Totally Ignored

GAZA, Nov 6 (Reuters) - Israeli fighter jets struck 450 Hamas targets in Gaza and troops seized a militant compound in the past 24 hours, Israel's military said on Monday, in attacks the enclave's health authorities said killed dozens of people.

A Reuters journalist in the Gaza Strip described the overnight bombardment from the air, ground and sea as one of the most intense since Israel launched its offensive in response to a surprise attack by Hamas on southern Israel a month ago.

 Health officials in Hamas-controlled Gaza said more than 9,770 Palestinians have been killed in the war since Hamas killed 1,400 people and seized more than 240 hostages on Oct. 7.

We are seeing similar reports daily of the human casualties of this most current war. What we don't hear or read of is the incalculable impact of war on the environment. Look at just this one AP photo, of which there are no doubt hundreds if not thousands of.

 

This photo from a story that emphasized the challenge of Gazans seeking some safe place amid the shelling and bombing of their neighborhoods. Just think of all the energy and materials that went into the construction of Gaza and what it will take to someday clean-up and rebuild a city of 2 million souls. The numbers will be staggering and they will add greatly to the carbon emissions we are trying to slow and reduce.

Today, November 6,  happens to be perhaps the most ignored UN International Day. It's the International Day for Preventing Environmental Exploitation in War and Armed Conflict. There is of course the total waste of energy and materials that war amplifies, but there are other "externalities" ignored in war that we will pay for - exposure to the toxicity for those who do the eventual cleanup and who live nearby; the extra toxicity from use of weapons like white phosphorus and depleted uranium; the contamination of soils, air, and water; the death of animals and destruction of plants and landscapes.

Each day the world community fails to impose a ceasefire, the tragedies grow and will ensure that future occupants inherent the costs. How many more have to die or be wounded; how much more destruction will satisfy the vengeance that war feeds?  Will the human family destroy itself and the community of life via unleashing these weapons directly or through those weapons of war destroying the ecology that provides us all with life? 

We need a Ceasefire NOW!!! Not just in Israel and Palestine, but Ukraine and Russia and all the other arenas of war. I am outraged that our government feeds this destruction and fails to call for an immediate ceasefire. It's a moral failure. As Edwin Starr so clearly noted 

"War! What is it Good For? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING? "

Ok, maybe. weapon makers.

Stop the Killing

 

 

As I start to write this I don’t know where it is headed, but I have to write it. Perhaps I may never share it.

 I have not experienced war. Sure, I have seen movies, even documentary clips, and I’ve read a bit. But I’ve never smelled the decaying bodies, seen the ripped flesh and bones or heard the cries of the family members of those slaughtered. So what do I know. This morning’s news:

At least 400 Palestinians were killed in Gaza in the last 24 hours, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, and 70 were killed overnight on Sunday in bombardments of the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp and streets close to two hospitals in Gaza City.

Early on Monday, the Israeli military said it had hit more than 320 “military targets” in the last 24 hours, and that ground forces had conducted “limited raids” to kill gunmen and search for hostages. Hamas said the day before that it destroyed an Israeli tank and two armoured bulldozers inside the territory, which it has ruled since 2007.(The Guardian, October 23 )

-----

A United Nations investigation has found further evidence that Russian forces committed “indiscriminate attacks” and war crimes in Ukraine, including rape and the deportation of children to Russia.

“The collected evidence further shows that Russian authorities have committed the war crimes of wilful killing, torture, rape and other sexual violence, and the deportation of children to the Russian Federation,” a United Nations commission of inquiry on Ukraine said in a report submitted to the UN general assembly.(The Guardian, October 23, 2023)

My experiences with war come through others. A cousin, returned from the Korean War, whom I shared a bedroom with as a young boy, had many scars of shrapnel wounds which plagued him his whole life. Later, I grew to understand some of the mental and emotional wounds he also suffered. But he never spoke to me about them. Perhaps I was too afraid to ask. Veterans of the Vietnam tragedy I lived with in my early 20s, shared a few sanitized memories of their times at war as have other veterans I’ve met over the years. But I have never experienced war.

