Obscenity in the Protest of Obscene Military Actions - David Loftus

On Friday, October 1, the activist group Veterans for Peace, who state that they are opposed to wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Palestine, hung the banner pictured here in a prominent place in Washington, D.C. The site was the Newseum, a museum just off the Capitol Mall between the U.S. Capitol and the White House, at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. The protestors pointedly hung their banner over a 74-foot marble engraving of the First Amendment.

Someone posted this photo to a discussion list I belong to -- one devoted to professional theater and film work -- and created a mini-uproar. As usually happens when people respond emotionally over a political issue, a lot of ground got covered in a very short time. Comments questioned the taste and appropriateness of the banner and its circulation to our list; objected to the President being addressed as merely “Mr.”; questioned the tactical wisdom of a banner that seemed intended only to “inflame, offend, and spark dissension”; and affirmed that the poster was (or was not) proud to be an American.

First, being offended does not confer any particular moral stature upon the person who takes offense, or express any inherent righteousness. We are all offended by different things, and some emotional responses are more justifiable than others. The reason one can offer for taking offense, if it is persuasive to others, is what confers legitimacy upon one’s complaint.

In this case, some readers in my newsgroup (and undoubtedly elsewhere) were offended by blatant public obscenity. But that was precisely the activists’ point: the banner acknowledges its offensiveness, but makes a comparison to the death and destruction our forces are responsible for overseas.

“The American public should be shocked that we are still killing and crippling thousands of innocent people in these countries as well as our own soldiers – that’s what’s truly obscene,” VFP spokesman Mike Ferner told the media. Ferner is a 59-year-old veteran who served as a navy corpsman during Vietnam. “Blowing people’s arms and legs off, burning, paralyzing them, causing sewage to run through their streets, polluting the water that kills and sickens children, terrorizing and bombing people and their livestock with flying robots -- that defines obscenity. If this banner shocks and offends a single person who hasn’t been shocked and offended by what’s being done in our name, we’ve accomplished our mission.”

Just imagine how people would react if enemy soldiers were in California, doing to American citizens precisely what our soldiers are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan! Yet we passively accept that it’s going on day after day, month after month, and year after year in our name. According to Ferner’s terms, the outraged responses to the banner among my peers in the theater list was precisely what the veterans had sought. Ideally, they might desire to change some minds and get more people to lobby against the wars, but given the state of apathy and helplessness with which most Americans seem to view U.S. foreign policy, in this as in so many other areas, Veterans for Peace surely knew that was too much to hope for.

Next: the tactical use of obscenity, and addressing the President

WikiLeaks and the Same Old-Same Old of War - David Loftus

I am going to offer you a commentary out of determined ignorance. If we are to be honest, this probably happens -- here and in the “legitimate” broadcast and print media, never mind the Internet -- more often than we are inclined to believe.

Concerning the release, last weekend, of about 92,000 U.S. military documents about the war in Afghanistan on WikiLeaks.org, I don’t believe I need to read the docs or news reports. Only a brief exposure to the stories, editorials, and letters to the editor has suggested to me there are likely no surprises here.

From the start, I opposed going to war in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. The reasons offered by our leaders were murky and suspect, whether they had to do with implicating these nations in the 9/11 attacks or Saddam’s supposed possession of nuclear weapons. President Bush and his team of Vietnam War-avoiding warmongers had lied to the country before, and the odds were high they were not giving us the whole truth this time around, either.

But this hardly distinguishes them from previous administrations. If you wade through American history, you’ll find almost every war has been initiated with half-truths and absolute falsehoods; that U.S. leaders took their citizens into battle with incomplete information (at best) or utter lies, and that between hundreds and tens of thousands of idealistic, innocent youths from the rural hinterlands and poor urban centers (led by a handful of the best and brightest) went to their deaths in Mexico, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and the first Gulf war for reasons that probably had less to do with freedom and liberty than power, greed, and long-range corporate strategies.

A family friend named Harold Bock, who was a schoolteacher in Coos Bay and Myrtle Creek, Oregon from the 1970s to the 1990s, told me stories about his conscientious objector status (the same as Oregon poet William Stafford) during World War II. In his teens, Harold had been gung-ho to enlist in the army, but an uncle who had served in World War I took him aside and told him about his discovery, on the battlefield, that the weapons and ammunition used by the Germans were made by the same companies that were making his own gear. That was a frightening lesson for his uncle.

A copyeditor for the Boston Globe by the name of Victor Lewis once told me about serving guard duty in Vietnam and reading a copy of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (however that got into his hands!), and suddenly getting the creeping suspicion that he was involved not in a war between us and them, but “them and them.” In frightened disgust, he threw the book out of the bunker.

Recall also the half-century it took to learn that a subsidiary of IBM provided the Nazis with the punch-card technology that helped them to organize their mass herd of victims -- to facilitate the genocide against Jews and other European minorities. There are easy profits to be made in every war, and you can depend on the amorality of private companies to find them. I imagine it will take decades to discover everything Halliburton, Blackwater, Bechtel, and probably dozens of other corporations have made on the backs of American and Muslim corpses on an uncertain and likely unsuccessful mission.

Critics of WikiLeaks have decried the release of the names of U.S informants among the Afghans and Pakistanis, who will likely be killed by the Taliban. Defense Secretary Robert Gates sounded that alarm on Thursday. That may well happen, but is it worse, in the end, than the thousands of participants and noncombatants who have died on both sides because the U.S. went in on an impossible mission in the first place? The criticism seems as useful and germane as focusing on the arrangement of chairs on the deck of the Titanic.

I would like to suggest that, instead of going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq (which have to date cost us 1,209 American soldiers lives and $286 billion, and 4,413 soldiers and $736 billion, respectively) in the first place, we should have engaged in trade, and simply handed over humanitarian aid -- food and medical supplies. But, you might object, that would be helping our enemies! The truth is, we helped them anyway -- with military aid to the Taliban in the 1980s when they were fighting the Russians, and military aid to Saddam in the 1980s when he was at war with Iran -- in ways that did the average citizens no damn good.

Of course Saddam and the Taliban would have siphoned off as much of that aid as they possibly could, but the average citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq would have benefited anyhow, even if by no more than not getting killed in a crossfire between U.S. soldiers and militant Muslims. Everyone would have formed a nicer image of the United States than they have today. Sooner or later, the locals would have questioned the wisdom and morality of their government on their own. Instead of manufacturing goodwill toward us and doubt toward their leaders with humanitarian aid, we chose to create stacks of dead bodies and more live enemies by coming across as heavily armed imperialist bullies. Is that a desirable American legacy? There may indeed be situations where war is the only answer, but I remain unconvinced that this instance -- or most of the others throughout history -- was one.

No question it would have been much less costly for us to have proceeded peacefully. These needless, wasteful wars have contributed mightily to the economic recession that is hurting us so badly at home. Above all, families who have lost their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers to these wars will have years to contemplate how little their ultimate sacrifice has accomplished, in making either Afghanistan and Iraq, or the rest of the world, a better place than it was before.

You may consider that pain the true and most lasting legacy of Reagan, the Bushes, and their wars.