W.J. Astore
Because words about war matter
As a retired Air Force officer and military historian, I’m familiar with all kinds of euphemisms about killing, e.g. “precision bombing” and “collateral damage.” Just as it’s easier to kill at a distance, it’s easier to kill when we use words that provide distance from the act. Words that facilitate detachment. Words that befuddle and confuse our minds.
When writing honestly about war, it’s best to use bullet-hits-the-bone words: atrocity, murder, war crime, slaughter. Rape, pillage, burn are “old” words associated with war, and these words often most fittingly describe war and its likely effects and outcomes.
Powerful, blunt, and accurate words should remind us that war is inherently horrible and also profoundly anti-democratic. War is consistent with authoritarianism and lack of freedom, yet Americans nowadays seem to think war (and words about war) is conducive to democracy and freedom, e.g. Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine.
We used to know better. Military people are fond of the saying, “freedom isn’t free,” but neither is war. Indeed, war and its various manifestations are costing this nation more than a trillion dollars a year while weakening democracy and our constitutional freedoms. And that is a very high price to pay to keep the factories of the merchants of death humming and the generals and admirals happy.
Fortunately, there’s a new guide and website available that alerts us to the importance of language and war. The website is wordsaboutwar.org, from which you can read and download suggestions on how best to use words to convey the horrors and costs of war to people everywhere. I urge you to visit the site and peruse the guide. (Full disclosure: I was an advisor to this effort, which was ably led by David Vine.)
Here’s a sample of a few comments I made in passing to the group:
A war on terror is truly a war of terror because war itself is terrible.
Friendly fire is being killed by one’s own, often due to the chaos of war, the sheer waste of it all, exacerbated by incompetence. “Fire” is always unfriendly.
Very few troops are “heroes,” and indeed most aren’t, because heroes are rare in all walks of life.
The word “casualty” is too benign. I much prefer killed and wounded: the victims of war.
What are “enemy noncombatants”? They are usually innocent civilians.
With respect to the “War on Terror” that the U.S. has prosecuted for 22 years and counting, I noted that:
We (the U.S.) manifested a Manichean world view; as George W. Bush said soon after 9/11, you’re either for America (and all its violence) or you’re for the terrorists (with their violence). If you wanted a non-violent approach, you were dismissed as naive or “for them.” It was good versus evil, thus the infamous “axis of evil” the U.S. allegedly faced.
This is, of course, a problem with all discourse related to war. Subtlety and nuance are thrown out the window. Language is greatly simplified. The U.S. is “doubleplusgood” and the enemy must be the opposite while simultaneously being dehumanized. We kill “cowardly” enemy troops or terrorists (by drone they’re “bugsplat”) yet our “heroic” troops “fall” in battle and are revered as “the fallen.” Violent combat is disguised as “kinetic action” in U.S. military communiques.
In my view, the dishonesty of this language captures the dishonesty of America’s wars.
General William T. Sherman (U.S. Civil War) famously said that “War is all hell.” Sherman knew the hellish and harsh realities of war; he knew, as he wrote, that “war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Too many people today are using and manipulating words to refine war. They’re camouflaging war’s harshest realities. Writers should write plainly and honestly, as General Sherman did, to capture war’s hellish nature. By choosing honest words, we also help to create a better future in which the threat of war recedes precisely because we recognize more clearly its horrific nature and terrifying costs.
Other high-ranking military officers, like General Smedley Butler, for example, also wrote plainly about war. As Butler famously said, war is a racket, and he described himself as a gangster for capitalism. Now that was plain speaking about war!
The chief intent of speaking and writing plainly about war is to discourage war and save lives. Some might see it as patriotic—saving the lives of U.S. troops by helping to prevent bloody awful wars—but more broadly the goal is humanistic—to save the lives of all those on the receiving end of bullets and bombs.
Interestingly, U.S. troops at lower levels are generally blunt about what war is about. Talk to sergeants at the front and you’ll hear visceral truths, probably enhanced by choice expletives. I’ve heard U.S. Marines shout “Kill!” at graduation ceremonies. Killing, after all, is what war enables. Mass killing leads to atrocities like My Lai in Vietnam. This fact should never be sugarcoated.
