our troops is to end this Corporate Person from creating situations that will ultimately put our Troops in harms way. This is the whole of the message in www.WAR IS A RACKET
Rest well,
The Juanste
PS; Is the Corporate Personhood of Insurance Corporations Detremental to your Health? Should your heath be viewed as a commodity on the Stockexchange? Since all of Government functions off of our money, who really pays for a Single Payer plan. Eliminate Insurance Corporate Personhood and pay for a Single Payer Plan or Give us what was given to Iraq. The Money Is There and We-the SubHumans deserve it and not Corporate bigwigs. |
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