The Hypocritical USA: On the Road to Damascus/Armageddon
Firstly, we ask did not the US support Iraq in its use of chemical weapons in the Iraq/Iran war? Did not the US use chemical weapons in the battle of Fallujah? Did not The US's client state Israel use chemical weapons in Gaza? How then can the US and her allies decry the use of such weapons by the Syrian regime?--Marvin X, Editor, Black Bird Press News & Review
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
California Prisoner Hunger Strike Continues
As prisoners mark day 51 of their hunger strike, lawyers and advocates continue to express outrage at the California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR) attacks on prisoners’ peaceful protest. After being internationally lambasted in the media last week for threatening prisoners with force feeding as well as ignoring their medical wishes, the CDCR continued to punish strikers by moving as many as 50 prisoners from Pelican Bay to other prisons. The CDCR issued a confusing press release on Monday evening, claiming it had met the demands of the strikers, while also maintaining it did not recognize the legitimacy of their protest, nor would it negotiate with them. Attempts by the strikers’ mediation team to keep open dialogue with the strikers and prison officials have been rebuffed by CDCR.
Lawyers and advocates have just learned that, in an attempt to break prisoners’ hunger strike, prison officials abruptly awakened more than 50 long-term Pelican Bay hunger strikers between 4:00 – 5:00 a.m. last Friday morning and moved them to various prisons around the state.
Anne Weills, attorney for the strikers responded to this news: “Just think of the state of these men, psychologically, physically and medically. The CDCR chose to arbitrarily move these men—many of whom may already be on the a verge of a cardiac arrest—making them get out of bed, chaining them up by the legs, waist and wrists, performing invasive cavity checks, making them march to a van, and then taking them wherever. And then isolating the four representatives who remain in the Stand Alone Administration Building at Pelican Bay.”
“These people are starving for a cause bigger than themselves. They have been very clear that they are fighting so that new prisoners, particularly younger men and women, do not have to suffer what they have had to suffer.” Said Azadeh Zohrabi, spokesperson for the Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition. “Instead of going to meet with the prisoners at Pelican Bay, CDCR is governing by fiat–responding in a public statement to prisoners’ demands rather than negotiating with them as human beings. The public should be disturbed by this, to say the least.”
Late last week, as the CDCR was likely planning its early morning raid, strike mediators attempted to meet with both the Department and with strike representatives as a way of exploring options for resolving the crisis. The CDCR refused both attempts. “Regular dialogue was a common practice during the 2011 strike that led to some moderately constructive discussions between strikers and the CDCR,” said Marilyn McMahon, of the strike mediation team. “Why would the CDCR foreclose on these completely reasonable options? They can either be open to change or continue to cause suffering. They can’t do both.”
“Governor Brown and the CDCR are playing with peoples’ lives to make a point – that they are in control,” said Donna Willmott of the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition. “They are using their emergency motion for force-feeding as justification to move against the strikers without restraint. Against all human decency, they have used every means at their disposal to destroy this peaceful protest: character assassination, coercion, isolation, and intimidation. And yet the strikers have not been broken.”
Despite CDCR’s apparent attempts to close the issue with its muddled press release Monday, mediators and lawyers continue to try open negotiations between the Department and the prisoners. Supporters continue to urgently request the California Legislature’s Public Safety Committee to convene a special session. Speaking to the strength and resolve of prisoners still on strike, family member and mediator Dolores Canales said yesterday, “I am filled with absolute awe at the strength and character of these individuals who have endured decades-long isolation. And I think it must be hope that fills them with such a determination… hope for long overdue change, hope within a system that has kept them in isolation for decades. And I think of great changes in history that only took place when people did not give up and when the awakening of a moral consciousness was stirred within the heart and soul of the public.”
