Open Letter to the Iraqi People
To the people of Iraq who suffer under the US occupation:
Those of us who opposed this war cannot apologize to you for what our government has done. But we can offer out condolences and our solidarity. As a former member of the US military, I join thousands of other veterans who abhor this administraton and its inhuman, illegal, and immoral occupation of your land and your society.
In case you do not understand how our society works now, I will also point to the complicty of our major so-called news organs in facilitating the invasion and supporting the occupation. The American people are not monolithic, any more than the Iraqi people are. But I can generalize enough to say that we are one of the most indoctrinated peoples in the world. This indoctrination is all the more powerful, because part of our national mythology is that we are free to choose… free to choose Coca-Cola or Pepsi, free to choose Ford or Chevrolet, free to choose MSNBC or CNN. free to choose Republican or Democrat.
We are free to choose between the economic, cultural, and political products offered to us by our dominant class. And since we also enjoy the comforts afforded by cheap oil from your region and cheap prodcuts made in sweatshops that are far, far out of our sight, that comfort translates into a great deal of complacency.
What passes for public discourse here is produced by the very rich and offered up as a commodity; and one of those commodities is a kind of melodrama of good versus evil, and the media participates in this because it is easy to sell, and because it sells the products that are advertised between 20-second “reports” that are supposed to substitute for understanding. Moral ambiguity doesn’t sell. Self-criticism doesn’t sell. The reality of war as you have experienced it in Iraq definitely doesn’t sell… unless it becomes a scandal.
So I have a suggestion for you that can help break through this veil of mystification that the government and the media-of-the-rich have stretched between my people and your people. Amplify a scandal.
There was a video made recently by a Marine in Iraq, called “Hadji Girl.” It was a cruel, racist, and woman-hating song that a Marine sang for other Marines at a kind of party there, that found humor in the lyrics that celebrated the killing of Iraqi children; and it was emblematic of the mindset that underwrites the cruel and racist occupation of Iraq. The cheering by the enitre unit during this video shows that the excuses made for this video — that it is not typical — is a lie.
I suggest that Iraqis begin a graffitti campaign all over Iraq, painting the term HADJI GIRL everywhere, and posting an internet link, as well as distributing flyers that show the translated lyrics of this reprehensible song. Paint this term so ubiquitously that no journalists camera can escape it. Make signs for every demonstration, for every shop, for every car, so that when journalists aim their cameras at anything, someone can hold up the sign that says HADJI GIRL. Build a movement around the song, its racist title, and its disprespect for Iraq.
The reason I suggest this is that once a campaign like this gains enough momentum, it can no longer be ignored by our media; and this song embodies everything that is wrong with the occupation — its imperial hubris, its true aim of domination, its racism and Islamophobia, its militarism, its dehumanization of occupied and occupier alike, and its wanton cruelty. It will help hasten the end of the war, and allow Iraqis to reclaim their own futures, as well as repatriate our soldiers before more of them can be infected with this hatred. My own son is in the military and at risk to be dehumanized.
This occupation must end. I encourage translation and wide distributon of this letter among Iraqis.
Yours for sovereignty and peace,
Stan Goff
Michael:
Damn that’s a REALLY great idea! To my knowledge only the blogosphere has covered that story in any detail.
I have a friend that has had some success with blogging and will probably being going over to Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division at the end of the year for the purposes of “independent journalism” where she will post her findings on her site. Personally I feel that she is going over to cheerlead a bit if you take my meaning. She tells me that she has phone contact with soldiers in Iraq and she supports the claims that incidents like this Hadji song and other incidents we’re finding out about are red herrings.
Personally I think her desire to “support out troops” is so large that she’s in denial. If she goes over there I hope she comes back whole and in one piece of course, but I also feel that she’ll go over there and see what she wants to see. I was amazed that she grabbed onto a war that she initially opposed for the sake of supporting the troops, even after the WMD/terrorist link search went to hell. She explains to me that we have to “finish the job” over there, even if all the reasons we were given to go in the first place were false. I also got that response also from a Navy SEAL on his blog. He was saying that if he ever met someone from the peace movement when he got back home he’d punch them in the nose. I replied that I would continue to do everything I could to end this war and bring him back safely (yeah, I know, like a SEAL needs MY protection!) I said a broken nose was a small price to pay for saving lives. His reply was that he’d rather stay and “finish the job” so that someone else wouldn’t have to go. FINISH WHAT? Anyway, we exchanged some respectful words and I wished him well and Godspeed. That was the end of it.
