Verdun and the Forbidden Forest

A photographer and writer named Jonathon Olley has a wonderful photo essay entitled "The Forbidden Forest" here. The photos are from a little article in Orion magazine; a small portion with a nice slideshow can be found on-line and is worth a moment to read and reflect.Imagine if, say, the former border between the U.S. and the Confederate States was a twenty-mile-wide zone where everything from tons of explosives to a hand-sized canister of poison gas lay buried in the earth. Where every basement, furrow, waterline, and sandpit risked encountering these hidden yesterdays in a manner somewhere between nervewracking and tragic.

"Often, with toxic shells held close to an ear, one is able to hear the bone-chilling swish-swish of the liquid gas as the shell is gently rocked from side to side."

Is it any wonder that nations of western Europe have not, by and large, outgrown their dislike for war?

...'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?

An Brief Poem, for Armistice (i.e. Veterans) Day

"In time of dangeror in warGod and the soldier we adore.Danger past, andall things righted?God is forgottenand the soldier slighted."I seldom feel more than a slightly irked contempt for the "Support Our Troops" sort of warrior- and war-hugging that gets trotted out on days like today and the last weekend in May. But this one always seems somehow even more false, since the only real reason for it is to commemorate the end of the insanely stupid slaughter of WW1, which we in fact neither remember nor reverence.

As I tell anyone who "thanks" me for my service today; I didn't do it for you. Oh, and I'll take the bonus Congress promised me now, without a side of beatings and gas, thanks.

I remain stubbornly proud of my service and the ideals of my country that led me to that service.But of the country itself, its "leaders", and many of its people, I am no longer so sure.

The strong do what they can...

Interesting.

This is a "Wordle" word cloud of the Bush Administration's National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2002:The application prepares a graphic measure of the number of times a word is used in a text. It is, then, a graph of the individual word density in the document.

Now, here is the same application product for the Obama Administration's 2010 NSS:I have to echo Robert Farley - I'm intrigued by the prominence of the word "must" in both documents:

"It’s interesting to me that “must” is so big in the tag clouds of both the Bush and Obama NSS." Farley says; “Must” implies a lack of freedom; it’s much different than “may” or “can.” It seems odd that the world’s sole superpower, hegemon, unipolar state etc. thinks strategically in terms of “must” rather than “can”."

Now part of this is, I think, a subset of the U.S. military habit of stating objectives in affirmative terms ("First battalion, Empty-empth Infantry WILL maneuver to secure such-and-such by 0700 21 JUNE 2010", for example).

But another part and, I think, the more substantive part, is the purpose this document and others like it have come to play in the propagandization of and psychological warfare directed towards the U.S. public.

Because of the very condition of our adventures in central and southwest Asia I suspect that the authors of this document intend it to hammer home the cruciality and centrality of military action as a means of enforcing national will and achieving national goals. "Must" is so much less negotiable than "can" or "should". "Must" sends the message that the Evil, Scary Bad People are going to taint our precious bodily fluids now, today, and MUST be defeated even if we have to sacrifice things like civil liberties and diplomatic finesses to do so.

So where I disagree with Farley is in my interpretation of the intent of the word "must". I don't think that "...psychologically, institutionally, and politically the imperative of “must” becomes real for policymakers..." I think that the policymakers know perfectly well that we have other options. But I think that they also know that those options do not have the potential for the optimal result they wish to obtain, regardless of the strong potential for a anti-optimal (that is, not merely less than the outcome that these policymakers wish completely for but a completely antithetical result; blowback, unanticipated outcome, disaster...call it what you wish) result.

They want to convince you, and me, that theirs is the ONLY option, much as BP wants you to believe that the only choice is between continued deepwater drilling using the current means and methods - and accepting the subsequent environmental disasters such as the one we're watching - and complete petroleum depletion and the End of the Industrial Era.

Farley seems to think cynically that the powers-that-be have been captured by their own apocalyptic rhetoric. I'm even more cynical; I think that the thrones and dominations are using these semantic smoke-and-mirrors tricks to continue to supinely ignore their foolery. He thinks that our leaders are fools. I think that our leaders are manipulative bastards who are playing us for fools.

I'm not sure which is truly worse, but I suspect that neither leads to a happy land of sparkle rainbows and fluffy puppies.

Were you born in a barn?

Janus was the god of doors.

The two-faced deity was also the god of endings and beginnings, and in the later Republic assumed the role of the overseer of war and peace.Plutarch of Chaeronea (c. 2nd Cent. AD) wrote:

"Janus also has a temple at Rome with double doors, which they call the gates of war; for the temple always stands open in time of war, but is closed when peace has come. The latter was a difficult matter, and it rarely happened, since the realm was always engaged in some war, as its increasing size brought it into collision with the barbarous nations which encompassed it round about. But in the time of Augustus it was closed, after he had overthrown Mark Antony; and before that, when Marcus Atilius and Titus Manlius were consuls, it was closed a short time; then war broke out again at once, and it was opened."

Virgil explains the meaning of the ritual closing of the gates:

The terrible iron-constricted Gates of War shall shut; and safe within them shall stay the godless and ghastly Lust of Blood, propped on his pitiless piled armory, and still roaring from gory mouth, but held fast by a hundred chains of bronze knotted behind his back.
[Aeneid, 1.293-296]

In other words: the gates were closed to keep War in.

I know that Memorial Day is supposed to be a "holiday" for "honoring" and recalling our war dead. But, frankly, the dead are dead. As a society the 21st Century United States doesn't do honor or remembrance particularly well. We're not, by and large, a retrospective - or introspective - people. Our fear of death largely prevents us from doing much real thinking about the dead as they are, instead of the fictions and romances we tell ourselves about them.So I find that most Memorial Day "memorial" ceremonies - those not simply an honest excuse to cookout and take a day off work - are poorly-disguised flag-waving exercises, where the zombie dead of past glorious wars are invoked to bless the warfighting of their descendants.The United States has never been a particularly peaceful nation. We have sent our people out to kill and die for us in foreign lands since we tried to invade Canada during the Revolution. As we are now. And just as with our dead, we do little introspection, or rumination, about the whys, the hows, the what-now, and the what-comes-after.

We're perfectly happy to pass by the open doors of the Temple of Janus.

Every year on Memorial Day I post this. But this year I'm tired of repeating what most of us here know and what most of those around us neither know nor care. Instead I humbly suggest that we let the dead bury their dead. And think of the living, and the decisions we make for them and to them.

For through those open doors will walk the dead men we'll "honor" the next last Monday in May, and left outside those doors will be the living bereft to whom they will not return.Whenever I used to walk past the open door my father would bark at me "Close the damn door! Were you born in a barn?"

My father would know what to do about the Temple of Janus.