From the Archives: Shallow Scholarship at Howard University Black Arts Movement Conference
Askia is not all wrong. I have heard many black intellectuals give revisionist black history talks, skipping from Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X, leaving out any mention of Elijah Muhammad. This is
sick and reveals some black intellectuals are still grieving over Malcolm so much they can't think straight, their understanding of history is clouded by emotionalism. Who will deny Elijah took Marcus Garvey's work to another level and Malcolm took it even further, albeit under the guidance of Elijah
Muhammad.--Marvin X, Editor, Black Bird Press News and Review
March 30, 2006
I am sick and tired of the shallow prevailing Black intellectual view of the Nation of Islam. It’s not just the Neo-Cons and the White Evangelicals of the World who have problems with Muslims, our own Black intelligentsia have issues with the Islamic influence—particularly the Nation of Islam—on Black literature and culture in the United States and they refuse to admit it.
Black literature and academia lionizes Brother Malcolm X, highlighting only the 14 months or so of his life after he broke with the Nation of Islam, while trying to wipe out his 12 years of steadfast service and leadership within the Nation, his platform for earning national attention in the first place. We’ve done the same with Muhammad Ali.
Howard University’s English Department concluded an elaborately produced yet faintly publicized conference celebrating the Black Arts Movement March 24, and when I saw the program, I went bonkers! “They’ve done it again,” I thought. “They’ve kicked the Nation of Islam’s contribution to Black intellectual development to the curb.”
They had a truckload of Ph.D. candidates chaperoned by real professors, presenting papers and performances for two whole days at Howard, talking about the Black intellectual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s—the Black Arts Movement.
The topics genuinely reflected the prevailing mood of that period: “It’s Nation Time.”
The panels and paper topics ranged from “Black Fire” to “Nation Building,” to The Last Poets, to Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Amiri Baraka, Marvin X, Haki Madhubuti, to Women Writers, to “New Frontiers: Black Publications of the 1960s and 1970s,” to “Black Panther Party Contributions to the Revolutionary Aesthetic,” all the way to “Organic Intellectuality.”
Naturally the assembled educators referred anecdotally to the NOI or its products often, but they never really talked about the Nation’s impact, nor did they have any intellectuals from the Nation to talk about its role.
After the final speaker had spoken, I indelicately raised the subject and at the same time expressed my vexation over this omission. I was told that my friend Marvin X had spoken for Muslims. Now, I love Brother Marvin like a Play-Cousin, but with all due respect: his scholarship concerning the Nation of Islam is badly flawed and unreliable.
Prime example. In a July 2005 essay called “Marvin X: A Critical Look at the Father of Muslim American Literature,” El Muhajir (Marvin X) wrote that he was the “Foreign Editor” ofMuhammad Speaks in 1970, and: “Note: a few months later, Marvin X was selected to be editor of Muhammad Speaks until it was decided he was too militant. Askia Muhammad (Charles 37X [sic]) was selected instead.” That is pure bogus history, riddled with inaccuracies. That is also indicative of the shallow scholarship at the root of Howard’s English Department’s conference.*
I’m not angry at the panelists, they did not organize the event and call it an academic exercise. But I was so angry when I saw that someone had presented a paper: “Voice of the Black Arts Movement The Legacy of Negro Digest/Black World,” that I went and dug out copies of both Negro Digest and Black World, in which poems I had written were published, and one Fiction Edition which featured my picture on the cover and a short story I wrote inside. “Am I not a writer, thinker, poet, intellectual?” I wondered to myself.
Howard English Professor Eleanor Traylor even publicly commended a student for writing a paper about writer Leon Forrest. For many years Leon Forrest was the Associate Editor and then Editor of Muhammad Speaks. He in fact hired me in 1972 and prepared me to edit the newspaper after him in 1973. So, let me get this straight. Leon Forrest made a contribution to the Black Arts Movement that is worthy of scholastic attention (of course he did), but Muhammad Speaks did not? Excuse me! Something’s wrong with that picture!
While I was looking through my files, I discovered my original manuscript—sent by Western Union Telegram—of the article I wrote for Muhammad Speaks when Angela Davis was acquitted in San Jose California, June 4, 1972. I found my manuscripts from the funeral of Jonathan Jackson in 1970 and the murder of George Jackson in 1971.
