We Seek an Endlessly Widening War...

I was going to write this post months ago. I was going to write this post after the Orlando shooting, or after the attacks in Nice or Dhaka, after the murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, after the sniper in Dallas, after the attempted coup in Turkey, after the most recent spate of airstrikes in Gaza. I was going to write about violence, but every time I tried, more violence seethed and spilled out from some other city and I couldn’t sort out my thoughts to write about it and it became exhausting, thinking that I could chronicle and pull meaning from some kind of endless march of violence and brutality and suffering.

And then came September 11th, a day that speaks in the US consciousness more than any other of violence. And it’s a day whose events represented blowback that spawned blowback that is still spawning blowback. And I tried to write this post then, and in the midst of that came more violence--brutality against anti-pipeline protestors, the murder by police of a 13-year-old Black boy in Columbus, the list goes on and on and will go on and on… But if I waited for the violence to ebb just so I could include as much of it as I could remember, I would never finish this essay. Consider it, then, a work of thoughts in continual process. Ideological violence, after all, doesn’t take days off. 

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"War, just like deadly diseases, has to be prevented and cured. Violence is not the right medicine: it does not cure the disease, it kills the patient.” —Italian war surgeon Gino Strada

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"We're teaching freedom for which they are yearning
While we're dragging them down to the path of never returning
But we'll condescend to talk while the cities are burning
But please be reassured, we seek no wider war...

And the evil is done in hopes that evil surrenders
But the deeds of the devil are burned too deep in the embers
And a world of hunger in vengeance will always remember
So please be reassured, we seek no wider war..."


- "We Seek No Wider War," Phil Ochs
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The first thing I knew about 9/11 was that it was the day my brother was born, and my parents always said that there had to be one good thing to happen that day to balance out all the bad. 

Later I learned of other good or at least hopeful things, how the citizens of New York built resiliency networks to hold each other together, distribute supplies, evacuate, and care for survivors, long before the shellshocked government stepped back in to administer, much less effectively, aid efforts. 

I also knew of other bad things, like the CIA-orchestrated coup against Salvador Allende in Chile--9/11/1973--which was overshadowed by the World Trade Center attacks. And in 2012, September 11th became again marked by violence in the attack on Benghazi, killing four US citizens. 

Before that, though, I just knew of the tragic, deadly aftermath of 9/11--the way social and political movements were sidelined as fear culture dominated, as the so-called War on Terror provided a stage for the neocons of the Project for a New American Century played out their imperial fantasies, as wars sucked endless lives and money into the jaws of the military-industrial complex, how the initial goodwill towards the US gave way to a massive victim-becomes-avenger complex in which we terrorized swaths of the world. Spreading terror and calling it democracy. Bombing terror but you can’t bomb terror; you can only bomb people, and we have. But while others, from Paris and Brussels to Dhaka and Ankara, reap the seeds we sowed, we forget.

Consistent memory has never been our national strong suit, and 9/11 when remembered and memorialized in the general culture, is frequently stripped of context, boiled down to a tragedy that obscures both the powerfully affirming ways ordinary people found purpose and agency in those early moments after the disaster, as well as the powerfully demoralizing wars in the years that bracket the tragedy--the years of US empire acquiring enemies and attracting resentment and ignoring blowback, and the years of the US continuing to repeat those patterns with an even more overt fervor, calling it a war on terror. The crisis is resurrected for our memories as a bewildering event, as an act of not just hatred and anger and violence but senseless hatred, anger, and violence. It was extreme. It was brutal. It was inhumane. But it was not without a kind of trackable, reprehensible but comprehensible logic. 

9/11 can be called a disaster or a tragedy, but I think crisis might be a better word to apply. Crisis refers not just to a chronic and deepening state of catastrophe, or even a rapidly escalating state, but to a tipping point--when conditions move swiftly to redraw the parameters of what is likely to happen: survival or death, disaster or aversion of it. A google search of the term gives this definition: “the turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death.”

9/11 was then a tipping point, a boiling point, a massive spray of blowback that most of us did not expect, a test that our nation in many ways failed. To make a medical analogy, let’s say the patient, the US, has been experiencing a slow poisoning, gradually ingesting a toxin that acts like a slow-moving pathogen in its body, until finally a threshold is reached and a crisis triggered. Although the patient batters down the flare and survives, throwing antibiotics at the endemic pathogen works only fleetingly, and the bitter struggle that ensues has the patient fighting for its life, but so consumed by the poison that the two are inseparable. 

The United States, then by analogy, is infected by an ideological poison. Terrorism is a symptom, not a disease. It is not crafted in a vacuum any more than it is deployed in one. And without acknowledging the poison at the marrow, no amount of treatment will cure the patient. 

