for Megan Heeney

I was dreaming about your future:
Later twenties, Manhattan, Union Theological Seminary,
“What’s a nice Catholic senorita like you doing in a place like this?”
It’s back to the books,
But with an occasional downtown jaunt to the Catholic Worker,
You cultivate an affinity group with your cheerful animation,
Speaking Spanish to the chicas on the subways,
Standing on Malcolm X Boulevard and 110th Street and listening to Dylan’s koan-like wind,
Picking up trash on the sidewalks as a spiritual exercise,
Watering geraniums at your studio apartment,
Teaching your teachers about the limits of language,
A NYU undergrad wants to come uptown and make a two-minute “movie” about you
And you say with a giggle to Katie, “I don’t want to be dismissed so cinematically!”

So far from the Midwest
With our cornfields and stolidness and segregations,
You feel liberated, like you could leap over the Empire State Building
Some days,
Other days, lost in the carrels,
Like Dorothy at the end of her life
(even though you’re still so young—une jeune femme en fleur)
You have elbows on the table, hands holding head of Botticelli Venus hair,
Weeping, sobbing, gasping for air
Half hour
Two hours
No studying today, simply
Soaked, spent, screwed

But then
(It’s a dream after all)
Like a bullet
You’re straight out of the frenzied focus of the library
Into the magnificent polluted spring air
Your eyes radiant, resurrected because
It came to you
It landed on you
It burrowed inside you
That precious, precarious image
That needs your noon-time and nocturnal nurturing
The image that suggests

How
To
End
The
War.

1.

“The Peace Corps left today and my heart sank low. The danger is extreme and they were right to leave… Now I must assess my own position, because I am not up for suicide. Several times I have decided to leave El Salvador. I almost could, except for the children, the poor, bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.”

–Jean Donovan, US lay missionary in El Salvador, raped and murdered by US-backed Salvadoran troops, 2 December 1980

“I’m having a hard time right now.   Just feel sick to my stomach from being doted on very sweetly, by people who are facing doom.  I know that from the United States it all sounds like hyperbole.  A lot of the time the kindness of the people here, coupled with the willful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me.  I can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry.   It hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be.”

–Rachel Corrie, US college student and activist in Rafah, Gaza, bulldozed to death by US-backed Israeli Army, 16 March 2003

2.

In the fall of 2003, I decided to take a sabbatical. Since I always encourage my Social Justice students to leave their comfort zone, I planned on doing the same: I worked with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For six weeks, I lived and worked in Rafah, Gaza, which had been the scene of many killings of Palestinian civilians and the demolition of hundreds of homes by the Israeli Army. While I was in Rafah, I thought many times of one of my predecessors there, an American college student by the name of Rachel Corrie.

On 16 March 2003 Rachel was killed by an Israeli soldier who bulldozed her as she tried to prevent a physician’s home from being demolished. The Palestinians considered her a shaheedah, a martyr, one who had died in the struggle against the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. At our ISM office, we saw photographs and posters of Rachel Corrie in the full bloom of youth, with an exuberant smile, a bright future of promise in her eyes. When we met Palestinians on the street who wanted to know who we foreigners were, we would say, “ISM,” and they said back with effusive respect, “Yes, yes, Rachel Corrie, Rachel Corrie!”

One room of the ISM office in Rafah has a wall collage of shaheed posters, remembrances of those ordinary Palestinians (and a few internationals) who’ve been killed since the second intifada began in September 2000. These posters include young girls, teen-age boys, bookish-looking bespectacled young men, as well as confident resistance fighters posing with weapons that were unable to protect them from Israeli Apache helicopters or tanks. How many walls would be filled by all the martyr posters of this intifada? I could not imagine. And for each face there, I supposed that there were 10, or 30, or 60 family members and friends still reeling from the loss.

Early in my time in Rafah, our ISM team wanted to visit where Rachel Corrie was killed. Two white Mercedes taxis drove our group to the area where the doctor’s home still stood (it has since been demolished). When we got out and drew near to the site, our local Palestinian coordinator noticed an approaching Israeli jeep and a tank. He did not think it safe for us to stay and so he hurried us back in the taxis and said, “We will come another day.”

So instead we went to the nearby Al-Salaam neighborhood so we could inspect the damage caused by the recent Israeli Operation Root Canal. We got out our cameras and took video and digital photos of the massive home destruction. We also had a brief exchange with the family whose homes were blown up; they erected tents on their property and that’s where they were trying to live. One ISM volunteer, Kristi, age 26, and best friends with Rachel Corrie, began to weep at the misery before her eyes, the misery that also moved Rachel Corrie, day after day.

A few days later we made another attempt to see Dr. Sameer’s home. Many of our team were taking photos and video footage, but I didn’t have the heart to reach in my backpack to pull out my camera to document more devastation. Then we saw an Israeli tank in the distance coming toward us (they patrolled that area every 15 minutes, I was told). Our Palestinian guide insisted that we duck and run but some of us were not so quick in following his instructions. Live ammo came whizzing our way, ricocheting off the wall we had just passed.

In an email to her mother while she was in Rafah, Rachel wrote, “When I am with Palestinian friends I tend to be somewhat less horrified than when I am trying to act in a role of human rights observer, documenter, or direct-action resister. They are a good example of how to be in it for the long haul. I know that the situation gets to them – and may ultimately get them – on all kinds of levels, but I am nevertheless amazed at their strength in being able to defend such a large degree of their humanity – laughter, generosity, family-time – against the incredible horror occurring in their lives and against the constant presence of death.… I should at least mention that I am also discovering a degree of strength and of basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances – which I also haven’t seen before. I think the word is dignity. I wish you could meet these people. Maybe, hopefully, someday you will.”

3.

Not surprisingly, some people have demonized Jean Donovan and Rachel Corrie: Jean was a “Communist” and Rachel was a “terrorist,” with the imputation that they “got” what they deserved.

Yet, all over the world others have been inspired by their commitment to justice. They are witnesses not only to the horrors of injustice, so smoothly explained away by U.S. leaders; they are also witnesses to our capacities for accompaniment, risk taking, and solidarity.

As a teacher, I am grateful to so many former students whose commitment also challenges and inspires me. Some of them have chosen to work overseas, and have become able to recognize in the people with whom they shared their days and nights what Rachel simply called “dignity.” I am thinking of such people as Mary (Mozambique), Wendy (Cameroon), Marybeth (Uganda), Magan (Palestine), Bridget (Chile), Danielle (El Salvador), Laura (Bolivia), James (Nicaragua), Randa (Mali), Ginny (Mexico), Laura (El Salvador), Becca (Haiti), Colette (El Salvador), Elizabeth (Colombia), Anna (Poland), Kristen (Belize), Zeina (Palestine), Layla (Afghanistan), Josh (Bolivia), Matt (Mozambique), Christine (Mexico), Lauren (Uganda), Jen (Guatemala), Megan (Colombia), and Lala (Indonesia).

4.

“I look forward to seeing more and more people willing to resist the direction the world is moving in, a direction where our personal experiences are irrelevant, that we are defective, that our communities are not important, that we are powerless, that our future is determined, and that the highest level of humanity is expressed through what we choose to buy at the mall.”

–Rachel Corrie, email from Gaza

In the first chapter of The Book of Mev (on writing Mev’s obituary), I cited Natalie Goldberg, whose book Writing down the Bones has been a companion of mine since 1986. Natalie will be doing a reading from and signing of her new book, Old Friend from Far Away, on Monday 16 March at Left Bank Books in the Central West End at 7 p.m. I have assigned Writing down the Bones for at least sixteen semesters, often to two or three classes each semester. Hundreds of my students at Saint Louis University and Webster University have been exposed to this wise and encouraging teacher.

Two passages, one from Writing down the Bones, and the other from Thunder and Lightning:

“When you begin to write this way — right out of your own mind — you might have to be willing to write junk for five years, because we have assimilated it over many more than that and have been gladly avoiding it in ourselves.”

“As a writer you should go to a book thirsty and suck it dry.”

1.

I have noticed that some Missourians are converging on Columbia on Saturday 21 March “to mark the 6th Anniversary of the Iraq War.” The slogans for this gathering include the following: “Yes We Can! Begin the Peace Economy. End the Wars!” In the words of the flyer now circulating, the day will be a time for “Speakers! Music! Marching!” In remembering such a dread event as the U.S. invasion, I’m unsure how to interpret the exclamation points.

I make the following surmise: The invocation of “Yes we can!” is a direct reference, not to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, but to the new American president, whose campaign adopted this self-empowering mantra.

Further, I admit to the following nagging curiosity: How can we end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially given President Obama’s undeniable commitment to the well-being of the military-industrial complex? Why would the Missouri peace movement adopt Obama’s own borrowed phraseology when he is escalating the U.S. commitment to “win,” whatever that means, in Afghanistan?

Last, I ask the following question: Why say “begin the peace economy” now? Haven’t people been addressing this issue since the end of the Cold War? Is now a particularly auspicious time to do so? What evidence is there to suppose so?

2.

“I don’t really see that we’re the bad boy.”

“Why should I feel responsible?”

“But the thing which I think I will remember about Vietnam when I am a hundred years old and will talk about it with my grandchildren is the countryside, how beautiful the women looked, and the food.”[1]

3.

A few elementary truths…

The United States has no right to be in Iraq.

The United States has committed war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity in Iraq.

No American officials are above the law, while they are in office or after leaving office.

American citizens have a responsibility for the crimes committed in their names by their government officials.

4.

“I don’t hate Americans. I hate the policy of invading other countries. And the debt, the distribution from the Paris Agreements, why haven’t they given us anything? We are very poor because of the war. The Americans don’t see how they destroyed everything, and they won’t pay their debt. I listen to the radio and hear how the Americans still have an embargo on our economy, and have no diplomatic relations with us. That’s not right.

This is the Vietnamese people’s land. Why did the Americans come to destroy us and make war, and why don’t they help now to rebuild our country? I am a farmer, I stay here. And I ask a simple question. Why did the Americans come here to destroy homes and kill people? And I ask you, who invaded who? If Vietnam decided to invade America they would have to send troops—the distance is far, thousands of kilometers. I ask you, if I came to your land to destroy and burn your houses, how would you feel? So I say, when the Americans came here to fight and destroy the Vietnamese people, they were wrong. The Vietnamese were not wrong to defend their land. And when the Americans lost the war, why didn’t they want to have relations with us?”[2]

5.

Since Israel’s assault on Gaza in late December and January, there has been increasing discussion about the need for supporting the Palestinian call to a boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign (BDS) against Israel.[3] Embraced by numerous organizations in Palestinian civil society, the BDS movement seeks to put the kind of pressure on Israel as was placed on apartheid South Africa by international civil society in the days when Nelson Mandela was still in prison.

U.S. citizens ought to consider whether BDS is an appropriate strategy here to force changes in Israeli policy, given that U.S. government has long been an enthusiastic accomplice with Israel in its torment of the Palestinians. But at this late date, six years into the American aggression against the Iraqi people, I wonder: Has anyone from within the U.S. or beyond called for a BDS movement against the United States, for example, by tactics such boycotting our artists and universities, and divesting from American companies? After all, the Bush administration was the singular instigator and relentless perpetrator of the war, occupation, mass death, torture, extraordinary rendition, destruction of Fallujah, devastation of culture, and unimaginably much more in Iraq.

6.

“I don’t think we ever lost hope or determination. But because the war was around for so many years the frustration was high and we ran out of what to do next. I mean first you have a picnic type of peace demonstration in the park, then you take it to Washington, or you have five demonstrations in five key cities. But that’s not working. They’re not paying attention. They don’t care if you have one peaceful demonstration. It doesn’t take any toll on the establishment. They can still pursue the war. There’s no price they have to pay. They don’t care if we don’t go to school. They don’t care if we’re out of our jobs and running around Washington or staying up all night. They don’t care.”[4]

7.

In a stirring conclusion to his brilliant examination of Gandhi’s relevance to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict, Norman Finkelstein said,

Gandhi translated satyagraha as “hold on to the truth.” Herewith is our challenge: to hold on to the truth that what Israel has done to the Palestinians is wrong; to hold on to the truth that Israel’s refusal, backed by the U.S., to respect international law and the considered opinion of humankind is the sole obstacle to putting an end, finally, to their suffering. We can win if we hold on to the truth, and if, as the Negro spiritual put it with cognate wisdom, we “keep our eyes on the prize, and hold on.” That is, if we keep remembering what the struggle—the prize—is all about: not theoretical fad or intellectual provocation, not holier-than-thou radical posturing, but—however humdrum, however prosaic, by comparison—freeing the Palestinian people from their bondage….

Where was the world during the Nazi holocaust?, we still ask. Where is the world now? Has the Palestinian struggle gone on too long? Has it become boring and passé? Has the time come to move on? But the Palestinian people continue to be ground under, the merciless Israeli juggernaut keeps pressing on, confiscating yet more land, demolishing yet more homes, destroying yet more lives. The time now is not to move on—but to hold on![5]

This month, as people remember the U.S. invasion of Iraq, to which truths will we hold on? To whom will we communicate such truths? Will we blunt the edge of those truths so we can be more “effective” to get the ears of people in power? Will we challenge those who admit that, yes, some mistakes were made in Iraq during the Bush years, but things are different now? Will we remember our crimes with shame or will some of us say with a shrug that Iraq is now passé?

Do we have any idea how to free the Iraqi people from their bondage by us? Do we have any strategy for dealing with the permanent U.S. military bases and the business-as-usual profiteering of U.S. corporations in Iraq? In this period of daily talk of hundreds of billions of dollars for the economy, have we given thought to the case for reparations we owe the people of Iraq?

Will we interfere with the merciless American juggernaut as politicos and intellectuals soberly debate whether or not to add Iran to the other two Muslim nations we are currently dominating?

When we were reading Chan Khong’s book, Learning True Love, I compiled the following for my young students who do not know much about the American War in Vietnam.