By the time I had reminded myself of my own role in the struggle, and of my own fitness to recount it for a new generation of thinkers and writers, I was not just intellectually perturbed, I was personally offended. “What am I supposed to be? Some kind of Fake Writer?” I thought again to myself.
Granted I wrote using the names Charles K. Moreland Jr. in poetry anthologies and magazines, and Charles 20X and Charles 67X before I was named Askia Muhammad. But we translated LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka, didn’t we? We know that Haki Madhubuti was Don L. Lee, don’t we? The contradiction is, that the Black—just like the White—intellectual establishment does not want to know about Muslim writers, accept when they go against the Nation of Islam.
Maybe I should recognize that the Nation of Islam was simply a “change agent,” a catalyst like the War in Vietnam, like the Civil Rights movement—a completely unstudied change agent, I would complain—which helped make the climate in the Black community receptive to the Black Arts Movement and its new way of thinking. Maybe, I should concede that the Nation of Islam was a change agent and not the object of the change.
No. The object remains the same, and it is independent of a religious label. It is to change the minds of Black people to realize that the six most important words for us in the English language today are: “Accept your own and be yourself.”
That is intellectually and artistically distinct. Name. Culture. Religion. Language. Diet. That is the new paradigm injected into our culture by the Nation of Islam. That is the thinking which the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s reflects. That is the 800 lb gorilla in the Black intellectual meeting room, which most scholars, even Black scholars, overlook, or try to ignore.
________
* Contrary to Askia Muhammad, Marvin X did indeed serve as Foreign Editor of Muhammad Speaks, appointed by Herbert Muhammad, while exiled in Mexico City and Belize during 1970. Marvin met and befriended Herbert's sons in Mexico City, Sultan and Elijah. Marvin provided them with copies of Muhammad Speaks.
One need only go to the editions of MS during that time to see his articles on Afro-Mexicans, including artist Elizabeth Catlett Mora, also he covered the trial in Belize of Black Power Movement brothers Evan X. Hyde and Ishmael Shabazz, for which he was ultimately deported back to the USA.
One need only go to the editions of MS during that time to see his articles on Afro-Mexicans, including artist Elizabeth Catlett Mora, also he covered the trial in Belize of Black Power Movement brothers Evan X. Hyde and Ishmael Shabazz, for which he was ultimately deported back to the USA.
Marvin X was indeed offered and accepted the position of Muhammad Speaks editor. He was told to go home to pack, but later was told Askia Muhammad got the position. Most people consider Marvin X a loose cannon with an uncontrollable pen, Askia was definitely a more passive personality but a good journalist.
As per the conference, Marvin X spoke on the role of the NOI in the Black Arts Movement on both days of the conference. Although Askia is a DC journalist, he did not arrive at the conference until the afternoon of the last day. His remarks seemed out of place since the audience was aware that Marvin X had discussed the NOI for two days.
For the role of the NOI in BAM, see the paper below by Dr. Mohja Kahf who refers to Marvin X as the father of Muslim American literature. She gives credit to the NOI for being the foundation of Muslim American literature and influencing the Black Arts Movement poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Toure (Roland Snellings), Marvin X, et al. My brother Askia Muhammad was himself guilty of shallow scholarship and pettiness. His remarks upset the audience and he was booed for being disruptive. Askia is still my brother!
Teaching Diaspora Literature: Muslim American Literature as an Emerging Field
Is there such a thing as Muslim American literature (MAL)? I argue that there is: It begins with the Muslims of the Black Arts Movement (1965–75). The Autobiography of Malcolm X is one of its iconic texts; it includes American Sufi writing, secular ethnic novels, writing by immigrant and second-generation Muslims, and religious American Muslim literature. Many of the works I would put into this category can and do also get read in other categories, such as African American, Arab American, and South Asian literature, “Third World” women’s writing, diasporic Muslim literature in English, and so forth. While the place of these works in other categories cannot be denied, something is gained in reading them together as part of an American Muslim cultural landscape. Like Jewish American literature by the 1930s, Muslim American literature is in a formative stage. It will be interesting to see how it develops (and who will be its Philip Roth!)
