The Fall of Baghdad and One Woman’s Voice

November 8, 2007 at 5:18 pm (Baghdad, Howard Zinn, IAVA, Iraq War, Military Famlies Speak Out, Peace)

In times of war, the definition of patriotism becomes a matter of life or death for Americans and the world. Instead of being feared for our military prowess, we should want to be respected for our dedication to human rights. I suggest that a patriotic American who cares for his or her own country might act on behalf of a different vision.

 

~Howard Zinn

 

The soft, drawling voice on the other end of the line belongs to Marty. Military mother, Peace Activist, and Christian, she defies the stereotypical raving hippie often depicted by the US media as war opponents. Her only son, like many Americans signed on the dotted line shortly after September 11, 2001. Honorably discharged, he served two full tours in Iraq and is currently in the I.R.R (Individual Ready Reserve) list. As recently as just a few short months ago, he received Muster Orders requesting that he “update” his contact information; however, Marty suspects there may be other reasons. Muster Orders came despite the fact that he had filed for disability (denied by the military). Her son is not alone in this experience, as reported in The Washington Post, many soldiers are re-activated and re-deployed with known disabilities ranging from PTSD to limb amputation. In response to this Marty points out that with organizations like the IAVA they are finding the support they so badly need. 

 

His injury occurred during his first tour of duty when the skirt of an M1A1 tank fell on top of him while he was performing maintenance on the machine. Immediately following the accident, he was unable to move. Once he regained some mobility, the doctors prescribed pain medication and he was sent back to work. Before her son was deployed to Iraq the second time, he was weeks away from fulfilling his obligations under his active duty contract. He was stop-lossed and had an appointment to appear before the medical review board. Marty writes to me, “Depending on his medical condition, he may have been discharged. But the army sent him to Ft. Erwin California to sit in a tent…in the desert…for 30 days…for “training”. He didn’t train. Neither did the 200 other broken soldiers in this tent. Some of them had just recently had surgery.” Now home, he is facing a continued struggle for benefits, health care, and possible re-activation. With the denial of his disability claim he is considered a “reinforcement asset.”

 

 

For Marty, the idea of her son’s possible re-activation is concerning for many obvious and not so obvious reasons. For example, Marty’s faith and her understanding of scripture has been a powerful force in her belief that the killing of innocents can never be justified. She is a devout Christian and peace activist, two roles that since the invasion of Iraq, have not always been congruent for her.

 

Like many Americans, Marty, cautiously supported the idea of military action in Iraq, however, that began to change when she received a solitary letter from her son dated June 3, 2003. Of the letter she says, “That letter will be in my mind until the day I die.” The letter, a response to Marty reporting what she was seeing on the news was a wake up call for her and, she hoped, a wake up call for every American.

 

Her son’s truth was very different from the truth on the television set. As Video News Releases, planted by at least twenty different government agencies across the country, (VNRs are pre-packaged “news” segments and additional footage created by broadcast PR firms, or by publicists within corporations or government agencies. A VNR presents a client’s message, using a format and tone that mimic actual TV news. Nothing in the material for broadcast identifies the PR firm—or, more importantly, the paying client or clients—behind the VNR.), were helping to spin Americans to death, Marty read the letter with a feeling of incredulity.

 

Most remarkable in the letter is the sense of shock communicated by his words as he rolled into Baghdad, where he states, “My stay in Iraq has opened my eyes to just how brutal a country we are.” This statement made in reference to the destruction of the country after years of crippling sanctions. He writes, “Baghdad from what I can tell was at one time a flourishing city. Highways, markets, industry, and neighborhoods. They say it’s the most Westernized city in the Arab world. That was until economic sanctions were brought to this place by our country…That is what economic sanctions do, they bring a country to its knees.” With over five million Iraq children starved to death during this time it was estimated that with the planned US military action, another one million would fall into the malnourished group placing them at risk of premature death. Current numbers however, show that these estimates were low, far too low. In fact, after four years of occupation UNICEF reports over one-third of Iraq children are currently malnourished, and as the occupation drags on, the future for these children is bleak.

