Yves here. While this post by Thomas Neuburger, and the tweetstorm Chris Hedges inspired, make the important point that violence begets violence, the framing worries me. Focusing on the “lust for revenge” emphasizes the harm done by the victim of revenge, and vice versa [nearly always unnecessary] the violence of the perpetrator that started the chain of revenge.
I read too many important books when I was too young to fully appreciate what they convey. One was Machiavelli’s The Prince: “But above all he must avoid taking the property of others, because a man is quicker to forget his father’s death than to lose his kingship.”
Maybe DLG, Reality Czar, will correct me. I used to make sense of this passage from the fact that few men get along with their fathers and would not miss them much, but all the young men did not like to receive the money that they expect from them. But in Machiavelli’s day, the main form of wealth was land. And land was not just property but it was given a position in society, like status or status. Therefore, taking a person’s “property” in this social situation may be seen as depriving him of his position in society, which is undoubtedly degrading to the mere loss of wealth.
In other words, the impulse to revenge is not only righteous and perhaps not particularly gratuitous killing. It is the delusion, the dehumanization of the basis of colonialism: taking people’s ancestral lands from them. It should come as no surprise that US and European imperialists cannot fully internalize what that means.
Yes, there are other ways to inflict deep wounds on a person and the community’s identity, such as desecrating or destroying sacred objects and sites, or breaking personal/religious barriers. Israel’s plan to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third most revered site in the Muslim world, could be the mother of all conflicts.
Written by Thomas Neuburger. It was first published in the book God’s Spies
The well-known journalist and author Chris Hedges published a long piece on Twitter, now called iX. In it you make many important points, but I want to emphasize one in particular: that there will be retribution for Western involvement in the Israeli genocide. .
From the piece (all emphasis mine):
Hatred and the desire for revenge, as I learned about the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous substance from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.
Those of us covering the Middle East were surprised that the Bush administration thought it would be hailed as liberators in Iraq when the US had spent more than a decade imposing sanctions that caused severe food and medicine shortages, resulting in at least one death. million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. …
Israel’s invasion of Palestine and the bombing of Lebanon in 1982, was the cause of Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, and the US support for Islamist attacks in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, military aid to the Philippines US on Israel and Iraq sanctions.
Will the international community continue to stand idly by and allow Israel to carry out a campaign of genocide? Will it ever have limits?
His answer to the above question is also mine: No, there will be no restrictions. Israel and the US will stop when they are made to stop.
I’m afraid, given that the Israel lobby bought and paid for Congress and the two governing partiesand terrorizing the media and universities, the rivers of blood will continue to overflow. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the military industry, strengthened by hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on political campaigns by Zionistsit will be a formidable obstacle to peace, not to mention mental.
The US is as guilty as Israel. It details with stunning clarity our policies like Israel’s torture and killings in Vietnam and Iraq.
“After the [Vietnam] war,” [Nicolas] Turse concludes that, “many scholars have written off accounts of the widespread war crimes that appear throughout the Vietnam revolution and American anti-war literature as so much propaganda. Few academic historians have thought to cite such sources, and almost none have done so much. At that time, My Lai represented – and thus extinguished – all other American atrocities. Bookshelves of the Vietnam War are now filled with heavily illustrated histories, sobering lessons in diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from a soldier’s point of view. Buried in the forgotten archives of the US government, locked away in the memories of survivors of pain, America’s real war in Vietnam has disappeared from public consciousness.”
My Lai was not the only one; it was blessed with policy and widely practiced. Same with Iraq.
Same with Abu Ghraib. Bagram. And all the other CIA torture sites that we still run or operate – in Poland, Lithuania, Thailand, Cuba.
The US is that bad. This is the true American way of war, blindly celebrated.
Mass Murder Will Find Its Way Home
Hedges fears retribution for evil. I think this is confirmed.
People are generally forgiving by nature – consider the relationship between the US and Vietnam now. If anyone deserves to be hated, it’s us. However, today we are friends.
But that’s not the case everything for us we forgive. How many would kill someone who kills their child? How many can kill many who kill their own people? The answer cannot be “none.”
Historical amnesia is an essential part of extermination campaigns once they are over, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of the genocide, and the longing for revenge, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways that the killers of humanity cannot predictwhich fuels new conflicts and new enmities.
Given America’s incredible vulnerability – “water and food; chemical plants; electrical grids and pipelines; bridges, tunnels, and ports; and the millions of cargo containers that carry most of the goods US consumers rely on” — I don’t think it would take the 9/11 attack complex, it’s those who think we need to punish, punish the US
How many supermarkets are there in America? What if there were five explosions at once? This place called Mall of America welcomes 42 million people each year. How many will come on Black Friday?
What if the delakufa joins the airport security line, the one that piles up quickly before screening, just before Christmas in New York, Chicago, or Dallas?
How many things like this can you name? They are infinite and omnipresent.
I am afraid – how the West, in arming and protecting the genocide of the people and the people, has made revenge inevitable. When it’s too late, we will live to regret these decisions.
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