Elie Wiesel, reluctant warrior

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sun Dec 22 12:37:13 PST 2002


[fwd Carl Remick]:

``...If the US, supported by the UN Security Council, is forced to intervene, it will save victims who are already targeted, already menaced. And it will win. The US owes it to us, and owes it to future generations. As the great French writer Andre Malraux said, victory belongs to those who make war without loving it.'' Elie Wiesel

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Forced to intervene? As in forced by what other than the desparate need to find bigger and fatter scapegoat for 9/11?

Malraux was referring to the reluctance of the US to launch itself into WWII and he wrote that in the early Sixties, as he thought back to the 1920s when the US was in relation to Europe, something like China is to the US, essentially a vast unknown. He remembered when he couldn't feel the overwhelming presence and pressure of the US on the world, and was thinking generously toward what seemed to be a mixed blessing. Since then, it has been many wars ago since the US has loved anything as much as war and empire.

Malraux thought it ironic that the US might inherit the worldq without wanting it. But I think the great surprise of WWII was that the US discovered in its collective psyche, that indeed it did love war and could imagine nothing else but its own empire upon the earth---the whole earth. Whether this is true or not, in fact, the US has done little else for the world but reign sixty years of wars, death, devastation and exploitation, in the name of its empire. It is not a question of whether or not any other power would have done better or worse, and in the past other powers have done both better and worse. The question is, is that really all that US is to itself and the world---a vast, powerful and bellicose killing machine? I suspect the answer is yes. And, the only protection that any people can seek against this nightmare is so contradictory and absurd that it turns their lives and dreams into the surreal. The only protection against the US is to join it literally by immigrating or conceptually by subsuming their own history under a US imperial protectorate.

The US will tolerate no other alternate history to its own enlightened Messianic vision. It is this ridiculous imperial presumption that Elie Wiesel is referring to whether he realizes it or not. Because, it is only within the circle of this preposterous conceit that it can make any sense at all to say that there are victims who have yet to be victimized prior to their murder, oppression, and exploitation---except that they have not been graced with the beatitude of the US gaze and they are therefore victims of all that lays beyond it, all that lays in darkness and shadow beyond the cone of wondrous light that the US shines upon the earth.

Chuck Grimes



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