Dear
Friends,
The
National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance will hold our next conference call
on Wed. July 5 at 9 PM EDT. This will be an important call as we make
plans for our July 12 Rivers of Blood II action. Please join the call and
be part of this important action as we go up against the Congressional push for
more war. This action will take place at the U.S. Capitol.
Call
details
Wednesday
July 12 9:00 pm EDT
Call-in
number (218) 339-7815
Access
code: 109431#
If you are interested in risking arrest at this action, please
contact joyfirst5@gmail.com
Please EVERYONE SIGN THE PETITION below by contacting
mobuszewski2001 at Comcast.net.
You
can sign the petition whether you are at the July 12 action or not.)
.
Monday, July 03, 2017
What Does
War Generate?
At an April, 2017 Symposium on Peace in Nashville, TN, Martha
Hennessy spoke about central tenets of Maryhouse, a home of hospitality in New
York City, where Martha often lives and works. Every day, the community there
tries to abide by the counsels of Dorothy Day, Martha’s grandmother, who
co-founded houses of hospitality and a vibrant movement in the 1930s. During
her talk, she held up a postcard-sized copy of one of the movement’s defining
images, Rita Corbin's celebrated woodcut listing "The Works of Mercy"
and "The Works of War."
She read to us. "The Works of Mercy: Feed the hungry;
Give drink to the thirsty; Clothe the naked; Visit the imprisoned; Care for the
sick; Bury the dead." And then she read: "The Works of
War: Destroy crops and land; Seize food supplies; Destroy homes; Scatter
families; Contaminate water; Imprison dissenters; Inflict wounds, burns; Kill
the living."
The following week, General James Mattis was asked to estimate
the death toll from the U.S. first use in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, of
the MOAB, or Massive
Ordinance Air Burst bomb, the largest non-nuclear weapon in
U.S. arsenals.
"We stay away from BDA, (bomb damage assessment), in terms
of the number of enemy killed," he told reporters traveling with him in
Israel. "It is continuing our same philosophy that we don't get into that,
plus, frankly, digging into
tunnels to count dead bodies is probably not a good use of our
troops' time."
His comment seemed to echo another General, Colin Powell,
who, when asked how many Iraqi soldiers might have been killed by U.S. troops
invading Iraq in 1991, commented, "That's not really a number I'm terribly
interested in." Other generals noted that some of those Iraqi troops,
conscripts trying to surrender, were literally buried alive in their trenches
by plow attachments affixed to U.S. tanks. More recently, Lieutenant
General Aundre F. Piggee acknowledged
that during the 2007 U.S. military surge in Iraq, when civilian casualties rose
by 70%, the U.S. military wasn’t “necessarily concerned” about limiting
civilian deaths.
What are the generals’ concerns and interests in Iraq and Afghanistan?
How strong is their concern even for the well-being of their own troops?
Several veterans of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have written persuasive
memoirs about the wastefulness of their deployments, accusing commanders of
sending them on futile missions. Major Daniel Sjursen, writing for Tom Dispatch,
describes the ostensible reasons for the entire U.S. war in Afghanistan as
fantasies. He argues that U.S. generals gained promotions and notoriety for strategic
proposals designed to win what they knew was an unwinnable war. He describes
the squandering of soldiers’ lives to secure villages which had been largely
abandoned, and the pointlessness of paying high-tech military contractors
billions for weapons useless against homemade enemy bombs:
That’s right, the local “Taliban” -- a term so nebulous it’s
basically lost all meaning --
had managed to drastically alter U.S. Army tactics with crude, homemade
explosives stored in
plastic jugs. And believe me, this was a huge problem. Cheap, ubiquitous, and
easy to bury, those anti-personnel Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, soon
littered the “roads,” footpaths, and farmland surrounding our isolated outpost.
To a greater extent than a number of commanders willingly admitted, the enemy
had managed to nullify our many technological advantages for a few pennies on
the dollar (or maybe, since we’re talking about the
Pentagon, it was pennies on the millions of dollars).
In a spate of recent articles, Sjursen and other veterans of
U.S. war in Afghanistan have shredded each of the various rationales U.S.
generals and pro-war think tanks have given to defend the wreckage and ruin the
U.S. has caused during sixteen years of “generational war” in Afghanistan,
throughout which U.S. people have been told that the war protects Afghans from
the Taliban.
War profiteers and self-marketing politicians have no interest
in helping U.S. people understand that war itself is a tyrant, that the sound
of nearby gunfire or a drone attack is as much of an order to flee one’s home
as any command from a Taliban warlord. Children displaced by war, living in the
relative safety of Kabul’s refugee camps find scant protection from hunger, disease,
and the harshest winters, while mothers repeatedly tell us that if it weren’t
for the children bringing scraps of food scavenged at the market place and
working as child laborers in the streets, the families would starve. When will
the U.S. end, when will it depose, this war that it has made into a ruler of
Afghanistan?
Mubasir,
age ten, lives in Kabul. He helps his family by polishing boots every day from
7:00 a.m. to 12 p.m. Then, as part of the APV “Street Kids School” program, he
goes to school during the second part of the day, assured that the APV will
compensate his mother for the income he otherwise might have earned. The APV
give her a monthly donation of rice, cooking oil and a small amount of beans.
In a recent videotaped
conversation with Mubasir, Hakim, who mentors the APV,
asks if he has any special problems at home. Mubasir responds: “We have
many problems. My father is in prison. I cannot manage on my own. There’s not
much at home.” Mubasir earns an average of 75 cents to $1.50 per day.
Do you sometimes have fruit at home?” Hakim asks. “No,” says
Mubasir. “And meat?” “Never, we’re definitely not able to have meat.” Asked if
he feels tired at the end of the day, after working in the mornings and
schooling in the afternoons, Mubasir notes that he does his homework
from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. “Then I say my prayers and go to sleep.”
Mubasir has never been helped by the U.S. or the Afghan
government. But Afghans have learned to help each other. I’ve watched the APV
community care, profoundly and practically, about feeding the hungry, bringing
drink to the thirsty, and visiting people nearly imprisoned in refugee camps.
Every year, they provide warmth for families at risk of freezing to death
during harsh Afghan winters.
It seems simplistic, at first, to contrast the works of peace
and the works of war. U.S. politicians endlessly promise us humanitarian wars
meant to create stable, democratic regimes wherever our bombs level buildings,
reservoirs and electricity plants, dismembering whole economies and countless
civilian bodies, creating endless reservoirs of panic and rage and grief from
which democracy might grow. Perhaps we forget people like Mubasir because after
having heard these implausible platitudes, we forget our humane pretensions and
settle down to rooting for our side against faceless enemies of the wrong race
and religion.
Humane aid is desperately needed in Afghanistan, but it can only
evaporate in corruption if people bearing weapons control it. Resources meant
for impoverished people are predictably diverted toward the benefit of various
factions fighting a war. Warring factions within Afghanistan, including the
U.S. army, cannot do the works of mercy as they pursue the works of war. War
has its own agenda and remains the worst of many dark outcomes for Afghanistan
until the U.S. resolves to contribute nothing more to the region but the
plentiful reparations it will owe once its pointless war is surrendered, and
its troops have gone home.
My young Afghan friends live in a country which is maddened,
bloodied, and broken. They know what war generates. Yet they still believe it’s
in the interest of U.S. people, including the generals, to abolish war and live
together without killing one another.
This work
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org)
co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org).
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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