Paying off the National Debt with Water

By Gene Franks

I read a clip from an engineering magazine about a Canadian inventor named Roy Jomha who has invented a toilet attachment called Econo-Flush. Mr. Jomha says that Econo-Flush can save 68% of the water that is sucked down toilets, and since 43% of the average home’s water goes down the toilet, he calculates that if every U.S. home had an Econo-Flush, the savings could take a big chunk out of the national debt in just a few years. 
This may be a good idea, but I got an even better one from the familiar medical slogan, “If we spend just one dollar on childhood immunization, we save $10 in later medical costs.” This could be the answer to the national debt, sickness care costs, and even world hunger. All we have to do is start spending $1 trillion or so per year on vaccinations, and with the $10 trillion per year we save in medical costs we can soon pay off the national debt and begin feeding the world.

I was pleased to see recently that the Centers for Disease Control, where they have lots of money to study such things, arrived at a similar conclusion about gonorrhea and the price of beer. I’ll let the Alternet  staff writer who calls him- or herself Mad Dog explain:

Somehow the scientists [at CDC] discovered that when alcohol taxes go up, gonorrhea goes down. They explain this by saying that the cheaper beer is, the more of it teenage boys can buy. The more they buy, the more teenage girls drink. And the more teenage girls drink, the more often they go down, which in turn sends the gonorrhea rate up. To put it in Einsteinian terms, beer equals sex and sex equals gonorrhea, therefore beer equals gonorrhea. No one can accuse CDC scientists of being overly complex.

They concluded that we can curb gonorrhea by raising the tax on beer. According to them, adding twenty cents to the price of a six-pack would reduce gonorrhea by about nine percent. This comes to just over two pennies a percent. If that’s the case, why stop there? Why not slap a $2.00 tax on a six-pack and stamp out gonorrhea completely?

Plans like these seem wonderful in the slogan phase,  but when you start applying them to reality you run into problems. Like whose money is being saved? And where does this money go? And doesn’t putting money in Paul’s pocket of necessity entail taking it out of Peter’s?

As a measles “victim” of the 1940s, I can’t remember a lot of expense involved with the illness. I had to miss school a few davs and suffer the inconvenience of having a blotchy face and hiding my comics from my mother. (Reading when you had measles was supposed to be bad for your eyes.) Probably my dad laid out $1.90 or so at the drug store for whatever was the placebo du jour. Apart from the $1.90, which wasn’t really a loss to the national economy since it was a gain for the drug store, and the per diem allowance that the school lost for my non-attendance but the taxpayers saved by not having to pay the school, I’m not aware of any great economic impact that resulted from my measles. Seems like about a break-even transaction to me. Similarly, when I had pertussis, which people called whooping cough in those days, I think not much expense was involved. It happened before I started to school, so there was no lost or saved per diem, and since my mother didn’t work, my illness didn’t slow the wheels of industry by keeping her off the assembly line or anything.

Most of us don’t give much thought to the purpose of measles, mumps, chicken pox and the other childhood diseases we’re always being asked to spend an additional several million a year nationally to “conquer.” Observation has convinced me that the human body, as part of the natural process, operates with an economy that precludes meaningless activities. The “common cold”, despite the lore promoted by doctors and legal drug dealers, isn’t a disease in need of correction, but a highly effective and essential cleaning exercise, initiated and carried out by the body. We owe our well being to orthodox medicine’s repeated failure to “cure” it. Cancer, in one view, is the result of the body’s inability to have a good cold.

When I had pertussis and later asthma, the doctor’s explanation was that pertussis “left me with asthma.” With the advantage of hindsight, my own view is that pertussis, with all the heaving and whooping it involves,  prepared my developing respiratory system to survive the intense asthma attacks that my lifestyle was leading me toward. They should do a study, though they won’t, comparing the life-long respiratory health of pertussis victims with that of children who were “protected” by having pertussis symptoms suppressed by vaccination. I had pertussis and I’ve also had indestructible lungs.

Measles isn’t really something the body “catches” but something the body “does.” No one seems to give much thought to what measles is. What is the body’s purpose for this brief and mildly unpleasant event that, before it was medically upgraded to a life-threatening dilemma, used to visit children once in their life and leave them, but for rare exceptions, all the stronger for the experience?

Dr. Richard Moskowitz, an M.D. and a practicing homeopathic physician, says that “the process of mounting an acute illness like the measles, no less than recovering from it, involves a general mobilization of the entire immune system.” The immune system, contrary to the cartoon version we are usually given, consists of far more than antibody production. Measles exercises the protective tissues at the portal of entry (the respiratory system, in this case), leukocytes and macrophages, the serum complement system, and “a host of other mechanisms, of which the production of circulating antibody is only one, and by no means the most important.” The purpose? Dr. Moskowitz continues:

Such a splendid outpouring leaves little doubt that such illnesses are in fact the decisive experience in the normal physiological maturation of the immune system as a whole in the life of a healthy child. For not only will the child who recovers from measles never again be susceptive to it; such an experience also cannot fail to prepare the individual to respond even more promptly and effectively to any infections he may acquire in the future. The ability to mount a vigorous response to organisms of this type must therefore be reckoned among the fundamental requirements of general well-being.

The practice of immunization, which is essentially an effort to trick the body into producing antibody by introducing a bogus version of the infective agent deep within, not only deprives the immune system of this “decisive experience” in its “normal physiological maturation,” but leaves it burdened for life with foreign contaminants it has no way of expelling.Gazette columnist Tiger Tom has said that vaccination is an initiation rite to lifelong servitude to the great modern Church of Medicine.

Beware of politicians who come to us, paying their debts to the Church of Medicine, with outstretched palms and tearful pleas for a wonderful vaccination revival that will enrich the poor and alleviate their suffering. Their crusade is really against that most feared heretic, the unvaccinated child. The “healthcare is warfare” dogma that drives the Church of Medicine supports itself on faith in the sacrament of vaccination. What the Church can least afford is a large control group of happy, healthy, unvaccinated children.

 

Should You Be Worried About Arsenic in Your Water?

by Gene Franks

Humans have always had to deal with contradiction. What’s good today is bad tomorrow.  Science stakes out a rigid position and in most cases eventually decides that the opposite is true. The American Medical Association would like you to forget that it endorsed smoking and told mothers that breast milk was nutritionally inadequate just a few short decades ago.  Chlorine, coffee, fluoride, knee surgery, sugar, estrogen therapy, therapeutic bleeding–you could name dozens–have had their ups and downs.

We’re so used to contradictory information that people didn’t  get too excited when the EPA announced that the allowable safe level for arsenic in water really isn’t 50 parts per billion (ppb), as “the experts” have been telling us for years, but it is really only 10 ppb.

How did the government’s mandated “safe” level of arsenic in drinking water shrink overnight from 50 to 10 parts per billion? Does this mean that arsenic suddenly has become more lethal? Should we take the 10 ppb limit seriously, or is it just another Swine Flu-style fundraiser?

The new arsenic limit should definitely be taken seriously.  Arsenic poisoning is terrible. And lowering the level took some real political courage.  Water utilities that were overnight out of compliance were faced with very expensive treatment requirements, and they screamed loudly.

The big drop in arsenic allowable actually makes sense. The  initial  limit for arsenic was set at 50 ppb simply because test labs before 1975 weren’t able to detect arsenic at levels below 50 ppb.  As tests got better, it became obvious that 50 ppb was too high.

After much deliberation, the EPA, with intense political pressure from both sides of the issue,  proposed reducing the allowable to 5 ppb in 2000, although the final rule did not take effect until 2006.  The number by that time had been negotiated up to the current 10 ppb.  (Two states, North Carolina and New Jersey, have independently set the arsenic allowable at 5 ppb.)

Arsenic Poisoning

Arsenic poisoning is implicated in cancers of the bladder, lungs, skin, liver, prostate and kidneys as well as non-carcinogenic endocrine, pulmonary, cardiovascular, and neurological damage. At around 60 parts per million in food or water it is an immediate threat to life and can result in sudden death.  (Note that that’s 60 parts per million, which is 60,000 parts per billion–or 6,000 times the current EPA allowable.)

The truth is that we get arsenic from lots of sources, including food. Rice, for instance, is often a source of unwanted arsenic. We get plenty of arsenic from our environment and certainly don’t need more in our water.  The only truly safe level of arsenic in water is zero.

From a water treatment standpoint,  arsenic reduction can be very easy or very complicated. Although plain carbon filtration can usually make a moderate reduction, the most commonly used strategies are reverse osmosis, anion exchange, distillation, and filtration with iron-based media. The complicated part is that arsenic exists mainly in two forms–As(III) and As(V).  Since As(III) is hard to remove and As(V) is relatively easy, the usual strategy is to convert As(III) to As(V) by oxidation to facilitate removal.  Here’s more detailed information.

How many Indians and Bangladeshis are exposed to a high level of arsenic in their drinking water? According to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, estimates vary from a low of 28 to 35 million to a high of 77 million—more than half the population of Bangladesh, one of the most crowded nations. It is estimated that over a million Indians are also drinking arsenic-laced water. Newer cases of arsenic poisoning in the Ganges Basin suggest that many of the region’s 449 million residents could be at risk.

Dipankar Chakraborti, a researcher at the Jadavpur University in Kolkatta, India believes that more than 50 million people are exposed and thousands are already showing symptoms of poisoning.