I suggest the following typology of MAL only as a foothold, a means of bringing a tentative order to the many texts, one that should be challenged, and maybe ultimately dropped altogether. My first grouping, the “Prophets of Dissent,” suggests that Muslim works in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) are the first set of writings in American literature to voice a cultural position identifiable as Muslim.
Contemporary Muslim writing that takes the achievements of the BAM as an important literary influence also belongs here, and is characterized similarly by its “outsider” status, moral critique of mainstream American values, and often prophetic, visionary tone. In contrast, the writers of what I call “the Multi-Ethnic Multitudes” tend to enjoy “insider” status in American letters, often entering through MFA programs and the literary establishment, getting published through trade and university book industries, garnering reviews in the mainstream press. They do not share an overall aesthetic but are individual writers of various ethnicities and a wide range of secularisms and spiritualities, and indeed I question my placing them all in one group, and do so temporarily only for the sake of convenience.
On the other hand, my third group, the “New American Transcendentalists,” appears to cohere,
in aesthetic terms, as writers who share a broad Sufi cultural foundation undergirding their
literary work. Their writings often show familiarity with the Sufi poets of several classical Muslim
literatures (e.g., in Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Urdu), as well as with American Transcendentalists of
the nineteenth century, and that which tends toward the spiritual and the ecstatic in modern
American poetry. Finally, the “New Pilgrims” is my term for a loose grouping of writers for whom
Islam is not merely a mode of dissent, cultural background, or spiritual foundation for their
writing, but its aim and explicit topic. Of the four groups, the New Pilgrims are the ones who
write in an overtly religious mode and motivation, like Ann Bradstreet, Cotton Mather, and the
Puritans of early American history. This does not prevent them from being capable of producing
great literature, any more than it prevented the great Puritan writers.
Here is an example of just a few writers in each category, by no means a comprehensive list:
Prophets of Dissent
From the Black Arts Movement:
Here is an example of just a few writers in each category, by no means a comprehensive list:
Prophets of Dissent
From the Black Arts Movement:
-
Marvin X, whose Fly to Allah (1969) is possibly the first book of poems published in English
by a Muslim American author.
-
Sonia Sanchez, whose A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1974) is the work of
her Muslim period.
-
Amiri Baraka, whose A Black Mass (2002) renders the Nation of Islam’s Yacoub genesis
theology into drama. As with Sanchez, the author was Muslim only briefly but the influence
of the Islamic period stretches over a significant part of his overall production.
Later Prophets of Dissent include:
-
Calligraphy of Thought, the Bay area poetry venue for young “Generation M” Muslim
American spoken word artists who today continue in the visionary and dissenting mode of
the BAM.
-
Suheir Hammad, Palestinian New Yorker, diva of Def Poetry Jam (on Broadway and HBO),
whose tribute to June Jordan in her first book of poetry, Born Palestinian, Born Black
(1996), establishes her line of descent from the BAM, at least as one (major) influence on
her work.
• El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) is an iconic figure for this mode of Muslim American writing and, indeed, for many writers in all four categories.
Multi-Ethnic Multitudes
• El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) is an iconic figure for this mode of Muslim American writing and, indeed, for many writers in all four categories.
Multi-Ethnic Multitudes
-
Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, an influential figure in the mainstream American
poetry scene, with a literary prize named after him at the University of Utah, brought the
ghazal into fashion in English so that it is now taught among other forms in MFA programs.
-
Naomi Shihab Nye, Palestinian American, likewise a “crossover” poet whose work enjoys
prominence in American letters, takes on Muslim content in a significant amount of her
work.
-
Sam Hamod, an Arab midwesterner who was publishing poetry in journals at the same time
as Marvin X.
-
Nahid Rachlin’s fiction has been published since well before the recent wave of literature by
others who, like her, are Iranian immigrants.
-
Mustafa Mutabaruka, an African American Muslim, debut novel Seed (2002).
-
Samina Ali, midwesterner of Indian parentage, debut novel Madras on Rainy Days (2004),
was featured on the June 2004 cover of Poets & Writers.
-
Khaled Hosseini, debut novel The Kite Runner (2003).
