Kemstone's Journal

My recently-renewed interest in Roman history led to a philosophical rumination the other day that I think might be worth writing down.

A lot of profoundly horrifying things happen in the world today, but these horrors sometimes seem small in comparison to the kinds of things that used to happen on a regular basis—people being tortured, children being sacrificed to the gods, chattle slaves being worked to death by brutal masters, and so on. Ancient history is littered with gruesome, sickening tales that will keep you up at night if you ever stop to ponder them.

Few things are more disturbing to think about than the sacking of ancient cities. Tens of thousands of armed soldiers rampaging through your streets, slaughtering all the men and raping every woman, girl, and young boy they can get their hands on before either enslaving or murdering them as well. It’s almost impossible to really wrap your mind around it and imagine what that must have been like from the perspective of those victims. Imagine being the father watching his wife and daughters raped in front of him as he’s beaten to death. Imagine being the little girl who had no concept of war, violence, or sex and is now suddenly subject to a brutal rape and killing. Imagine being that girl’s mother or brother looking on but powerless to do anything about it, knowing you’ll be next. Imagine the despair of knowing that you are not only about to endure such a painful end but that your entire city is being destroyed, everyone you’ve ever known or cared about is suffering the same fate and everything you or your ancestors have ever accomplished is being wiped away forever.

This is by no means a rare scenario. It’s happened tens of thousands of times in human history throughout the entire world. Hundreds of millions of human lives have ended in such a way.

I find myself contemplating such things, getting absolutely sick about them, and then pausing to ask myself why I’m doing this. Why not just accept that it happened and that I’m lucky to live at a time when this kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore? What use is there in dwelling on it?

And I realize that the reason I’m trying so hard to picture what it must have been like for these people is because I’m asking myself a very deep question—a much broader version of a question I’m always asking regarding only my own life: is it worth it?

We all have moments of great despair when we look at our lives and wonder whether we’d rather have never been born. We weigh all the negative experiences against the positive, the pains against the pleasures, the joys against the horrors, and try to determine whether the whole experience is really worthwhile.

When it comes to my own individual life, there was a time when I didn’t think the good outweighed the bad and I wanted to end it, but many good years filled with many great experiences in the mean-time have completely reversed my assessment. Not that I still don’t have moments when I wish I’d never been born, but if I were to die tomorrow I know I’d feel as though my life had been worth living.

Certainly compared to the lives of most ancient people, I’d have to consider myself extremely privileged. Even as an obscure individual with relatively tight financial constraints on my freedom, I’d have to admit that the quality of my life as compared to most ancients is like the quality of the lives of today’s super-rich as compared to mine. If you could take a simple pleasure/pain ratio of the lives of every human being who has ever lived and put them on a spectrum from most pleasurable to most painful I know mine would certainly be close to the high end.

But when I consider the nasty, brutish, and short lives of the masses throughout history and all of the horrors that so many of them had to endure, I’m not making an assessment of my own life but of human life in general. Given all the misery and suffering wrapped up in human existence, would it be better if humanity had never existed at all?

Most people would dismiss this as a pointless question to ask, but my metaphysical leanings actually render it the most important question of all. I am by no means certain what the basic nature of reality is, but I think there’s a strong possibility that the phenomenon of awareness or consciousness is fundamental to the universe, and that despite the appearance of separateness and individuality everything is actually connected. The implication is that there are not billions of individual conscious minds on Earth but one singular ‘Universal Consciousness’ looking out from behind all eyes simultaneously. Conscious minds are merely the window through which the universe becomes aware of itself.

Every experience you have is an experience the universe is having. As the Universal Consciousness you don’t just live your own life but every other life as well. You have been both the victim and the perpetrator of city-sackings, the rape-victim and the rapist, the murdered and the murderer.

Every thought in your mind is a thought the universe is thinking. When you ponder the universe, it’s the universe reflecting on itself. When I consider the suffering involved in human existence, it’s the universe considering whether humanity is a phenomenon it’s glad to have given rise to or whether it would have preferred that the species had never come into being—whether all of the human lives it’s lived have been worth it or whether it would rather have never lived a single human life at all.

Of course the universe is immense and homo sapiens are likely just one among billions or trillions of similar species, and the laws of physics being the same everywhere it’s likely that most species have similarly violent histories full of pain and suffering as well. So when I try to imagine what the worst of the worst kinds of experiences might be like, it’s actually the universe judging whether or not it’s worth it to exist in the first place.

But here I have to stop, because I run into a wall of unanswerable questions. The fact is that not only can I not know what the horrific experiences of the ancients were really like for them, but I also can’t know whether they, when looking back on their whole lives, would consider them worth it in spite of the often-brutal end anyhow. Perhaps the poor raped and murdered girl was happy almost every day of her short life, and only had to endure extreme panic and horror for a few brief minutes at the end. I know that if I had to suffer a violent death I would still probably consider my own life to have been worth it, as the sheer volume of good experiences would certainly outweigh even the most painful experience at the end. Who is to say the same wouldn’t go for victims of torture or city-sackings?

And even if I could actually look at the pleasure/pain ratio of every human being who has ever lived and see clearly that the bad outweighs the good, I’d have no way of knowing that humanity won’t continue its slow moral progress and eventually reach a state of existence in which virtually all suffering is a thing of the past. Perhaps these past few thousand years were just the rough beginning to what will eventually become a multi-million year history of peaceful, enjoyable, worthwhile existence?

Finally, there’s the most important question of all—the question that determines whether or not the universe reflecting on the value of its own existence even matters at all: does the universe have a will?

As individual beings we all seem to have a conscious will of our own. We can make decisions and as long as they don’t violate the basic laws of physics or whatever man-made restraints may apply, we can implement them. But does the Universal Consciousness work the same way? Is there in fact a state of being in which the entire universe can be conscious of its whole eternal self, or can it only awaken through certain structures—brains—that over billions of years slowly evolve the ability to process thought?

To put it simply, can the universe decide not to exist? Most philosophers agree that the most fundamental question is “why is there something rather than nothing?” and many believe that the answer is existential necessity. Non-existence can’t exist. There can be no such thing as nothing. Existence will go on eternally and infinitely, everything that can possibly exist will exist and everything that can ever be experienced will be experienced.