Few people, however, truly want to confront war’s horrors. Gazing upon the face of war is profoundly disturbing, which is why we’re encouraged to look away. And so the face of war is airbrushed and camouflaged with euphemisms and buried under a blizzard of acronyms.
If we are to end war and prevent atrocity, we must seek to name things accurately while calling up mental images (no matter how disturbing) appropriate to the horrors of war. The guide at wordsaboutwar.org is an important step in that direction.
Update: I went on Podcast by George today to talk about all this:
Bracing Views 
So important. ‘Taking out’ is another American euphemism for killing. If language does not reflect reality, it becomes dangerous. Of course the nature of war encourages people of one nation to regard people of another as sub human. From this all kinds of abuse flow. It rewards murder with medals and calls serial killers heroic.
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tnx bill and jonathan; you hit the bullseye, not just the target’s outer orbits. euphemistic equivoques contaminate communication and have been commandeered to deceive since our inchoate grunts and squeaks on the plains of africa. as a former rhetoric prof once exhorted, “language deludes, disguises, and distorts more often than it conveys accuracy, precision of meaning, or veracity of one’s intentions.” war is sanctioned murder. taxes are sanctioned theft. public education is sanctioned propagandizing. religion is sanctioned brainwashing. marriage is sanctioned prostitution. jobs are sanctioned slavery. mining and manufacturing are sanctioned resource depletions. forestry is sanctioned habitat destruction…. and our seas and oceans are the planet’s human-induced communal toilet. you 2 can no doubt add to the inventory.
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i’m curious Jeanie: Was Your former rhetoric prof teaching at a public university? And did he regard his job as “sanctioned slavery”? Or his marriage as “sanctioned prostitution”?
And did he view the resources from mines, forests, or the seas needed ~ for the manufacture of what HE needed and wanted so as to be able to live in the lifestyle to which he, living his life as a university professor, had grown accustomed ~ as depletions?
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no idea, jg. i did not know him, as he was not my prof. he was the former prof of one of my friends, who was a doctoral candidate in the expository and technical writing unit of the rhetoric and public address dept at the univ of iowa, back in the 1960s. all i recall about him was that he was a korean war vet who lived in a commune west of iowa city, east of cedar rapids. given i’m 82, my friend is dead, and i presume her old prof is long-dead as well, i cannot investigate any details of the ‘rhetorical’ queries on those issues that you legitimately raise. i suspect he was endeavouring to force-feed a metalepsis of perspective among his rhetoric students.
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Fair enough, Jeanie. That being the case, then let me ask You this:
During the course of Your working career, did You personally ever regard Your job as a form of “sanctioned slavery”? And if You were ever married, did You regard it as “sanctified prostitution”?
And, if “taxation is sanctified theft,” then how are governments supposed to provide all the services, goods, and products that they do without that thievery?
Without taxation, Who is going to pay for all these things that governments do; and that at least some of their Citizens demand that they do? And How are they going to pay for it?
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some jobs, not all, jg. some marriages, not all. some taxes, not all… and so on, ad nauseum. personally, as a marine, lacustrine, riverine, and estuarine invertebrate zoologist, i would have ‘slaved’ till infirmity for the unalloyed joy of it. as for marriage, i have been in that mostly blissful state for 57 years, from which i philoprogenitively spawned 7 bairns. as for taxes, i have paid them w/out an interlude to both the canadian and US govts since the age of 16, despite the brobdingnagian US portion’s being commandeered to launch ‘sanctioned murder’ across the globe. w/out my subsequent launching of a tax revolt, i plead guilty to being a craven tartuffe, sourced from a fear of being chucked into the clink rather than the ‘drink’ [water], the latter ambit’s being my preference, of course.
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b/c i am not yet infirm, jg, i still drift thru waters and scending wave crests, but no longer on behalf of an employer, or to feed my bantlings, or to provision the taxman. i covet dying in the sea w/out maculating or polluting my consociate critters’ water-column.
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Hi Jeanie: First of all, Thank You for another perfect example of why i enjoy conversing with You so much.
