BY CAMILLO “MAC” BICA

In Part One and Part Two of this article, I asked the reader to utilize her ability to think and offered a theoretical analysis of what I termed “moral casualties.” I argued that as soldiers experience the horror and cruelty of war, especially guerrilla/counterinsurgency war such as was the case in Vietnam and now in Iraq, the moral gravity of their actions – displacing, torturing, injuring, and killing other human beings – becomes apparent and problematic. As a consequence, soldiers suffer not only the effects of trauma, but from debilitating remorse, guilt, shame, disorientation, and alienation from the remainder of the moral community – moral injuries. In this installment, in the hope of providing a more complete picture of the psychological, emotional, and moral impact of war, I will offer, not theoretical analysis, but personal observations regarding the aftermath of war. In doing so, I will ask the reader not to think so much as to feel. 

All who are touched by war are tainted. I have labored, over the years, to follow the advice of well-meaning, though “war-naïve” clinicians, family members, and friends to put the war behind me and go on with my life. I have failed miserably, I think, and have watched the tragedy of others failing as well. As a veteran suffering the effects of war and a philosopher studying war and morality, I have looked at the phenomenon and its human cost from both perspectives, experientially and theoretically – from the inside and from without. I have concluded that the psychological, emotional, and moral injures of war cannot be cured, that war never “goes away.” That for far too many, such war injuries are and have been terminal. For others, such as for me, they are chronic, demanding that we struggle each day through anger, perhaps even rage, guilt, shame, remorse, grave despair, and depression to come to grips with the experience, with “what I have done and what I have become.”  With luck, and with love and support, the best that can be achieved, I think, is a benign acceptance, understanding, forgiveness and reconciliation.

In part one and two of this study, I spoke to you analytically as a philosopher. Now you will hear poetically from the veteran, the victimizer and the victim of man’s inhumanity to man. 

War Crazy 

Throughout my adult life,

I have thought myself a free spirit,

a philosopher mendicant,

seeking an alternative, more substantive, lifestyle.

So many others, however,

see my unorthodoxy, my “spiritual seeking,”

as abnormal and a clear indication of my insanity.

Perhaps I need to pause and to reevaluate my life.

After all, being insane is not something one readily admits.

I guess it’s part of being crazy to cling to a facade of sanity,

to think oneself normal and everyone else insane. 

**

One thing I am certain of, however,

I haven’t always been crazy.

Wasn’t born crazy.

I think insanity crept up on me,

happened in Vietnam, in the war.

War does that you know, drives people crazy.

Shell shock, battle fatigue, soldier’s heart, PTSD,

all that killing and dying can make anyone crazy. 

** 

Some survive war quite well, they tell me.

Many even benefit from its virtues.

War’s effects, however, are not always apparent.

No one escapes war unscathed, in body and in mind.

All war, any war, every war, ain’t no virtue in war. 

** 

I think, of those not driven crazy by war,

many were crazy already.

Their insanity, however, was of a different kind,

a hard kind, and an uncaring kind.

I knew people like that.

While I did not like them much,

I thought them fortunate,

as killing and dying meant nothing.

In fact, in a perverse way, they enjoyed it,

enjoyed the jazz, the excitement, the power.

They became avenging angels,

even god herself,

making decisions of life and death,

but mostly death.

Those crazies hated to see the war end.

For me, the war never ends. 

** 

Sometimes things work out for the best, though,

as my unorthodoxy, my being crazy,

probably saved my life.

You see, sane people can’t live like this,

in a war that never ends.

Not all crazy people can either.

Guess I was lucky.

Sometimes being crazy helps you cope.

Sometimes, I wish I were crazier than I am. 

 ** 

Serious introspection has made clear

the foundations of my unorthodoxy,

the nature of my insanity.

It is a cruel wisdom allowing,

no better, compelling a clarity of vision.

I have seen the horror of war,

the futility and the waste.

I have endured the hypocrisy and the arrogance 

of the influential and the wealthy,

have tolerated the ignorance and narrow mindedness

of the compliant and the easily led.

War’s malevolent benefactors,

who pretend and profess their patriotism

with bumper-sticker bravado,

with word but not deed,

intoxicated by war’s hysteria,

from a safe distance.

Appreciative of our sacrifices they claim

as they applaud the impending slaughter,

sanctioning by word, or action, or non-action,

sending other men and women

to be killed, and maimed, and driven crazy by war. 

** 

And when they benefit from the carnage no longer,

their yellow ribbon patriotism and shallow concern

fade quickly to apathy and indifference.

The living refuse of war that returns

are heroes no longer,

but outcasts and derelicts, and burdens on the economy.

The dead, they mythologize with memorials and speeches

of past and future suffering and loss.

