Rotters wrote:
"Geez Larsen, that's a bit heavy handed, isn't it?"
Rotters,
Not hardly and definitely not in the face of wishful thinking and willful ignorance. Large sections of Western society seem to think that if they ignore war, if they simply recite rote phrases ("It's bad for children, trees, and other living things"), if they keep their head under the sand deep enough and long enough, war will simply go away. Does that sound like an effective way to tackle any problem to you?
Strangely enough, the folks who are most likely to chant that mealy minded mush about war, who are most likely to try and wish it away, are the same folks who try and work to solve the other social ills afflicting humanity. They'll tackle racism, classism, and any 'ism' you got - except militarism. They choose to ignore war, refuse to face the actual realities of war, reduce war to the level of cant and euphemisms, just like the Victorians did with sex and with the same lack of results.
Please don't think I mean to glorify war, I don't. I mean to BURY it. To solve our species problem with war, we first need to face that problem squarely. A first good step would be to refuse to recite all the usual pap and pablum that disguise the true nature of war in layer after layer of soothing, and ultimately meaningless, words.
"I survived a war (in fact i've seen combat in four different theatres). To me, I couldn't give a foetid dingoe's kidney if we won or lost... the most important thing was to be able to get back to my family. So, for me anyway, surviving
was what it's all about. My personal opinion, anyway..... no offence

"
Please believe me there is none taken. Being in the middle of it as you were, being at the sharp end, you know how wasteful, degrading, and wretched war is. You've faced it, came through it. Would you reduce it to level of comfortable cant; 'No winners, only survivors' or 'Two villages fighting can only score one'? Can what you saw and experienced be so blithely dismissed? Or should war be squarely faced and tackled? At the end of the day, which is more honest and which is wishful thinking?
I've been fortunate enough not to have been a combatant. I've also been unfortunate enough to have seen war and it's immediate aftermath. I worked under the 'midnight sky at noon' in Kuwait after the '91 ceasefire, ink black plumes of almost liquid smoke lining the horizon. The volcanic vent 'black smokers' found in the mid-oceanic rifts look so much like them. As we surveyed the damaged industrial plants war left behind, more than once our noses told of some poor bastard who died alone and unseen and whose presence hadn't even been suspected because the blowing sands had covered him up.
Thanks to Soweto necklaces, gasoline no longer reminds me of lazy summers mowing lawns and, thanks to the Highway of Death, Chanel No. 5 no longer reminds me of smiling women in cocktail dresses gliding across dance floors. That scent will be forever linked with the smells of burnt pork and shit; the true and final odor of humanity. Strolling by the perfume counter in a department store is no longer very pleasent.
I've paid the irregular road tolls demanded by teenagers with Kalashnikovs in Nigeria and have seen the droves of Tutsi refugee women in Uganda each with her right arm off at the elbow. They used machetes for that.
I've seen the hordes of preteen slave soldiers recently disarmed, deloused, and removed from the Sudan. I've seen the results of Paul Simon's delightfully silly song lyrics too, the 'bomb in the baby carriage triggered by the radio'.
But of course, none of that is talked about in polite society. Please Mr. Whipsnade, you're making a scene, war hurts children. Yes, it does. I know because I've seen the children. Now what are we going to do about it?
Reciting 'No winners' and 'War hurts children' in some brain dead, knee jerk reaction everytime someone brings up the topic may be soothing to you, but it did nothing for the thousands of women sent to rape camps in the Balkans simply because they were Muslim. However good and superior it makes you feel, it still doesn't do anything to solve the problem. All it does is perpetuate society's preference for willful ignorance. As for me, I'd rather make a scene.
In 2003, we cluck our tongues and shake our heads about the Victorians and sex. All those lives lost to childbirth and veneral diseases. Simple problems really requiring just as simple solutions, but those silly Victorians just couldn't talk about it. They wrapped it all up in euphemism and whispered that such things weren't talked about in polite society.
We so righteously look down our nose at the Victorians because of being so silly over such an little problem. Perhaps future generations will look down their noses at us after they have had the moral courage to face up to humanity's innate love of violence and solve that little problem. Here's hoping.
Sincerely,
Larsen