Friday, December 14, 2012

On Nationalism, Racism, and Enabling of 3rd World Slaughter

"This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it. Considering that the people of this country are not having a very comfortable time, you can't perhaps, blame them for being somewhat callous about suffering elsewhere, but the remarkable thing is the extent to which they manage to be unaware of it. Tales of starvation, ruined cities, concentration camps, mass deportations, homeless refugees, persecuted Jews — all this is received with a sort of incurious surprise, as though such things had never been heard of but at the same time were not particularly interesting. The now-familiar photographs of skeleton-like children make very little impression. As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses."

George Orwell

Details are still coming out about the mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school earlier. 27 are confirmed dead so far, 18 young children. The media circus acted like it always does, and named the wrong person as the shooter on national television. Just like how this always plays out, pundits will turn this into a gun debate, Obama will shed a few tears and not do anything, and everything will go back to normal in a month or two.

In the early hours of March 11, an American soldier in Afghanistan named Robert Bales left his post at Camp Belamby, in Kandahar Province. He went to two nearby villages that night, and massacred 16 people in their homes. 11 of the victims were from a single family, and 9 of the victims were children.

RT:

"We are children! We are children!" was one victim's last phrase before being killed.

[...]

The youngest witness was a thirteen-year-old Sadiquallah. He described being awakened by loud screams that an American had "killed our men." He then went to hide in a storage room with another boy, ditching behind the curtain. A bullet ricocheted off his head, fracturing his skull.

"I was hiding behind the curtains. A bullet hit me," Sadiquallah told the court. He also said the killer had a gun and a light, but he could not identify the man.

His friend was shot in the thigh and also survived. He is to testify later.

[...]

Khamal Adin, a witness from the second massacre site, the village of Najiban, told the judge how he came to his cousin’s house on the morning after the rampage and found bodies piled together and burned.

Adin said he found an aunt dead in a doorway with a gunshot wound to her head. Inside, he found the bodies of six of his cousin's seven children, his wife, and other relatives. The fire that burned the bodies was out by then, but he said he could still smell smoke.

When Adin began presenting his testimony, Bales moved from his seat to be closer to the monitor. Neither at that time or at any other moment of the hearing did he give any discernible reaction to the stories he heard.

The court then asked Adin to describe the injuries. He said: "Everybody was shot on the head… I didn't pay attention to the rest of the wounds."



In September, a NATO airstrike murdered eight Afghan women who were collecting wood.

On October 14, a NATO airstrike blew three kids apart.

U.S. drone strikes have killed at least 178 children in Pakistan and Yemen.

A drone operator describes how war dehumanizes the people who are killed:

Drones are becoming the preferred instruments of vengeance, and their core purpose is analogous to the changing relationship between civil society and warfare, in which the latter is conducted remotely and at a safe distance so that implementing death and murder becomes increasingly palatable.

[...]

I fear the folly in which I took part will never end, and society will be irreversibly enmeshed in what George Orwell's 1984 warned of: constant wars against the Other, in order to forge false unity and fealty to the state.

It's very easy to kill if you don't view the target as a person. When I went to Iraq as a tank commander in 2004, the fire orders I gave the gunner acknowledged some legitimacy of personhood: "Coax man, 100 meters front." Five years later in Afghanistan, the linguistic corruption that always attends war meant we'd refer to "hot spots", "multiple pax on the ground" and "prosecuting a target", or "maximising the kill chain".

An American reporter recently visited Iraq and took questions from ordinary people:

An impassioned young woman from the middle of the lecture hall spoke up. It was obviously not easy for her. “It is not,” she said, “about lack of water and electricity [something I had mentioned]. You have destroyed everything. You have destroyed our country. You have destroyed what is inside of us! You have destroyed our ancient civilization. You have taken our smiles from us. You have
taken our dreams!”

Someone asked, “Why did you this? What did we do to you that you would do this to us?”

“Iraqis cannot forget what Americans have done here,” said another. “They destroyed the childhood. You don’t destroy everything and then say ‘We’re sorry.’ “You don’t commit crimes and then say ‘Sorry.’”