Bangladeshis are being poisoned—usually without knowing it—by drinking water drawn from wells. Three decades ago health and development experts, and small local contractors, dug millions of deep tube wells throughout Bangladesh. The expertsencouraged the whole nation to drink well water because it was deemed to be safe, free of the bacteria that causes water-borne diseases such as diarrhea and other intestinal maladies that have long plagued the tropical country.

But in switching from rivers and other surface sources of water, the people of Bangladesh may have exchanged water-borne diseases for slow poisoning by arsenic. In the 1970’s public health specialists and government policy-makers were unaware of the problem. It was only in 1993 that “clean” well water was discovered to contain dangerous quantities of the poison.

“It is a terrible public catastrophe,” said Allan H. Smith, professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a WHO consultant who has investigated the problem in Bangladesh on several trips.

The number of people affected by the arsenic disaster ranks with those being threatened by the biggest killer diseases. “By virtue of its sheer size it is pushing the limits of our knowledge and capacity to respond to it,” said Hans van Ginkel, rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo.

In a new effort to alleviate the crisis, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is undertaking a project in which integrated geologic, hydrologic, and geochemical approaches will be used to develop criteria that will identify and map sources of safe or low-arsenic ground water. This involves the digging of new deep bore wells which might help determine arsenic levels in boththe Meghna and Ganges river basins.

Local people are being used to manually dig to the sort of depths that in the western world are normally accessible only with the assistance of sophisticated drilling rigs. David W. Clark, a specialist with USGS who is currently working in Bangladesh, says, “I have been amazed that the local folks are drilling wells up to 1,200 feet (366 meters) deep using no machinery of any kind. It is a lot of hard work and the drillers are very skilled and do an excellent job.”

But what really intrigues Clark is watching the drillers remove the 1,200 feet (36 meters) of drill stem from the well. “The entire crew of 25 to 30 laborers would climb the derrick singing a local Bangla folk song in response to the leader…at a given point they would all jump off hanging onto a rope to try to extract the pipe…this would move the pipe a few feet,” he said. “The entire process takes many hours, but it gets done.”

According to the USGS the purpose of drilling these deep wells is to get a better definition of the deep aquifer system and to see if—at least in some areas—it may provide a viable source of potable water, free of arsenic.

WHO’s most recent guideline for the maximum amount of arsenic in drinking water recommends 10 parts per billion (ppb). That was in 1993 when it was lowered to that level from 50 ppb. But most water consumed in arsenic-affected areas in Bangladesh has substantially higher levels, frequently far above 50 ppb.

Arsenic-contaminated water is not restricted to developing countries. In the western states of the United States of America about 13 million people drink arsenic-tainted water, albeit less contaminated than the well water in Bangladesh. Australia, too, has arsenic-contaminated water. So do Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Hungary, Mexico, Taiwan (Province of China), Thailand, Vietnam, and the eastern areas of India in Bengal.

Arsenic poisoning is recognizable from skin color changes, blotches all over the face and body, hyper pigmentation on the chest and upper arms, hard patches on palms and soles of the feet, inability to walk, debilitating pain, and watery eyes.

In the developed world, sophisticated methods of arsenic treatment exist. US well owners avail themselves of reverse osmosis, specialized filtration and ion exchange technologies to remove arsenic from water that tests a few parts per billion over the 10 ppb MCL. These technologies are not available in Bangladesh and other poor regions. A variety of simple filters have been devised to address arsenic poisoning in these regions with varying degrees of success.

For more information about arsenic and treatment of arsenic, please go to the Pure Water Occasional’s  Water Treatment Issues section.

The algebra of infinite justice

As the US prepares to wage a new kind of war, Arundhati Roy challenges the instinct for vengance

Arundhati Roy
Guardian

Saturday September 29, 2001

In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: “Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don’t know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee.” Then he broke down and wept.

Here’s the rub: America is at war against people it doesn’t know, because they don’t appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an “international coalition against terror”, mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once Amer ica goes off to war, it can’t very well return without having fought one. If it doesn’t find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we’ll lose sight of why it’s being fought in the first place.

What we’re witnessing here is the spectacle of the world’s most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America’s streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn’t show up in baggage checks.

Who is America fighting? On September 20, the FBI said that it had doubts about the identities of some of the hijackers. On the same day President George Bush said, “We know exactly who these people are and which governments are supporting them.” It sounds as though the president knows something that the FBI and the American public don’t.

In his September 20 address to the US Congress, President Bush called the enemies of America “enemies of freedom”. “Americans are asking, ‘Why do they hate us?’ ” he said. “They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” People are being asked to make two leaps of faith here. First, to assume that The Enemy is who the US government says it is, even though it has no substantial evidence to support that claim. And second, to assume that The Enemy’s motives are what the US government says they are, and there’s nothing to support that either.

For strategic, military and economic reasons, it is vital for the US government to persuade its public that their commitment to freedom and democracy and the American Way of Life is under attack. In the current atmosphere of grief, outrage and anger, it’s an easy notion to peddle. However, if that were true, it’s reasonable to wonder why the symbols of America’s economic and military dominance – the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon – were chosen as the targets of the attacks. Why not the Statue of Liberty? Could it be that the stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot not in American freedom and democracy, but in the US government’s record of commitment and support to exactly the opposite things – to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide (outside America)? It must be hard for ordinary Americans, so recently bereaved, to look up at the world with their eyes full of tears and encounter what might appear to them to be indifference. It isn’t indifference. It’s just augury. An absence of surprise. The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around. American people ought to know that it is not them but their government’s policies that are so hated. They can’t possibly doubt that they themselves, their extraordinary musicians, their writers, their actors, their spectacular sportsmen and their cinema, are universally welcomed. All of us have been moved by the courage and grace shown by firefighters, rescue workers and ordinary office staff in the days since the attacks.

America’s grief at what happened has been immense and immensely public. It would be grotesque to expect it to calibrate or modulate its anguish. However, it will be a pity if, instead of using this as an opportunity to try to understand why September 11 happened, Americans use it as an opportunity to usurp the whole world’s sorrow to mourn and avenge only their own. Because then it falls to the rest of us to ask the hard questions and say the harsh things. And for our pains, for our bad timing, we will be disliked, ignored and perhaps eventually silenced.

The world will probably never know what motivated those particular hijackers who flew planes into those particular American buildings. They were not glory boys. They left no suicide notes, no political messages; no organisation has claimed credit for the attacks. All we know is that their belief in what they were doing outstripped the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered. It’s almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds. And what they did has blown a hole in the world as we knew it. In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing.

But war is looming large. Whatever remains to be said must be said quickly. Before America places itself at the helm of the “international coalition against terror”, before it invites (and coerces) countries to actively participate in its almost godlike mission – called Operation Infinite Justice until it was pointed out that this could be seen as an insult to Muslims, who believe that only Allah can mete out infinite justice, and was renamed Operation Enduring Freedom- it would help if some small clarifications are made. For example, Infinite Justice/Enduring Freedom for whom? Is this America’s war against terror in America or against terror in general? What exactly is being avenged here? Is it the tragic loss of almost 7,000 lives, the gutting of five million square feet of office space in Manhattan, the destruction of a section of the Pentagon, the loss of several hundreds of thousands of jobs, the bankruptcy of some airline companies and the dip in the New York Stock Exchange? Or is it more than that? In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the US secretary of state, was asked on national television what she felt about the fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. She replied that it was “a very hard choice”, but that, all things considered, “we think the price is worth it”. Albright never lost her job for saying this. She continued to travel the world representing the views and aspirations of the US government. More pertinently, the sanctions against Iraq remain in place. Children continue to die.

So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the “massacre of innocent people” or, if you like, “a clash of civilisations” and “collateral damage”. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice. How many dead Iraqis will it take to make the world a better place? How many dead Afghans for every dead American? How many dead women and children for every dead man? How many dead mojahedin for each dead investment banker? As we watch mesmerised, Operation Enduring Freedom unfolds on TV monitors across the world. A coalition of the world’s superpowers is closing in on Afghanistan, one of the poorest, most ravaged, war-torn countries in the world, whose ruling Taliban government is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the man being held responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The only thing in Afghanistan that could possibly count as collateral value is its citizenry. (Among them, half a million maimed orphans.There are accounts of hobbling stampedes that occur when artificial limbs are airdropped into remote, inaccessible villages.) Afghanistan’s economy is in a shambles. In fact, the problem for an invading army is that Afghanistan has no conventional coordinates or signposts to plot on a military map – no big cities, no highways, no industrial complexes, no water treatment plants. Farms have been turned into mass graves. The countryside is littered with land mines – 10 million is the most recent estimate. The American army would first have to clear the mines and build roads in order to take its soldiers in.

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out – food and aid agencies have been asked to leave – the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold. Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they’re waiting to be killed.

In America there has been rough talk of “bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age”. Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it’s any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way. The American people may be a little fuzzy about where exactly Afghanistan is (we hear reports that there’s a run on maps of the country), but the US government and Afghanistan are old friends.

In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilise it. When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America’s proxy war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam. (The irony is that America was equally unaware that it was financing a future war against itself.)

In 1989, after being bloodied by 10 years of relentless conflict, the Russians withdrew, leaving behind a civilisation reduced to rubble.

Civil war in Afghanistan raged on. The jihad spread to Chechnya, Kosovo and eventually to Kashmir. The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a “revolutionary tax”. The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between $100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.

