Two weeks ago my second grade music class at Crow Agency Public School wanted to sing and dance the "Duck & Dive." A week later someone asked if I had seen the old documentary The Atomic Café, which contains a film clip from 1950 of students in a New York City school "ducking and diving" under their desks during a nuclear attack drill. What an interesting coincidence! I remembered seeing that film several years ago, and the clip in question had refreshed my memory of practicing the same nuclear attack drill as a 2nd grader in 1950 at my one-room country elementary school in Iowa. The connection between the two "duck and dive" approaches had never occurred to me before. There is a similarity. But unlike that nuclear attack drill, the Crow Indian song and dance version is rational.
I believe it's important to teach children to deal rationally with dangers. The Crow version of "Duck & Dive" relates to dodging a bullet or an arrow—a rational and useful strategy in warfare. But the 1950's nuclear version presented fear on a much larger scale. Because the teachings in the film were totally irrational—ducking and diving could not possibly protect any students in ground zero—the film was soon pulled from appropriate content for students.
You should check out The Atomic Café if you get a chance. The propagandized statements in the documentary are so dated and off-base that they are hilarious. It's really fun to watch it from the perspective of 2012. The irrationality of fears governing hearts and minds of Americans at that time quickly becomes clear.
Tom Englehardt's book, the United States of Fear, makes a related point. As a nation, we may be succumbing to the same fears and expensive responses in life, blood, human rights abuse and international disrespect that brought down the Soviet Union a few decades ago. Some evidence of this is our two entrenched loyal allies whose brutal dictators were debunked and dethroned (initially against our will) in the Arab Spring: Egypt and Tunisia. Englehardt uses data to illustrate how and why our huge investment of lives and dollars in world-wide military domination is actually damaging our nation and making us less safe, rather than increasing our national security.
We keep seeing more books, articles, and opinion pieces about the decline of America. Until recently, I thought these were misguided attempts to instill fear and contempt for the United States. For example, when I was a teacher in China, back in 2001, I enjoyed confronting students with real economic data when asked, "When (not if) do you think China will overtake America as the number one world power?" Since then, my certainty has vastly diminished. Am I succumbing to my own version of 1950s duck and dive or is the evidence of decline really compelling? I'm starting to ask myself more questions about our position in the world and what it really takes to defend ourselves, versus feeding an insatiable quest for military domination.
Do our fears lead us to imitate the decline and fall of the Soviet Union? Is there more than an ironic coincidence that we are bogged down in a war in the Middle East with the same country that the Soviet Union was fighting just before its demise? Is our heavy toll of human rights abuse, excessive civilian casualties, and casualties of our own troops the real reason for the polls that say a majority of us oppose Obama's war? Have we become skeptical of the continual stream of positive news from the battlefields via the pentagon? Is America really in decline, ready to fall?
I invite fellow citizens to carefully examine and ponder the evidence they see across sources. If we find it compelling, we need to challenge our government to make the kinds of changes that will keep us all safe and guarantee the future of the human race.
This last week of school, when my Crow Indian students dance and sing their "Duck & Dive," I'll be reminded of rational ways to handle fears and find real security. Our awesome power to kill is not rationally the foundation of personal, family and national security. Irrationally, we have degraded the God of Scripture into a god blessing chariots, swords and horses. Now, 2000 years after those sacred writings, we regularly invoke God's blessing of our more efficient technology of massive destruction. It's a minority of Christians in America who still trust what Jesus really says about God's power for personal, family and national security in the face of the fears from which we learned to "duck and dive" for safety. If you doubt this, pick one of the four Gospels and read it entirely. Read right on through Jesus' resurrection and ascension, and try to discern the real messages rather than the conventional ones.
The following material is only in my blog, not in the Big Horn County News:
I had already read much of the content of the book in TomDispatch.com, essays by Tom Englehardt and others.
Here's the jist of Englehardt's book: Since our entry into the nuclear age, having dropped two bombs on two major cities obliterating almost their entire population in one blinding flash each, we the American citizenry have been fed a fear obsession that has twisted our culture into a faster and faster suicidal vortex as a nation.
Believe this? I doubt many Americans do. But I admit that information from that film and that book have brought skepticism to bear on my skepticism.
Our American defense spending harms rather than helps American power and prestige because we end up supporting dictators with our lavish gifts of military hardware and support. And this is calculated as foreign aid. Just on our own defense, we are spending 47 percent of the world's total military spending. The Arab Spring—with the overthrow of US supported dictators in Egypt and Tunisia-demonstrates this erosion of American power. Without our military support of these dictators they would have been overthrown or outvoted long ago. Our habit of seeking unsavory allies to support with military aid is highlighted currently in the continued Egyptian turmoil, because the generals have enormous difficulty relinquishing power to civilian control.
More recently, the efforts to "revitalize the bugaboo of Chinese military power" is cited as justification for Obama's increase in American military spending to expand our world military occupation into east Asia.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the drones don't get you, the fallout must.
This is a review of Tom Englehardt's latest book, February 27, 2012
By Chris (Washington state, USA)
The United States of Fear (Paperback)
Something very much in evidence in this book is Mr. Englehardt's ability as a writer. The essays in this book are well written.
