This, That, and the Other

1.

An excerpt from my 2015 novel, Dear Layla/Welcome to Palestine:

Corporate Citizen/1 (Products/2)

Some things changed and some didn’t on September 11
It shocked and angered us
To see products we had built to connect people for peaceful purposes
Used for acts of terror and destruction
Many nations joined the United States in waging war against terrorism
Boeing products —
Fighter aircraft,
Smart bombs,
Missiles,
Helicopters,
Heavy airlift,
In-flight refueling tankers and satellites —
Were deployed to protect the peace

How reassuring
To know that
Boeing is the patriotic creator
Of products to protect the peace
Pursued so selflessly by the United States

Prevailing in This Epic Struggle: A Finkelstein Collage

Regarding [Israel’s] methodical breaking of Palestinian bones, Wiesel courageously chose silence:  ‘I refuse to see myself in the role of judge over Israel.  The role of the Jew is to bear witness; not pass judgment.’  At any rate, on Jews.  Wiesel does not miss a beat when it comes to passing judgment on Arabs, Russians, Germans, Poles.
—Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Israel won sympathy and masked its systematic violations of human rights in no small part by exploiting the memory of the Jewish people’s martyrdom.  To mute criticism, it claimed to be acting in our name and in the name of our tragedy.  Many decent people, Jews and non-Jews, deferred to that claim, turning a blind eye to the suffering of the Palestinians.  Jews who chose silence therefore passively collaborated in Israel’s crimes, for their silence left Israel unchallenged and unimpeached.
—Norman Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years

Indeed, fixating as it does on the pathologically criminal, Hitler’s Willing Executioners  fails to even grasp, let alone resolve, the central mystery of the Nazi holocaust: how, under particular historical circumstances, ordinary men and women, as well as the “civilized gentlemen” who lead nations, can commit history’s greatest crimes.
—Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth

The current campaign of the Holocaust industry to extort money from Europe in the name of ‘needy Holocaust victims’ has shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom to that of a Monte Carlo casino.
—Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

Yet the biggest fraud  is the title itself. [Alan] Dershowitz hasn’t written a case for Israel. How could anyone genuinely concerned about the Israeli people counsel policies certain to sow seeds of hatred abroad and moral corruption within? What he has in fact written is the case for the destruction of Israel. Letting others—Palestinians as well as Jews—pay the price while he plays the “tough Jew”: isn’t this what Dershowitz’s chutzpah really comes down to?
—Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah:  On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History 

In other words, Israel was able to pinpoint its targets on the ground and, by its own admission, could and did hit these designated targets with pinpoint accuracy. It thus cannot be said that the criminal wreckage resulted from mishap or from a break in the chain of command. What happened in Gaza was meant to happen—by everyone from the soldiers in the field who executed the orders to the officers who gave the orders to the politicians who approved the orders. “The wholesale destruction was to a large extent deliberate,” Amnesty similarly concluded, “and an integral part of a strategy at different levels of the command chain, from high-ranking officials to soldiers in the field.”
—Norman Finkelstein, ’This Time We Went Too Far:’ Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion

Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose

The following is from a 1983 interview with MIT professor Noam Chomsky…

Interviewer: If you were to wake up tomorrow morning, and find yourself at the State Department, not MIT, and you were Secretary, what initiative would you take?

Noam Chomsky: First of all, I’d move towards a genuine disarmament, because I think  the current technical programs that the UnitedStates is pursuing are probably a greater danger to the United States than the policies of any of its enemies. Our new nuclear systems, the MX missile and the Pershing, are probably going to drive the Russians to some kind of launch-on-warning strategy which almost guarantees the destruction of the  United States sooner or later. The first thing I’d do is abort these programs and move toward some genuine disarmament. The  I would move at once to put an end to the American policy of supporting various neo-Nazi monsters all over the world, particularly in Central America,  which is the most striking case, and in other regions. As far as the Middle East is concerned, I’d move toward the international consensus.

However, though I could add a whole range of other policies, I should add this qualification: I couldn’t do any of these things. The fact is that the constraints of parameters within which any policy-maker operates are rather narrow, and they’re set from the outside, they’re set by real interests. The real interests in society are those of the people who own it. Objective power lies elsewhere. Decision-making power does not lie in the political sphere.

—Language and Politics, p. 358

Vietnamerica

Thuy, Cafe Ventana

1967

Today’s Email: “Thank you for signing up for the [New York Times] Vietnam ’67 newsletter. Over the course of the next year, we’ll examine the participation of the United States in the long war in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam ’67 newsletter will arrive in your inbox weekly.”

“Participation”
“Long War”

Journalist Bernard Fall writing in 1967: “It is Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity which is threatened with extinction. While its lovely land has been battered into a moonscape by the massive engine of modern war, its cultural identity has been assaulted by a combination of Communism in the North and superficial Americanization in the South.”