In 1995, the Taliban – then a marginal sect of dangerous, hardline fundamentalists – fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women. It closed down girls’ schools, dismissed women from government jobs, and enforced sharia laws under which women deemed to be “immoral” are stoned to death, and widows guilty of being adulterous are buried alive. Given the Taliban government’s human rights track record, it seems unlikely that it will in any way be intimidated or swerved from its purpose by the prospect of war, or the threat to the lives of its civilians.

After all that has happened, can there be anything more ironic than Russia and America joining hands to re-destroy Afghanistan? The question is, can you destroy destruction? Dropping more bombs on Afghanistan will only shuffle the rubble, scramble some old graves and disturb the dead.

The desolate landscape of Afghanistan was the burial ground of Soviet communism and the springboard of a unipolar world dominated by America. It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalisation, again dominated by America. And now Afghanistan is poised to become the graveyard for the unlikely soldiers who fought and won this war for America.

And what of America’s trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country. Before the CIA arrived, there was a small rural market for opium in Pakistan. Between 1979 and 1985, the number of heroin addicts grew from zero to one-and-a-half million. Even before September 11, there were three million Afghan refugees living in tented camps along the border. Pakistan’s economy is crumbling. Sectarian violence, globalisation’s structural adjustment programmes and drug lords are tearing the country to pieces. Set up to fight the Soviets, the terrorist training centres and madrasahs, sown like dragon’s teeth across the country, produced fundamentalists with tremendous popular appeal within Pakistan itself. The Taliban, which the Pakistan government has sup ported, funded and propped up for years, has material and strategic alliances with Pakistan’s own political parties.

Now the US government is asking (asking?) Pakistan to garotte the pet it has hand-reared in its backyard for so many years. President Musharraf, having pledged his support to the US, could well find he has something resembling civil war on his hands.

India, thanks in part to its geography, and in part to the vision of its former leaders, has so far been fortunate enough to be left out of this Great Game. Had it been drawn in, it’s more than likely that our democracy, such as it is, would not have survived. Today, as some of us watch in horror, the Indian government is furiously gyrating its hips, begging the US to set up its base in India rather than Pakistan. Having had this ringside view of Pakistan’s sordid fate, it isn’t just odd, it’s unthinkable, that India should want to do this. Any third world country with a fragile economy and a complex social base should know by now that to invite a superpower such as America in (whether it says it’s staying or just passing through) would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windscreen.

Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It’ll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? Will my love come home tonight? There have been warnings about the possibility of biological warfare – smallpox, bubonic plague, anthrax – the deadly payload of innocuous crop-duster aircraft. Being picked off a few at a time may end up being worse than being annihilated all at once by a nuclear bomb.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry. To what purpose? President Bush can no more “rid the world of evil-doers” than he can stock it with saints. It’s absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It’s transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their “factories” from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals.

Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven’s sake, rights. Instead, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was asked what he would call a victory in America’s new war, he said that if he could convince the world that Americans must be allowed to continue with their way of life, he would consider it a victory.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America’s old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel – backed by the US – invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century. The first was Pearl Harbour. The reprisal for this took a long route, but ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This time the world waits with bated breath for the horrors to come.

Someone recently said that if Osama bin Laden didn’t exist, America would have had to invent him. But, in a way, America did invent him. He was among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI. In the course of a fortnight he has been promoted from suspect to prime suspect and then, despite the lack of any real evidence, straight up the charts to being “wanted dead or alive”.

From all accounts, it will be impossible to produce evidence (of the sort that would stand scrutiny in a court of law) to link Bin Laden to the September 11 attacks. So far, it appears that the most incriminating piece of evidence against him is the fact that he has not condemned them.

From what is known about the location of Bin Laden and the living conditions in which he operates, it’s entirely possible that he did not personally plan and carry out the attacks – that he is the inspirational figure, “the CEO of the holding company”. The Taliban’s response to US demands for the extradition of Bin Laden has been uncharacteristically reasonable: produce the evidence, then we’ll hand him over. President Bush’s response is that the demand is “non-negotiable”.

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs – can India put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It’s all in the files. Could we have him, please?)

But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He is the American president’s dark doppelgänger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full-spectrum dominance”, its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think. Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. Their guns, bombs, money and drugs have been going around in the loop for a while. (The Stinger missiles that will greet US helicopters were supplied by the CIA. The heroin used by America’s drug addicts comes from Afghanistan. The Bush administration recently gave Afghanistan a $43m subsidy for a “war on drugs”….)

Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other’s rhetoric. Each refers to the other as “the head of the snake”. Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed – one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other.

President Bush’s ultimatum to the people of the world – “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” – is a piece of presumptuous arrogance. It’s not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.

© Arundhati Roy 2001

This article is reprinted courtesy of the Guardian Unlimited.

Other Works by Arundhati Roy on this site: War Is Peace.

War Is Peace

Arundhati Roy

The world doesn’t have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of the world—literature, music, art—lies between these two fundamentalist poles.

Editor’s Note: Arundhati Roy is a novelist, essayist, film maker, and passionate activist from India. She is no ordinary writer. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the coveted Booker Prize and has sold six million copies.

 Her political commentary is sharp and precise. If your brain has been “shrink-wrapped” in a flag, as she puts it, you probably are going to get mightily pissed off by this article.

But read on–getting pissed off is good for you. — Hardly Waite.

As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on Sunday, October 7, 2001, the US government, backed by the International Coalition Against Terror (the new, amenable surrogate for the United Nations), launched air strikes against Afghanistan. TV channels lingered on computer-animated images of Cruise missiles, stealth bombers, Tomahawks, ‘bunker-busting’ missiles and Mark 82 high-drag bombs. All over the world, little boys watched goggle-eyed and stopped clamouring for new video games.

The UN, reduced now to an ineffective abbreviation, wasn’t even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright once said, “The US acts multilaterally when it can, and unilaterally when it must.”) The ‘evidence’ against the terrorists was shared amongst friends in the ‘Coalition’. After conferring, they announced that it didn’t matter whether or not the ‘evidence’ would stand up in a court of law. Thus, in an instant, were centuries of jurisprudence carelessly trashed.

Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is committed by religious fundamentalists, private militia, people’s resistance movements—or whether it’s dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognised government. The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the world. Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington.

People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They first use flags to shrink-wrap peoples’ minds and suffocate real thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to cloak the mangled corpses of the willing dead. On both sides, in Afghanistan as well as America, civilians are now hostage to the actions of their own governments. Unknowingly, ordinary people in both countries share a common bond—they have to live with the phenomenon of blind, unpredictable terror. Each batch of bombs that is dropped on Afghanistan is matched by a corresponding escalation of mass hysteria in America about anthrax, more hijackings and other terrorist acts.

There is no easy way out of the spiraling morass of terror and brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the human race to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective wisdom, both ancient and modern. What happened on September 11 changed the world forever. Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war—these words have taken on new meaning. Governments have to acknowledge this transformation, and approach their new tasks with a modicum of honesty and humility. Unfortunately, up to now, there has been no sign of any introspection from the leaders of the International Coalition. Or the Taliban.

When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said, “We’re a peaceful nation.” America’s favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of Prime Minister of the UK), echoed him: “We’re a peaceful people.”

So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is Peace.

Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President Bush said: “This is our calling. This is the calling of the United States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire.”

Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with—and bombed—since World War II: China (1945-46, 1950-53); Korea (1950-53); Guatemala (1954, 1967-69); Indonesia (1958); Cuba (1959-60); the Belgian Congo (1964); Peru (1965); Laos (1964-73); Vietnam (1961-73); Cambodia (1969-70); Grenada (1983); Libya (1986); El Salvador (1980s); Nicaragua (1980s); Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998); Yugoslavia (1999). And now Afghanistan.

Certainly it does not tire—this, the Most Free nation in the world. What freedoms does it uphold? Within its borders, the freedoms of speech, religion, thought; of artistic expression, food habits, sexual preferences (well, to some extent) and many other exemplary, wonderful things. Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate and subjugate—usually in the service of America’s real religion, the ‘free market’. So when the US government christens a war ‘Operation Infinite Justice’, or ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, we in the Third World feel more than a tremor of fear. Because we know that Infinite Justice for some means Infinite Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring Subjugation for others.

The International Coalition Against Terror is largely a cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world’s weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed, and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn’t in the same league.

The Taliban was compounded in the crumbling crucible of rubble, heroin, and landmines in the backwash of the Cold War. Its oldest leaders are in their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a society scarred and devastated by war. Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years, about $45 billion worth of arms and ammunition was poured into Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude upon a thoroughly medieval society. Young boys—many of them orphans—who grew up in those times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women. Now, as adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape, and brutalise women; they don’t seem to know what else to do with them. Years of war have stripped them of gentleness, inured them to kindness and human compassion. They dance to the percussive rhythms of bombs raining down around them. Now they’ve turned their monstrosity on their own people.

With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of human civilization—our art, our music, our literature—lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they’ll all embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about Good vs Evil or Islam vs Christianity as much as it is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony—every kind of hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious, and cultural. Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile a monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of dictatorship. It’s like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing. Eventually, it will be torn open.

One and a half million Afghan people lost their lives in the 20 years of conflict that preceded this new war. Afghanistan was reduced to rubble, and now, the rubble is being pounded into finer dust. By the second day of the air strikes, US pilots were returning to their bases without dropping their assigned payload of bombs. As one pilot put it, Afghanistan is “not a target-rich environment”. At a press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, US defense secretary, was asked if America had run out of targets.