I think there are a lot of people here and over there that simply don’t want to admit that a lot of people died and are still dying for absolutely nothing. I think they cling to it desperately b/c if they were forced to admit this was all for nothing they might go insane…it makes me sad and damn angry….
19 July 2006, 7:00 pmDeAnander:
In doing or in reading about social justice work, I often find myself asking: What does it take to change a person’s mind? How do attitudes and beliefs change?
Rudyard Kipling was a paramount flag-waver and jingo-merchant, great fan of Empire and war and all the “manly virtues”.
He was very gung-ho about WW1 — ‘beating the Hun’ and all that. He proudly sent his 17-year old son off to the war and the boy disappeared — just disappeared. He was sighted by a sergeant — iirc he’d been hit in the face and was making his way back to a medical facility. But that was the last that was seen of him — stumbling and bleeding and crying in pain, trying to find a medic. That was the last news Kipling had of him. Obviously a shell landed on him, or something like that — seem to remember reading they may have found his remains about three or four years ago. Anyway at the end of the war, about 1921 or 22, Kipling wrote a poem that has these lines in it:
If they ask you why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
That was a radical transformation of the guy who was waving flags and believing in the Just Cause and the Holy Fight in 1914. But it took the devastating loss of his own son to open his eyes… What will it take for the gung-ho true believers in the American Empire?
BTW I think the Hadji Girl campaign is a good idea — kind of a politicised version of Kilroy was Here.
19 July 2006, 10:25 pmblubonnet:
What this country has become makes me want to cry.
The “manly….fighting for freedom” CRAP perpetuated by the military industrial complex/media is so deeply instilled in the minds of Americans, the conversations on the blogs, despite the plethora of facts, have no impact on those devotees to the empire. They don’t even know they are devotees to the empire. It’s painful to know the power of the MIC/media.
The GOP are going to be using the Swift-Boat-Liars for Empire, I hear again. So, now the worst of the worst, the GOPukes along with the DIEbold machines will probably destroy the chance for the lesser of the two evils to be running the show. I can hardly believe the HELL this country has become in these last 5 and a half years. I can’t imagine he Dems would be this bad. Clinton’s sins came no where near this vampire-empire PNACzi war-profiteering criminal cabal. I don’t even have words to express my disgust and rage at what they have done to humanity, both in mind and body (as in bodies destroyed…except for the precious blastocysts.. sarcasm should be noted there). F**K them all, the Robotican assholes that allowed it, and cheered it on.
I hope the idea works, Stan. I think scrambling for life: food, water, and cover under machine gun fire, finding a doctor, etc. might be preoccupying them though.
20 July 2006, 4:54 amVictoria:
The waves of lies washing over us from the government/media will not erode what we know to be true. There is no war that is worth my child’s life!!! There is no war that is worth any mother’s child’s life. My daughter and I regularly wear our Code PInk Shirts - women/girls for peace. One day, my daughter asked me if her father could have a button that said men for peace. I tried to explain to her that it was mostly men who keep war going, start them in the first place and seem not to want to sit down and work out solutions, as she learned to do by the time she was three. I said, too, that many men do want peace but that the leaders of countries, who are for the most part men, do not.
Iraqi children are dying - I recently took part in a reading of war dead - US names paired with Iraqi names and many of the names I read were children, 5 years old, one was 7 months old, and on and on. If our children were dying here, our little toddlers and babies, not just our grown-up children on another country’s soil, then I think that would sure as shit wake us up! But I forgot, that is the whole point of this war, to keep us ’safe’ at home so that we never have to experience the horrors of war as the people of Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan et al., have to do every minute.
There can never be too much compassion and peace. There is no such thing as too much solidarity. I hope we bring these aspects more to the forefront of the anti-war movement.
Thank you Stan, you always illuminate my mind and I love to ponder what you have sparked. Courage, brother!
20 July 2006, 3:41 pmDan:
Maybe it would help to send “Hadji Girl” to the next person who sends you a patriotic “lets all wear red on Fridays” message. Just hit “reply all”…
Did you notice how they sort of blurred the word “fuck” (twice!) so as not to offend anyone? For me, that just says it all.
20 July 2006, 4:03 pmDahlia Wasfi:
We should do that here in the U.S.
20 July 2006, 8:09 pmDeAnander:
It’s Not Too Late To Say: Enough by Yitzhak Laor, Ha’aretz.
they won’t have the sense to bequeath the recoiling from war to the next generation — this is the essential task (one of ‘em) before us, one in which the human race has serially failed.
