Fri Feb 10 2012
Departments
International Issues

The moral dead zone
by Robert C. Koehler
January 20, 2009

“Mr. Ban said too many people had died and there had been too much civilian suffering.”

That almost bears repeating, but I won’t because I don’t believe it. Too many? In the moral dead zone of the human heart, perennially justified as “war” (evoking honor, triumph, glory), there’s no such thing as too much suffering. There’s no bleeding child or shattered family or contaminated water supply that can’t be overlooked in the name of some great goal or strategic advantage, or converted to fodder for the next round of hatred, revenge and arms purchase.

Ban Ki-Moon, the U.N. secretary general, about to embark on a peace and diplomacy tour of the Middle East, was speaking, of course, about the hellish conditions in the Gaza Strip, pummeled by Israel with modern weaponry and Old Testament fury for the last three weeks. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the coalition government. Close to a thousand have died. Many more thousands have been injured or displaced. Too many?

No. Not even close. If too many had died — if hell had reached its capacity, or some other limit had at last been achieved — something would change. The collective enterprise of human violence would convulse and start malfunctioning. Fear, perhaps, would mutate into courage, anger into forgiveness, hatred into love. Or at least we would start looking at what we’re doing . . . how do I say this? With evolved compassion? With an understanding, with a determination to survive, we now disdain and mock?

Israel’s invasion of Gaza is the world’s spotlight war right now, reaping headlines, global censure, a special endorsement from the U.S. Congress and, apparently, an audiotape hiss from Osama bin Laden, possibly from beyond the grave.

What all of these reactions do, it seems to me, is confer an unwarranted special status on the war, as though it were isolated, without a context any deeper than its accompanying propaganda. This forces us to try to understand the war strictly on its own terms — who started it? who’s the bad guy? who’s innocent? — rather than as an occurrence within a larger, dysfunctional system as deep as human history and as wide as planetary politics.

This war, and the nine or 10 other armed conflicts officially classified as wars that are going on right now — including wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (4 million dead since 1997), Darfur-Sudan (500,000 dead since 2003), Somalia (400,000 dead since 1988), Sri Lanka (80,000 dead since 1983), and of course Iraq (possibly a million or more dead) and Afghanistan (35,000 dead) — whatever they are on their own terms, are also symptoms of a human syndrome of self-destruction.

So are the local conflicts on city streets and other jungles that are too small to be called wars. So are the horrific aftermaths of conflicts that have officially ended, including poisoned environments, the ruined health of participants and bystanders, unexploded mines and bombs, the psycho-spiritual traumas that never go away, and the grievances that fester from generation to generation.

What links them in an immediate way is the global arms industry, as corrupt as it is invisible, which does a trillion dollars worth of business annually worldwide, is crucial to every major economy and is therefore served, either with overt collusion or discreet silence, by governments and the mass media.

But the problem is bigger than mere greed. The business of war, like war itself, defies rational control and containment because it is fed by the paradox of human fear. As we arm to protect ourselves and fight back, our enemy also arms, and thus is born, over and over again, the cycle of escalation, from which the cynical can profit handsomely. The industry of war is self-perpetuating.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that, as Anup Shah noted recently in an essay on the arms industry for GlobalIssues.org, “The top five countries profiting from the arms trade are the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the U.S.A., U.K., France, Russia and China.”

Thus world peace — at least the sort of peace that most of us envision, which is sustained by international cooperation and universal disarmament rather than subjugation and the capacity for hair-trigger retaliation — would challenge the status quo of the world’s largest economies, as they have come to constitute themselves.

As long as we stay trapped in the paradox of fear, we can’t even use our intelligence to save ourselves. We have employed it to serve only our self-destruction. The ultimate paradox is that the military industrial complex, that highest of high-tech human endeavors, about which Dwight Eisenhower sounded the alarm nearly half a century ago, is wedded to the most primitive of human emotions. We have become trapped in our collective reptile brain.

Only if we disarm our intelligence do we have a chance to find wisdom. And only wisdom can save us.

---
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.


