Yves here. While this Thomas Neuburger post, and the Chris Hedges tweetstorm that inspired it, make the important point that violence begats violence, the framing bothers me. The focus on “lust for vengeance” puts the emphasis on the damage done by the victim striking back, as opposed to the [nearly always unnecessary] violence of the perpetrator who set chain of retributions in motion.
I read many important books at too young an age to fully appreciate what they conveyed. One was Machiavelli’s The Prince:” But above all he must refrain from seizing the property of others, because a man is quicker to forget the death of his father than the loss of his patrimony.”
Perhaps DLG, Reality Czar, will correct me. I used to make sense of this passage over the fact that quite a few men don’t get on with their fathers and so would not much miss them, but all young men would sorely resent having money they expected to receive take from them. But in the days of Machiavelli, the primary form of wealth was land. And land was not just property but conferred a position in society, as in status or standing. So taking a man’s “property” in this social context could be seen as stripping him of his position in society, which is arguably more demeaning that the loss of mere wealth alone.
In other words, the impetus for revenge is not just and perhaps not mainly wanton killings. It is the deracination, the unpersoning of the most basic operation of colonialism: of taking people’s ancestral lands from them. It should not be surprising that US and European imperialists can’t fully internalize what that means.
Of course, there are other ways to inflict deep wounds on an individual and community’s sense of who they are, such as desecrating or destroying sacred objects and sites, or violating personal/religious taboos. The Israeli plan to destroy Al Aqsa Mosque, the third most revered site in the Muslim world, would be the mother of all provocations.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
The noted journalist and writer Chris Hedges has published a long piece at Twitter, now called X. In it he makes a number of important points, but I want to emphasize one in particular: that there will be vengeance for Western complicity in the Israeli genocide.
From the piece (all emphasis mine):
Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.
Those of us who covered the Middle East were stunned that the Bush administration imagined it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. …
Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.
Will the international community continue to stand by passively and allow Israel to carry out a mass extermination campaign? Will there ever be limits?
His answer to the question above is also my own: No, there will be no limits. Israel and the U.S. will stop when made to stop.
I fear, given that the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties, as well as cowed the media and universities, the rivers of blood will continue to swell. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.
The U.S. is as guilty as Israel. Hedges details with breathtaking clarity our similar-to-Israel policy of torture and killing in Vietnam and Iraq.
“After the [Vietnam] war,” [Nicolas] Turse concludes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for — and thus blot out — all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”
My Lai wasn’t a one-off; it was blessed by policy and broadly practiced. The same in Iraq.
The same with Abu Ghraib. Bagram. And all the other CIA torture sites we ran or run — Poland, Lithuania, Thailand, Cuba.
The U.S. is that bad. This is the real American method of war, blindly celebrated.
Mass Murder Will Find Its Way Home
Hedges fears a retributional return of evil for evil. I think this is guaranteed.
Humans are generally forgiving by nature — consider the relations between the U.S. and Vietnam now. If anyone deserves to be hated, it’s us by them. Yet today we are friends.
But not all of us are forgiving. How many would kill the one who murders their child? How many would murder the many who murder their people? The answer cannot be “no one.”
Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities.
Given America’s remarkable vulnerability — “water and food supplies; chemical plants; energy grids and pipelines; bridges, tunnels, and ports; and the millions of cargo containers that carry most of the goods U.S. consumers depend on” — I don’t think it would take an attack of 9/11 complexity, by those who think we need punishing, to punish the U.S.
How many very large malls exist in America? What if five blew up at once? The so-called Mall of America welcomes 42 million people each year. How many show up on Black Friday?
What if a suicide bomber joined an airport security line, the one that piles up immediately prior to screening, just before Christmas in New York, Chicago, or Dallas?
How many what-ifs like these can you devise? They’re endless and everywhere.
I’m frightened for us — for how the West, in arming and protecting a genocide this public and large, has made retribution inevitable. When it’s too late, we’ll live to regret these choices.