•Michael Muhammad Knight, a Muslim of New York Irish Catholic background, whose punk rock novel The Taqwacores (2004) delves deeply into Muslim identity issues.
• There are a number of journals where Muslim American literature of various ethnicities can be found today, among them Chowrangi, a Pakistani American magazine out of New Jersey, and Mizna, an Arab American poetry magazine out of Minneapolis.
New American Transcendentalists
-
Daniel (Abd al-Hayy) Moore is an excellent example of this mode of Muslim American
writing. California-born, he published as a Beat poet in the early sixties, became a Sufi
Muslim, renounced poetry for a decade, then renounced his renouncement and began
publishing again, prolifically and with a rare talent. His Ramadan Sonnets (City Lights,
1986) is a marriage of content and form that exemplifies the “Muslim/American” simultaneity
of Muslim American art.
-
The Rumi phenomenon: apparently the most read poet in America is a Muslim. He merits
mention for that, although technically I am not including literature in translation. Then again,
why not? As with so many other of my limits, this is arbitrary and only awaits someone to
make a case against it.
-
Journals publishing poetry in this mode include The American Muslim, Sufi, Qalbi, and
others.
New American Pilgrims
•Pamela Taylor writes Muslim American science fiction. Iman Yusuf writes “Islamic romance.” This group of writers is not limited to genre writers, however. Dasham Brookins writes and performs poetry and maintains a website, MuslimPoet.com, where poets such as Samantha Sanchez post. Umm Zakiyya (pseud.) has written a novel, If I Should Speak (2001), about a young Muslim American and her roommates in college. Writers in this group also come from many ethnicities but, unlike those in my second category, come together around a more or less coherent, more or less conservative Muslim identity. Websites tend to ban erotica and blasphemy, for example. The Islamic Writers Alliance, a group formed by Muslim American women, has just put out its first anthology. Major published authors have yet to emerge in this grouping, but there is no reason to think they will not eventually do so.
My criteria for Muslim American literature are a flexible combination of three factors:
Muslim authorship. Including this factor, however vague or tenuous, prevents widening the scope to the point of meaninglessness, rather than simply including any work about Muslims by an author with no biographical connection to the slightest sliver of Muslim identity (such as Robert Ferrigno with his recent dystopian novel about a fanatical Muslim takeover of America). It is a cultural, not religious, notion of Muslim that is relevant. A “lapsed Muslim” author, as one poet on my roster called himself, is still a Muslim author for my purposes. I am not interested in levels of commitment or practice, but in literary Muslimness.
Language and aesthetic of the writing. In a few cases, there is a deliberate espousal of an
aesthetic that has Islamic roots, such as the Afrocentric Islamic aesthetic of the Muslim authors
in the Black Arts Movement.
Relevance of themes or content. If the Muslim identity of the author is vague or not explicitly professed, which is often the case with authors in the “Multi-Ethnic Multitudes,” but the content itself is relevant to Muslim American experience, I take that as a signal that the text is choosing to enter the conversation of Muslim American literature and ought to be included.
In defining boundaries for research that could become impossibly diffuse, I choose to look mainly at fiction and poetry, with autobiography and memoir writings selectively included. I have not included writings in languages other than English, although there are Muslims in America who write in Arabic, Urdu, and other languages. I have looked at the twentieth century onward, and there is archival digging to be done in earlier periods: the Spanish colonial era may yield Muslim writing, and we already know that some enslaved Muslims in the nineteenth century have left narratives. More research is needed. If one expands the field from “literature” to “Muslim American culture,” one can also include Motown, rap, and hip-hop lyrics by Muslim artists, screenplays such as the Muslim American classic The Message by the late Syrian American producer Mustapha Aqqad, books written for children, sermons, essays, and other genres.
There are pleasures and patterns that emerge from reading this profusion of disparate texts under the rubric of Muslim American cultural narrative. It is time! I hope, as this field emerges, that others will do work in areas I have left aside in this brief initial exploration.
