#war talk

[outspokenblackman]

[briarpatch-kids]

I spoke a little on this in the tags of the "piss hot soldier" post, but the US military industrial complex is a real thing that I think more people in and out of the military should talk about. Very few people in the military see combat, and I think too many people use that to absolve themselves of the guilt they should be carrying.

You are not innocent because you aren't directly dropping the bombs and firing the guns. Those schoolgirls are dead because of you. No matter what role you took in the military, you carry some of the guilt of their deaths.

Were you in finance? You made sure the pilots who flew the plane and the generals who ordered it got paid on time. Work in the chow hall? You fed them. Perhaps you were MP and made sure that the base they lived on was a nice place to raise their children.

I was a Geneva Convention non combatant as medical personnel. I was required to provide aid to anyone sick or injured, had I deployed. I am complicit because I provided the medical care that many desperate people joined the military to access for their families. I was not a doctor, I worked in records.

I am complicit because I made birth certificates for their children, death certificates for their grandfathers, and tracked all the injuries they received in the line of "duty" so that they could be compensated for them by the government later. The US government does not compensate all the innocent civilians injured in the line of those soldiers "duty" the same way they compensate the people doing the injury.

And speaking of Geneva Convention noncombatants and how they're required to render aid no matter what and to no matter who? I went to a couple different military PTSD facilities and the majority of the people there were Geneva Convention Noncombatants because they were medical professionals who rendered first aid. And they were there for things they had done that I will not repeat. Not even to my husband.

[dk-thrive]

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

– Arundhati Roy, War Talk (South End Press, April 1, 2003)

[lab-raised-steven]

I don't blame Iran when they inevitably retaliate for our idiot in chief's actions.

If I get exploded, I apologize in advance.

[litandlifequotes]

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

War Talk by Arundhati Roy

[dearorpheus]

Real poems, Celan wrote, are “making toward something   ...    perhaps toward an addressable Thou.” I would argue that, for any poet writing toward such a subject, regular words and syntax soon become inadequate. Celan is an extreme case though, because he also had to contend with the inadequacy of the German language to express the experience of the Jewish poet, post-Holocaust. [...]  Celan’s mother’s language was German. This German-speaking mother, who makes fitful enigmatic appearances in his poems, was shot by Germans. [...]  Celan chose to protest from inside German, in “death-rattling,” “quarreling” words. Though he spoke numerous other languages (Romanian, Russian, French), and though he had written previously in Romanian, he nevertheless decided to remain in German, which he broke and reclaimed. German, for Celan, was the language that had to “pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.”

Why break a language? To wake it up. “We sleep in language,” writes Robert Kelly, “if language does not come to wake us with its strangeness.”

— Ilya Kaminsky, “Of Strangeness That Wakes Us”

I am reminded of the (Marie Howe sourced) Joseph Brodsky quote: “You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language.”

[katelouisepowell]

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Arundhati Roy