If that is in fact the case, and the universe has no choice but to experience existence in all of its infinite possible forms, it would be akin to saying there is no God, as any truly omnipotent being would have to have the power to not create. If it has no choice but to create and go on creating for all eternity, it would mean pondering the experiences of the ancients for the purpose of judging whether existence is worthwhile is a useless activity after all. It would in fact render all of our activities useless.

I don’t know what’s more depressing—the idea that so many people have had to endure so much suffering throughout history, or the idea that these things only happened because they had to happen and not even God could have stopped them.

At least we know it’s not all bad. There is plenty of joy in the universe to balance out the sorrow, and on our level of existence we are capable of appreciating both—even if on the deepest level both are ultimately pointless.

Trouble is hardly ever not brewing on the Korean peninsula, but things have been heating up recently. As the crazed über-narcissistic dictator Kim Jong Il hands the reins of power over to his young and presumably equally narcissistic son Kim Jong Un, North Korea seems to be itching for war with their South Korean enemies. Between the testing of nuclear missiles and this past week’s artillery bombardment of Yeonpyeong, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine this escalating into full-scale war.

If that happens, I’ll do something I’ve never done before in my lifetime and advocate for the U.S. military to get involved in the conflict. The South Koreans are our allies and it would be wrong of us to stand idly by as the Kims of North Korea attempt to kill millions of them and subjugate the rest. Those living under the North Korean regime have been handed one of the unluckiest lots in life imaginable, and it would be a moral error to let that regime expand and doom another population to the same fate. It would be just as wrong as letting Adolf Hitler conquer Europe.

I say this as someone who vehemently opposed the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan before it started. I didn’t think conventional military tactics were the right approach to stopping terrorism. A nation-state didn’t attack us on 9/11. A small group of people who hate us did, and dropping bombs on their fellow Muslims and killing innocent civilians seemed like the most counter-productive response possible. That would only lead to more terrorism, and more hatred of the U.S. internationally.

Now, if war breaks out in the Korean peninsula it will be an entirely different matter. North Korea is an actual nation-state with an actual military made up of actual soldiers. An act of aggression on their part against South Korea would absolutely call for military intervention. We’d be fighting a country as opposed to an ideology.

The potential benefits of such a scenario are actually enormous. If the U.S. is suddenly confronted with a real war against a real enemy, it would have a clarifying effect on the wars of the last decade. The very juxtaposition of these two types of wars would highlight their differences in a way that we’ve never seen before in our history, and even without having to reflect on it too hard both liberals and conservatives alike would be able to understand why one kind is justified and the other is not.

A war against a Hitler-like aggressor with an actual military would bring the country together like it hasn’t been since WWII, and our political parties might just put aside their bickering for a brief historical moment to deal with a real threat to world peace (though I admit that’s a pretty big might, seeing as how the Republicans have shown us that they’re not above playing politics with matters of international security).

It would also give us a good reason to completely pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, as we couldn’t possibly fight three wars on three fronts at the same time. This would then lead to a restoration of the image of America abroad, as the rest of the world will see us actually doing what we’ve only been pretending to do for the last few decades: defending freedom.

A war fought for noble purposes as opposed to one fought for corporate profits would go a long way to restoring the world’s faith in America, and Americans’ faith in themselves.

All that said, I do not believe such a restoration would be worth the loss of so many Korean lives and the lives of American soldiers, so I sincerely hope that North Korea is just flexing its muscles and that the ultimate result of the death of Kim Jong Il will be peace rather than war.

“Turn on the TV!” James shouted as he entered my college dorm room. “The war is starting!”

Are you serious? I’d just turned the damned thing off about a half hour earlier, getting sick of waiting for the fireworks that for all I knew wouldn’t be coming at all. I’d been glued to the TV all day, watching the cable news networks count down to the moment Bush’s 48-hour deadline for Saddam to leave Iraq reached 0:00. What an anti-climactic moment that had been. Once it came, the reporters started to remind everyone that this was just the count-down to the end of Bush’s cowboy-diplomacy deadline—that the actual fighting might not begin until the next day or later.

Thanks to James, I hadn’t completely missed the historical moment I’d been waiting for all day. The beginning of a war that might come to define my generation.

More than six years later, James reached me through a Facebook chat and informed me that he was enlisting in the military. That he’d very likely be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, but he’d given it a lot of thought and decided it’s what he wanted to do. The terrible economy had cost him his job a year earlier and in spite of his college-degree he couldn’t find any work elsewhere. The military seemed like his best option.

Throughout the years I’d also occasionally ponder joining the fighting, usually in my darkest moments when life seemed too overwhelming to figure out how to live it on my own. After graduating college with a relatively useless degree in philosophy, I spent the next couple of years just trying to figure out how to kill the remaining time I had left before death. The likelihood that there were far more years ahead of me than behind me would at times fill me with despair. I never seemed to fit in this world. What was I supposed to be doing here?

Important things were always happening, of course. Mostly too big to wrap my head around, too big to do anything about. Ever since September 11, the instant I heard someone in my high school classroom say the words, “They hit the second tower” I knew that I was probably one of those human beings cursed to live in interesting times. My sense of personal responsibility increased tenfold on that day and the weeks that followed.

After overcoming my initial reaction of anger and rage at the terrorists, I’d thought about it and decided that the best thing for the United States to do would be not to retaliate. We should go after the people responsible for the attack, but not invade an entire country. Not drop bombs that would kill innocent children and make those people hate us even more. After 9/11 we had a chance to show the world what an honorable nation we could be—to refrain from flexing our military muscles and instead focus only on the individuals responsible for the crime.

That was not a very popular position at the time, but I stood my ground and made my case to anyone who would listen. I pointed out that if we were in fact going to war, it would be people my age who would be doing the fighting. I asked everyone if they’d be willing to die for this cause. At that time, most said yes. Ultimately, most never did.

Had I believed in the cause, I might have enlisted. Had this been an event like Pearl Harbor in which my country had been attacked by an actual army from an actual nation that posed an actual existential threat to us, I would have followed in the footsteps of the “greatest generation” and gone to fight and die for my country.

