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Today's
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Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
December 12, 2003
Josh Frank
Halliburton,
Timber and Dean
Chris Floyd
The
Inhuman Stain
Dave Lindorff
Infanticide
as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies
Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?
Jean-Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al-Deeb on the Geneva
Accords
David Vest
Bush
Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton
December 11, 2003
Siegfried Sassoon
A
Soldier's Declaration Against War
Douglas Valentine
Preemptive
Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program
John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra
Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
December 13 / 14, 2003
The Use and Abuse
of a Woman Soldier
Jessica
Lynch, Plural
By STAN GOFF
In her book Race Against Empire, Penny M. Von
Eschen showed how during the Cold War Black anti-colonialism
was smashed through the judicious use of reward as a carrot to
compliant Black leaders who dropped their critique of colonialism,
and McCarthyite intimidation as the stick against those like
the Huntons, DuBoises, and Paul Robeson who did not. This maneuver
was ideologically consolidated by redefining racism as an individual
psychopathology (thereby publicly abandoning any critique of
slavery, Jim Crow, and colonialism as systems).
A similar discursive strategy developed
after the Vietnam War, where the American imperial system itself
was discredited by any detailed examination of the war, especially
those critiques that focused on powerful decision-makers in Washington
DC.
The essence of this discursive strategy
is to shift the public's point of view from the system to individuals.
Focus on political leadership cuts far too close to the system,
so after Vietnam the story became that of the individual soldier.
One heard less and less about Westmoreland
or Johnson or Nixon. The stories became those of individual soldiers
and their angst and tribulation. Perversely, Vietnam veterans
themselves (including many who never saw combat in  Vietnam) adopted this portrayal of themselves
as the primary victims of a war of occupation in which they themselves
were the occupiers.
Susan Jeffords, in her essay "Telling
the War Story", says, "This trend away from the war
itself to the people who fought in it shifts the war from a national
to a personal experience, making it possible for viewers to forget
the specific historical and political forces that caused the
war."
This shift fits nicely with "support
the troops" appeals that oblige the public to drop all critique
of leadership or interrogation of geopolitical motives to ensure
we don't disempower our "loved ones" in uniform, or
encourage their attackers. We are allowed to have differing individual
opinions about the war, provided they are superficial enough,
but expected to rally round our team once the war is on (ignoring
in the most recent case of Iraq that low intensity war had never
ceased against Iraq for over a decade).
Gender iconography was combined with
this approach in the manufacture of the Jessica Lynch story.
Ideally, from the point of view of political rulers, the redefinition
circuit is only complete after the geopolitical war is reconstructed
out of the social sphere and into the individual, whereupon the
individual is iconographed in order to be reintegrated with a
mythology that substitutes itself for social reality in the public
imagination.
With the able assistance of the commoditized
American press, the American public was treated to an irresistible
series of lurid and titillating feature attractions that combined
the patriarchy, racism, and chauvinism that form the internal
structure of American national mythology. There is a great deal
to be learned about our notions of the binary opposition of masculinity-femininity
if we unpack these stories and identify the multiple representations
of Jessica Lynch.
I don't know a great deal about Jessica
Lynch, and neither do most people. In any case, what is most
revealing about the Jessica Lynch saga is not what it reveals
about Lynch, but what it reveals about American attitudes regarding
sex, race, and war. New York Times columnist Frank Rich insightfully
called the Jessica Lynch story an American ink blot test.
Jessica Lynch was raised just south of
the Ohio River valley in Palestine, West Virginia. The Little
Kanawha River and Hughes River run nearby, and this region of
Appalachia has become popular for backpackers and conoeists who
can afford these hobbies that most West Virginia "Palestinians"
cannot.
Extractive industries, in particular
coal and timber, have long colonized Appalachia. As these industries
have become ever more mechanized, coal colonies like Palestine
have suffered high rates of unemployment. The mountaintop removal
method of coal mining has reduced the mining labor force to 10
percent of its former levels while it trashes and toxifies the
land.
The Southern Regional Council used to
publish poverty maps of the south, reaching from West Virginia
to Texas, with color codes for each county that reflected percentages
of total populations in poverty. There was a corresponding map
showing percentage of Black population by county. Taking these
two maps together, there was a high degree of correlation between
Black counties along the cotton producing Black Belt and high
poverty rates, and a strong correspondence of heavily Hispano-Latina
counties and poverty in Texas. There is only one region that
has an overwhelming white majority where the poverty figures
are extremely high. That is an area reaching from Scott and Fentress
Counties in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee, across Eastern
Kentucky, and across all of West Virginia. There is only one
county in West Virginia with poverty rates below 15 percent,
Putnam.