In these two posts, i learned the meaning of eight [8] words that i had never seen before: lacustrine, philoprogenitively, bairns, tartuffe, scending, bantlings, maculating, and consociate. Fine additions to my possible working vocabulary, all.
But i gotta ask You [and may have asked You before]: Do You talk like this in normal, day-to-day conversation? And did You write like that when You were all those different breeds on Invertebrate Zoologist?
And nobody is calling anybody a “tartuffe” here.
First of all, how many World-Class Tartuffes are presently ~ or have recently been ~ in Washington, DC and/or Ottowa [and/or every other political capital on the Planet]? Or are doing everything they can to get there and, once there, to stay there? Talk about Tartuffes… Sheesh.
But second, and more importantly, let me ask You a question: What would happen if a CRITICAL MASS of American [and/or Canadian] individual, organizational, and institutional taxpayers suddenly reduced all voluntary deductions from their paychecks to the absolute minimum, and then come Tax Day, they simply do to not file their Tax Return?
Howz that as a scenario for a reality-tv show?
In any event and from Your description, Jeanie, it sounds like You have had a very full, fulfilling, and satisfying existence as a Human Being; both as a Woman [particularly as a Wife and Mother] and as a Scientist. And my guess is that the Scientist part makes You pretty unique among Wives and Moms.
And Your Love of things involving Water is perfectly understandable. Having lived on a sailboat ~ except for six months after Katrina ~ since 1988; and having done a fair amount of coastal, offshore, and high seas sailing [across the Atlantic twice, the Gulf of Mexico seven times, and on and off the West Coast from San Diego to as far north as Seward, Alaska; and currently living in Sitka, AK on the S/V WayFinder, which i brought up from San Francisco Bay eleven years ago this summer]…..
Having been there and done all that, Your Love for the Rivers, Lakes, Bogs and Marshes, and The Oceans of GAIA rings a very resonant bell.
And while i do not “covet dying IN the sea” [EMPHASIS added, as i have had a couple of close enough calls with that to prefer to die elsewhere and elsewise], it is my intent to be buried at sea about 25 miles off the coast of Sitka in a bio-degradable Burial Shroud. And i know that that will disturb Nobody’s water-column.
Have a Great day. ~ jeff
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since my replies to you, jg, have putatively disappeared from astore’s blog [i no longer see them], i’m not as restive or reluctant to respond to your neoteric interrogatives, being sanguine that this rather too apposite personal response will not be logged onto BV’s comment section either, particularly given how off-topic it is… as were my quondam comments. i suspect such was the rationale behind defenestrating them… far too personal and having naught to do w/ astore’s subject matter or the fabric of deceptive language issues his narrative has raised.
yes, your interrogatives have broached the selcouth lexicon debouches i’ve discharged in past BV comment sections. and yes, i recall addressing them. and yes, to repetend, i speak as i write… to such an extent that the bullies on my school playground in elementary and middle school avoided me, which was my intent, declaiming me as ‘weird’, a tramontane, or an addled bedlamite… which i am, of course.
i also recall informing you that my uncle nick, who was the sunday editor of the NYT, propined me a dictionary on my 5th bday which weighed more than i did. i humped it across my wee hips everywhere i ventured; it was my treasured ‘vade mecum’. when threatened w/ conflict or comminations, sesquipedalian words were more efficacious and less destructive than fisticuffs. i saw and dealt w/ enough blood, broken bones, contusions, and lacerations growing up in my father ‘doc”s veterinary hospital.
as to your 2nd query, yes, in the early days of my scientific career i wrote as i spoke, both informally and formally, including lab reports, which were sufficiently cumbrous i was compelled to take several courses in technical writing and editing. enough about moi.
you are, w/ certitude, an endemic in the human assemblage of H2O-besotted animals, and your enshrouded corpse would be welcomed in any water-column’s community of zooplanktonic animals, micro or macro. my husband and i, tho’ not proficient sailors, lived aboard our son preston’s ‘WINDFALL’, a 43-ft sailing ketch moored in prickly bay off the southeast coast of grenada island, at the southern tip of the caribbean’s windward group. this was during our final year before retirement in 2013~’14… after which we retired to mindoro island in the philippines, where our son firth was working as a consultant for SEAMO~innotech at the time. as w/ you in sitka, alaska, this is where we plan to inspire our final island-based breaths. our 7 bantlings have agreed to help facilitate that end.
