We're here today, you die tomorrow. A little token for remembrance.

The targets are the children, of course.

The initial blasts may be for whoever is in the vicinity of the dropped bombs, but the little unexploded, sometimes brightly colored bomblets, that mimic food packages? Or are dropped 72 hours before a planned cease-fire?? Those are for the children, so that they can keep dying or being maimed long after a war is over.

Who else runs heedlessly across the grass, looking over their shoulder at the kite they are propelling, laughing and leaping with joy until the moment they seem to leap higher than ever, only to come down in pieces. What others, no matter how many times you warn them, reach out their small hands to investigate what is this new thing in their now very short world.

Remember me, the wee bomblets are saying, sending a message from a people to a people long after their representatives are gone. Remember what I can do to you - my power is such that I can snatch your children from you anywhere. Your garden, their playgrounds, their schools, the road to the market, any little place at all - that's the beauty of it. And it can all be done while we are sitting at home in our easy chairs, watching our own children play outside in the pool, having nothing to remember.

Remember that you can't do anything at all about it... except bury your dead. You can rage and cry and shake your fist, talk about morality and mercy, about proportionality and accountability, about justice and non-combatants - but no law will touch me, because I am within the law. In fact, I am the law - my power deems it so. If I want to space out the killing of you for two days, two weeks or two decades, the law has said it is perfectly okay. A child, a stranger, a grandmother, a groundskeeper - a leg, a hand, an eye or a life, it's all in memory of me.

Remember what I can do to you - my power is such that, with nary a footstep set on your patch of earth, I can dig your grave and put you or your children in it in the same blink of time, and never break a sweat.

Remember me as you lead the blind, steady the halt, bind the wounds of the maimed and feed the motherless with the milk of despair.

Remember me from generation to generation, our little giftlets demand...

...yet we are always so surprised when they do.

Thinking out loud - Human Nature

I have to confess that I am not an anthropologist. That subject actually interests me, but I've not done any study of that field and so my question probably already has been answered by those who have, but it's fun to ask anyway. (As this is not a real post and is just a thinking out loud thing, grammar and spelling don't count)!

Anyway, every once in a while I'll read of some really reprehensible behaviour by a person or a group of people ... mobs screaming at marching Latinos or people calmly discussing the benefits of torture or any number of other things, and if you express disgust or dismay sooner or later someone will come along as say, "Well, what can you do? That's just human nature".

This is the answer whether the question is about racism, oppression, mobs, income inequality, and many other things.

So, of course my question is... is it? If there are humans around the world whose behaviour doesn't fall into these sorts of patterns, does that negate the "it's human nature" thing, or does that mean that these humans are maybe not progressed enough to have this particular nature of humans?

It seems to me to be yet one more type of thing, such as "you can't judge things that happened years ago by the morals of today" or whatever, that is brought up when discussing the past actions of say, Empire or slavery or something. This might wash, if there were not also people during those times that protested, said this or that was wrong, that they would not participate and so on. Which group was displaying human nature? The "everybody" that "does it" or the few that don't? Who decides which nature if human and which is not?

If you consider the fact that in 100 or so years, people will perhaps (hopefully!) be past the point of warmaking... possibly because things are so messed up everyone needs each other to survive, will they look back on us and say that you can't judge things by their time and morals, even though there are those of us who recognize that war is not a productive or right thing?

Counting Cherry Stones: the White Feather Wielder and the Down-trodden Woman

I tried writing about them separately. They wouldn’t have it. No sooner did I get to describing one of them and there was the other, beating the door down, getting her feet under the table, shaking her head, rolling her eyes and saying “You think you’re going to write about her and leave me out of it?”.
I looked at them – unreal though they are – and they looked alike. Are you one and the same then? I thought. Through one eye they are almost impossible to tell apart; through the other one would never have thought them related. Not identical then, but not easily separable.

They are the two heads to the same coin. Mirror images. Inversions. When one’s down the other’s up. Janus looking forward and back. Two-faced.

Like Rosie, the white-feather wielder casts her echoes before her, flowers strewn before the troops departing for battle. Once she was a Spartan mother sternly instructing her son, “Come home with your shield or on it.”

Ninety years ago or thereabouts, she strolled through these streets, cool and slim in long Edwardian skirts, white feather held jauntily between thumb and forefinger seeking out unmilitary men. Men to chastise for their ununiformed unmanliness, for above all she is a womanly woman.

The white-feather wielder is man-made and in that she is the same as many womanly women. Rosie also sprang fully-formed from the forehead of J. Howard Miller, a latter-day Athena for an industrial age. She too had her avatars and her priestesses to officiate at her altar poised precariously on the fuselage. Is the white-feather wielder also a goddess then? Or is she a demon, this womanly woman? Lamia. Seductress. Despatching young men to drown in mud, just as the sirens sang them down beneath the swell. Her creator described her and her gift as “far more terrible than anything they [men] can meet in battle.” Perhaps to those who believed in ideas of manliness and womanliness she was more terrible at that.

