The hate that dare not speak its name
MELBOURNE AGE April 6 2003
By Terry Lane
My friend Q (I will give him deep anonymity) says to me, apropos the war: "I know I shouldn't say this, but when I read that Iraqis have had a small and unexpected victory I feel really pleased. I want the Iraqis to win. I know that they won't, but I can't stop hoping."
We laugh it off as good old schadenfreude. But we are embarrassed. He has dared to say the unsayable. He has given a name to the hatred that dare not speak its name.
On the television, a smartly uniformed, handsome, clean young spokesman for the US army tells us, with a solemn face, that the deaths of the women and children in the mini-van is entirely the fault of Saddam Hussein. Their blood is on his hands, he says. And I am embarrassed to confess it, but at that moment I would have liked to have seen a Scud fall on his cruel, sanctimonious head.
When the army goes to war in our name but without our concurrence, what are we entitled to feel and to hope for?
If we believe that their mission is wicked, are we not bound to pray for their defeat? We can hardly be indifferent to their possible victory, which will only reinforce the delusion that they were on a mission from God.
In the present case, we know that the wicked will prosper. American imperial ambitions will be satisfied. Twenty-three ministries to administer Iraq after the war are going to be headed by Americans. Their immediate underlings will all be Americans. Each ministry will have four Iraqi advisers, all appointed by Washington - what used to be known as Quislings in wars past.
The new Iraq will do business only with the US. The pipsqueak partners in the coalition of the cruel will apparently get no say. And George the Smaller wants us to believe that America has no imperial intentions.
Tony Parkinson, The Age's international editor, is incensed that an American academic has said in public that "the only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the US military. I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus". (A reference to the display of dead Americans in Somalia in 1993.)
It is a shocking idea. I don't want to see even one Mogadishu. The dilemma for the person of peace is this: I want the army of my country, which is engaged in an act of gross immorality, to be defeated - but I do not want a single soldier killed or wounded.
In 1992, with memories of Gulf War I still fresh, Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote in The Spectator about the moral ambiguities of being on the wrong side in a war. He was writing about the British bombing of German cities to break the civilian will to continue with the war. In one night in 1943, Hamburg was set alight and 40,000 people died. They were, in the current newspeak of war, "degraded" and "deconflicted" in a massive act of collateral damage. Lord Cherwell called the Hamburg inferno "dehousing".
Wheatcroft tells of reaction to the carnage from two points of view. A friend tells him: "A (German) woman of very noble principles said to me later, 'I shouldn't really say this, but I felt a wild joy during those heavy British raids. That was the punishment for our crimes against the Jews'."
But one British airman who took part in the raids on Hamburg said: "Whatever statesmen or braided air marshals may say or write, it was barbarous in the extreme. 'Whoever harms a hair of one of these little ones . . .' I expect no mercy in the life to come. The Teacher told us clearly. We disobeyed."
In the end, those of us who cherish peace must admit that we are moral and political failures. We did not strive hard enough to keep the destiny of the nation out of the hands of the egregious war lovers. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20030406/263296e4/attachment.htm>