The poison, in the analogy, is inside the patient. The flare-ups of the disease attack the patient themself. Likewise, the attacks on 9/11 were planned by a foreign terror outfit, but by analogy they were a manifestation of the poison overloading its imbiber’s system, the US in some sense being attacked from within--ideologically speaking. 

That we live in such a violent world is a result of blowback of the ideological warfare Western capitalism has been waging for decades, predicated on the deterministic idea that our ideologies, culture, and economic structures are fundamentally correct and inevitable, while all others are illegitimate and backward, and also dangerous--which they are, psychologically, as a challenge to our empire of thought, as well as inspiring people to resist our physical empire with their own force. We will not stem the violence until we challenge and dismantle the ideologies that have precipitated it. 

Could we not consider it very fitting, in a dramatic irony sort of way, that Chile and the US experienced each their own tragedy on September the 11th, and that these tragedies bookend in a way the decades of hegemonic neoliberalism, as well as the late stages of what Tom Engelhardt calls victory culture? 9/11 called our victories into question. The bravado, the jingoism was resurrected afterwards to herald the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the faith in our inevitable victory, our story, has been shaken. How badly shaken, well, not badly enough. Inevitability is one of the most dangerous frameworks in which to place our ideologies, especially economic ones like capitalism, because those are so evidently contrived. There is no knowledge base that exists divinely or separately from humans, no perfect way that we can seek out and emulate. There is nothing set in stone that names us the inevitable victor, and although 9/11 did not by any means fracture capitalism, it did close our age of victory culture, according to Engelhardt. As for Chile, while its conquest and shock therapy did not launch victory culture itself, but in some ways it could be said to have cemented the shortsighted testing and affirmation of our favored economic religion, neoliberalism. 

The United States did not, of course, begin its misadventuring and economic force-feeding in Chile (long preceding that coup were those in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and others, and before that, decades of intervention from Central America to Oceania). But Chile is considered the key success story in the shock lab of neoliberal economics, its CIA-orchestrated 1973 coup against democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende the cornerstone in a story that unfolded over and ravaged Latin America for the next several decades (and not yet abated, given recent coup attempts in Venezuela and successes in Honduras and Brazil). That the rise of exported neoliberalism coincided with victory culture is not a coincidence.  And 9/11 could be considered the kind of blowback we can expect to reap more of because of the fallout of the policies and ideologies like those we forced on Chile. 

It is in this ideological context that another 9/11 attack, that in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, appears a particularly direct event of blowback; a tragedy deeply laced with irony, for the attack would not have occurred had the US not intervened in Libya and orchestrated a coup, plunging the country into inter-militia violence--a pattern of intervention, regime change, and unnecessary warfare (though technically legally sanctioned in Libya) launched after 9/11/2001. Libya was also a continuation of that same brand of empire in that it appeared alongside Iraq on a list of seven countries the neocons wanted to see overseen during the Bush administration. 

Besides these three 9/11 disasters--all of which we ought to recognize as children of our own neoliberal empire project--which have so delivered so much devastation, volatility, and violence, we are also cultivating, worsening, and reinforcing a domestic culture of violence. The land we call the United States has never been free from terrorism and violence, especially state terrorism, since the initial European colonization, but in a more overt and better-televised way it’s been recently rearing its head. Some of it is “senseless” violence, which usually means violence born either of desperation or bigotry. There is also the violence targeting resistance to state terror, from anti-police brutality struggles to the anti-pipeline fight thrown into focus by the #NoDAPL fight, which crystallizes perfectly the struggle against both the apparatuses of state violence and the cumulative historical violence of oppression and dehumanization. 

We like easy causes for violence--that people are simply evil or weak, for instance. Positing an ideology as the superstructure on which our violent culture is built is much less easy, because it indicts all of us. We are not equally complicit, but we all take part in a world whose violence is sustained by the same ideological forces that sustain our governments and economic systems. When we consider violence as rooted so deeply in the structures that govern our lives all the way to our concept of the world and our place in it, we cannot separate out different strands from this knot as if we can treat each symptom one by one. Systemic problems require systemic responses. 

Small, specific causes are more palatable as scapegoats for our violent culture, our violent world. We talk about videogames provoking or normalizing violence, but not how they mirror the real world. The condoning and mainstreaming of violence did not begin with simulated war video games (though it’s an interesting note that video games have been used as a recruiting and branding channel by the military). It has more to do with the linking of war to victory to the very character of our nation. That can be reinforced through video games, but it did not start there. The violence that mars our society is nurtured in a culture of fear and masculinized violence at home, but it finds roots in the same system of rapacious capitalism and conquest also practiced overseas, through our foreign policy.   