the reason i have resisted posting comments on astore’s BV blog for the past several months is that doing so has become, for me at least, too politically banausic, repetitious, non-proactive, and therefore discouraging. concomitantly, instead of feckless word-scripting, i have recently returned from 3 months of teaching as a volunteer in the 4 palestinian refugee camps which surround the nablus area in palestine’s west bank. it was an epiphanic experience. if you contact PROJECT HOPE NABLUS, you can investigate their past triumphs and future agendas. i signed w/ PHN b/c it was the only such palestinian organization i was able to uncover which did not dictate an upper age limit. as an octogenarian, i was way past the other organizations’ sell-by date.
the militant, genocidal israeli govt is in collusion w/ the US/UK to eliminate palestinians from their homeland altogether. we were subject to near- nightly bombing raids, house demolitions, assault weaponry enfilades, drone attacks, infrastructure despoliations, curfews, and helicopter hoverings that so terrified the children in our refugee camps it was virtually impossible for them to settle their cortical machinery sufficient to acquire any semblance of in-depth knowledge or to explore intellectually challenging subject matter, never mind complete homework assignments.
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Wow Jeanie- that is a seriously comprehensive list! Your professor was right in pointing out that language can be used to disguise or to mislead. But this must be balanced by its ability to reflect truth. Loose sight of that and we are in a trackless wilderness. Education of any sort could be described as brainwashing, but where does that leave us? How do we speak without learning to speak? And something similar applies to taxation and robbery; prostitution and marriage. Let’s say it’s one way of describing social institutions. Any way of describing them will involve a political stance and a series of usually unstated assumptions.
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Some words about War: VIET NAM WAR POEMS (extracts, 1966-1969)
JUST AN ODE
Out of so too many
shattered moments
one could find
but brief respites
That would seem to silence
empty longings
which haunted
death’s wish from bleakened nites.
An empire built on sands of fate
had crumbled in our mud;
a tempest borne destruction, we,
as pillars engorged with hate,
would rise in lust with
calls to arms.
Impotent screams, too much,
too late.
Childess of God
is near this truth.
Why, then,
do I seek revenge?
C.O.
I’d vowed once
not to meet the bitch
under any but the most noble
of circumstances.
Ah, to be swept
up by her, into her,
womb, truth, being.
To be sundered awash
in her crimson gutter,
the waxen awe of
someone I’ll never know
my statement to all.
A yellow-green sacrifice
to some such forgotten
worthy cause as “liberty.”
I’ve come now
to regard that pit
as a poor attempt,
and wonder
whose climax I’ve breached.
For, a whore is truly worthless,
and permeates all.
A POINTLESS PROVOCATION IN 8/3 TIME FOR VIOLA AND TAMBORINE
I saw an outpost overrun last nite
a day ago, oh boy……….
Women, children, dogs, pigs, cows, soldiers Vietnamese
raped, robbed, plundered, and mobbed;
left to bleed into the Delta mud and
to stink into the warm, soft, pungent, ugly nite…
We carried out casualties and lifted out condemned.
It’s funny, you know? They bleed,
and scream, and cry, and die just like we do
when we’re overrun.
And tears, like cunts —
contrary to popular belief —
are not slanted…
I saw a mortar attack last nite, oh joy…
depending upon where you were,
on, or at, me.
The Dream Merchant of Orrifficci
would come and leave behind her
the shattered ruins of men
confronted with the dreams of each other.
The shadow of her being
would linger within their souls
and lengthen as the nite of knowledge
enveloped them.
And the dreams.
That told why what is….
And isn’t, so….
And won’t be, thus….
And can’t be, impossible.
The dreams that failed only
to tell why Why.
And they all then knew
what God didn’t understand.
And She understands
what God doesn’t even know.
But what,
asked one very young man,
of yours…..dare we know
of them?
Dreams shaped like 75-millimeter recoilless rifle shells…..
mama…Mama…MAMA…MMMAAAMMMAAA…
A LETTER
Eternal Spring of Eternalness,
The poem…”The Delta”…Remember?