20 July 2006, 8:14 pmCarlos:
Where were you guys in Nov, 2000 and Nov 2004? I hear alot crying from the antiwar, antimilitary leftist camp about how the election(s) were stolen but they’re a bunch of do-nothing effete snobs who believe they’re somehow morally superior because they oppose the status quo. The Marine who sang Hadji Girl, however misguided or racist, expresses the rage and contempt he honestly feels about what he’s faced over there. Intellectual elites can barely change a flat tire but somehow feel their opinions matters more than that Marine. Total BS.
31 July 2006, 12:47 amStan:
Thank you Carlos for this moronic repetition of a hoary old trope about effete liberals. Let me help you out, baby. You seem confused. Read carfully, and I’ll try not to use too many big words.
Most of the people on this blog are not liberals. I know you said leftists, but lots of people — even grownups — don’t know the difference.
Now let’s move on.
Most of the people on this blog have more and more different kinds of practical experience than that Marine, who has now spent most of his adult life in an institution that tells him what to wear each day.
De raises food in real dirt, and taught self-defense classes for women, and knows how to make a boat move without a motor.
One of the Dan’s is a field geologist; that means he breaks rocks and climbs around outdoors, and fixes equipment, anmd allsorts of other cool, manual shit.
Peggy is an academic; but Peggy did her field work living in the boonies with Tamil guerrillas, where they did one better than fixing a flat (they didn’t even have cars); they bathed out of buckets, cooked on open fires, slept on dirt floors, and shit into a hole in the ground.
The other Carlos did a stretch in prison. Does that measure up with fixing a flat?
Yolanda lives poor and Black in the South, and cares for two disabled adults.
Audrey roams the boarded up streets of Detroit, and camped with me and 200 others all along the Gulf Coast last March, and has returned there to help with reconstruction (real hammer and nails stuff, Carlos).
Elaina drives a truck, works as a union organizer, and used to care for disabled adults. She’s from East Tennessee, and will pick up a snake.
Of the leftists I know, there are furniture movers, postal workers, school teachers (you should really try that if you think it’s easy), farmers, municipal water workers, etc. For the record, I spent most of my adult life in an institution that told me how to dress, too. The Army. Gee whiz, I learned how to change tires (actually I knew that when I was 12); I can tie sheepshanks and double-bowlines; perform immediate action on an assault rifle; apply a Hare traction splint; deliver a baby; construct a ring-main; read a topographical map; and know when to deep my mouth shut when I’m being investigated.
The difference between that Marine changing a tire and one of us changing it is that we don’t compose songs about killing kids in our heads to pass the time, and we actually know more about the effect of the automobile than he does.
So take you “intellectual elites” myth to someone who’ll buy that bullshit. That would not be here.
31 July 2006, 9:33 amDeAnander:
“effete” is a code word for “sissy” and “changing a tyre” is a code phrase for Dirty Sweaty He-Man Work.
HeManWork involves tools, for preference big heavy tools (watchmakers and brain surgeons don’t quality, despite the nearly exclusive domination of both professions by males); it involves getting dirty, for preference smeared with fossil fuel distillates or something even more toxic (this helps to demonstrate a suitably Manly disregard for both personal safety and biotic integrity). and the most HeManly of all HeManWork involves destruction: guys who decapitate entire mountain ranges with enormous Mighty Morphin Power Shovels to get at coal seams are far more HeManly than guys who merely, say, risk their lives at sea to save sinking ships, in jungles struggling to detect and prevent poaching, or on sheer cliffs conducting audits of endangered species of plants or birds. and guys who destroy whole buildings, towns, and large numbers of people are the most HeManly of all — particularly when they do this with large, heavy power tools like tanks and bulldozers and the larger sizes of bombs and rockets, using as much fossil fuel as possible in the process. [this association of HeManWork and destruction might be, I suppose, why the extremely sheltered academics of the Chicago School of economic theory took such delight and satisfaction in destroying Argentina — made ‘em feel like Real Men?]
it’s odd, but somehow the sweaty, dirty, muscle-taxing work that women do never counts — for example cleaning the bathrooms of the world’s hotels and pubs after men have pissed and vomited (and worse) in them all through a lively Friday night, or cleaning and turning and tending the broken victims of HeManly wars in VA hospitals and private homes, or birthing and feeding and cleaning and schlepping infants and toddlers. no matter how sore the arms or back are at the end of a long day, how many pounds have been hefted or how many gruelling hours put in (or how dirty she got, or what toxic chemicals she was exposed to on the job), a woman’s dirty work is just never prestigious and “manly”, especially when (as with most of Women’s Work) it involves caring or repairing or cleaning. and men who do Real HeManWork always think that their opinions are worth so much more than those of women and girly-men who do not do Real HeManWork.