Unlike Rosie, the white-feather wielder has not gathered a stable iconography about herself. She has not become a symbol of women’s liberation or power. She did exercise a particular kind of power though, using her words to persuade men to go and slaughter or be slaughtered. Perhaps the War Poets caught her off-guard: some of them took a dim view of drowning in mud and a dimmer view still of the particular form of manliness which she upheld. In any case revival efforts in World War II failed dismally. She had come to be seen as a woman who used her feminine wiles to send young men to their deaths. A Lorelei repeating endlessly the old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Like the leopard, she had to change her spots. Scatter her feathers to the four winds. Feathers? What feathers. No feathers here. These days, she’s a ‘security mom.’ For a while before that she was a soccer mom: she still is. Clad in jeans and sneakers, slightly harried, ferrying the kids to practice in the SUV with the the red-white-and-blue festooned bumper and the yellow ribbon (faded now from a couple of years of sun, rain and snow) drooping from the antenna. She’s all for staying the course: after all the troops are protecting her children from terrorism. And if that means recruiters in schools – well that’s what it means and that’s all there is to it. It’s like the man on the T.V. said “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

“And after all, look how they treat the women!” she says. “Just barbaric.”
The coin spins on its edge and comes down heads.

Sometimes she’s Belgian. Perhaps she’s a nun in a torn habit. More recently she’s been spotted in a chador. But she has worn many different kinds of clothing in her myriad lifetimes, she has lived in many different places. Once she may have been a kidnapped bride. Did she stand atop Troy’s towers? Perhaps so, but now she has been safely reduced and diminished so that the one central fact of her life, the sine qua non of her existence is her oppression. She is dust beneath the enemy’s heel, foreign or domestic: bereft of agency or resistance. She has no avatars, only involuntary sacrifices. What woman would choose to embody her?

Like the others – the Grocer’s Daughters, the Rosies, the White-Feather Wielders, the Down-Trodden woman is a type, a figure, used in service of war-making. Which is not to say women are not often oppressed, or even to debate which forms of oppression are to be considered culturally superior. That is not the point. The point is that the Down-trodden Woman, whoever she is and whereever she comes from, needs liberating and we know just the folks for the job. Results guaranteed.

She is a strange creature, this Down-trodden Woman. So clearly visible in the Enemy’s citadels, yet when the citadel is stormed she evaporates like a puddle on a hot day. Her liberation is so instantaneous it leaves no trace. Practical indicators of her presence– the number of women being raped, for example – may increase quite dramatically. And certainly it is true that after liberation, actual women may also have far less in the way of practical opportunities to keep themselves from such things as starvation. All of which might suggest that the Down-trodden Woman should still be there, that she had no business leaving yet, but no. She has gone her ways. She vanished the moment the first ‘liberator’ passed through the gate.

To complain about such practical indicators – to gripe and moan, to whine and wail, to bitch – is simply to mistake the nature of the Down-trodden Woman’s Liberation. It is symbolic. Or perhaps more accurately, it is nominal, pertaining to names. The Down-trodden Woman is Liberated because certain generous gestures have been made. Certain phrases have been pronounced correctly. Incantations recited over just the right bubbling stew.

The lives and living conditions of actual women have absolutely nothing to do with the Down-trodden Woman’s Liberation: they never did.

Smoke and Mirrors

Illusions and sleight-of-hand on a mid-summer’s morning.
I first about heard it on the radio when the alarm clock went off.

‘Evil terrorist plot foiled.’ ‘Terrorist attack imminent.’ Critical Alert. Agitation. Excitement. News anchors sounding solemn. Abandoning civil liberties to save them. Mass detentions. Men with guns at airports. WMD in the tampax. Saving the West from the deadly twin spectres of spectacle cases and baby food. And all that jazz.

Performance theatre at its finest, deserving of awards all round, followed by an extravagant cream tea at the parish hall with lashings of strawberry jam and generous helpings of Auntie Marjorie’s Victoria sponge.

Smoke and mirrors

Then again, one cannot know that for sure?

Wouldn’t a propagandist have managed to come up with something a little more inspired? Inventive? Original?