American Heritage Dictionary

Napalm, incendiary material used in bombs and flame throwers. Developed during World War II, napalm is a mixture of gasoline (sometimes mixed with other petroleum fuels) and a thickening agent. The thickener turns the mixture into a dense jelly that flows under pressure, as when shot from a flame thrower, and sticks to a target as it burns. Earlier Soap thickeners were replaced by polystyrene and similar polymers.

Philip Jones Griffiths, Vietnam, Inc.

NAPALM. The most effective “anti-personnel” weapon, it is euphemistically described as “unfamiliar cooking fluid” by those apologists for American military methods. They automatically attribute all napalm cases to domestic accidents caused by the people using gasoline instead of kerosene in their cooking stoves. Kerosene is far too expensive for the peasants, who normally use charcoal for cooking. The only “cooking fluid” they know is very “unfamiliar” – it is delivered through their roofs by U.S. planes.

Some of its finer selling points were explained to me by a pilot in 1966: “We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow [Chemical Company]. The original product wasn’t so hot – if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene – now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter (WP – white phosphorous) so’s to make it burn better. It’ll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.”

Philip Jones Griffiths, in the book Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides by Christian Appy

There was a napalm ward in the provincial hospital of Quang Ngai where the people were so badly disfigured they could probably never go back into society. Many had been put in there to die. I was there once and saw this kid. He had his eyelids burned off, his nose burned off, and his lips burned off. He was halfway to becoming a skull, but he was still alive. I could hardly look at him—he was so ugly, so frightening, really, really frightening.

So I just glanced at him and turned around. I was photographing someone else and I felt somebody pulling at the back of my shirt. I turned around and it was the boy. He indicated with sign language that he wanted me to take his picture. As I took his picture, I remember thinking that it will never get published but it’s something we should have for the war crimes trial. Of course that never happened.

When I came out of that ward there was an American journalist. She said, “I can’t go in there, it’s too horrible. Can you take my camera and take some pictures for me?” I said, “No, you go in there. Those people were burned with your taxpayer’s money. Go and see what they did to those people with your money.”

Teachings from the Buddhist Order of Interbeing

Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering by all means, including personal contact and visits, images, sound. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.

Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies that deprive others of their chance to life. Select a vocation which helps realize your ideal compassion.

Do not kill. Do not let others kill. Find whatever means possible to protect life and to prevent war.

Respect the property of others but prevent others from enriching themselves from human suffering or the suffering of other beings.

Review of Jimmy Carter, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work.

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), $27.00.

Now in his eighties, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter persistently continues his pursuit of peace in the Middle East. In the follow-up to his controversial book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (2006), Carter covers familiar territory and comes up with a surprisingly optimistic perspective, revealed in the book’s title: We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work.

For his last book, Carter was denounced by some as an anti-Semite and the best friend of terrorists; nevertheless, he accomplished what he set out to do: namely, to provoke a lively debate on this central foreign policy question of how to foster peace in what he calls the Holy Land (i.e., Palestine and Israel).

I read Palestine Peace Not Apartheid with some appreciation and interest, because Carter used his immense cultural, symbolic, and political capital to draw attention to issues long downplayed or ignored in the U.S. mainstream. For example, in that book, he wrote, “Regardless of whether Palestinians had no formalized government, one headed by Yasir Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas, or one with Abbas as president and Hamas controlling the parliament and cabinet, Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land. In order to perpetuate the occupation, Israeli forces have deprived their unwilling subjects of basic human rights. No objective person could personally observe existing conditions in the West Bank and dispute these statements.” [208-209] I and several friends in Saint Louis have taken the opportunity to visit and work in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and can confirm Carter’s analysis.

Early in his this book, Carter asks, “What is the existing deadlock in promoting peace?” [xvii] In the latter part of the book, he makes the following observations:

For the past thirty years, there has been no doubt in both private and public discussions, within the Holy Land and globally, the confiscation of land and building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank are recognized as one of the primary obstacles to peace. There has been a recent outpouring of condemnations by political leaders. [151-152]

The chance for successful peace negotiations would be greatly enhanced if the threat of terrorist acts could be effectively addressed. There is little doubt that a peace agreement in the Holy Land with a contiguous and viable state for the Palestinians would remove a major cause of terrorism throughout the region. [155]

Palestinians, Israelis, and other observers recognize that during the past sixteen years, U.S. political leaders have acquiesced in Israel’s massive settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Intended to establish permanent “facts on the ground,” the result has been to diminish (or eliminate) the prospect of a sovereign, contiguous, and viable Palestinian state with the West Bank linked to Gaza and its capital in Jerusalem. [166]

These three observations, then, go a long way to illuminating that issue of deadlock: Both the U.S. and Israel have been unwilling to agree to Israel’s withdrawal from Palestinian territory. Under Carter’s presidential successors Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the so-called “peace process” can more accurately be described as the “ghettoization process” of the Palestinians.

Carter achieved lasting fame for his role in bringing together Israel and Egypt in the Camp David Accords in 1979. During those negotiations, Carter noted that the Israeli leaders Menachem Begin and Moshe Dayan were not willing:

(1) to withdraw politically or militarily from any part of the West Bank; (2) to stop the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing ones; (3) to withdraw Israeli settlers from Egypt’s Sinai or leave them under U.N. protection; (4) to acknowledge that U.N. resolution 242 applied to the West Bank-Gaza area; (5) to grant the Palestinians real authority or a voice in their own future; or (6) to discuss the issue of refugees. [35]

Many of the foregoing refusals characterize recent Israeli policy. Indeed, over the last thirty years, there has been a remarkable consistency in Israeli leadership. One expression used to describe their strategy is “movement without motion”—producing the illusion that diplomacy was focused on peace (while “facts on the ground” were being established that negate the possibility of a real peace settlement).

The “plan” referred to in the book’s subtitle refers to the long-standing two-state solution, which calls for Israel to return to its 1967 borders and terminating its settlements. (The two-state solution is based on the crucial U.N. resolutions, and embraced by the Arab League, and is the subject of several appendices in Carter’s book.) Yet, Carter plainly sees the continued, operative U.S. support for Israel’s “facts on the grounds,” as in these two passages: “As President Bush had not mentioned settlements in his Knesset speech, the Israelis not only ignored [Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] but announced plans to build another thirteen hundred new homes in the West Bank and projected forty thousand more during the next decade.” [152] “On March 17 [Ehud Olmert] announced that Israel had the absolute right to continue expanding existing settlements and building new ones, especially around Jerusalem, despite objections from Washington or anywhere else.” [114]

Carter acknowledges the baleful significance of these settlements for the possibility of peace between Israel and Palestine. Further, he cites Palestinians and Israelis who believe that the settlements have rendered impossible a two-state solution, thus raising the issue of both peoples living together in one state. Carter notes: “The next stage within a single state would be a struggle before world opinion for equal political rights for millions of Palestinians voters similar to what took place in South Africa.” [162] Israel would then face the choice of losing its Jewishness as a state, or gaining full apartheidness as a state. Carter soberly concludes, “Perhaps the most important overarching decision for the Palestinians is whether to seek equal citizenship within a single nation instead of continuing their frustrated struggle for separate statehood. The Israelis will have to provide the ultimate response.” [170]

It is with that last sentence that I have to disagree. What is jarring in Carter’s book is his view, not of Israel or Palestine, but the United States. Consider these excerpts:

The United States will find all parties to the conflict—and leaders of other nations—eager to support strong, fair, and persistent leadership from Washington. [xx]

Yet for the past fifty years the United States has been widely recognized as the essential interlocutor that can provide guidance, encouragement, and support to those who want to find common ground. Unfortunately, most leaders in Washington have not been effective in helping parties find peace, while making it harder for other potential mediators in Europe, the Near East, and the United Nations to intercede. [xv]

I know from personal experience that the influence of our government is limited, but there is no prospect for regional harmony and stability unless the United States plays a leadership role … [179]

The historical record demonstrates that the U.S. government has overwhelmingly backed one side (Israel) with abundant military aid, steadfast diplomatic support in the U.N. and ardent Congressional backing as well, hardly a fair and balanced approach to the conflict. Accordingly, Washington has been relentlessly effective in enabling Israel to pursue its goals, not of peace and normalization, but of conquest of the choicest parts of Palestinian territory and of the elimination of any meaningful sense of Palestinian sovereignty. But even as Carter admits that U.S. influence is limited, surely, he must also realize the enormous agency the U.S. has long exerted in the region, agency that has been detrimental to the cause he champions. The U.S. has overwhelming power and has used that power as it sees fit, in this case, to empower Israel through dollars, votes, and deals. Regardless of official pronouncements, the U.S. government has been a full, bipartisan, and devoted partner to the demise of the two-state solution.

After the cover the United States provided Israel in its assault on Gaza in December and January, our claim to be interested in peace for Israel and Palestine is simply incredible to increasing numbers of people around the world. The U.S. has wanted it both ways: To be Israel’s staunch ally and to be seen in the international community as an honest and judicious broker. This is impossible. Either the Obama administration continues to unconditionally back Israel or else it must substantively change course and pursue an even-handed, balanced peace process.

For, as Palestinian Salam Fayyad put it simply to Carter, “Unless America stops the Israelis from expanding settlements there can be no peace. Not one more brick!” [124]

1.

Meditate that this came about:

I commend these words to you.

Carve them in your hearts

At home, in the street,

Going to bed, rising,

Repeat them to your children,

Or may your house fall apart,

May illness impede you,

May your children turn their faces from you.

Primo Levi

Auschwitz survivor

Recently, Senator Patrick Leahy, the Senate Judiciary Chairman, spoke of forming a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the possible crimes of the out-going Bush Administration. When a reporter asked President Obama about this, he said, “My view is also that nobody’s above the law and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen.”

The famed Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi strongly agrees with the new president, “that nobody’s above the law.” In fact, last spring Bugliosi published a book that argues that there were clear instances of wrong doing in the U.S. going to war against Iraq. The title of this impassioned legal argument is The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.

Like any good prosecutor, Bugliosi has an instinct for drama: “The book you are about to read deals with what I believe to be the most serious crime ever committed in American history—the president of this nation, George W. Bush, knowingly and deliberately taking this country to war in Iraq under false pretenses, a war that condemned over 100,000 human beings, including 4,000 young American soldiers, to horrible, violent deaths.” [3]

Bugliosi hopes that the U.S. Attorney General in Washington (now, Erich Holder) or any of the 93 U.S. Attorneys in the federal district courts or even a state attorney general from one of 50 states will take heed of his argument and seek to prosecute the former president for the now almost 5,000 dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

According to Bugliosi, the case against Bush would rely on U.S. Code 1117 (conspiracy) and U.S. Code 1111 (murder). “The overriding assumption here has to be that if, in fact, Bush lied to the nation in taking it to war, we all should want to find some lawful way to bring him to justice. That has to be the predisposition among all good [men and women]. It cannot be otherwise.” [91] Here, Bugliosi is quite specific; I wonder if President Obama would agree with the prosecutor.

The definition of murder is “the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought.” Given the months of build-up to the U.S. invasion in March 2003, Bugliosi asserts that premeditation is a given in this case. He believes that “at an absolute minimum, in the absence of a legal justification such as self-defense, Bush’s taking the nation to war would constitute implied malice, that is, an intent to do a highly dangerous act with reckless disregard and indifference to human life, and hence, at least second degree murder in every state, as well as under federal law.” [99]

The crux for Bugliosi is that Bush knowingly distorted the CIA’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate which declared that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat to the United States. Yet, in a speech a week later in Cincinnati in October 2002, Bush stated the just the opposite, that the U.S. had to act now, in self-defense, before it was too late. By Bush falsifying the intelligence report, Bugliosi avers that Bush cannot argue that he was acting in self-defense. Indeed, Bush’s deceitful rhetoric was intended to mobilize the American public’s support for a war that was totally unnecessary.

Many Americans will seek to honor the fallen troops by asserting that they died for freedom or democracy or “our country.” Bugliosi will have none of this sentimentality: “As ugly and grotesque as it is, the fact is that [U.S. soldiers] gave up their lives to further the political interests of Bush, Rove, and Cheney. No political figures in American history ever so shamelessly exploited a war for political advantage as much as these three.” [44]

Professing that he is pained by the deaths of Iraqi civilians, Bugliosi still admits that “I take the reports in the paper of American soldiers being killed in Iraq harder.” [68] I think that many American citizens likewise instinctively take harder the deaths, injuries, impairment, and mental anguish suffered by the U.S. troops. Unlike so many of his fellow citizens, though, Bugliosi locates the root cause of this needless misery: George W. Bush.

Bugliosi dismisses as totally unrealistic the possibility that Bush could be tried for war crimes against the Iraqi people, though attorneys and judges outside the U.S. may have already taken careful note of the precedent involving former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was tied up in investigation for several years before his death.

How appropriate it would be for Bush (and Rumsfeld and Rice) to ever be looking over their shoulders both inside the United States and beyond. Imagining the horrible nightmares veterans and their families are sure to endure in the years ahead, Bugliosi declares “the least I can do in return is to put the thought in Bush’s mind for the rest of his life that he may someday be held accountable in a criminal courtroom for all the murders he alone is responsible for.” [157]

While Bugliosi exudes righteous indignation at Bush, he also manages scorn for his fellow citizens, as in this passage: “It is terribly, terribly, terribly scary that this nation is so abysmally and profoundly stupid that it could easily be talked into going into a deadly war with a nation that wasn’t our enemy and as much of a threat to us as you or I.” [246] Last week, after a gathering of people to watch an Arabic film at a local college, a student from an Arab country asked a friend of mine why the American people didn’t rise up against Bush when what he was doing was so wrong.

2.

