"The Bridge"

Stan Goff

WARNING: This commentary may cause anxiety.

The United States government has initiated a chain reaction that it
can no longer control. The stalled vengeance assault on Fallujah is
merely a symptom. So is the uprising triggered by the US closure of
a Shia newspaper in Sadr City, Baghdad, followed by gunning down the
demonstrators who protested (Ah, yes, we don’t even hear about that
when they talk about the latest demon, Muqtada al-Sadr… Memory is so
short.).The chain reaction is far broader and deeper than the battlefield
fiasco in Iraq right now. Once brown people start to pick up guns,
other brown people follow suit. The myth of invincibility of the
United States military — called into question even before the Bush
Doctrine arrived at this particular Iraqi cul-de-sac — is
shattered. No one is shocked. No one is awed.

Nothing left now but plain grimy brutality. Apache helicopters are
buzz-sawing through neighborhoods with chain guns and rockets. Bombs
are being released onto mosques. The hospitals and morgues are
receiving a rich harvest.

I remember a sign at the entrance of Camp Mackall in North Carolina,
where I began Special Forces training. “Rule #1: There are no rules.
Rule #2: Obey the first rule.”

The post 9/11 renewal of ground wars in Southwest Asia swept me up
into a new role. A career soldier who is a leftist; a leftist who is
a retired soldier. I became a trump card that antiwar activists
could play against the patriot-baiting of the right, so I’ve been
trotted out in front of one audience after another, from town halls
to CNN, as a spokesperson against the Bush Doctrine’s militarism.

But people transform their roles. They deviate from the scripts.

I’m a leftist who carried a gun, in a culture where what passes for
the left is terrified of guns. So people pay attention to me. In
audience after audience, I have noted that people pay attention to
me. They are engaged before I even speak, because they know that I
can kill, and that gives me an immediacy… not because I am different
than them, but because I am so very much the same. I laugh at good
jokes. I rock babies. I take an interest in the weather.

This is more than morbid fascination.

We are a culture insulated from our own basis. It is a condition of
metropolitan modernity, more so even of post-modernity. In a
consumer society, where general-purpose money has eaten away every
bond of community, where alienation -- and even narcissism -- is
defined as normalcy, where nature is seen as something apart from
and below us, the very personhood of each of us is deracinated and
left to drift through the retail landscape like a grieving banshee.
Planned obsolescence applies even to our identities.

We really have no idea who pays for this privilege of
superficiality, but those billions who are doing the paying -- far
out of our reified view -- are getting a clearer idea all the time.

Of course, this culture is pure charade. We can pretend we are as
disembedded as we like, but we are invariably physical -- diaphragms
heaving incessantly, articulating gases in our guts, dissipating
heat, concentrating urine, sloughing off dead cells, yawing and
eating and scratching and sleeping and fucking and finally, dying.

Inside-Outside.

Inside this whole charade, where money “grows” and media-stunned
young women aspire to be models for Victoria’s Secret, resides
liberal hypocrisy. Outside it resides imperial militarism -- the
last refuge of capitalism as it devours its own social and material
bases like a vampire stranded alone on a desert island.

Soldiers who were raised inside this cultural charade are now
outside it, in Southwest Asia getting blood on their hands so we can
have malls and road trips and household appliances and climate
control. The personhood of soldiers (mostly male) has become a
battleground, too, between masculinity and cognitive dissonance.
Warfare is the practice and masculinity is achieved in the practice,
but they are confronted now with other persons -- people who are
first reduced in the media, then defined in training (The Enemy),
then dehumanized in the word (Raghead!), then commanded by the
occupier as subjected persons, then -- if obedience is not swift --
erased. This is where the soldier either recognizes or denies the
hypocrisy, because the fuller reality of the system is right there
before his eyes. Now he has a choice to make.

I’m talking to you, soldier, and not judging you. This is an
invitation to take back your personhood. This is an invitation to
confront every fear, breach every obstacle, take every risk; to leap
over your old self and enter into a deeper struggle.

Capitalism has to build bridges from its metropolitan hypocrisy to
the scenes of its imperial crimes, and that bridge is made with the
backs of soldiers. We have to build a bridge from the scene of the
crime to clarity.

To do that, we can’t back away from this gun-question, this whole
issue of violence.

When the guerrilla picks up the gun, the imperial soldier must pay
attention. When an alienated teenager in Columbine picks up a gun,
we metropolitans pay attention. We should.

People with guns should be taken seriously. People who have lived
with guns should be taken seriously, and they are. Some of us are
not going to be bothered with Victoria’s Secret or any of that other
bullshit. We are looking right through those mirages, right through
to our animal actuality, right through to the horror vacui of a
world where people can and do erase other people, and no deity
descends to make things right. There are no decrees from on high,
and you are still responsible.