Given the situation, such things, such grandiose plans are not utterly remarkable. After all, any number of grandiose plans involving planes, bombs and civilians as ingredients are not only made but also implemented with monotonous regularity. And by thoroughly respectable members of society no less: certain heads of state routinely order such plans implemented by the truckload and who could be more respectable than they? It’s true that their well-refined recipe calls for a slightly different combination of the ingredients – they prefer to fill the planes up with bombs, take them up reasonably high and then drop the bombs on the civilians from a height, rather than just combining all three at once. And currently they express a preference for seasonings like white phosphorus, depleted uranium, cluster bombs and such. It must be a style thing. Why the one is deemed so acceptable and the other so appalling.

But where such recipes exist, so too will innovation. Regrettably, therefore, it would be naïve to say that the whole thing is prima facie impossible. Invented from whole-cloth. The fervid nightmare of a fevered brain. The sort of thing that nobody would ever do. It isn’t. Things just like it happen every day.

Smoke and mirrors.

Then there are the intermediate options, the dim and murky possibilities that lie between those two. There may have been some people who did have grandiose plans (along with a lack of discretion) whose ‘discovery’ was saved for an opportune moment and who knows? Perhaps for public consumption, their plans were made a little more grandiose. Elaborated on some. They provided the outline: others fleshed it out.

There was Reid – seemed like it was just the day before that he was describing various human rights as ‘made for another age.’

Another age. Presumably not this age of
smoke and mirrors.

Or perhaps it was just the U.S. dog wagging the U.K. tail.

I’ve had my doubts about that one, I must confess. Some of the colonies – like this one in fact – do have a kind of limited Home Rule and it did seem very well-timed, not to mention well-tailored for indigeneous consumption. There’s nothing like long queues for bringing out a kind of enculturated compliant stoicism. But perhaps my doubts are ill-founded.

Q: What does theoretical parsimony look like in the absence of credibility?

A: Smoke and mirrors

Perhaps (Probably? Certainly? I suspect the latter) there was someone who was tortured. The U.K. is a part of that extensive spiderweb of rendition and torture: presumably it’s good for something. And there are a lot of names there. Someone (some ones?) hurt beyond the edge of endurance, saying anything at all to make the pain stop? (It’s true that evidence based on torture is now supposed to be inadmissable, but how would one know whether or not it was used?)

Smoke and mirrors

And doubtless a whole myriad more of intermediate possibilities, blurrings, smudges, shades all of which strongly resemble
smoke and mirrors.

Of this I am told we may all be sure: that it has nothing at all to do with foreign policy whatsoever. Which comes as a huge relief, because if it did have anything to do with foreign policy then there really might be widespread scepticism. After all as Max Hastings has observed, “one could nowadays fit into an old-fashioned telephone box those who believe anything Bush or Tony Blair says about foreign policy.” He was writing about the U.K. but he seems to have confused an ‘old-fashioned telephone box’ for the Tardis. It’s an easily made mistake in this place of
smoke and mirrors.

We Are All Hezbollah

Today, on another blog which I will not name, in order to spare the poor tired fingers of the operatives of GIYUS et al, I was privileged to see what is to my knowledge, the first instance of an American even hesitantly approaching the momentous and terrible utterance of the Forbidden Phrase:

Lebanon has a right to defend itself

Hezbollah, like "Al Qaeda," has "morphed;" as a Lebanese lady said the other day to a western reporter, asking some predictable question probably on the order of "but of course you don't support the people who dare to defend you against the Sacred Israel?," to which the lady replied, "We are all Hezbollah."

And all over the Majority World, in the same spirit that so many there, as well as in the more affluent 15% world said on one day in September not so long ago, "We are all New Yorkers," many, many people are saying "We are all Hezbollah."

Hezbollah, having "morphed," is no longer a struggling little band of guerilla fighters, no longer a political party in Lebanon, no longer even the only entity in Lebanon that has provided the nation what infrastructure and services it has had for the past far too many years.

Today Hezbollah has, and not by its own hand, but by the hand of the Enemy, undergone a magical transmorgification into that most powerful, yet ephemeral and yes, dangerous thing an entity can be.

Today Hezbollah is a symbol.

And not just any symbol. It is a noble symbol, a symbol of something very laudable, at least in the minds of the Majority World, namely Resistance against the tyranny of the US and its fat little pitbull there in the Levant, it is now a symbol that trumps and transcends the luxury concepts of politics or theology, it is now a symbol of the most primal and basic instinct we have: protecting our children, our future, preservation of our species from the fearsome beast, protecting our babies from the predator's talons, from the hungry tiger of the night, the horde of brutes from the tribe across the river, across the Blue Line.

When someone, somegang, anyone, anygang, rushes snarling into our cave, gaping maw set to devour our young, We are all Hezbollah.

And frankly, the Majority World has been in sore need of a little Hezbollah for quite some time.

Considering the Situation, we need all the Hezbollah we can get.