But for me, a German, it is not quite so simple. In the end, all who did not put up resistance were implicated, entangled in the belief systems of “these” Germans, lending them a hand and sharing in the profits. Among those who “went along,” in the broadest sense of the words, were all who practiced the art of looking away, turning a deaf ear, and keeping silent. There has been much quarreling about collective guilt and responsibility, but my basic feeling is, rather, one of ineradicable shame – the shame of belonging to this people, speaking the language of the concentration camp guards, singing the songs that were also sung in the Hitler Youth and the Company of German Girls. That shame does not become superannuated; it must stay alive.

Dorothee Sölle

German theologian

The following are excerpts from Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).

“What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider…. the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think…. for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about…..and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated…..by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us…..

“Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’…..must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing…..Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

“You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone….you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

“That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

“You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father….could never have imagined.”

3.

This would be, first and foremost, a war waged within myself, one where my fears and doubts would come face to face with my conscience, a war to reclaim my humanity and my spiritual freedom. It would also be a war against the system I had come from, a battle against the military machine, the imperial dragon that devours its own soldiers and Iraqi civilians alike for the sake of profits. I had to turn my words into weapons, that speaking out was now my own way to fight.

Camilo Mejia

Iraq war veteran and war resister

Who is going to say the unsayable?

Who is going to press for the prosecution of George W. Bush and Company for murder?

Who is going to stand for law and order?

Who is going to dignify the truth by acting on it?

Who is going to pay practical tribute to Lady Justice?

Who is going to remember what we’ve done in Iraq?

Who is going to patiently recite the facts?

Who is going to tell the tales from the Iraq inferno?

Who is going to repeat these tales to their children?

Who is going to meditate on the photographs?

Who is going to keep alive the shame?

Who is going to bring up issues from Morality 101? Legality 101?

Who is going to count the tears?

Who is going to groan lamentations in the streets?

Who is going to hurl imprecations up at the stately buildings?

Who is going to imagine for even 30 seconds a day George Bush eating chow in a maximum security prison?

Who is going to resist the temptation of silence?

Who is going to risk a little derision, a few guffaws, some insults?

Who is going to haunt the criminals?

Who is going to monitor their comings and goings?

Who is going to envision a ten-year strategy?

Who is going to develop the contingency plans?

Who is going to remove one brick amid the billions of bricks that keep the system together?

Who is going to train citizens in going out of their way to make trouble?

Who is going to insist on follow-up?

Who is going to spend even one minute a day imagining one simple step to take?

Who is going to cultivate optimism of the will?

Who is going to be the courage they wish to see in the world?

Who is going to abandon the sidelines?

Who is going to disturb the cozy peace?

Who is going to stop waiting for someone else to say something first?

Who is going to do something inconsequential about it today and then tomorrow?

Who is going to talk to the guys at the firehouse?

Who is going to bring it up at the neighborhood bar?

Who is going to query the hair stylist?

Who is going to take inspiration from the little mosquito?

Who is going to dare make a scene, raise a ruckus?

Who is going to perform an act greater than Camilo Mejía?

Who is going to remove every single thread from the Emperor’s trembling limbs?

If past behavior is any guide, Elie Wiesel must be having a fit. I’m not thinking here of the great loss to his Foundation from the audacious and criminal pilfering of Bernie Madoff. No, I am guessing he is outraged by the growing frequency, since late December 2008, of comparisons made between Israel’s Operation Molten Lead in Gaza and the Nazi period, specifically the Warsaw Ghetto.

Both intellectual commentators and protesting activists have made linkages between the human horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Gaza Ghetto, as well as between the ghettos’ resistance to their tormenters. On the web and via email a photographic juxtaposition is circulating that documents Nazi oppression of Jews and Israeli oppression of Palestinians. A Vatican official, Cardinal Renato Martino, said that increasingly Gaza resembles a “big concentration camp,” while Israeli officials expressed shock at such an offensive comparison.

Back in 1982 Israel carried out Operation Peace for Galilee, a massive bombing and invasion of Lebanon, resulting in an estimated death toll of 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians. During that summer and early fall, Wiesel was interviewed frequently about Israel’s Lebanon attack. Since the June 1967 war Wiesel had been an enthusiastic apologist for Israeli power; what he found so disturbing that summer was not the excessive militarism of the Israeli state but the excessive analogies of Israel’s critics.

Wiesel’s own outrage was directed at those political and intellectual detractors whom he said “profaned the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust by comparing Beirut with the Warsaw Ghetto … Israel’s soldiers with the Nazis; the military operation in Lebanon with the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis — obscene comparisons, twisted analogies, vile and base and rooted in hate.” For Wiesel, the Holocaust was so singular and unparalleled that it shouldn’t be debased by such scurrilous associations. The Holocaust, he believed, is above politics, existing in a sacred realm that ought to be respected.

Nevertheless, critics of Israel’s assault simultaneously undermined Israel’s assumed monopoly of victim status by pointing to its thousands of Arab victims as well as relativized the Holocaust’s incomparability, a double scandal for Wiesel.

And yet the future Nobel Peace laureate should have known how frequently the Holocaust had been invoked in fierce political struggles in Israel from the beginning. David Ben-Gurion juxtaposed the Nazis and Arab leaders such as Nasser. From the right-wing, Menachem Begin used Nazi analogies to attack Ben-Gurion. Israeli leaders even retroactively “Zionized” the Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighters, seeing in them their own willingness to fight, rather than be passive like so many Diaspora sheep to the slaughter.

So, if Israelis from different camps have passionately invoked a whole range of Holocaust/Nazi images, references, and stories to pursue their political aims, others, not surprisingly, will also use some of those same references and images for their own symbolic and political ends. As Joseph Massad pointed out in his recent article, “The Gaza Ghetto Uprising,” the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising “was always inspirational to the Palestinians. In the heyday of the PLO as a symbol of Palestinian liberation, the organization would lay flower wreathes at the Warsaw Ghetto monument to honor these fallen Jewish heroes.”

There have been Israeli establishment figures who have deplored the use of the Holocaust to validate Israeli violence. One is the longtime Zionist leader Nahum Goldman who, in 1981, asserted that “[t]o use the Holocaust as an excuse for the bombing of Lebanon, as Menachem Begin does, is a kind of ‘Hillul Hashem’ [sacrilege], a banalization of the sacred tragedy of the Shoah [Holocaust], which must not be misused to justify politically doubtful and morally indefensible policies.” Thus, Wiesel opposed banal Holocaust discourse if it was used to criticize Israel’s policies, while Goldman contested that same rhetoric if it was to mobilize support for Israel violence.

More recently, former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg has addressed what he sees as the overwhelming presence of the Holocaust in Israel life. In his book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes, he writes, “We have pulled the Shoah out of its historical context and turned it into a plea and a generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah, and therefore all is allowed—be it fences, sieges, crowns, curfews, food and water deprivation, or unexplained killings. All is permitted because we have been through the Shoah and you will not tell us how to behave.” For the Israeli Jewish people to heal, Burg contends, this Shoah-fixation must come to an end.

In his book, Burg quotes the famous teaching from Rabbi Hillel: “What is hateful to thee, do not do unto thy fellow.”

Who doesn’t hate hearing the relentless barrage of dehumanizing propaganda and stereotypes against oneself and one’s co-religionists … or being forced to become a collaborator against one’s own miserable people?

Who doesn’t hate being systematically deprived of normal life—school, work, leisure—by an occupying power with its arbitrary dictates… or trying to fathom the labyrinthine legalities of the bureaucracy that is methodically chipping away at your dignity and resources?

Who doesn’t hate being publicly humiliated by the arrogant troops of the invading conqueror … or seeing one’s children being terrorized by the enemy’s unpredictable raids and incursions?

Who doesn’t hate having no way to protect oneself and one’s family from the oppressors … or having one’s property and land expropriated by those who never let you forget that you are weak, and they are mighty?

Who doesn’t hate witnessing one’s family, friends and neighbors brutally massacred … or concluding in despair that no one in the world either knows or cares about the abyss one’s whole people is falling into?

Dear Shannon,

I enjoyed our long conversation on Saturday afternoon at 6 North Coffee. I appreciate you taking the time to visit on such a busy weekend. After our chats, the strong impression I am left with is of a person of great integrity and commitment to justice. You want to “walk the walk.” In the idiom of your semester in San Salvador, you want your “praxis” to be real, substantial, and serious.

You were curious about Ralph Nader, whom I mentioned I had been reading recently. My friend Andrew Wimmer and current Social Justice student Dan McGinnis have stimulated me in this deeper consideration of Nader. As I look back on it, I knew his name in my early teens, but I didn’t know who Dorothy Day was until I read her autobiography at 21. Nader was a household name in the Seventies because he was the foremost consumer advocate in the United States.

I assume in your studies in El Salvador you learned about people who made “the preferential option for the poor.” The option wasn’t made only by relatively famous people like Archbishop Romero and Ignacio Ellacuría; it was made by countless poor people in Salvador but also throughout Latin America. I’d like to borrow that expression to describe Nader as having made a preferential option for the American consumer. From his first confrontation with General Motors in the mid-1960s, Nader expressed great suspicion of corporate America’s willingness to seek profits at the expense of individual safety. Through painstaking investigations, he exposed GM’s lethal lack of consideration for auto-drivers.

You surely have come across that conviction of Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Nader seemed to notice problems about which no one else seemed to care. An early example in his life: When he was an undergraduate at Princeton in the 1950s, he wondered if there was any connection between the dead birds appearing on campus and the fact that Princeton’s beautiful trees were sprayed with DDT.

Attracting young people to the nascent consumer movement, Nader and his associates researched corporations and the government itself, seeking to root out injustices and make reforms that were of benefit to large numbers of Americans. Nader’s biographer, Justin Martin, summarized, “Through his efforts, dozens of safety laws have passed, and at times he has shown himself to be as skilled a legislator as any duly elected U.S. senator.” The following are some of the areas in which Nader has made an impact: air bags in cars, seat belts, remuneration when being bumped from a plane, clean air, food safety, lead protections from x-rays in during visits to the dentist, warnings on drug labels, nutritional labeling for foods, automobile crash-testing, cigarette labeling for tar and nicotine, the right to know in your workplace when being exposed to chemicals, among others.

For well over forty years, Nader has played this role of activist, gadfly, and relentless skeptic of corporate power. But he also ran as a presidential candidate in recent years, which has tarnished his reputation among some, but brought his name and mission to younger generations of Americans. His strongest critique is that the two parties, Democratic and Republican, are ensconced with corporate power. In effect, both parties make their own “preferential option for the rich.” Crucial issues are ignored by the entrenched elites of both parties, to the detriment of the U.S. citizenry. Nader believes, “We can have democracy or we can have the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both.”

To better understand the arena in which Nader has operated since the 1960s, I’d recommend reading Joel Bakan’s book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. The heart of the book argues that the corporation’s fundamental nature is psychopathic, at least as based on the Personality Diagnostic Checklist from World Health Organization (ICD-10/Manual of Mental Health Disorders, DSM-IV”). The following characteristics match the intrinsic nature of corporations:

1. Callous unconcern for the feelings of others

2. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships

3. Reckless disregard for the safety of others

4. Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit

5. Incapacity to experience guilt

6. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors

Nader has energetically addressed these characteristics in his battles on behalf of the American population. You can imagine it has earned some vociferous enemies. His critics call attention to his self-righteousness, vindictiveness, and caustic tone. One associate, though, Alan Morrison speaks about Nader with great respect: “I have never known anybody who has more ideas about more things than Ralph. He’s not interested in two or three or five or ten things. He’s interested in a million. He sees things differently from everybody else. He just sees injustices, unfairnesses, and improper ways of handling situations that everyone else just accepts. He has a cosmic view of these things, very broad, but at the same time, he is a person who pays enormous attention to details. I never met anybody who can think so big and think so small at the same time.” Nader acknowledged that his work is like “playing fifty chess games simultaneously.”

You can read Nader’s views on many current issues, including his critique of corporate-based globalization, in The Good Fight: Declare Your Independence and Close the Democracy Gap. Apropos of what Morrison said about Nader’s curiosity and hunger for justice, among the issues he treats in The Good Fight are: corporate takeovers, unraveling neighborhoods, cultural decay, political parties dominated by corporations, horrible prisons, the use of the death penalty, the disproportionate percentage of young black males in jail, the war on drugs, the glass ceiling for women, attacks on civil liberties, lack of proper investment in fraud control, deregulation, tax havens and tax avoidance schemes for the rich, the decreasing amount of taxes paid by corporations, mountain top removal coal-mining, dirty air, toxic water, erasing habitats and the killing off of species, the ruthless class war waged by the rich, union busting, pathetic enforcement of weak labor laws, precarious pensions and dwindling heath care, unsafe workplaces, corporate crime, corporate fraud, savings and loan fraud, corporate homicide, the WTO displacing national sovereignty and human rights, declining schools, inadequate transit systems, lack of nuclear disarmament, lack of low cost of drugs for HIV/AIDS, lethal arms trafficking, hunger, and the smoking industry.

Sounds overwhelming, doesn’t it? But as Nader is fond of saying, “Nothing is possible without an individual. Nothing is perpetual without an institution.”

I also strongly recommend his short book, The Seventeen Traditions, in which he pays homage to his upbringing in the Thirties and Forties in a Lebanese immigrant family in a small town in Connecticut. You know the expression, “Mother, home, and apple pie”? I’d add Ralph Nader to that as a fourth item on that list of what is quintessentially American. As you read his warm and loving accounts of the lessons taught to him by his family and community, you will be reminded of how civic life was once nurtured and might be again.