The one bone-chilling experience I experienced that might have  more viscerally awakened me to the real terror of war, was the murder of a young man a few hundred feet away on a cold November morning in 1970 on the campus of Wayne State University. A little context to this as I recall it 50+ years ago. I was struggling with school, wrenched with trying to understand how to stop a senseless, illegal war in Vietnam. I was changing my major every term, I was involved in the birth of a Free University, including beginning a class on nonviolence. Anyone could facilitate courses, what we now label as ‘co-learning’ groups, around any topic. I was also a draft counselor assisting others in finding ways to avoid being sent off to Vietnam and had filed my own conscientious objector application months before.

On this particular day, I had arrived on campus early, and bought my typical coffee at the student union. Having finished it and reading the student newspaper I began to walk from the Union to State Hall. It was early, maybe 8:30-9:00, and the campus mall I was walking across was sparsely occupied. The chill in the air was notable, but I was warm with a long wool overcoat wrapping me up. To my left near the Library I heard two, or was it three, loud bursts. I looked to see someone falling and another running away towards Cass avenue. I reacted, I didn’t think. I ran to the fallen victim, a youngish, maybe 17 or 18 year old African American. He was breathing, but he was choking on blood. I held his head up hoping it would help him, telling him that help was on the way and that he’d be ok (I really had no clue). He was shaking. I took off my coat and put over him and gently re-lifting his head in hopes of preventing him choking on the blood. Another person came by and ran to call police. Within perhaps 10 minutes they arrived and I was shunted out of the way. Once the ambulance arrived, I asked if I could get my coat back. I did.

I don’t remember the police talking to me then, or getting my name, but maybe I recounted to them what I saw. That part is definitely foggy. Although to this day I remember the young man’s face and especially his eyes like it was yesterday. I was walking around that day and surely for a week or more, as if in some dense fog, trying to make sense of this experience. Trying to fit myself into this crazy and too violent world. The young man died with 24 hours of the shooting. News account suggested that the shooting was the remnant of game of pool the night before that upset the shooter.

A singular shooting like this is certainly not the same as a war with many bodies strewn across landscapes. Yet, that I can still feel the torment of that experience 50 years later reveals an indelible truth to me: that killing and war are, as veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges writes, “The Greatest Evil”.

I’ve been pushing myself slowly through his recent book The Greatest Evil is War, and in so doing reflecting on current wars in Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Sudan, and so many more. Why do we keep on thinking that “only killing shows killing doesn’t pay” as 60’s folk singer Phil Ochs sang about capital punishment? Why is even the urging of a ceasefire objected to (the U.S. vetoed a recent attempt at the United Nations Security Council!!)? Does one need to see and smell the destruction firsthand? To experience the fear of impending death or grave injury? To hold their dying family member in their arms?

I surely can’t adequately summarize Hedges’ recent book or his many other works that rip open the veil of war. Short of being on the battlefield, Hedges depictions and his deep reflections on the sources of war should be required reading for all potential recruits and their families. I will share a couple of excerpts:

I know the instrument of war. War is not politics by other means. It is demonic. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, where I covered wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone with another friend, Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora.

I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and confusion. In a firefiight you are only aware of what is happening a few feet around you. You desperately, and not always successfully, struggle to figure out where the firing is coming from to avoid being hit.

I have felt the helplessness and paralyzing fear which, years later, descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me wrapped in coils of terror, my heart racing, my body dripping with sweat.

I have heard the wails of those convulsed with grief as they clutch the bodies of friends and family, including children. I hear them still. It does not matter the language. Spanish. Arabic. Hebrew. Dinka. Serbo-Croation. Albanian. Ukrainian. Russian. Death cuts through linguistic barriers.

I know what wounds look like. Legs blown off. Heads imploded into a bloody, pulpy mass. Gaping holes in stomachs. Pools of blood. Cries of the dying, sometimes for their mothers. And the smell. The smell of death. The supreme sacrifice made for flies and maggots.

I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police. I was taken prisoner by the Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base in Honduras to see if they should kill me, and again in Basra after the first Gulf War in Iraq, never knowing if I would be executed, under constant guard and often without food, drinking out of mud puddles.