Inspiring and prophetic words

by those who sanction the slaughter

to those who know nothing of sacrifice.  

** 

I used to try to explain war

to help them understand and to know its horror,

naively believing that war was a deficiency,

of information, understanding, discernment, and vision.

Being crazy has liberated me, however,

allowing me to see

that war is not a deficiency at all,

but an excess,

of greed, ambition, intolerance, and lust for power.

And we are its instruments,

the cannon fodder, expendable commodities

in the ruthless pursuit of wealth, power, hegemony, and empire.  

** 

Now, I accept and celebrate my unorthodoxy, my insanity,

as an indictment of the hypocrites and the arrogant,

of the ignorant and the narrow-minded

for a collective responsibility and guilt

for murder and mayhem,

and crimes against humanity.

And I offer my insanity

as a presage of their future accountability,

to humankind in the courts of history,

and to the god they invoke so often

to sanction and make credible their sacrilege of war.

Eli Lilly CEO Sydney Taurel received a 5-year $37-million compensation package for heading a company whose ethical standards are indistinguishable from those of a common criminal.

BY WILL HALL | Originally at ADBUSTERS MAGAZINE

For pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, death and injury are just a cost of doing business. When Zyprexa, Lilly’s drug to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, hit the marketplace in 1996, it was hailed as an “atypical” – a “safe, gentle psychotropic,” more effective than older drugs like Thorazine and Trilafon, without the dangerous side effects. Sales skyrocketed. The hype soon gave way to reality, as Lilly faced waves of lawsuits by patients suffering from diabetes, massive weight gain, pancreatitis and cardiac problems. Lilly responded with the cozy arrangement that worked with Prozac, another blockbuster plagued with problems: quietly settle suits out of court, with proceedings sealed and secret under a gag order. Anything embarrassing – or illegal – that Lilly is doing behind closed doors would remain hidden from public view. Read the rest of this entry »

BY JUSTIN PODUR | Originally at Znet Magazine |
Dateline: May 11, 2007

In recent years, a number of important contributions have influenced the growing debate on global warming. Paul Baer and Tom Athanasiou’s book, Dead Heat, from a few years ago, was excellent. Noam Chomsky’s latest book, Failed States, mentions global warming as one of the three more urgent problems humanity faces (the others being war and the lack of democratic institutions to deal with problems). George Monbiot’s new book, Heat, provides a workable set of proposals for stabilizing the climate without draconian sacrifice (except commercial flight).

Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth cuts back and forth between cogent explanations of climate science and self-aggrandizement (Gore on the farm, Gore walking to the stage, Gore changing planes at the airport, Gore doing product placement typing on his Mac computer). Properly filtered, however, it provides an excellent introductory lecture on climate change. I wish that it had come from someone else, someone who hadn’t vice-presided over the Iraq sanctions regime and the bombing of Yugoslavia. But the fact that Gore made it popular doesn’t make it a sham. The terms of discussion for any major problem are usually set by elites, with the rest of us trying to sort out truth from falsehood and sensible policy from corporate propaganda after the fact. Read the rest of this entry »

BY MATT TAIBBI | Dateline May 10, 2007

There is a growing number of people out there who believe the Reid-Pelosi Iraq war supplemental is a gigantic crock of shit, and who think the Democratic Party leadership should now officially be labeled conspirators in the war effort. I’ve even seen it suggested that Reid and Pelosi should now be sent official “certificates of war ownership,” to formally put them in a club with Bush, Cheney, Richard Perle and the rest of the actual war authors.

The growing tension between the real antiwar movement and the Democratic Party was reflected in a long article over the weekend in the New York Times. “Antiwar Groups Use New Clout to Influence Democrats.” The piece that described how an umbrella group of antiwar activists called Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq was ready to drop the public relations hammer on the Dems, should they cave too easily in their negotiations with the president. Read the rest of this entry »

BY CHALMERS JOHNSON
Dateline: May 17, 2007

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

ALI, AN 12-YEAR OLD IRAQI VICTIM OF THE WAR. JUST ANOTHER CASE OF “COLLATERAL DAMAGE.”

