posted June 24, 2004 02:17 AM              

The 20th century, as we are so often reminded, was the most lethal in history--a century of staggering human slaughter, with more than 100 million people dying at the hands of others. Author and scholar Peter Brooks writes that for European intellectuals, the First World War was a major shock. At a time of unprecedented scientific, economic, and social progress, “war had come to seem unthinkable.” The outbreak of the war drove Albert Einstein to remark, “What a sad species of animal we belong to.” For Sigmund Freud, it was almost as if “some primal force was at work ... a hatred of life or a lack of talent for living.” Freud was no optimist about the human condition. He thought he saw in man an instinctual drive toward self-annihilation. He called this the “death instinct” and postulated that man fought off this drive in himself by projecting it outward as aggression, thereby obtaining relief. As such, aggression was too deeply rooted to ever be expunged completely. At best, it could only be managed--through a blend of knowledge and reason. This was Freud’s one hope for mankind.

In a PBS documentary, Legacy, first broadcast in 1992, British author and historian Michael Wood captured a small part of the tragedy and disbelief of it all with these words:

It is a freezing February night in northern France. Former enemies, French and German, meet to commemorate the bloodiest battle in history, which began on this night [in 1916], Verdun. Only a lifetime ago, three quarters of a million men died here for a couple of square miles of ground. The pointlessness of it all passes belief today. The inescapable lesson of history is that for all the great achievements of the West, for all its humanistic values and its egalitarian principles, its character is touched by a deep strain of violence; that’s the paradox which confronts us as we look to the future of civilization at a time when all across the world, the values of the West are supposed to have triumphed.

But next to the sober words of Freud, Einstein, and others, there arose a perversion of the “language of war.” This language in the current day, so carefully crafted--”smart bombs,” ‘collateral damage,” “blowback”--attempts above all else to desensitize awareness of the Achilles Heel of all war, the enormous human cost. Leaders go to great lengths to keep this awareness from the public. We witnessed this recently when the Bush administration tried to block photographs of the coffins of dead soldiers returning from Iraq. And again when certain local television affiliates refused to broadcast ABC’s Nightline segment in which the photos of dead Americans from the Iraqi War were shown and their names read aloud.

I was born during the last months of World War II. and when I was about 10 or 12 and the war was still a fresh topic, I recall a friend and I trying to get his father to talk about his combat experiences in the war. He had fought in North Africa and Italy and was wounded twice. But the most we could ever get out of him were some stories of drunken revelry while on leave, of once being sold whiskey made from gasoline by the locals. It was so dangerous, he said, “you couldn’t drink and smoke at the same time.” War sounded like great fun.

Philosopher Jackson Lears describes this type of non-response as part of “the minimalist vocabulary of ordinary American soldiers during World War II,” men who “just had a job to do and didn’t want to talk about it when they returned home.” It was, says Lears, “the honor of silence in response to the unspeakable.” For poet Walt Whitman, who tended to the wounded and dying in the Civil War, “The real war will never get in the books.” Says Lears of Whitman, “He sensed that there was something new about the carnage of modern war, something that resisted literary convention and ultimately language itself.”

The mechanization of war not only produced mass killing on an unprecedented scale, but it made death more random and impersonal. Death could come without warning from anywhere, without seeing one’s enemy. Survival came to the lucky, not the fittest. Karl von Clausewitz, the famous 18th century military strategist, whose detailed treatises on the conduct of war are still required reading at the Army War College and West Point, in the end likened war to a card game, “a meaningless exercise in calculating chance.”

One of the cruelest features of any war is the enormous price paid by the young. Former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey, a Medal of Honor recipient who fought in Vietnam, writes that when he returned from the war he wrote to the Selective Service System arguing that the age of the draft be increased from 18 to 30, because, he said, “young men had too little political or social power for their objections to matter.” But he found himself corrected by a veteran soldier who told him that anyone over 30 was of little use for military training because at that age they begin to think, form opinions, and ask questions. But, he added, “Give me a group of men between the ages of 18 and 26, and give me the power to control how much they can eat and sleep, and I can get them to do anything I want.” Such is the cruel trick played on the young--“old men dreaming up wars in which young men do the dying,” as George McGovern put it.

