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I have been a critic of American foreign policy all my adult life. I have spent much time reading, listening, watching, talking, and asking questions. I have tried to read non-American works on American foreign policy and American perspectives.
I have known people who have donned the uniform of the United States, including several members of my family (living and dead). I have known flag officers and enlisted soldiers, and I have read a lot of combat testimonials.
I know people whose mission is to provide care to those in harm’s way, and I have studied the work of Dr. Jonathan Shay, who did pioneering research into trauma and moral injury among combat veterans. If you have not read Achilles in Vietnam or Odysseus in America, I strongly urge you to read both.
I have also read antiwar fiction, Vietnam War fiction (from Vietnamese, Vietnamese- American, and American authors), fiction about several different ‘American’ or ‘American involved’ wars, and numerous oral histories of what soldiering in war is like. I found Voices From The Plain Of Jars by Fred Branfman about the aerial bombardment of farmers in Laos during the 1960s, a book everyone should read.
I’ve also read antiwar novels written by non-Americans among them SozaBoy by Ken Saro Wiwa, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque as well as Homer’s Iliad to gain a more global and trans-historical perspective. I recommend Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht, one of the most poignant plays I’ve ever consumed which tells the story of a landless family on the move across continental Europe during the Thirty Years’ War.
I have read Arab and Jewish literature on wars in the Middle East and North Africa, and I’ve read many books on the Holocaust, fiction and non-fiction, that attempt to understand what that horror did to the minds of its survivors and how that legacy ripples out to this day. I have studied the work of Arab and Israeli historians to try and broaden my perspective on the break up of the Ottoman Empire, the European conquest of the Middle East, the creation of Israel, the Arab-Israeli wars from 1948 to the present, the Naqba, the Intifadas, and the internal politics of these nations, including the role of the PLO and the birth of Hamas.
I have studied residential schools in Canada, the Red River Rebellion, the Northwest Rebellion, the Battle of Duck Lake, the creation of the Canadian treaty system, and colonial wars against Indigenous people in the United States, across the Americas, and Southern Africa (through the present day). I have read literature on slavery, the slave trade, and slave rebellions, and studied the tactics of colonial powers against peoples on six continents. I’ve looked at leaders who some say are heroes, others say murderous villains, and I’ve tried to find perspectives across the political and colonial/post-colonial spectrum.
I have investigated dirty wars, particularly those in Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil during the 1960s-1970s. I have read survivor testimonials and official government justifications for the murder, torture, internment, kidnapping, and disappearance of citizens. I have considered how Nazi techniques and actual Nazis informed those practices.
I’ve dabbled in defense literature, and work on nuclear weapons. I’ve read about and looked at the Geneva Convention and read narratives of torture, its techniques, and its consequences. I’ve read psychological studies of war, like James Hillman’s A Terrible Love Of War, and examinations of what it is like to go and fight, such as Karl Marlantes’ book, What It Is Like to Go to War.
And if I have learned anything at all, it is that war destroys lives, souls, cultures, children, societies, landscapes, and ecologies. It makes some people very rich and immiserates far more. I agree with Einstein that you can’t plan for and prevent war. I agree with Bill Withers that war “is one big drag.” And I am skeptical of ‘civilizing missions,’ wars to promote democracy, and any war that is for lebensraum.
I believe in Ukraine’s right to protect itself. I believe in a sovereign Palestine. I believe in a sovereign Israel. I believe in the right to life of all people, and I believe war must be a last resort. I believe in the integrity of Lebanon and the right of people to live free of foreign (and domestic) aggression. I also believe in the right of asylum, militant nonviolent protest, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the right to protest for right.
I believe in much else, too. And I offer this long list of work I’ve done, not to try and impress you with my reading habits, but to admit that I know how I know so little. I’m a bystander, barely an observer.
But I do know that war pollutes and destroys the minds, hearts, and souls of the nations that wage it. Soldiers can tell you this:
“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
. . .
“Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few—the self-same few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
“And what is this bill?
“This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.”
-General Smedley Butler (“War Is A Racket”)
I wrote my poem “Territorio libre” in tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti when he turned 100 in March 2019. Ferlinghetti knew war directly and personally, and he wanted to live in a country unburdened by militarism and the lust for empire. It is one of the many things I admire about him. He was a skeptic about American power and power politics, and he did not believe in the civilizing mission of empires. Ferlinghetti wanted Americans to wear other uniforms, to dress for work and play and games, but not to don uniforms for killing, conquest, and death.
My poem appeared in Unlikely Stories shortly thereafter.
Territorio libre
—for Lawrence Ferlinghetti at 100
It has been one of my fondest wishes
to sit under the dry sun of the island fog
you speak of
and grow wild as any joke you
and your North Beach set every told
Well before people said the word woke
you and your cohort were aiming ancient
wisdom like some guerrilla troupe
of Maquis mimes
returned from Paris or Lhasa
from the deepest and tallest temples
of the world
To say
wake, America
you don’t need to be woke
you just need to look at the face
of the sun outside of the cave
and turn your back
if only for a moment
on the infernal fires you praise
and lob into space
never noticing how the light which is cast
is actually not His face.
Maybe one of my second fondest wishes
would be to play a game of stick ball
on Columbus Avenue
just before your big bookstore went in
that ivy covered Green Monster
of the afternoon game literary scene
and all of us gathering
in drab drip dry suits bought for five bucks
while we sport what some newsman calls
androgynous haircuts
there we would assemble and
play ball!
playing by street rules
where our new America is again being made
while the players provide the color commentary
And when the umpire comes around
demanding to know
why no one called him
to make the calls
and who was it who thought
the game could be played by these rules
I like to think I will stand like you
look into his face, offer him a lotus and say
Don’t worry, chum
once we don our uniforms
you won’t be able to tell us apart
since everything is in play
everything in the territorio libre
of American baseball
where new peoples and ideas all look alike.
-Jeremy Nathan Marks
I too read much on war and there is indeed a pattern. In the end, we see that war in not inevitable but the choice of humans in power. Flawed humans. Highly flawed humans. Yes, I am saying directly that politicians are more flawed that the everyday person.
Such humans are flawed by their hubris and their desire to dominate. Such humans act outside Nature.
Once we humans recognize that we are not mere observers, but participants in Nature, something begins to shift in our minds. We begin to see that we share the planet with other humans and the millions of species that reside with us.