(Crossposted from Enemy of the State )

Looking at Kings

Forewar(ne)d

Another old re-post from BT and dKos: I've said it before, but this one probably is the last or close to the last in any case. At present I'm once again looking at glass and wrestling with writer's block, which from memory was what was going on when I wrote this. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose and all that. And 'supporting the troops' continues to be the last thing on my mind. So it's sort of apropos, even though in the interim I have drawn the conclusion that allusions, anecdotes and vignettes are no more nor less, but exactly and precisely as effective as blunt words in terms of their general audibility to imperialists. Took my sweet time about it, but there's little that can be done about that now.

Looking at Kings

I've not been writing much lately. That's for a couple of reasons. One is that I've been looking at glass and canals with an over-interested eye lately. The other rather more serious reason is that I've been trying to think about what a colonial subject might say to her imperial masters. Even a cat can look at a King.

DuctapeFatwa recently wrote of colonialism as a religion

"You can no more convince a colonialist that the world is not the property of the west, specifically the US, than you can convince a Christian that Jesus was not crucified or a Muslim that the Angel Gabriel did not visit Mohammed."

Which got me thinking. Never a good sign.

And a few days ago, I saw a diary over at dKos about sending presents to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and what a wonderful idea it was. Which got me thinking some more.

One of the things it got me thinking about was the difficulty of having honest conversations with colonialists - on whom, I might add, the Republican Party has no monopoly. Imperialism is a thoroughly bi-partisan policy: its flavour may change, but not its substance. Though from where I stand, it always tastes bitter. The difficulty proceeds, I think, not so much from the desire to keep the peace by keeping one's peace, but from a gap where words fail. Oh - the words can be spoken plainly enough, but their utterance would render my imperial masters deaf to the speaker.

Hence my silence.

When I was in New Zealand, one of my lecturers was a recent Russian émigré. He was far from my favourite person, but I remember one of the things he said well enough to paraphrase it. "You will no longer find," he said, "great composers in Russia. Now that anything can be said freely, nothing will be said of substance." What he meant, I think, was that political constraint can result in the production of a musical language that is subtle, rich in allusion and veiled political meaning. I suspect his fears for Russian music were misplaced: evidently he did not foresee Putin.

So let me try to accomplish with allusion, anecdote and vignette what I fear blunt words will not convey.

*

If you're a U.S. citizen, your military used the first city I lived in as a supply base for the land it occupied in the frozen South - though it's not so frozen now, is it? Your nuclear ships (though your military coyly declined to confirm or deny whether they carried nuclear weapons) moored in the great volcano crater that is Diamond Harbour. Sometimes I'd see your soldiers on the bus. Indeed, my brother married the daughter of one of your ex-soldiers, formerly stationed there in that wild and woolly colony at the end of the earth, until he grew too accustomed to Southern skies to return to the homeland. As colonists from more than one empire had done before him.

*

In a world where geography so often defines destiny, my brother and I both made what used to be termed `good marriages' by the cynical - or perhaps they were just intensely practical. But the dowries and settlements we brought to our nuptials concerned the currency of citizenship.

*

In the 1980s, the colony where I grew up staged something akin to a populist, non-violent revolt against its imperial masters. I wouldn't say it managed to get out of the imperial bedchamber, but it certainly threw the bedcovers about a bit and complained vigorously about having a terrible headache. It got off pretty lightly. Frankly, I put that down to most of the inhabitants having white skin. Had the country had the same demographics as Grenada, I suspect the fallout may have been rather different. But my imperial masters graciously confined themselves to threatening to assassinate the then Prime Minister David Lange (admittedly your Vice-President's threats were perceived at the time as having about the same level of credibility as the subsequent denials that they were ever made). Various imperial officials announced in peeved tones: "We're not talking to you any more." N.Z. was suspended from ANZUS - though this was hardly a punishment -- everyone I knew considered it proof positive that every silver lining has a silver lining. From the sidelines, Bob Dole twittered about imposing economic sanctions -- but unlike Iraq, N.Z. has no new graveyards filled with infants' bodies. More recently, a refusal to creep back under the imperial duvet scuppered a free trade agreement between the U.S. and New Zealand. Like I said, the colony I grew up in got off pretty lightly. It's still just a colony though, with limited Home Rule.

*

I moved to the heart of the empire.

I went out with a bunch of (U.S.) grad students to celebrate my flatmate's birthday.
Being politically inclined, we started talking about U.S. foreign policy and bashing Bush. I contributed some uncharitable remarks about Clinton and the bombing of Sudan's pharmaceutical factory. (Apparently Christopher Hitchens was experiencing a welcome remission of popinjayitis when he wrote this back in '98). Most likely, I also waxed lyrical about Madeleine Albright. In a fairly stunning non sequitur, I was told that, "You're just jealous because New Zealand didn't fight in World War II."