∗ Mohja Kahf (Comparative Literature, University of Arkansas) is the author of Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (1999), E-mails from Scheherazad (poetry, 2003), and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (novel, 2006).
Relevance of themes or content. If the Muslim identity of the author is vague or not explicitly professed, which is often the case with authors in the “Multi-Ethnic Multitudes,” but the content itself is relevant to Muslim American experience, I take that as a signal that the text is choosing to enter the conversation of Muslim American literature and ought to be included.
In defining boundaries for research that could become impossibly diffuse, I choose to look mainly at fiction and poetry, with autobiography and memoir writings selectively included. I have not included writings in languages other than English, although there are Muslims in America who write in Arabic, Urdu, and other languages. I have looked at the twentieth century onward, and there is archival digging to be done in earlier periods: the Spanish colonial era may yield Muslim writing, and we already know that some enslaved Muslims in the nineteenth century have left narratives. More research is needed. If one expands the field from “literature” to “Muslim American culture,” one can also include Motown, rap, and hip-hop lyrics by Muslim artists, screenplays such as the Muslim American classic The Message by the late Syrian American producer Mustapha Aqqad, books written for children, sermons, essays, and other genres.
There are pleasures and patterns that emerge from reading this profusion of disparate texts under the rubric of Muslim American cultural narrative. It is time! I hope, as this field emerges, that others will do work in areas I have left aside in this brief initial exploration.
∗ Mohja Kahf (Comparative Literature, University of Arkansas) is the author of Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque (1999), E-mails from Scheherazad (poetry, 2003), and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (novel, 2006).
Drama by David Glover: Old Happens!
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Please Please Stop the Madness-Driven Violence
How can violence stop with a trillion dollar war budget by the American military-corporate killing machine? While Charlie is killing around the world, why should little Johnny stop killing in the hood?
Violence is an addiction, the more you do, the more you want to do--it's a high. Ask killers. Ask Obama with his list of people to kill around the world. --Marvin X
Dear Friends,
Our government has war-fever again. I have lived it all my life, all 65 years. We never learn our lessons. Our neo-con press push us again toward blood spilling.
So we have violence at home and abroad. We cannot carry on decades of wars abroad without the virus spreading among our own citizens and brothers.
Let us give national awards to the peacemakers, rather than the blood-spillers. Let us shout down the hypocrites whether they are high or low, private citizen or politician.
I invite you to read Wanda Coleman's poem below about Madness. My critique is that she does not connect the dots to violence abroad and violence at home.
But that is not only a shortcoming of Ms. Coleman'pem, it was also a shortcoming of Al Sharpton's March on Washington. That man needs a lot of criticism.
Loving you madly, Rudy
Rudolph Lewis, Editor
ChickenBones: A Journal
http://www.nathanielturner.com/wandacolemanslam.htm
Please Please Stop the Madness-Driven Violence
By Wanda Coleman
August 25, 2013
In the name of Trayvon Martin, just Americans
must rise up and stop this monstrous domestic brutality
motivated by bias and bigotry, justified by fear,
a vigilante violence that has claimed too many lives to count:
Like 19-year-old Michael Donald, kidnapped at
random and beaten to death in Mobile , Alabama ,
on March 20th 1981, courtesy of the Ku Klux Klan.
Like 20-year-old, mentally disabled Melvin Eugene Hair
who succumbed to a carotid chokehold by a
Tampa , Florida police officer on February 20th 1987.
Like 19-year-old Jerrold Hall, accused of stealing a $60
Walkman, felled by a shotgun blast to the back of his head,
issued by a BART transit cop on November 15th 1992.
Like 16-year-old exchange student Yoshihiro Hattori, shot
dead for trespassing by an irate property owner in Baton Rouge ,
while on his way to a Halloween party on October 17th 1992.
Like 21-year-old Matthew Wayne Shepard, mistaken for a
scarecrow after being tortured and tied to a fence outside
Laramie , Wyoming , October 12th 1998, because he was gay.
Like 19-year-old Tyisha Miller bullet-riddled 12 times by
Riverside , California officers during a brain seizure, a semi-
automatic allegedly in her lap, that December 28th, 1998.
