The Free Press -- Independent News Media

Fri Mar 19 2010

Departments
National Issues

The future of civilization
by Robert C. Koehler
January 1, 2009

The tight, absurd parameters of “peace,” as they are drawn by the military model we continue to believe in, make real peace —neither bitter nor temporary — impossible even to imagine. God save us, for instance, from New York Times editorials, which inflict as much damage on civilians as F-16s.

“Israel must defend itself,” the paper intoned a few days into the bombing attack on Gaza that quickly left 350 people dead, expressing regret only that the action was “unlikely to weaken” Hamas. The editorial affected a neutral assessment of the situation that failed to mention either the Israeli occupation of Palestine or the month-and-half-long blockade of Gaza that preceded the bombardment and, among much other deprivation, left the region’s few hospitals drastically undersupplied with medicine, gauze or even space to treat the flood of newly wounded.

With that omission securely in place, and clear signals emanating from every sentence that the right of heavily armed U.S. allies to bomb powerless Third World “enemies” into good behavior would not be questioned, the Times editorial remembered its compassionate side sufficiently to declare: “Israel must make every effort to limit civilian casualties.”

How decent of them. Or as Jerry Seinfeld might have put it: Yada yada yada.

I quote from the Times, of course, not as one paper among thousands, but as the Paper of Record and exemplar of the mainstream, corporate media’s unified voice on geopolitics and the future of civilization. This is the voice of moral relativism and denial. Nowhere in it is there room for something other than a military solution to chronic global troubles, and that solution flows in only one direction. And nowhere is there the least real humanity toward the punishees, whose role is to suffer, die and retaliate just enough to keep the cycle going for another round. “Israel must defend itself . . .”

And thus the civilian dead — whatever that term actually means — merit the barest sniff of a eulogy as, alas, the regrettable byproduct of the high-tech pummeling their country or territory has called upon itself, before being consigned to some mass grave in paragraph five. By gliding over the dead, the media are free to discourse on grand strategy, as though war is rational and contained and does something other than spread toxins, hatred and its own ongoing inevitability — and as though “winning” such one-sided, preposterous displays of power actually means something, or is possible.

Whether reporting on Iraq, Afghanistan or Gaza, our media spare us eyewitness accounts of the hell we create in pursuit of our interests, such as Safa Joudeh’s live Gaza diary on electronicindifada.com:

“There were piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit,” she wrote on Dec. 27. “As you looked at them you could see that a few of the young men were still alive, someone lifts a hand, and another raises his head. They probably died within moments because their bodies were burned, most had lost limbs, some of their guts were hanging out and they were all lying in pools of blood.

“Outside my home,” she goes on, “which is close to the two largest universities in Gaza, a missile fell on a large group of young men, university students. They’d been warned not to stand in groups as it makes them an easy target, but they were waiting for buses to take them home. Seven were killed, four students and three of our neighbors’ kids. . . . Nothing could stop my 14-year-old brother from rushing out to see the bodies of his friends laying in the street after they were killed. He hasn’t spoken a word since.”

No war, no military action, no act of self-defense or revenge has a legitimacy that exempts the perpetrators from responsibility for the consequences they create. And every bombing campaign — certainly one against the most densely populated region on Earth — will wreak the sort of searing havoc Joudeh describes.

I refuse to believe that any long-term human good will come out of a geopolitical strategy that casually inflicts this sort of suffering on people, and fear for the souls of the complicit parties, especially if they lack the courage to acknowledge what they do without reducing their victims to expendable, subhuman status.

And I cannot read something like the New York Times editorial quoted above without feeling an urgent need to fill the void that it opens. Peace on this planet is possible, but only if we make ourselves bigger than war. This can happen only with the sort of genuine openness to our “enemies” that is documented, for instance, in a Peace Now video of Israeli and Palestinian students engaging in dialogue with one another that I viewed on the organization’s Web site.

“It’s very easy to dehumanize someone you don’t know,” a student says at one point, glowing from her realization that we’re all in this together. The implications of this simple truth are the only antidote I know of to the suicidal folly of war. On a day in which I have endured too much news from the Middle East, they burst in my heart like a symphony of peace.

---
Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com. © 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Email this article to a friend

Don't forget to check out articles from 2009 and 2010

National Issues

"McCain could have meant Less War"
December 31, 2009
David Swanson

"Healthcare mandate vs. the Constitution"
December 24, 2009
David Swanson

"A healthy economy"
December 24, 2009
Robert C. Koehler

"Apostle of our inner genius"
December 17, 2009
Robert C. Koehler

"Wars or jobs: decide now"
December 14, 2009
David Swanson

"Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free?"
December 13, 2009
Bruce E. Levine

"The school-to-prison pipeline"
December 11, 2009
Robert C. Koehler

"Kucinich circulating privileged resolutions to end wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan"
December 10, 2009
David Swanson

"National security state still killing John F Kennedy"
December 7, 2009
Pete Johnson

"Richard Viguerie calls GOP litmus tests "Well intentioned," but urges replacement of Republican establishment leaders"
December 3, 2009
Bob Sturm

"Craziest Obavietghanistan speech moments "
December 2, 2009
David Swanson

"New civil resistance coalition formed to end the war"
December 1, 2009
Cindy Sheehan

"Anti-Americans"
November 24, 2009
Christopher Bifani

"Why can't we do to DC what we did to Seattle? "
November 19, 2009
David Swanson

"They should get a union"
November 17, 2009
David Swanson

"KSM and MSM"
November 17, 2009
David Swanson

"The two percent robustness"
November 15, 2009
David Swanson

"Between hate speech and adoration"
November 15, 2009
David Swanson

"Pelosi arrested us for asking for healthcare"
November 15, 2009
Dan Hodges, Chair, Health Care for All-California

"Over 2,200 veterans died in 2008 due to lack of health insurance "
November 15, 2009
Physicians for a National Health Program

"Isolated incident"
November 15, 2009
Robert C. Koehler

"Come together right now"
November 15, 2009
David Swanson

"Joel Peresman of the Rock Hall Foundation says the time has come today "
November 4, 2009
Harvey Wasserman

"Between hate speech and adoration"
November 2, 2009
David Swanson

"Preview of Ramzy Baroud's 'My Father was a Freedom Fighter'"
October 29, 2009
Stephen Lendman

"Why I am risking arrest for Medicare for all "
October 29, 2009
Margaret Flowers, M.D., Congressional Fellow, Physicians for a National Health Program

"Single-eye vision"
October 29, 2009
Robert C. Koehler

"Did Obama/McCain choice matter?"
October 28, 2009
David Swanson

"No one else will stop the killing -- Veteran's group to members: Multiply resistance by any peaceful means available "
October 27, 2009
Mike Ferner

"Accepting the prize"
October 26, 2009
Robert C. Koehler

"Glen Ford speaks in Columbus"
October 26, 2009
Free Press

"Heavy Traffic"
October 23, 2009
Terence Robertson

"Who SHOULD Decide About War?"
October 14, 2009
By David Swanson

"Starting Another Year of War in Afghanistan"
October 14, 2009
Norman Solomon

"Congress must pass single-payer health care now! "
September 30, 2009
Cynthia McKinney

"U.S. Drug War Priorities in Need of Re-Evaluation"
September 16, 2009
Mary Jane Borden

"Senator Kennedy visits then Cleveland City Councilman"
August 26, 2009
Representative Dennis Kucinich

"Govt-funded reporter urged lynching of Black Congresswoman"
August 24, 2009
David Swanson