Wirt County West Virginia has only five
small towns, Munday, Elizabeth, Creston, Brohard, and Palestine.
Wirt County and neighboring county Ritchie are more fortunate
than some of their adjacent counties. Wirt and Ritchie have poverty
rates--using the federal government's grossly understated criteria--only
around 29 percent. Calhoun and Gilmer Counties nearby have poverty
rates above 35 percent.
This region of white Appalachia is rivaled
on the SRC maps in its overall poverty only by the Arkansas-Louisiana-Mississippi
Delta and the border region of southwest Texas. These maps clearly
show three economic colonies in the southern United States--the
Black Belt, the Southwest, and coalfield Appalachia.
What makes Appalachia different from
the other two is its strong cultural identification with being
"white."
Slavery and the terrible political power
of the planter class drove poor whites off of fertile lowlands
to scratch out an existence on the rocky slopes of these ancient
mountains. Then the fossil fuel age began and the carbon energy,
trapped for millions of years underground--and now beneath the
blue haze, the little subsistence patches, and the lush green
forests--was monetized.
The mechanical cotton gins of the south
and the northern industrial manufactories that were being born
out of the belly of slave cotton were insatiable in their appetite
for coal. The aspiring coal barons arrived with their gun thugs
and the full backing of the United States government, and that
region of Appalachia was subjugated to King Coal, the younger
sibling of King Cotton.
In all these regions this colonized status
carries with it the paradoxical combination of extreme backwardness
and progressive resistance, to include archaic gender constructions
alongside evolving ones. There are also powerful solidarities
based on shared oppression. Millenarian religion sprang out of
a sense of hopelessness in the face of this subjugation even
as some of the most militant, and first multi-racial, unions
in the country fought back against the bosses, sometimes with
firearms.
John Sayles' matchless film Matewan portrayed
these contradictions in relating the story of a 1920 union-management
war in Mingo County that culminated in a shootout in the town
of Matewan in which ten people were killed. Sayles himself made
a cameo appearance as a chialistic preacher, who interpreted
the millenarian Baptist cosmology on behalf of the ruling class.
The film's narrator was a teenage preacher who sermonized for
the union using the same cosmology. And women, who neither bossed
nor worked in the mines, were mobilized as a kind of underground
support cell during the conflict, transforming their roles from
passive observers to active insurgents.
Many that formerly toiled in the coal
mines, thrown off the land as subsistence farmers and into the
pits as subterranean proletarians, are now being steadily expelled
from the economy by more "efficient" technology and
the coal capitalists' overarching desire to break or subjugate
the unions. Like their counterparts in other internal colonies,
young people look at their situation and select from the menu
of options that seem available. Some nurture tragic dreams of
celebrity. Some deal drugs and then sink themselves into addiction.
A few compete for the handful of public sector jobs that are
available in a shrinking economy. And some get a free ticket
out of town, the offer of some training and money for an education,
and a regular paycheck, by joining the military.
This is the real story of Jessica Lynch
which I will combine with inferences and speculation, but inferences
and speculation from the perspective of both soldier and leftist,
and not the perspective of those who have serially reduced this
young woman to symbols.
She wanted to teach school. She needed
money to get her education. She signed on the dotted line and
entered the contradictory world that is the United States Army.
There could have been worse things.
Pornographers troll for people like Jessica
Lynch: slender, blonde, with an air of pretty next-door innocence
the degradation of which titillates the main consumers of pornography:
men. Wealthy men are also quick to colonize young women like
Jessica Lynch as models, mistresses, and trophy wives. Some of
the men from her own home might have sought to subject her within
a patriarchal marriage.
So even in the masculinist culture of
the military, she might find an element of juridicial equality.
This belief leads many young women to choose the military. A
supply clerk is a supply clerk, ungendered. A degree of independence
was accessible within that institutional framework, along with
some job training, a written guarantee of some money for college,
and a way out of Palestine. Then she could go to school and get
a certificate to get a public-sector job teaching kindergarten.
As she was undergoing her initial training
as a supply clerk, and during her initial assignment to the 507th
Maintenance Company in Ft. Bliss, Texas--now immersed without
knowing its import within another region like Palestine, the
most deeply colonized region of Southwest Texas--plans were being
drafted and re-drafted for the military conquest of Iraq. Kentucky
and West Virginia weren't the only places with the misfortune
of sitting atop colossal fields of the combustible hydrocarbons
required to feed industrial capitalist expansion.
