"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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We are all insurgents at heart
Of course, in war there are seldom any actual good guys, but there are often a lot of people who think of themselves that way, and fight and die for what they hold dear regardless of the fact that they are consistently used and abused by various power centers. The only way to win against such people is to kill their children before they are able to hold a gun. In order to survive my five unarmed years as a civilian aid worker in Viet Nam, during the worst years of that war, I had to understand, in a way that the vast majority of foreigners who traveled under armed escort could not, what that war was really about. I had to continually prove my status as a non-combatant and politically non-aligned interloper in order to stay alive. Countless opportunities were presented to me, most accidentally, but some deliberately as tests, to inform on the activities of the resistance. I am still amazed that I managed to thread my way through this obstacle course and stay alive and unwounded (not counting my multiple cancers and other problems related to Agent Orange exposure). I suspect that those few independent aid workers in close contact with ordinary Iraqis who have survived their stays in Iraq (are there any?) would understand when I say that I have yet to see anything written about the American War in Viet Nam that even comes close to portraying accurately the experience of ordinary Vietnamese during that war. Any such surviving foreign civilian aid workers in Iraq likely feel equally alienated by press and scholarly accounts about the American War in Iraq. But then, it needs to be this way. The greatest weakness of the foreign aggressor is his irreducible ignorance about the ground level realities of his resistance enemy. I suspect as well that there are numerous people in the US military who do understand what is going on in Iraq The truth is that if you want to fight a whole people, the only possible avenue to "Victory" is total, or near total, genocide, such as was pursued in the American Indian Wars. It is a mark of social progress that such openly genocidal campaigns of conquest have become unacceptable to the conscience of the world. Now, aims of conquest must be pursued covertly under the cover of "bringing democracy" or "fighting terrorism." But this formal restraint does put the initiative in the hands of resistance fighters who are willing to endure the punishment of aerial bombardment, uranium weapons, cluster bombs and white phosphorus and the ten to one or greater discrepancies in wounded and dead fighters that that the use of those terrible weapons implies, not to mention the vast numbers of civilian casualties, which are now termed "collateral damage" in Newspeak. Would the citizens of the US be willing to endure such suffering in order to defend our sovereignty from foreign conquerors? Maybe.
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