But I never thought this was a noble cause. I didn’t think the fighting in Afghanistan was necessary, and I found the invasion of Iraq to be even less justifiable. If you’re going to put yourself in a position from which you might actually have to kill people—from which you might actually end up killing children—you’d better have a damned good reason, I thought. And giving my life a sense of purpose or direction never seemed good enough.

Those who’ve fought in these wars have my undying respect and admiration, but I just can’t make myself believe that their efforts have been for a good cause. They haven’t been fighting and dying for freedom. They haven’t even been fighting and dying for the United States of America. They’ve been fighting and dying (and killing and maiming) for Blackwater and KBR, for the military industrial complex, for neoconservative ideologues, and for multi-national corporations who have a vested interest in permanent warfare.

I could never be a part of that. All other considerations aside—the sense of accomplishment, the pride of my family, the benefits of being a veteran—none of these would be worth the sense of responsibility that I’d have to carry with me for the rest of my life for having been a part of one of history’s greatest crimes. And the invasion and occupation of Iraq was and always will be a crime in my mind, regardless of how it ultimately turns out.

But that doesn’t mean I consider the soldiers criminals. Far from it. They were following in the footsteps of their fathers, doing what they saw as the most noble thing they could do. In a sense I envy them. When the last decade becomes nothing more than a distant memory and the wars another chapter in the history books, they’ll be able to tell their grandchildren that they were there—that when their country made the call they stood up and answered it. No matter what the politics, that’s something to be proud of.

And what did I do? I partied with my college friends, I moved to California and relaxed on the beach, I flew to Germany to teach English to businesspeople, and I started a blog.

The Iraq war technically ends today. I’ve come a long way since that night in my dorm-room when James and I watched the bombs falling on Baghdad. I’m still not sure which direction my life is going, but I’m always thinking. These are interesting times, and the sense of historical responsibility is still nagging at me. And if I won’t fight, it seems all I can do now is write.

To all of my fellow millennials who fought in Iraq, who were injured, who died, or who watched their friends die: this one’s for you.

I’ll write a lengthy reflection on the Iraq war when it’s “officially” over at the end of the month, but there’s one aspect of the current situation there that Rachel Maddow did a superb job of highlighting and that I want to emphasize as well.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now that the troops are leaving and Iraq does not appear to be collapsing into complete chaos, the neoconservatives are going to start doubling-down on their efforts to paint the Iraq war as a victory. After all, we got rid of Saddam and left a [somewhat] functioning government in place. What more can the Iraqi people ask for?

Well, how about electricity? Life in Iraq may not have been wonderful under Saddam, but at least they had power—more than they do now anyway.

How many billions have we spent demolishing their nation’s infrastructure? Is it really so much to ask that we spend whatever it takes to get these people some electricity? Isn’t that the least we can do after plunging their country into violent inner turmoil and killing their friends and family members? Is sparing them the long summer nights boiling from the heat within their pitch-dark houses really so much to ask?

The neoconservatives are gearing up to start saying, “You’re welcome, Iraq”. And if life were really better now than it was under Saddam, they might be willing to overlook all those people we killed and find some small measure of gratitude in their hearts. But unless we can get the electrical infrastructure at least back to where it was pre-invasion, we shouldn’t expect them to thank us.

It’s time for an old-school personal journal entry, the kind I used to write all the time but which I now usually end up privatizing because they tend to get a bit too personal. This one has a strong political element so it definitely belongs on the blog even in its current mostly-political incarnation, so I’ll try to fight the impulse to engage in excessive introspection.

Yesterday, one of my friends—Oliver’s girlfriend Lena—was participating in a demonstration here in Hannover and I was invited to come along. Naturally I couldn’t resist—a genuine European lefty-protest is certainly worth checking out if the opportunity presents itself, and it would probably provide me with something worth writing about.

Well, I’m not really sure how that turned out. I can’t guarantee you’ll gain any valuable insight from this entry, but if you don’t mind long stories with no climax and no particular over-arching point, you might enjoy it. Who knows?

I’ll skip the part where Oliver comes by my flat a few hours before the protest starts while Lena meets up with her friends. I’ll start from the point when Oliver and I get off the tram and walk towards the Hannover Congress-Zentrum where the protest is taking place.

Actually, I need to start even earlier to explain what this whole demonstration was about. Apparently the higher-ups in the German military and the executives from the corporations that make up its military-industrial complex all gather together once a year for something called “La Luna” where they meet at the Congress building and have a jolly celebration together. It’s a bit more complicated than that but the Germans had a hard time explaining it in English. It also has something to do with a nearby military airport which Germany lets other countries use for military missions. And the soldiers are all from the “1st Panzerdivision” whatever that means. I tried to research the event but somehow the English-language media neglected to cover it.

So as the military brass and corporate big-wigs are having their lovely party in the Congress building, German lefties gather outside to yell at them and let them know how evil they are. That’s really all there is to it. The message is basically, “You say the military is good? Well, we say it’s bad! Take that!”

To be fair, you could be sure that some of the people who are responsible for the fact that German soldiers are still in Afghanistan would be attending the event. So at least a part of the message—the “Get out of Afghanistan” part—was a bit more specific than the overall “War is bad” message.

Back to the story. Typically, the tram stops right in front of the Congress-Zentrum but Oliver and I were surprised to find that the particular tram we needed wasn’t running at that time. Either they were afraid the protesters might block the tracks or they just wanted to make it as difficult as possible for protesters to get there—most of the protesters naturally assumed that the latter was the explanation.

So it was a bit of a walk from the nearest tram stop to the protest grounds, and all along the way there were scattered bits of colored paper with slogans like, “Es gibt nichts hier zu feirn” (There’s nothing to celebrate here). The one that really caught my eye was “Soldaten sind mörder” which means “Soldiers are murderers”. I told Oliver that you could never get away with saying that in America. You can protest the war all you like, but if you say anything bad about the soldiers you have crossed a sacred line.

Naturally, the streets were swarming with Polizei. We passed several dozen police officers, about a third of them mounted, before finally spotting the actual protest. When we arrived there was a small group of people—less than a hundred—walking down the street behind a van equipped with loudspeakers from which someone was shouting incoherent babble (even if my German was perfect I wouldn’t have been able to understand it) with horrible metal-music playing in the background. The whole group was completely surrounded by police, who were obviously prepared for a protest ten times the size. They were marching so close that you could almost believe they were participating in the demonstration themselves—apparently the Polizei are anti-military too!