“First we’re going to re-hit targets,” he said, “and second, we’re not running out of targets, Afghanistan is…” This was greeted with gales of laughter in the Briefing Room.

By the third day of the strikes, the US defense department boasted that it had “achieved air supremacy over Afghanistan”. (Did they mean that they had destroyed both, or maybe all 16, of Afghanistan’s planes?)

On the ground in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance—the Taliban’s old enemy, and therefore the International Coalition’s newest friend—is making headway in its push to capture Kabul. (For the archives, let it be said that the Northern Alliance’s track record is not very different from the Taliban’s. But for now, because it’s inconvenient, that little detail is being glossed over.) The visible, moderate, “acceptable” leader of the Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood, was killed in a suicide-bomb attack early in September. The rest of the Northern Alliance is a brittle confederation of brutal warlords, ex-communists, and unbending clerics. It is a disparate group divided along ethnic lines, some of whom have tasted power in Afghanistan in the past.

Until the US air strikes, the Northern Alliance controlled about 5 per cent of the geographical area of Afghanistan. Now, with the Coalition’s help and ‘air cover’, it is poised to topple the Taliban. Meanwhile, Taliban soldiers, sensing imminent defeat, have begun to defect to the Alliance. So the fighting forces are busy switching sides and changing uniforms. But in an enterprise as cynical as this one, it seems to matter hardly at all. Love is hate, north is south, peace is war.

Among the global powers, there is talk of ‘putting in a representative government’. Or, on the other hand, of ‘restoring’ the Kingdom to Afghanistan’s 89-year-old former king, Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome since 1973. That’s the way the game goes—support Saddam Hussein, then ‘take him out’; finance the mujahideen, then bomb them to smithereens; put in Zahir Shah and see if he’s going to be a good boy. (Is it possible to ‘put in’ a representative government? Can you place an order for Democracy—with extra cheese and jalapeno peppers?)

Reports have begun to trickle in about civilian casualties, about cities emptying out as Afghan civilians flock to the borders which have been closed. Main arterial roads have been blown up or sealed off. Those who have experience of working in Afghanistan say that by early November, food convoys will not be able to reach the millions of Afghans (7.5 million according to the UN) who run the very real risk of starving to death during the course of this winter. They say that in the days that are left before winter sets in, there can either be a war, or an attempt to reach food to the hungry. Not both.

As a gesture of humanitarian support, the US government air-dropped 37,000 packets of emergency rations into Afghanistan. It says it plans to drop a total of 5,000,000 packets. That will still only add up to a single meal for half-a-million people out of the several million in dire need of food. Aid workers have condemned it as a cynical, dangerous, public-relations exercise. They say that air-dropping food packets is worse than futile. First, because the food will never get to those who really need it. More dangerously, those who run out to retrieve the packets risk being blown up by landmines. A tragic alms race.

Nevertheless, the food packets had a photo-op all to themselves. Their contents were listed in major newspapers. They were vegetarian, we’re told, as per Muslim Dietary Law(!) Each yellow packet, decorated with the American flag, contained: rice, peanut butter, bean salad, strawberry jam, crackers, raisins, flat bread, an apple fruit bar, seasoning, matches, a set of plastic cutlery, a serviette and illustrated user instructions.

After three years of unremitting drought, an air-dropped airline meal in Jalalabad! The level of cultural ineptitude, the failure to understand what months of relentless hunger and grinding poverty really mean, the US government’s attempt to use even this abject misery to boost its self-image, beggars description.

Reverse the scenario for a moment. Imagine if the Taliban government was to bomb New York City, saying all the while that its real target was the US government and its policies. And suppose, during breaks between the bombing, the Taliban dropped a few thousand packets containing nan and kababs impaled on an Afghan flag. Would the good people of New York ever find it in themselves to forgive the Afghan government? Even if they were hungry, even if they needed the food, even if they ate it, how would they ever forget the insult, the condescension? Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York City, returned a gift of $10 million from a Saudi prince because it came with a few words of friendly advice about American policy in the Middle East. Is pride a luxury only the rich are entitled to?

Far from stamping it out, igniting this kind of rage is what creates terrorism. Hate and retribution don’t go back into the box once you’ve let them out. For every ‘terrorist’ or his ‘supporter’ that is killed, hundreds of innocent people are being killed too. And for every hundred innocent people killed, there is a good chance that several future terrorists will be created.

Where will it all lead?

Setting aside the rhetoric for a moment, consider the fact that the world has not yet found an acceptable definition of what ‘terrorism’ is. One country’s terrorist is too often another’s freedom fighter. At the heart of the matter lies the world’s deep-seated ambivalence towards violence. Once violence is accepted as a legitimate political instrument, then the morality and political acceptability of terrorists (insurgents or freedom fighters) becomes contentious, bumpy terrain. The US government itself has funded, armed, and sheltered plenty of rebels and insurgents around the world. The CIA and Pakistan’s ISI trained and armed the mujahideen who, in the 1980s, were seen as terrorists by the government in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. While President Reagan posed with them for a group portrait and called them the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers. Today, Pakistan—America’s ally in this new war—sponsors insurgents who cross the border into Kashmir in India. Pakistan lauds them as ‘freedom fighters’, India calls them ‘terrorists’. India, for its part, denounces countries who sponsor and abet terrorism, but the Indian army has, in the past, trained separatist Tamil rebels asking for a homeland in Sri Lanka—the LTTE, responsible for countless acts of bloody terrorism. (Just as the CIA abandoned the mujahideen after they had served its purpose, India abruptly turned its back on the LTTE for a host of political reasons. It was an enraged LTTE suicide-bomber who assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.)

It is important for governments and politicians to understand that manipulating these huge, raging human feelings for their own narrow purposes may yield instant results, but eventually and inexorably, they have disastrous consequences. Igniting and exploiting religious sentiments for reasons of political expediency is the most dangerous legacy that governments or politicians can bequeath to any people—including their own. People who live in societies ravaged by religious or communal bigotry know that every religious text—from the Bible to the Bhagwad Gita—can be mined and misinterpreted to justify anything, from nuclear war to genocide to corporate globalisation.

This is not to suggest that the terrorists who perpetrated the outrage on September 11 should not be hunted down and brought to book. They must be. But is war the best way to track them down? Will burning the haystack find you the needle? Or will it escalate the anger and make the world a living hell for all of us?

At the end of the day, how many people can you spy on, how many bank accounts can you freeze, how many conversations can you eavesdrop on, how many e-mails can you intercept, how many letters can you open, how many phones can you tap? Even before September 11, the CIA had accumulated more information than is humanly possible to process. (Sometimes, too much data can actually hinder intelligence—small wonder the US spy satellites completely missed the preparation that preceded India’s nuclear tests in 1998.)

The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical, ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And freedom—that precious, precious thing—will be the first casualty. It’s already hurt and hemorrhaging dangerously.

Governments across the world are cynically using the prevailing paranoia to promote their own interests. All kinds of unpredictable political forces are being unleashed. In India, for instance, members of the All India People’s Resistance Forum, who were distributing anti-war and anti-US pamphlets in Delhi, have been jailed. Even the printer of the leaflets was arrested. The right-wing government (while it shelters Hindu extremists groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal) has banned the Students’ Islamic Movement of India and is trying to revive an anti-terrorist act which had been withdrawn after the Human Rights Commission reported that it had been more abused than used. Millions of Indian citizens are Muslim. Can anything be gained by alienating them?

Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let loose into the world. The international press has little or no independent access to the war zone. In any case, mainstream media, particularly in the US, has more or less rolled over, allowing itself to be tickled on the stomach with press hand-outs from militarymen and government officials. Afghan radio stations have been destroyed by the bombing. The Taliban has always been deeply suspicious of the Press. In the propaganda war, there is no accurate estimate of how many people have been killed, or how much destruction has taken place. In the absence of reliable information, wild rumours spread.

Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger. Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart missiles are just not smart enough. They’re blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury.

President George Bush recently boasted: “When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It’s going to be decisive.” President Bush should know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his missiles their money’s worth. Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world. But then, that may not make good business sense to the Coalition’s weapons manufacturers. It wouldn’t make any sense at all, for example, to the Carlyle Group—described by the Industry Standard as ‘the world’s largest private equity firm’, with $12 billion under management. Carlyle invests in the defense sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending.

Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US defense secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle’s chairman and managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld’s). Carlyle’s other partners include former US secretary of state James A. Baker III, George Soros, Fred Malek (George Bush Sr’s campaign manager). An American paper—the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel—says that former President George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets. He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make ‘presentations’ to potential government-clients.

Ho Hum. As the tired saying goes, it’s all in the family.

Then there’s that other branch of traditional family business—oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry.

Turkmenistan, which borders the northwest of Afghanistan, holds the world’s third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a developing country’s energy requirements for a couple of centuries.) America has always viewed oil as a security consideration, and protected it by any means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt that its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its strategic interest in oil.

Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently moves northward to European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and Russia are major impediments to American interests. In 1998, Dick Cheney—then CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry—said: “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It’s almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight.” True enough.

For some years now, an American oil giant called Unocal has been negotiating with the Taliban for permission to construct an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and out to the Arabian Sea. From here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative ’emerging markets’ in South and Southeast Asia. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban mullahs traveled to America and even met US State Department officials and Unocal executives in Houston. At that time the Taliban’s taste for public executions and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to be the crimes against humanity that they are now. Over the next six months, pressure from hundreds of outraged American feminist groups was brought to bear on the Clinton administration. Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now comes the US oil industry’s big chance.

