What War Does to Us

W.J. Astore

It Makes Us Hate; It Leads Us to Slaughter

From the Gaza Strip, the Hamas offensive against Israel has been murderously effective. The vaunted and much-celebrated Israeli military was caught by surprise and is responding to the Hamas attacks with its own version of murder, as captured in this announcement:

Israel Defense Minister: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” [emphasis added]

Actually, we have laws against allowing animals to starve. Think of the SPCA, the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Furthermore, comparing humans to animals is most often an insult to animals. Animals’ thirst for blood is sated quickly compared to humans and our thirst.

Let’s be clear: Hamas and the Palestinian people are not “human animals.” They are not lesser humans or beasts. Are the Jewish people forgetting the way that the Nazis reduced them to lesser humans or beasts to be exterminated during the Holocaust?

The Gaza Strip has been described as the world’s largest open-air prison.

Announcing a siege against all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (no food, no power, mostly unsafe water) is the equivalent of launching a holocaust in slow motion. How is this in any way a proportionate and defensible response to the attacks by Hamas?

Meanwhile, as usual the U.S. government, showing its inherent unity and conformity, is 100% behind Israel, sending an aircraft carrier and issuing blank checks of unequivocal support. The mainstream media once again is telling Americans which side to hate. Think of the Palestinians as a gaggle of little Putins and you’ll be applauded for your right-think.

This is why I hate war. It turns us into killers. It leads us to hate those we kill. And hate kills our minds and makes us even more willing killers.

I applaud and support neither Hamas nor Israel. I applaud and support those who fight for a peaceful future in which we don’t see each other as “human animals” to be slaughtered with impunity.

11 thoughts on “What War Does to Us”

  1. The perspective continues to be excellent and challenging. I find myself quoting Bracing Views more and more often. Here, the insight about who calls whom “animals” is profound.

    Unfortunately, I don’t know how to pronounce the name. Is it ASS-tor? Or Uh-STORE-ay? Or what? I’d be pleased to know I’m saying the name correctly.

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      1. Thanks for what you said in this post – and for how you said it – as well as for replying to this question about how to say your name. I’ve been saying uh-STAWR-ee. Maybe that should have been ah-STOHR-ee.

        It would be great if you could point to a video of an interview, say, where the host introduces you and gets your name right. If this seems obsessive, sorry, it’s because I am – about this stuff:

        j.mp/2soundz (a word list with phonetic respellings)

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  2. With apologies to the shade of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his immortal poem “Ozymandias,” I offer here a brief meditation on the current, continuing, and contemplated depredations of the Apartheid Zionist Entity upon those captive Palestinian Arabs who had absolutely nothing to do with the German/Christian persecution of Jews in Europe before and during World War II.

    Cozy, Scandalous

    I met a refugee from Gaza Strip,
    Who spoke to me with empty, staring eyes
    Dumb words whose depth of pain I could not grip
    With all the helping hands the world denies
    While lapping up the lurid lies that slip
    And roll so greasy off the practiced tongue
    Of Zionists whose caged and wounded prey
    Are told to flee and leave their dying young
    To weep beside the corpses of their old
    In darkened shattered former homes where they
    Cannot refute the garbage we’ve been told
    By glib Israeli liars trained to spread
    A veil of darkness over crimes they’ve sold
    As “Peaceful Co-Existence” — with the dead.

    Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2009

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      1. “Only the dead have seen the end of war” — George Santayana

        Of course, the dead have seen the end of “seeing” anything, for that matter. So, where does that leave us who still have a few (hopefully) years of eyesight remaining?