“Men are making war together tonite in the Delta…” You cried.
Last nite or before, I flew to some arena up the canal
and heard Dustoff 85 call that he’s got “30 casualties…”
and I saw from where and knew what was happening
and shrank back in the terror of a man brought suddenly
face-to-ace with that which he has strived and strided to avoid and deny.
Again.
The insanity factory of life, love, hate, and death
as performed in the stretches of green south of Saigon.
And I wondered,
“How many mothers will soon cry?”
How many?
How many it was indeed.
“30 more casualties,” the medevac pilot
metallically informed.
Human beings in death…
screaming, sobbing, choking, ghurking, and dying…. .
What was life is now empty.
Desolate.
Vapid the stare into the face that God has to face
every morning.
Just like that…. So easy.
So bloody,
fucking,
easy.
“30 more…” And that’s just the friendlies.
How many bad guys now stare into whatever it is that we all will?
How many of the “enemy”?
How many MORE mothers?
Love and death are so mathematical…..
a mother’s love, a child’s scream…
a mother’s love, a child’s shudder…
a mother’s love, a child’s moan…
a mother’s love, a child’s ghurk…
a mother’s love, a child’s stare…
a mother’s tears…
a mother’s screams…
a mother’s sobs…
a mother’s life unto death and death unto life…
a thundercloud is pierced…..
a raindrop’s falls…..
How many it was indeed.
But how can such be so? And I shuddered and remembered.
Because it is. That’s why.
I watched the Delta nite filled with sons and fireflies
touching the dusk of a man whisked off to a field hospital
where all is in vain because he has choked to death
on his own blood and supper.
Man……..was I happy I was here when it was there and
that I could think about all that that was happening before me…
In time, I would realize
that it had already happened to….
WHY. WHY NOT.
a little boy,
a pimp of sorts,
his voice destroyed by the VC,
saw me and
began crying,
explaining his joy
as having thought
me be dead.
a young mother,
baby in arms,
is smiled at
by me as I wave
to the child.
she spits
in my face,
not bothering
to explain.
do you know
what it feels like
to be hated?
perhaps tomorrow
I’ll kill that
little pimp. God
forgive me
the mother and her child.
6 PM, DAWN OF THE MIDNITE NOON
The people gathered at the corner
and between them composed a song
that asked whoever was listening,
where had God gone wrong?
And the children at war in the streets
put down their weapons for play;
and mingled among the silent mob,
claiming nothing to have to say.
And then someone whispered
even above the mammalarian cries:
“Remember the days I was hungry
and it was your world…..
for tomorrow,
it will be mine.”
CONFUSION SAY
At nite’s fall
is moment to rest
and reflect
in your wake
of the days’
moments.
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MORE WORDS ABOUT WAR THAT MATTER [at least to me]…:
It is November, 1969; and tens of thousands of Vietnamese and thousands of Americans are killed.
Among the Americans is a young helicopter pilot from Van Nuys, California, who dies when the AH-1 Cobra attack gunship he was piloting was shot out of the sky by .50 caliber machine gun ground fire. CW2 Lawrence J Babyak left behind a young widow bride, and two elderly parents paralyzed with grief.
At the military funeral in Van Nuys on January 3, 1970 ~ four months and a day before four more young Americans were to be killed in a place called Kent, Ohio ~ in a massive, solemnly packed Russian Orthodox Cathedral ablaze with emblems of patriotic fealty and fervor, many words are spoken. Among those words are these by a young soldier, the only enlisted man in the church. He was a door gunner who’d flown with Larry on UH-1 assault helicopters down in the Mekong Delta back in 1967-68. They’d survived Tet together. And more. Lots more. Too much more….. :
EULOGY
It is difficult, my friends. Very difficult.
I know none of you, yet I call you my friends. Thank you for being here, for sharing this, for enabling me to bear it.
After two years of this War, I have finally lost someone I love. Buddies? There’s been plenty. Never, until now, someone I love.
It is said that tragedy is the fire that tempers the soul. I can only hope that my soul, and my heart, and my mind, and my life is
tempered and forged from this nightmare into a design of dedication NOT to the forces and elements that killed him: rage, hate, lust for violent revenge, a mindless, headlong flight into, through, and finally submerged by insanity.