The woman who said that was kind and intelligent and would certainly consider herself liberal - possibly even leftist. She hated Bush and I wouldn't be at all surprised if she was been out there campaigning for Kerry last November. But imperialism is a power relation that promotes asymmetric information.

*

A friend of mine is at a union meeting. In his first and only language, he explains, patiently and painstakingly to an uncomprehending room, that since the British colonised the country that he came from, he has as much claim on the English language as anybody else. He passes around a copy of his immigration documentation, which is marked "Subject does not speak English. Instruction will be provided upon arrival." He explains how he was required to attend 'English language instruction' classes before being permitted to teach. "But __" someone says, "we don't mean you. You speak English fine - hell, you speak English better than me! But you've got to understand that we've got a duty to protect our students."

Words failed.

*

Well - if you've made it this far through my self-indulgent rant, let me close by telling you something about me. I took the nickname dove some years ago now - it's one I've used in a few different contexts. It's kind of a reminder. I wouldn't describe myself as a naturally peaceful, or non-violent, or particularly compassionate person. I tend to favour a cold fury over sorrow. But growing up red (or at least, deeply pink) in a post-Stalin world provided a fairly compelling reason to think carefully about the proper relationship between means and ends. And that led me to non-violence.

So I oppose the war and I'm committed to non-violence.

And here's another place where I think words often fail. For many, opposing the war and being non-violent means `supporting the troops by bringing them home.' That's not what it means for me. `Supporting the troops' is the last thing on my mind.

Counting Cherry Stones: Rosie the Riveter

All the day long, whether rain or shine,
She's a part of the assembly line.
She's making history, working for victory,
Rosie the Riveter.

Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage,
Sitting up there on the fuselage.
That little frail can do more than a male can do.

Rosie's got a boyfriend, Charlie.
Charlie, he's a Marine.
Rosie is protecting Charlie,
Working overtime on the riveting machine.


Is this what liberation looks like?

These days she's her own icon. A minor American Goddess for a major American Century, emblazoned on posters, key-rings, T-shirts, badges and other spaces dedicated to devotional display. Fridges, for example. She's a feminist icon too, at least for a particular strand of feminism.

"We Can Do It!" she proclaims boldly, displaying the muscular strength in her good right arm. Her stare is level: the arc of plucked eyebrows, the mascara artfully-thick on those lashes, the red luciousness of her lipstick diminishes the seriousness of her gaze not one little iota. "We Can Do It!" Jaunty but nevertheless determined in the polka-dotted headscarf covering her hair.

Rosie is feisty and feminine. Strong and (hetero)sexy. Binaries fall before her gaze like so much wool from the shears, like scales from the eyes. Hence her divinity, hence her iconography.

But who are the "We"? And what is the "It" that "We" can do?
And just what was the history that Rosie was making?

Like all goddesses, Rosie predates herself. At least some of her foremothers lie over the Pond, entangled in the tall tale of 'How The Vote Was Won.' When World War I broke out the Pankhursts, 'First Family' of U.K. feminism fractured: Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst suspended hostilities, ceased calling for suffage and urged women to enter the munitions factories. Which many did: it was good pay and what pay wouldn't do, loyalty to Empire would.

But my affections lie with Emmeline's awkward and contrarian daughter Sylvia, who was having none of it. A pacifist, expelled by her family from the Women's Social and Political Union in 1914; she later got chucked out of the Communist Party of Great Britain for good measure. She endured forced feeding, was imprisoned for sedition and argued with Lenin. Her life began in Manchester and ended in Ethiopia: she was an emigrant. She never did master the art of going along to get along. Anything that could be done an easy way, she inevitably found the hard way. Stubborn and obdurate. People like that should be loved (though they seldom are) for their lack of expediency and their mulish honesty. Their beliefs might shift with time, but their truthfulness does not.

I digress.

Rosie had her forerunners: they built the shells with which much of World War I was fought and in their day they too were seen as 'liberated.' Breaking new ground. Proving themselves worthy. New Women, not like those Old Women. According to the Official Historical Narrative, their willingness to be militarised was rewarded with the Vote. But isn't that the way with new godesses? Don't they always eat the memory of their mothers? How else could they be so brand-spanking-shiny new? So iconic, so stripped of the messiness of life. And contrarian Sylvia? Relegated to the margins, to the footnotes: she too is history. Perhaps there are worse fates -- at least on the sidelines one is less likely to be chomped upon.

Who are the 'We'? And what is the 'It' that 'we' do?

'We' are the women who consent to be militarised believing that militarisation leads to liberation. 'We' believe that consenting to militarisation will give us the power to protect those whom we love; that it is a means by which women will finally be treated as men's equals; that it is a means to economic freedom; that it is a means of political equality; that it is how 'we' women can gain the respect which 'we' have for so long wanted. And because 'we' have hungered for respect, because 'we' have hungered for liberation, 'we' grasp the proffered militarising hand that promises those things without asking too many awkward questions.