In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines. Therefore, it would be foolish to expect this talk of guns and oil and defense deals to get any real play in the media. In any case, to a distraught, confused people whose pride has just been wounded, whose loved ones have been tragically killed, whose anger is fresh and sharp, the inanities about the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ and the ‘Good vs Evil’ discourse home in unerringly. They are cynically doled out by government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins or anti-depressants. Regular medication ensures that mainland America continues to remain the enigma it has always been—a curiously insular people, administered by a pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government.

And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we’re hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?

As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one wonders—have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to re-imagine beauty? Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a new-born gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear—without thinking of the World Trade Center and Afghanistan?

December 7, 1941: A Setup from the Beginning

By Robert B. Stinnett

As Americans honor those 2403 men, women, and children killed — and 1178 wounded — in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941, recently released government documents concerning that “surprise” raid compel us to revisit some troubling questions.
At issue is American foreknowledge of Japanese military plans to attack Hawaii by a submarine and carrier force 59 years ago. There are two questions at the top of the foreknowledge list: (1) whether President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his top military chieftains provoked Japan into an “overt act of war” directed at Hawaii, and (2) whether Japan’s military plans were obtained in advance by the United States but concealed from the Hawaiian military commanders, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short so they would not interfere with the overt act.

The latter question was answered in the affirmative on October 30, 2000, when President Bill Clinton signed into law, with the support of a bipartisan Congress, the National Defense Authorization Act. Amidst its omnibus provisions, the Act reverses the findings of nine previous Pearl Harbor investigations and finds that both Kimmel and Short were denied crucial military intelligence that tracked the Japanese forces toward Hawaii and obtained by the Roosevelt Administration in the weeks before the attack.

Congress was specific in its finding against the 1941 White House: Kimmel and Short were cut off from the intelligence pipeline that located Japanese forces advancing on Hawaii. Then, after the successful Japanese raid, both commanders were relieved of their commands, blamed for failing to ward off the attack, and demoted in rank.

President Clinton must now decide whether to grant the request by Congress to restore the commanders to their 1941 ranks. Regardless of what the Commander-in-Chief does in the remaining months of his term, these congressional findings should be widely seen as an exoneration of 59 years of blame assigned to Kimmel and Short.

But one important question remains: Does the blame for the Pearl Harbor disaster revert to President Roosevelt?

A major motion picture based on the attack is currently under production by Walt Disney Studios and scheduled for release in May 2001. The producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, refuses to include America’s foreknowledge in the script. When Bruckheimer commented on FDR’s foreknowledge in an interview published earlier this year, he said “That’s all b___s___.”

Yet, Roosevelt believed that provoking Japan into an attack on Hawaii was the only option he had in 1941 to overcome the powerful America First non-interventionist movement led by aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. These anti-war views were shared by 80 percent of the American public from 1940 to 1941. Though Germany had conquered most of Europe, and her U-Boats were sinking American ships in the Atlantic Ocean – including warships – Americans wanted nothing to do with “Europe’s War.”

However, Germany made a strategic error. She, along with her Axis partner, Italy, signed the mutual assistance treaty with Japan, the Tripartite Pact, on September 27, 1940. Ten days later, Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, a U.S. Naval officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), saw an opportunity to counter the U.S. isolationist movement by provoking Japan into a state of war with the U.S., triggering the mutual assistance provisions of the Tripartite Pact, and bringing America into World War II.

Memorialized in McCollum’s secret memo dated October 7, 1940, and recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the ONI proposal called for eight provocations aimed at Japan. Its centerpiece was keeping the might of the U.S. Fleet based in the Territory of Hawaii as a lure for a Japanese attack.

President Roosevelt acted swiftly. The very next day, October 8, 1940, the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fleet, Admiral James O. Richardson, was summoned to the Oval Office and told of the provocative plan by the President. In a heated argument with FDR, the admiral objected to placing his sailors and ships in harm’s way. Richardson was then fired and in his place FDR selected an obscure naval officer, Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, to command the fleet in Hawaii. Kimmel was promoted to a four-star admiral and took command on February 1, 1941. In a related appointment, Walter Short was promoted from Major General to a three-star Lieutenant General and given command of U.S. Army troops in Hawaii.

Throughout 1941, FDR implemented the remaining seven provocations. He then gauged Japanese reaction through intercepted and decoded communications intelligence originated by Japan’s diplomatic and military leaders.

The island nation’s militarists used the provocations to seize control of Japan and organized their military forces for war against the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands. The centerpiece – the Pearl Harbor attack – was leaked to the U.S. in January 1941. During the next 11 months, the White House followed the Japanese war plans through the intercepted and decoded diplomatic and military communications intelligence.

Japanese leaders failed in basic security precautions. At least 1,000 Japanese military and diplomatic radio messages per day were intercepted by monitoring stations operated by the U.S. and her Allies, and the message contents were summarized for the White House. The intercept summaries were clear: Pearl Harbor would be attacked on December 7, 1941, by Japanese forces advancing through the Central and North Pacific Oceans. On November 27 and 28, 1941, Admiral Kimmel and General Short were ordered to remain in a defensive posture for “the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.” The order came directly from President Roosevelt.

As I explained to a policy forum audience at The Independent Institute in Oakland, California, which was videotaped and telecast nationwide over the Fourth of July holiday earlier this year, my research of U.S. naval records shows that not only were Kimmel and Short cut off from the Japanese communications intelligence pipeline, so were the American people. It is a coverup that has lasted for nearly 59 years.

Immediately after December 7, 1941, military communications documents that disclose American foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor disaster were locked in U.S. Navy vaults away from the prying eyes of congressional investigators, historians, and authors. Though the Freedom of Information Act freed the foreknowledge documents from the secretive vaults to the sunlight of the National Archives in 1995, a cottage industry continues to cover up America’s foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor.

The War Prayer

by Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and  gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.
Sunday morning came — next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams — visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory!

With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths.

The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory —

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside — which the startled minister did — and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said “I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!”

The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention.

“He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import — that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of — except he pause and think.

“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

“You have heard your servant’s prayer — the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it — that part which the pastor — and also you in your hearts — fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. the whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.

Amen.

[After a pause.] “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! — The messenger of the Most High waits!”

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

————–

Albert Bigelow Paine first published extracts from “The War Prayer” in his 1912 biography of Mark Twain with the comment that the author said he had been urged not to publish it. According to Paine, Mark Twain acceded to its suppression by stating, “I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead.”

“THAT’S RIGHT! THAT’S RIGHT!”

or Things They Don’t Say About War on the Ten O’ Clock News

by Gene Franks

Author’s Note:  Sept. 16, 2001.  This piece appeared originally in Pure Water Gazette #34, published in early 1991 even as Bush the Elder was entertaining the nation with the televised drubbing of the demonized Iraqis. I revised it and put it on the website a few years later when Bill Clinton was performing sanitized-for-TV slaughter of the Serbs in an effort to distract us from one or another of the flaws in his character.  Now, I’m revising it slightly and posting it again only five days after the Sept. 11 New York/Washington catastrophe, at a time when George Junior still hasn’t been told that there are multiple R’s in terrorist but has the whole thing figured out well enough to tell us that we are good and “those folks” are evil and that they can run but they can’t hide.

I believe that if you pay close attention to the real purposes of war presented in the discussion of the Iron Mountain Report you’ll get an inkling that there is really a lot more to the war we’re about to rush blindly into than good vs. evil and teaching the “terrists” a lesson they’ll never forget. I believe you’ll also see an almost spooky resemblance to the never-ending war being waged in George Orwell’s 1984.

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If every mother cut off her son’s right-hand index finger, the armies of the world would fight without index fingers. And if they cut off their sons’ right legs, the armies would be one-legged. And if they put out their eyes, the armies would be blind, but there would still be armies: blind armies groping to find the fatal place in the enemy’s groin, or to get at his throat.–Hector, the Trojan hero, in Jean Giraudoux’s play, The Trojan War Will Not Take Place (often called Tiger at the Gates in English).

In a book called A Whack on the Side of the Head by a certain Roger von Oeck, I read a story about two men who went to a Sufi judge and asked him to act as arbitrator to settle an argument they were having.

The plaintiff presented his case eloquently and persuasively. The judge, obviously impressed, nodded his head in approval and said, “That’s right, that’s right.”

The defendant protested, of course, that the judge had not yet heard his side. The judge agreed to let him speak, and he, too, was eloquent and persuasive. When he finished, the judge said, “That’s right, that’s right.”

When the court clerk heard this, he jumped to his feet to protest. “They can’t both be right,” he said. The judge looked at the clerk and said, “That’s right, that’s right.”

We usually lack the judge’s ability to see the merit of what seem conflicting truths. Things are black or white, right or wrong. A strange duality flaws our thinking and gets us in trouble. We have blind spots in our thinking that often lead us to absurd conclusions that exclude other viewpoints. Our rationalizations about war are striking examples.

Anyone will tell you that war is odious. Even congressmen who vote to wage war do so with a message of peace on their lips. War is the ultimate atrocity. We all hate it. That’s right, that’s right.