Not to that, but to the ideals and principles that should have been the forces and elements at work that could have kept him, you, me, us all nowhere near Vietnam, or Biafra, or Suez, or Korea, or Normandy, or Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, and on and on back thru the ages and the battlefields, back to the beginnings of time, the beginnings of man, the beginnings of War.
The ideals, principles, forces, and elements of understanding, concern, love, peace, and the knowledge of our status as but “the family of Man, fellow-passengers on the Spaceship Earth…. .”
And how meaningless, empty, and vapid these words sound and are tonite. But, a man’s words are really nothing more than indicators, the elements of the metaphor that his living is, as it seeks to explain to him, and to us, his life.
Perhaps these moments of futility, emptiness, and tragedy are the price we must pay for having had the privilege of his company, the strength of his presence, the happiness of his warmth and joy, the security of his being.
We have all lost something. A friend, a husband, a son. But there is a greater loser, a more tragic victim from all this than we, his wife, his parents, his family, and his friends. And that victim, my friends, is the world.
It is this world…this world that murdered him, that is the big loser.
The terms I think it might understand are that he is no longer at its disposal; that he is free and no longer subject to the prices that the world and mankind demand from its children as they attempt to struggle as individual human beings, with individual lives and loves, and concerns and cares, projects, goals, and plans, and wins, losses, and rainouts.
The world requires that you be more than a man or a woman ~ which, until death, is impossible.
It requires that citizens of nations become us all. Citizens of nations, and pawns to realities revolving around such grandiose, eloquent, pompous terms, tenets, and ideas as ideology and geopolitics, alliances and balances of power, negotiations, diplomacy, and treaties, and on and on ad nauseam…. the vocabulary of Government.
And much more real, final, and meaningless terms as enemy and body-counts, and hot LZ’s and .50-caliber machine gun positions, and frozen rotor blades at 300 feet, and notification of next-of-kin…. the vocabulary of the logical conclusion of the rhetoric of Government, the vocabulary of War.
The world required this of him, and he agreed to pay his portion of the price. Tonite, however, the world’s account is overdrawn. Tonite, there is the matter of revenge. No. No, not revenge. Avenge. Avengeance. aVengeance… revenge without Vengeance; revenge without Violence.
But against whom does one direct it? And how?
Is it to be directed against those people and places and principles that killed him? Against other young – and old ~ women and men from other nations who, too, are but paying [and playing] their price and thus part, as their world ~ this world, our world ~ demands? They are but pawns as we. And as long as we pawns keep fighting ~ and paying for ~ all these Wars, there will be War.
What, then of the kings and queens and bishops and rooks and generals and knights and such? They, too, are but pawns. Their bloodshed is not their own; rather, it is of those that they like to call “their Peoples’.” These, too, however, are paying a price: the price of being those most directly associated with the true killers ~ the ideas, and terms, and tenets, and vocabularies. And, having to live with them, by them, and for them, they thus become the emptiness, the insanity, the impotence, the wretchedness that these words are.
No. It is neither the pawns nor the princes ~ the presidents, premiers, and propagandists ~ that are to be sought out and made to give retribution for Larry. It’s not the people who are directly, and thus apparently responsible for his having been there, and thus being no more.
Rather, it is those who are truly, though indirectly responsible. It is those that could have stopped it, could have prevented this specter from becoming the spectacle that it is.
It is, indeed, those who permit the world to make them pawns and slaves, and legions to, of, by, and for these ideas and words. Those who permit themselves to go and become but the bit-players in this passion play, the finale of which is the death of their brothers and their sisters, their sons and daughters, their fathers and their mothers, their selves.
A death as meaningless, as senseless, and as empty as their lives. Lives spent under the tyranny of ideas, killing and thus dying under their effect. Lives lived under the anarchy of this self-imposed despotism, rather than in and through the fulfillment that is to be found in the truth, the beauty, the reality of the mind’s products ~ Ideas ~ as they are used instead to eliminate the trials, tragedies, and traumas of man. Rather than, as today, propagating, perpetrating, and perpetuating them.