In addressing his readers, Nader wrote this book to provide “stimuli for your own thoughts and recollections—as an occasion to revisit lessons passed on within your family. Such family traditions challenge the notion that fads, technologies, how-to-manuals, and addictions of modern life have somehow taken the place of the time-tested wisdom fashioned in the crucibles of earlier generations.” Among the traditions he highlights are those of listening, health, history, the kitchen table, independent thinking, and patriotism. At the book’s close, he writes, “I feel sure that raising civically responsible children is most likely to happen in the kind of atmosphere my parents created: one of indirection and delights, strong examples and certain boundaries, solitude and conversation, witness and respect, and, above all, the strength of parental love and sacrifice. All of this cannot help but nourish a sense of dedication to help one’s fellow human beings achieve a better life.” I trust that some of these traditions will be quite familiar to you because of how your parents raised you and your siblings.

There may come a time when you are feeling down, pessimistic and despairing that Americans will throw off our ignorance, ethnocentrism, and laziness to address the problems that face us. At such times, it’s good to remember the people who have gone before us marked by a passion for justice, people who stood up and stood out and paid a price. For me, I would want to remember Ralph Nader in those dark times, for he shows that injustices can be fought. Like the saying attributed to Mohandas Gandhi, Nader’s life is his message. He reminds me of a sentence from George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.”

Last thing I’ll say is a quotation from Nader: “All things start with a sign-up sheet.”

I’ll put in the mail to you Nader’s pamphlet, Civic Arousal, and you can tell me what you think.

Hope to see you again this spring and good luck in the Boston Marathon!

Dr C

P.S. In addition to The Good Fight and The Seventeen Traditions, Justin Martin’s biography, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, is worth exploring, as is the 2006 documentary film, An Unreasonable Man, on Nader’s life and career. It’s available now on DVD, and you can check out a Youtube clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS1c5Ei0eIg.

Last, check out http://nader.org/.

The following is a short reflection, which grew out of a talk on Friday 30 January at Karen House, the Catholic Worker House of Hospitality in Saint Louis.

Four decades ago the courageous Brazilian archbishop Helder Camara wrote The Spiral of Violence in an attempt to better understand the social dynamics of his own — and many other – impoverished Third World countries. Written shortly after the pivotal Latin American Bishops Conference at Medellín in 1968, Camara sketched a typology of societal violence in three escalating stages. First is the stage of institutionalized injustice, exemplified by poverty, high infant mortality, unemployment, exploited workers and farmers, and inadequate health care; in other words, a social situation breeding misery. The second stage is that of revolt against the first stage, as more and more people find the status quo intolerable. Repression is the third stage of violence and is a response to quell the revolt and preserve the status quo deemed all too tolerable by its architects and beneficiaries. Camara’s straight-forward analysis calls to mind John F. Kennedy’s view, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

A now familiar case in point of Camara’s analysis is El Salvador. Long dominated by an economic oligarchy of “fourteen families” who were backed by the military, many Salvadorans – of the Catholic Church and the Marxist left – revolted, in different ways, against the pervasive denials of human dignity throughout Salvadoran society. Accordingly, the “preferential option of the poor” – embraced by Father Rutilio Grande, the Jesuit intellectuals at the University of Central America, and Archbishop Oscar Romero – was seen as “subversive” by the Salvadoran elite and the full fury of state terror was inflicted upon them as well as their numerous, less famous companions.

In his book, Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein states, “Looking back after two decades of study and reflection, I am struck most by how uncomplicated the Israel-Palestine conflict is.” Looking at this conflict in the terms of Camara’s analysis confirms Finkelstein’s observation. If people want to reduce the violence in the region, they must first see that the 41-year-old Israeli occupation is at the root of the spiral of violence. What would we think if our land was appropriated by a foreign military power and the citizens of that nation took over our land? What would we think of that military force monitoring and controlling our movements, interfering with our ability to get to at work, visit a doctor, or even visit our extended family? What would we think of power being exercised over our lives without us having any input or representation? What would we think of the humiliation and intimidation with which the military troops treat our friends and family?

Given the Israeli occupation and domination of the Palestinians and their land, Palestinians have resisted, revolted, and attempted to “shake off” (intifada) the Israeli occupation. Some revolt with arms, others with nonviolent methods. The use of rifles, Qassam rockets, suicide bombing, stone throwing, tax resistance, and peaceful demonstrations are among the ways Palestinians express their resistance to being occupied.

Having shown no indication that it wants to end its control of Palestinian territory, Israel must regularly resort to force to repress the insubordinate and insurgent Palestinians. Among the methods it has historically and recently employed for repressing them: imposing curfews for days or weeks at a time; constructing roadblocks and checkpoints; practicing administrative detention, which means one can be arrested without charge and held for months or years; engaging in torture; building a separation Wall; firing sound bombs; shutting down universities and schools; shooting tear gas; assassinating terrorist suspects with predictable “collateral damage”; deporting “trouble-makers,” both Palestinians and international activists; demolishing homes; using white phosphorus in heavily populated civilian areas; bombing “terrorist” infrastructures; imposing an economic blockade. All of these methods only increase the immiseraiton, marginalization, and powerlessness of the Palestinian people, which drive more to despair and compel others to new levels of fury.

What was the dominant theme of discussion in mainstream circles in December and January regarding Gaza? It was the firing of the rockets and Israel’s unquestioned right to defend itself. Notice, though, that the Hamas rockets represent the second stage of violence, that of revolt. Scant attention was paid the harsh humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank, both of which are the first, primary stage of violence. This systematic, on-going, and generative violence of the Israeli occupation and control is overlooked or downplayed. Notice, too, that Israel’s “response” to the rockets was an especially vicious and devastating three-week campaign of repression and state terrorism, resulting in over 1,300 deaths, including hundreds of children, as well as thousands of wounded. Mosques, schools, homes, buildings, and neighborhoods were bombed and destroyed.

Among U.S. commentators and politicians, ensuring Israel’s security is touted as a major pillar of U.S. Middle East policy. It’s worth remembering that, armed with nuclear weapons and backed by the world’s only superpower, Israel has one of the most powerful military forces in the world.

Among U.S. political leaders and media pundits, there is no evidence of a comparable concern for Palestinian security, because U.S. policy is fixated on the second stage of violence, Palestinians violently resisting Israel’s illegal occupation.

Activist A. J. Muste once advised fellow pacifists that their agenda should be “to denounce the violence on which the present system is based, and all the material and spiritual evil it entails for the masses of [men and women] throughout the world. So long as we are not dealing honestly and adequately with this ninety percent of our problem, there is something ludicrous and perhaps hypocritical about our concern over the ten percent of violence employed by the rebels against oppression.”

For citizens in the United States, then, an important ethical imperative is that if we are disturbed by the violence of Hamas rockets and suicide bombers (and are even occasionally taken aback by the or “disproportionate” reaction of the Israeli authorities), we ought to direct ourselves to addressing the complex of social injustices that constitute Camara’s first stage of violence, namely, the Israeli occupation. The reason is simple: That endemic injustice of one nation dominating and oppressing another people is the root of the unsurprising revolt and the guaranteed, consequent repression. Unless the unjust status quo is significantly transformed in the West Bank and Gaza, violence will continue to escalate, including greater numbers of people in its deadly spiral.

The simple words of Pope Paul VI retain their relevance to the current situation, “If you want peace, work for justice.” If we want justice, end the occupation. If we want to end the occupation, we have to transform the U.S. diplomatic, military, financial, media, and congressional support away from Israel’s occupation and toward freedom and some semblance of justice for the Palestinians.

Think of phrases and words you typically hear in mainstream discussions and media reports on the Israel-Palestine conflict. I recently asked some friends, and they mentioned the following: “fighting terrorism,” “the peace process,” “Israel’s right of self-defense,” and “suicide bombers.” Occasionally, “the Holocaust” will appear in these discussions because of the concern for Israel’s security.

An expression that doesn’t get mentioned in mainstream discussions is a crucial one—al-Nakba, Arabic for “the Catastrophe,” which refers to the events of 1948: with the establishment of the State of Israel, Palestinians experienced a catastrophe, including the destruction of 400 villages and the creation of 750,000 refugees.

Last year at the time of the 60th anniversary of al-Nakba, scholar Joseph Massad noted that the policies of Israel’s on-going confiscation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem constitute the continuance of the catastrophe.

In her searing account of the effects of the Vietnam War on the United States, Winners and Losers, journalist Gloria Emerson writes, “The war began like this: one man died, then another, then one more, then the man next to that man. The dying was one by one.” So, too, for the Palestinians, the calamitous experiences of 1948 and the recent past (the massacres at Shabra and Shatila refugee in Lebanon in 1982, for instance). The Nakba, past and present, is a collective experience made up of millions of stories: the land stolen from one family, the murdered son of another family, the imprisonment of two brothers of a third family. One, then one more, then one more still.

فلسطين

Back in the fall of 2003, I worked in Rafah, Gaza for six weeks with the International Solidarity Movement. Our team had members from Sweden, Canada, and the U.S. One Saturday we took a taxi to Gaza City to meet a family. The father, in his early 40s, had been shot in the back during the first intifada and then was later severely beaten by Israeli soldiers. At that time, the mother miscarried as a result of their home being shot at and tear gassed. The father could not lift heavy weights and had been suffering from the trauma of both incidents; he had long been unemployed, not uncommon in Gaza. He and his wife had eight children.

Their eldest son, Mahmoud, 13 years old, served as the family breadwinner by catching birds and selling them at the souq. The week before we arrived, he was catching birds when Israeli soldiers shot at him and a companion. According to eyewitnesses, the boys were 600 meters from the Green Line, which is the border between Gaza and Israel. Mahmoud’s friend got away with being shot only in the foot but Mahmoud did not get away: He was beaten and kicked so often by the soldiers that their boot prints were left on his face.

The soldiers then drug him close to the Green Line, and shot him a total of seventeen times, in the heart, stomach, and legs. Eye witnesses presume dragging him close to the border provided the soldiers with their rationale for killing him; he could then be considered guilty of menacing Israel.

His mother had identified him at the morgue.

As she was telling us this story, his mother Umm Mahmoud held up the jacket he was wearing that day with the bullet holes in the front and back of the jacket. She told us, “My son was doing his work, catching birds in order to survive.” The father then brought out three cages with various birds Mahmoud had caught. She continued, “Don’t they love children? How can they kill him in cold blood? We love all children, Israeli, Palestinians, all. Why?” That question long lingered as I meditated on the shaheed [martyr] poster of Mahmoud that was taped to their wall.

Shortly thereafter, we went out to buy some food to bring back for the Ramadan fast breaking late in the afternoon. When we returned the family had already made food, so with what we brought, it was a bountiful feast. Having been in Gaza for eight months, Lora, a young American Jew, and I stayed the entire night with them, Laura translating the mother’s Arabic for my benefit. We heard from two uncles who had spent 20 and eight years in Israeli prisons. The next day, the mother told us she so grateful for our presence, the eating and sharing with us helped the family, she said, to forget their pain for a while.

Those experiences that day and night in a home of mourning reminded me of an acquaintance, Catholic nun and medical doctor Ann Manganaro, who worked for years in El Salvador during the civil war. When members of the murderous Atlacatl Battalion would come through her village of Guarjíla, she could see the contempt on their faces for the villagers and she pondered, “Where did such malice come from?”

Seventeen bullets in Mahmoud’s body? Stomping on his face? A thirteen year-old?

فلسطين

What happened in 22 days in December and January in Gaza is an extreme intensification and malicious escalation of the continuing Nakba faced by the Palestinian people. Who knows how many of the million and a half Gazans have experienced such lacerating nightmares as that endured by Umm Mahmoud’s family?

The language of the U.S. and Israeli politicians and diplomats cannot contain the excruciating truths of the past and current Nakbas. These truths are exiled, negated, and denied. The powerful—with their nuclear arsenals and their state of the art military machinery of death—blame the incalculable destruction of Gaza on the decisions of Hamas. The lamentations of the relatives of the victims of White Phosphorus won’t reach those in the White House. The photos of children riddled with shrapnel won’t invite a deeper reflection by those Senators who solemnly profess to stand by Israel. The heart-breaking testimony of the heroic doctors working in impossible conditions won’t manage to stir the consciences of the heads of elite editorial pages across the United States.

In his commentary on the prophet Isaiah, Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan wondered, “Where are the Isaiahs of our day? Could they be found among the outsiders — a prisoner or a widow or an orphan or a homeless one or an ‘illegal alien’ or someone driven mad by the system? The vision often starts among such persons who can cut to the essentials in matters of life and death, of compassion and right judgment, while the rest of us know nothing.”

The Palestinians are outsiders to the American political economy of memory. Their Nakbas are not deemed worthy of attention, remembrance, much less protest and interference in the present.

Even at a distance, will we seek out the testimony of the Palestinian widow, the orphan, the homeless, and those driven mad by the Israeli domination of their people? Will we learn something of the essentials of life and death from the Gazan furnace of affliction?

Or will we be at ease, at peace with diversion, knowing nothing of the real world?

Double standard, noun. Any code or set of principles containing different provisions for one group of people than for another.

Hopes are being raised for President Obama’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. To many, the appointing of George Mitchell as the Special Middle East Envoy seems to augur well, given Mr. Mitchell’s previous negotiations in the Northern Ireland conflict. President Obama acknowledged the difficulties of reaching an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, but said, “That’s why we’ve got George Mitchell going there. This is somebody with extraordinary patience as well as extraordinary skill, and that’s what’s going to be necessary.”

Undoubtedly, these traits and skills are necessary, but certainly not sufficient. For there to be a breakthrough, Mr. Mitchell is going to have to terminate a long-standing practice of U.S policy in the Middle East, which is the adherence to a strict double-standard.

For example, prepare yourself to hear for the thousandth time how it is absolutely central for Hamas to make good on three issues: recognize Israel, renounce all violence, and adhere to previous agreements.

Who could disagree with these wonderful goals?

Yet, will Mr. Mitchell insist (not merely ask) that Israel also renounce violence? If so, will that renunciation include the fundamental violence of the Israel occupation of the West Bank and the violence of the embargo and the creation of Gaza as an open-air prison (and, now, morgue)? Will the U.S. envoy call for others in the international community to work to prevent Israel from securing more weapons, which aren’t smuggled in through tunnels, but arrive in broad daylight at Israeli ports?

