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Haunted by the Ghosts of War

by Edward Curtin


Memorial Day, May 29th is his birthday. November 22nd is the day he died defending his country. A true war hero, a naval officer, he risked his life to save his men. Like so many we should remember on November 11th, the day of remembrance for the millions of war dead from WW I, “the Great War” they call it, he goes before us as an exemplar of courage, real patriotism, and a witness to war’s brutality. Veteran’s Day, Armistice, Remembrance Day, Memorial Day – there are so many days for the war dead, and they include but a small portion; we might as well have one every day of the year.
But remembering all the war dead is like drifting on a ghost ship in a still sea of burning water. Haunted by the eerie silence of their absent presence, if we listen closely enough, we can hear such victims calling to us: Remember me, remember me, why did it have to be?
“All warfare is ghostly,” writes Norman O. Brown, “every army an exercitus feralis (a funereal exercise), every soldier a living corpse.”
The world is littered with the corpses of war’s victims, those of the killers and the killed, soldiers of every nation – but the vast majority are innocent civilians who never picked up a gun. The earth is so saturated with all their blood that one would expect the rivers to run red as a reminder. But that only happens in poems, as with Federico Garcia Lorca: “Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood.”
But what do poets know that the potentates, politicians, and mad generals don’t? These killers are experts at shedding innocent blood to satisfy their blood lust and then erecting monuments to the killers. They are necrophiliacs, while all the poets do is to remind us that we will all die and that we should affirm life and love each other before we do – that war is an evil lie, as Wilfred Owen told us:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori
.

But that was long ago. War’s victims still fall everywhere, every day they are stilled in deserts, mountains, jungles, cities, houses, hospitals, schools, on the open roads, in bedrooms, in woods, in alleyways, crouched in basements, killed from the sky, the ground, directly, remotely, by their own desperate hands, slowly in despair. Why count the ways, why count the victims – the truth is countless.
Yet we can remember a few that we know of and weep. Victims dead and victims alive.
There is that naval officer whose birthday I mentioned. He survived the south Pacific waters and Indonesian jungles only to die by enemy fire in an open car on a street in Dallas, Texas. Let us celebrate and mourn President John F. Kennedy, who would have been 100 years old this year, while remembering how hard he fought for peace that the killers within his own government, led by the CIA, didn’t want then and don’t want now. So they shot him down “over here,” just as the U.S. war machine keeps killing millions “over there.” George M. Cohan was right: “The Yanks are coming.” They are always coming, but he was wrong to think it is ever over. It’s not supposed to be ever over.
Because he knew the horror of war and grasped the systemic evil of its proponents in his own government, John Kennedy grew out of the war machine – in James Douglass’s words from JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters, when he was assassinated, JFK “was turning, Teshuvah, ‘turning,’ the rabbinic word for repentance,” against war and toward peace as his actions in the last year of his life make clear. As a result, the “unspeakable” deep state forces murdered him. But as a military veteran, his courage in turning against the war machine has inspired many other honorable veterans to do the same.
Like others who followed Kennedy – MLK, RFK, et al. – he died in his own country as a soldier in a non-violent “war” for peace and reconciliation for all people across the world. His enemies were here at home.
And “over there,” Maha Khalil, a one year old Iraqi girl, was killed in the first few months of America’s criminal war against Iraq. Mrs. Ngugen Thi Tau was slaughtered by U. S. soldiers at My Lai, Vietnam. Who knows all the dead in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, East Timor, Indonesia, Cambodia, El Salvador, etc? Who can grasp it? Their names mean nothing to those who didn’t know them, just as the endless names of the U.S. military dead (most drafted into a war they didn’t want or understand) that line the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are a sad blur to those who come to look but didn’t know the fallen.
The same is even truer for anyone who views the Holocaust memorial in Boston where all one sees are rows and rows of concentration camp numbers; for every number a real person, each one reduced by the Nazis to seven-digits tattooed on arms. When we try to name and count war’s victims, we are overwhelmed and stunned. Yet the wars persist. Like the pawns conscripted to fight them, the anonymous ghosts of all the victims murmur in our ears: Why?
Dylan sings:

Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And the land that I live in
Has God on its side.

