ricevo e inoltro volentieri.
avrei voluto tradurla ma ho molto da rtadurre per lavoro. nei prossimi
giorni forse riuscir=F2. se simo ha tempo e voglia potrebbe incominciare.
saluti.
giovanna caviglione
----------
Da: Carla Marchetti <marchett@???>
Data: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 09:02:41 +0100
A: diplist@???
Oggetto: [Diplist] a proposito di una certa guerra (infinita?)
Per chi ha voglia di leggere una testimonianza importante
Hold On to Your Humanity:
| An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
| by Stan Goff
| posted 15 Nov 2003
|
| Dear American serviceperson in Iraq,
|
| I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among
| you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are
| happening to every one of you-some more extreme than
| others-are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say
| some things to you straight up in the language to which you
| are accustomed.
|
| In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd Airborne Brigade, then
| based in northern Binh Dinh Province in what was then the
| Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had my head full
| of s**t: s**t from the news media, s**t from movies, s**t
| about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and s**t from a
| lot of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty
| about Vietnam even though they'd never been there, or to war
| at all.
|
| The essence of all this s**t was that we had to "stay the
| course in Vietnam," and that we were on some mission to save
| good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese, and to keep the bad
| Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside of Oakland. We
| stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were dead and lots
| more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast Asians were
| dead. Ex-military people and even many on active duty played
| a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt.
|
| When I started hearing about weapons of mass destruction
| that threatened the United States from Iraq, a shattered
| country that had endured almost a decade of trench war
| followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my
| first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that
| this suffering country presents a threat to the United
| States? But then I remembered how many people had believed
| Vietnam threatened the United States. Including me.
|
| When that bulls**t story about weapons came apart like a
| two-dollar shirt, the politicians who cooked up this war
| told everyone, including you, that you would be greeted like
| great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam to
| make sure everyone there could vote.
|
| What they didn't tell me was that before I got there in
| 1970, the American armed forces had been burning villages,
| killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests, killing
| civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and committing
| rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and
| raging over that weren't in a position to figure out the
| difference between me-just in country-and the people who had
| done those things to them.
|
| What they didn't tell you is that over a million and a half
| Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical
| neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those
| who died were the weakest: the children, especially very
| young children.
|
| My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our
| grandson every chance we get. He is eleven months old now.
| Lots of you have children, so you know how easy it is to
| really love them, and love them so hard you just know your
| entire world would collapse if anything happened to them.
| Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are
| not going to forget that the United States government was
| largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids.
|
| So the lie that you would be welcomed as liberators was just
| that. A lie. A lie for people in the United States to get
| them to open their purse for this obscenity, and a lie for
| you to pump you up for a fight.
|
| And when you put this into perspective, you know that if you
| were an Iraqi, you probably wouldn't be crazy about American
| soldiers taking over your towns and cities either. This is
| the tough reality I faced in Vietnam. I knew while I was
| there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been one of
| the Vietcong.
|
| But there we were, ordered into someone else's country,
| playing the role of occupier when we didn't know the people,
| their language, or their culture, with our head full of
| bulls**t our so-called leaders had told us during training
| and in preparation for deployment, and even when we got
| there. There we were, facing people we were ordered to
| dominate, but any one of whom might be pumping mortars at us
| or firing AKs at us later that night. The question we
| started to ask is who put us in this position?
|
| In our process of fighting to stay alive, and in their
| process of trying to expel an invader that violated their
| dignity, destroyed their property, and killed their
| innocents, we were faced off against each other by people
| who made these decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and
| slapped each other on the back in Washington DC with their
| fat f***ing asses stuffed full of cordon bleu and caviar.
|
| They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped.
|
| That's you now. Just fewer trees and less water.
|
| We haven't figured out how to stop the pasty-faced,
| oil-hungry backslappers in DC yet, and it looks like you all
| might be stuck there for a little longer. So I want to tell
| you the rest of the story.
|
| I changed over there in Vietnam and they were not nice
| changes either. I started getting pulled into
| something-something that craved other peole's pain. Just to
| make sure I wasn't regarded as a "f***ing missionary" or a
| possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that group
| that was untouchable, people too crazy to f*** with, people
| who desired the rush of omnipotence that comes with setting
| someone's house on fire just for the pure hell of it, or who
| could kill anyone, man, woman, or child, with hardly a
| second thought. People who had the power of life and
| death-because they could.
|
| The anger helps. It's easy to hate everyone you can't trust
| because of your circumstances, and to rage about what you've
| seen, what has happened to you, and what you have done and
| can't take back.