Jessica Lynch was 19 when she was deployed
to Kuwait to support an impending invasion of Iraq. Like so many
young people for whom the military is a sectoral economic strategy,
she was unschooled in the dynamics of capital accumulation and
imperialism. Her frame of reference--like the vast majority of
white Americans--was what Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes as "the
U.S. Origin Myth," which portrays the development of the
United States as some axiomatic force for good, and which is
underwritten by the assumption of white supremacy and "white
man's burden." In the context of this Origin Myth, there
is no question of the rightness of invading other nations to
"civilize" and "democratize" them. Young
people, white or otherwise, have not been equipped by their education
to interrogate these assumptions--quite the opposite. With this
background uninterrogated, they were simply "doing their
job" by participating in an invasion.
She was also unschooled about the patriarchal
dynamics of this system.
The invasion was delayed by international
resistance, and that resistance resulted in the loss of the Turkish
and Saudi fronts.
Almost the entire United States ground
force was forced to drive north into Iraq along a single axis
out of Kuwait that would bifurcate into two columns along the
Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The initiation of the invasion was
now being conducted during sandstorm season. And Iraqi resistance
fighters were now able to concentrate their pinprick attacks
along a single avenue of approach.
On March 21, an inconceivable mass of
military vehicles crawled northwest along the main axis of advance,
with units blending and weaving among each other in the open
terrain, a small unit commander's accountability nightmare. Jessica
Lynch was driving a 5-ton truck with an equipment trailer attached.
The sandstorms that had plagued the invasion taskforce left a
heavy residue of dust in every moving part of every machine and
weapon, settled in the corners of eyes and the folds of skin,
and insinuated itself between clothing and skin. The frantic
movement schedules and the sand undermined mechanical maintenance,
troop comfort, and attentiveness.
Lynch's unit was supporting the 3rd Mechanized
Infantry Division, the main combat force aimed ultimately at
Baghdad. The 507th was not a combat unit and they never anticipated
combat. The intelligence summaries issued by Central Command
(CENTCOM), still reflecting the triumphalist expectations of
Donald Rumsfeld and the optimistic predictions of Rumsfeld's
con-man advisor Ahmad Chalabi, said that Iraqi soldiers would
surrender on sight. The U.S. troops were directed that Iraqi
soldiers were to be allowed to keep their weapons, presumably
so their own officers could control them.
The convoy went non-stop for a grueling
48 hours, using their blackout-drive infrared headlights and
night vision goggles during darkness. They were gritty-eyed,
nodding, and exhausted. Lynch's truck, like many others, casualties
of the sandstorms and the schedules, died and was hitched to
a giant recovery vehicle. She was put aboard her company first
sergeant's Humvee, where she could nod off fitfully while the
bleary-eyed driver, another young woman named Lori Pietsewa,
fought sleep behind the wheel.
As they approached the outskirts of Nasiriyah
on March 23, where units were now channeled along narrower roads
and convoys achieved a degree of separation. The sun was not
yet up when the first sergeant's Humvee, leading the 507th convoy,
encountered a U.S. traffic control checkpoint at the intersection
of Highway 1, their main avenue of advance, and Highway 7 that
went due north toward the center of Nasiriyah.
No one has established exactly who was
working on that checkpoint, or what their communications had
been, or how exhausted they might have been. It was dark. They
were stupefied with fatigue. The first sergeant and the 507th
company commander, Captain Troy King, had GPS navigation systems.
They claim they had no maps as backups
for when these hi-tech gadgets lied or failed. But the truth
is no one in the 507th expected that there would be any need
to actually navigate. They were part of a growling river of northbound
steel and diesel, and these checkpoints were there to direct
them as compliant traffic.
Pietsewa and the first sergeant, Robert
Dowdy, looked at some nameless military policeman, and he raised
his hand toward Highway 7, directing Jessica Lynch into a future
of terror, dislocation, huckster iconography, and racialized
patriarchal culture war.
The sun rose over the 507th creeping
steadily along Highway 7, its addled leadership now making excuses
for discrepancies in the GPS systems. No military leader likes
to admit when a mistake has been made, especially when they are
still unsure whether it's been made or not. They are like the
proud father at the wheel of the family car not yet prepared
to admit that he is lost. Surely, that day, as the 507th passed
through not army but Marine units, the doubt went deeper. But
they were traveling generally north. They hadn't crossed the
Euphrates, which was there like a great geographical backstop.
The commander bit back his self-doubt while he tried to puzzle
out the contradictions between his GPS readings and an operations
order that was jumbled in his sleep-deprived brain, and continued
on.
In the morning light, they found themselves
driving into Nasiriyah with 33 sleep-starved support troops and
16 vehicles. Rising up around them were buildings where most
people were apparently still abed. Then before them was a bridge.
