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A Love Affair with Violence and Death
By Gabrielle Bernard, Winsted
The debate about the war in Iraq reminded me of 1943. I was fifteen. I had a brother in Europe, one in North Africa, and one in the South Pacific. I was reading All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. He was a German solider during World War I. The novel tells the story of a young soldier who is killed after four years as, day after day, month after month and year after year, young men leaped out of their filthy trenches to butcher one another. (The French lost 1.4 million men in that war.) Ever since that summer, I have been trying to understand the persistent horror of war and the male love affair with violence and death.
World War II was probably the most justifiable, given the nastiness of the Nazis and the attack on Pearl Harbor. But even "good" wars are brutalizing: whereas early on we condemned the bombing of civilians in London and Coventry as barbaric, by the end we were firebombing Dresden, Tokyo and, of course, Hiroshima.
In war, writes Chris Hedges in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, the first people silenced are those who question the state's lust and need for war. When the anti-Vietnam War protesters became a problem, Richard Nixon sent his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, to discredit them. Overnight the goals of the war shifted to "supporting our men who are fighting the war." It worked so well that the phrase "support our troops" has effectively intimidated war resisters ever since. It has become code for silencing dissent. But anyone who saw on television the father who mourned: "President Bush, you have taken from me my only son," caught a glimpse of the terror and anguish in the minds and hearts of these lovely young people and their families. It is an insult to infer that opposing a war that most religious leaders, including the Pope, have denounced as immoral and illegal is synonymous with disdain for our soldiers. They, mostly working class and minorities, are as much victims of the war machine as Iraqi children.
I'm also dubious about our "bringing democracy to the world." Our record is not good. We've been doing "regime change" around the world for fifty years: Iran, Greece, Guatemala, Chile, East Timor. The record is dismal. Without exception the United States has installed thugs who bled their countries dry and did U.S. bidding. Remember, under Ronald Reagan, Saddam Hussein was "our" thug. True, war did end slavery and stopped the Nazis, but by far the ongoing protection of our constitutional rights is the result of a century of heroic struggle by labor unions, black civil rights workers, and women suffragists. (During World War I, women chained themselves to the White House fence with signs that said: "When will we have democracy in America, Mr. President?")
We should also put to rest the myth that Vietnam veterans were singled out for scorn. Those images came primarily from pro-military films like Coming Home and Rambo. A Harris Poll taken at the time reported that only 1% of the returning vets had encountered hostility.
Abraham Lincoln denounced the Mexican War. Mark Twain denounced the slaughter in the Philippines.
To say that those who oppose the war are supporting terrorism is to be astonishingly misinformed. The FBI, the CIA, the United Nations and the New York Times have not been able to find a shred of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11. Not a shred. In fact, many who oppose the war do so because it distracts from the real enemy: Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. This war, if anything, will drive thousands of recruits into terrorist hands.
Finally, there are those who proposed the tracking of American dissenters as dangerous fifth-column subversives. A first reaction is laughter and the suggestion of a psychiatric consult—until we remember that this was just the tactic used by that great Republican "lover of freedom," Joe McCarthy. Our nation's conservatives seem to want democracy everywhere in the world except in the United States.
"The prospect of war is exciting. It provides a cause that exalts us, that reduces and at times erases the anxiety of individual consciousness," writes Chris Hedges. "Many young men see it as the ultimate definition of manhood." But images of war, he continues, leave out "the one essential element—fear. We are safe. We do not smell the rotting flesh, hear the cries of agony, or see the blood and entrails seeping out of bodies … Killing is always a sordid business and the business of war is killing. It is the betrayal of the young by the old."
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