Will Mr. Mitchell’s research assistants provide him with a single instance of any Israeli Prime Minister who has recognized any Palestinian right to exist on the land they have cultivated for centuries?

Will the Special Envoy demand that Israel, like Hamas, abide by previous agreements or, more broadly, international law? Like the Geneva Conventions which prohibit an occupying power from moving its population into occupied territory?

These questions cut to the heart of the matter: How can one reasonably expect our government to “broker” a peace settlement, when the United States has such a lopsided relationship to one of the antagonists? Consider the arms deals, the diplomatic support in the U.N., and the year-after-year munificence lavished on the Jewish state.

Here’s a thought experiment: Given the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, how many U.S. Senators do you think would issue a public statement (however belated) supporting the Palestinians’ right to self-defense?

As La Rochefoucauld remarked, “Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” In U.S. policy in the Middle East (a region so indispensable because of the oil resources), double standards are standard operating procedure. The U.S. cloaks its actions and policies in the most noble and moralistic rhetoric, yet realpolitik is the way, the truth, and the life.

Remember: Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds did not arouse the Reagan Administration’s indignation; that indignation was only expressible years later when, in his rhetorical build-up to invasion, George W. Bush repeated ad nauseum, “He gassed his own people!”

Remember: The U.S. is dead set against Iran having a nuclear weapons program. Indeed, the thought of Iran having nuclear bombs is nerve-wracking, but the thought of anyone having nuclear weapons ought to be similarly nerve-wracking. When have you heard a single comment from a U.S. politician critical of Israel’s existing nuclear weapons arsenal? It’s regularly asserted that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East; it’s also the only nuclear power. The U.S. isn’t concerned about that some nation has nuclear weapons per se; it’s which nation has them.

Remember: The U.S. justified its invasion of Iraq because the Iraqi people deserved freedom and democracy, which we, as U.S. citizens, are to understand as worthwhile objectives. Notice, though: There has been no invasion of Saudi Arabia to liberate those people under the thumb of a brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime.

Remember: In recent years, U.S. military officials and politicians have expressed outrage that a foreign political power—Iran—dares to interfere with Iraq’s progress to stability and democracy. Of course, the foreign power that is the U.S. isn’t meddling—it’s helping.

Many people outside U.S. borders understand quite clearly that the U.S. government and corporations have long played a crucial role in assisting Israel in its dispossession and torment of the Palestinian people. They can also see the pertinence to the U.S. of Orwell’s observation, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.”

The horrors in Gaza are indefensible. We have to undermine the righteous defense of these horrors and increase the number of people in our own society who can see the true workings of the United States in the Middle East. We can start by asking our friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors, clergy, teachers, and media workers: Should we conduct our public affairs by a single standard based on human rights and international law? Or is the United States entitled to a double standard? Does might make right? Are we above the law?

How the Bush Administration answered these questions is painfully clear. Mr. Mitchell, President Obama, and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton are soon to reveal their answer.

Cowardice asks the question – is it safe? Expediency asks the question – is it politic? Vanity asks the question – is it popular? But conscience asks the question – is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sociologists have identified two traditions in what they call the American civil religion: The Priestly emphasizes superior morality and singular calling of American power, while the Prophetic does not hesitate to criticize power for violating its ideals. One example of the Priestly tradition in U.S. history is the theory and practice of Manifest Destiny in the 19th century, while an example of the Prophetic tradition is the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

The national calendar provides an unusual juxtaposition for a consideration of these two traditions, amounting to two distinct options for the American future. Monday Americans remember and celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King and on Tuesday witness the inauguration of Barack Obama.

What’s striking is that Dr. King, who once referred to his own United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” has been appropriated into the national pantheon. King has been honored with this holiday on the third Monday of January, while plans move forward for establishing a Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, Inc., to be located on the National Mall.

Such a foundation needs generous donors and they have been responding to the call. For example, in summer 2008, the Boeing Company gave a million dollars to this project to further the memory of Dr. King’s work. Boeing president James Bell said, “on behalf of Boeing and its employees, I am proud to announce this gift with the sincere hope that, through this Memorial, the power of Dr. King’s example will endure and become a reality in our lifetime. Striving to create a better future by bringing people together, enabling communication and protecting peace is what inspires our 160,000 employees every day. We are tremendously honored to support the Memorial as an enduring reminder of Dr. King’s legacy of inclusion, hope and freedom.”

It may be that Mr. Bell has not yet studied Dr. King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam” from 1967. A stirring indictment of U.S. policy, King states therein, “A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Or, possibly, Mr. Bell has read the speech but no matter. Even Boeing can cite Dr. King for its purpose.

In her study, America, Amerikkka, U.S. theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether comments, “[American leaders] both pursue murderous policies motivated by that they see as American self-interest and also manage to sincerely believe that they are serving the best interests of these colonized and exploited people as well. Few American politicians are pure hypocrites who know that what they say to justify their policies has little to do with what they are doing. Most politicians are deeply self-deluded by their own rhetoric. Indeed, to combine being both practitioners of realpolitik and also self-deluded believers in the rhetoric of America’s messianic role is the basic requirement of an effective American politician.

On Tuesday Mr. Obama officially begins his presidential work of offering stirring rhetoric and pursuing American self-interest. During the campaign, Mr. Obama’s mantra-like oratory on change and hope supposedly indicated his distance from the horrors of these last eight years of Republican rule. Yet, it may be useful to keep in mind what a character said in Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “Change everything just a little so as to keep everything exactly the same.” Quote Dr. King and support Israel. Call for more diplomacy and say no option is off the table. Pull back from Iraq and go full-throttle in Afghanistan. Acknowledge the mistakes (not crimes) of your predecessors and be relentless in pursuing victory in the Global War on Terror. Call for citizen sacrifice but don’t ask too much of the corporations.

The King Holiday and the Obama inauguration can lead us to consider: With whom and what do we Americans identify, past and present: the priestly or the prophetic lineage of our history?

The abolitionists or the defenders of the slavery status quo?

The Robber Barons or Nader’s Raiders?

Boeing’s sale of weapons to Israel for its Gaza bombing or Hedy Epstein, Paul Larudee and the Free Gaza Movement?

The neoconservatives who planned and plotted the invasion of Iraq for reasons of WMD, democracy, and liberation (and oil and hegemony) or the veterans who return from Iraq to speak the truth of the brutal killing of civilians?

Journalist Ida B. Wells or the respectable city fathers and citizens who applauded lynching?

Cardinal Spellman who blessed the U.S. invaders of Vietnam or Daniel Berrigan who burned draft files?

The nationally approved iconic King on the National Mall or the King who in his last days stood with the Memphis sanitation workers?

An accommodation to Obama’s new and improved American Exceptionalism or a commitment to a growing, permanent opposition of conscience?

Under review

Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes—Inside the Army’s Secret Archive of Investigations (New York: Basic Books, 2008) and Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian, Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians (New York: Nation Books, 2008).

“[U.S. military forces] raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war….” – Vietnam Veteran John Kerry

“I remember my unit was coming along this elevated overpass. And this kid is in the trash pile below, pulls out an AK-47 and just decides he’s going to start shooting. And you gotta understand… when you have spent nine months in a war zone, where no one—every time you’ve been shot at, you’ve never seen the person shooting at you, and you could never shoot back. He’s some guy, some fourteen-year-old kid with an AK-47, decides he’s going to start shooting at this convoy. It was the most obscene thing you’ve ever seen. Every person got out and opened fire on this kid. Using the biggest weapons we could find, we ripped him to shreds…. Everyone was so happy, like this released that they finally killed an insurgent. Then when we got there, they realized it was just a little kid. And I know that really fucked up a lot of people in the head….They’d show all the pictures and some people were really happy, like, “Oh, look what we did.’ And other people were like, ‘I don’t want to see that ever again.’” – Iraq Veteran. Patrick Campbell

“Support the troops.” How many times in the last seven years have you heard or seen this imperative? Its frequency may be due to its mindless lack of specificity. With the dominance of the Bush Administration’s viewpoint in the media during this “global war on terror,” “support the troops” easily functioned as “support the Bush Administration.” Don’t question authority.

One Iraq war veteran, Aidan Delgado offered a more specific challenge to those fond of repeating, mantra-like, support the troops: “Honor the veterans by listening to what they really have to say.” Of course, veterans have all kinds of things to say as well as all kinds of things they are unable and unwilling to say. Several of my students over the years have spoken about a relative who was in the Vietnam War, and the young people have never heard a word from their uncle or father about their war-time experiences. It’s obvious, too, that they know not even to ask a question of their elders.

Two recent books provide an opportunity for us to consider veterans who want to communicate to us about the crimes of war that are barely acknowledged in the mainstream press. Deborah Nelson’s The War Behind Me and Laila al-Arian and Chris Hedges’s Collateral Damage examine U.S. soldiers who’ve been willing to confront the U.S. military’s contempt for civilian life in Vietnam and Iraq. A few hours with these two succinct and revelatory volumes may better enable us to understand what has happened in both Vietnam and Iraq and so stimulate our critical thinking and responsible action.

Deborah Nelson conducted interviews with a number of Vietnam veterans whose stories she initially found in a recently declassified Army archive of war crimes investigations about U.S. troops in Vietnam. Composed of letters from soldiers, official investigations, and statistical reports, the archive provided ample, official confirmation of what soldiers had long been desperate to reveal to those high in the chain of command. Nelson excerpts amply from these documents as well as from recent interviews with the soldiers, and some of the higher-ups responsible for the policies that horrified these soldiers.

Nelson offers the following pointed rationale for her book: “It’s a place for [veterans] to tell their stories again, now with the full force of the army’s own investigation findings behind them. Years ago, many of them hoped their accounts would pressure the Pentagon to stop ‘all the wrong killing,’ as a soldier wrote in a private letter to then army chief of staff William C. Westmoreland in 1970. The war ended without an accounting or acknowledgement of the war crimes they witnessed. Their retelling comes at an equally important time when, having failed to address the past, we’re destined to repeat it.” [4-5]

The very nature of U.S. strategy in South Vietnam was to increase the “body count” of the enemy, the “Viet Cong” (National Liberation Front). This necessitated neutralizing the value of the civilian population to the guerilla fighters, which required uprooting villagers and moving them to “strategic hamlets” behind barbed wire. Once removed, the areas around their villages became “free-fire zones,” which allowed the U.S. to bomb or shoot anything that moved, including civilians who went back seeking food or to be near where their ancestors were buried. Vietnam veteran Myron Ambeau observed, “The firefighting you could handle. It’s all that other stuff that plays on your mind. We just basically search and destroy with no rhyme or reason….How in the hell do you go in there, completely destroy everything they have, beat up their family members, rape their wives, and burn down their houses?” [37]

Some older Americans will be able to link the name My Lai with U.S. atrocity in Vietnam. One “Anonymous Soldier” had written persistently to U.S. commanders, asserting that the My Lai massacre of March 1968 wasn’t unique: “In case you don’t think I mean lots of Vietnamese got killed this way, I can give you some idea how many. A batalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 batalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy. (One batalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay each month for over a year.” [78]

Dead civilians were counted as “V.C.” and so increased the body count, said quantification facilitating officer advancement and perks for the enthusiastic soldiers. In one case, a U.S. soldier eager to win a competition of the most kills was convicted on unpremeditated murder, but only received less pay and demotion in rank. He was soon able to get another tour in Vietnam. One of Nelson’s interviewees, Robert Stemme, Jr., told her, “I just couldn’t believe that went away after what happened to those people. I was really kind of shocked.” Nelson goes on to write, “The wrist slap reflected the ‘mere gook rule,’ [Stemme] says. U.S. soldiers learned in basic training to dehumanize the enemy and carried the lesson to its logical conclusion in the field. So when Army leaders pressured the men at LZ English [a support area and camp] to produce more bodies and intelligence, the ‘mere gook’ rule provided an easy solution.” [59]

Some defenses of the Vietnam War view claim that the war was lost because of a cantankerous, anti-military media, or the half-hearted timidity of the politicians, who did not allow the military to use all the power at its disposal. Yet, Vietnamese themselves used words like “extermination” for what the U.S. military was doing in the 1960s. Consider two perspectives contrary to the view that the U.S. might have won if allowed to use its full might. The first is James Henry, one of the whistle blowers interviewed by Nelson: “All we wanted to do is survive this and get out. Nobody wanted to quit. Everybody wanted to do their job. When we were told to attack, we did. It was a fight. But it was pretty obvious that we weren’t going to accomplish what the government wanted us to accomplish, especially the way we were going about it. I mean, going around killing all the people that we’re supposed to be saving isn’t going to work. If they weren’t enemies before we got there, they were enemies after we got there.” A second view is that of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: “The more American troops sent to Vietnam, the more the anti-American campaign led by the NLF becomes successful. Anger and hatred rise in the hearts of the peasants as they see their villages burned, their compatriots killed, their houses destroyed. Pictures showing NLF soldiers with arms tied, followed by American soldiers holding guns with bayonets, make people think of the Indochina war between the French and the Viet Minh and cause pain even to the anti-Communist Vietnamese.” [from Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, 63-64]

As more and more soldiers began to complain of systematic disregard for Vietnamese civilian life, the Army grew concerned. It was obligated to investigate each claim of a war crime, but, like President Richard Nixon, military officials weren’t interested in seeing these crimes make the front page of the nation’s newspapers. Damage control mode kicked into high gear, which tried to minimize what happened, or to discredit the soldiers who became increasingly outspoken.

