Then and Now: From Indochina to Iraq and the Destruction of Meaning.

by Robert Bohm

A veteran¹s thoughts on the eve of a new war.

Almost half a century ago, Larry Fries wrote how chemical weapons could create a surreal cocoon of safety in the midst of a landscape that, although once alive with crops or wild growth or people, now was a site of silent emptiness.

A mile on either side . . . 
Safe is nothing growing.

A US soldier in Vietnam, Fries saw firsthand how the military industrial complex promoted the use of chemicals like agent orange and napalm on a so-called enemy society. By turning Vietnam into a laboratory for conducting chemical experiments in obstacle removal, the US armed services taught grunts like Fries the military efficiency of killing not only enemy soldiers but also the very land they lived on. Such devastation¹s totalistic character eventually resulted in millions of Vietnamese dead, a nearly destroyed ecosystem, and untold numbers of US soldiers years later suffering and dying from chemical weapons-related illnesses. 

But not only were people and land destroyed, so was the very meaning of things as the gap between "seems to be" and "actually is" expanded. We seemed to be a democratic force fighting for the Vietnamese people¹s political freedom but what we actually were was a mass of armed invaders who slew the very people we were supposed to liberate. 

Such an experience of the war led Fries to understand how the powers that be forcibly morphed ordinary words into disguises for ominous realities. Giving an example of this, Fries wrote:

Peace is tons of napalm falling. 
A gamble where it lands. 

The idea that scorching sections of the world with napalm is a pro-peace activity is the type of linguistic reversal of meaning that George Orwell depicted in his novel, 1984, in which the Ministry of Truth was the agency in charge of disseminating propaganda and lies, and the word "joycamp" meant forced labor camp. Orwell would have understood exactly what Fries meant when the poet wrote with melancholy sarcasm, "Peace is tons of napalm falling." According to Orwell, the purpose of mainstream language in a society run by an over-powerful state isn¹t to facilitate communication but to reinforce the state¹s world-view and "to make all other modes of thought impossible." In such an environment of corrupted significations, previously stable meanings transform into each other in unpredictable ways. Consequently, moral incoherence reigns ­ e.g., peace equals mass destruction. 

The status quo's assault on what Orwell called non-desirable modes of thought doesn't necessarily mean outright censorship. For the status quo's purposes, it is sufficient that there be a gradual narrowing down of meanings so that language's capacity to undermine authoritarianism, alienation and oppression is weakened in an evolutionary way over time. When language's power shrinks in this way, society's subgroups often seek out non-verbal languages that they believe express their frustrations and aspirations better than the dominant language does. Such non-verbal languages inevitably begin as outlaw vocabularies ­ multiple tattoos, body piercings, spiked hair, baggy pants, overly extravagant gold chains, slam dancing, mass gatherings of dissenters, etc. ­ that are screams against the falsity of existing language, wisdom, and political morality. 

We're at a stage like this now. The appearance of meaning-seeking black-masked anarchists among us is one symptom. The antiwar movement is another.

Mounting numbers of U.S. citizens are grasping the insanity built into much U.S. political dialogue. On March 17 Bush proclaimed about the coming assault on Iraq that "a broad coalition is now gathering to enforce the just demands of the world" because "when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror" it is appropriate that the US rise to the occasion by leading a global army against the foe.

Bush spoke these words in a solemn imperial tone designed to emphasize his speech's sobriety. Yet for all of its imperial seriousness, much of the speech was ludicrous. Bush's contention that he was about to lead "a broad coalition" against Iraq was an unabashed fabrication, given the fact that the US's attempt to create such a coalition had ended only hours previously in fiasco and defeat in the UN security council, thereby sentencing Washington to start a second gulf war with only a tiny fraction of the support it had in 1991 for the first gulf war.

Even more absurd was Bush's depiction on March 17 of Iraq as a formidable power in possession of alarming amounts of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. In reality, the US isn't preparing to invade Iraq because Iraq is militarily strong and therefore a danger to others in the world. Rather the US has targeted Iraq for the exact opposite reason: because Iraq, after its defeat in 1991 and its subsequent social-economic deterioration as a result of more than ten years of economic sanctions, is one of the globe's feeblest military countries and can't possibly defend itself against the US.

Iraq's military weakness lends itself to the achievement of Washington's three main goals: (1) a victory that results in greater US control over the region's oil supplies, (2) a victory that establishes the US as the sole military power capable of policing and shaping a "reborn" Middle East and (3) a stage ­ i.e., Iraq and its people ­ upon which the US can send the rest of the world a message: look in shock and awe at the apocalyptic destructiveness of our weaponry and forever after be on notice that any nation or dissident group that dares to mess with us runs the risk of total obliteration. This of course is the language of empire building.

When Bush stared into the camera on March 17 and announced about Saddam Hussein that "the tyrant will soon be gone," the president earned no credibility as an honorable warrior. On the contrary, his cockiness was more akin to the demented self-congratulation of a fake Romeo whose biggest love-conquests have come about after using rohypnol, the date rape drug, on his victims. 

Neither love nor peace is an activity that the criminally aggressive admire. As Bush has already shown, if in order to get satisfaction he must rape the Iraqi people and ignore the majority of world opinion in doing so, he will do it. 

More could be said about Washington's war policy, but further commentary can be postponed until Bush¹s and his compatriots' trials as war criminals. Right now we must take to the streets in massive expressions of democratic dissent.

Robert Bohm is a member of the Green Party of Delaware.
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