Nevertheless, during the half century plus that I’ve been on earth, my country, while spewing a constant message of peace and goodwill, has been at war every minute. Even during the brief respites from active destruction, we are always at war, devoting a giant share of our resources, our skills, and our attention to preparation for war (or “defense,” as we prefer to call it). In fact, in the history of the world, peace has never existed. Peace is only a theory.

The reasons our minds have conjured up to explain why we participate in organized violence range from simple to complex, but they are all superficial. It is only recently that governments have felt the need to justify wars. Before the media began poking its nose into their affairs, governments pillaged and plundered with no pretext at all, or at most with an occasional word about converting infidels or restoring national honor. Now, with a TV crew standing ready to record the action and interpret it for us every time a bomb explodes or a general farts, we need a more complex set of justifying slogans to keep our minds at ease.

For the Persian Gulf conflict waged during the Bush the Father years, our favorite superficial reasons were the old standbys about liberating oppressed people and nipping potential aggressors in the bud. These always work, and most people seem to believe them, although it should be obvious that we could find plenty of oppressed people to help in Wichita, Kansas. And certainly the “do unto others before they can do unto you” strategy could be just as reasonably used to justify nuking the French or machine-gunning the crafty Mexicans who are always sneaking in from the south.

The growing number of people who are dissatisfied with the first order of superficial reasons oppose the war and protest against it with an alternate set of slogans. The most common superficial reason of this order is that we are fighting for oil. While I agree that many of the clever guys in the back rooms who control our national policies believe that we are fighting for oil and to stimulate the economy, these are, none the less, superficial reasons–symptoms, not causes. If we weren’t fighting for oil, we’d be fighting for control of the pogo stick market.

Iron Mountain

Beneath the first few levels of superficial reasons for war that get air time on the Ten O’ Clock News, there is an entire substratum of more complex superficial reasons for war. Though the public normally does not hear these, they are commonplace among the behind-the-scenes experts (the Back-Room Boys, as Dr. Seuss calls them in the anti-war classic, The Butter Battle Book) who whisper government policy into the ear of Tweedledum or Tweedledee or Wimp or Shrimp or whoever is currently our elected official.

To the Back-Room Boys, war is merely a means toward the fulfillment of higher purposes. Sacrificing a few thousand pawns does not bother them if it helps us win the game. They take a far more Machiavellian view of war than the TV-fed public could possibly imagine.

The Back-Room rationalizations for war are most succinctly explained in a small book called Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace that appeared in 1967. Iron Mountain, as I’ll call it, is the report of a secret, select panel of 15 experts from a variety of backgrounds who were asked during the Kennedy years to study and report on the question of whether the world as we know it could continue without war. To allay suspense, I’ll tell you now that their answer was a resounding No.

Our government neither sanctioned nor forbade publication of the report. The group itself voted against publication, but one of its members published it anonymously. The copy I have is a 1967 Dover 4th printing, so it must have had some circulation, although I’ve never talked to anyone else who has read it. The group called itself “The Iron Mountain Boys” after Iron Mountain, New York, where their first and last meetings were held. They worked from 1963 to 1966 with full access to government resources.

For most of us, the mere discussion of whether or not peace is desirable is an absurdity. We all love peace. We long for it. That’s right, that’s right. Yet most of us think of peace as merely a state of no war in which everything else would continue as it is. And we non-native Americans conveniently forget. for example, that our own ultra-high standard of consumption and opulent lifestyle are possible only because our ancestors waged war against the native inhabitants of America. Although we have learned to speak of this vast war of conquest in terms of “colonization” and “settlement” and of its perpetrators as “pilgrims” and “settlers,” and of their motives as “opportunity” and “religious freedom,” to the native Americans our European ancestors were nothing more or less than an army of cutthroats who took what they wanted by cunning or violence. Saddam Hussein did not invent conquest.

Before we denounce the Back-Room Boys as heartless monsters, consider that without blinking an eye we participate each day in cold-blooded sacrifice of human life for the sake of expediency. For example. we could easily prevent tens of thousands of horrible deaths on the highways by reducing the speed limit to 30 miles per hour. Would we be willing to drive 30 to save thousands of lives? Not likely. Yet we say that live is sacred and priceless.

Measured by the well-intentioned motives we usually attribute to ourselves, Iron Mountain is an outrageous document. It speaks frankly and matter-of-factly of startling ideas that we have not been prepared to face by the cartoon version of reality we get from the media. Here are a few basic Iron Mountain, assumptions that most of us will find hard to accept:

Most medical advances are problems, not progress.

Public posturing by politicians notwithstanding, poverty is necessary and desirable.

Standing armies are, among other things, social welfare institutions that serve functions similar to nursing homes and mental hospitals.

The main purpose of space programs and ultra-costly weapons is neither defense nor the advancement of science; it is the wasteful spending of vast sums of money.

The military draft is only remotely related to defense.

Organized repression of minorities and perhaps the reestablishment of slavery would likely be necessary products of genuine peace.

Deliberate intensification of water and air pollution could be vital steps in a program leading to world peace. [Our great industrial polluters should perhaps get the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting peace by heroically trashing the environment?]

Universal test-tube procreation would have to be an inevitable feature of a world at peace.

Government “budgeting” of lives to be destroyed by warfare is a high priority for maintaining prosperity.

Another shocking and disheartening assumption of Iron Mountain is that war is not a function of political systems, but that societies and political entities are formed for the purpose of waging war. Although it is a universally accepted social cliché that war is subordinate to the social system, the truth is that “war itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today.”

The following is of special interest in the context of our recent Gulf Wars:

“Threats” against the “national interest” are usually created or accelerated to meet the changing needs of the war system …. Wars are not “caused” by international conflicts of interest. Proper logical sequence would make it more accurate to say that war-making societies require–and thus bring about–such conflicts …. Most of the confusion surrounding the myth that war-making is a tool of state policy stems from a general misapprehension of the functions of war.

The “misapprehensions” include defense against attack and the advancement of political and economic “national interests.” These are the visible, or ostensible, functions of war, and if they were the only functions, “the elimination of war would indeed be the procedural matter that the disarmament scenarios suggest.”

The Functions of War

The most obvious and spectacular function of war is economic. War is to the general economy even better than perpetual Christmas would be to retail merchants. War is an unequalled stimulator of the economy because it is superbly wasteful.

Massive waste is essential to keep the nation’s economy pumped up, and nothing wastes like war. Like Christmas, it creates artificial demand for otherwise useless items, and, as one writer explains, it “solves the problem of inventory,” which means that you never finish the job: as soon as you have enough Formula X missiles, you declare them obsolete and go to work producing Formula Y missiles, and since the enemy also has missiles, you have to build anti-missile missiles, and since the enemy has anti-missile missiles, you have to build anti-anti-missile missiles. Iron Mountain views war as not only as an unequalled economic stimulator, but also as a sort of giant balance wheel, which allows the Back-Room Boys to fine tune the economy by controlling defense spending. For example, employment figures can be manipulated by adjusting defense spending. War is the great controller of the nation’s economic metabolism.

One obvious political function of war is the establishment and enforcement of national sovereignty. “The elimination of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state,” says the report. It is by war that we enforce our boundaries. Patriotism and national stability have their roots in war. “The historical record reveals one instance after another where the failure of a regime to maintain the credibility of a war threat led to its dissolution …. The organization of a society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer.”
Sociological functions of the war system include the control of delinquent and hostile social groups, both through police action (police activity is merely one segment of society waging war against another) and military service. Armies also offer jobs for the unemployed. War has been traditionally the main motivating factor in assuring allegiance to the political system. “Allegiance requires a cause: a cause requires an enemy.” War breeds patriotism and patriotism breeds war–a perfect, self-sustaining system. Social cohesiveness erodes and societies crumble unless people can be made to believe that a formidable external menace, a life-and-death enemy, exists.Equally important politically is war’s function as “the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary social classes.” War promotes the separation of classes and assures that there will be “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

The ecological function of war seems so obvious that elaboration is unnecessary. Organized violence together with the disease and famine that often follow it have through the ages been our most effective tool for destroying surplus members of our species. In addition to all-out wars of mass destructive scope, people have throughout history experimented with smaller wars against selected segments of their societies for the purpose of limiting their numbers. These have been far less effective than all-out war. Examples are infanticide, sexual mutilation, monasticism, forced emigration, and extensive capital punishment. Currently, abortion, war against the unborn, is openly promoted as a population limiter.

One of the many ironies involved in thinking of the life-destroying properties of war as our main life-preserving tool in the overall picture of species survival is that nuclear weapons, which threaten us with extinction, are becoming increasingly necessary if war is to limit population significantly. Improved sanitation, nutrition, and medical advances now protect armies more effectively against disease mortality, so more destructive weapons are needed. For example, during Napoleon’s Peninsular campaign, 400,000 of the 460,000 French casualties were from disease, but in World War II only about 16,000 of the 300,000 Americans who perished died from disease. Iron Mountain concludes that conventional weapons will almost certainly prove inadequate in future wars “to reduce the consuming population to a level consistent with survival of the species.”

The cultural and scientific functions of war are equally obvious. From the Iliad on, war has inspired countless artistic masterpieces. Have you read any great epic poems about peace? Scientific research and medical technology have profited immensely from the war system. The transistor radio, steel-frame buildings, and the concept of the assembly line are typical war-inspired advances. Even the power lawnmower has its origins in war  It developed out of a revolving scythe designed by Leonardo da Vinci for the purpose of lopping off enemy heads when pulled by horses through their ranks. War has contributed most heavily to medical technology. “The Vietnam war alone has led to spectacular improvements in amputation procedures, blood-handling techniques, and surgical logistics. It has stimulated new large-scale research on malaria and other tropical parasite diseases; it is hard to estimate how long this work would otherwise have been delayed, despite its enormous nonmilitary importance to nearly half the world’s population.”