In my solid black T-shirt and khaki pants, I was probably the most well-dressed person there. At least my long hair and beard made me fit in with the crowd, which I don’t otherwise need to describe because if you just picture what a crowd of young German protesters looks like you’re right on the mark. These people were living stereotypes.

There was one guy walking a little ahead of us with messy hair and tattered clothes, sporting a vest with a slogan sewed on to the back: “Ich trinke, Ich stinke, Ich bin der böse Linke.” You can probably guess what it means: “I drink, I stink, I am the evil Left.” All I could think was: You’re not helping, guy. I get it—you are exactly what mainstream Germans think you are (you’re jobless, you never bathe, you buy beer with taxpayer money) and you don’t care. But seriously, that message helps no one. It only reinforces the majority of Germans’ perception of young liberals as lazy drunken scumbags who should therefore not be taken seriously.

After a few minutes of marching, Oliver and I both had to piss and we knew Lena was back at the main protest grounds anyway so we split from the marchers and walked towards the Eilenriede—the city forest—which is right across from the Congress building. We took care of some business there and got back to the road just as the protesters were returning to the main grounds.

We had to cross the street to get to the main grounds—the field right outside the Congress building—and while there were no cars coming Oliver and I waited until the light was green because a crowd of five Polizei were standing right there and we didn’t want to give them any excuses.

Lena was there with a few of her friends and I went up and shook everyone’s hand. There was an older lady with gray hair, a thirty-something guy with red eyes, and a thirty-something woman named Anka whom I recognized from Lena’s costume party last year when I went dressed as Jesus and got completely trashed. Anka is quite beautiful and I found myself admiring her frequently throughout the evening, but I confirmed with Oliver that she does (of course) have a boyfriend.

I learned a bit more of the background of the protest from Lena and also learned that this was not just one group that organized the protest but actually several different lefty organizations that were protesting at the same time and trying to coordinate their efforts as they went. One of the groups was about to take a megaphone-van for a spin around the block, and half the crowd would be going with them while the other half—Anka included—stayed behind.

So we marched a little further and I tried to listen to what the woman on the megaphone in the van was saying. Her voice was much clearer but there were too many distractions for me to give the necessary amount of attention it would have taken for me to understand the German. She was definitely talking about Hindenberg a lot for some reason—I knew about the zeppelin but apparently the guy was a real piece of shit as well—and Lena told me that he was from around here or something. I guess this was the anti-Hindenberg part of the demonstration. Yeah, fuck him and his blimp.

At one point the crowd suddenly erupted with noise. They were shouting at someone walking by, and I tried to peer over the crowd to see who they were shouting at. It was some guy in a soldier’s uniform walking back from the zoo (also near the Congress-building) with his family. They were shouting “Mörder! Mörder!” at him. Wow, I thought. If a crowd of anti-war protesters in America were ever caught on tape shouting “Murderer!” at a soldier and his family, it would be broadcast on Fox News 24/7. The soldier, of course, just smiled and continued on his merry way.

This actually happened several more times during the walk, even with occasional chants breaking out. “Blud! Blud! Blud an deine Hande! Blud! Blud! Blud an deine Hande!” which I’m sure I don’t need to translate.

At one point the Polizei came and stopped a girl a few feet away from me who was carrying a sand-filled hospital glove with red paint on it. They opened it up to see if it was some kind of bomb or maybe filled with anthrax or something, but it was just a clever little piece of symbolism. They kindly gave it back to the girl who was acting like her rights had just been terribly violated.

You might be getting the impression at this point that I was feeling a bit of contempt for the protesters, but that’s not totally accurate. I certainly thought a few of them were not helping the cause (like Herr Trinke Stinke) but I always admire people who get out and make their voices heard. I even confess that I have a slight bit of admiration for the people who go to Tea Party rallies—they may be dead wrong on all the issues and possibly a little racist, but at least they’re doing something. At least they’re making their voices heard in a far more visible way than signing online petitions or blogging.

The irony of this particular protest, however, is just how invisible it was. The Congress-Zentrum is not in a very high-density area of the city. The immediate surroundings are quiet residential neighborhoods, the city zoo, and a giant forest. The Polizei had us bottled in nice and tight, so our message wasn’t really reaching anyone other than the poor citizens who happened to live in that area and maybe some elephants at the zoo.

So we got back to the Congress building as the woman in the van finished her speech and tossed on some Rage Against the Machine. Now that’s protest music. If all we did was stand on the lawn and blast Rage all evening I would have been more than happy.

For the next half hour or so we stood on the lawn and shouted at people as they arrived at the Congress building for their La Luna celebration. It wasn’t hard to tell who the bad guys were—they were all dressed in suits and escorting their wives in fancy dresses. They all got hollered at and called murderers as they walked by. Most of them smiled and laughed.

At this point I have to offer another confession and say that my mind was a bit more focused on all the attractive females around than on the politics of it. Man, there were a lot of good-looking lefty chicks. Is a protest a good place to meet women? Could be. But whenever I spotted someone that I felt the urge to make sweet love to, I thought of the million and a half steps I’d have to take to get to that point, beginning with the most difficult step of all: introducing myself and hoping they speak English. No, the ocean between me and these women was far too vast to try and swim.

One of the good-looking women was going around with an egg-carton passing out what looked like eggs but which I believe were actually filled with paint. I thought, “Oh good, now it’s going to get interesting” but I was mistaken. A few people threw eggs at an effigy of a German soldier they’d erected on the field, but nobody egged any of the military-elites or their wives.

Finally the big van parked on the lawn from which someone had been shouting at the Congress building all afternoon picked up its gear and got moving. We were now going to take the protest away from the Congress building and towards an area where there might be some people. We formed up behind the van and noticed that the crowd had now grown to somewhere between two and three hundred. That didn’t seem too shabby but they were a bit disappointed because they’d been expecting to break a thousand. Certainly the Polizei were over-prepared. The ratio of protesters to police was almost 1:1.