|
| It was all an act for me, a cover-up for deeper fears I
| couldn't name, and the reason I know that is that we had to
| dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did. We
| knew deep down that what we were doing was wrong. So they
| became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being
| transformed into ragheads or hajjis. People had to be
| reduced to "niggers" here before they could be lynched. No
| difference. We convinced ourselves we had to kill them to
| survive, even when that wasn't true, but something inside us
| told us that so long as they were human beings, with the
| same intrinsic value we had as human beings, we were not
| allowed to burn their homes and barns, kill their animals,
| and sometimes even kill them. So we used these words, these
| new names, to reduce them, to strip them of their essential
| humanity, and then we could do things like adjust artillery
| fire onto the cries of a baby.
|
| Until that baby was silenced, though, and here's the
| important thing to understand, that baby never surrendered
| her humanity. I did. We did. That's the thing you might not
| get until it's too late. When you take away the humanity of
| another, you kill your own humanity. You attack your own
| soul because it is standing in the way.
|
| So we finish our tour, and go back to our families, who can
| see that even though we function, we are empty and incapable
| of truly connecting to people any more, and maybe we can go
| for months or even years before we fill that void where we
| surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetics-drugs,
| alcohol, until we realize that the void can never be filled
| and we shoot ourselves, or head off into the street where we
| can disappear with the flotsam of society, or we hurt
| others, especially those who try to love us, and end up as
| another incarceration statistic or a mental patient.
|
| You can ever escape that you became a racist because you
| made the excuse that you needed that to survive, that you
| took things away from people that you can never give back,
| or that you killed a piece of yourself that you may never
| get back.
|
| Some of us do. We get lucky and someone gives a damn enough
| to emotionally resuscitate us and bring us back to life.
| Many do not.
|
| I live with the rage every day of my life, even when no one
| else sees it. You might hear it in my words. I hate being
| chumped.
|
| So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to
| do to survive, however you define survival, while we do what
| we have to do to stop this thing. But don't surrender your
| humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself. Not for an
| adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and
| frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching f***ing military
| careerist to make his bones on. Especially not for the
| Bush-Cheney Gas & Oil Consortium.
|
| The big bosses are trying to gain control of the world's
| energy supplies to twist the arms of future economic
| competitors. That's what's going on, and you need to
| understand it, then do what you need to do to hold on to
| your humanity. The system does that; tells you you are some
| kind of hero action figures, but uses you as gunmen. They
| chump you.
|
| Your so-called civilian leadership sees you as an expendable
| commodity. They don't care about your nightmares, about the
| DU that you are breathing, about the loneliness, the doubts,
| the pain, or about how your humanity is stripped away a
| piece at a time. They will cut your benefits, deny your
| illnesses, and hide your wounded and dead from the public.
| They already are.
|
| They don't care. So you have to. And to preserve your own
| humanity, you must recognize the humanity of the people
| whose nation you now occupy and know that both you and they
| are victims of the filthy rich bastards who are calling the
| shots.
|
| They are your enemies-The Suits-and they are the enemies of
| peace, and the enemies of your families, especially if they
| are Black families, or immigrant families, or poor families.
| They are thieves and bullies who take and never give, and
| they say they will "never run" in Iraq, but you and I know
| that they will never have to run, because they f***ing
| aren't there. You are
|
| They'll skin and grin while they are getting what they want
| from you, and throw you away like a used condom when they
| are done. Ask the vets who are having their benefits slashed
| out from under them now. Bushfeld and their cronies are
| parasites, and they are the sole beneficiaries of the chaos
| you are learning to live in. They get the money. You get the
| prosthetic devices, the nightmares, and the mysterious
| illnesses.
|
| So if your rage needs a target, there they are, responsible
| for your being there, and responsible for keeping you there.
| I can't tell you to disobey. That would probably run me
| afoul of the law. That will be a decision you will have to
| take when and if the circumstances and your own conscience
| dictate. But it perfectly legal for you to refuse illegal
| orders, and orders to abuse or attack civilians are illegal.
| Ordering you to keep silent about these crimes is also
| illegal.
|
| I can tell you, without fear of legal consequence, that you
| are never under any obligation to hate Iraqis, you are never
| under any obligation to give yourself over to racism and
| nihilism and the thirst to kill for the sake of killing, and
| you are never under any obligation to let them drive out the
| last vestiges of your capacity to see and tell the truth to
| yourself and to the world. You do not owe them your souls.
|
| Come home safe, and come home sane. The people who love you
| and who have loved you all your lives are waiting here, and
| we want you to come back and be able to look us in the face.
| Don't leave your souls in the dust there like another
| corpse.
|
| Hold on to your humanity.
|
| by Stan Goff
| posted 15 Nov 2003
|
|
| (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
| material is distributed without profit to those who have
| expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
| information for research and educational purposes.)
|
|
| ( Also see other texts at
| http://bringthemhomenow.org/what/latest.html )
--=20
Carla Marchetti, Dr
Istituto di Biofisica
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
via De Marini, 6
16149 Genova, Italy
tel. 39-010-6475578
Fax 39-010-6475500
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