O Trayvon, Trayvon! Far too many were martyred decades before you.
Too many to name, too many to remember:
Who says they got what they deserved?
What kind of justice was served?
Where is empathy and respect for human life?
When will there be an end to this God-ugly strife?
Why the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-too-late?
How many unarmed or incapacitated victims of hate?
These names in the name of Trayvon demand we defend The Dream
with unrelenting commitment,
with protests against and repeals of unjust laws,
with hearts and eyes that refuse to be blinded by lies.
In the names of innocents slain, the compassionate must rise.
The author is a widely published Los Angeles poet and fiction writer.
Visit www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/wanda-coleman & www.blacksparrowbooks.com/ for more on this Guggenheim fellow and recipient of The Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America (2012).
The Atrocities and Allure of America’s Perpetual War Machine…
According to Wikipedia, perpetual war refers to a lasting state of war with no clear ending conditions. The United States is in this particular state and has been for a very long time. There also appears to be no end in sight as tensions mount with Iran. So, why is America always at war?
The economic costs associated with perpetual war are staggering. Getting a firm dollar amount is very difficult, but according to costofwar.org the Pentagon’s total allocation for war from 2001-2011 in current dollars was $1.2 trillion dollars. So, what does America have to show for that $1.2 trillion dollar investment? There are several companies making annual profits from this never-ending war. You can see the top ten profiteers here.
So everybody knows that big business makes big money from war, but what about the non-economic costs? What toll is being paid by our troops fighting this war? Chris Hedges, in an excellent article titled “A Culture of Atrocity“, writes,
All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms “atrocity-producing situations.”
He continues about the betrayal of war,
War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal is seeping into the ranks of the American military. It is bringing us a new wave of enraged and disenfranchised veterans who will never again trust the country that sent them to war.
So what about the betrayed veterans of war. The U.S. and other NATO countries have this mythical love affair with the heroism of our soldiers fighting for our freedom overseas. You see the yellow ribbons claiming support for our troops. So what, exactly, do we support? Hedges continues,
We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds. We give them uniforms with colored ribbons for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our demented civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself.Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits—there are few people in pulpits worth listening to. The prophets are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and find the courage to speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must hear and digest in order to know ourselves. These veterans, the ones who dare to tell the truth, have seen and tasted how war plunges us into barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies, if we take the time to listen, which alone can save us.
By no means am I saying that I do not support our troops. I have many friends who are or have served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. I do support them, however I feel that they are pawns in this endless game of chess. The atrocities of war are taking a huge toll on our troops. Last month, anarticle in the New York Times discusses the very high rate of soldier suicides. The article, from June 8 of last month states,
The suicide rate among the nation’s active-duty military personnel has spiked this year, eclipsing the number of troops dying in battle and on pace to set a record annual high since the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan more than a decade ago, the Pentagon said Friday.
Seeing data like this makes you wonder if our troops truly believe in what they are doing. Do our soldiers, having been in some of the worst situations imaginable, really believe in the cause? They have been betrayed. In Hedges’ article “War is Betrayal “, written yesterday, he says,
The disillusionment comes swiftly. It is not the war of the movies. It is not the glory promised by the recruiters. The mythology fed to you by the church, the press, the school, the state, and the entertainment industry is exposed as a lie. We are not a virtuous nation. God has not blessed America. Victory is not assured. And we can be as evil, even more evil, than those we oppose. War is venal, noisy, frightening, and dirty. The military is a vast bureaucratic machine fueled by hyper-masculine fantasies and arcane and mind-numbing rules. War is always about betrayal—betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians.
So please, by every means possible, support the men and women who serve the country, they truly deserve as much support as we can give them. You don’t, however, have to support the cause. Don’t be fooled with the mantra of “fighting for our freedoms”. The U.S. government is fighting against its own citizens in an attempt to strip freedoms away. The threat is not external, but rather internal. Don’t be sucked in by main stream media who will attempt to rationalize another reason to go to war. Do your homework, figure out who the real enemies are…and you will find that they are right here.
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