One of the police divisions had strange markings on the backs of their jackets and I turned to ask if anyone knew what they meant. Anka, the beautiful thirtysomething, actually answered me in English but only to say she didn’t know. How wonderful of her to go through the trouble of trying to find the English words. I think I might be falling in love. But what to say next? I guess I can ask her how many protests she’s been to before and start a conversation that way…oh she just walked away and is talking to someone else now. Too late. (That’s when I went to Oliver and confirmed that she was, in fact, taken).

We continued marching down the street and shouting “Mörder!” at everyone in a suit who passed by. It felt like we were just this mob of people walking around looking for people to yell at. If you were in a suit, you were targeted. Doesn’t matter what you do for a living or even if you had nothing to do with La Luna…Suit = Murderer.

A bit of a ruckus erupted behind us a few minutes into the march, as a shouting match broke out between two of the protesters. One of them seemed like he was about to get violent, and seven police officers came to drag him away from the rest of the crowd. The older lady that Lena knew said in German I understood perfectly: “Seven police to one protester! Wouldn’t it be a dream if we had seven teachers to one student?”

When we reached a big intersection half the crowd seemed to want to go straight but the mounted police quickly moved their horses in to block the way. Some protesters starting running towards them, apparently thinking that the fun was about to begin. But instead of violence there was just a big shouting match and in the end the group took a right-turn and went the direction we were apparently allowed to go.

At that point, Lena and Oliver had to leave because they needed to be back in Celle by 9 p.m. and it was 8:00 now. I said goodbye to all the people I’d “met” including the lovely Anka, and the three of us broke ranks and headed back towards the Congress building where Lena’s car was parked.

Along the way she found a discarded sign and figured she’d take it back with her because the placard could be painted over and used for future protests. If it weren’t for the sign, nobody would have been able to know we’d been a part of the protest group, but the sign changed the whole dynamic. The police kept their eyes on us, and as we approached the Congress building and passed within inches of some of these suit-clad politicians, soldiers, and businessmen with their fancily-dressed wives (murderers, all of them) we got plenty of dirty looks. I found I had the urge to start yelling “Blud an deine Hande!” at them, but the police could have cracked my skull within fifteen seconds.

There were a lot more ‘murderers’ arriving now but the protest had moved on to the city so they were spared the bombardment of insults. I said that a much more effective tactic would have been to just slash all their tires, as oddly enough the police didn’t seem to have anyone monitoring the parking lot. I didn’t know any of those people but their fancy suits and dresses seeped under my skin somehow and I just felt this strong loathing towards them. These are the power-elites I’m always railing against. They may be second-rate power elites but they still profit from bloodshed. The fact that they were there to celebrate their ill-gotten success was a tad infuriating.

Hence the protest, which all in all I’d say was a good thing. Yeah, there were a lot of idiots there and it might have contributed to reinforcing negative stereotypes of left-wing activists, but just the very existence of left-wing activists is a good thing. Thanks to their visibility, the political spectrum in Germany is much farther to the left than in America where it seems that the only protesters are the Tea Party crowds on the right. Because Germany does have a radical, left-wing fringe, it provides breathing room for the more moderate liberals to take more liberal positions. “Yes, I think certain aspects of socialism are beneficial to a civilized society, but that doesn’t mean I want to hand over complete control of everything to the state like some of my liberal friends do.” In America, if you so much as suggest that it might be a good idea for the government to maybe provide health insurance for just a few citizens, you’re a radical socialist communist Maoist.

Without frequent, visible left-wing protests, the media narrative is that all of the political energy is on the right. The American left has retreated from the streets to the blogosphere and we’re suffering the consequences for it. Politicians tend to be reactionary types, and right now they’re only reacting to the Tea Party because the left isn’t making its message heard.

So to my fellow American lefties I say: Germans were protesting the war in Afghanistan yesterday. What have you been doing?

I’ve had some trouble figuring out how to approach this story. With over 90,000 previously classified documents from the war in Afghanistan having been posted on WikiLeaks, an online state-independent organization dedicated to fighting power through truth, most of the media coverage thus far has been either about WikiLeaks itself or about how there is nothing contained in these documents that we didn’t already know. I’ll touch briefly on what I see as the three main elements to the story—what it says about the wars, how the media has covered it, and the larger implications of the existence of an organization like WikiLeaks in terms of humanity’s future.

The War

I confess I haven’t read all 90,000 documents, so I can’t offer too much analysis of what they actually contain. What I do know from reading articles about the documents is that they contain details that basically confirm everything critics of the war have been saying for years—that it looks to be going very badly, that Pakistan’s interests aren’t exactly aligned with ours and they may be working against us in some cases, and that far too many innocent civilians have been killed by the U.S. military either through recklessness, carelessness, or honest errors of judgment.

Those of us who have been critical of the war from the very beginning can point to this and say it supports the arguments we’ve been making. Most importantly, these documents should highlight the fact that what we’re doing in Afghanistan (and Iraq as well) is not ‘warfare’ in the sense that most Americans still think of the term—two opposing armies meeting on the battlefield with the intention of doing as much damage to the other side as possible—but is more of an occupation. When you’re looking for historical precedents, this is far more like the British occupation of [insert name of third-world country here] than it is like either of the two World Wars.

Ironically, we may have Rush Limbaugh to thank for helping us drive this point home. His completely outrageous misunderstanding of the nature of this war, deliberate or otherwise, perfectly exemplifies the problem with the war hawks’ thinking:

“The documents cover some known aspects of the troubled nine-year conflict. US Special Operations Forces have targeted militants without trial.” Afghans have been killed by accident. Why, that is unheard of. That is unheard of, in any war, anywhere in the history of the world, that civilians have been killed by accident?

That’s unheard of! Do you realize what this says about us? How guilty, how rotten-to-the-core can this country be? Innocent Afghan citizens killed by accident! In the old days it used to be on purpose (i.e., Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden). In the old days the definition of winning a war was killing people and breaking things. In the old days, there was no such thing as a “surgical strike.” In the old days, you purposely killed innocent civilians. That’s what war was all about. That’s how you won it! But now all of a sudden these big WikiLeaks documents say that Afghans have been killed by accident. Whoa, the incompetence of the US military!

