UNCONSCIOUS CULTURE

Is violence not just endemic to our culture and economy, but intrinsic to it?

Problems must be solved by “legitimized” violence to allow the exercise of political power and economic dominance. Seeing the role of violence is curiously difficult, even when it is explicitly identified. Anne Davis is the Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in Washington writes:

JSOC, or special ops, brings together the toughest soldiers from Delta Force and Navy Seals – some of the most highly trained killers in the US military.

The units have been used since the September 11 terrorist attacks in hunting down high-value targets, including the arrest of Saddam Hussein and the targeting of al-Zarqawi, and it was these types of forces the former vice-president Dick Cheney was referring to when he said that America would have to “work the dark side” in the war on terrorism.

Our “killers” are good guys, theirs are “terrorists” or perhaps al Qaeda or in the case of Pashtun nationalists, Taliban. How come the United Nations is at war with the Taliban?

Davis is repeating the official line, even when the script was obviously written for Monty Python:

At a press briefing, the Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, insisted that the reason was the new strategy of the Obama Administration, which is now focused on hunting out al-Qaeda operatives in the border areas of Afghanistan, while at the same time trying to rebuild the trust of the civilian population in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, to undermine the Taliban’s efforts to gain a foothold in the populations of both countries.

Once upon a time, when the strategic imperative was seen differently, some of the tribal leaders were seen as allies, worthy of American support.

Historically, it is worth noting that the Muslim state of Pakistan was a creation of the grateful British Empire, the very same people who drew the so-called boundary between Afghanistan and British India, the Durand Line. Writing in The Guardian, Khaleb Diab is on the case:

To properly understand Pakistan, one must go back to its birth. The country was “conceived in a hurry and delivered prematurely”, as Tariq Ali puts it. The Indian independence movement matured over decades and had the chance to build enduring democratic and civil institutions, and much of what we call India today had been a recognisable political entity, first under the Mughals and then the British.

In contrast, Pakistan had no precedent and was created almost as an afterthought by the British to reward the loyal Muslim League, which had split away from the Congress party out of fear of post-independence marginalisation or persecution.

Much more than the rest of the subcontinent, Pakistan was rocked to the core by the massive population shake-ups – with a huge influx of Muslims from all over India and an almost complete exodus of Hindus and Sikhs. However, Pakistan’s apparent religious uniformity masks major ethnic and cultural tensions.

The dominance of the Punjabi muhajirun (migrants or refugees) is resented by the native Sindhis, Pashtuns and, earlier, Bengalis, who broke away to form Bangladesh after Pakistan’s bloody invasion in 1971.

So, despite Pakistan’s original conception as a secular democracy, its leaders, faced with the prospect of territorial disintegration and a lack of legitimacy (particularly among non-Punjabis), fell back on the only common denominator, Islam, to try to keep the fragile country together and cement their hold on power – with disastrous consequences.

The imperial past is merely history, and has no bearing on what is happening now. How can it, since the last thirty years or more of civil war, with the possible exception of Taliban Government and the Northern Alliance Enclave (now the government of Afghanistan) is similarly ignored.

But notice how in the Anne Davis article it is necessary to “hunt” and “kill” people – and it is to the good. There is no strategic and economic context. Counterinsurgency is simply murder and population displacement by another name, but so apparently blinkered are we to overt violence that it cannot be seen, even when it is “unconsciously” pointed by the dutiful correspondent. “The most highly trained killers in the US Military”, indeed.

Still the quantitative award by far goes to the boys (and perhaps girls), presumably without any human psychological (or pyschiatric) blowback, kill from the sky either as pilots of planes or drones. They surely are “the bravest of the brave”. Yes, they have a noble cause. Wow! and they do not even have to be tough.

Unconscious culture, unconscious history, so do not mention the bombing of Vietnam and Laos. Kill in the night, you should be right, since phosporous will be your light.

Referring to Afghanistan, Richard Neville notes:

In 2008, according to the New York Times, American led coalition forces killed 828 civilians, mostly “in airstrikes and raids on villages, which are often conducted at night”. 

ELSEWHERE:

I remembered later that I should have included Cambodia. However, William Pfaff explains my omission in his article, “Cambodia De Ja Vu – The Invasion of Pakistan” via Truthdig. An extended quote on this occasion is justified, if only to inform one person of this global society of ours, me:

A younger generation than mine, including senior military officers (not to speak of Barack Obama), may not know exactly why the United States and the South Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia in 1970, and what the result was. The invasion was a failure, and the result a humanitarian catastrophe.

Washington, frustrated in its war against the Communist Viet Cong in South Vietnam, which eventually included bombing on a scale greater than the bombing of Germany in the Second World War, decided it could solve its problem by an invasion to cut the Communist supply routes inside neutral Cambodia (which it nonetheless was also bombing: dropping 540,000 tons of explosive on Cambodia over four years).

The invasion accomplished nothing except further destruction in Cambodia. It destroyed the U.S.-supported military government in Cambodia and empowered the native Cambodian Communist resistance, known as the Khmer Rouge, which eventually, in order to create a utopian society, killed some 2 million of its fellow Cambodians.

The later head of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale wrote of the bombing: “The emergent Communist party … profited greatly … (using) the widespread devastation and massacre of civilians (to justify) its brutal, radical policies.”

Minimally in this global society, we owe each other a duty of care.

Bruce Haigh, at ABC Unleased observes:

Sadly the United States and Australia appear unable to learn from history.

The US is in the same position in Afghanistan that it worked so hard to lock the Soviets into 20 years ago. Then the recalcitrant, chauvinistic, Pathan tribesmen on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border were with the US, now they are not.

Like the rulers of British India before them, the governing Punjabi elite in Pakistan have long cut deals with ‘lawless’ tribes in Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province in order to assert authority.

Of course, it should not matter, that others agree with me in general, but it is nice to see they do. At least, it suggests that I am not completely disorientated. At the same time, it is necessary to remember that democracy only works honest disagreement in the search for what is truer and better. Electoral politics is about gaming the system, the real democratic process must run deeper.

Tom Hayden reports on the McChrystal appointment suggesting covert and nighttime operations are on the agenda.

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