My Internal Exile

“Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s spritely waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull’d, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.”
Shakespeare, Coriolanus

Long ago, but what seems like only yesterday, I didn’t go to the U.S. war against Vietnam but the war came to me. It was when my exile began.

I am telling you this to try to shed some light on today’s wars and alarums since my tale is common for a small subset of Americans of my generation. We learned long ago that the USA was run by ruthless killers who reveled in war. Vietnam, the Phoenix Program, Cambodia, Indonesia, etc. Nothing was beyond them. We sensed that they would never stop and they haven’t. The genocide of Palestinians, the proxy war via Ukraine against Russia, the current US/Israel/Turkey bloodbath in Syria and Lebanon led by our ruthless terrorists – it is all nightmarish, malevolent, utterly evil, and conjures up hell on earth. And it will get worse in the future.

The mainstream media is claiming that the new savior of Syria is the terrorist “rebel” leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the founding leader of Al Qaeda in Syria, al-Nusra, and a former deputy to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

While there is truth in the view that the world has always been a butcher’s bench with wars, hatred, and strife being a common theme, “always” is meaningless to me. For I have never lived in “always.”

I have lived since birth in the United States during a period of time when it has been the world’s number one butcher, starting with the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then continuing waging non-stop wars, assassinating foreign and domestic leaders, including President Kennedy, executing coup d’états, supporting and arming ruthless dictators and terrorists, and creating an economy dependent on war.

All this has been sustained by lies and propaganda that most Americans have swallowed. It is a deeply ingrained Yankee doodle dandy ethos joined with American exceptionalism and a self-induced false innocence.

Just this morning, December 8, 2024, as it did during the Vietnam war, The New York Times spewed out lies about the events in Syria, calling the U.S.-backed jihadist terrorists (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham/Al Qaeda, et al.) “rebels” and the overthrow of the Assad government a “civil war.” In doing so, the paper is just doing what it has always done as an organ for U.S. foreign policy, seemingly forgetting that it was the Obama administration that in 2012 launched Operation Timber Sycamore, a CIA program to, under the guise of a civil war, overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as part of a larger effort to undercut Iran and Russia for U.S./Israel/Turkey/NATO control of the region.

It is propaganda about a much larger war well underway, as the presence of Ukrainian forces in Syria and the usual Israeli bombing attest. Like a mountain ridge wildfire, the winds whip wildly now, and whether the fire spreads next to Iran or somewhere else, it is sure to spread.

To paraphrase Thoreau, there is no need to care for a myriad of instances and applications, the only thing you need is to be acquainted with the principle, which in this case is the long-standing demonic nature of U.S. foreign policy which is synchronous with waging perpetual war.

Yet most people don’t want to go past such lying headlines that are repeated by all the mainstream media. They never did, except when the issues concerned them personally, as when there was a military draft.

Yes, government and media propaganda have contributed mightily to it, but so many of the country’s war crimes have been committed out in the open and accompanied by the public’s cheering and flag waving that propaganda is only part of the explanation.

The will to believe and self-delusion are a large part of it. And people seem to like war, if it is far away and the cheerleaders are on this side of the water. It lends excitement to life like a real murder mystery, a sex scandal, or an approaching hurricane.

Furthermore, it provides roots for the national myth, the mythic home, the mythic womb, wherein one can root for the home team as one stands with tens of thousands of team people and sing along with the words “bombs bursting in air” while feeling a stirring of patriotic pride. This desire to be patriotically conventional, to support the national team in war and peace, is very powerful. Why else the creation of the mammoth bureaucracy called Homeland Security, the un-American word homeland taken straight from Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg rally. Root, root, root for the home team.

I know the patriotic feeling. It left me back in 1967 when my exile began. For the most part, it has not been apparent to outside observers, for there are places difficult to reach, and the one within is the most distant. My youthful “normalcy” received its first body blow with JFK’s assassination in 1963. By 1967 I had joined the Marines and then declared myself a conscientious objector as I realized the evil my country was committing in Vietnam. I was on my way away.

In the years that followed, as Malcom X, MLK, Jr. and RFK, were assassinated and Johnson and Nixon lied and brutalized Vietnam, my understanding of history and politics deepened. Families and friends called me a communist for being a C.O. and opposing the war and a lying government. It was laughable but relentless.

Many years have elapsed, and the charges have risen and fallen as the years have gone by. For years now, the name of abuse is a “conspiracy” theorist or Russian sympathizer for daring to say that Russia Gate was a Democratic conspiracy and the war against Russia in Ukraine has been a U.S. project from the start. There is much more.

But my point about internal exile is that I had to adopt the motions of normalcy in everyday life – to create a pleasant persona – to get through the days. My teaching and writing continued as hard-hitting as before, but family, friends, academic colleagues, and acquaintances didn’t take my courses or read my writing, which they made sure to avoid.

These days, many more people have been forced to discover the twofold life where they can’t talk to the people in their lives about many issues – politics, wars, Covid, etc. Something has broken. Almost everything.

To accept the conclusion that the country is run by a bunch of ruthless warmongering imperialists is a step too far for most people. They must mean well or just make mistakes, for their hearts are in the right place, runs through so many minds. At least they assume that about the leaders they support.

A key way the endless wars roll on is the deadly political game of the lesser of two evils. If it is one’s political party waging the foreign wars, there are always many reasons to still find it better than the other party’s wars. “My leader may be a warmonger but he’s better than your warmonger” is the unspoken implication.

This neat trick is supported by a host of mitigating excuses to justify the delusion that one is for peace even as these wars occur non-stop throughout the decades as the Democratic and Republican leaders switch highchairs.

Rather than dismiss the lot of them, the desire to feel that patriot heart-pump, however dim, and to reject the “extremist” conclusion that war is the life blood of the country, remains.

Throughout the sixty years of my adult life, the U.S. has been continuously waging wars, hot and cold, small and large, openly and secretly, all across the world, and its economy has increasingly become a military-industrial-national-security complex so vast and intricately linked to daily life that the country would collapse without it. Simply put: Beneath daily life lies a death cult, a river of blood. If that sounds too strong for you, give me another name for it.

It seems to me very clear that most Americans are today suffering from some sort of traumatic mental sickness, trying desperately to deny it in a multitude of ways. Scratch the surface of an everyday conversation or a greeting on the street and there’s the rolling of the eyes and the looks that say, “Let’s not go there, it’s all too crazy!” Something has broken, and people seem like walking desperadoes with the flag planted like a dagger in their hearts.

Even the alternative media, those writers with whom I share wishes for a peaceful world, have for a good while let their hopes trump realty by claiming the American empire is doomed, as is Israel and the neo-liberal, neo-con agenda. For many months now, I have noticed something amiss with these claims. Too much wishful thinking. Too little appreciation for the machinations of the CIA, M-16, Mossad, Turkish conspiracies. To think these devils would accept defeat without bringing the world down is naïve.

I don’t relish saying all this. It is depressing. But I think it is true.

Some people who know me call me an extremist and claim I make no room for the middle ground. When it comes to U.S. war-waging, I say there is none. It is endless and integral to U.S. foreign policy no matter which party is in office. And the foreign policy is integral to the domestic policy. Without it, the country would be so different. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden – to buy their lies is to be a fool.

To realize the difference between power and innocence is to come to understand the demonic nature of America’s Forever Wars.  When in 2014 President Obama stood at West Point and said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” he was revealing, consciously or not, a hard truth, just as when he received the Nobel Peace Prize and told the world he believed in war.  But he smiled.

For war is the lifeblood of this “exceptional” country.  But if you keep repeating that, don’t expect smiles to come your way.

Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.

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