By completely missing the point, Rush has actually confirmed the point we’re making. This is not WWII, in which victory can be secured by carpet-bombing cities and devastating the enemy to the point where his will to fight is broken—in this kind of conflict ‘winning’ involves actually helping the civilians, providing them security and infrastructure in order to win their hearts and minds so that they would rather support their government and fight the Taliban instead of joining the Taliban to fight their government. If people like Rush Limbaugh—who seem to relish the idea of indiscriminate destruction—want that kind of war, they need to rethink their support of this one.

If we decided to do a Dresden-style carpet-bombing of Kabul, it would be like kicking the ball through our own goal-posts a thousand times over. Every last able-bodied Afghan civilian would take up arms against us, and the rest of the Muslim world would join them. The war would be over. The victory would belong to the Taliban, to Al Qaeda, and to every other militant or insurgent group that we’re supposedly waging ‘war’ against.

The fact is, ‘war’ as we know it seems to be coming to an end. This piece by Andrew Bacevich lays out this case perfectly, and it’s the biggest lesson that we could potentially learn from these leaked documents if our nation were to actually have a serious discussion about it.

The Media

Unfortunately we’re not going to have a serious discussion about the nature of war in the 21st century any time soon, thanks to the nature of the American mainstream media in the 21st century. The reaction to this leak has been every bit as pitiful as one would expect, and the media’s extreme deference to the established power-structure has seldom been more apparent. It’s as if every corporation within the military-industrial complex got together to feed their talking points not just to the White House but directly to the media organizations themselves.

“This is not news” was the headline from nearly every front. “Nothing to see here. No big revelations. This is only stuff we already know.” Jason Linkins and Ben Craw at the Huffington Post did a superb job of mashing together the reaction to the leaks from the White House and the media, which are barely distinguishable:

To be [extremely] fair to the White House and the media, this is a legitimate point. What has been revealed by the documents are merely the details behind the broader facts that we already knew if we’d been paying any attention.

But the best points are made right at the end of the clip, as Jon Stewart says “I’m not reacting to the newness of it, I’m reacting to the fucked-uppedness of it,” and Dennis Kucinich wonders why—if we already knew all of this—we haven’t been debating it for the last six years. This may not be new, but it’s fucked up stuff that calls for debate and frankly should have been debated every step of the way.

But these leaks don’t fit the proper time-table for the White House and the media. This is supposed to be election season, when everyone is talking about the economy and the impact it will have on the upcoming mid-terms. Afghanistan is not supposed to be among the election issues this year. The debate is supposed to happen next year when we approach the July 2011 deadline that Obama said would be when we begin our withdrawal.

But if things really are going as badly as the documents suggest, there’s no excuse not to have the debate right frickin now. This has been the single deadliest month of combat in Afghanistan since the war began. If we know the war is un-winnable, why let our soldiers continue to die for a lost cause? The sad truth is, our brave men and women overseas aren’t dying for national security or even for Afghan liberation anymore—they are dying for politics.

The Future

This is why organizations like WikiLeaks have such tremendous potential for the future of humanity on this planet. I’ve written extensively about the current precipice on which we stand, from which we can either sit idly by as civilization collapses and the human species faces extinction, or wake up and do what needs to be done to tear down the existing power structures and put something in their place that will allow for a peaceful, sustainable existence worldwide.

One of the biggest tools of the powerful is secrecy. The less the masses know about what the power-elites are doing, the less chance there is that we’ll be able to stop them. Certainly, as long as no one is held accountable, they won’t be afraid to make decisions that benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Case-in-point—we’re just now learning about what was said in behind-closed-door meetings regarding the escalation of the Vietnam War 40 years ago. Because the transcripts of these meetings were classified and everyone in the room knew they would remain classified for the next four decades, they didn’t have to worry about making mistakes or doing the right thing. They needed only do what they wanted to do or what it was in their best short-term political or financial interests to do—by the time anyone found out they’d either be dead or too old to bother prosecuting. Currently, the White House can make any decisions it wants with impunity because they don’t have to worry about being held accountable for another forty years.

WikiLeaks has the potential to change that. Had the person who leaked these documents online gone to an actual mainstream news organization, it’s likely the editors would have sat on the story. By putting it on WikiLeaks, they guaranteed that the story would get out there. WikiLeaks itself can’t be prosecuted for leaking the documents because it doesn’t exist within the jurisdiction of a particular country.

As Janine R. Wedel and Linda Keenan write, WikiLeaks can serve as a counter-weapon to the “Shadow Elite” who direct the course of world events. The people who benefit from the existing power structures, who profit from war and by sucking money from the middle class, can only get away with it as long as nobody is paying attention. If somebody at the highest echelons of power suddenly develops a conscience, WikiLeaks will be waiting.

Yes, there is the potential for some innocents to be harmed if leaks are made irresponsibly, but it’s a small price to pay for a much greater good.

I keep saying that the internet is the best chance we have to come together as a species and really change the way the world works from the ground up. So far we haven’t even come close to realizing that potential, but sites like WikiLeaks could go a long way towards bringing us to that goal. It can be one of the most powerful tools we have to fight back against the powerful, and I hope its influence continues to grow.

At the very least, it can help make up for what the mainstream media is missing, and force us to examine facts that would not have otherwise been reported. The facts about the war in Afghanistan almost all lead to the conclusion that our nation is doomed unless it starts withdrawing, so the more facts that come to light the more pressure there will be to do so. Neither the White House nor the leadership of either political party wants to deal with that pressure right now, but that’s too bad. The lives of our soldiers, the security of the Afghan people, the health of our economy, and the long-term interests of the human race depend on keeping that pressure as high as possible for as long as it takes.

The argument for American troops remaining in Afghanistan is essentially that Afghanistan needs our help. Without a strong U.S. military presence there, the Taliban will retake control, impose brutal Sharia law on all the citizens, and life for the Afghan people will be much worse than if we stay.

If that was all there was to it, I’d be saying we should stay. If we had the capability to really make Afghanistan a better country through our military presence, then I’d be the first to advocate intervening in their affairs. Not only that, but I’d also call for us to intervene in Somalia, Darfur, and everywhere else where people are suffering at the hands of brutal, corrupt, or nonexistent governments.