MAN is the object. MAN and LIFE. All of LIFE. Ideas are but vehicles. The price for avenging Larry shall have been extracted when that simple statement becomes a world-truth.
We live now in the insanity of Man being the vehicle, and terms, tenets, vocabularies, ideologies, and ideas being the object. The object that man has permitted to become, at not only his expense and thus life’s, but at the world’s, as well.
The guilty, my friends, is you and me and him and her and everyone. Each and every one of us all. Including Larry. And we begin, now, to pay the price for this. We have lost someone for whom Man and Life was the object.
Larry, as the rest of us, the young, was at but the beginning of this realization, at the beginning of this work. Because those of us that could have helped, long ago, to prevent what has happened did not, we are now paying the price.
Again: MAN is the object. MAN and LIFE. Ideas are but vehicles. The price for avenging Larry shall have been extracted when that simple statement becomes a world-truth.
The question, again, is “How?”
If, in fact, a man is ready to die when he knows himself completely, I am at last ready.
With this experience, with these words, I have come now to know and to understand the meaninglessness of the meaning I have permitted the world to attach to my, to your, to Larry’s, to everyone’s being.
And knowing this, I swear… No more.
aVengeance will be mine. I pray, my friends, yours as well.
The question, at last, is “How?”
This we will learn. With help….. .
……………………………………………….
EPITAPH: Much Too Late For Yesterday, Early For Tomorrow [to be toed in the sand at low tide]
Like the shadow of an important line
that clings within the mind, and refuses to permit itself be spoken,
his life was spent at dusk and dawn walking with the pipers;
lost not in memory, begetting no conspiracy,
attempting but to find in now a meaning.
And is the world a better place because he was alive,
or is it that this is not a worthy question?
To take a moment with his view,
might not it be in some sense true
that he is better off in learning dying?
###
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Thank You, once again, Bill, for Your reference and link to WORDS ABOUT WAR.
As i noted on BV Substack earlier: This is something that i wish had been written ~ and that i [and a whole bunch of other people] had read ~ 22 years ago today, September 10, 2001; aka the Day Before “The End of the World as We All Knew It.”
And again, Thank You for Your part in making WAW happen.
i urge every BVer ~ and every American who wants to understand what has happened in this nation and on this planet since 9/10 ~ to read WAW’s “Guide for Discussing War and Foreign Policy” at https://www.wordsaboutwar.org/ . And then ~ and particularly ~ that they read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” a [if not the] foundation document for WAW’s Guide.
And then, i urge them to read Christopher Hitchens’ WHY ORWELL MATTERS [ https://www.amazon.com/Why-Orwell-Matters-Christopher-Hitchens/dp/0465030505/ ], published in 2002, and Andras Szanto’s and Orville Schell’s 2007 anthology, WHAT ORWELL DIDN’T KNOW: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics [ https://www.amazon.com/What-Orwell-Didnt-Know-Propaganda/dp/1586485601/ ].
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On the occasion of the 22nd anniversary of 9/11, a Question every American old enough to think for themselves needs to ask themselves, their families and loved ones, friends and neighbors, cohorts, colleagues, compeers, and compatriots is…:
WHAT WILL YOU DO, AMERICA, WHEN 9/11 HAPPENS ONCE AGAIN?
What will you do when your government once again fails its Constitutionally-mandated duty and responsibility to preserve and protect the Life, Liberty, Property, and Pursuit of Happiness of America’s citizens from all enemies, foreign and domestic? Will you meekly and absent-mindedly accept the fact that, once again, not one single elected politician, not one single entrenched civilian or military career bureaucrat, not one single anointed political appointee is to be held accountable or made to be responsible and to pay for his or her failures?
WHAT WILL YOU DO, AMERICA, WHEN 9/11 HAPPENS ONCE AGAIN?
