DUCKPOND

War represents the methods of violence taken to a more barbarous level in an overt attempt to deal with the violence of others in an effort to create a peace based on injustice.

Often times, as in Afghanistan, events and script are so discordant that even Public Relations struggles and fails to play their lullabies of glory with gore.

Chris Hedges at Truthdig takes aim at the Afghanistan slaughter:

The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban. The moral lines we draw between us and our adversaries are fictional. The uplifting narratives used to justify the war in Afghanistan are pathetic attempts to redeem acts of senseless brutality. War cannot be waged to instill any virtue, including democracy or the liberation of women. War always empowers those who have a penchant for violence and access to weapons. War turns the moral order upside down and abolishes all discussions of human rights. War banishes the just and the decent to the margins of society. And the weapons of war do not separate the innocent and the damned. An aerial drone is our version of an improvised explosive device. An iron fragmentation bomb is our answer to a suicide bomb. A burst from a belt-fed machine gun causes the same terror and bloodshed among civilians no matter who pulls the trigger.

Five years ago Chris Hedges, addressing the American Friends Service Committee annual public gathering, recounted some of his direct experience of “living to the top” as a war correspondent.

War by this account is not glorious. It is inhuman. So it would be best if we all got down to the work of being human in the world, while we have a planet that makes that project possible, but for how much longer give current behavior it is hard to say. It is clear that the structures of thought, organization, and technology that that are indifferent to larger system of nature have met their end point. The human species gripped of the egotistical delusion is facing a merciful extinction if all that is on offer is cruelty and stupidity. Violence it turns out is the path to nowhere. But where is the way out?

César Chávez, has a very pertinent observation:

Violence just hurts those who are already hurt… instead of exposing the brutality of the oppressor, it justifies it.

Open Development:
So what does it mean to work at being human?

The focus shifts from work as moving stuff around, as activity for it own sake, although informed physical activity is intrinsic to human life. There has to be a relation between means and ends. Socially constructed systems that consign human beings to mere survival needs are evidence of structural violence, if it is objectively not necessary.