There has yet to be an honest national reckoning with the crimes the United States committed in Indochina. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission needs to take place here. If such were to happen, the testimony revealed in Nelson’s book would surely be crucial evidence in the process of facing the gruesome truth of what really happened and who was ultimately responsible. Let James Henry have the last word: “I would guess that there hundreds if not thousands of allegations of various abuses. Not stealing bananas, but serious abuses. The army could not possibly bring all of these problems out into the open, (which court martial trials would do) without admitting that they had failed in every aspect of training, tactics, and command of the troops in Viet Nam and the ultimate responsibility and the corruption went from the rice paddies, all the way to the Pentagon.” [185-186]

&&&

One striking difference between the U.S occupation of Iraq and the U.S. occupation of South Vietnam is that in the latter case, U.S. commanders were obsessed with body counts—the greater the number of “Viet Cong” killed, the closer we were to “victory.” Yet, General Tommy Franks said after the invasion of Iraq, “We don’t do body counts.” When he declared “mission accomplished” in May 2003, President Bush also said, “With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war, yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent…” In Collateral Damage Hedges and al-Arian focus principally on those modes of a military occupation that cause harm and death to innocent civilians: convoys, checkpoints, raids, and detentions. By understanding the dynamics of these phenomena, we can detect an operative “mere haji rule” in Iraq. The authors state, “The word ‘haji’ in the Muslim world is a term of respect and denotes someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. But it is used by American troops as a slur, taking the place of ‘gook’ in Vietnam or ‘raghead’ in Afghanistan. The dehumanization of the Iraqis, the implicit assumption that they were less than human, made it easier to cope with abuse and killing, to deny the humanity of those standing on the wrong end of the conflict.” [94]

According to the authors, “conveys are the arteries that sustain the occupation. They ferry water, mail, maintenance parts, sewage, food, and fuel to bases across Iraq.” [9] But to the Iraqis, they are seen as “freight trains of death.” To supply the troops, convoys have to travel great distances and need protection. Drivers are therefore instructed by commanders never to stop because that puts the convoy and its protectors at risk of insurgent attack. The human consequences: if Iraqis of whatever age, including children, are seen as an impediment to the plan to go smoothly from point A to point B, then the Iraqis will be run over, or shot, no matter what. Sergeant Geoffrey Millard said, “No one ever questioned if someone skipped the step [of firing a warning shot] and just fired directly into the vehicle, because it’s a split-second decision. And you err on the side of life, meaning your life and not the life of the person in the vehicle.” [16] Sergeant Kelly Dougherty commented, “It was just like, the mentality of my squad leader was like, Oh, we have to kill them over here so I don’t have to kill them back in Colorado. He just seemed to view every Iraqi as a potential terrorist.” [26] National Guardsman Fernando Braga reported: “[The lieutenant] said the reason was that we shouldn’t hesitate [to run over children] because of the way they would treat their children. They don’t value human life like we do and they don’t share our same Western values.” [13]

The authors describe the checkpoint system as follows: “The U.S. military has checkpoints dotted across Iraq. They are designed to restrict the flow of traffic, make travel by insurgents difficult on roads, and prevent the shipment of weapons and explosives. These checkpoints serve as safety valves, used by the occupation troops to protect neighborhoods, fortified compounds, and city streets from attack. But the checkpoints are deadly for civilians.” [30] Due to the ignorance of the Iraqi civilian drivers, or to the short temper of the U.S soldiers, a checkpoint is a calamity waiting to happen. A family in a car approaches and the driver is neither able to read the minds of the soldiers positioned many meters away nor understand their language, the U.S. modus operandi is predictable: Shoot first, ask questions later. Sergeant Dougherty admitted, “You start looking at everyone as a criminal…. Is this the car that’s going to try to run into me? Is this the car that has explosives in it? Or is this just someone who’s confused?” [36] Sergeant Ben Flanders recollected, “The enemy can come from any direction. They can come in any form, whether it’s a pregnant woman who blows herself up on soldiers or it’s this car just sitting idly on the side of the road.” [37] Spc. Patrick Resta stated, “I even specifically remember being told that it was better to kill them than to have somebody be wounded and still alive.” [41] The U.S. military does not keep statistics of civilians killed at checkpoints.

Raids are frequently undertaken to identify and arrest the insurgents. The raids typically take place from midnight to 4 or 5 a.m. These are incursions into domestic Iraqi lives, disruptive, destructive, and tending to the dehumanizing. Sergeant John Bruhns pointed out, “And if you find something, then you’ll detain him. If not, you’ll say, ‘Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.’ So you’ve just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you’ve destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes. [53-54] Staff Sergeant T.J. Westphal contended: “Most of the people were terrified. You could see it in their eyes. We knew that this was not the way to win the hearts and minds. You don’t come in the middle of the night and harass people and then expect them to give you flowers the next day.” [70] As with U.S. “pacification” efforts that uprooted Vietnamese civilians, the raids, according to some of the interviewees, were seen as counterproductive, as they led outraged Iraqis to become opposed to the U.S. occupation.

Detentions have achieved certain notoriety in the U.S. as increasing attention has been paid to the practice of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Hedges and al-Arian state the gravity of the problem: “Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been incarcerated in prisons and detention facilities in Iraq. The numbers range from 60,000 to 120,000, according to military officials. Some prisoners have languished for months, even years, in Iraqi prisons. Families are forced to navigate a dysfunctional bureaucracy to find and plead for the release of their relatives.” [72] Spc. Resta’s supervisor claimed, “The Geneva Conventions don’t exist at all in Iraq, and that’s in writing if you want to see it.” Resta had the gumption to ask to see it in writing, but the commander refused. Resta realized that he could be obedient and relent or risk a court-martial. Power trips by the soldiers and dehumanization of the Iraqis went hand in hand.

The last chapter, “Hearts and Minds,” alludes to President Lyndon Johnson’s “Hearts and Minds” speech. To win in Vietnam required military success and political success, the latter involving “winning over the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.” Yet the U.S. was doomed in Vietnam, because napalm, Agent Orange, search and destroy, torture, mass murder, and strategic hamlets/concentration camps were guaranteed to be great recruiting for the resistance, as Thich Nhat Hanh observed in 1967. The continued U.S. domination of Iraq is guaranteed to generate outrage, bitterness, leading some to take up arms (or to throw shoes at Bush), leading others to recall, in a hard to fathom nostalgia, the good old days under Saddam Hussein.

Many have felt a sense of relief at Barak Obama’s 2008 election victory, as well as the impending supposed handing over of power from the U.S. to Iraqis. Yet, these two books ought to give pause. 30,000 more troops going to Afghanistan? Won’t they have to institute more checkpoints there? Won’t these troops undertake hundreds of nocturnal raids, seeking Taliban terrorists? Won’t there be a proliferation of convoys, leading to further “collateral damage” of Afghan civilians, added to those already killed while celebrating at their weddings by U.S. aerial bombings? Won’t more Afghanis and other nationals be swept up in raids and pressured to confess via means Americans have found abhorrent?

In Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the United States created an incalculable disaster for the people of these countries. The damage and destruction of human life and society has continued in Iraq and is soon to accelerate in Afghanistan. But veterans ranging in age from their mid-20s to their mid-60s, continue to speak out about the human costs of U.S. arrogance and belligerence past and present. In his communication to superiors when the Vietnam war was a daily topic of conversation in the United States, James Henry said, “My motivation can be stated quite briefly: I want the murder of Vietnamese stopped and I want the military to stop putting Americans in the position of becoming murderers.” [16]

How many nanoseconds did it take your hasbara specialists to transform the “Gaza Massacre” into a heroic tale of self-defense against the Hamas terrorists?

How many percentage points will this operation in Gaza gain your side in the up-coming election?

This week how many pairs of terrified Arab eyes do you think looked upon the substantial results—outside the morgues, on the streets, in the hospitals—of the opening salvos from the IDF?

This week how many of your Jewish citizens will have good night’s sleep, as they feel more secure due to your bold and lucid leadership?

How many individual pieces of shrapnel do you estimate your F-16s and Apache gunships have skillfully generated since the 2005 disengagement from Gaza?

How many Palestinian bodies (subcategories including head, torso, limbs, etc.) have the aforementioned shrapnel penetrated?

How many poems and essays will be written in Israeli schools in the next month, praising the IDF for its courageous bombing from the skies?

In the last six months, how many encouraging phone calls did you received from European leaders concerned about your country’s safety?

How many reassuring syllables have you heard from Condoleezza Rice in the month of December?

How many Merkava tanks do you have in good working order?

How many total bullet holes have you made in all the Swiss cheese homes and buildings in Rafah?

How many stones have the Palestinians thrown at your soldiers in 2008?

How many times a month do you muse, “If only the Arabs would just realize, ‘There is no God but Israel!’”?

How many souvenir cluster bombs did you leave behind in Lebanon?

How many inobservant Lebanese have been affected by these cluster bombs? Are you planning a comparable gift for the Gazans?

How many American evangelists would you be willing to fly over to say a blessing and a prayer before your pilots go off on their next round of duty over Gaza?

How many constructive ways of spending time can you recommend to the moderate Arabs in Gaza, given the unemployment rate?

I assume you keep meticulous records: goals and objectives, names and numbers, places and dates, facts and figures, charts and graphs.

Since September 2000, keeping to Gaza now, how many buildings have you burned, detonated, bulldozed and made unfit for the terrorists to use?

How many times have you been inspired by the words of Ben-Gurion: “Destroy a neighborhood, and you begin to make an impression!”?

How many hours in legislative meetings do you think it will take to get passed a law banning public utterance of the words “apartheid” and “Nakba”?

Will you give an informed guess of how many times this last year your citizens have yelled or chanted “Death to the Arabs!” and “Gas the Arabs!”?

How many terrorists masquerading as children under the age of 16 have your snipers expertly shot dead?

How many millions of employment hours have been lost in the last decade because of your restrained curfews on Palestinian towns?

How many major ghettos and minor ghettos have you created because the Arabs left you no other choice?

In the past three years, how many refugees from Darfur have you warmly welcomed to the Jewish state?

How many tons of Palestinian produce have, alas, rotted because of your inarguable security considerations and checkpoint procedures?

How many mutually satisfying contracts have you made with Motorola? With Caterpillar? With Dupont? With Boeing? Is business really booming?

How many pounds do you think the Gazan population has lost due to the solicitous diet encouraged by Israel’s measured policies? Ten million, maybe? Or is this estimate way off?

On average, how many times a month in meetings is the Shoah invoked for whatever strategic plan is being considered?

Speaking of which, how many books have you read on the Warsaw Ghetto?

How many employment positions have been created for your lawyers who work tirelessly to insure that what is happening on the ground is unquestionably legal?

How many individual Arab bones have your soldiers and settlers broken, both in official and unofficial intifadas?

How many pieces of delicious candy have your soldiers cheerfully given to Arab children?

How many doors—over the last four decades, now—have your soldiers kicked down in Arab homes?

How many men, women, and children have been administratively detained for the possible crime of thinking about resisting your rule?

How many kilometers have your talented engineers designed for highways and roads on which Jews can enjoy each other’s company?

Seriously now, how many nuclear warheads do you presently have? Wouldn’t you feel better if you could just flaunt it?

How many Spinozas has your training regimen turned into Sabras?

How many cumulative volts of electricity have been applied to (actual and potential) Palestinian terrorists in the present millennium?

How many hours of happiness for all concerned have been enjoyed since Israel’s security wall was built?

How many plucky Jewish colonists are you currently and munificently subsidizing in Judea and Samaria?

How many times since 1968 have your citizens spat at the mere mention of the name of Yeshayahu Leibowitz?

How many of Alan Dershowitz’s books have been translated into Hebrew? How many copies have been sold?

How many years have all your refuseniks and conscientious objectors spent in your hospitable jails?

How many days in prison have been spent by your soldiers convicted of killing Palestinian civilians?

How many bona fide self-hating Jews live in Tel Aviv?

Surely, somewhere there is an Office of Statistics. These questions must have answers.

How many relatives of suicide bombers have you had to teach a memorable lesson?

Tell me (it will be our little secret), how many times have you and your ministers bragged behind closed doors that you can get the Americans to do anything you want?

How many didactic tutorials have IDF troops given to suspect Arab fathers with his family members looking on?

How many Einsteins would it take to make sense of the permit system in use in the West Bank?

How may lies were told about Yusuf Q, who, without having done anything wrong, was arrested one fine morning?

How many cubic meters of water in the territories have ended up beautifying your colonies?

How many unimpeachable trials have you held in courtrooms in the Arab territories?

How many useful confessions from Arab prisoners have your investigative methods produced?

How many Arab collaborators have you induced or seduced to spy for you?

How many U.N. resolutions condemning your policies have you been able to serenely ignore?

How many dunums of land have your forces painstakingly appropriated for the greater glory of Eretz Israel since 1967?

How many suspicious Palestinian trees (olive, orange, almond, whatever) have you uprooted, destroyed, carried off and/or interrogated since 1967?

How many visits did your diplomats make to South Africa during the good old days before Mandela was released? How many deals were made?

How many times have your commanders sincerely averred, “We will investigate”?

If Moshe Dayan were alive, how many questions about strategy and tactics would you ask him?

How many Israeli towns and villages had Arabic names 65 years ago?

How many Palestinian villages did the Hagana and the IDF raze to the ground?

Since 1948 how many Palestinians were made orphans because of Israel’s consistently defensive actions?

How many miles high would go the stack of de-classified and still classified documents detailing Zionist and Israeli plans to acquire as much land as possible, adequate for the needs and happiness of the Jewish people?

How many of your predecessors before they became Prime Minister refused to be squeamish and carried out the hard but necessary tactics that ultimately served the national cause?

All the data must be in some super-macro-mega computer. How many engineers, bureaucrats, and functionaries are needed to use said computer?

How many non-Jewish roads must a Palestinian walk down, before you call him a man?

How many of your embassies and consulates do you estimate will be the scene of protests in the weeks and months ahead?

How many hearts and minds in the USA do you anticipate you’ve brought over to your embattled side as a result of the attacks on Hamas?

How many United States Senators have you yet to persuade to be 100% supportive of your government?