I’m not opposed to the idea of American Interventionism—I simply recognize that there is no “America” anymore, at least not in the sense that most people believe.

In the prophetic 1976 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky spells it out brilliantly in the pivotal scene in which network chairman Arthur Jensen explains to Howard Beale, his news-anchor-turned-crusader-for-America, how the world really works:

For those who still believe that America can and should spread its ideals throughout the world and bring peace and democracy to all, I would emphasize these words:

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels.

…

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

There is “America” and there is America. “America” is the land of the free, home of the brave, champion of human rights and individual liberty, and crusader for the rights of man worldwide. America, on the other hand, is a governmental structure which has made itself extremely well-suited to Big Business interests. Multi-national corporations can do extremely well by putting America to good use. Tax-loopholes, virtually no regulation, and the strongest military the world has ever seen.

The only flaw in Arthur Jensen’s speech is this:

And our children will live, Mr Beale, to see that perfect world in which there is no war nor famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit. In which all men will hold a share of stock.

In all fairness to Chayefsky, this is what the corporate titans who really control the world probably tell themselves to justify their actions—that when all the world is a business there will be no need for war. But they ignore one important thing: war is great business.

Military and defense contractors, oil companies, drug-lords, corrupt government officials, and a slew of multi-national corporations all stand to make loads of money through continued American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is their bidding that our troops are doing there. American interventionism is actually corporate interventionism conducted through America.

But what if “America” actually existed? What if, as a nation, we collectively decided to intervene in countries that needed our help? What if instead of deploying armies of soldiers equipped with guns and bombs, we deployed armies of doctors equipped with medical supplies?

If you have the time, I’d strongly recommending watching this clip from the Young Turks’ “Rethink Reviews” segment in which documentary-film critic Jonathan Kim discusses the film “Living in Emergency” (about Doctors Without Borders) with Cenk Uygur (discussion begins at 4:49):

Doctors Without Borders is a non-governmental organization that does exactly the kind of intervention I wish America would do—sending doctors into impoverished nations and war-zones to offer humanitarian assistance to the people who need it most.

For those of you without the time or patience to sit through the whole clip, here is what Doctors With Borders did in 2006 alone:

• Held more than 9 million out-patient consultations
• Hospitalized half a million patients
• Delivered 99,000 babies
• Treated 1.8 million people for malaria
• Treated 150,000 malnourished children
• Provided 100,000 people with HIV and AIDS retro-virus therapy
• Vaccinated 1.8 million people against meningitis
• Conducted 64,000 surgeries

They did this with a team of 20,000-26,000 doctors and nurses who work for free, either out of the goodness of their hearts or to pad their resumes. Either way, they do an amazing amount of good with an amazingly small amount of resources.

Here are the statistics that will blow your mind:

• In 2006, the United States spend about $2 billion per week in Iraq.
• Doctors Without Borders runs with a budget of about $400 million per year.
• For the price of a week in Iraq, we could have either funded Doctors Without Borders for five years, or quintupled the size of Doctors Without Borders and ran it for one year.

• It’s estimated that there are at most 100 Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, and we have about 100,000 soldiers there at a cost of about $1 million per soldier per year.
• This means we have about 1,000 troops per Al Qaeda member, which means we are spending $1 billion per Al Qaeda member.
• This amount of money would fund Doctors Without Borders for 2.5 years.
• National priorities: We can either chase one Al Qaeda member in Afghanistan for a year or fund Doctors Without Borders for two and a half years.

• This fiscal year, we’re spending $167 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. This amount of money would fund Doctors Without Borders for 417.5 years.

Do I even need to spell it out? If the idea behind American Interventionism is to improve the lot of humanity on a global scale, there are far better ways of doing it than dropping bombs on civilians. If the main argument for staying in Afghanistan is that we’re helping the Afghan people, it is undeniable that the money could be spent in much wiser ways to help much more people. Not necessarily by funding Doctors Without Borders, but by modeling our overseas interventions as humanitarian rather than military campaigns.

Obviously, security is important and we need to have soldiers to protect the doctors we deploy as well as to support the national governments of countries threatened by violent insurgency. But right now the focus is far more on the cost of weapons than the cost of medical supplies.

The entire justification for the Global War on Terror is to fight the enemy overseas to keep America safe at home. But by making this an almost purely military endeavor, we’re only boosting the perception that America is an Empire and we’re occupying these foreign countries out of our own selfish interests. As such, more terrorists are recruited and we lose the support of allies who were otherwise willing to help us in the fight against violent extremism.

But if we spent the same amount of money on medicine and infrastructure as we do on weapons, the perception would be completely different. Our international image would be unassailable, and we’d once again be looked up to by the rest of the world with respect and admiration. What Muslim kid is going to strap on a bomb and blow himself up to fight the country that built his school or cured his father of a terminal illness? Terrorist organizations would find themselves obsolete within a matter of years.

Unfortunately, this is never going to happen, precisely because “America” as it was once understood no longer exists. We may be the most powerful nation-state on earth, but we’re not the most powerful entity. The multi-national corporations have all the power, and it’s in their best interests to keep the engines of war churning, to keep third-world nations impoverished, and to keep the peoples of the world divided, distrustful, and hateful of each other.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today.

You can’t meddle with the primal forces of nature.

When Obama announced his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan (or ‘surge’ if you prefer), he also said we would begin drawing down troop levels in July 2011, a move that most people see as more political than practical.

First off, the president said from the beginning that July 2011 was only when forces would begin to be brought home – which means he could conceivably bring back just a few thousand troops and still technically meet the deadline.

But more importantly, the White House and military have made clear the deadline can simply be changed depending on conditions on the ground. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said Thursday that if the strategy doesn’t look like it’s working at the end of the year, the military may recommend that the timeline be altered.

True, he may have been trying to placate both sides by giving the right their escalation and the left their timetable for withdrawal, but there’s a very practical benefit to having a deadline that hasn’t been getting much focus.

Rachel Maddow is in Afghanistan this week, and one of the things she keeps mentioning is the importance of the July 2011 deadline. It gives the Afghans a sense of urgency by sending them a message that our commitment is not open-ended. The U.S. Army is not going to be around to provide security forever, so if they don’t want the Taliban to take control they’d better step up their security efforts now.