I’ll mention just a couple of the more interesting lesser functions of war covered by the report. One is “war as a general social release,” which is explained as necessary for “the dissipation of general boredom, one of the most consistently undervalued and unrecognized of social phenomena.” As such, our Gulf Wars might be viewed as something to fill TV time between the Super Bowl and the onset of the pro basketball playoffs. The start date depends on the TV ratings of the Winter Olympics. Another lesser function of war is as a “generational stabilizer,” which “enables the physically deteriorating older generation to maintain its control of the younger.” Finally, there is the important function of war “as an ideological clarifier,” which is needed to screw our heads back on straight when we start to become deluded into thinking there might be ways to look at things other than the ways we have been taught. Dualism, us vs. them with no room for compromise, “characterizes the traditional dialect of all branches of philosophy and of stable political relationships.” Iron Mountain concludes: “Except for secondary considerations, there cannot be, to put it as simply as possible, more than two sides to a question because there cannot be more than two sides to a war.” That’s right, that’s right!

Substitutes for the Functions of War

The Iron Mountain researchers were able to find no “peaceful” endeavors that could waste resources as effectively as the military. Maintaining readiness for war fulfills the need for “planned annual destructions of at least 10 percent of the gross national product” and does so while operating outside the normal supply-demand system. Substitute suggestions usually center on vast expenditures in health, education, housing, transportation, and alleviation of poverty; these are rejected as inadequate because they are far too cheap. The most promising substitute is the establishment of a grandiose and unimaginably expensive space research program. “Space research can be viewed as the nearest modern equivalent yet devised to the pyramid-building, and similar ritualistic enterprises, of ancient societies,” yet it is unlikely that governments could “sell” people on such expenditures without some real or imagined threat to their security. Seen in this light, the defense strategy commonly called Star Wars might be viewed as a transitional effort to shift from massive military to massive non-military spending.

In the area of politics, the end of war would equal “the end of nationhood as we know it today.” No suitable substitute has been devised, and most suggestions, such as maintaining order by means of an international peace force, border on merely substituting one form of war for another. There have been experiments with imaginary external threats (e. g., bogus flying saucer reports), but so far nothing works as well as Saddam Hussein.

In sociology, a suitable control function might exist in slavery, “in a technologically modern and a conceptionally euphemized form.” Slavery relieves unemployment and provides a niche for social misfits. It could easily be argued that we are moving toward widespread slavery “in a technologically modern and a conceptionally euphemized form” through debt. College students, for example, who incur massive debts and spend the rest of their lives working to pay them are in a very real sense indentured servants–slaves of our very demanding economic system.

In terms of motivation, a typical Iron Mountain suggestion is the deliberate intensification of environmental pollution to create a genuine non-human enemy to do combat with. The development of “blood games” to control individual aggressive impulses is also suggested, but its effectiveness would be limited.

As for ecology, the solution is easy: simply limit procreation to artificial insemination. The tough part is getting people to accept it. It would likely involve universal administration of a variant on “the pill” via public water supplies and essential foods. If people will accept mass drugging of the water with a powerful toxin like fluoride because they are told it will lessen tooth cavities, they might be convinced to accept contraceptive treatment of municipal water.

The Iron Mountain panel concluded that the world would probably survive even if no peaceful substitute could be found for war’s stimulation of culture. As for science, grandiose space projects and massive eugenics programs might serve man almost as well as war.

The overall conclusion?

The war system cannot responsibly be allowed to disappear until 1) we know exactly what it is we plan to put in its place, and 2) we are certain, beyond reasonable doubt, that these substitute institutions will serve their purposes in terms of the survival and stability of society …. The war system, for all its subjective repugnance to important sections of “public opinion,”  has demonstrated its effectiveness since the beginning of recorded history;  it has provided the basis for the development of many impressively durable civilizations, including that which is dominant today.

 

Bill Gets a Job

I’d like to leave the gruesome subject of war for awhile to tell you a story about a young student named Bill who worked in a shoe store just off the Yale University campus. Bill sometimes boosted his income by taking odd jobs around the university. One day he called about a one-evening job advertised in the school paper by Yale’s Psychology Department. He was pleased to learn that they could use him that very evening, so he called his girlfriend and made a date to blow his earnings on beer and bowling as soon as he finished.

When Bill arrived at the Psychology lab, be met Bob, who was to work with him, and together they were introduced to a professor with a long, complicated name. Bill forgot his name right away, so he just called him the Prof. The Prof said they were to be in an experiment to find out if punishing a pupil for his mistakes could have a positive effect on the learning process. A computer had already assigned their roles: Bob was the learner, and Bill would serve as teacher, checking Bob’s answers and administering punishment as required. It sounded like fun.

In the test room, Bob was given a long list of paired words to study briefly–words like blue sky, ink pen, and bowling ball. Bob was to be given a multiple choice test and punished if he chose ink blot or tennis ball rather than the correct response. When Bill saw the punishment apparatus, he was glad he was the teacher. Bob was strapped into an electric chair and an electrode was attached to his forearm. Bill was seated at a console with a simple set of controls. He was told to administer a shock by pushing a button at each incorrect answer and to increase the shock by 15 volt increments, as clearly marked on a big green knob, each time that Bob answered incorrectly. The Prof made a couple of lame jokes about this being an “electrifying experience” and they got underway.

Bob got the first two questions right, then he chose dead duck rather than wild duck and Bill gave him a shock. Bob winced and everyone laughed. Bill turned up the juice by 15 volts and the test went on.

Bob didn’t laugh anymore. He grunted when he got the 30 volts, and after the 75-volt shock, Bob cried out, “Hey, man, I don’t want to do this anymore. Get me out of this thing!”

Bill looked at the Prof, who said calmly, “Please go on.” Bill reluctantly pushed the button. At 150 volts Bob was begging to be released. Bill looked at the Prof, who only said, “The experiment requires that you continue.”

Bob’s answers obviously were getting worse. He was in pain and could no longer remember even the correct answers he had given earlier. After the 315-volt shock, he screamed out violently that he wanted out. He said that he could not take any more. Bill asked the Prof for permission to stop, but the Prof said sternly, “Whether he likes it or not, he must go on until he learns all the word pairs correctly. It is absolutely essential that you continue.” Bob felt like walking out, but he pushed the button.

By this time, Bob was so upset that he stopped giving answers to the questions. Bill assumed they would stop the test, but the Prof explained that no answer was an incorrect answer and he had no choice but to push the button. From that point, Bob sat in a daze and did not appear to hear the questions. He shrieked in agony with each shock. When Bill asked for permission to stop, the Prof said, “You have no other choice. You must go on.”

Bill stuck with the experiment until the end. He gave Bob the 450-voit shock, but he wasn’t proud of himself. In fact, he left the test lab quickly and picked up his pay from the secretary. He didn’t want to talk to Bob again.

In the weeks that followed the test, Bill thought a lot about it. He wished he could do it over. He thought of a dozen speeches he would make to the Prof. They all ended with “Take this job and shove it.”

It was almost a year later when Bill saw a long article in the school newspaper about the research he had participated in. It was his turn to be shocked. The article said that Dr. Stanley Milgram of the Yale Psychology Dept. had completed an extensive experiment which tested over 1,000 subjects at Yale and was repeated in Italy, South Africa, Australia, and Germany. The purpose of the experiment, Bill was surprised to learn, had nothing to do with learning: it was to assess the degree to which normal individuals like himself would submit to authority. It was he, Bill, who was being tested, not Bob. Bob, the article said. was an actor hired to play the role of learner, and the “electric chair” was a sham; it wasn’t even hooked up. The test was to see if the Prof, using nothing more than a stock set of authoritarian clichés, could turn a decent guy like Bill into a dehumanized torturer. The fact was that Bill did have a choice; he could have stopped at any time. But he went all the way to the 450-volt maximum.

The article also said that before the experiment was administered,  Dr. Milgram had outlined the research to 39 psychiatrists and asked them to predict the outcome. The consensus of the psychiatrists was that most of the subjects would not go beyond 150 volts, and they predicted that only 4% would reach 300 volts. Only a pathological fringe of about 1 in 1,000 would do what Bill had done, administer the highest shock on the board. The result was a surprise to everyone. Over 60% of the 1,000 plus subjects tested at Yale obeyed the Prof to the very end, as Bill had done. In Italy, Australia, and South Africa, the percentage of obedient subjects was somewhat higher, and in Munich, 85% gave the 450-volt shock!

I’ll explain now that Bill and Bob are fictitious, but the rest of the information is factual. The study in question was done and the results were as reported. I wasn’t telling the truth when I said I was “leaving the gruesome subject of war,” because Bill’s dilemma is exactly that of the vast majority of our Persian Gulf soldiers. In fact, the Yale research is used to bolster the central argument of Arthur Koestler, one of the most challenging thinkers of our time, in his book Janus.