But not all of war’s victim’s die. Vast numbers become “living corpses,” also mostly anonymous and forsaken. Across the world wherever the American war machine has set its sights, the lame and crippled struggle on, victims of bombs and bullets, napalm and white phosphorous, nuclear radiation, small pox – all the grotesque weapons the ghouls of the weapons’ industry have conjured up from hell for their paymasters. Countless living victims, yes, but the weapons industries carefully count their bloody profits, as do those who invest in these companies while turning a blind eye to their own complicity.
Many of the wounds of war are psychological and spiritual. And so many of the victims suffer silently. Often misused and abused by their own government, they suffer (to paraphrase Douglass Valentine in his book , The Hotel Tacloban, a son’s riveting tale of his combat veteran father’s haunting by war) “in an anguish so profound and so abiding that they live in torment ever after.” War’s terrors follow them everywhere down their nights and down their days, and they can often find no escape from the nightmare images that populate their minds, flashing in and out. It’s beyond imagining the living hell of children worldwide reliving the sight of the bloodied mangled bodies of their parents at their feet, victims of bombs or death squads or perhaps “collateral damage,” as if any words or reasons could undo their everlasting trauma.
We owe it the wounded, dead, and tormented war victims everywhere to memorialize them with the words:

War is a lie, and only truth will free us.

Then we must devote ourselves to ending war. Each of us is responsible.


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Filed under: Edward Curtin, Essays, featured, JFK
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mohandeer
mohandeer
Nov 11, 2017 6:48 PM

Reblogged this on Worldtruth.

mohandeer
mohandeer
Nov 11, 2017 6:48 PM

There is nothing sweet about dying in an unnecessary war or a proper way to die for the war lust of others.

summitflyer
summitflyer
Nov 11, 2017 12:41 PM

I am presently reading the book mentioned above ,”JFK and the Unspeakable” .Very well done , ties all the loose ends.I highly recommend it .
What gets me about today’s wars of aggression ,as they always are,is the fact that the soldiers fighting them are mostly under the impression that they are fighting for their country while their own country was the instigator in the first place. There is no such thing as the war on terror.War is terror.

Dave Ratcliffe
Dave Ratcliffe
Nov 11, 2017 1:55 PM
Reply to  summitflyer

For an introduction to Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable – Why He Died and Why It Matters in the author’s own words, please see the heart of the matter: Why President Kennedy Was Assassinated at https://ratical.org

“If you get a veteran honest enough to talk about their war experience they will tell you the dirty secret is that they take the dead with them. I learned that from the Vietnam vets. Violence is no resolution to an issue. It may seem clean on a TV movie but in real life violence has cost to you as well as the person you’re violent against, even if you’re defending yourself and much more so if you’re in some sort of an abstract battle with that person, you don’t know what you’re doing there and they don’t have any connection to you.”
—John Judge, “September 11 Critical Analysis,” Feb 16, 2002, Univ. Of Washigton, Seattle
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/Sep11Antidote-CritclAnlysis021602.html

“It’s that everything [in the Cold War in 1962-1963] was totally out of control and then, through a kind of incredible process where these two men were communicating secretly with each other over the year previous [Sep 1962-63], and smuggling letters back and forth to each other, in the midst of this conflict, they were beginning to trust each other…. It’s a remarkable process. And it’s all beneath the surface. But so are all the things that count as Merton understood…. And that’s why I have some hopes that if we are willing to go deeply enough into the darkness – and Kennedy was, and Khrushchev was – anything can happen for the good. But if we don’t go into the darkness it doesn’t happen.”
—Jim Douglass at Elliot Bay Books, Seattle, May 6, 2008