They crossed over it, but after a couple
of miles they realized that they had crossed the Euphrates River.
Iraqis began to appear on the streets. Captain King then ordered
them to turn the convoy around. They were definitely in the wrong
place.
Vehicle traffic began to clutter the
streets as the convoy went through the clumsy business of turning
16 military vehicles about in the tight thoroughfares of downtown
Nasiriyah.
There were Iraqis carrying weapons.
They began to pass actual manned Iraqi
tanks.
Looks were exchanged.
But the CENTCOM intelligence summary
had said the Iraqis would either be friendly or they would surrender,
and the 507th was not a combat unit. Their greatest desire now
was to be back in the company of a real combat unit. Adrenaline
began to make headway against their deep muscular fatigue.
At just after 7 AM they could hear a
fierce firefight in the distance. The Marines they had passed
earlier were in contact. Some began to wonder, if they will fire
on the Marine infantry and armor, won't they fire on this collection
of mechanics and clerks?
The convoy made several false turns in
Nasiriyah, becoming ever more confused about their location,
and their disorganization became evident to the Iraqis. As they
attempted to reorganize themselves, now split over two narrow
streets and trying to turn around, an Iraqi pickup truck turned
around to make a slow second pass of the convoy, two men inside
now frankly assessing the disorganized American unit. In a few
minutes, a second pickup with a mounted machinegun wheeled past
them and around a corner. One portion of the convoy was still
out of sight from the other. Pulses were now fluttering and mouths
were dry, as they began to sense that they had stepped out of
everything they knew and everything they had trained for.
They were prey, and they were in trouble.
A few bullets suddenly snapped past them
from buildings on both sides of the street. Orders were shouted
and radioed. "Get out!" Then the sprinkle became the
storm.
Bullets and then RPGs began slamming
into and around the vehicles. As they frantically tried to maneuver
their vehicles, Iraqis threw tires into the street to block escape
routes. Down another street, a bus was being pulled forward to
block that avenue of escape. Dowdy jumped off the Humvee and
attempted to direct the other vehicles back into a semblance
of order to escape the intensifying ambush. Moments later he
was dead. Two soldiers whose vehicle had been disabled leaped
aboard Pietsewa's vehicle.
Pietsewa, the two who'd leapt aboard,
and Lynch careened wildly over the street as if trying to actually
dodge the bullets, then Pietsewa lost control. Jessica Lynch
was gripping whatever she could find inside the careening vehicle.
The Humvee smashed to a halt under the trailer hitch of one of
the convoy's destroyed semi-tractor trucks.
Jessica Lynch saw Pietsewa and the others
vaguely, unable to assess their conditions or her own. She managed
to get off the Humvee where she fell to her knees and began praying,
then for Jessica Lynch the day was over. The concussion from
a gaping head wound sustained from the crash caused her to lose
consciousness. There is a contradiction here yet unresolved,
a story that her rifle jammed, which would mean she attempted
to put it into action... but in this series of presumptions,
I am presuming from the severity of her injuries that she was
in shock and it was unlikely she attempted to operate an assault
rifle. It happens in the movies, but this was no movie. Her ankle
was dislocated. Her femur was fractured and releasing blood in
to the muscle of her thigh. Her arm was broken, and she had a
large, copiously bleeding laceration on her head. Pietsewa, her
best friend, and a woman of the Hopi Nation, was already in deep
shock.
Part of the convoy, with Marine assistance,
escaped.
Once the attack was over, the Iraqi troops
took Lynch and Pietsewa to the Nasiriyah military hospital. Had
they not, she would have bled to death. Pietsewa died of her
injuries.
Dr. Jamal Kadhim Shwail and Dr Harith
al-Houssona examined her. She was in shock with precariously
low blood pressure. Not knowing the extent of the musculoskeletal
injuries or whether there was spinal damage, they could not afford
to jostle her to remove the layers of combat gear, uniform, body
armor, and web gear. They had to use bandage scissors to cut
away the equipment and clothing, which was still fully secured
on her body. She was infused with fluids, including three units
of whole blood--two donated on the spot by Iraqi hospital staff--catheterized,
splinted, her head sutured, and transported to Saddam hospital,
also in Nasiriyah, for surgery on her dangerously fractured femur.
Dr. Mahdi Khafazi performed the surgery.
