Seven lessons learned from a quarter century in a war-oriented society.
It's 2001—the year the movies promised we'd make contact with aliens—and the United States has rather recently been attacked by terrorists who flew passenger planes into buildings.
www.the-reframe.com/war-or-nothi...
I have a distinct memory from the day of the attacks, of a news anchor announcing—before the buildings even fell—that we were now at war, which we technically weren't yet; thanks to my high school civics class I knew that news anchors aren't empowered to declare war.
But sure enough, here in late 2001, old what's-his-name the news anchor has been proved right: we're heading to war in Afghanistan. Old what's-his-name knew, with the sage wisdom of somebody living in a war-oriented society; when you are attacked, war is not optional.
Lesson #1 of a war-oriented society:
Killing is not only *an* appropriate answer to killing, it is the *only* appropriate answer.
The choices are war, or nothing.
Afghanistan isn't the country where most of the terrorists who attacked us hail from, incidentally. It's where the terrorists operated, partly because we funded them to operate there—so bringing war to the region is something millions of us notice has made us less safe, not more.
And millions of others who've already learned a war-oriented society's lessons inform us that pointing this observable fact out means that we are suggesting that those who died in the terrorist attacks deserved it, that we denigrate their memories by suggesting we do nothing.
Again the choices: war, or nothing. The only way to honor the dead is with more death.
Some millions of us notice that this alignment toward death also seems to be how terrorists seem to think about things.
Our noticing this is offered as further proof that we love terrorists.
And now it is 2003, and we are fixing to go to war in Iraq, which means the people of Iraq will not have a choice about whether or not to experience war, and we do have a choice, but we are saying we do not.
For them war truly is not optional. They are going to have some. We will make sure.
We are going to deliver something called "shock and awe" to them; not just killing, but a lot of killing.
Lesson #3: the only appropriate answer to killing is not only killing—it must be disproportionate killing—a hundred times more killing, a thousand times more.
This suggests that we believe almost instinctively that we are much more valuable as human beings than any other human beings from any other places—100x more, 1000x—so much more valuable, that it might be said we don't even think of those other people as human beings.
Iraq is not a country where most of the people who attacked us are from, either. It is a country some of our current leaders indicated they wanted to go to war with even before we were attacked, and they said they wanted to do this because there is a very bad guy in power there.
It is true that there is a bad person there. He is in power there in part because we helped put him there, which is also true but not mentioned. He does terrible things to the Iraqi people, we're told—also true. In response to this crime, we propose to ... do terrible things to the Iraqi people.
We put the bad guy in power there because doing so served our national interests, according to the people who decide. And sure, there's a lot of oil in Iraq, and our most prominent current leaders who most wanted war in Iraq are oil men, but never mind—we're talking about safety for American people.
Now our current leaders—some of whom were involved with putting the bad guys in power in Afghanistan and Iraq, are saying that Iraq—which has not attacked us, is about to attack us, very very very soon, and therefore it needs to be very very very attacked.
Lesson #4 of a war-oriented society:
Any hypothetical future threat of potential attack justifies the same disproportionate violent response as an actual attack. Any imagined threat must be taken as the same as a real one.
So yes, our leaders say that Iraq poses an imminent threat. Our leaders say there is evidence. The experts whose jobs involve knowing such things say there actually isn't any evidence. We are told by our leaders that this means the experts are aligned with the terrorists.
The experts are aligned with terrorists, who apparently more than anything do not want us to go to war in Iraq, because terrorists want to kill Americans, and nothing apparently makes the job of killing Americans more difficult than if America opens a SECOND ground war.
And now it is 2005, and we have brought a lot more death to Iraq and Afghanistan than was ever brought to us. Maybe a million civilians. Maybe more. And 10,000 of our troops, and 10s of thousands more injured. And two countries broken forever, hi-ho.
And millions of us find all this death and maiming tragic. And we're told by millions more—the same who told us that we were aligned with terrorists for predicting this exact eventuality—that finding the death of foreign civilians tragic means we are aligned with the terrorists.
We are told that we hate our country and love the terrorists, because we have failed to recognize that the US is not to blame in any way for wars it started and continues to wage; the fault lies with the Iraqis themselves, who can stop fighting if they want to stop the war.
Lesson #5 of a war-oriented society:
Any killing we do, not matter how indefensible it is, can only ever be self-defense. Anyone who suffers and dies is a victim not of us but of those who threaten or harm us, or even a victim of themselves.
Those who had no choice about whether or not to be at war are blamed for not ending the war, which is not something that is in their power to do. Our violence is not only pure; it is self-purifying.
But never mind, because now it is 2007, and it is time for even more war.
We were told that this war in Iraq would be over in a matter of days—months, maybe, not years—but it is 2007, and the war is somehow only getting bigger and more entrenched. We're now told that this means we need to deliver more death to more people, in the name of safety.
Millions of us think this is absolute bullshit. Those who brought the case for war have been exposed as terrible liars, and their rationale for the war has been exposed as a sham, and their operation of it has been an unmitigated corrupt cock-up on every level.
Many of us are dismayed by this betrayal of what we believed to be our nation's identity, and we don't want to be complicit in the killing of thousands of people who just wanted to live their lives, so we commit the great crime of opposing the war, and we oppose expanding it.
And we're still told, by the same people as before—the ones who insisted on opposing terrorists that wanted to make a world of death by making a world of death—that by opposing the war (and our new torture program!), we have proved that we love the terrorists and their cause.
These same people are eager to tell me that because I oppose bringing death to people I do not know, it means that I want to do nothing, because our options are war or nothing.
And our institutions of power and influence are aligned with this binary framing.