BY CAMILLO “MAC” BICA

Inherent in modern war-making practice is the conviction that there is a significant moral difference between killing innocent civilians in an attack such as that on the World Trade Center or on a bus filled with college students and killing noncombatants during a military response to such an attack. This conviction is clearly demonstrated in a myriad of against Palestinian terrorist groups such as and in the US war in , , , and . It is reflected, as well, in the language used to describe the innocent deaths, the value laden term “” in the case of the former, and the morally neutral term “collateral damage” in the latter.War, even as a response to terrorism is rule governed. According to Just War Theory and a myriad of international agreements and treaties, war is evaluated according to whether established criteria are satisfied. One of the most important rules of war is the legal and moral prohibition against the targeting and killing of innocents, i.e., the criterion of discriminating and affording of immunity to noncombatants - . Since noncombatants are neither directly nor indirectly involved in the prosecution of a terrorist attack or of a war, they have done nothing to warrant a forfeiture of their immunity. Consequently, to kill noncombatants to further some goal or objective whether political, religious, or social, even if for a just cause, is not an act of war but of murder and fundamental to our understanding of terrorism. That is, the Criterion of Discrimination is integral in differentiating war from terrorism and killing in war from murder. Acts of terrorism, unlike acts of war, knowingly harm and kill noncombatants. Read the rest of this entry »

BY MATT TAIBBI
RollingStone.com
Posted on September 26, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/42181/

Why the “9/11 Truth” movement makes the Left Behind series read like Shakespeare.

A few weeks ago I wrote a column on the anniversary of 9/11 that offhandedly dismissed 9/11 conspiracy theorists as “clinically insane.” I expected a little bit of heat in response, but nothing could have prepared me for the deluge of fuck-you mail that I actually got. Apparently every third person in the United States thinks George Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks.

” You’re just another MSM-whore left gatekeeper paid off by corporate America,” said one writer. “What you do isn’t journalism at all, you dick,” said another. “You’re the one who’s clinically insane,” barked a third, before educating me on the supposed anomalies of physics involved with the collapse of WTC-7. Read the rest of this entry »

While America obsessed about Brittany’s shaved head, Bush offered a budget that offers $32.7 billion in tax cuts to the Wal-Mart family alone, while cutting $28 billion from Medicaid.

BY MATT TAIBI || RollingStone.com
Posted on February 20, 2007 | Posted at http://www.alternet.org/story/48278/

“Now, after she shaved her head in a bizarre episode that culminates a months-long saga of controversial behavior, it’s the question being asked by her fans, her foes and the general public: What was she thinking?”– Bald and Broken: Inside Britney’s Shaved Head, Sheila Marikar, ABC.com, Feb. 19.

What was she thinking? How about nothing? How about who gives a shit? How’s that for an answer, Sheila Marikar of ABC news, you pinhead?

I’m not one of those curmudgeons who freaks out every time that Bradgelina moves the war off the front page of the Post, or Katie Couric decides to usher in a whole new era of network news with photos of the imbecile demon-spawn of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. I understand that we live in a demand-based economy and that there is far more demand for brainless celebrity bullshit than there is, say, for the fine print of the Health and Human Services budget. Read the rest of this entry »

BY DAVID CORN
BLOG | Posted 05/30/2002

THE DEBUNKING OF MICHAEL RUPPERT

Since 9.11 a veritable cottage industry of conspiracy theorizing has arisen not only in the US, where it has naturally found a fertile ground, but around the world. This article by David Corn is one of the most comprehensive efforts, so far, to examine the possible substance that such claims may have. —Eds.

On March 25, during a Pacifica radio interview, Representative Cynthia McKinney, a Georgia Democrat, said, “We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11…. What did this Administration know, and when did it know it about the events of September 11? Who else knew and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered?” McKinney was not merely asking if there had been an intelligence failure. She was suggesting–though not asserting–that the US government had foreknowledge of the specific attacks and either did not do enough to prevent them or, much worse, permitted them to occur for some foul reason. Senator Zell Miller, a conservative Democrat from her state, called her comments “loony.” House minority leader Dick Gephardt noted that he disagreed with her. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer quipped, “The congresswoman must be running for the Hall of Fame of the Grassy Knoll Society.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called her a “nut.” Two months later, after it was revealed that George W. Bush had received an intelligence briefing a month before September 11 in which he informed told Osama bin Laden was interested in both hijacking airplanes and striking directly at the United States, McKinney claimed vindication. But that new piece of information did not support the explosive notion she had unfurled earlier–that the Bush Administration and/or other unnamed parties had been in a position to warn New Yorkers and had elected not to do so. Read the rest of this entry »

The remains of an Iraq War victim (make that of an unnecessary Iraq War).

By KURT NIMMO | Dateline: January 21, 2005
REPOSTED AS AN ENTRY IN CLASSIC ESSAYS

On January 15th, at Kane Hall, on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, former L.A. cop and self-described 9/11 investigator Mike Ruppert told a standing-room only crowd the obvious:

“[Ruppert] believes that no sanctions, indictments or criminal prosecution [against the Bush warmongers] will ever be handed down. Rubicon [Ruppert’s book], he says, remains a base map of the decades before and the years since 9/11. But now he says we must look at the herd of elephants charging at us, instead of the one elephant that just ran us over,” Ken Levine summarizes on Ruppert’s From the Wilderness website. Read the rest of this entry »