Many of my associates in the antiwar movement talk about “reaching
out” to the military. They want to convert them. They want to
transform them from robotic killing machines into Ghandians. These
are the liberals.

Soldiers don’t listen to liberals, and neither do the majority of
people. They intuit the detachment of them, their other-worldly
abstraction, their desire to have their cake and eat it too. When
people are frightened or angry, they may be confused about the
source of their fear and anger, but they know they want to be with
someone who will fight. Liberals have never learned this.

A young woman I met recently was surprised by her own first
encounter with several soldiers. She is not a Nation Magazine
“leftist,” but a revolutionary young woman who recognizes that
social transformation is neither painless nor bloodless, and she has
no illusions about that. What astonished her about these young
soldiers was her own recognition that they were, like her, willing
to take tremendous risks -- up to and including the loss of their
own lives -- to fight for what they thought was right. It was the
very quality that she had been seeking from her own political
allies.

She wondered aloud whether it is easier to turn a person with
intellectual clarity into a courageous person, or whether it was
easier to help a courageous person to achieve greater clarity.

“Should we be trying to make smart people into fighters, or fighters
into smart people?”

Damn good question. May have the elements of a false dichotomy, but
it’s still a good question. She is a hell of a lot closer to the
mark than those who see the military as brainwashed aneroids in need
of a religious epiphany. She knows that soldiers are not robots, and
she doesn’t want to empty them of their belligerence, which is an
appropriate attitude for our Umwelt. She wants to free them from the
bonds of their illusions. The cruelty to which these soldiers have
been inured has the potential to be turned against hypocrisy, then
against the system. Clarity is often cruel; cruelty is often clear.

The imperial soldier is constrained by the superstitions of
patriotism, and the soldier becomes a danger to power when he
recognizes the speciousness of patriotism. For now, he mimics the
confident acceptance of the official narratives, but he experiences
the contradiction like a recurrent rash. A friend of mine said that
soldiers are political scientists. They are embryonic political
scientists at least, waiting for midwives... the right questions,
perhaps, or the right nightmares.

I think soldiers need to reach out to the left as well. Maybe we
soldiers have a contribution to make to your clarity. Academic
leftists can talk to you until they are blue in the face about
reification -- be it the reification that confuses the transient
with the eternal, or that substitutes the abstract for the specific.
But every military leader, beginning with a 19-year-old corporal,
knows that before every task there must be an assessment of the
situation -- one that takes account of the mission, the enemy, the
population, the terrain and weather, one’s own capacity in
technology and personnel… and the time available… as a unified and
changing whole. Dialectics, anyone?

While metropolitan leftists will extol the virtues of the Vietnamese
NLF -- rightly so -- some of us saw them dying for their struggle.
Their corpses were us. We have seen ourselves as corpses. Politics
doesn’t happen in clean, well-lighted places. It happens in the sand
and mud. It happens in the rivulets of blood coursing into the edges
of an Iraqi hospital floor. It’s happening in the head of some
unnamed Marine or Green Beret or tank gunner, who is looking out
over the truth of the imperial landscape in Sadr City or Fallujah or
Kut and recognizing that he has been thrust into this drama
anonymously and that he now shares a more intimate space with his
“enemy” than he ever will with the oil companies and military
contractors and politicians who sent him here.

Ani DiFranco says, “Those who call the shots are never in the line
of fire.”

Non-violence can be an effective tactic, but so can violence. It’s
only liberal hypocrisy that denies the latter. For Iraq, it is the
only tactic. And the armed resistance in Iraq -- regardless of its
methods or ideologies -- is doing more to halt the runaway train
that is global capitalism than anything else in the world right now.
(You want white hats and heroes, go by a cinema ticket.)

We cannot imagine the sheer joy of rediscovery being felt throughout
the region right now as people see these fighters striking back at
the source of their long humiliation -- imperialism, and by
extension against imperialism’s local attack dog, Zionism.

Ghandi and King were important people, courageous people, people who
embraced non-violence as a core principle, yet that non-violence as
a tactic is what worked for them. It worked in a specific time and
context. The notion that this tactic is a generalized principle,
that it can work now, fails to account for that context. Without the
Soviet Union, warts and all, there would have been no Ghandi, and
there would have been no King. Had the struggle for credibility in
the global periphery not been engaged by the US and the USSR,
non-violence would have been suicidal. Even that struggle was based
-- at the contextual end of the road -- on the military power of the
Soviet Union that stood eye-to-eye with imperialism until it
collapsed from the effort.

There is a difference between imperial thuggery and armed resistance
to imperialism, and in this era of exterminist imperialism, armed
resistance has become for more and more people the synonym of
self-defense. The occupying soldier fragments his personality with
the gun. The resistance reclaims its humanity with it.

