{"id":248152,"date":"2023-11-13T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2023-11-13T12:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=248152"},"modified":"2023-11-11T10:00:42","modified_gmt":"2023-11-11T10:00:42","slug":"militarism-vs-our-shared-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/11\/militarism-vs-our-shared-humanity\/","title":{"rendered":"Militarism vs. Our Shared Humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>8 Nov 2023<\/em> – Sitting safely at my desk, looking at photos of bombed buildings and knowing that missing children are buried under the rubble, imagining (unavoidably) what this must feel like . . . oh my God, empathy gives way to horror. Move on, I tell myself. Write about something else. All wars are like this.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the big question won\u2019t go away: Why?<\/p>\n

Beyond all the reasons and excuses for the continuing carnage of Gaza, beyond the U.S. justifications for its complicity: Why?<\/p>\n

Every war foments this question, but only if you care about the victims. If you don\u2019t \u2014 if you embrace one side\u2019s justification \u2014 the dehumanization process kicks in and, if you\u2019re sitting at home reading about it on the Internet or watching it on TV, it starts morphing into a video game. Crash, boom, hooray! This is war and we\u2019ve got no choice but to win, no matter the cost . . .and no matter that a victory carved out of corpses in the rubble only means that further war and further hell (for everyone) are inevitable.<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

I think the answer is collective in nature. Humanity has politicized itself into a war mentality. When a soldier has served his term and returns to a solitary life, he may be beset by monsters, flooded with guilt. This is called moral injury. Collectively, we can protect ourselves and justify our participation in the murder of \u201cthe enemy.\u201d It\u2019s necessary, and I\u2019m just following orders. But when the collective spirit dissipates, the spiritual wounds \u2014 the self-annihilating shame and regret \u2014 manifest. We can\u2019t dehumanize someone else without dehumanizing ourselves.<\/p>\n

How do we escape this paradox? No one wants war \u2014 not when it affects them personally, or when the veil of propaganda justifying it gets torn open. But to stand publicly against it isn\u2019t easy and often has consequences. Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib<\/a>, who is Palestinian, is currently facing congressional censure for making this outrageous statement in the House of Representatives:<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t believe we have to say this but Palestinian people are not disposable,\u201d she said as she broke down in tears.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are human beings just like anyone else,\u201d she continued. \u201cMy sity, my grandmother \u2014 like all Palestinians \u2014 just wants to live her life with freedom and human dignity we all deserve. Speaking up to save lives no matter faith, no matter ethnicity should not be controversial in this chamber. The cries of the Palestinian and Israeli children sound no different to me. What I don\u2019t understand is why the cries of Palestinian children sound different to you all. We cannot lose our shared humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

How dare she? Congress doesn\u2019t care about \u201cshared humanity\u201d \u2014 not when it passes $800 billion-plus<\/a> defense budgets every year, the point of which is to maintain a divided humanity.<\/p>\n

Author and theologian Walter Wink called it \u201cthe myth of redemptive violence<\/a>\u201d \u2014 the myth of the ongoing necessity to kill the enemy before the enemy kills us. In his book The Powers That Be<\/a><\/em>, he writes that violence \u201cdoesn\u2019t seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be in the nature of things. It\u2019s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence certainly functions as a god.\u201d<\/p>\n

America, America, \u201cgod\u201d shed his grace on thee . . .<\/p>\n

The profound danger of the myth of redemptive violence is, as I note, that it is collective. Humans band together against other humans. Today the world is divided into nation-states \u2014 195 of them at this point in the game \u2014 which, with a few exceptions, spend an enormous portion of their wealth and energy preparing for (and\/or waging) war. Nation-states do what they want: That\u2019s what \u201csovereignty\u201d allegedly means. But doing what they want keeps winding up meaning killing, imprisoning and threatening their external and internal enemies. Thanks to this simplistic attitude, humanity is on the brink of committing suicide, either politically, via nukes, or ecologically, by smothering the planet\u2019s life-sustaining environment. Or both.<\/p>\n

But the myth starts small. Every problem, whether personal or social, is something to fight. Consider, for instance, that even though the medical profession is all about healing, we \u201cfight\u201d our diseases more than we try to understand them, just as we fight our social maladies. We wage wars on cancer, on drugs, on crime \u2014 on virtually everything that\u2019s problematic. None have been successful. But then again, wars are never successful, even when we \u201cwin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, that\u2019s only in the real world. In the mythical world, where the myth of redemptive violence rules \u2014 the world of Hollywood, let us say \u2014 congressionally funded violence (a.k.a., \u201cgood violence\u201d) is consequence free.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how it plays out: John Wayne, the Ringo Kid, has climbed atop the stagecoach and the Apaches are tearing after them as the music swells. In a few minutes of the 1939 John Ford classic Stagecoach<\/a><\/em>, a few dozen Indians die, each one flying dramatically off his horse. There were hundreds of them, hooting, armed with rifles, but they have almost no impact on the valiant stagecoach, on which four white men return fire at the savages with grim precision. One of them actually has a wry smile on his face, relishing his opportunity to do so. They blast away. Eventually the cavalry shows up and the Indians flee.<\/p>\n

The myth of redemptive violence is God\u2019s gift to scriptwriters \u2014 but a curse on our shared humanity and the real world.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at <\/em>koehlercw@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8 Nov 2023 – If you don\u2019t care about the victims, the dehumanization process kicks in and, if you\u2019re reading about it on the Internet or watching it on TV, it starts morphing into a video game. Crash, boom, hooray! This is war and we\u2019ve got no choice but to win, no matter the cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":122360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[3143,2642,1817,2914,2009,1253,87,1029,88,444,427,119,70,1025],"class_list":["post-248152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-anti-hegemony","tag-anti-imperialism","tag-anti-militarism","tag-anti-nato","tag-anti-war","tag-demilitarization","tag-gaza","tag-hamas","tag-israel","tag-nonviolence","tag-palestine","tag-peace","tag-usa","tag-west-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248152"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248153,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248152\/revisions\/248153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}