Al Jazeera published photos from Nasiriyah,
including pictures of the dead and captured Americans. The U.S.
military would eventually attack the al Jazeera offices (as they
had also done in Afghanistan) for daring to publish the true
face of war. In those pictures were prisoners from the ambush
of the 507th: Specialist 4 Edgar Adan Hernandez, 21, of Mission,
Texas; Specialist 4 Joseph Neal Hudson, 23, of Alamogordo, New
Mexico; Specialist 4 Shoshana Nyree Johnson, 30, of El Paso,
Texas; Private First Class Patrick Wayne Miller, 23, of Walter,
Kansas and Sergeant James Joseph Riley, 31, of Pennsauken, New
Jersey.
The fear and pain of Specialist Johnson,
a young African American woman who had been shot in both legs
before capture, was almost palpable in her picture. Shoshana
Johnson's story would cross Jessica Lynch's again.
During Lynch's convalescence, Dr. Harith
Houssona, a young 24-year-old physician, and several of the nurses
befriended Lynch. Iraqi military commanders considered her a
prisoner of war but, given the severity of her injuries, gave
the hospital staff wide latitude and little oversight. Seven
days into the ordeal, most of the Iraqi military left and Houssona
ordered Jessica Lynch to be returned to the American military.
One Iraqi officer and an ambulance driver named Sabah Khazaal
tried to transport Lynch back to the Americans.
The reasoning was that an ambulance is
protected under the Geneva Conventions and wouldn't be fired
upon. It didn't work. When the ambulance was within 300 meters
of the American army checkpoint, U.S. soldiers opened fire on
it, nearly killing Lynch after she was well on her way to a successful
convalescence and repatriation to the United States.
It is probably coincidental that a detachment
of SEALs and Rangers were deployed for a "special"
mission on April Fools Day. Several things were special about
it.
First, special teams like this are generally
employed on sensitive missions, for which the tactics and techniques
are classified.
Second, special teams like this, given
the classified techniques and tactics they use, would not take
along a civilian cameraman, who would both record classified
techniques unnecessarily and be a possible impediment to the
operation.
Third, there was not a threat for this
special secret mission that warranted the use of these classified
tactics and techniques.
It was well known to American military
intelligence, by the time that the so-called rescue of Jessica
Lynch was planned, that the Iraqi military was abandoning Nasiriyah
as tactically untenable. Civilians were moving freely between
Nasiriyah and American positions on the outskirts of the city.
Wily opportunists were among them, one in particular a lawyer
named Mohammed al-Rehaief. The official story is that al-Rehaief
reported Lynch's "captivity" to the Americans, and
CENTCOM then organized a special ops rescue mission.
Given what we know now, including that
al-Rehaief has become rich and lives in the United States, it
seems likely that al-Rehaief, whose wife worked in the hospital,
told him about Lynch. He went to the Americans, who then began
debriefing him.
The war was going very badly for American
forces at that point with Rumsfeld's feeble new doctrine and
his incessant and counter-productive micromanagement. Doubt was
emerging in the anesthetized consciousness of America, and to
keep that patient asleep, the War Department needed a publicity
boost.
Al-Rehaief was offered a free trip to
America for him and his family and a life of fame and adulation
in exchange for a modicum of cooperation.
He was sent back to the hospital to gather
specific information on floor plans and door locations, while
the "special" unit began planning the "rescue"
of PFC Lynch. The Public Affairs Officer of CENTCOM was put on
high alert, and the whole Department of Defense Wag-the-Dog Bureau
went into action, including the Rendon Group.
The Rendon Group has been around through
both the Clinton and Bush II administrations. It is not the only
public relations outfit feeding at the public trough for the
purpose of shoveling bullshit at the very public who signs its
checks. But Rendon is emblematic.
Rendon stage managed much of the run-up
to the current quagmire in Iraq, to include being largely responsible
for the organization of the new Iraqi quisling regime--dubbed
by Rendon the "Iraqi National Congress," complete with
the changed regime head and convicted embezzler, Ahmad Chalabi.
(Said one unnamed State Department official in a moment of anonymous
candor, "Were it not for Rendon, the Chalabi group wouldn't
even be on the map.")
Neither would Jessica Lynch's "rescue,"
because it never would have happened. It was a staged military
operation... staged for the entertainment media with the purpose
of injecting some war optimism into the American mass consciousness.
There never was a rescue. There was a made-for-television mini-movie.
Rendon has picked up where Hill &
Knowlton, the Gulf War I perception managers, left off. I people
recall, Hill & Knowlton, on contract with the US government,
hatched the Kuwaiti-babies-thrown-from-their-incubators-by-Iraqi-soldier
s story that mobilized massive press and public support for the
Bush I invasion. Of course, the story turned out to be complete
horseshit, but it proved so persistent that an HBO movie about
Gulf War I last year actually echoed it again as fact. It should
not surprise anyone that Torie Clarke, Pentagon spokesperson
during the stop-and-start blitz at the beginning of the latest
invasion, is a former Hill & Knowlton staffer.
