The current IP discussions on DK have been disturbing to me. Not "bombs being dropped on my relatives" disturbing, more of a "upsetting world events that happen regularly that I wish I could do something about" disturbing. That's horribly callous, of course. But honest. It would be possible for me to jump a plane to Israel or Egypt, or sell my stuff and donate everything to a deserving non-profit, or stage a dramatic newsworthy protest in front of the White House, were I sufficiently motivated. But I'm not. I'm just going to write a blog about it.
So here are a few simple facts, extrapolated from a few decades-worth of experiences in my present incarnation, that seem relevant to the present conflict in Gaza and Israel.
_There is no such thing as "collateral damage", when it comes to the death of innocent human beings. If you kill my sister, or cousin, or friend, in the attempt to kill an enemy, I will be profoundly upset. If our relationship is based on a history of conflict, violence, injustice and brutality, I will be strongly inclined to commit myself to what I can only hope will be an overly disproportionate amount of vengeance. The act of pulling the trigger on a gun, or pushing the button that releases a bomb or a missile is a deliberate one, and the responsibility resides with the individual that committed that act, as well the culture/organization/nation/religion/cause that trained the individual, procured the weapon, and rationalized the act of violence. The vengefulness of those close to the victim will be focussed on all of the above.
_Children are innocent. They are a product of their environment. Their moral code, their honor and ethics, are determined by the culture they grown up in, the people around them, the experiences they have, and the stories they are told. Children are sponges, they are products of their environment. A child who lives in fear and loss, deprivation and violence, will become an adult attuned to those particular dynamics. Most families in America have relatives affected by war, children who saw death, young men and women who fought in WW2 and Vietnam and so many other wars, girls and women mistreated, sexually or otherwise, crossing the border to America, in a war or insurgency, or by a boy or man so traumatized by his experiences of violence that he took no responsibility for his actions. They are our parents, our aunts and uncles, our grandparents and beyond, and those of the people that we are close to. Children are innocent, and the violence that they experience takes generations to dissipate.
_"Unconventional War" is the only possible response to unequal war. If your opponent has superiority in a specific aspect of conflict, you will search out ways to counter that imbalance. The victor determines the war criminals. Had the Axis powers won WW2, there would be shrines to the war atrocities perpetrated by the Allies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg. Instead of the Nuremberg trials, we would have had the Bristol and Boston trials. Had the South won the Civil War, Sherman would be pilloried for his pillage of Georgia, and Lincoln for his desecrations of the Constitution. And so on and so forth. The Russians in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and the Americans in Vietnam and Iraq are proof positive of the consequences of superior conventional power - they result in unconventional counter-tactics.
_There are always those who lust for war. They may have been deformed by their experiences as children, or the narratives that they have internalized. Some of these individuals achieve political power, some are pleased to find themselves at a flash-point of history, most are sociopaths, and some are serial killers. They act without regard for the innocent, or are willing to use innocent civilians tactically, like pawns.
_Those who start wars, the Deciderers, the Profiteers, the Delusionaries, the Sociopaths, do not usually suffer from them. Innocents do. Innocents civilians, as well as those who once were, but were impelled by all the false prophets of fear, patriotism, nationalism, tribalism, faith and family. They take up weapons and fight for things they care more about than their own lives. Often enough, their core motivation is protection - they want to make sure that their families will be safe. The motivations of those who start and perpetuate wars are different - they lust for power, or profit, or have been so deformed that they only understand viciousness.
_There are few to no effective paths for innocent civilians caught within combat or war. I am immensely proud of the fact that most of my father's family stood by and did nothing, in Vienna, during WW2. They didn't cheer when Hitler annexed Austria, they didn't participate in the demonization of the Jews, or profit from their degradation. They kept quiet when coworkers were dragged away for speaking lightly against the Third Reich. They witnessed, or heard about, Jews forced to work as slaves, and marched at gunpoint into the Danube, in winter, to die of hypothermia. They fought as soldiers on the fronts but did not (to my knowledge) actively participate in the Holocaust.
I know how outrageous it is that I would be proud of such passive complicity, but I am. And before anyone questions my position, ask yourself, what have you or your relatives been passively complicit in, in terms of civilian deaths, within the last 50 years?
My father's family lived in Vienna during WW1 and WW2. Three corners of the residential apartment that my father was born in were hit by Allied bombs. His family lived in the fourth corner. I have great-aunts who were raped by the Russians, and great uncles who were still, 50 years later, proud to have shot down Canadian planes during the war. My mother's family is from Canada. They lost friends and lovers over Germany, and in the Pacific.
I have a relative that witnessed the firebombing of Hamburg (part of Operation Gomorrah) as a child from a Red Cross train. The bombs stopped half a mile from him, and he heard the screams and watched the flames. I have relatives and family friends that lived through the London Blitz, and lost loved ones. In August of 1914, my father's grandfather kissed his family goodbye and promised that he'd be back by Christmas. He was caught by the Russians, escaped from a POW camp and made his way home years later. Other relatives ate dogs, starved and freezing outside of Petersburg/Leningrad during WW2. They were lucky to make their way back home, that winter.
My father played in Allied bomb craters as a child, and his family knew fear and hunger during the war and after. My mother grew up playing with kids whose fathers died or were brutalized by their experiences in WW2. I count myself among those lucky enough not to have directly experienced war, and I hold no specific grudges against any but the warmongers. But I'm still close enough to those stories to have nothing but repugnance for the atrocities of war, and the Apologiae of the rationalizers, the complicit, and the profiteers. I'm still close enough to be willing to respond viciously to those who would threaten me and mine.
I spent a summer in a village in Austria, working in a forestry. One day we drove out to what had once been a village - there were collapsed walls, holes were there were once basements, broken glass and scattered cobblestones. My boss pointed at a tree in the center of the ruins, and said, "Do you know what that is?". I didn't. It was a tree. "It's a Hitler-Oak". When Hitler annexed Austria, many towns and villages planted an oak tree, in adherence with Nazi Doctrine. It represented purity, and nationalism, and pride. A lot like the US relationship with the bald eagle. After the war, when the Allies came in, the Hitler-oaks were cut down, but this village was abandoned before then, for whatever reason, and the tree still grows.
This isn't to say that there remains some Nazi menace in Austria, there may or may not, but the tree is not relevant to that. The tree speaks to how long a seed, once planted, can remain.