This is an old delusion; a long-standing hysteria.

As for the 'It?' Well, it's not just riveting any more: it never was. We nurse. We weld. We manufacture. We crack codes. We buy war bonds. We invest. We sell arms. We go out and buy, buy, buy to keep confidence high. We enlist. We fly planes. We cook. We shoot guns. We break down barriers. We challenge sexism. We're strong and (hetero)sexy, just like Rosie. We do what we're asked. We do what we're told. We even tell people how we could do it better given half a chance. And we believe that this will be our independence, our liberation, that this time, proving that 'We Can Do It!' will make us free. And above all we believe that this is feminism and that we are feminists. Look at Rosie -- how feisty she is, how feminine: is she not the image of feminism? Isn't she divine!

Looking for power in the wrong places.

61 years ago today, the U.S dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was dropped from a B-29 built at the Martin Bomber Plant in Omaha, Nebraska. 40% of the workers there were women: most likely Rosie riveted bits of that plane together. That bomb (I was about to say Hiroshima, but the city was not the bomb despite the way in which they have become synonymous with each other) still claims about 5000 lives a year: about half of those are presumably women and the other half are those whom some woman, somewhere, loved, whether as mother, sister, wife, lover, daughter, niece or last but not least, friend. Three days later, they dropped another bomb on Nagasaki. And Rosie's rivets held again.

So. What does Rosie have to say to those women's corpses and the corpses of those whom they loved? What does "We Can Do It!" mean to them?

Is this what liberation looks like?

Two Coastlines

I.

A peninsula near the city, encircling a deep-blue-sea harbour. Red rock that crumbles under the fingers. That harbour is a caldera: the peninsula a crater. This is a place where the earth’s patience is thin. An early map, drawn before imperialism was yet a foregone conclusion there showed it as an island, but it is not. (It was a delicately coloured map, not yet the bloody hue it assumed in old, battered school atlases remembered from primary school.)

Whether it through possession of one of those early pre-imperial maps, through not being good at map-reading, or simply because those are treacherous waters, at least one ship’s captain missed the entrance to that deep sea harbour, sailed into the bay neighbouring and lost his life giving it a name. Taylor’s Mistake. It already had a name of course. It didn’t need a new one.

I used to go walking out onto the steep hills and along the tops of the cliffs around there on that peninsula. It’s beautiful. I’d give it that. Even bereft of its forest, even open to that bone-bleaching sun. Sheep-skulls in long grass, sometimes with remnants of flesh still clinging to them and a cloudy buzz of blowflies. In summer the grass has the colour of gold: in that part of the country, winter was the green season. That’s changing now. Macrocarpa outlined against a deep blue-gold skyline. There, one could look away from the smog lying on the city. But all of it, bones, tussock, macrocarpa, smog is profoundly unnatural to that place which was forest before empire burned it.

Vestiges remain. In some places there are still stands of kahikatea. Matagouri – which I had always imagined as the inspiration for barbed wire – still grows like a snare on the hillside to bloody the hands of the unwary. Certainly it cut mine on occasion. Now there’s a metaphor for those who like such things: te whenua still resisting the hand of the colonist’s descendents.

Apparently there’s a network of disused tunnels out there: occasionally one would meet someone who claimed to know someone who used to go role-playing out there, clambering about in the cold roots of those hills pretending to be someone else. But as I never met anyone who had done so themselves, I have more than half consigned that tale to legend.

But this I have seen for myself.

A concrete emplacement, set concealed in the hillside, invisible from just a few feet away. It is an ugly thing, long abandoned. The steps one descends to enter it long ago began to crack: its interior stinks of piss and wretchedness. Barely clearing the grass, unable to be skylined, a wall-less stretch surveys a reach of harbour. This emplacement is from World War II, but some date back to 1900 and paranoid fears of Russian invaders.

A few come in pairs, the remnants of a narrow trench running between them. There is the red metal-rusted place where the gun was mounted once. It was removed eventually but they couldn’t be bothered removing the emplacements so they left them, cracking piss-stinking concrete on a marred headland.

It’s been over sixty years now: they are practically historical architecture. And no, this has not been a peaceful place for a long time and even now it lies beneath a shadow. Or so it is rumoured.

Would I even want them removed for that matter? What is better? That the scar, that sordid ugliness should remain – a visible reminder that militaries never do clean up their messes? Or that kahikatea and other trees belonging to that long-since burned forest should put their roots down in place of those emplacements? Could they even live there now on those bare wind-battered headlands?


II.