 

The letter continues, “After all, we just liberated the Iraqi people from a horrible dictator. Go ahead and let your newspapers and television news tell you all the latest and greatest propaganda. The only people smiling for the cameras are the children and the people that got left with nothing after years of oppressive sanctions. Even a dog that’s been beaten still wags it’s tail when his owner brings him food…The older one’s the ones that probably had a nice cush life before the sanctions, they don’t smile. Their eyes stare at you like daggers, piercing you with deep hatred.”

 

It is the plight of these innocents and the future of her son that Marty thinks of most these days. As always, she is active in church and occasionally participates in the local and national activities of Military Families Speak Out, a non-profit organization giving the families of military personal a voice. She takes part in organized action, protesting the occupation in any way she can. For her, it is simply what she must do, as a mother, a Christian, and a patriot.   

Leave a Comment

Narcissistic Holidays and the American Way

October 8, 2007 at 10:47 pm (Comubus Day, Genocide, Howard Zinn, Indigenous People, Paul Farmer)
Tags: , , , , , ,

The essential feature of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.

 

 

~DSM-IV-TR

 

One must wonder how it is that Americans celebrate a day like Columbus Day. Even worse, one wonders how Americans do not demand that it be stripped of its place in the American cluster of days to be celebrated. Only a country with a collective Narcissistic Personality Disorder would dare honor this day.  

 

 

Unlike the propaganda taught in American schools of how the natives welcomed us and offered their generosity in assisting us with the growth of corn, the reality of “American Discovery” is brutal, barbaric and just plain gross. Yet Americans seem to wonder about content to honor the likes of Christopher Columbus, the early colonizers, and the great aptitude they apparently had in the realm of survival. It is as if in the American collective conscious the millions of natives living here did not exist at all.

 

 

Many will argue that the people of today can not be held to account for the sins of their fathers, and to a certain extent there is some truth to this premise; however, Americans continue to honor this day and the acts of Christopher Columbus as if it they are actually something deserving of our praise. Even now, the state of natives living in America is bleak. As one example, Amnesty International recently released a report highlighting the sexual assault and rapes of natives living on reservations, where the perpetrator rapes with impunity and confidence, knowing no one will investigate the crime, no one, including Federal Authorities.

 

 

If historians are correct and the cumulative statistics of European conflict and conquest are assessed with any honesty, Columbus Day would need to change its name to something like Genocide Day. According to author and historian Mark Cocker, …eleven million indigenous Americans lost their lives in the eighty years following the Spanish invasion of Mexico. In the Andean empire of the Incas the figure was more than eight million. In Brazil the Portuguese conquest say Indian numbers dwindle from a pre-Columbian total of almost 2,500,000 to just 225,000. And to the north of Mexico it has now been widely accepted that Native Americans declined from an original population of more than 8,000,000 to 800,000 by the end of nineteenth century. For the whole of the Americas, some historians have put the total losses as high as one hundred million.

 

 

True to form, Americans tend to have a short attention span and certainly lack in their ability to empathize. The continued oppression of indigenous peoples around the globe is more than enough evidence to support such a charge. Paul Farmer, human rights activist, physician and author documents this continued oppression well in his most recent book Pathologies of Power-Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor, where he rightfully charges …structural violence, which influences the nature and distribution of extreme suffering as oppressions main cause. The most basic right, “the right to survive” continues to be trampled on by those in power. He argues: “Human rights violations are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will b shielded from harm.”

 

 

Of course we can not lay the blame for the suffering of all indigenous people both present and past solely on the shoulders of Columbus, but certainly we can discontinue our celebrations of his genocidal actions. Are the Arawak Indians who Columbus contemptuously kidnapped, enslaved, and subsequently wiped out not deserving of our remembrance? According to historian Howard Zinn …the Indians were taken as slave labor and on huge estates, known as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.

 

 

Indeed, only a country with no conscious at all could honor the man responsible for committing genocide, especially in the name of progress. It is this continued lack of empathy that has allowed the oppression and death of millions, simply for the sake of furthering our own agendas. Zinn continues: This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.

 

 

Certainly all indigenous peoples around the globe who struggle against America’s continued hegemony can testify as to how this deadly attitude and apathy has impacted their life, suffering, and death. Sadly, it will be up to the snoozing populace of Americans to wake each other to the atrocities being committed in their names – perhaps then, the indigenous people around the globe will finally have justice.

Leave a Comment