The Other Massacre

There were two massacres “in the news” this week.

One, in a bucolic Virginia college town, kept the voracious, non-stop gaze of the media transfixed. Each detail described over and over again. Pictures replayed on seemingly infinite loops, the lives of victims explored and celebrated. The human cost considered and the inhumanity of random killing pondered as the massacre became a cultural obsession.

The other?

Haditha.

This week Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell issued a 104-page report on the 2005 massacre in a worn-torn Iraqi town that took 24 civilian lives. In it, Bargewell excoriated the chain of command for ignoring the misconduct that lead a group of Marines to inflict deadly vengeance upon innocent civilians in response to a roadside bombing by insurgents.

An example of the fog of war, perhaps? The grayness that colors the interaction between and occupying force and the people they were sent to “liberate.” Or that mind-shattering experience we know so well from Vietnam Veterans…inconclusive lines between friend and foe created by guerrilla tactics, a language barrier and a civil war? Or just an example of the inhumanity of forcible occupation without moral justification?

Key questions our media and culture must engage as we stumble down the road to empire and ponder the mounting human cost of a global war on “Terror.”

However, while the media focused on the sort of mentality--the mental illness, in fact--that leads an individual to kill without conscience, the report on Haditha was basically ignored. A report that, while predictably denying any real cover-up by the Pentagon, is punctuated by some startling statements by the career officer in charge of the investigation.

According to Maj. Gen. Bargewell:

"All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics."

…and…

"Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes."

So, as we consider the value of human lives lost in Virginia shouldn’t…couldn’t we…also consider the value of human life in Iraq?

What of the over 650,000 Iraqi casualties since the invasion? The Pentagon and the White House dismiss these numbers, for obvious reasons. Perhaps for the same reasons they forbade hospitals in the newly “liberated” Iraq from counting the casualties they encountered.

Or what about the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have lost or fled their homes since the invasion?

Perhaps the size of the numbers is the problem. Too big, too hard to comprehend. They are simply statistics, not individuals.

32 people killed in Blacksburg.

It’s a staggering number, but still manageable in the media’s mind. Pictures can be shown, the lives understood. They are people…human beings with obvious value to their families, friends and their communities.

But then isn’t 24 a manageable number, too?

Yes, the story was basically told when the “not-really-a-cover-up” was exposed. Still, it doesn’t seem that the lives of those Iraqis…whether men, women or children…hold the same value for us and our media. Just as they don’t, according to the report, for the Marines in charge of democratizing them.

Although, to be fair, the Department of Defense has goen to the trouble of ascertaining the actual "value" of individual Iraqis.

In yet another report that was basically ignored, the ACLU pried loose documents from the Army that revealed Iraqis, and their co-liberatees in Afghanistan, “have received more than $32 million in compensation from the Army for noncombat-related killings, injuries and property damage.”

The devilish details from the report show just how cheap life is in Iraq.

• No more than $2,500 can be offered to each person killed, although a few exceptions seem to have been made.
  
• The family of an Iraqi fisherman in Tikrit killed while turning off his boat’s engine received nothing for his death. The Army ruled that it was collateral damage--the result of combat. But they did coughed up $3,500 for his boat, net and cell phone…all lost after he was killed.
  
• A civilian fueling his car and an Iraqi Army officer directing traffic were shot by American soldiers in a passing convoy in Balad, for no apparent reason. The Army ruled that neither Iraqi had done anything hostile or criminal and approved $5,000 to the civilian's brother but nothing for the Iraqi officer.
  
• Soldiers killed a man and his sister by firing 200 rounds into their car as it approached a checkpoint, apparently too quickly, near Mussayib. The Army lieutenant colonel who handled the claim awarded relatives a $10,000 compensation payment, finding that the soldiers had overstepped the rules of engagement.
  
• An American soldier in a dangerous Sunni Arab area south of Baghdad killed a boy after mistaking his book bag for a bomb satchel. The Army paid the boy's uncle $500.
  
• In one incident, in Feb. 18, 2006, a taxi approached a checkpoint east of Baquba that was not properly marked with signs to slow down, one Army claim evaluation said. Soldiers fired on the taxi, killing a woman and severely wounding her daughter and son. The Army approved an unusually large condolence payment of $7,500.
  

And in Haditha?

Various residents of the town received a total of $38,000.

Life, it would seem does have some value in Iraq. A monetary value.

Yet, wouldn’t we find it strange…even distasteful…if the parents of the Virginia Tech killer offered each of the victims’ family $2,500? Wouldn’t it be dehumanizing to put a price--and a paltry price, at that--on the humanity each of their loved one’s exhibited over the years, on the relationships and affectations that made them who they were?

It’s all part of a bizarre numbers game.

Those brutally massacred in Haditha are, like the tens of thousands of Iraqis who seen their lives inexorably changed or summarily lost, merely statistics.

Reports are issued, money is paid.

The victims in Blacksburg deserve all the humanity we can muster…in condolences and outrage and tributes. But during a week in which we grappled with the consequences of random murder, what does it mean that we so easily glossed over the reports on Haditha, on the millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of casualties?