What will you do when thousands more of your countrymen are murdered before your very eyes on live television? Will you once again dutifully and diffidently shrug off your absolute, inalienable, and unconditional Right to know the Real, Whole Truth about WHAT actually happened, about HOW it actually happened, about WHY it actually happened, about WHO actually made it happen, and about Who actually LET it happen? Will you once again passively and patriotically accept the Official “conspiracy theory” version of events as explained to you by your government, and as packaged and presented, marketed and sold to you by its experts, cheerleaders, gatekeepers, and champions in what used to be called The Media – mainstream, corporate, liberal, alternative, conservative, progressive, patriotic, radical, which, what, and/or wherever?
WHAT WILL YOU DO, AMERICA, WHEN 9/11 HAPPENS ONCE AGAIN?
What will you do when the so-called War Against so-called Terrorism abroad and at home is transparently, clearly, and undeniably demonstrated to be a total, abject failure and thus lie, scam, hoax, and sham? Will you once again give even more untaxed money, unchallenged political power, and unchallengeable legal authority to the very people, offices, organizations, and agencies by whose failures this “War” was created and is waged, and who can promise you only that your — and their — investment in it will last forever?
WHAT WILL YOU DO, AMERICA, WHEN 9/11 HAPPENS ONCE AGAIN?
What will you do when your elected and appointed officials further dismantle Constitutional government in the name of “civilization,” further diminish individual and civil liberties in the name of “freedom,” and finally destroy the last vestiges of whatever power We, the People, may have once commanded, all in the name of “democracy” and “security”? Will you obediently and obsequiously once again hide and watch the next stage in the biggest seizure of government power on this planet since Stalin’s Russia in the 20s, Hitler’s Germany and Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 30s, and Mao’s China in the 40s?
WHAT WILL YOU DO, AMERICA, WHEN 9/11 HAPPENS ONCE AGAIN?
Will you rush out to buy brand new flags and ribbons and bumper stickers, buttons, posters and signs, to replace the torn, shredded, faded, matted, pealed, and rusted ones you rushed out to buy after the first 9/11? And then once again go on with your lives, desperately hoping that you can somehow continue pretending to pretend that nothing has really changed, that life does indeed go on the Day After The End of The World As We Knew It, Once Again.
WHAT WILL YOU DO, AMERICA, WHEN 9/11 HAPPENS ONCE AGAIN?
Will you piously, stoically, and heroically accept a Draft as part of the necessary, national sacrifice demanded in this time of new national peril and challenge? Particularly if you get to keep your tax breaks and gas in your SUVs, and your kid gets to get his Deferment?
WHAT WILL YOU DO, AMERICA, WHEN 9/11 HAPPENS ONCE AGAIN?
Will you, the so-called “peace, anti-War, and social justice” community of America, once again walk right past GROUND ZERO — The Real, Whole Truth — looking for something more significant, something more relevant, something more important? Will you once again rush to hold your episodic and periodic semi-annual Gatherings Of The Tribe to rail and rant and beat your breasts and massage your gums and egos against the newest extension and expansion and endless continuation of this so-called “War” at home and abroad?
This War about which you have — from DAY ZERO, from September 11, 2001 — completely refused and thus failed to “think the unthinkable,” and thus understand, and thus first prevent and then and now stop?
Will you ever succeed? Will you ever stop ANY War? Will you ever really want Peace instead of just Power, Justice instead of the Judicial Authority that comes with that Power, and Truth instead of nothing more or less than simply your fair share of the Loot?
WHAT WILL YOU DO, AMERICA, WHEN 9/11 HAPPENS ONCE AGAIN?
What will you do when those who benefited most from its happening the first time determine that the time has come for another major Terror Event, because maximal strategic and tactical political, economic, and, above all, psychological gain is to be achieved with another, with a second “new Pearl Harbor”? Will you once again feign ignorance of their — and your — history?
WHAT WILL YOU DO, AMERICA, WHEN THOSE WHO BENEFITED MOST FROM THE FIRST 9/11 DETERMINE THAT THEY STAND TO GAIN EVEN MORE WITH A SECOND ITERATION?
Who and/or What is going to stop them? Do you have the courage to even ask yourself these questions? Let alone answer them?
[Note: This was originally written and posted in early December, 2001. And the exact same Questions could be asked about another Saddam and his “WMDs,” another 2008esque “Too Big To Let Fail” financial “¢risi$,” and, of course, another Pandemic. Particularly the last Question.]
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