Concretely, we also witness the specific characteristics of our foreign policy come home to roost with events like the shooting-by-sniper of police officers in Dallas, which was a remarkable example of wars coming home both in that the shooter trained in his weaponry in the military and that he was neutralized by an armed drone as though he were a dot on a foreign screen, just another targeted assassination.  

The violence of the sniper and the response to him had much to do with our official wars, our foreign wars, and all have much to do with the system of neoliberal capitalism they exist to defend. The targets in Dallas, the police, are another manifestation of militarism in our society, and the wars the police conduct are similarly waged against marginalized, erased people who by their existence represent resistance to the preferred status quo of the US. It is a racialized war, and it is also an economic one. The police punish poverty, punish people who are presumed to be failing in the capitalist game because they couldn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Because neoliberal individual-centered capitalism starkly fails in impoverished communities--creates that poverty, in fact--the inhabitants of those communities, often working people of color, are demonized as an enemy from both the historical racial lens and the capitalist lens. The police manage enforcement of the ideological war at home, as the military does overseas--except when the government calls in the military to tamp down especially fierce resistance, be it to police brutality or recently, environmental exploitation. The police are armed with surplus military equipment and frequently receive training from brutal foreign regimes such as Israel’s, further illustrating their likenesses to the military. Both are state apparatuses that exist to hold order in check, to advance corporate interests at a human price.  Both engender blowback, as well. 

There is also the question, as our culture is so saturated with violence, of whether we as a society are raising our violence threshold, becoming inured--for those who have that privilege of distance--to the destruction done in our name and also done to us at home. Does the reification and normalization of the toxic standard of violence--of mass shootings, of police violence, of hate crimes, of sexual assault, of all the forms of violence that plague us---corrupt or diminish the human instinct for solidarity and altruism? Does it prevent us from coming together when we need to the most? In the face of so much violence, how do we do the snarled and difficult work of untangling our own history, pain, isolation and memory to construct a foundation for peace with justice?

We are witnessing a world held hostage, burning, imploding, at war, but the wars the US government is fighting have never been against terror. They are in the service of empire, which always serves to uphold the interests of capital. That’s why it’s been said that the only victors of the $5-trillion-or-so war on terrorism are defense contractors. Bluntly, we might in fact say that this war has been against peace the whole time, and also against democracy, which cannot healthily last under late-stage capitalism. We are supposed to remember these years of the war on terror as a time of surging Islamic terrorism, forgetting that what began and sustains that terrorism (read: blowback) was US empire and state terrorism. Clearly, we cannot fix these fundamental problems through more violence. We cannot bomb away dissidence, just as it could not be tortured away in Chile or Iraq, nor can it be tear-gassed out of the streets in the US or Palestine, nor will attack dogs quell it in the Dakotas. Brutal measures of crackdown highlight the brutality of the system, the lengths to which the corporatocracy will go to defend its stolen wealth and power, the lengths to which, fundamentally, it dehumanizes nearly all of us. 

We in the United States above all have not reconciled with our past, from before the other 9/11 to after the more well known one, through all of the recent attacks and tragedies and atrocities, so how can we build on that fractured consciousness a brighter future?

An interesting concept from criminal justice lawyer and writer Bryan Stevenson deals with the necessity of proximity, arguing that people who do not directly experience a certain violence or oppression need to get closer, to the bedrock of the problem, in order to grasp fully how to fight for justice. But in this world wracked by violence largely generated and nurtured by the most dominant and potent global ideological system in history--capitalism--are we not all living in proximity to the problem? Some of us are served by the status quo more than others, but we are all right here at the bedrock, though we don’t recognize it. It’s like the air around us. We need first to realize what exactly we’re breathing. 

Some of that realization can be done at a small scale, through conversations: deconstruct this narrative we’ve been taught, figure out what we really need and want without making demands or assumptions of others, especially those worst affected--because it is not possible or fair to place the responsibility for dismantling their own oppression on the shoulders of marginalized people--and talk about how our entire system, political, social, cultural, and economic, is implicated and complicit. (“The whole damn system is guilty as hell,” as they say…) 

And critically, when we discuss solutions, the conversation must not stagnate in the more surface level and easy-to-correct slights and problems. None of us alone can change this. That’s a myth propagated by the ideology that has been used to create so much devastation. Thinking on the level of small problems, personal choices, and individual lifestyles ultimately keeps us working inside the box, when it is the framework of the box itself that prohibits those small changes from being enough to overturn the status quo. We have neither time nor space for moderation. We are living in perpetual disaster, and we will free ourselves of it only through massive displays of the solidarity we’re trained out of.

Until we dismantle the deterministic thinking that insists there is us, the right and the righteous--fundamentally, the capitalism of the West, the US in particular--and then there is them, the wrong, backward, and dehumanized, there will be conflict. There will be war, and all its attendant suffering and oppression. There will be violence.