The primary lesson in war is that we as distinct individuals do not matter. We become numbers. Fodder. Objects. Life, one precious and sacred becomes meaningless, sacrificed to the insatiable appetite of Mars. No one in wartime is exempt.

I am wrestling with the same demons that troubled me 50+ years ago and I still don’t have a good handle for how to steer us away from war and violence. We surely have more bread and circuses that distract us from staring at the terror of actual war and violence. Sure, I write letters, sign petitions, organize programs, pass along the wisdom I bump into, even phone our representatives asking them to reject war and militarism and to address the accelerating crises of climate change, income inequality, and attacks on democracy. No doubt this is another struggle that will outlast me, yet I feel compelled to continue to search for nurturing the seeds of true peace.

As Qunicy Institute President, Andrew Bacevich notes today in his post synthesizing his new book, we need to realize that “To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are.”  From the safety of our sofas and central heating we need to stir ourselves awake to all that is unraveling and join with others to end violence and war upon each other and the planet that is our home.

Lest We Forget

Seventy-eight years ago today the US launched a new world with the dropping of an atomic bomb on the residents of Hiroshima Japan. That legacy is pulsing today as the nuclear weapon states – US, Russia, France, Britain, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea fail to discuss steps to reduce the number of weapons and threaten their use. The newly released film “Oppenheimer” gives a hint at some of the deliberations that went into developing and using the bomb, but if you want a real ring side seat, there is nothing better than Gar Alperovitz’ The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. In the three-hour film, there are few minutes devoted to that decision and all the players involved in it, but one who reads Alperovitz account will see the seeds of current global affairs germinating in that decision.

One might hope that the popularity of “Oppenheimer” combined with the increasing threats posed by the Russia vs. Ukraine/NATO conflict, might trigger more sane minds to work to reducing the nuclear arsenals and the conditions that might even inadvertently spark their use. That’s surely at the forefront of the Veterans for Peace restoration of the ship “The Golden Rule”, which attempted to disrupt testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific during the 1950s. Actions like this Quaker nonviolent direct action did eventually lead to the halting of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Nonviolent direct action works!!

The current crew of the Golden Rule that has sailed up the Mississippi into the Great Lakes will be in Michigan this week with a stop at the Quaker’s Red Cedar Friends Meeting House in Lansing on August 15^th at 6:30p.m. to help us consider how we could work to meet the goals of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) – their elimination. While we’ve have been lucky to date that these weapons of mass destruction have not been unleashed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki 78 years ago, they continue to rob our treasuries of billions of dollars that might be used to address hunger, health care, climate change or any of the other threats to our prosperity. The U.S. alone, under both Republican and Democratic administrations plans to spend nearly $1 TRILLION on the weapons over the next decade. What a huge waste of our resources –financial, human, and environmental.

There is barely a pittance spent on negotiating arms control or elimination of the weapons and rarely do we hear anything from our Washington officials even calling for more efforts to reduce the weapons, only more money to build more and newer weapons. This has just played out again in the recent National Defense Authorization Act passed in different versions by each house of Congress. But they both believe in shoveling more money for building and maintaining these scourges of humanity.

Just at the brave crew of the original Golden Rule attempted to sail into the testing zone in the Pacific to halt the testing of these hideous weapons, we must find the courage to speak out and make the abolition of these weapons a focus for the U.S. government that is responsible for unleashing this sword of Damocles on the life of our planet. Silence is not an option. Please urge your members of Congress to support H. Res. 77 “Embracing the Goals and Provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”

 

Ideas coverging

 

The blending of ideas. Three things read this morning coalesce into this brief thought. The final chapter of a book by German climate scientist Friederike Otto, Angry Weather:  Heat Waves, Floods, Storms and the New Science of Climate Change(2020), An essay by Greek  scientist and author George Tsakraklides “The Never, Never, Neverland of Degrowth”, and the introduction to a new book I stumbled on to at MSU library, Geoff Mulgan’s Another World is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination(2022).

