Call to Arms
Hans Leder
www.virtualcitizens.com
2007-01-05

http://www.virtualcitizens.com/articles/Call_to_Arms

We die with the dying:

See they depart, and we go with them.

T.S. Eliot

Led by the illegal and immoral U.S. invasion of Iraq, our troops, bombs, torture methods and weapons have caused the murder of more than 650,000 Iraqi men, women, and children.  Thousands of American military personnel, maimed, paralyzed, poisoned, and dead are also among the victims.  While press reports of now 3000 Americans dead in Iraq reads like a football score, thousands more die at home in silence, neglected by a government that imprisoned Katrina victims, shuts down hospitals and clinics, underfunds schools and services for children, yet expands the prison rolls. 

Have we become more that an empire crumbling on the inside?  Brutality deadens empathy.  Shock and Awe, Abu Graib, free fire zones in Falluja, torture in Kandahar and Gitmo: why were our outcries so feeble?  Being at war fosters public gullibility and works to extinguish the spirit of inquiry – an essential quality in a democratic state. 

Bush’s illegal and immoral preemptive war against Iraq has increased wide-spread hatred and fear of the U.S. thereby killing the dream that inspired so many millions to come here. The President says, “They hate us because they hate freedom.”  Since, immediately after 9/11 I heard none of our “leaders” trying to understand why we had been savaged.  A few days later I wrote an e-mail to a friend:

Horrible?  Yes - but why were those buildings targeted?  Is it because, as our "pundits" have been intoning, the people who did this, and especially the people who had trained and sponsored them, are "inherently evil"?  And what about the Palestinian refugee camps?  Disgusting?  Yes -- but why are people stuck in refugee camps – and what happens to one’s humanity living for generations inside the walls?  Are these refugees little more than what the Israelis have always said they were, "subhuman monsters"?

Giuliani declared that the rescue workers who are risking their lives in attempting to find survivors "are doing God's work."  Why would eighteen hijackers give their lives in order to carry out their mission?  Were they not also "doing God's work"?  Or is it simply that one man's God is another man's Satan?

Yes, today our "Great Satan" is Bin Laden, but who is his "Great Satan" if not the United States?  And why do millions of people, not only in the Middle East but also in most of the world, agree with bin Laden?  If, bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, did he not commit a truly evil act?  Yes--but why, given the overwhelming number of evil acts we have engaged in throughout the 20th century, is he to be considered the worst Satan on a planet that is replete with evildoing nations?

If the people who suffer around the world under those morally corrupt regimes were able to nominate the worst of the lot, the U.S. would win hands down.  Why?  Go ask the Guatemalans, the Vietnamese, the Greeks, the Salvadorans, the Iranians, the Chileans, the Nicaraguans, the Libyans, the Iraqis, the Somalis, the Indonesians, ad nauseam; moreover, the horror that was inflicted upon America Tuesday can in no way match the horrors that we have inflicted, without letup, on many millions of essentially defenseless people.

Hold on a minute.  Who is the "we" to whom I refer?  I think the worst most Americans can be accused of is ignorance, chauvinism, racism, and selfishness.  Lousy traits, to be sure, but given their lousy education and their stultification by the corporate-controlled media, it is hardly surprising that they can consistently be gulled by the military-industrial complex into supporting whatever abomination that complex tells them is for God and our "democratic way of life."

After the assassination of John Kennedy, when interviewed, Malcolm X said that "the chickens have come home to roost."  Malik El-Shabazz was castigated for his "callousness."  But what can we say about the many "chickens" (e.g., bin Laden, Noriega, Saddam) America's leaders created?  Have they not come home to roost, and with a vengeance that we should have anticipated?  Why do we persist in creating such monsters?  Why do we racket around the world, overturning regimes that we dislike, and forcing such monsters upon citizens of the world?

Instead of attempting even to ask such questions, Bush calls for a jihad - and that can only result in an unending cycle of slaughter.  True, Bush is a cowardly, bloodless, stupid bungler, however, would Gore have done better? And how did Clinton handle a similar situation?  By bombing a pharmaceutical factory or a capital building?

On 14 September 2001, I watched an interfaith memorial services, 98% Christian, at the D.C. cathedral.  The assemblage, composed in large part of scoundrels (e.g., bribe-takers, adulterers, liars, vicious hawks, corporate lickspittles), whom Jesus would certainly have driven out of his temple, seemed, despite their crocodile tears, to believe that Christianity is a religion of peace and love, whereas it is only Islam that foments jihads.  But what were the Crusades if not jihads, in which the Christians had gone to war "for the sepulcher"?  Did not those violent, "God-willed" holy wars decimate not only the Muslims but also thousands of Jews?  Is it not true that the history of Christianity, up to and including the present, is a history soaked in blood?

For some my questions are rhetorical.  But our depressingly a-historical compatriots couldn't even comprehend, much less answer them.  What to do?

When Judith, my firebrand of a wife, and I were teaching, we introduced our students to Zinn’s America.  Moreover, we were able to create campus-wide anti-war activities (e.g., our last action before we retired in the early 1990’s was to organize a teach-in on the first U.S. invasion of Iraq).  Now?  Out of desperation we have launched (in the spirit of Dean Swift) the following campaign:

                                            A CALL TO ARMS!

Our President is adamant about increasing our troop level by 30,000 young men and women.  To avoid having more of our young people killed or maimed, I call upon our fit senior citizens to volunteer to replace them.  Though I served as a Marine in the Pacific in World War II, while I can no longer “kill with my bare hands,” I can drive a Humvee.

If this idea makes sense to you, please contact me at lederhans@yahoo.com.

Just think of the look on Gates’ face when we 30,000, we happy band of geezers, show up at the Pentagon.

Naturally, I don’t want to send any more troops into the inferno we have made of Iraq.  On the contrary, I want us to bring the troops home NOW.  I just think that seniors are more expendable than the young.  Besides, putting together 30,000 senior volunteers might shame Congress into doing the right thing – end the war, impeach Bush and the members of his cabal, and fund Iraqis to undo the mess we have made of their country by illegally making war on them.

Even as I write the last sentence, the word “illegally” sticks in my craw.  What, in the final analysis would make a war “legal”?  As has always been the case, we “winners” of WWII became ever more brutal as the war dragged on, both individually – one Marine tank “proudly” decorated with the head of a Japanese soldier – and in formation, fire-bombing Dresden and Tokyo, and using atom bombs to annihilate Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  When we resort to war, it is an admission that we have failed to meet the very standards we have set for ourselves, i.e., to be human is to be thoughtful, kind, patient, empathetic, and above all, humane.

Hans Leder
www.virtualcitizens.com