That's All Folks

 The blundering history of the human race
is always given coherence by power elites
and their courtiers in the press and academia
who endow it with a meaning and coherence it lacks.
They need to manufacture national myths
to hide the greed, violence and stupidity
that characterize the march of most human societies. 
--Our Mania for Hope is a Curse, 
 Chris Hedges 

I shouted out,
"Who killed the Kennedy's?"
When after all
It was you and me 
--Sympathy for the Devil,
 The Rolling Stones 

The people who burned witches at the stake
never for one moment thought of their act as violence;
rather they thought of it as an act
of divinely mandated righteousness.
The same can be said of most of the violence 
humans have ever committed 
--Violence Unveiled, Gil Bailie 
 _____________________

For the Ralph Peter's crowd, the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) is a legitimate given, not to be questioned or deconstructed. As he said with the manly swagger of the armchair FOX warrior in a recent NY Post piece, "Sorry folks, but that's war (it's not dainty)." His view complements that of people like Mr. Rumsfeld who saw democracy in the rubble (war smells like democracy in the morning?)

But the United State's actions in Afghanistan and Iraq defy the logic of war. The actions of ISIS in the region make more military and political sense than anything exhibited by U.S. policy to date.

The purpose of war is to achieve a peace. The PWOT © has not in any instance led to peace. Military violence -- whether theirs or ours -- is not war, but simply violence unrestrained, unjustified and lacking an achievable strategic military goal. This violence is merely criminal activity.

The media shovels us the "Good News" when the Iraqi forces (or some semblance of them) "regain territory previously held by ISIS," as though the conflict was about terrain. What it is about is a millennial struggle within Islam for hegemony of the combatants, the different stripes of Islam.

The violence in Iraq and Afghanistan is not about terrain or body counts [though body counts are de rigueur again, thank you Mr. McNamara.] It is about which side is the true and divine representatives of their god here on earth. 

That is pretty simple and, if true, U.S. participation in the rodeo violates our core belief in separation of church and state for as members of Western society we are not supposed to kill for religious reasons. That behavior is so Middle and Dark Ages.

So why is the U.S. funding and conducting military violence to support sectarian violence?

If we fail to confront this basic reality, we are doomed to live our military and political lives as if they were violent video games, which is but a poor simulacrum of real life.

[cross-posted @ RangerAgainstWar.]

Gods and mud bricks

This is wicked off-topic for this site. But this is also a busier site than my personal blog and I thought I'd get more input here, so if you're looking for our usual content just disregard.

Anyway, I was helping the Boy with his homework last night and it got me thinking.

His sixth-grade class is studying ancient Mesopotamia, and the question for discussion last night was "learn about monotheism and polytheism and their effects on society" in the context of the early irrigation civilizations of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. The "book solution" was that a) the early Sumerians and Akkadians had a pantsload of gods that b) affected every aspect of their civilization, from architecture to social organization.

The kids' textbook didn't continue, but being who I am I had to follow the trail a little further. What I found based on a cursory look over the Internet was that c) the actual documentary evidence for early Mesopotamian religions is pretty skimpy - most of what we "know" is inferred from fairly fragmentary sources - and d) what consensus there is suggests that the "Sumerian" civilizations were solidly polytheistic - that is, that the peoples of the earlier inhabitants of the region centered around Sumer had a God of Bunions and another god for wheat and another for oral sex or whatever and they were all pretty much equals - but that as the "Akkadians" took over (that is, Babylon became the Big Ziggurat) a handful of the "bigger" deities tended to become, well, bigger. The various secondary sources seem uncertain as to how much this actually approached "monotheism" but agree that the result was somewhat different in both form and function from the earlier godly free-for-all.

The implication in the Boys' text was that this change in religion caused a change in society; gods first, people after.

But being the godless heathen I am I wonder; wouldn't it make just as much sense the other way around? If gods are - as I suspect they are - more a reflection of the people who imagine them why shouldn't the changes in civilizations result in a change in gods?

My brief understanding of the difference between the "Sumerian" and "Babylonian" (or "Akkadian") civilizations is that the latter was more centralized, and that the Akkadian rulers were more god-like god-kings than the earlier Sumerian versions; that Sumer was a bunch of city-states and that Babylon was Babylon and a bunch of tributary cities.

So why wouldn't it make sense for someone who looked at his or her society and saw that kind of heirarchy all around imagine the heavens as similarly organized? If your little city is just one among many it'd make sense that your city's gods were, too. If your city was the Big Pomegranate why shouldn't your god be the boss of the other cities' gods?

Makes sense to me, anyway, but I know from Mesopotamia what I know about Croatian poetry. Well, other than the Great Whore of Babylon because...well, because. It took everything I had in me not to sing the Boy the Crocodile Hotel Blues. I'm a Bad Dad that way.

Anyone with a bigger brain and more knowledge have ideas on the subject?

'Cause the Bible Tells Me So

One thing my rock-ribbed agnosticism has always helped me with is soldiering.