A coastline on the South-West peninsula of another island.
A path winds around the coast for hundreds of miles, across the cliff-tops, down steep winding ways onto beaches rocky and sandy. Through holiday towns throbbing with a fevered gaiety in summer: quietly desperate in winter. A few years ago I walked on that path for a few days.

It is beautiful. I’d give it that. In summer wildflowers cling to the rock faces and all manner of moths and butterflies are on the move. There is the long curve of the horizon. Closer to hand, perhaps heard rather than seen is the roar of breakers on rocks.

It used to be tin country, until the tin ran out.
Mine shafts dissect these hills: those near the paths are sometimes surrounded by wire fencing. Others, which have become home to bats, have strange-looking chimney-like hats: bat-doors to the bat-caves.

It used to be pilchard country, until the shoals were fished out. Now huge sunfish bask off those coasts, far from what were their usual haunts before the climate changed.

This was wrecking country. Perhaps on this headland bonfires were lit to lure ships onto the rocks. Gotcha. The ultimate practical joke.

Now it is tourist country and perhaps there is an element of the trickster in that too – in the endless pasties, the clotted cream, the boat trips to see seals.

It is a peninsular, but in some of the inland villages there are still people who have never in their lives seen salt water.

There was a steep bare hillside, that day, stripped of everything but grass. The path was grassy, hard to distinguish, and the hillside dropped away steeply: just out of sight began the cliffs.

I had been expecting it: I had looked at the map. But then again, it was not what I was expecting. There was the sign as advertised, warning that the hillside ahead might have unexploded ammunition, mines and things that go bang. It even had little icons of exploding people flying through the air, for extra added emphasis. All the obvious stuff: Don’t pick anything up. Don’t step on anything protruding from the ground.

It also said ‘Keep on the path.’ I looked down: presumably I was now on the path. Of course I had thought I was on the path before, but I’d had to leave it and walk uphill a bit to be able to read the sign. It didn’t seem terribly pathlike but then neither had what I had previously thought was the path. The sign (and the guidebook no less!) also said keep the white markers to landward. I looked around. The only white marker I saw was a painted white pole attached to the end of a fence further down the hillside, nearer to the cliff face, though I could not see where that began. ‘Perhaps’ I thought, ‘the path goes on the other side of that fence, because that’s the only way for there to be any white markers to landward here. And it would sort of make sense to have a fenced off path if there were things that explode. In which case where I am standing is not the path. That's fine: it certainly doesn't look like one.’

So I edged my way slowly down the hillside to the fence and when I got there, I realised that I was actually quite close to the cliff and that such land as was on the seaward side of the fence was undercut enough that nobody was going to walk along that. At least not for long. Realising as I looked along that sweep of cliff that there was every reason to assume I was standing on land that was just as tenuous, I went back up the hill and considered my options. Eventually I picked my way across the hillside.

The sign, the white pole on the fence, and the absence of white markers (and a path for that matter) are things I’ve wondered about occasionally since.

Was it a practical joke to paint that pole white and stick it there? Had the actual markers been removed? Was it one of the ‘gotcha’ moments of that wreckers’ coast? Instead of being luring ships onto the rocks, luring walkers over the cliff? For what were the bonfires but false markers?

Or was it the opposite of falsehood: a truth albeit twisty? After all, imperialism (and certainly imperialism is something which that military has a particularly deep investment in) is about establishing rules that people cannot follow if they want to live and then using their disobedience as the excuse to kill them. How simple and elegant an illustration for domestic consumption then: a sign instructing one to keep to the path with the white markers to landward or risk being exploded, coupled with no path and a white marker placed on the very edge of a cliff.

Follow the impossible rule or else . . .

Moral Equivalency Permit

While I respect Dove's wish that this blog be an International space, I think the struggle taking form now between the anti-war left and the military left in the U.S. is one that has great international consequences.

Cross posted with minor deletions and additions from Even Flow


Where can I get mine, and what are the requirements?
Judging by recent arguments among supposed left leaning supporters of the military, unless you are active duty and are willing to disobey your orders to fight in Iraq you have no real right to ask any soldier to stand down and disobey illegal orders, let alone have an opinion about it. Excuse me but the last time I checked every citizen of America has the right to their opinion and there is no military test that you are required to pass in order to voice it. In fact, any honest military person will tell you that that's exactly what they're supposed to be serving for. That some who I previously considered allies are now basically telling anyone who holds a soldier to his duty to defend the Constitution of the United States to shut the &$!* up unless they're laying their own life on the line in an illegal war is a pretty good sign of some pretty stark lines beginning to be drawn in the sand, or circling of wagons as DTF would say, between the military left and the anti-war left, including those on the anti-war left who still support the troops by fighting to bring them home alive and now. Those in the anti-war community who aren't anti-military, and I would argue that they are the majority of the modern anti-war movement, are very different from the historical anti-war movements of the past, particularly the mass movement of the 1960's and 1970's who were definetily more anti-military, though I've been told by some Vietnam Veterans, and read Veteran testimonies that the stories of Vets being spit on by anti-war activists were fabrications of the pro-war right.