How many Gazans (women and men) up and down the Strip do you think your current intervention has convinced to throw out Hamas (round up to the nearest 10,000)?

How many nations in the global community understand that Israel truly and deeply wants peace?

How many seconds would it take for you to explain the Torah to me, while I stand on one foot?

So many questions.

So many particulars.

Upon beginning Martha Hess’s, Then the Americans Came: Voices from Vietnam, I was immediately reminded of my late wife Mev Puleo who embarked on a similar project at about the same time as Hess. Mev was determined to go to Brazil and interview and photograph Brazilian Christians who had become committed to the “preferential option for the poor.” She wanted to know how they changed, and what message they had for her own people back in the United States. By circulating Brazilians’ testimonies in her book The Struggle Is One, Mev hoped readers might ponder more seriously the meaning of solidarity and extend themselves on behalf of others suffering injustice.

In 1990 and 1991, Martha Hess traveled and interviewed men and women all over Vietnam. She went as a receptive American to hear and record the Vietnamese people respond to her earnest question, “What was the war like for you?” (The Vietnamese refer to that period as “the American War.”) Joining the battle against amnesia and indifference, Hess wanted to bring back these testimonies to her fellow citizens. Her rationale: “Because of racism and humiliation, Vietnam remains a faceless nation to Americans and the extent of its people’s suffering at our hands in unknown. We must acknowledge our shame and accept responsibility for the actions of our government, so that the next time we can stand up and say no. We demand no less from the Germans. We have sought absolution from our war against the Vietnamese in other wars, on other faceless person.” [14] Indeed, with victory in America’s first gulf War, President George H. W. Bush stated, “the specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”

I once read somewhere that members of Jonah House, the anti-nuclear resistance community in Baltimore, would each month watch a documentary on the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They subjected themselves to this discipline to be ever mindful of what these weapons can do, so as to continue their work of raising an outcry against U.S. policies. It would be comparably good for American citizens to read and ponder Hess’s interviews once a year, in the hopes that it may remind us not only to remember the lessons of Vietnam but to interfere with our current wars. What we may have forgotten (or, if we are young, never knew) was the both the scale of barbarity of the U.S. attack on South Vietnam (our ally, whom we were supposedly “protecting” from the Communists) and the devastation caused by the relentless bombing of the north. In her book on Brazil, Mev wanted her readers to read the Brazilians’ own voices as they told their stories of conversion and engagement. In the same spirit, I share the following passages to give you an idea of what some Vietnamese people expressed to Martha Hess in the early 1990s.

***

“I wanted to tell you something that I saw myself and of my own loss, but the war was not just about me. It was the whole country. We all lived with great difficulties and suffering. The poverty and hard conditions that still exist today are because of the war. You are an American woman. You want to know about the war in Vietnam and bring the crimes of the U.S. before the U.S. public, and I thank you for that. Not only the Vietnamese people or Vietnamese women, but all people in the world hate war. So who starts wars?” [Mrs. Phung Thi Tai, 50-51]

***

“I don’t hate Americans. I hate the policy of invading other countries. And the debt, the distribution from the Paris Agreements, why haven’t they given us anything? We are very poor because of the war. The Americans don’t see how they destroyed everything, and they won’t pay their debt. I listen to the radio and hear how the Americans still have an embargo on our economy, and have no diplomatic relations with us. That’s not right.

“This is the Vietnamese people’s land. Why did the Americans come to destroy us and make war, and why don’t they help now to rebuild our country? I am a farmer, I stay here. And I ask a simple question. Why did the Americans come here to destroy homes and kill people? And I ask you, who invaded who? If Vietnam decided to invade America they would have to send troops—the distance is far, thousands of kilometers. I ask you, if I came to your land to destroy and burn your houses, how would you feel? So I say, when the Americans came here to fight and destroy the Vietnamese people, they were wrong. The Vietnamese were not wrong to defend their land. And when the Americans lost the war, why didn’t they want to have relations with us?

“The American people didn’t make the mistake, it was the government. American people and Vietnamese people are alike, we work in the fields, we till the land. We have blood, we have hair, we have skin. Since we are all the same, we should be friends. Johnson and Nixon should ask pardon of the Vietnamese people and help to restore our country, as the Paris Agreements say.

“I live in this temple now, close to the spirits, so I don’t know anything.” [Mr. Cau Ngoc Xuan, 43-44]

***

“The war ended fifteen years ago in victory for our people, but the country remains devastated. We say that victory cannot match our suffering. After all, the United States sent their troops over here with the intent to destroy all, burn all, and kill all. They destroyed the land.

“In the South, the Americans burned villages and herded the women and children into camps surrounded by barbed wire. South Vietnam because an enormous prison. Many children couldn’t go to school, people weren’t free to work their land. They killed brutally, indiscriminately. You remember the massacre at My Lai, in Quang Ngai province. There were many other villages where the people were massacred. My Lai was only the worst.

“Women everywhere were raped, killed, arrested, beaten. Pregnant women’s bellies were cut open and their unborn babies thrown into burning houses. Thousands of women were imprisoned. Some were suspected V.C., some were real fighters, many were just ordinary people who were arrested and jailed for no reason. There were prisons all over the South. There were central prisons and provincial prisons and district prisons. Mothers with babies and pregnant women were arrested. They arrested old people and children and even handicapped people. I remember in Con Son prison there was an old blind woman, Mrs. Sau. She was kept in a tiger cage, with five or six people, all in a cage, covered by iron poles.” [Mrs. Truong My Hoa, 84]

***

“The Americans started the war, and when they knew they were losing they kept on killing, until they were defeated. But they didn’t all want war in Vietnam. There were American soldiers who resisted, who agreed with the massive anti-war demonstrations in their homeland. There were even some, for instance, who would ignore the secret shelters in the villages. They didn’t want to stay in Vietnam and they didn’t want to die in Vietnam, they wanted to go back to America.

“But most of them were barbarous. The crimes of the United States are on our minds, even now. Our losses were inconceivable. Ten people in my family were killed by the Americans and the puppet government. They rounded up families that had relatives in the revolutionary forces. What we remember most is the barbarity. They burned houses, they stole, they beat people, and they killed them. Thousands and thousands of people were injured, especially women. I can tell you, many women are now paralyzed, they have half a body, because they were beaten and tortured by the Americans. They tortured women with electricity. They did many, many terrible things.

“We want peace so that we can rebuild our country. We lost so much in the war. What can the Americans, who are responsible for so much loss, do for my nation? We try to do away with the past and to shake hands. We try not to hate, but it’s been a long hatred now.” [Mr. Hoang Lanh, 177]

***

“The American government asks for missing bones in Vietnam, and they say we have to help find them. Why don’t they talk to the women who told you how they lost their husbands, how they lost their brothers, how they lost their children at the front and never saw their bones? Why should we help them? They have the right to come to Vietnam and start a war, but we have no right to defend our country? They can tell the world they are right, but it’s not true. So why should we help the Americans find their bones? But we do that for humanity.” [Mr. Nguyen Van Tuyen, 236]

“Many people are handicapped today. Many people lost everything in the war, and can’t support themselves. So you can tell the American government to make reparations. To be fair, the Vietnamese didn’t send troops to invade America. Never, never forget. We remember the war. We remember our losses. All the little children—nine years old, thirteen, they had committed no crimes for the Americans to come and kill them. When they died in the bombings, their eyes popped out from the compression. Their bodies were mangled. Small children and old people. They lived here, and worked their whole lives here. They never sent troops to America. They never took one plant, one leaf from American. Why did the Americans come here to destroy everything, to kill the people, to kill small children, to kill even pregnant women—why? Don’t the American people even know why?” [Mrs. Phung Thi Tiem, 64-65]

“A piece of bomb cut my head and skull, and I lost my arm. I was taken to the hospital right away. Otherwise, I would be dead. After my mutilation, my husband left me and remarried. Now my brothers and sisters help me, because the government has little money for wounded civilians. I have pain all the time, here in my head and my eyes keep tearing. I need an operation but it costs hundreds of thousands of dong. My life was destroyed by that bomb. Since then, it has no meaning.

“Now there is peace, but why doesn’t the American government pay? How can we live out our lives? [Mrs. Nguyen Thi Xuan, 69]

***

“Toxic chemicals and defoliants were dropped, and lot of napalm. Many people today still have scars from napalm bombs. There were different kinds of fragmentation bombs, some the size of a fist. Even now people get killed from small, unexploded bombs. Wounded people were looked after by their families, or by the community if they had no children or relatives. The dead were buried everywhere, without coffins. Three people died in my family.

“The Americans cannot repay this debt, because it’s too big.” [Mrs. Nguyen Thi Thiet, 34-35]

***

“The Americans came to Vietnam to conduct a war, and to kill Vietnamese people. That means they were the aggressors. The puppet soldiers were also Vietnamese but they were Americanized, meaning they listened to the Americans and took up arms against their own people. For those soldiers we have more sympathy than hatred. To this day we think of the Americans as they enemy. Our children have no fathers. The Americans killed a generation. They owe us, for the next generation. [Mr. Dich, 56]

***

“In the villages, the civilians were afraid and the Americans did whatever they wanted. The village and the land and the houses belonged to the people, but the Americans went wherever they wanted. They came into our houses and used our things. They had no respect for our ancestral table, which is sacred. They didn’t know the habits or the traditions of the Vietnamese people. In our village they didn’t normally burn the houses or rape the women because we were very near their base, and they wanted to maintain good relations. But the people were angry, and they helped the Liberation Forces, showed them the way.

“The Americans destroyed our land. Every family has loved ones who were killed and every family suffered big losses in the war. With all the American soldiers did to the Vietnamese people, how can we not hate them? They bombed so much. Even now people get killed form unexploded bombs. Yesterday a bomb exploded at the Dong Ha stadium. People still suffer from the toxic chemicals the Americans dropped. Babies are born deformed. And they left children, the Amerasians. I feel very sorry for them, and for their mothers.

“We don’t like to remember the war, but sometimes we sit down like this, and we remember very clearly.” [Mr. Nguyen Thanh Khiem, 193-194]

***

“We did everything we could to liberate the South. For example, if a bridge was destroyed, the families who lived near that bridge would take everything from their house—beams and everything, to patch the bridge, for the army to pass. And if it rained, families would then have no house, no shelter. We were all ready to give, and I think that is how we won the war.” [Mrs. Nguyen Thanh Mai, 29]

***

“If you compare the conditions of the American soldiers with ours, theirs were better. They had water for showers brought in by helicopter—when we saw that, we knew they would never win the war.” [Mr. Nguyen Van Tuyen, 236]

***

“There was always manioc. It’s easy to grow in Vietnam. We planted it all over the forest for the soldiers to cook and eat the root. Before they left, for each one they took, the soldiers planted another, for the next ones that passed through. That’s how we won the war. We were clever.” [Mrs. Nguyen Thanh Mai, 30-31]

***

“The first time I met a South Vietnamese soldier I was surprised to see he was about forty years old, but his identity card said he was thirteen. He had been forced to join the army three times, and the third time he had tried to get out of it by saying he was too young. He had no spirit left to fight. In North Vietnam you would never find that.” [Mr. Nguyen Quoc Hung, 57]

***

“I got married after the liberation and now have four children. Women always said it was better to wait until liberation to get married. The war was more difficult for women than for men but our duty was the same, to liberate the country. We were equal. I can’t say that I was never afraid, but the Vietnamese people were suffering. In my own family I lost my brother and an uncle, and my father was beaten by Americans in a village operation. So, though I have joined the war at the beginning of my life, I have never regretted it.

“This is the first time I have met you, and I can see that you are a woman like me, and you can talk with me, and want to understand my life. You are an American and I am Vietnamese. As women we can talk.” [Mrs. Bach Thi Lan, 125-126]

***

“The Americans occupied this country, destroyed it, committed horrors here. Twenty years ago you came here with helicopters, with guns, with planes, with rockets and bombs, and then you were the enemy. But we want to shake hands today. Vietnamese people have a tradition. After war we want a good life, happiness, we want peace. War destroys everything. Peace, no matter how poor you are, you can build something. Slowly, but you can build. So we try to forgive America for what they did, to build our country and to build world peace. We defeated the Chinese three, four, five times, and each time we laid down a carpet of flowers, for them to come back in peace. American, Chinese, or anybody else that comes in friendship, it’s okay.” [Mrs. Nguyen Thanh Mai, 239]

***

Vietnam has undergone many changes since 1993, when Then the Americans Came was published. Every year since, for one reason or another, U.S. veterans of the war return to Vietnam. Yet, in light of the Vietnamese testimonies Hess offers us, I think it is not only the responsibility of U.S. veterans to go to Vietnam in a spirit of friendship and understanding, but it is the responsibility, too, of younger generations. Given the damage that was done and which the Vietnamese said was unhealable, we must aspire nevertheless, some of us anyway, to a new vow for bodhisattvas: The suffering caused by our government toward the Vietnamese has been unending and unimaginable; we vow to confront it and make reparations.*

*The four vows of the bodhisattvas in the Buddhist tradition, as expressed by poet Allen Ginsberg: Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to liberate them all. Obstacles are countless, I vow to cut through them. Dharma gates are uncountable, I vow to enter every gate. The Buddha path is endless, I vow to follow through. Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995 (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 366-367.

I was recently rereading Proust’s Swann’s Way, and came across the following passage early on…

“They took a turn or two in the park, where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather by the arm and cried, ‘Ah, my dear old friend, how fortunate we are to be walking here together on such a charming day! Don’t you see how pretty they are, all these tress, my hawthorns, and my new pond, on which you never congratulated me? You look as solemn as the grave. Don’t you feel this little breeze? Ah! Whatever you may say, it’s good to be alive all the same, my dear Amédée!’ And then, abruptly, the memory of his dead wife returned to him, and probably thinking it too complicated to inquire into how, at such a time, he could have allowed himself to be carried away by an impulse of happiness, he confined himself to a gesture which he habitually employed whenever any perplexing question came into his mind: that is, he passed his hand across his forehead, rubbed his eyes, and wiped his glasses. And yet he never got over the loss of his wife, but used to say to my grandfather, during the two years by which he survived her, ‘It’s a funny thing, now; I very often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her for long at a time.’”