The numbers coming out of Iraq are not abstractions…not to Iraqis. But then again, the media would never rest if they tried to deal with those murders as more than just numbers.

It just too big…which also says something about our role in Iraq, doesn’t it?

Critical Massacre

Inexplicable. Horrifying. Tragic.

Shocking and senseless.

The massacre at Virginia Tech inspires language of disbelief, fear and indignation. The media, politicians and pundits offer ponderous meanderings through a maze of confusion built by one gunman in a moment of vindictive violence.

Once a name and a face, along with a thought-provoking package sent to NBC, were layered over the top of the random killing…our national attention turned to the question of “why.”

What would explain this?

What could explain this?

Who is to blame?

To the casual observer, and those of us who did not lose loved ones or have some temporal connection to Virginia Tech and Blacksburg are just that--casual observers, the obvious answer is that a troubled youth exhibiting obvious psychological warning signs just lost it…he went nuts and happened to have guns he could use to play out a twisted scenario: a personal, paranoid war against a perceived enemies.

But is this latest example of mass killing yet another anomaly we may never fully understand? Another example of how convoluted the human mind truly is?
Or is it just an outgrowth of who we are? Who we really are when we peel back the bucolic veneer of the American Dream?

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Despite all those heroic high school lessons in American history, the rhetoric we hear every election cycle about the goodness, generosity and peaceful intentions of America…the truth is that America and American history are replete with war, bloodthirsty campaigns against American Indians and Third World peasants, and violent repression and enslavement of an entire race of people.

We are a warlike and violent people. Always have been. Our God-given right to violence stretches back to our “Puritan” founders, our Colonial ambitions and the slaughter of those people who stood between us and our Manifest Destiny.
That was a long time ago. But the language they used--against infidels, Godless savages and “Imps of Satan”--echoes today in the War on Terror and our “Crusade” against “Evildoers.”

Violence punctuates our national myth--the Winning of the West, with shootouts and lynchings and posses riding out to mete justice on cattle rustlers. The entire founding of the nation “from sea to shining sea” was done with guns.
With killing and theft. With wars.

“War” is our primary national modality. Wars that mostly were, as history has shown to any willing to examine it, of choice and ambition and a bloodthirsty disregard for the humanity of our enemies. The Mexican-American War. The Spanish-American War and the brutal repression of the Philippines that followed. Too many campaigns against American Indians to list.

Since the end of the Second World War, the one “Good War” and our lone moment of moral superiority, it has been non-stop violence: the Cold War (and its numerous, violent “hot spots“), the Korean War, the Vietnam War…and countless little wars around the globe like Angola, Cambodia, Laos, Central America, hapless Grenada, Afghanistan, Panama, the Persian Gulf.

And we so love war that we declare one even when the intention is some common good, like the War on Poverty…on Drugs…on Cancer.

We have Presidents who’ve said that they are starting a war to keep the peace. Peace through war. A War on War, it would seem.

As we look at this one sociopath will we also look at the context within which he festered? An amorphous War against Terror that has cost countless “innocent” men, women and children their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whole families killed by faceless bombs, large caliber ammunition fired from planes, helicopters and Humvees.

We are a society that has, more or less, made peace with torture. A society that was easily lead into a war against a people that did nothing--no attack, no invasion--to justify the unleashing of the largest military in the history of mankind. What about the fact that we have the largest military in the history of mankind?

And what do we make of those Executive Branch sociopaths who ordered the mass killings we’ve inflicted upon the people of Iraq? Or the gunmakers who profit hand over fist fueling the wars we start? Or inspire others to start. The corporate heads of Lockheed Martin, of General Dynamics…are they, too, inexplicable killers who cause random death of innocents? The media, politicians and pundits spend no time questioning the psychology of the executives and scientists who create new and interesting ways of killing people.

In fact, we celebrate them…with huge salaries and Congressional kowtowing.
But what really separates them from the lone gunman? Profitability, perhaps?

Or what do we make of the thousands of “contractors,” a.k.a. mercenaries, who are riding around Iraq, armed to the teeth and making huge salaries. Or those who have been caught “randomly” shooting Iraqis civilians? They are reprimanded by their companies, but where is the national conversation about those mass killings?

It comes down to language. The language of mass murder, of random death dealt out by a crazed lone gunman, is reserved for those events that we ourselves are not directly complicit in. We do not feel complicit in the tragic event at Virginia tech. Or Columbine. Or any of the growing number of mass shootings our country has experienced over the last four decades. Those are anomalies in American society…examples of the mysteries of the human psyche and, in the ultimate Americanization, the price we pay to live in a free society.

But the mass killings that made our nation? That protect our national interests, like oil? The mass killings that happen when we drop bombs on civilians? Or what about the weaponry we, the world’s largest dealer of guns and military hardware, sell to governments and rebels alike? That we sold to both sides of the Iran-Iraq War?

Those are wars. Or for wars. And as a nation of war, we have found a way to disassociate ourselves from those acts of violence with the language of war:
campaigns, battles, collateral damage, casualties, enemy combatants.

