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CounterPunch
March 15,
2003
Consigning a
Nation to Flames
Do You Know
What War Is?
by JOE QUANDT
It's a woman with 3 children making her way along
a dusty road at sundown. Her man, her family, have been torn
out of her life. As the sunlight leaks out of the bleak dusk
of another bleak day, she pulls up her filthy shawl and runs
a hand over the brow of the baby she's carrying. He has a fever,
has had one for a couple days. The 2 other kids scuff along behind
her, one holding vacantly onto her dress, eyes wide in the growing
blackness of a night without streetlights, without buildings,
without food. Emptiness, and sniffles.
The other kid's eyes are half closed
with fatigue and hunger, her mind shocked into a torpid, mock
adulthood. A brilliant catalog of disasters and collaterally
damaged humans flips its endless pages within her silent, groping
little brain. "This," she decides, "is what life
is."
The woman is not beautiful because this
is not a movie. No one will come to artfully arrange her hair
for the big scene when her baby dies. No one will give her a
hug at the end of the scene and tell her she's doing a great
job.
She is doing what refugees from the dawn
of "civilization" have done, outrunning disaster, using
all of her animal wit to just keep 4 people alive until tomorrow.
Just tomorrow.
She last danced at her wedding.
* *
*
Civilization dates itself from the ancient
Iraqi city-states of Mesopotamia. With civilization came war-the
mindless, wanton child of civilization.
From comfortable chairs in the quiet
rooms of State, decrees are penned that consign nations to the
flames, for war is the ultimate game of the wealthy. Only in
popular revolutions do the poor utilize war, and then only to
gain immediate ends. Still, the under classes must fight all
the wars.
War, as a concept, a necessary evil,
must be sold to the people, who in their hearts hold a healthy
dread of it. And so it is idealized as patriotism, the enemy
is demonized, and God's protection is invoked. Young men are
turned from their natural pursuits, the sacrifices of mothers
are lionized, and the old shake their heads in disbelief at the
recurrent folly of humanity.
Is it any wonder that the trumpet, loudest
of all instruments, is the actual and metaphorical sound of war?
Or that it is the violin, so like the human voice, that plays
the somber, mournful sound of war's aftermath?
War is the death of Law. And when nations
have sickened and wasted their wealth, both human and capital,
and when the original point of the war has become a fossilized
memory, and when men have become indistinguishable from beasts
in the lone pursuit of survival... they lie down exhausted, and
this is called Peace.
* *
*
As the United States lumbers closer and
closer to the disaster that every war eventually becomes, as
the flames of international hate rise, it is well that we turn
our thoughts to that woman and those children on that road.
To believe that the world would exact
no penalty on us because we failed to visualize her would be
a dangerous lack of imagination on our part.
Joe Quandt
is a member of Voices
in the Wilderness. This interview was conducted in Baghdad
in October. He can be reached at: ytonthemoon@aol.com
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