“To bomb us and then send teams to do investigations on the effects of the bombs…No, it will not be forgotten. It is not written on our hearts, it is carved in our hearts.”

We are happy to make bridges between people, said the president of the college, but we will not forget. What can you do? In Fallujah 30% of the babies are born deformed.” What can you do?

He spoke of how he’d met an American soldier in the airport. He was part of the Special Forces in Iraq. The soldier told him “The bible tells us not to kill. But we were taught to kill, to kill for nothing. Just kill. I am so sorry.”

“Build bridges? the president repeated. Apologize? he said. What can you do?” There was no rancor in his tone or demeanor, only anger and deep pain.

It's obvious that Americans are not unsympathetic or callous, because we can see the outpouring of sympathy, and the heartbreak towards the shooting that just happened. American donations to Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake exceeded $709 million. But there's a reason Americans are sympathetic to some problems, and ignore others: propaganda. We need to bring this word back, and use it seriously again. When Americans are made aware of problems, we're usually kind and gentle and generous. But the sort of propaganda we're subjected to is extremely clever: instead of pushing misinformation, it simply omits facts, enabling a whole new narrative to be developed. For example, the Obama administration is giving weapons to regime in Bahrain, which is shooting its people in the streets. But Syria has diplomatic ties to Russia, so that's the regime we have to condemn. When the Egyptian revolution first kicked off, the American media narrative pretended that we've always been on the side of "freedom" and "democracy," without ever mentioning that the Mubarak regime had been bolstered by the U.S. for decades. They were (and still are) a top buyer of American weapons and munitions, exceeded only by Israel.

All the innocent people we slaughter in Yemen, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Palestine, ad infinitum, don't matter to us because that's not the media narrative. Americans are ignorant of the circumstances surrounding these events, they feel too powerless to educate themselves, and so the slaughter continues unopposed. There is an often overlooked aspect to all this that's essential to upholding this narrative: racism. Ever since American imperialism was in its infancy, overt racism has been a key tool in justifying it. And it's still with us -- it's not something white people can easily notice or see with our own eyes, it's an invisible presence in our hearts that must be constantly called out and checked. It is the culture in which we grew up, and we are all embedded into it.

As President William Howard Taft observed, "the day is not far distant [when] the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our race, it already is ours morally." President Wilson noted that Latin Americans are, "naughty children who are exercising all the privileges and rights of grown-ups" and require "a stiff hand, an authoritative hand." However, it may be useful to occasionally "pat them a little bit and make them think that you are fond of them," Secretary of State John Foster Dulles advised President Eisenhower. Wilson regarded the Italians as "children [who] must be [led] and assisted more than almost any other nation." This policy prevailed among the U.S. oligarchy all the way up to the 1930s, when Mussolini's "fine young revolution" destroyed any hope for democracy among Italians who "hunger for strong leadership and... enjoy being dramatically governed." This attitude was revived immediately after the war, when in 1948, the U.S. bullied the Italian people into voting for who they wanted by withholding food from starving people, and restoring the fascist police. Haitians were "little more than primitive savages," according to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As Richard Nixon observed, concerning his progressive policy on abortion rights, "There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape." Speaking to Henry Kissinger on the Vietnam War, "The only place where you and I disagree... is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care." This nonchalance towards hundreds of thousands of deaths can also be seen when Nixon suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam: "The nuclear bomb? Does that both you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ's sake!" A nuclear attack, of course, would be a public relations disaster. It's a good thing, then, that our strategies with shock and awe bombings and brutal sanctions have become so effective, that they can inflict a similar amount of calamitous suffering as any nuclear attack. The Bush administration were all Nixon men.

It's fairly easy to understand why most Americans think "our" children are the only ones who matter, when one acknowledges this mass imperial racism in which they're raised. It's a good thing that Americans are so heartstricken by what happened in Connecticut. It means that we can still feel, in spite of everything that points to the contrary. However, it would do Americans a lot of good to understand that their tax dollars directly fund massacres just like this, every single day -- in countries they can't pronounce, towards people they will never meet, who are exactly like them and the schoolchildren who were killed in Connecticut today.