What's So Complex About It?

In the past few weeks I haveminutely explored, often with Stephen Shalom, multifold concerns about September11 and the "war on terrorism." With him I have tried to calmly and soberlyrespond to all kinds of concerns people feel. I recommend doing it. We all needto become adept at rebutting the insanely manipulative media messages that crowdinto so many people’s minds, and into our own as well. But going straight tothe uncomplicated heart of the matter sometimes has merit, too.

The U.S. bombing of Afghanistanis a barbaric assault on defenseless civilians. It threatens a nearlyincomprehensible human calamity. It is pursuing abominable goals.

The bombing is not a "justwar," as Richard Falk labels it in The Nation, but a vigilante attack. No, itis not a vigilante attack; it is a vigilante lynch-mob assault writ large. No,it is not even a vigilante lynch mob assault writ large–even vigilante lynchmobs go after only those they think are culprits and not innocent bystanders.The bombing of Afghanistan is a gargantuan repugnance hurled against some of thepoorest people on the planet. And this gargantuan repugnance is undertaken notout of sincere if horrendously misguided desires to curtail terrorism--since thebombing undeniably manifests terror and feeds the wellsprings of more terrorismto come--but out of malicious desires to establish a new elite-serving logic ofU.S. policy-making via an endless War on Terrorism to replace the defunct ColdWar. This is rehashed Reaganism made more cataclysmic than even his dismal mindcould conceive.

When people say, but doesn’tthe U.S. have a right to defend itself? Don’t we have to do something?. Iunderstand their hurt, pain, anger, and confusion. But I also have to admit thatI want to scream that the U.S. is increasing the likelihood that a million ormore souls will suffer fatal starvation. That is not self defense. Doingsomething does not entail that we be barbaric. We can do something desirablerather than horrific, for example.

Put differently, what kind ofthinking sees denying food to humans as self defense, as the only"something" at our disposal? The answer is thinking like Bush’s, thinkinglike bin Laden’s, thinking that treats innocent human lives as chess pieces,as checkers, as tidily winks, in pursuit of its own deadly agendas. Thinkingthat is willing to rocket a plane into a building to take 6,000 innocent lives,or thinking that is willing to drop bombs into an already devastated countryabetting cataclysmic starvation is terrorist thinking. Or, more often in thecase of average upset folks, it is thinking that has been systematically deniedthe most basic information relevant to the issues at hand, and that is toofearful, depressed, angry, or cynical to admit disturbing truths and reasonthrough real options and values.

You think I exaggerate?

Jean Ziegler, Special Rapporteuron the Right to Food to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, saidOctober 15, "The bombing has to stop right now. There is a humanitarianemergency." Lest anyone miss the point, he continued, "In winter the lorriescannot go in any more. Millions of Afghans will be unreachable in winter andwinter is coming very, very soon." As Reuters reported (and AP carried aswell, but not any U.S. newspaper or other major media outlet, as best I cantell), "the United Nations has warned of a catastrophe unless aid can getthrough for up to seven million Afghans. " Ziegler continues, "We mustgive the (humanitarian) organizations a chance to save the millions of peoplewho are internally displaced (inside Afghanistan)," adding that he wasechoing an (essentially unreported) appeal made by U.N. Human RightsCommissioner Mary Robinson a few days earlier, who was in turn echoing reportsthat go back to before the bombing. Ziegler called the bombing "acatastrophe for humanitarian work." Or in the words of Christian AidSpokesman Dominic Nutt (quoted in the Scotsman but again in no U.S. papers):"We are beyond the stage where we can sit down and talk about this overtea. If they stop the bombing we can get the food aid in, it’s as simple asthat. Tony Blair and George Bush have repeatedly said this is a three-stringedoffensive--diplomatic, military and humanitarian. Well the diplomatic andmilitary are there but where is the humanitarian? A few planes throwinglunchboxes around over the mountains is laughable." You can look at reportsfrom one AID agency after another, it is all the same story. Impending calamity,stop the bombing.

So what’s complicated in allthis?

Perhaps someone with a moresubtle mind than mine can clarify it for me. But assuming one has the aboveinformation at hand, to me it seems to boil down to this. If we bomb (or evenjust threaten to bomb), they are more likely to starve. If we don’t bomb (orthreaten to bomb), they are less likely to starve. If we continue bombing, weare telling the innocent civilians who may starve--not thousands but millions ofthem--you just don’t count. Compared to Washington’s agenda, you arenothing.

And what is Washington’sagenda? Remarkably the stated aim is to get bin Laden and to try him or perhapsjust execute him ourselves. We could stop the bombing and have him tried in athird country, the Taliban has noted, but that’s not acceptable. So for thisminuscule gradation of difference, we are told that Washington is willing torisk 7 million people. Behind the rhetoric, to me the real goals appear to be todelegitimate international law, to establish that Washington will get its wayregardless of impediments and that we can and will act unilaterally whenever itsuits us – the technical term for which is to ensure that our threats remain"credible" --and to propel a long-term war on terrorism to entrench the mostreactionary policies in the U.S. and around the globe, and, along with all that,to terminate bin Laden and others. Risking seven million people’s lives forthese aims is worse than doing it only for the minuscule gradation of trying binLaden ourselves rather than having a third country do it, because the additionalreasons are all grotesquely negative, supposing such calculus is even manageableby a sane mind.

When I was a kid and firstlearned about Nazi Germany, like many other kids, I asked how the Germanpopulation could abide such horrors. I even wondered if maybe Germans weresomehow genetically evil or amoral. I have long since understood that Germansweren’t different than Brits or Americans or anyone else, though theircircumstances were different, but for those who still don’t understand masssubservience to vile crimes induced by structural processes of great power andbreadth, I have to admit that I mostly just want to shout: Look around, dammit!