The popular view is that war results from our overly aggressive nature. Our pent-up aggressive instincts are fanned to a fiery outburst by living in a world that is drunk on violence. That’s right, that’s right.  Koestler disagrees. War, he says, does not result from an excess of aggression, but an excess of devotion. Bill did not push the button because he hated Bob or because he needed to release pent-up aggressiveness. He did it from misguided loyalty to the Prof, a symbol of authority. Only a tiny fraction of the 60% of Americans who pushed the button until the bitter end were Rambo-like lunatics bent on doing violence to Bob. Most, like Bill, were ordinary, good-intentioned people who simply were unable to say no to authority.

Koestler writes: “Anybody who has served in the ranks of an army can testify that aggressive feelings toward the enemy hardly play a part in the dreary routines of waging war. Soldiers do not hate. They are frightened, bored, sex-starved, homesick; they fight with resignation, because they have no other choice, or with enthusiasm for king and country, the true religion, the righteous cause–moved not by hatred but by loyalty. To say it once more, man’s tragedy is not an excess of aggression, but an excess of devotion.”

Our “excess of devotion,” Koestler says, is no mere coincidence. It results from the way our brains have evolved. Briefly stated, we are defective creatures, unable to perceive and deal with certain aspects of our environment because of short-circuits in our brain function which cause us to use limbic, “old brain,” thinking where logical neocortex decisions are needed. Although we have developed remarkable intelligence in some areas, we are bumbling morons when it comes to thinking for ourselves in the face of authority. The tragic flaw of our species, a flaw which gives us only a modest chance for survival, is that we are blind followers of the leader.

In regard to the Yale experiments, Koestler writes: “That humane people are capable of committing inhuman acts when acting as members of an army or a fanatical mob has always been taken for granted. The importance of the experiments was that they revealed how little was needed to push them across the psychic boundary which separates the behavior of decent citizens from dehumanized SS guards.”

The Gazette’s Conclusions on War

You will find no pat answers, but here are some miscellaneous thoughts about war:

1. War is much overrated. It is no big deal. It is one of 27,461 ways nature has devised to rid the world of excess people, and everyone who dies in war would eventually die from something else. Nevertheless, for some reason, since the time of Homer, war has always sold papers.

2. The Feb. 10, 1991 Denton Record-Chronicle devoted almost the entire front page, complete with computer illustrations, to a Marine Gulf War operation in which a handful of lives were lost. A brief story hidden on page 10A of the same issue said that as many as 1 million Sudanese are expected to starve to death this year. In terms of lives lost, tobacco is the most toxic substance on the planet, yet it is only recently that the government has caught on that persecuting tobacco producers can be a significant source of income and has developed a stance of belated righteous indignation. We tolerate the ravages of alcohol, and it is even politically incorrect to speak against it. War is hell. That’s right, that’s right. So are slow, agonizing starvation, delirium tremens, and being crushed by a truck. No one ever writes epic poems about lung cancer.

3. The sexual urge, hunger, and thirst are built into our genetic code to get us here and keep us going. It is likely that we are also programmed with an urge for war as a survival tool to limit our numbers. This is a grim thought.

4. Actor Dennis Weaver said, “For there to be lasting peace, the hearts of people must be changed, and the only heart we can directly change is our own. Peace is not something we can graft on from the outside; it must be grown from within.” This should be obvious. Peace imposed from outside is just another form of war. Therefore, make peace first with yourself. Then with those around you. Eliminate cruelty from your diet. Cultivate your garden. Visualize peace.

5. The prospect for peace seems dim as long as Bill is a pushover for every authority figure that pops up. This is the Catch 22 of all planning for peace: Bill can be an anarchist or a wimp, and we get war either way. Perhaps the ideal was best stated in a Frank & Ernest cartoon: “Question authority, but raise your hand.”

6. The Iron Mountain Report sucks. It is also bogus in the sense that it was probably not even prepared  by a presidential commission but was ghost-written as a spoof on “think tank” reports by a writer named Leonard Lewin. The matter has been debated and  litigated. The authenticity does not matter, because whatever its origin,  Iron Mountain reflects well the beliefs of the “back room boys” who do our thinking.  We must not surrender to its negative conclusions. I reviewed it in detail because it is thought-provoking.  Not one on the back room boys who decided that “poverty is necessary and desirable” was poor. And if war is so great for the economy, why, after decades of unprecedented military spending, is our economy hopelessly in the red? If waste is really needed, I have great faith in American politicians to provide it aplenty, with or without war.

Bogus or genuine, Iron Mountain is what we get when we delegate our thinking to experts.

7. Talk of war breeds a conformist fervor that is hard to resist.  Just ask Bill, and just ask the 98 U.S. Senators who opted in Sept. 2001 to sign on to the insane coronation of Bush Junior.  Not a single U.S. senator had even the courage to ask for debate of the issue. Only two senators had the courage to oppose the Tonken Gulf Resolution which gave President Johnson the king-like authority to plunge the United States into a bloody, pointless conflict that became a military and moral tragedy for America.  We now know, through recently declassified documents,  that even as  Johnson went to Congress with tears in his eyes and gravity in his voice to ask for authority to wage war, he knew that there was no real Tonken Gulf crisis and that the initial report of an attack on a U. S. ship was in error. A two-day delay to examine the matter would have altered the course of history, but only two U. S. Senators had the courage to question the President.

8. Of all the great literature inspired by war, my favorite piece isn’t an elaborate Homeric celebration of the glories of battle, but a brief confession of a practical yet heroic act performed by a Greek foot-soldier/poet named Archilochus, who chose to thumb his nose at the Prof and save his own skin. Archilochus described his heroic act in a poem called “The Lost Shield.” To understand it, you should know that to the Greeks of the period it was a supreme disgrace, a breach of the honor code, to lose one’s shield and not one’s life at the same time. Archilochus’ poem begins:

Some Thracian strutteth with my shield;
I dropped it as I scurried from the field,

and goes on to point out that shields are cheap and replaceable and that he’s just glad to have escaped with his bones intact.

I have often found encouragement in Archilochus’ irreverent outlook. It is a sensible approach to life. I even once wrote a poem of my own in imitation of his. My poem was called “The Lost Hood Ornament,” and it celebrated my decision to have a laugh rather than go to war over the loss of a ram hood ornament from my mighty Dodge pickup. I found out that my Ram–in my poem, the symbol of my Texan machismo–had been slyly stolen from the hood of my truck during my sleep by a young Mexican-American neighbor.  Truly a cowardly act, worthy of  vengeance.  My poem started,

Some bold Chicano strutteth with my Ram
He’ll likely trade it for a can of Spam,

and concluded that losing one’s hood ornament is not really the massive disgrace the redneck code has it to be.

Although this may not seem like the kind of thinking that made America great, it’s the attitude we’ll have to learn if we are to stop jumping every time the Prof says frog or flag or honor. And the next time our government starts beating the drums about how we have to go to war to teach  whoever is the Saddam or Osama du jour  a lesson, we’re going to have to learn that taking a few days to think things over and consider the real issues isn’t going to be an irreparable blemish to the national honor. Infinity is long, and “Infinite Justice,” as an overpaid national cliché writer originally chose to call the “war against terrorism,”  can surely wait a couple of days. God, in whose name our we’re always killing people, has plenty of time.

Bomb Jerusalem!

by Tiger Tom

Veteran Gazette Columnist Tiger Tom’s RX for Peace in the Holy Land

Editor’s Note: This piece first appeared on the Gazette’s website a few weeks before the 911 bombings–at a time when the Taliban were taking heat from the whole western world over the destruction of  Buddhist holy objects. — Hardly Waite.

I, Tiger Tom, am weary of hearing artsy yuppies whine about the religious statues blasted to oblivion by the Taliban. Good riddance, I say.  Let me tell you why.

Religious objects have been nothing but trouble since the beginning.  If the Taliban blows up a statue, that’s one thing less to have a religious war about.  If  cubs fight over a toy, the wise mom puts it out of sight to stop the fracas.  That’s what the Taliban did when they blasted the religious art works.    I, Tiger Tom, say well done.

As long as there’s a Temple Mount or a Wailing Wall or even a bush that Ahab or some lower-echelon prophet took a dump behind, the Jews and the Palestinians are going to keep fighting over who gets to have them.  I  say that for the good of humankind and animalkind alike we must demolish every last smidgeon of religious paraphernalia in the whole Holy Land so that there isn’t so much as a holy splinter left to fight about.  You can negotiate your paws off and talk till your tongue has blisters,  but as long as there’s a holy this or that or an ark of the whatever, those people are going to fight over them. As long as there’s a wall to wail on, those people are going to fight over who gets to wail there.  And if you take away their guns, they’ll fight with sticks, and if you cut off their hands, they’ll fight with their bloody stubs.

So I, Tiger Tom, say,  blow up every last relic. Blow up the whole sacred bunch of them. Blow them up so the world can get on with its life.  And if they pick up the dirt where the temple used to be and start saying it’s holy dirt, I say take the dirt away from them, hurl it into the deepest part of the ocean, and throw away the key.

Probably the only reason we don’t have never-ending wars in the USA is because we don’t have any places where some long-ago god ate his last meal or said something nifty or talked to an angel or fed a multitude with a single tuna-fish sandwich.  We do great without holy places.  I, Tiger Tom, say let’s give the Jews and Palestinians the same advantage by ridding them of holy stuff to fight about.   In the name of peace and all that’s sacred, bomb Jerusalem!

And I would hope that in the future gods would have the good sense and common decency to stay in the heavens or wherever they are supposed to stay and not to go wandering around the earth creating a lot of holy stuff for people to fight about.