More and more, the right-wing is bringing
women into the limelight as spokespersons for their policies.
Rendon Group was founded by the former
Democratic Party operator, John Rendon. Rendon Group worked alongside
Hill & Knowlton during Gulf War I, inside Kuwait, where they
learned quickly how to mine America's consumerist witlessness.
Rendon even boasted about it to the National
Security Council, saying, "If any of you either participated
in the liberation of Kuwait City ... or if you watched it on
television, you would have seen hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small
American flags. Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of
Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful
months, were able to get hand-held American flags? And for that
matter, the flags of other coalition countries? Well, you now
know the answer. That was one of my jobs."
Did you ever stop to wonder...
Well, no. We don't. That's why we keep
signing checks for dull-witted gangsters pretending to be statesmen.
Hill & Knowlton actually published a pack of lies disguised
as a book, called The Rape of Kuwait, that was sent directly
to troops prior to launching Desert Storm, presumably to remove
their inhibitions and imbue them with the proper fighting spirit
by dehumanizing their new enemy.
The Rape of Kuwait is an interesting
choice of words. Rape comes up again and again in warfare, on
the one hand as an unspeakable reality, and on the other as part
of a patriarchal morality tale, as we shall see further down.
The shifting fictional account that happened
to Jessica Lynch was likely a fabrication that originated in
the White House's Office of Global Communications--an office
almost run by Rendon people. (Rendon's Chief Financial Officer
is Sandy Libby, wife of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice
President Dick Cheney's chief of staff.) They generated "news
stories" to be released through CENTCOM and elsewhere faster
than the press could keep up in order to push deadlines and competition
and inhibit fact-checking. Then the stories come apart, sometimes
in mere days or hours, but the fabrications are allowed to "linger"
without comment.
"Linger" is a wag-the-dog industry
word and a concept employed by military psychological operations
(Psyops).
This tactic is combined with language/message
control--explaining why masculine bluster like "Americans
are not the running kind" can show up in two separate speeches
in the same day by different members of the administration--redefining
all opposition to US actions as terrorists, and building false
associations through repetition: "echoing," another
industry word. (How many times did we hear "September 11,"
"terrorists," and "Saddam Hussein" in the
same breath.) This is a Psyops technique, a method to "construct
memory," and the "target audience" is not the
enemy, and not the "indigenous population." It is us.
When they get caught, they reconfigure
the story with elliptical, some would say obtuse, language, then
let it linger some more. Weapons of mass destruction become a
"weapons program," a "seeking" of WMD. George
Tenet's CIA "had questions" about the British forgery...
er, dossier. By the time this is published, who will remember
the Jessica Lynch fable, or care?
Some of these constructed tales are so
lurid they would defy imagination if people had any.
But the American press, always a bastion
of healthy skepticism and critical thought, lapped up the Jessica
Lynch fable like Basset hounds. The prefabricated story was ready
at had for the press pool at CENTCOM headquarters in Qatar, and
they dutifully echoed a dramatic morality play of chauvinism--national
then male--around the world.
Concept.
The pretty, plucky, white American female
soldier fights off the degenerate, blood-drinking, cowardly (that
is, feminized), sub-human Iraqis, emptying her magazine into
several of the evil-doers until, multiply shot and stabbed, she
is overwhelmed and taken prisoner. CENTCOM solemnly left the
question of sexual assault open to let the public imagination
run with it. Wicked Fedayeen interrogators reportedly cuffed
her around in the hospital.
Then, the epitome of moral American manhood,
Special Operations, enters the set to rescue our heroine, fallen
beneath the assaults of the unmanly Arabs, reaffirming the roles
of male and female fully-human Americans, and the great chain
of being is reconstituted in all its proper hierarchies.
To paraphrase Susan Jeffords in her essay,
"Telling the War Story", at a time when American military
invincibility is being called into question by Iraqi resistance,
a display of heroic, militarized male power can provide a "compensatory
national identity."
Fade in.
Roll subtext: "Never overestimate
the intelligence of the general public."--P. T. Barnum
Susan Schmidt and Vernon Leob of the
Washington Post were positively fawning on April 10 when they
regurgitated the "leaked" story of Jessica Lynch's
fight to the death with deviant Iraqis and her subsequent rescue,
complete with subtitles like, "Fighting to the Death,"
"Talk About Spunk," and "Classic Special Ops."