It was Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the
Earth, who said, “The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by
thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils
over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself
in that he himself creates his self. Far removed from his war, we
[the privileged white metropolitans -SG] consider it as a triumph of
barbarism; but of its own volition it achieves, slowly but surely,
the emancipation of the rebel, for bit by bit it destroys in him and
around him the colonial gloom. Once begun, it is a war that gives no
quarter. You may fear or be feared; that is to say, abandon yourself
to the disassociations of a sham existence or conquer your
birthright of unity. When the peasant takes a gun in his hands, the
old myths grow dim and the prohibitions are one by one forgotten.
The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity.”

As a solider, I needed this history to understand my own, and to
come to terms with my own, and to transform my own into this
project. And as a soldier, Sartre’s words, and Fanon’s, have special
meaning for me precisely because there is nothing abstract about
them. I was part of that history -- it doesn’t matter on what side;
that was a pure accident.

And so I started helping build this bridge.

Soldier, I am saying, here is the cause, here is the side of history
your grandchildren will want to see you were on. Soldier, study this
history and this movement, so your courage and your blood aren’t
sent into space like those idiotic capsules full of snapshots and
mementos for some alien life form to discover.

And to my comrades now, I have grim news from those places where
soldiers go.

You will not win with non-profits. You will not win with
non-violence. You will not win with non-committal. To win you must
become effective, and when you do, you will be attacked. Then you
will fight or you will be exterminated. You may even fight and still
be exterminated. No guarantees. We are responsible.

You will never make a revolution behind the bourgeoisie’s back,
because the bourgeoisie has eyes in the back of its panopticon head.
You will never make a revolution while the ruling class sleeps,
because it never sleeps. You will not sneak up on necessity, and no
one can evade it.

Soldiers have seen it.

That’s why they don’t listen to liberal platitudes about morality in
the abstract. They know about the power from the barrel of the gun.
It ends debates. It forces people to pay attention.

People listen to me, and I see them peering at me, trying to imagine
what I am the way people sometimes try to imagine others having sex.
I am arguing against imperialism, and I can talk about commodity
fetishism with the best of them -- because I applied myself to it
with the same rigor and intensity that I did to trauma protocols as
a Special Forces medic or marksmanship fundamentals as a sniper. Yet
these audiences can hear about imperialism from a host of others.

But there in front of them is someone who has been willing to take
life or to give it away. And they are paying attention.

Only it’s not me. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that. I’m just
a circumstance. What they are really paying attention to is
themselves, to the questions they haven’t confronted, to the doubts
that plague them about their politics, to the incessant whisper of
mortality.

And I’m paying attention to them. I study Rosa Luxemburg, Alf
Hornborg, Robert Connell, Joy James, Robin D. G. Kelley, Mao Zedong…
and I study the academic research and the social theory and science
and philosophy. Because simply understanding the final argument of
the gun is not enough. We soldiers need to understand before and
after the gun, and we need to understand -- as much as we can --
where our personhood is rooted in social constructions and where
society is rooted in the biosphere and how there is no clear line of
demarcation between biology and symbols. We need the context.

So as a leftist I build this bridge toward my brothers and sisters
under arms. I don’t judge… I can’t.

The ultimate liberal hypocrisy is the one that shuns the soldier as
if the soldier lives in a parallel system, not recognizing that
militarism doesn’t float over history any more than the make and
model of your automobile. If you turn on your lights with a wall
switch and drink clean water from your tap, if you walk in the park,
if you wear a stitch of manufactured clothing, if you’ve shopped on
a vacation overseas, if you so much as breathe in the United States
of America, you are as much a part of the body of actually-existing
imperialism as any nervous, trigger-happy Marine killing a family at
a Baghdad roadblock.

Different rooms, same house.

Deforested Haiti cooks on charcoal so you can cook with electricity.
A child in Botswana dies of AIDS so I can work on this computer. And
personal ethics will not transform this.

It’s a system, an expression of an immensely complex and dynamic web
of relationships and realities, and it will default to its basic
program -- capital accumulation -- again and again and again, until
it is destroyed.

And it will go down like a raving beast, if the reader will forgive
this metaphorical shift.

We need this bridge between the left and the military, because when
the time comes, when the hypocrisy fails at last and confronts us
with the painful reality of transformation, when the gun is all that
is left and the choice is to seize or diminish our humanity, the
soldier will need to become a revolutionary, and the revolutionary
will have to become a soldier.

The time will come when we are all participants. Most of the world
already is.

Soldier, leftist… “abandon yourself to the disassociations of a sham
existence or conquer your birthright of unity.”

Fallujah lives!

[Stan Goff is the author of Hideous Dream and Full-Spectrum Disorder.
He can be reached at: Stan Goff.]