A Liberation Doctor: Dang Thuy Tram

Mark Chmiel

Last evening I had a conversation with my friend Suzanne, who is a playwright.  I asked about her play, which deals with an Iraq war veteran and if she producing it a second time.  She wondered aloud if the arts could truly speak to such a calamity as war, or are they only able to provide entertainment.  I remembered a passage from one of Kafka’s letters and attempted to reassure her that plays—like books—could, indeed, be what we need precisely at this time:

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? So that it shall makes us happy? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.[1]

Recently I have had just such an encounter with a book: Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram. Published in English in 2007, it’s the diary of a young doctor from Hanoi who goes south to support the struggle against the U.S. occupation of South Vietnam in 1967.  In the mountains of central Vietnam, she worked in hospitals and clinics, attending to wounded civilians and the revolutionary fighters.  It’s hard to imagine being faithful to a diary under such excruciating and continually dangerous circumstances.  Yet, throughout these pages, there are brilliant flashes of humanity, humility, compassion, indignation, and tenderness.

Thuy’s parents were doctors, too, and so, she faced the on-going tension of being of bourgeois origin while striving to be accepted by the Communist Party.  A self-aware and committed revolutionary, marked by impressive self-discipline and drive, she nevertheless remained harshly critical of some comrades in her midst:  “Ugly injustices happen all around me every day. There are worms and mites gnawing away within the Party; if those vermin are not eliminated, they will gradually erode the people’s faith and love for the Party.”  [ 21]  Later on, she makes clear her

devotion to the authentic Communist revolutionaries: “Now I understand why people can sacrifice their whole lives for our cause, and how they can remain absolutely faithful to the revolution. The revolution has forged a noble people and bound them into a unit firmer and more solid than anything in this life. Could anything make one prouder than to be part of this family of revolutionaries?” [61][2]

While reading this book,  I thought of so many of my students who are already practicing or going into medicine,  like Nima Sheth, Gina Meyer, Erin Nealon, Beth Schwab, Toria Rendell, Don Lassus, Theresa Drallmeier, Amy Nuismer, and Charity Kaiser. They aspire to be doctors with a strong commitment to justice.  They are not interested in the high status and material comforts often available to U.S. physicians.  Such young people could gain sobering insight on what it might mean to be a “liberation doctor” in the sense that Thuy is a part of a mobilized movement not for social improvements here and there, but for a whole new society.[3]

Thuy’s dedication to the revolution, freedom, and independence are daily tested amid the shock and death of war.  Imagine trying to be a physician in the vicinity of “search and destroy” missions and “mopping up” operations. Imagine the military preponderance of the United States compared to those who live in tunnels and eat manioc and, occasionally, some rice.  Thuy writes, “Death is so near and simple. What makes our lives surge forth so strongly? Is it the love between our people? Is it because the hope for tomorrow still burns in our hearts? Is that it, my beloved comrade?” [185]  Thuy’s heart is broken over and over by the agony see witnesses: “He died with a small notebook in his breast pocket. It held many pictures of a girl with a lovely smile and a letter assuring him of her steely resolution to wait for his return. On his chest, there was a little handkerchief with the embroidered words Waiting for You. Oh, that girl waiting for him!  Your lover will never come back; the mourning veil on your young head will be heavy with pain. It will mark the crimes committed by the imperialist killers and my regret, the regret of a physician who could not save him when there was a chance.” [100]

In Quang Ngai Province Thuy forms deep bonds of affection and solidarity with the people she serves.  She appears to be the kind of person with whom it is easy to fall in love, given the number of men who proclaimed their devotion to her.  However, she is scrupulous about not giving the wrong impression, as she must tell more than one young man that her love is fraternal, not romantic:  “I want you to lead and teach me like a caring brother. It’s just that I don’t want people to think I am an easy girl, one who gives her heart readily, or that I want to have a relationship with high-level officials.” [106] Several years earlier, Thuy had a relationship with an man who left Hanoi to join the resistance in the south.  Referred to as “M.” in the diary, we can see her grappling with longing, loss, anger, and pride.  She doesn’t think they will be reunited to have a normal life together even when the war ends, and so channels her energy toward her sisters and brothers in the struggle for independence, as here: “Late at night, I’m lying next to my comrades. They are sound asleep, their breaths are even. Outside, artillery shells explode all over the sky. Oh, my comrades, we breathe the same air on this fiery, smoky battlefield. Let’s love and care for one another. Death is so close now. Why be jealous and quarrel?” [203]

Thuy is not only moved by love and compassion.  There is something altogether fierce about her.  What will be hard for some Americans to come to terms with is Thuy’s characterization of the U.S. military.   Her diary is sprinkled with such expressions as “bandits” and “devils.” After one successful operation, she reflected: “The bleeding has stopped; the patient’s urine has become clear and normal. A life saved should be a great joy, but somehow I feel apathetic and inadequate before my smiling patient, unmoved by his respectful eyes. It is because I know I have stemmed by one bloodflow while countless others are still bleeding? I must mend all the wounds of our nation. The Americans are upon us like bloodthirsty devils, stealthily sinking their fangs into our bodies. Only when we have chased them all out of Vietnam will our blood stop pouring into the earth.” [47]   How could she not  experience the gamut of extreme emotions living in a cruel context?  She admits that the letters she sends home to her beloved family don’t begin to go into how it really is.  While totally committed to the struggle for victory, she also craves normalcy, which is manifested in a dream: “If only I had wings to fly back to our beautiful house on Lo Duc Street, to eat with Dad, Mom, and my siblings, one simple meal with watercress and one night’s sleep under the old cotton blanket. Last night I dreamed that Peace was established, I came back and saw everybody. Oh, the dream of Peace and Independence has burned in the hearts of thirty million people for so long. For Peace and Independence, we have sacrificed everything. So many people have volunteered to sacrifice their whole lives for two words: Independence and Liberty. I, too, have scarified my life for that grandiose fulfillment.” [27]

In June 1970 while moving her clinic yet again due to increased hostility in the area, Thuy and her companions were shot and killed by American soldiers.  U.S. intelligence Fred Whitehurst was going through the remains to keep what was of military value, the rest to be burned.  A Vietnamese translator urged him not to throw Thuy’s diary into a fire.  Violating military protocol, Whitehurst kept the diary and took it home to the U.S.  Decades later, he figured out a way to return it to Thuy’s family.  It was eventually published in Vietnam and sold phenomenally well.

Many of us have probably never encountered such a stirring piece of writing before of a Vietnamese person whole-heartedly committed to the independence of her people from foreign occupiers. (How many of us—in the present—have read or heard the voices of Iraqis now resisting yet another U.S.—made catastrophe, another U.S. occupation?  We as a people have not truly reckoned with the American War in Vietnam.  How many of us can articulate what the war was about? How many of us know—even roughly—the death toll of the Vietnamese, not simply the 58,000 plus Americans who died there?  How many of us could state with any accuracy parallels between U.S. involvement then in Vietnam and now in Iraq?  Were the Vietnam period brought up in conversation, how many of us might say instinctively,  “Oh, that’s ancient history!”?  How many of us have either forgotten that chapter of our recent past or are totally ignorant of it (as U.S. history  high school classes don’t seem to make it to the Vietnam period before school’s out for summer)? How many of us know or remember what the war must have been like for the Vietnamese? After all, the devastation took place on their land.[4]

While there is a Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington along with the Vietnam Veterans Wall, there is no memorial project addressing our war crimes in and destruction of Vietnam. Irving Greenberg, a Jewish theologian whom I first read in the 1980s, once wrote about those who testified about the Holocaust:   “The Scriptures of the new era are hidden.  They do not present themselves as Scripture but as history, fact, and sometimes, as anti-Scripture.  …They are the accounts that tell and retell the event, draw its conclusions and orient the living.  In the Warsaw Ghetto, Chaim Kaplan wrote in his journal:  ‘I will write a scroll of agony in order to remember the past in the future.’”[5]

Dang Thuy Tram’s diary is such a scripture, a scroll of agony and passion that has the power four decades later to orient us in the present, which means making ourselves accountable to our past and our present.

 

 

Imagine reaction in the United States to the following scenario: An ambitious, tough-talking Russian politician is vying for greater political power and influence. Twenty years ago, he served his country as a pilot in the air force during the Soviet Union’s occupation in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, for his sake, his aircraft was shot down by the Afghan resistance (think of some of those scenes of Russian pilots and the mujahedeen in Charlie Wilson’s War). He was taken prisoner, tortured, but ultimately found his way back to freedom and his homeland. Now many years later, his popularity in ascendency, his ardent aspiration is to “serve the Russian people” and restore “pride” in Russia as a “world power.” His supporters, intellectuals and ordinary Russians on the street, gush with rapt devotion over their “war hero.”

The following is from photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths’ last volume of his Viet Nam trilogy, Viet Nam at Peace: In human terms millions had died and many more disabled. Everything that could be bombed had been—often more than once. As one American pilot claimed: “We made the rubble bounce!” Nothing was spared (except for parts of Ha Noi and the port city of Hai Phong for fear of angering the Soviets by sinking their ships). Schools, hospitals, pagodas, churches, factories, bridges, dykes and any building that could house anyone or anything were relentlessly attacked. North Viet Nam was little more than a mass of ruins, while much of South Viet Nam had its agricultural base destroyed by bombs, Napalm, and the defoliant Agent Orange.

Mr. Nguyen Duc Hanh, head of the War Crimes Investigation Commission of Hanoi: Of the 102 villages in the suburbs of Hanoi, all were bombed. One hundred and sixteen schools and thirty kindergartens and nursery schools were bombed. One hundred and fifteen pagodas, churches and temples were bombed. One hundred and ten factories and businesses were bombed. One hundred and fifty warehouses were bombed. One hundred and six streets and sixty neighborhoods were bombed. Fifty three hospitals and clinics were bombed. The dikes were bombed in seventy-one places—they are very important for flood control. All systems of transportation, communication, railway stations, bridges, and airports were bombed. Fifteen embassies were bombed.

President Richard Nixon to Henry Kissinger: I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ sakes the only place where you and I disagree is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddmaned concerned about the civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.

This year there has been a lot of reflection and retrospection, 40 years after the pivotal 1968, which included the Tet Offensive, assassinations (King and Kennedy), student uprisings, and protest and police violence outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

A while back, I read a memoir by U.S. radical writer Michael Albert, Remembering Tomorrow. Albert’s political awakening came in the mid-1960s when he was a student at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Inspired and challenged by the civil rights movement, a new wave of feminism, and the antiwar movement, Albert reached the fork in the road: one path led to pursuing an upper-middle-class lifestyle and the other path to throwing his lot in with social change movements. He chose the latter, and has, since that time, embraced the need for revolution, meaning, a radical change in our society’s fundamental structures.

Recalling his youthful passionate opposition to the war, Albert writes candidly, “And I sure as hell hated Washington. And I sure as hell loved the spirit of the Vietnamese resistance. Vietnam was for me a parent, a brother, a sister, a life guide. Vietnam was and still is everything for me.”

I wished he had elaborated on the latter sentiment of his love for Vietnam. He says that the love and Vietnam’s meaning were not just then, 1967 and 1968, but it is still. I take this to mean, that, unlike many people who were active then in the antiwar movement, he has not forgotten Vietnam. But what, then?

I wonder: How exactly has Vietnam served for him a “life guide”? Who have been the most influential Vietnamese writers, intellectuals, activists, and artists for him? Did he ever learn Vietnamese? Did he become friends with Vietnamese refugees in the greater Boston area? Has he ever visited Vietnam since the 1975 unification? Has he been aware of the work of Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, particularly his retreats for Vietnam Veterans? Does his Znet web site focus on contemporary issues and struggles in Vietnam? What does he think of the society the Vietnamese created after the horrific brutality and destruction inflicted by our own country? How has he been a brother to Vietnam, past and present? To younger generations of activists, how would he encourage solidarity with Vietnamese people, given their centrality in his own path of revolutionary activity?

I was seven at the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive. It wasn’t until 1982 when I began reading about the Catholic anti-war movement (Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, Thomas Merton) that I began to learn about the event that was so life-changing for millions of Americans fifteen years earlier. While working at the Church of Epiphany in Louisville, my first direct contact with Vietnam was as a tutor to a Vietnamese family, the Huynh’s, who had been sponsored by our church in the late 1970s. My political awakening occurred in the 1980s via the church-based Central American solidarity movements. It was during that time that I was exposed to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. For many years, I have assigned Cao Ngoc Phuong’s inspiring autobiography, Learning True Love, to my students at Saint Louis University. In recent years I have had Vietnamese-American students who teach me about their and my history.

I am curious about Michael Albert’s avowal, because I think there is tremendous work we have to do in reckoning still with our role in Vietnam. Not enough of us in the United States have faced what our government did in Indochina from the 1950s to the 1970s. Thinking of Vietnam, I remember something German theologian Johann Baptist Metz once stated, “We Christians can never go back behind Auschwitz; to go beyond Auschwitz is impossible for us by ourselves. It is possible only with the victims of Auschwitz.” If there is to be a future for Christianity, the German theologian contended, it could only be with the Jewish people.

Although Michael Albert isn’t religious, I think, given his comment on the centrality of Vietnam, he would adapt Metz in this way: “We Americans can never go back before the destruction we caused in Vietnam; to go beyond that destruction is impossible for us by ourselves. It is possible only with the Vietnamese who were our enemies and victims.”

Friends in the liberationist Brazilian Catholic Church told me about three essential themes of their ministry and activism: memory, resistance, and utopia.

So be it, for us, too.