The latter refers to that "daring
special operations raid" that "rescued" Lynch.
The story "echoed" breathlessly
across the airwaves and the pages of ostensibly respectable magazines
and newspapers. The public memory was "constructed"
through repetition. As questions were raised, the story was allowed
to "linger."
On May 15th, the Guardian said, "Her
rescue will go down as one of the most stunning pieces of news
management yet conceived. It provides a remarkable insight into
the real influence of Hollywood producers on the Pentagon's media
managers, and has produced a template from which America hopes
to present its future wars." Americans don't read the Guardian.
They still believe the rescue fiction.
In point of fact, the Special Operations
raid was conducted with zero resistance, exactly as they expected,
given that they were perfectly aware the Iraqi combatants had
already withdrawn. But to give it the feel of authenticity, they
cut the power to the hospital (putting every patient there in
danger), explosively breached doors that hospital staff would
have willingly opened for them, and even flex-cuffed two hospital
employees, taking one prisoner for several days, and two patients,
one with an intravenous infusion.
That was edited out of the film version.
Then the doubt as the Lynch fight-to-the-death
story collapsed, and the ellipsis came. Lynch's actual experiences
were "still being sorted out," said CENTCOM. They were
obscured by "the fog of war," a fog generated from
the White House Office of Global Communications.
The Rendonesque spinmeisters, taking
their cue from Hollywood, manned by men who clumsily tail social
trends like commodified-media ersatz feminism, constructed their
tale of the spunky woman soldier, kind of a GI Jane meets Courage
Under Fire, and ran headlong into an unexpected red-meat reactionary
backlash. Any woman who donned a uniform was a manifestation
of something called "radical feminism," which meant
anything remotely resembling feminism at all. Lynch the late
imperialist token woman hero ran headlong into Lynch the violator
of primitive partriarchy's weapons taboo. America the diverse!
Patriarchy doesn't assign women one monolithic
script, but many, with every script developed safely within a
phallocentric construction of sexuality.
As Zillah Eisenstein notes in her essay
"Disciplining Female Bodies for Khaki", as part of
its restless renegotiation of sexuality, capitalist patriarchy
pluralizes femininities in relation to their corresponding, also
evolving, and dominant opposite poles, masculinities.
Lynch had been grotesquely exploited
by army Public Affairs, but now she was going to undergo multiple
transformations. Like women in all situations, she was one female
body who would now be plurally defined against a plurality of
masculinities serving a diversity of interests. Her subordination
as a woman, her femininity, was not abolished. It was diversified,
like a product line that is losing market share.
As quickly as the fiction of the fight
to the death was released, liberal feminists came forward to
seize this proof of women's fitness for combat. She was GI Jane.
This backfired, as the battle to the death story unraveled, and
the liberals were silenced by the misogynists arguing against
women's fitness for combat.
[This is a bogus argument either way,
engaged with arsenals of competing empirical claims about upper-body
strength and other near-irrelevancies, given that there is not
a single combat skill that doesn't have its corollary in non-military
endeavors and which has not been practiced from the very beginning
by women. Harriet Tubman led so many forays behind Confederate
lines during the Civil War, including commanding units in combat,
that she earned the nickname General Tubman. Tens of thousands
of Yugoslav partisan women fought valiantly against Ustasha,
Chetniks, and Nazis by turns. Soviet women flew fighter aircraft
and were among the top combat snipers for the Red Army in the
war against Hitler, with one Soviet schoolteacher single-handedly
sending 93 Aryan warrior-males of the Wehrmacht on to Valhalla.
These are just a few examples. It's not even a real question
whether women can perform in combat. They can. History has already
settled that question quite decisively, yet another reason why
history can be so dangerous and has to be displaced by mythology.]
Jessica Lynch, the person, was hidden
away, while her definitions were played.
Why didn't the press cover the men who
died fighting? Why did Jessica Lynch receive a Bronze Star? Why
didn't anyone point out that Pietsewa, a woman, "lost control"
under fire? These agenda-driven questions proliferated.
Sex and war are hot buttons.
Jessica Lynch's defenders from the latter
attack have in many ways reduced her to a poor, picked on girl,
which while true in some respect is also another script... it's
inescapable. Jessica Lynch was chosen because she was a white
woman-soldier, and the issue became a can of worms for the same
reason.
The perception managers of the fight-to-the-death
story, in trying to mobilize "feminist" sympathy as
support for the war, now spotlighted (if we were looking) how
patriarchal society has to reduce women in order to retain male
hegemonic claims on this key institution, the military.