Some of the topics covered by the author include terrorism vs. food poisoning in terms of the threat presented to Americans; Raymond Davis; and the author's education about the world through viewing foreign films while growing up in Manhattan in the 1950's. A recurrent subject in the book is the misleading or farcical nature of the "deadlines" civilian and military officials give for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. The exorbitant costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan military ventures are another prominent theme. For example, he focuses heavily on the mega-embassies/regional command centers/cities within cities that we have built or are building in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Englehardt quotes a National Priorities Project study which found that the $790 million price tag for the new embassy and consular facilities in Afghanistan could have provided jobs for 22,000 teachers, 15,000 healthcare workers and 13,000 clean energy workers in the US. Other exorbitant costs noted by the author include several tens of billions of dollars in unsuccessful programs to train Afghan military and police and $773,000 to remodel a cinder block building to house a KFC/Taco Bell for our soldiers in Guantanamo Bay. The Gitmo torture camp, of course, is still open though Obama promised to close it.
The American method of fighting the "War on Terror" receives coverage in this book. He discusses examples of civilian casualties from the American war in Afghanistan (along with a few in Iraq). He notes that Wikileaks released a video of a US Apache helicopter attack on a Baghdad street in July 2007 that killed 12 non-combatants, including two Reuters employees and a father of two children who had stopped his vehicle to help the wounded of the attack. The Pentagon covered up this massacre until Wikileaks released the video of it. Englehardt notes that Wikileaks also released Pentagon logs showing that hundreds of civilians had been killed in unreported US military actions in Afghanistan. Englehardt reports an incident in February 2010 in Paktia province in Afghanistan. In that incident US snipers killed a local police intelligence chief, his brother and three women. The snipers dug the bullets out of the dead women, bound and gagged them and claimed that the dead men had killed the women in an "honor killing." The American media, as is their wont, accepted the military's version at face value until the version started to crumble and the military paid the victim's relatives $30,000 and sacrificed a goat. Other atrocities include a US raid that killed a prosperous Afghan businessman with ties to the Afghan government and 76 members of his extended family in August 2008; the killing of 27 civilians in an attack on a minibus in February 2010; the indiscriminate shooting by marine special forces retaliating for a suicide bomb along an Afghan road in April 2007, killing--among others-- a 75 year old man and a 16 year old girl gathering grass for her family's farm; and a March 2011 massacre of 9 Afghan boys collecting wood. David Petraeus and Robert Gates apologized for this last atrocity to President Karzai though in the case of another air attack that killed 65 civilians--including children--Petraeus suggested that it was a fabricated atrocity. According to Englehardt, the US has also massacred at least half a dozen Afghan wedding parties in air attacks since 2001. He quotes Stanley McChrystal as saying that US troops have killed a lot of people who were no threat to them at checkpoints in Afghanistan. He notes that US troops have been in the habit of bulldozing homes and destroying agricultural walls in southern Afghanistan in order to build roads and other conveniences for their war against the Taliban.
Englehardt implies that civilian deaths caused by the US military in Afghanistan are, for the most part, not deliberate. However American pilots are often unable to tell the difference between insurgents and non-combatants. Often, information about suspected terrorists is very unreliable.
Englehardt notes that Mike Mullen and Robert Gates declared that Jullian Assange had a lot of blood on his hands as a result of the Wikileaks file leaks. He notes that it is rather rich that Mullen and Gates make this charge, when it is they who have real blood on their hands.
Englehardt's overall picture is that US foreign policy is dominated by a military industrial complex--most particularly Pentagon officials and arms manufacturers who have a vested interest in continued astronomical military spending. State, local and federal budgets are being slashed for essential services but the military budget is only slowed in its growth. The United States accounts for 47 percent of the world's military spending. In spite of the military-industrial complex, Englehardt writes that American power is declining and it won't be long before the US is not the superpower it once was. He suggests that the Arab Spring--with the overthrow of US supported dictators in Egypt and Tunisia-demonstrates this erosion of American power. He notes recent efforts to revitalize the bugaboo of Chinese military power as one of the justifications for increasing American military spending.
It is certainly depressing that Bradley Manning, Jullian Assange and other whistleblowers are prosecuted by President Obama--who also refuses to prosecute Bush administration torture enablers and war criminals. Of course, Obama himself along with Gates, Mullen, George HW Bush, John Negroponte, Bill Clinton etc. are not prosecuted in spite of being guilty of crimes against humanity.
Englehardt discusses the use of drones in US combat operations but I wish he would have cited the studies about the many hundreds of civilians that Obama's drone attacks have killed in Pakistan.
The author provides no footnotes but explains in a note at the very end of the book that URL sources are available on the pages where these essays were originally published at TomDispatch.com (end of this book review)
I began my awareness of my own culpability to fear while in China. Like most residents of rural America, I have gone to several air shows and watched the exhibit of awesome power. Soon after arriving at XiHua University (Pixian County, Chengdu, Sichuan, China), I was treated to the deafening sound of low altitude fighter jets flying in formation, their delta wings in and out of the clouds. Seeing that air force power and watching the red flag with the bright yellow hammer and sickle flying over our campus with the air power overhead gave me a queasy feeling in my stomach. Do I trust the Chinese with this kind of military might like I remember trusting American military might? I wasn't sure.
The 9-11 event while in China only increased my subliminal anxiety. But as time went on we learned to go about our business and gradually adjusted to being with genuinely caring, compassionate friends. I got over it.
Soon after returning from China I happened to watch the documentary, "The Atomic Café." If only we as a nation could reduce our fears to an innocuous fun dance, and stop the flow of our nation's blood and cash. It would help to learn a thing or two from the Crow "Duck & Dive," from Englehardt's book, and from "The Atomic Café." I highly recommend immersion in all three.
--David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