Knowing that I don't have to agonize over how an omniscient, omnipotent, loving Father God can sit on his holy ass in the sky whilst humans inflict all sorts of horrors on each other has made doing whatever fucked-up military thing I was told to turn my hand to so much simpler.

But I did get a certain amount of unholy (as it were) amusement out of watching my Christian comrades try and work through the notion that the Christ that called them to love one another as he had loved them - and died for them - could also ask them to rip apart tiny children and helpless civilians as part of their mission.And - just my opinion, mind you - "nuclear war" has always seemed like the LEAST defensible of the "just war" notions. There's not really any sort of "defense" argument there, is there? Seeing as how you're either cold-bloodedly first-striking a helpless population, or, with missiles already inbound and your own civilization doomed, merely scourging that helpless population in a vengeful reflex, a reptile tail-whip of dying fury.

So I got a cynical chuckle our of Chaplain (Capt) Soh's little Powerpoint for missile officers that lead (naturally) to the conclusion that a good Chrstian CAN, indeed, incinerate millions of innocents and still go to church - whatever's left of it - the next day with the stainless heart of a child.

How about this?

How about just accepting that warfare in ALL its aspects is the Devil's Work and, like most things we do in our lives, there are times when the Devil sings loud and sweet, and we gleefully jump up and dance antic hay on the ruins of others' lives......and always will?

Quo Vadis?

I am revising this post in light of the good work that bg and Aviator47 have done in annotating the subject addressed in the original.

The foundation was this post, in which the correspondant, an active duty soldier, complained of being told that his "Spiritual Fitness" was a problem. His - and my initial - interpretation was that this was the result of a conventional religious bias of the survey authors and reflected the influence of conventional religion in the Army. Given the well publicized religiousity of people like LTG Boykin and the USAFA evangelism crowd, this was very disturbing to me as an individual, a citizen, and a soldier.

Al and bg (see the comments section for their excellent criticism) make the point that this appears to be an effect, however, of a poorly designed survey and not a cause per se. bg examined the survey itself (which is unavailable to me) and pointed out the ambiguous questions and the linkage between things like the soldiers' feelings of inclusion in their unit and their sense of mission with their overall "spiritual" well-being. Al points out that the effect of survey questions can be extermely variable depending on the wording of the question and the surroundings of the surveyed. They both see no attempt to actively promote religion in the Army and I accept their interpretation.Based on their work I agree that this survey does, in fact, appear to be an attempt to determine the "legitimate concerns about the well being of the troops resulting from feelings of frustration, isolation, lack of identification with the "big picture" and so forth." as Al puts it, or, as bg explains, to "...change the organizational culture of the Army to one that encourages soldiers be introspective about their mental state and seek help when needed."

But that, in itself, raises some larger questions.

Al points out that "(s)urveys are typically conducted to measure issues of interest, for either descriptive or prescriptive reasons. More disturbing to me is the concern that the soldiers are possibly floundering from an emotional standpoint, and this is just a well intentioned (if dubiously valuable) attempt to promote self help." And certainly there is no lack of examples from human history of nations and ideologies attempting to erase moral and spiritual uncertainty towards their causes, from the god-kings of Egypt to the "Gott Mit Uns" on the belt buckles of German landser in WW2.The late enthusiasm for all things "warrior" as opposed to secular soldiering, the outspoken evangelism of many officers and defense department officials, the current climate of bristling passive-aggressive defensiveness from religious conservatives still worries me. But more to the issue of this survey is; are we unintentionally creating a more-difficult emotional and moral climate for our guys on the ground in central Asia?

The public face of these wars has been a "War on Terror", that we are fighting those who "hate our democracy" or "hate our values". And yet, what we're DOING is what imperial troops have done since Cicero's day; suppressing a rebellion against a local ruler we've erected to accomplish our foreign policy goals.

I suspect that a GI in Kandahar isn't seeing a whole lot of "democracy" and "freedom" coming from the local government we're supporting. No doubt they're marginally better than the Talibs...but, still. Imperial powers have traditionally had imperial reasons for their actions. We are trying hard to avoid those reasons, while taking most of those actions. And I can't imagine that this is going unnoticed among a portion of our troopers.

I wonder; is this attempt to rearrange the "Spiritual Fitness" of these guys an artifact of the disconnect between what they're doing and what they're being told they're doing? And is the solution to adjust the propaganda? Or the policies?

Blessed are the Snipers, for they shall Hit the Center of Mass

This is sweet. Turns out that this outfit is adding little Bible verse citations to the end of the serial numbers to the weapon sights they supply the U.S. Army.

"Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions "have always been there" and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. The company's vision is described on its Web site: "Guided by our values, we endeavor to have our products used wherever precision aiming solutions are required to protect individual freedom."

"We believe that America is great when its people are good," says the Web site. "This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals."

Because nothing - nothing - says "Blessed are the peacemakers" like a full metal jacketed round right through the fucking forehead.