John McCain doesn’t seem to understand this, or at least he’s pretending not to:

Leaving aside the fact that the withdrawal date is obviously not ‘firm’, just the idea of such a date supports rather than undermines the strategy. What would happen if we didn’t set a date? What if McCain were president and went with a strategy of announcing that the United States would remain in Afghanistan for as long as it takes—even a million years if necessary?

Our Afghan allies would have no sense of urgency to build up their army, police force, and infrastructure on their own. They’d simply get used to relying on the U.S. for everything.

And our enemies, who McCain thinks are now just waiting in their caves until July 2011, would have a much easier time recruiting if the announced policy of the U.S. was basically to occupy their land indefinitely. In fact, they already think that is our policy, and with good reason. Most of them are fighting us because we’re occupying them. I’m speculating, but I’d bet that none of them actually believe the U.S. has any intention of ever withdrawing. If they thought we really wanted to leave and give them their country back, there would be no reason for them to fight us now. But they are fighting us now, so we might as well announce a withdrawal date.

I’d like nothing more than for our mission to succeed and for Afghanistan to be able to govern and protect itself free from the threat of a Taliban takeover. I’m just not convinced that after 9 years, we’re capable of doing that job, and I’m not willing to go another 90.

The chairman of the Republican National Committee was recently caught on tape giving possible talking points to republican candidates for this Fall’s mid-term elections:

If you had trouble hearing, this is what he said:

Keep in mind, again, our federal candidates, this was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not, this is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in. It was one of those, one of those areas of the total [horde?] of foreign policy…that we would be a background sort of shaping the changes that were necessary in afghanistan as opposed to directly engaging troops. But it was the president who tried to be cute by…flipping the script deomonizing iraq while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well if he’s such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right? Because everyone who has tried over a thousand years of history has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways that we can engage in Afghanistan without committing more troops…

Of course the neoconservatives and the rest of the establishment Republican Party immediately blasted him for these comments and demanded his resignation. Michael Steele, who is now infamous for making stupid political gaffes that spark calls for his resignation, isn’t going to do so now. But it’s being reported that because this particular gaffe represents the polar opposite of the Republican Party’s stance on Afghanistan–namely that if anything Obama should be escalating the war even more than he is–that while he may not resign, Steele will essentially be irrelevant for the rest of his time as RNC Chairman.

If only the GOP’s strategy were as simple as it seems–just look at whatever Obama’s position is on anything and advocate for the opposite. That’s what they did on health care and financial reform, and what they’re planning to do on energy and immigration legislation. Michael Steele might have assumed that this would be the strategy for Afghanistan as well–since Obama wants to escalate it, the GOP should now oppose it. Call it “Obama’s war”. Tie it around his neck like a stone and let it drag him down, just like Iraq dragged Bush down.

The irony is, this would be a winning strategy. If republicans actually listened to Michael Steele and repeated his talking points, “Don’t get into a land war in Afghanistan” is a message I think would resonate across the political spectrum. If the republicans suddenly became the anti-war party standing opposed to the democrats’ inistence on continuing to wage this hopeless and costly battle, they’d completely dominate the mid-term elections and pick up seats all over the place.

It’s all a matter of whether their raging right-wing base could let its hatred of government spending overcome its love of war. The Tea Party hates spending and they keep crying about the deficit, but they insist we keep fighting in Afghanistan. Well, give them a choice between the Republican plan of not spending money at home or in Afghanistan and the Democratic plan of spending money all over the place (though still not enough at home) I’ll wager those people will ultimately choose their wallets over their smart-bombs.

Hell, if the Republican Party suddenly decided to campaign on ending the war, I might even consider supporting them.

Sometimes it really feels like the people in power are deliberately robbing the poor to give more money to the rich. Or to put it more accurately, like they’re funneling money from the middle class to pay their rich friends in the military industrial complex, the energy industry, Wall Street, and so on.

Whenever there’s talk of cutting spending, it’s almost always about spending on the middle-class and never about subsidies to giant corporations. A huge case-in-point came last week when House republican leader John Boehner gave an interview in which he made a policy suggestion for how to deal with the deficit:

House Republican Leader John Boehner said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review out today that he would back raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 for those who will not retire for another 20 years.

Obviously, we can’t keep paying out social security checks if we want to pay for war in Afghanistan. We’re talking priorities, people.

It might not be as scary if it weren’t for the fact that the talk of cutting entitlement spending weren’t coming from both sides of the aisle. Obama took a lot of heat from his own supporters for creating a bipartisan deficit commission to address the growing problem.

“We’re going to mess with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security because if you take those off the table, you can’t get there,” commission co-chair Erskine Bowles, former Clinton White House chief of staff, said in a March speech. “If we don’t make those choices, America is going to be a second-rate power and I don’t mean in 50 years. I mean in my lifetime.”

They keep talking about how Social Security is in crisis. That it’s going to go bankrupt unless we take drastic measures such as privatization (i.e. handing control of our retirement money to the same people who caused the financial collapse). This is based on the premise that once revenues from payroll taxes fall short of the cost of paying out benefits, it will be broke. But as Paul Krugman explains, this doesn’t take into consideration the last 25 years of surplus in the program. Social Security is just fine. It’s this giant cash-cow that the wealthy interests have had their eyes on for a long time. They can’t wait to raid social security to cover their financial bets, pay for more war, and do whatever else it is they do with our money.

The big misunderstanding comes from the word we use for programs like social security and medicare: “entitlement” programs. Yes, we’re “entitled” to that money because it’s our money. We pay into the system our whole lives with the expectation that when the time comes and we can no longer work or afford our medical bills, the government will be there to help us out. But they’re trying to take that away from us, to take the money we’re entitled to (because it’s ours–not because it’s some kind of gift that they promised us) and use it to pay for war and financial shenanigans.

Cenk Uygur does a great job explaining it in this clip from The Young Turks:

Don’t let them tell you we can’t afford to pay back your money that you’re paying into the system. There are a hell of a lot of other things we can cut, starting with unnecessary and unwinnable wars.