“elite” is an easy shot to throw at anyone in the industrial West, because it’s true of all of us — as compared to the majority of humanity getting by somehow on one or two dollars a day, we’re all “elite.” but so is Joe Grunt out in Baghdad elite, with his Hummer and his advanced munitions and his radio and his air support (and his laptop on which he can record stupid pseudo-MTV racist anthems), compared to Joe Iraqi Insurgent crouched in a ditch somewhere improvising land mines out of bits of baling wire and whatever variations on Semtex he can get by hook or by crook. and howzabout those senior, ranking US personnel in the Green Zone with their air conditioners, golf course, swimming pool, four star (well three at least) cuisine, and all the rest — while the grunts in the field are going out with inadequate body armour? now we’re talking “effete elite”, practically Tiberian…
for the record (sigh) the idea that girls don’t know how to handle power tools or mechanical contraptions, and therefore that anyone who doesn’t work with power tools is girly, aka effete, is getting somewhat threadbare at this point. the idea that leftists are complete strangers to manual labour and competence likewise. I know plenty of people, sad to say, who have no idea how to fix the power slaves on which they are pathetically dependent — cars, dishwashers, garbage disposals, laundry equipment, vacuum cleaner, you name it. I know plenty of people who have no idea where their food comes from, or their municipal water supply; have no idea how to tend their own injuries or illnesses; have no idea how their electricity is generated or what path it takes to their house; think a mile is “an awfully long way to walk,” and can’t find North on a sunny afternoon. but this large body of underinformed people is not ideologically unified; there are at least as many rightists as leftists in the ranks of the clueless.
despite the fact that Heinlein was a wingnut, he was right in general principle about “the things every adult human being should know how to do”… I personally know how to fix about half the things I own (the ones that really matter to me), and how to use most of the standard tools found in a machine shop, a contractor’s van, or a mechanic’s or carpenter’s bench. I know how to can food, keep bees, grow vegetables and safely compost humanure. [coming soon: cheesemaking and welding.] in my time I have had to know how to do basic maintenance/diagnostics on a diesel engine, how to troubleshoot AC and DC circuits, how to do electrical wiring (both solder and crimp), and the fundamentals of marlinspike seamanship. unlike some people whose employer tells them what to wear every morning
I also know how to make and repair my own clothing. but this is nothing all that special and has nothing to do with ideological positioning. I know evangelical Christians and old-order Amish who could say the same — and more — and I am sure there are Aryan Nation nutcases who could say the same, and Sendero Luminoso Maoists, and Zapatistas, and First Nations organisers, and Republicans, and Democrats, and you name it… what the H does one’s personal SKA inventory have to do with one’s politics? a left guerrilla can field strip an AK47 just as handily as a right guerrilla. because I agree with Heinlein that any adult person should be able to make their own shirt, doesn’t mean I have to agree with the old lunatic on anything else.
btw, when I owned cars I knew how to swap a wheel, which is what most people mean by “fixing a flat” — and have done so more than once. I also ran the power tyre-change machine at an auto repair shop now and then as a young pup, which is how you *really* “fix a flat” (on a car). and of course I’ve fixed flats on my bike, what regular cyclist hasn’t? nowadays, if I need to haul 40 lbs of Stuff from A to B, I use a cargo bike or a bike plus trailer, powered by Me. in fact I consider owning and depending on a fossil-fueled car to be a bit… well, to be perfectly honest, effete
31 July 2006, 11:53 pmAudrey:
De and I should get together and trade skills. I’ve got the cheese making and arc welding down. The main thing about cheese making is that you should make bread at the same time, and use the whey for the bread liquid so it doesn’t go to waste. The main thing about welding is that a muffler is an easy thing to burn through. Unless you have an adequate supply of curse words, I don’t recommend starting with mufflers, even if you really really want to turn one into a cello.
The main thing about racism is that there is nothing more elitist at its core.
I started making my own bread because it’s cheaper to make than to buy. I started making it when I was dirt poor. I was also scavenging for food in the woods – I made it my business to learn where hazelnuts, walnuts and such grew in the wild. An added bonus is that most things you can scavenge or make yourself are better quality than what you’d find in a store, regardless of cost. My sort of elitism has to do with thinking one object is better than another object.
Racists operate on a whole different level of elitism – one that says one group of people is inherently better than another group of people. Expressing that “honestly” doesn’t make it any less elitist, or any less ugly.
2 August 2006, 1:13 amDeAnander:
zing! Audrey — right to the point and so much more succinct than my aimless rambling. hat tip to you.
2 August 2006, 1:55 pm