In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Vietnam historian Jack Langguth writes that in its earliest days, the republic was fortunate to have former General George Washington as its first president. His military experience shaped his actions as president, says Langguth. When Washington faced the prospect of entangling the United States in further wars, “he risked his reputation by maintaining the nation's neutrality.” Thomas Jefferson was also wary of unleashing the power of war, once remarking, “I think one war is enough for the life of one man.” But James Madison, who had little experience in military matters, led the country into the senseless War of 1812.

The chickenhawk argument that has risen to such prominence today, with the major players in the Iraq war--Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz--having never experienced war firsthand, is in fact an argument as old as war itself. Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, in an address to a class of military cadets after the war, concluded his remarks with the now-famous words, “War is Hell.” Lesser known are the words that preceded his conclusion: “It is only those who have never fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”

In our current age, George McGovern ran for the presidency in 1972 against Richard Nixon; the campaign issue was the Vietnam War. McGovern had flown 50 combat missions as a bomber pilot over Europe in World War II; Nixon secured a safe and comfortable slot in the navy during the war. Yet, it was Nixon who was viewed by the country as the tough guy, the man who would--in those God-awful words--”bring us peace with honor.” But tens of thousands more soldiers died in Vietnam during the Nixon years as the war ground on well past any point of reason. And let us not forget the real architect and arch-villain of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson; like Nixon, Johnson also wound up safely in the navy during WW II, far removed from harm’s way.

War is an unleashing of the most powerful man-made destructive force on earth. The only thing we can ever be certain about in war is that there will be human corpses to dispose of and painful letters to write to family members of those who sacrificed everything. All else is subject to the law of unintended consequences. Karl Kraus, an Austrian writer, wrote of WWI, “The war was a disastrous failure of the imagination and an almost deliberate refusal to envisage the inevitable consequences of words and acts ... made possible [in part] by the corruption of language in politics and in the newspapers.” In our modern age, with so many staggering examples of war’s unintended consequences, war is more than ever a colossal failure of leadership, vision, diplomacy, and above all, a failure of human will itself.

Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times writes that we are just now hearing serious debate in this country about whether the Bush administration’s response to 9/11--particularly the decision to go to war with Iraq--signaled “a major shift away from the values, principles and strategies that guided America before.” Although an accurate assessment, Brownstein’s words certainly understate the situation. It would be more accurate to say that the war was not just the result of a failed ideology and bad policy making--which it was--but more, a deliberate attempt to distract attention away from the Bush administration’s strategic and tactical failures that contributed to the tragedy of 9/11. It was also intended to give Americans some sense--no matter how false and perverted--that George Bush was doing something about terror, at the same time as he and his cohorts in the administration never tired or felt ashamed of reminding us in so many subtle ways to be afraid and that only George Bush could protect us from the evil of international terrorism.

That facade of “leadership” is now collapsing, and a growing majority of Americans are beginning to see that no president of the modern era has been more reckless and derelict in his duty than George W. Bush. The Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, has resigned in disgrace. Leading newspapers, including The New York Times, have called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. The disgrace of Abu Ghraib prison is almost beyond words. And most recently, a group of 27 retired diplomats and military commanders who have held positions of major responsibility in American foreign and defense policy over the past 50 years have called for the removal of George Bush from office. George Bush is a failed president. It is time for change.

Gerald S. Rellick, Ph.D., worked in the defense sector of the aerospace industry. He now teaches in the California Community College system. You can email Gerald at Rellick@interventionmag.com

http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload& name=News&file=article&sid=782&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

This makes me want to sing and cry:

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?

Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?

Where have all the flowers gone?

Gone to young girls, every one!

When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone, long time passing?

Where have all the young girls gone, long time ago?

Where have all the young girls gone?

Gone to young men, every one!

When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the young men gone, long time passing?

Where have all the young men gone, long time ago?

Where have all the young men gone?

Gone to soldiers, every one!

When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?

And where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?

Where have all the soldiers gone, a long time ago?

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Gone to graveyards, every one!

When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?

And where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?

Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?

Where have all the graveyards gone?

Gone to flowers, every one!

When will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn?

posted June 24, 2004 09:43 PM            

What if the people of today, those very people that are pushing for war and fighting the fight..karmically, are those that fought in so many wars before..lifetimes ago..and they somehow, in their heart of hearts understand that we must fight?

Seriously, if people believe in Karma and people believe that Karmically there are people that are born today that were brilliant warriors in the past, wouldn't it make sense for them to want to right the wrongs of today in the same warrior fashion learned through lifetimes of lessons?