“Extinction”
“Moonscape”

Two Teachers

For two of my teachers
I give thanks:

Cao Ngoc Phuong
Khuu Vinh Ngoc Thuy

I first read Phuong’s autobiography
Learning True Love:

How I Learned & Practiced Social Change in Vietnam
When it was published in 1993

Citizens

 

 

A Singer

In 1969 or 1970, I began to re-evaluate my whole concept of what I wanted my music to say…. I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world.
–Marvin Gaye

 

A Journalist

1.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. –Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

2.
She had first traveled to Vietnam in 1955, glad to see that the U.S. was making good on its aspiration to set the world right. By her second visit in 1963, she had sobered up. Seven years later, she began a stint as foreign correspondent for the New York Times, she had a hard time believing she was in the same country as before.
She had compassion and understanding for the U.S. troops, as she had for the Vietnamese being displaced, bombed, and killed by those same troops.

She knew she had privilege, of course; journalists could come and go, get the big story and give their careers a needed boost.

When she returned to the United States, she was obsessed. She admitted, “Turn the corner, people said to me in a kindly fashion. Forget the war. But I could not stop writing about it.”

Wartime during Life/3

We Expect the Germans

To know their own history
To tell the truth about their war
To refuse rationalizations and excuses
To act responsibly here and now
However many decades
Ago that was

The world expects the Americans
To know their own history
To tell the truth about their wars
To refuse rationalizations and excuses
To act responsibly here and now
However many decades and seconds
Ago that was

McNamara and Co.

“I’d chain all of the politicians to that haunting Vietnam memorial
and have them read—slowly—every name aloud.
Then the war would end for me.

Take all of them, all of them who gave us the war —
all of them who, like McNamara, began to doubt that the war could be won
and still kept it going.

Chain them to the memorial for several days,
if need be, and have them read each name aloud.
Wouldn’t that be something? Justice at last.”

—Adapted from Gloria Emerson, author of Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from the Vietnam War

Compañeras

I needed to find other women who knew what I knew, and more. I needed to talk to women who had seen unspeakable things, who were without self-pity, who had faced the liars and lunatics, who had survived all of it and, in surviving, made a difference.

–Gloria Emerson, Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses and Ruins from a Long War

Wartime during Life/2

November 12, 2007. Smithfield, NC.

After Reading Levertov’s Poem on the 1972 Christmas Bombing

for Andrew Wimmer and Suzanne Renard

Haven’t you had a similar fantasy
Sure, a different decade
A different civilization now being destroyed
Different men (sometimes)
Same crimes
Getting away with mass murder

Mind movies of righteous payback
(But like the Vietnamese woman said:
“The Americans cannot repay this debt
Because it’s too big”)
And after the phantasm runs its course
The daily discipline remains:

Channeling rage into the work—
Memory, resistance, eutopia

Mentshes/3

With Jim, Dan, and Mev, Upper West Side, 1995

 

What You Understand Depends on Where You Stand

For Brent Fernandez and Brett Schrewe

On Daniel Berrigan’s Night Flight to Hanoi

Night Flight to Hanoi is an account of Jesuit Daniel Berrigan’s odyssey in late January and early February 1968, when he and historian Howard Zinn traveled to Hanoi as representatives of the American peace movement. Their aim was to bring home three U.S. pilots whom the North Vietnamese had released. The narrative includes his decision to go, the waiting, the arrival, the tours into the grotesque and destructive displays of US military power, the testimonies of Vietnamese humanity and ingenuity, the meeting with the pilots, and the unelaborated denouement when the men are flown home—contrary to the wishes of the North Vietnamese—on a military plane. He and Zinn went in good faith around the world to promote peace between the two countries; the U.S. government, however, violated the agreement.

What is bracing in this account is Berrigan’s journey of solidarity, risk-taking, and accompaniment (example: sitting in the bomb shelters with the Vietnamese). So, what matters after such exposure and confrontation over the course of several days?

Seeing matters: “I have seen the victims. And this sight of the mutilated dead has exerted such inward change upon me that the words of corrupt diplomacy appear to me more and more in their true light. That is to say—as words spoken in enmity against reality.” [22-23] How Berrigan’s Jesuit brother Ignacio Ellacuría stressed over and over the imperative to confront realidad.

Wartime during Life/1

Matthew Teo Mathieu, Robert MacArthur, & Sheetal Ray

 

 

What Catches Our Attention (And What Doesn’t)

Reshma observed
About a group of doctors she works with

“They talk all about Lady Gaga
But nothing about the wars we’re in”

 

 

 

For Robert

To Whom It May Concern,

I had Mr. Robert MacArthur in my Social Justice course from the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University in the fall semester of 2005. He and I have met a couple of times after that course and we have exchanged occasional correspondence when he no longer lived in St. Louis.