We live in a highly advancedcountry with means of communication that are virtually instantaneous and vastlysuperior to what the German populace had. We don’t have a dictator andbrownshirts threatening everyone who dissents. Dissent here can be somewhatunpleasant and may involve some sacrifice and risk, but the price is most oftenway less than incarceration, much less death. That’s fact one. Fact two isthat our country is risking murdering a few million civilians in the next fewmonths…every serious commentator knows it, no serious commentator deniesit…and we are pursuing that genocidal path on the idiotic or grotesquelyracist pretext that by so doing we are reducing terrorism in the world, even aswe add millions to the tally of civilians currently terrorized for politicalpurposes and simultaneously breed new hate and desperation that will yield stillmore terror in the future. Does anyone remember "destroying the city to saveit"? What’s next? Terrorize the planet to rid it of terrorists? For peopleof my generation, in the Vietnam War the U.S. killed roughly 2 millionVietnamese over years and years of horrible violation of the norms of justice,liberty, and plain humanity. The utterly incomprehensible truth is that the U.S.could attain that same level of massacre in the next few months, and, whether ithappens or not, our leaders, our media moguls and commentators, in fact most ofour "intelligentisia" are quite sanguine about doing so.

It is possible, with considerableeffort, for the average person to discover that this "war" is potentiallygenocidal. One can easily get much more background, context, and analysis fromZNet, sure—but of course only one out of roughly every five hundred or onethousand U.S. citizens has ever encountered ZNet--but one can get that singleinsight, the possibility that genocidal calamity is imminent, even from the NYTimes or Washington Post or any major paper that one might read, if one digsdeep into it and reads it very carefully, that is. Of course, the fact that suchinformation isn’t prime time news in every outlet in the land reveals howsupinely our media elevate obedience above truth. Our media pundits are seeingthe AID and UN reports and calls for a bombing halt I mentioned above, they areseeing stories about these in newspapers from Scotland to India, of course, andthey are simply excluding the information from U.S. communications. Yet evenwith this massive media obfuscation, which says volumes about our society, howhard is this war to comprehend, supposing one actually tries to comprehend it?

Shortly after September 11 therewas a letter in the NYT that a grade school child wrote to the editor, and Iparaphrase from memory: "If we attack them aren’t we doing to them what theydid to us?" This child wasn’t a genius, just a normal elementary schoolstudent. The Times probably ran the letter to show how cute kids can be, but ofcourse the child was correct, not cute. The real question is why don’t more ofus see what the child instantly saw, even now, weeks later, with the horrorbefore our eyes?

Yes, a never-ending trumpet beatof patriotism proclaiming U.S. virtues and motives contributes to our blindness.Of course accumulated confusions, augmented daily, cloud our understanding andpush the sad facts of potential starvation out of our field of vision. And yesthe human capacity for self deception to avoid travail contributes, no doubt, tothe process, as does anger and fear. But I suspect most people’s blindness islargely due to resignation. The key fact, I suspect, isn’t that people don’tknow about the criminality of U.S. policies, though there is an element of thatat work, especially in the more educated classes, to be sure. But even amongthose carefully groomed to be socially and politically ignorant – which is tosay those who have higher educations -- I think many people do know at somebroad level Washington’s culpability for crimes, and of those who don’tknow, many don’t in part because they are deceived, sure, but also in partbecause they are more or less actively avoiding knowing. And in my view the keyfactor causing this avoidance isn’t that people are sublimating comprehensionto rationalizations due to cowardly fearing the implications of dissent andwanting to run with the big crowd instead of against it. I think instead thatpeople can find deep resources of courage if they think it will do some good.Witness those firefighters, average folks, running up the stairs of the WTC.

No, to me the biggest impedimentto dissenting is that people feel that they can’t impact the situation in anyuseful way. If one has no positive hope, then of course it appears easiest andleast painful and even most productive to toe the line and get on with life,trying to ignore the injustices perpetrated by one’s country, or to alibithem, or even to claim them to be meritorious, while also trying to do what onecan for one’s kids and families, where we believe we can have an impact. Toadmit the horror that our country is producing seems to auger only alienationand tears. Here is one of many examples … at the end of an email that I gotfrom a young woman as I was finishing writing this essay, the author laments:"I've never had a huge amount of trust in governmental actions. But what I doknow is that I have no control over anything. And all I can do is hope."

It follows that the task of thosewho understand the efficacy of dissent is not only to counter lies andrationalizations by calmly and soberly addressing all kinds of media-inducedconfusions that people have, but also to demonstrate to people their capacity tomake a difference. We have to escort people, and sometimes ourselves too, overthe chasms of cynicism and doubt to the productivity of informed confidence.

We do not face, as some wouldclaim, a transformed world turned upside down and inside out. There is no newDNA coursing through us and our major societal institutions are as they wereyesterday, last week, and last year. In fact, the main innovation in thismonth’s events is that major violence based in the third world hit for thefirst time in modern history people in the first world. But the problem ofcivilians being attacked is all too familiar. And all too often the perpetratoris us, or those we arm and empower, including in this case since bin Laden is aprime example of monstrous blowback. And now the problem is being replicated,writ ever larger, as if by a berserk Xerox machine.

What we have to do is preciselywhat we would want others to do: oppose barbaric policies with our words anddeeds, arouse ever greater numbers of dissenters, and nurture ever greatercommitment to dissent, until elites cannot sensibly believe that a "War onTerrorism" will lead to anything but a population thoroughly fed up with andhostile to elites.People all over the world are embarking on this path…weshould too.

(Michael Albert is a founder and current member of the staff of Z Magazine as well as System Operator of Z Magazines web system: ZNet . By arrangement with Zmag)