Drop a Paradigm

"The problems that face us cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them. What we need is a shift in consciousness." ---Einstein

Visiting our nation's capital this week was a study in contradictions for me, as shame mixed with pride, and as hope did the same with despair. These polar opposites were not poles apart, however; they tended instead to occupy the same physical and temporal spaces. The recurring theme for me was the unassailable truth of the quote above, and the undeniable necessity of embracing it with sober hearts and open minds.

The photograph above is part of the World War II memorial in Washington. It's quite an impressive monument and it elicited a solemn and serious pride and respect from my own admittedly skeptical, though hopefully not cynical, heart and mind. More than anything, it illuminated the relevance of Einstein's quote.

The American narrative of World War II is that of a selfless act of liberation. There is some truth to this, of course, and I personally have never been more proud to be an American as I was at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. This was a killing factory whose murderous machinery formed as efficient an abattoir as possible and made no distinction between man or woman, child or elder, soldier or doctor.

That killing was stopped by American soldiers. American soldiers died taking that camp, died to ensure that the killing would not continue for one more day. And despite what pacifists may say, the only way to stop that killing was to kill the killers. That, of course, is the tragedy and the moral inversion of war; to stop a killer, you become him.

There were a great many acts of liberation and selfless sacrifice by Americans during World War II. The problem is that the oversimplified and omission-riddled image of the American liberator was allowed to distract attention from the true cost of the war and then to serve as "rationale" for all manner of subsequent killing by Americans, facilitated by the fact that World War II had given Americans the permanent delusion that they killed only for freedom, that their bombs and bullets magically sought out only the enemy, and that anyone who would resist them was simply Hitler revisited.

This willful blindness began during the war, and it is present at the memorial. The above photograph is from the part of the memorial that lists all of the theatres in which American soldiers fought and died. "Air War in Europe" is quite the euphemism. It is actually much more sinister than that; there's not as much difference as we might wish to believe between calling what the United States did in Europe an "Air War" and calling the Holocaust a "Ground War".

The "Air War", which calls to mind images of dashing and roguish pilots locked in combat with enemy fliers high above foreign territory, resulted in millions of deaths in Europe. Millions. And it was policy. "Area bombing", it was sometimes called. A choice taken by American leadership to destroy the enemy's will rather than his capacity was actualized by a campaign of terrorism, pure and simple. Cologne. Dresden. Hamburg. Destroy those cities and everyone in them and perhaps the enemy will lose "his" will. Such was our policy.

Without erasing the acts of liberation or the evil of Hitler, we could change "Air War in Europe" to "Indiscriminate Terrorist Slaughter of German Civilians" without sacrificing any intellectual integrity. The point isn't to make us feel bad about ourselves; it's to ensure that war is always the last option in deed as well as in word. It is to guarantee that we have a realistic understanding of what we are forced to do when we are forced to war, rather than to portray the greatest slaughters of all time as redemptive violence.

Next I wandered over to the Vietnam Wall, another solemn and sorrowful exercise, this one even more tragic that World War II, since only the most blinkered and delusional ideologues can seriously argue that the Indo-China Wars, whether gagued by their origin, their conduct, or their conclusion, were worth 3 million lives.

As I glanced at thousands upon thousands of names, one number kept coming back to me: 19. The average age of those 58,000 American "men" that were lost in Vietnam was 19. Since there were no 12 year old soldiers dragging down this average, we know that virtually all of the Americans killed in Vietnam were 18, 19, or 20 years "old".

But how big would the Vietnam Wall be if everyone who died in the Vietnam War was on it, rather that just the Americans? Well, it would be 50 times the size it is. Because for every one of those American boys whose breathed his last breath screaming for his mother in the Mekong mud, there were 50 Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotians.

While in Washington, I attended a public health convention including a lecture on Veteran's Health. To my surpirse, one of the lecturers, a Vietnamese woman, focused on the Vietnamese veterans of the Vietnam War. Don't we tend to think of "veterans" as exclusively American? The doctor's presentation was on the effects of Agent Orange in her country.

Forty years after the fact, this woman delivers children with no heads, with three arms, with no arms, with no mouth, and so on. This is the real cost of the Vietnam War. Vietnam was not something that happened to the United States; the United States is something that happened to Vietnam. And, after saturating the country with chemical weapons and killing millions with conventional bombs and bullets, we left. No reparations, no war crimes trials, and no apology.

When the Iraq War memorial is built, will it make mention of the Iraqi dead, now numbering 1 million? Will it memorialize the millions of others who were driven from their homes? Will it be built to remember an entire nation which exists now in name only? Of course it won't; it will memorialize the few thousands American soldiers who died there.

And this is why we need Einstein's "shift in consciousness". World War II lulled us into a myth that wasn't even entirely true at the time, never mind in the sixty years since. Americans have not fought to liberate since World War II. They have fought to impose. They have always argued that if they failed to impose a certain system onto a certain country that country would succumb to a worse system. This has occasionally been true, but it does not erase the American impositions, the American aggressions.

When we are convinced that we fight to liberate, we end up doing things that we rightly hung Germans and Japanese for doing after World War II. Torture. Wars of aggression. Use of chemical weapons. War is not waged to liberate; it is waged to destroy. It is not a political debate; it is a killing contest. Once we started killing Vietnamese or Iraqis who could never have harmed us, the relative merits of our system as opposed to theirs became totally inconsequential.

Let's be honest about what World War II was. It was the low point of Western civilization. The United States had the good sense to stay out of it until it was dragged in. The "Greatest Generation" was called upon to kill for its country, and to kill on a scale previously unimaginable. And it did so. And in doing so, it guaranteed that no subsequent American generation would have to do what they did.

However, subsequent American generations have done these things, against progressively defenseless foes. What more direct way to disrespect a World War II veteran than to send his son and grandson to kill men in sandals because they are the "next Hitler"? What greater disservice to them than to glorify their killing rather than to memorialize them as the most evil necessity upon which our nation ever embarked?