Probably too deep and serious to be a blog entry

I just finished one of the best and thought-provoking books I have read in a while, Derek Gregory's, The Colonial Present. I've been thinking about it, in my usual tendency to be overly serious about everything, for the last few days. It was, of course, mandatory reading for class and as it is THE one book out of many that the professor made mandatory for everyone to review, I somehow feel gullible and as though I am falling into a brainwashing trap. But that is probably my paranoia speaking.

The last seven weeks has been an intellectual journey that has led me full circle back to my perspective I held five years ago when graduating from UCLA. It is not the same location of course but I have tread a familiar path back to where I left off. I feel myself being fractured into at least two "me's" or two perspectives so to speak. Being able to better describe the world, its hidden power structures, its continuing but inadequately articulated "architectures of enmity" has considerable political and strategic relevance. I firmly believe I am a citizen of the "United States of Amnesia," the reluctant super-power, the executer of "empire-lite" who would rather not regard itself as such. There is no question in my mind. This understanding can of course be used to further US interests and values in the world; they are of course interests and values I find pleasing. The rhetoric anyway. This is strategic 'me' so to speak. Then there is the detail that comes from the excluded side, the dominated, the 'other.' Then comes in universal justice 'me.' It isn't right for some things to be ignored. Gregory's depiction of the physical and mental horrors or war and occupation are insightful, penetrating, and certainly realistic.

Do I believe that this is some sort of deviation from war as it has always been? No. It has, as much as we all like to sanitize it with ideas like "smart bombs", retained its indescribable brutality and terror. Only watching the trajectory of a Tomahawk cruise missile from the video-game-like combat information center of a warship does not eliminate the terror, destruction, and lives lost on the other side. People become merely objects or targets when we look at those screens. It is brutal...but I am under no illusion that this mental gymnastic exercise has not been present for any military engaging in combat throughout the span of human history. What sort of mental gymnastics must have been involved for the countless atrocities and brutalities committed from the times of the Assyrians, to Caesar, to the Mayan ceremonial war culture, to Muslim conquests and the following crusades? It has never, in the end, been romantic, precise, clean, or fully justified. In war there is always the dehumanized 'other'; Gregory's homer sacer who is outside the law and outside any human rights. It is truly horrifying. And we create that "fictive 'we'" for the viewers back home; "a vantage point was carefully constructed to privilege and protect the (American) viewer through the fabrication of (American) innocence and the demonization of the (Iraqi) enemy." I agree, we do this. The media performs for the American public; it's all propaganda, I don't question that. How else to you maintain a national support for war? It is the brutal, ugly fact and truth that is really easy to say as I sit here and drink my french-pressed coffee, positioned above my persian carpets and in my marbled-floor flat worthy of Cleopatra.

So we have the cold realist take: this is an effed world and every country for themselves. If it wasn't us doing it then it would be someone else making us into the homo sacer. We could take that a step further and say "at least American values are 'nice' for the most part." At least we aren't fascist, or trying to further a theocracy. You could have China come in as the 'colonizer' with its lack of moral screening and support for oppression as long as it gets stability and access to the production and goods it needs...but then we forget that we do the same thing. We only scream our support for democracy when it suits us, for better or worse.

Is there a way to stop the human-made structures of power in the world from perpetuating such violence? Is it worth the try? Or is it really always just 'us' against 'them' in a war over who gets the ability to have privilege and freedom. Is this simply academic over-analysis of a cruel and hard world? Yeah, this is a bit serious for me to be writing in a blog I guess. But I like to rant about what is running through my mind.

I'll leave off with this excerpt from Paul William Roberts during Desert Storm:

"In places, not a building was left standing as far as I could see. By the road-side, at intervals, lying on makeshift beds in the misty, freezing damp, lay casualties crudely swaddled in bloodstained bandages. They were waiting, I learned later, for the few ambulances that daily made rounds, either treating the wounded where they were or carrying them off to overburdened, understaffed hospitals. Most doctors and nursing staff had been sent to the eastern front. So had all able-bodied men. We were bombing the defenseless, the old, women and children...

"Perhaps the description should be as surgical as the bombing was said to be. One girl, aged ten or so, with shrapnel wound to the abdomen, holding lower intestines in hands like snake's nest. Teenage boy, unconscious, head like a half-eaten boiled egg. Old woman coughing out a spray of blood...

"A little later, Muhie and some of the soldiers showed me an obliterated high-tech death-factory cunningly arranged to look as if it had been an elementary school. Scraps of kids' art projects fluttered beneath crumbling concrete slabs and twisted metal rods. A little exercise book lay stained by fire and rain, with the universal language of children's art and words etched in rudimentary English that were just too apt and too heartbreaking to be ever repeated."