We create an alternate world of skewed morality to justify the wealth, the land, the death created by those acts. We indemnify whole peoples and their ideas and cultural affectations to rationalize the violence we portray as necessary and just. Paranoid worldviews predominate our history, particularly since the end of the Second World War.

Disassociation. Skewed morality. Violence justified by paranoia.

How much of an anomaly is the lone gunman? Or has our culture reached critical mass…that to be an American is not just to be part of a culture of violent retribution, but an example of it?

Rectification of Names

Confucius:
“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

So, what does an ancient Chinese philosopher have to teach us about our post-Modern world?

Quite a bit, actually.

Since the 2000 Election, we've seen our national language deteriorate into Orwellian NewSpeak, into transpositions of black for white and into lies parading around as fanciful conventional wisdoms. Propaganda and truth, until Katrina came and washed away the media's veneer of compliant patriotism, were fed to the American public, from the Administration by way of the news media, like MREs--a great Pentagon acronym for Meals Ready to Eat. Incidentally, the professional association of military reporters and editors is also called "MRE."

Isn't funny how sometimes people give us the truth unintentionally?

Anyway....

Confucius would marvel at just how completely we, the American people, have proven his axiom on "incorrect language." But even his genius couldn't foresee the power of the Corporate-American media. Still, he knew that a people who are propagandized cannot make judgments and, as we've seen for six years, "stand about in helpless confusion."

Now, it is true that Team Bush had to steal the first election and that there is plenty of evidence that the Team did it again in 2004. You can't fool all of the people...or even 51% of them, I guess. And it is true that at least 1/3rd of Americans saw through much of the propaganda offered up as truth since 9/11..and that number has grown. But those people also tend to hold their American brethren in contempt...for not being able to see through the often paper-thin tissue of lies that have been peddled by our Fearless Leaders and our Cowering Media. The Informed need to read Confucius. It is not so easy to stay informed when there is so much disinformation clogging the informational arteries...and for those who are struggling to stay afloat in this debt-ridden, fear-factored environment there is very little time to read all of the alternative news sources out there.

One of the great advantages Team Bush has is that it takes time and effort...and a serious dose distrust and cynicism...to wade through it all and make sense of it. They've cynically used cynicism to drive a wedge through the electorate.

It is true that the media is now more likely to ask questions, but it is still woefully inadequate to the Confucian task at hand. Team Bush is a disinformation machine...a prolific propagandizer and language engineer.

The Rectification of Names is a 24/7 job these days, and the confusion...along with the obvious deterioration of our morals and our art...is six years in the making (if not more, but let's do this one presidency at a time!).

Here are some examples that need Rectification:

War on Terror: If it is indeed a war on "Terror"--meaning terrorism (it's already imprecise language)--why do we support terrorism? We are supporting, through advisors in Pakistan and funding from Saudis like Prince Bandar, Sunni terrorists operating in Iran and Lebanon. And why didn't we identify the source of the money and personnel behind 9/11--Saudi Arabia--as a State Sponsor of Terrorism?

State Sponsor of Terrorism: As we see above, this is a name needing major Rectification. Iran is a SST, but isn't the US also a SST for supporting Sunni terrorist conducting a bombing campaign in Iran?

Terrorist: Anyone killing "innocent life" is considered a terrorist. How many innocents--women and children--have we killed in Iraq? What about Israel, which has killed dozens of children with indiscriminant bombs in the Occupied Territories since 9/11? Heck, they even helped to found Hamas, an organization labeled "terrorist" and who we are countering through Prince Bandar's initiative to fund Sunni terrorists in Lebanon. Well, Al Qaeda wouldn't even exist if the CIA hadn't helped to create it in 1979 to, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, to goad the Soviets into invading Afghanistan. So confusing.

Hostages: The just-released British sailors were hostages. Their confessions were coerced. So what does that make the hundreds of Muslims held for years in secret and not-so-secret prisons? What about their confessions? What's the difference between British sailors and the five Iranians we took and are still hold in Iraq? Or the confession of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to every plot imaginable?

Syria: Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes to Syria and sends the wrong signal. So, what was the signal sent to Syria by Team Bush when the CIA shipped "enemy combatant" Maher Arar (since cleared of all charges) on a private jet to Syria to be tortured?

Torture: We don't even know what this is anymore. No agreed upon definition. This has led to the kind of moral decay Confucius predicted, hasn't it? From Gitmo to Abu Ghraib, the US tortures because the language and definition of what torture is has been brought into question.

And on and on and on....

The "People" depend upon leaders, reporters and editors...upon the news media...to use language judiciously and accurately. They have an inherent need to trust those in power. A need that was multiplied by 3000 on 9/11, and magnified by the Anthrax Attacks and the continual drumbeats of war...on Terror, on Iraq...that followed.

The "Informed" should show some patience and spend more of their time attacking the purveyors of incorrect language and less time occupying an elitist perch above the "People." We are all in this sinking ship of state together and there are few lifeboats left. Those bobbing on the waves of propaganda should throw a line to those sinking into the depths of it. Don't blame the victim. Be Confucian and Rectify the Names under which all of this is being done.