 

I suspect the chances of another human being having read all three of these is so remote as to approach zero. And even the happenstance that brought all of them to me today would be hard to describe. But each is worthy of review. I won’t even attempt o adequately summarize them, although the essay by Tsakraklides is short enough you can read in a few spare minutes. Let me just cite a few sentences that captured me this morning to give you a flavor of what you might expect and then jump to what they collectively suggest to me.

            The Lucifer heat wave that transformed the Mediterranean into a veritable furnace in summer 2017 would have been extremely rare in a world without climate change; today however, we cqn expect a summer like that almost every eight years. If the global temperature were to increase by another 0.5 °C, making it 1.5 °C warmer overall, a heat wave of this magnitude would occur every four years. If it were to rise by 2 °C, we would experience these extreme temperatures almost every second summer – and those are the most conservative estimates from all of our model calculations. With a 3 °C increase, most summers would be even hotter: 2017 would feel cool in comparison. (Otto, 2020; pp. 199-200)

            The problem therefore is profit itself, the very notion of money, and an economic system which keeps humanity hostage to its own incoming Armageddon. We are addicted to profit.  At every turn, this civilization consciously opts for meaningless short-term lifestyle benefits, at the expense of existentially disastrous future consequences. These are the exact same priorities as those of a drug addict.  Our system of necrocapitalism is indeed the thief, the oligarch who still operates at large, and who never got caught.  It has been running a negative balance for centuries, living on credit from the BOE. Humanity aggressively took over the formerly sustainable company called Earth, ascending into CEO with the sole purpose of devouring capital, ripping off stakeholders, and liquidating what’s left. The Leadership Board, composed entirely of humans, is a criminal organization. (Tsakraklides, 2023)

 

            I’m convinced that we’re suffering from an ‘imaginary crisis’. By this I don’t mean that the various crises around us aren’t real, but rather that there’s a deep malaise affecting our capacity for imagination, whether social or political. We can more easily imagine the end of the world than a better future. The places that once were sources of exciting new ideas – universities, think tanks, and political parties – for the most part no longer produce them. A sullen depression has swept over elites, commentators and much of the public, and you are more likely to get a hearing if you try to explain why progress is so difficult, or why decay, collapse and decline are likely, than if you attempt the opposite. (Mulgan, 2022; p.5)

These thinkers have resurrected for me three key intersecting realities. First, that we don’t recognize the enormous threat of climate change can have in the not too distant future. And that most of what we non-scientists don’t grasp is that the consensus models of climate change are ‘conservative’ – it could be much worse (Otto’s book was translated into English in 2020 with data only through 2018). Global greenhouse gas emissions were still going up in 2022, not down as agreed to by the Paris Agreement!!!

Second, even many of those who grasp the seriousness of the ecological overshoot and what it portends, tend to have a technological optimism that we will invent our way out of this dystopian future, with little to no thought that we may have to reduce our overall consumption. This faith in progress through growth of renewable energies is the magic ticket to a utopian future underlines the third reality.

Third, our inability to ‘imagine’ a better world through different social, political, and economic arrangements limits our chances of thriving together and certainly passing on a habitable home for our children and grandchildren.

When I started this blog almost a decade ago under the title of ‘Possibilitator’ it was with the hope that we could imagine possibilities that would lead us to what my friend, Sir Richard Bawden calls, ‘Betterment’ or Getting to Better Together). I have written on the power of imagination a few times including for example here in 2014 and again in 2019 when triggered by other thoughtful thinkers and authors. While I’m only a few chapters into Mulgan’s recent work, the combination of his erudite base of knowledge, thinking, writing and possibilities, has been the most inspiring new read of this year. I look forward each morning to sitting with him and letting his ideas inspire my own. You may, too.

Inspired by a thoughtful piece sent to me by a good friend I read after writing this I want to share the following poem by Denise Levertov that continues to reverberate in me over decades. As the article my friend sent me notes, perhaps we should look again to poets for the wisdom to steer us toward betterment.

 Beginners — Denise Levertov

A poem by Denise Levertov,that echoes themes from Laudato Si’

Beginners
Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla

“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea—“

But we have only begun
To love the earth.

We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
— so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
— we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet—
there is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

~ Denise Levertov ~