{"id":256975,"date":"2024-03-11T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2024-03-11T12:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=256975"},"modified":"2024-03-11T06:40:58","modified_gmt":"2024-03-11T06:40:58","slug":"the-tears-of-war-belong-to-all-of-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/03\/the-tears-of-war-belong-to-all-of-us\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tears of War Belong to All of Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>6 Mar 2024<\/em> – First you call them terrorists. Then you say you\u2019re defending yourself. Moral problem solved!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now you can kill as many of them as you want.<\/p>\n

Well, maybe there will be consequences later (and maybe not), but for the moment you have overcome your own moral barriers and can start doing your job as a soldier: killing people. And in the process, you are making the world \u2013 your world, not theirs \u2013 safe. War is such a paradox: killing one\u2019s way to peace. But apparently it\u2019s humanity\u2019s primary organizing principle.<\/p>\n

Citizens of America, citizens of Israel, citizens of Russia . . . citizens of the world . . . this has to change! Now is the time to end war, by which I mean transcend war: disarm, demilitarize. We\u2019re killing the planet; we\u2019re living on the brink of nuclear suicide. Creating and dehumanizing an \u201cenemy\u201d isn\u2019t going to create peace, but rather, just the opposite. We\u2019re spreading hell across the planet, and not only does war always come home, it continues to create an endless cycle of death and destruction \u2013 simply to justify itself.<\/p>\n

For instance, Palestinian writer Emad Moussa<\/a> put it this way recently in the Los Angeles Times: \u201cThe general impression among us Palestinians \u2014 whether at home or abroad \u2014 is that as Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza, what the soldiers saw contradicted their worldview of the inferior, subhuman Palestinian. They had to destroy all and re-create an image of Gaza that matched their imagined worldview. As if to say, dehumanize to facilitate and justify the culling.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paradox of dehumanization! When we dehumanize others, we dehumanize ourselves. And as an American, I find it troubling for the nation\u2019s mainstream position on present wars to be free of any self-awareness, any lingering shock and awe, about our own bellicose history.<\/p>\n

So I jump back a few decades and a few wars, to Vietnam, specifically to what came to be called the My Lai massacre, where between 350 and 500 unarmed villagers \u2013 men, women, children \u2013 were shot and killed by U.S. troops in 1968. The deaths were just a small percentage of the war\u2019s total cost in civilian lives (possibly more than 2 million), but the horror of the killings has remained etched in the American, and global, consciousness. It opened us to the moral price of dehumanization.<\/p>\n

During the Vietnam war, the good guys were fighting communists, not terrorists, but the terms had essentially the same meaning: bad guys with no moral sanity, who only wanted to impose harm on the world. Seymour Hersh<\/a>, the journalist who initially wrote about the massacre, exposing it to the world, wrote a New Yorker essay many years later further contextualizing the event. One of the people he spoke to was Paul Meadlo, a participant in the massacre, who said to him: \u201cThere was supposed to have been some Vietcong in (My Lai) and we began to make a sweep through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That simple quote reverberates in every direction. Vietcong, Hamas . . . they\u2019re presence (actual or merely alleged) poisons everything: the village, the hospital, the school, the community. Civilians in their midst are now, first and foremost, nothing more than collateral damage.<\/p>\n

Hersh\u2019s story continues. The soldiers gathered up the villagers. Then the Charlie Company leader, Lt. Willaim Calley, told the men he wanted them shot. \u201cI started to shoot them,\u201d Meadlo said, \u201cbut the other guys wouldn\u2019t do it.\u201d So Calley and Meadlo \u201cwent ahead and killed them. We all thought we were doing the right thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Hersh complicates Meadlo\u2019s account by adding some of the original testimony of other soldiers, one of whom had said Meadlo and a fellow soldier \u201cwere actually playing with the kids, telling the people where to sit down and giving the kids candy.\u201d And when Calley and Meadlo started shooting, Meadlo \u201cstarted to cry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those tears belong to all of us, you might say. We \u2013 at least those of us who are not the victims \u2013 have to start claiming collective responsibility for these wrongs, which begin with dehumanization. Armed<\/em> dehumanization, for God\u2019s sake. Why is this where we find ourselves?<\/p>\n

In the context of war, peace is just a blank. It\u2019s nothing, or virtually nothing. A quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson puts it this way: \u201cPeace is that brief, glorious moment in history when everybody stands around reloading.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, we raise our families, create art and culture, emanate love . . . during ceasefires. But the social structure in which we live with relative safety (or not) is only present because armed authorities have cleared the space for it to exist, temporarily, beyond the forces of evil. This is the belief that allows militarism to endure, sucking up some two trillion dollars from the global economy every year.<\/p>\n

Ray Acheson<\/a>, addressing the Ukraine war two years ago, wrote: \u201cThe abolition of nuclear weapons, of war, of borders, of all the structures of state violence that we can see clearly at play in this conflict is at the core of the demand for real, lasting, paradigm-shifting change that we need in the world. It can feel like vast, overwhelming, and inconceivable. But most change is inconceivable until we achieve it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conflict among people will never go away. Our fear of the unknown \u2013 of people, say, who don\u2019t speak our language, who don\u2019t look like us, who possess something we want (such as land) \u2013 will never go away. We can dehumanize those we fear, attempt to kill them, and stay in hell. Or we can attempt to understand them.<\/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

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

6 Mar 2024 – First you call them terrorists. Then you say you\u2019re defending yourself. Moral problem solved! Now you can kill as many of them as you want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[1854,87,865,1029,88,715,427,880,265,965,2686,1025],"class_list":["post-256975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-hamas","tag-israel","tag-massacre","tag-palestine","tag-state-terrorism","tag-terrorism","tag-war-crimes","tag-war-of-terror","tag-west-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256975","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=256975"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256976,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256975\/revisions\/256976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}