        Peace. n. “A period of cheating between two periods of fighting.” — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s dictionary”

        Always on the lookout for novel verse formats by the masters whom I might choose to emulate, I came upon another unique sonnet by Shelley that seemed eerily familiar:

        England in 1819
        By Percy Bysshe Shelley

        An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
        Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
        Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
        Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
        But leechlike to their fainting country cling
        Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
        A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field;
        An army, whom liberticide and prey
        Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
        Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
        Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
        A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
        Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
        Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

        I thought of simply changing the country and year in composition’s title (now that England — or Airstrip One — again has an elderly male monarch like the United States) but then decided to go a bit beyond that, what with Orwell’s 1984 always open at my elbow for handy reference:

        Oceania in 2023

        The Secretive Collective Oligarchy
        anointed by our courts as Power, Inc.,
        produces Narrative, puerile and snarky,
        intended for us proles to eat and drink
        then swallow without tasting pure malarky.
        Our role in life: to buy but not to think.
        In charge, a schizophrenic and psychotic
        cabal of cretins slithering through slime:
        a “leadership” decrepit and sclerotic
        long past whatever one could call their “prime,”
        addicted to War’s treacherous narcotic,
        resulting in a “government” despotic:
        Assange in Belmarsh prison for no crime
        The “Law” a mealy-mouth-noise pantomime.

        Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2023

        That should about do it for me this morning. Only a few more hours before I have to see my dentist for a continuation of my root-canal procedure.

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  4. “Palestinians Speak the Language of Violence Israel Taught Them”, by Chris Hedges, Sheerpost (October 8, 2023):

    [begin quote]

    The indiscriminate shootings of Israelis by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations, the kidnapping of civilians, the barrage of rockets into Israel, drone attacks on a variety of targets from tanks to automated machine gun nests, are the familiar language of the Israeli occupier. Israel has spoken this blood-soaked language of violence to the Palestinians since Zionist militias seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, destroyed some 530 Palestinian villages and cities and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in more than 70 massacres. Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1949 to create the state of Israel in 1948.
    . . . [snip] . . .
    The next stage of this struggle will be a massive campaign of industrial slaughter in Gaza by Israel, which has already begun. Israel is convinced greater levels of violence will finally crush Palestinian aspirations. Israel is mistaken. The terror Israel inflicts is the terror it will get.

    [end quote]

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  5. Pingback: What War Does to Us – Emma Olive

  6. A War upon the Occupied

    A “war” upon the occupied
    Confined within their camp,
    Denied the chance to flee so that
    Upon them we may stamp;
    The U.S.A. and Israel:
    Two partners, whore and tramp.

    Those Arabs who once owned their land
    Can now just pack and go.
    Our reasons for decreeing this,
    They have no need to know.
    As far as they’re concerned, it’s just
    Because we’ve told them so.

    You see, once in the recent past,
    Some Jews thought they could take
    – with help from some Americans
    And propaganda fake –
    What Arabs had inhabited
    For centuries: a stake

    In their ancestral history
    That no conquest can kill;
    But persecution maybe might
    Conform them to our will,
    Which anyway has turned into
    Another poison pill.

    Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2012

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  7. Another Odious Occupation Implodes

    This recent January marks the date
    When I came home some fifty years ago
    From Vietnam to realize my fate:
    Forever after I would truly know
    How shallow, base, and stupid were the men
    And women of my government, how prone
    To leap with vain alacrity each time
    The siren silhouette of Folly shone,
    Its dim outline inviting once again
    A blunder? No, much worse: a venal crime.

    Enraptured by possession of the keys
    To power and the wealth that from it grows
    Their Midas minds set out to grasp and seize
    Each gainful opportunity that flows
    And ebbs with time and tides. Let none pass by
    Without some speculator selling short,
    Or politician groveling for bribes,
    Or lobbyist rewriting laws for sport
    Deciding who will live while others die
    In wars against the world’s least favored tribes.

    Possessed of weaponry and willing hands
    To wield it on command, their hubris grows.
    Upon benighted, backward, peasant lands
    The leaders of the U. S. A. propose
    To bomb obedience into the awed
    And shocked survivors of explosive love
    Administered by lethal robot drones
    That target heat and movement from above.
    Back home, the body counts our rubes applaud
    Whom we have spared the shrieks and cries and moans.

    And now once more our vanquished legions leave
    In dark of night so none can photograph
    Their vanishing: a transient reprieve;
    A mound of trash their tawdry epitaph.
    Ten years ago, Obama also claimed
    To have withdrawn our forces from Iraq,
    As Biden promises the Taliban.
    Yet in Iraq our troops have wandered back
    To pad the totals of the killed and maimed.
    A tale not lost upon Afghanistan?

    Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2021

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