Democracies cannot fight theological wars

A letter from E.A. Miller, Penrose, Colorado

Dear JUST Response,

Re: Who was behind 9/11? (JUST Response, Nov 26 2003)

A few evenings back I was exhausted by all the noise of life. Curling in front of our fireplace I retreated into the words of the European poet Antonio Machado. As my eyes hit the page, Antonio wrote: "Under all that we think, lives all we believe, like the ultimate veil of our spirits".

It wasn’t as if my spirits were low, it just seems like I have been blinded by the Right through inexhaustible rhetoric, and now it was time for a reassessment of the entire picture. This "anxiety of meaningless spin" from fear-based political positioning with their color-coded alerts topped off with Orwellian propaganda from the oval office is wearing very thin. The screaming of the daily mantra, "By defeating terrorism in Iraq, we defeat terrorism here at home". I still can’t shake the words of past Presidents selling the American public, that if we didn’t stop Communism in Vietnam then the balance of power would shift and we were all doomed. Dominoes.. Dominoes.. Dominoes.

I’m glad I listen to the BBC for American news. A few more nights of Fox and CNN and my mind was ready for a meltdown.

The following Sunday, a group of my evangelical friends and I were restauranteering which, as always, leads into discourses of the many worlds around us. I expressed my doubts to my Christian cohorts about the direction of our county with the current administration. Immediately, as if on cue, my apprehensions were considered defamatory and inappropriate if not unlawful, since I called in question the beliefs and positions of our sitting republican administration. In so many words, I was flayed in my chair and warned that I shouldn’t criticize our sitting President since we are at war, and after all, what about 9/11? It could happen again, any day, any moment.

I reminded my cohorts that I stood in front of the Pentagon and World Trade Center after the attacks. Al-Qaeda was in fact, responsible and as such, we have entered into a war without end. It’s a war of modernism against a medievalist religion and culture.

As it stands, Al-Qaeda is a terrorist network that has to be dealt with, with all the military-legal-cultural means available to us. I do not believe that democracies can fight theological wars and that is, what this war is all about. Much like our Civil War, not the popular view of slavery, good against evil, but as class warfare without the religious twist.

In my friends' opinion it’s God against Satan, end of story. I think I need new friends.

Yet pursuing conflict with this medievalist culture comes martyrdom operations as seen in Israel and now in Iraq. If the United States chooses the path of conventional warfare, it is unwinnable. Ostensibly we are to support our President and his policies. Realistically, nothing can be further from the truth except the daily filling of body-bags of American G.I.’s. This conflict is starting to sound all too familiar.

Since religious Fascists have targeted our country, we must be prepared. But, by entering into this war, my wife and I are not the only losers – it's democracy and the American people as well. Our way of life has changed as our civil liberties become a distant echo. Collateral casualities? Hardly. In the end, it’s about control.

But this cultural collision is a grim reality and must be guided by a firm but representative hand. And since there hasn’t been a truthful sitting president during my lifetime, the lies must be held to a minimum. Americans are used to lies from their government, but if it costs the lives of our armed forces then it is time for a change. Presidents Johnson and Nixon were made painfully aware of this underlined fact. Yet the parleying of political utterances is so reminiscent of the Vietnam era.

Hence, I stand firm on this issue. America, which has the greatest fighting force on the planet with troops serving in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, must be supported. We must support them in every facet. This includes restoring funding back to the Veterans Administration hospitals to help those who served their country.

Mr. President, you cannot have it one way and then look the other.

Yet my mind turns to history during the events of the last century with unsurprisingly clarity and reverence to the wills of men of vision and wit. World War One lost an entire generation to the trenches. The Lost Generation, as it was labeled, was neither glorious, understood or justified but led to a "Crisis of the Mind" for the citizens of the world.

In a time of "crisis" societies traded their freedom to an authority that promised meaning and imposed answers. "Twentieth century man," wrote Arthur Koestler in 1955, “is a political neurotic because he has no answer to the question of the meaning of life, because socially and metaphysically he does not know where he belongs”. Anxiety was thought to be generated by that "crisis of the mind" that Valéry had detected in 1919 but that had been also brewing for decades. When we turn our attention to European culture after the war we are struck by two things. First, this sense of despair, bitterness and anxiety. Second, we can detect the maturation of the modernist movement. A literary revolution burst upon the general public in the 1920s.

Collectively referred to as "the men of 1914, The Lost Generation", they were artists who rebelled against the senseless slaughter that was the Great War. They had no interest in defending either the world or the values of their fathers. In Paris in 1919, a group of writers and artists launched a protest against everything. They named it Dada ("hobby horse" in French). Everything was nonsense: literature, art, morality, civilization. Action is vain, art is vain, life is vain, everything is absurd. Or, as Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) announced: DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING The activities of the dadaists were an expression of post-WW1 bitterness. Without WW1 as a backdrop, there may have been no dadaism at all. In Zürich in 1915, wrote Hans Arp, "Losing interest in the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to the fine arts. While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious folly of these times".

The dadaists held public meetings at which poets made brash statements about art, literature and a hundred other things. Sometimes, whole manifestoes were read by ten, twenty thirty people at once. Here's a sample: No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more armies, no more police, no more nations, no more of these idiocies, no more, no more, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING.

This has a faint echo of John Lennon’s Imagine. So the lines are drawing deeper in the sand. The right wing calls Hollywood "elitist" with such notables as Mike Moore, Ed Harris, Danny Glover, the late Robert Altman, Janeane Garafalo, Larry Hagman, Martin Sheen, George Clooney, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Robert Redford and others. Their crime – challenging the Bush administration policies and the republican status quo.

In another era, the administration policies of the status quo were challenged. No longer wishing to be silenced in a time of mass communication. Labeled the same as the ones above were, Gunning Bedford Jr., John Dickinson, Richard Bassett, Jacob Broom, James McHenry, John Blair, William Blount, Richard Dobbs Spaight, and others. Who were these men? Look them up. It may surprise you.

I share the same vision as our founding fathers and subsequently will never surrender my faith in the United States. But to claim sole ownership of our patriotism as our current administration smacks of McCarthyism. At time of war it is our right and duty to challenge and question authority. Now, more than ever.

I am an American Citizen and I have a right to speak.

Note: This letter was published by JUST Response on December 9 2003.

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