Recent International Issues Articles

On Gaza drivers, rumors and Egypt’s steel wall
  December 31, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

It's the system, stupid: The Ragnarok of globalized corporate capitalism and the rise of the planetarian paradigm
  December 30, 2009
  James Heddle

Palestine/Israel: A single state, with liberty and justice for all
  December 30, 2009
  Susan Abulhawa with Ramzy Baroud

Obama's rejection speech
  December 11, 2009
  David Swanson

Peace movement objects to Peace Prize
  December 10, 2009
  Michael McPhearson and Josh Brollier

Afghanistan: What Obama and the US Media Aren't Telling Us
  December 4, 2009
  Evan Davis

Columbus Free Press editors Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman speak out against sending more US troops to Afghanistan
  December 2, 2009
  Tom Over

Afghanistan: Our 177th Colony
  December 1, 2009
  David Swanson

The Meaning Of The Gift-Giving Season, According To Rev. Billy Of The Church Of Life After Shopping
  November 28, 2009
  Tom Over

A paradigm shift in Singapore: yet Apec offers no clear answers
  November 25, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

Dissidents make noise -- oops, news
  November 24, 2009
  Saul Landau

Thai military wants U.S. satellites to hunt Islamist rebels
  November 20, 2009
  Richard S. Ehrlich

Globalization unchecked: How alien media is suffocating real culture
  November 18, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

Death to no one
  November 15, 2009
  Bitta Mostofi

America won't lift sanctions unless Suu Kyi is freed for election
  November 15, 2009
  Richard S. Ehrlich

Admiral Mullen announces Afghanistan strategy: prepare to nonviolently resist
  November 15, 2009
  Jeff Leys, Co-Coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence

America Appeals to Extradite Russia's Alleged "Merchant of Death"
  October 23, 2009
  Richard S. Ehrlich

War, negation and Muslim identity revisited
  October 22, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

Obama’s test: democracy or chaos in Latin America
  October 12, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

The G-20 Announces the New World Order
  October 1, 2009
  Michael Collins

Crucial questions on Afghanistan war
  September 2, 2009
  Free Press Editorial

The scapegoat's apology
  August 28, 2009
  Robert C. Koehler

Fighting for the right to walk
  August 27, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

The heart of the future
  July 18, 2009
  Robert C. Koehler

Italy to declare independence from US military
  July 8, 2009
  David Swanson

Israel attacks justice boat: kidnaps human rights workers, confiscates medicine, toys and olive trees
  June 30, 2009
  Greta Berlin

North Korea: "sanity" at the brink
  June 27, 2009
  Michael Parenti

A boy and an artificial leg: a Gaza story
  June 11, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

Is anyone speechless?
  June 8, 2009
  Iqbal Jassat

Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi is on trial because an American had "A Vision"
  June 1, 2009
  Richard S. Ehrlich

Support U.N. Economic Crisis World Conference
  May 22, 2009
  Ramsey Clark, winner of the 2008 U.N. Human Rights Award

Gaza disowned: the Pope, Israel and "reconciliation"
  May 20, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

Applying the lessons of Nuremburg to the USA in 2009
  May 19, 2009
  Paul Lehto, Juris Doctor

Vets Speak Out! Interview with Rick Reyes
  May 17, 2009
  Joan Brunwasser, OpEdNews

Goliath's vulnerability is the truth
  May 16, 2009
  Robert C. Koehler

Harvest of suicides
  May 11, 2009
  Vandana Shiva

The Hague's International Criminal Court will not put Bush on trial
  May 10, 2009
  Richard S. Ehrlich

War without context: Fatah, Hamas and flawed language
  May 8, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

CAIR's humanitarian mission to Iran
  May 6, 2009
  Mahmoud El-Yousseph

Sixth Nobel Nomination for Leonard Peltier
  May 5, 2009
  Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee

The international criminal court and a rogue empire
  April 27, 2009
  David Swanson

Wall of fear
  April 25, 2009
  Robert C. Koehler

The big strike
  April 25, 2009
  Dick Meister

Somali piracy or Somali patriotism?
  April 20, 2009
  Steven R. Linnabary

Israel investigated, but will it repent?
  April 10, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

Intifada: A third chapter
  March 21, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

American protester critically injured by soldiers in Ni'ilin
  March 16, 2009
  AATW

Engaging Hamas: Will history repeat itself?
  February 28, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

A new Afghanistan nightmare
  February 23, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

A new Afghanistan nightmare
  February 21, 2009
  Ramzy Baroud

Under siege again, but Gaza will not die
  February 12, 2009
  Ann Wright, AfterDowningStreet

The moral dead zone
  January 20, 2009
  Robert C. Koehler

Children of Gaza, run to the angels
  January 12, 2009
  Suzanne Baroud

Let Gaza live
  January 12, 2009
  Cynthia McKinney

Gaza: Plan of Attack
  January 1, 2009
  Jim Miles




Read International Issues Articles by Year:
2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000



FREE PRESS EMAIL UPDATE


Donate to The Free Press The Free Press Store

FOLLOW US ON
twitter
facebook


SEARCH THE FREEPRESS




1021 E. Broad St. Columbus, OH 43205 | 614.253.2571 | truth@freepress.org
All content © 1970-2012 The Columbus Free Press
Disclaimer