The story of Vietnam era soldiers who revolted against what was clearly an immoral and unwinnable war is largely unknown in this country. It's assumed that the civilian anti-war movement of that era was the most influential group attributed with bringing an end to that war. They were a part of it, but I don't think they were the biggest force behind the end of the war. According to the new documentary, Sir!, No Sir!,

"In the 1960’s an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history. This movement didn’t take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point. And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam. It was a movement no one expected, least of all those in it. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile. And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. Yet today few people know about the GI movement against the war in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War has been the subject of hundreds of films, both fiction and non-fiction, but this story–the story of the rebellion of thousands of American soldiers against the war–has never been told in film.This is certainly not for lack of evidence. By the Pentagon’s own figures, 503,926 “incidents of desertion” occurred between 1966 and 1971; officers were being “fragged”(killed with fragmentation grenades by their own troops) at an alarming rate; and by 1971 entire units were refusing to go into battle in unprecedented numbers. In the course of a few short years, over 100 underground newspapers were published by soldiers around the world; local and national antiwar GI organizations were joined by thousands; thousands more demonstrated against the war at every major base in the world in 1970 and 1971, including in Vietnam itself; stockades and federal prisons were filling up with soldiers jailed for their opposition to the war and the military.



Yet few today know of these history-changing events.



Sir! No Sir! will change all that. The film does four things: 1) Brings to life the history of the GI movement through the stories of those who were part of it; 2) Reveals the explosion of defiance that the movement gave birth to with never-before-seen archival material; 3) Explores the profound impact that movement had on the military and the war itself; and 4) The feature, 90 minute version, also tells the story of how and why the GI Movement has been erased from the public memory.

Sir! No Sir! reveals how, thirty years later, the poem by Bertolt Brecht that became an anthem of the GI Movement still resonates".,

"General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect: He can think".


Brecht's poem can be found in full at the beginning of the book Soldiers In Revolt, written by David Cortright, an exhaustive and statistical analysis of the anti-war movement and revolt by GI's during the Vietnam War, how they impacted the ability of the U.S. to continue the war, and they're contribution to it's ultimate end.

From the introduction to the book, written by Howard Zinn:

"Soldiers in Revolt documents one of the least known and most
important aspects of the Vietnam War: the rebellion among U.S.
soldiers opposed to the war. From the front lines to stateside military
bases, the U.S. armed forces were wracked by widespread
resistance, including combat refusals and mutinies. GIs produced
more than 250 antiwar committees and underground newspapers
to voice their discontent. A new chapter looks at the enduring
imprint of this period on the U.S. military and the lessons that this
era holds for the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
David Cortright, in this remarkable book, reminds us, as the war in Iraq continues,
that a point can be reached where men and women in uniform can
no longer tolerate what they begin to see as an unjust war. It is encouraging
to be reminded of the basic desire of human beings to live at peace
with other human beings, once they have divested themselves of the dceptions,
the nationalism, and the racism that is provoked by war".
—from the introduction by Howard Zinn

The question is, do civilians have the right to encourage active duty soldiers to disobey orders? Well sure, they have the right. But on a moral level should it be required or demanded, as some are now doing, that civilians first risk their own freedom, lives, and the livelihood of their own families before they ask soldiers to do the same. No, I don't think it's right to demand it. But in fairness, I think some sort of shared sacrifice should be seriously considered by anyone doing the asking. It's easy to understand and empathize with the frustration and the fear that active duty soldiers and their families are facing in the Iraq war. But their lashing out at those in the anti-war movement who are fighting to bring about the end of the war through different means, including expecting soldiers to uphold their oath to the Constitution, and the efforts to remove those soldiers from an unwinnable, dangerous, and most probably illegal war, can't be tolerated. It seeks to stifle dissent. It seeks to make illegitimate any argument put forth by those who haven't served in the military. And that is a dangerous thing to a democracy. It's dangerous because it seeks to reverse the democracy's bedrock tenet that the the government be civilian led, not military led, and that the freedom to dissent in this country not be predicated on one's willingness or not, to serve in it's military. Soldiers have a duty to their country and it's stated and ratified principles and are obligated to refuse illegal orders. Citizens have a duty and an obligation to hold their government accountable for it's actions and it's abuse of it's military. Both of these groups have an obligation to each other to not only stand up for each other, but to also hold each to it's obligations.