The father of a male soldier--who had
reportedly fought fiercely before being killed--excoriated Lynch
when her book deal was signed. So did a host of others. Now she
would become a gold digger, a woman ruthlessly exploiting the
deaths of brave male soldiers to make money.
Rick Bragg--a white man--was fired from
the New York Times for almost plagiarizing a freeleancer's material
and pretending he was reporting from on the scene, when he was
clearly not.
Bragg cut a million dollar deal with
Knopf publishers to write Lynch's "authorized" biography,
which raises the suspicion that he swindled Lynch into signing
a contract in which she relinquished her control over the final
product. Or not. I'm not here to idealize Lynch or anyone else.
I don't know. A million dollars is a lot of money to turn down
for a poor family from Palestine, West Virginia. A million dollars
is just a lot of money.
The book, I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica
Lynch Story, patched together as many details as Bragg could
string together, then added a twist to pump up the sales. Jessica
Lynch, it claimed, was raped by her captors.
Raped.
This claim, it turns out, has no evidence
to support it, and the Jessica Lynch doll (that is, whatever
collection of interests now acting as her public surrogate) is
reported to have another bout of amnesia about this ostensible
rape. The doctors at Nasiriyah hospital who examined her in great
detail, to include catheterizing her, said that (1) there was
no sign of sexual assault, (2) her clothing was still buttoned,
zipped, and intact when she arrived at the hospital, and (3)
her condition was so grave from her injuries that a sexual assault
would have killed her.
Aside from selling books, why rape? The
answer will take us across the terrain where gender and race
tread together in the landscape of the American psyche.
Rape happens, and rape happens in war
as well as peace. Men rape women. Male sexuality is socially
constructed, understood, and accepted as aggression. "Getting
fucked" is still metaphorical slang for being attacked.
Men still boast about their sexual exploits as "tearing
that pussy up." These are not aberrations. This is the norm.
And this is not news.
The frequency of rape is amplified by
war, but it can be amplified so readily because patriarchal culture
is rape culture. Masculinity that is associated with violence
that defines the sexual subject (male) as aggressive, and describes
sex as aggression, necessarily defines the sexual object (female)
as an object of (sexual) aggression.
Women, nature, and brown people's societies
are "naturalized" in the imperial Cartesian cosmology,
the objects of male subjectivity, the objects of conquest (often
referred to as penetration) and control. When an imperium requires
war to continue its exploitation, the (masculinized) military
as an institution assumes greater centrality, taking the rest
of society along with it by further militarizing masculinity.
When sectoral wars occur, this dialectic of militarism and masculinity
happens too, and the frequency of rape is amplified.
The merger of violence and sexuality
that is already there in countless forms is suddenly released
from the legitimizing constraints of civil association, and men
take their opportunity to rape, to actualize sex as aggression
and aggression as sex and therein actualize their own masculinity.
But rape also has propaganda value, and
here is where we have to take great care. Just as we deal with
the intricacies of separating anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism,
we have to separate the denial of rape culture, about which women
and their male allies are rightly outraged and in motion, from
identifying actual falsifications about rape. This is an extremely
important critical challenge as imperialist patriarchy becomes
ever more deft and sophisticated in retaining its ideological
hegemony.
In Cynthia Enloe's Maneuvers, remarking
on the breakup of Yugoslavia, she said, "Rape has been used
as one method to terrorize civilian populations in villages and
forcing ethnic groups to leave [according to the U.N. "Investigation
into Rapes in Bosnia," which published its report in 1993].
... Serb paramilitary units would enter a village. Several women
would be raped in the presence of others so that word would spread
throughout the village and a climate of fear was created. ...
Those male villagers who had wanted to stay then decided to leave
with their women and children in order to protect them from being
raped. ... Often, men were deported or fled. Women were then
often raped in their own homes or taken from their hopes to another
location to be raped ... (p. 140)"
This is an example of unwitting collaboration
with one form of patriarchy, and with imperialism, that happens
when seeking "evidence" to support one's case in a
singularized issue, in this case the characterization of the
military as a dehistoricized thing-in-itself with no reference
to which military, under what circumstances. The fact is that
in some militaries rape was not tolerated. And every story of
rape cannot be accepted uncritically.
A thorough review of the breakup of Yugoslavia
reveals in short order that many of the lurid tales of mass rape
and "rape camps" were in fact not true, that these
stories targeted almost exclusively those crimes alleged against
Serbian combatants, and that they were used to mobilize not only
Western feminist outrage, but--and this is even more significant,
I think--also the paternalistic outrage of men as women's father-protectors.
There were rapes in Yugoslavia, and they
were committed on all sides. But that does not constitute a "rape
camp."
Yoshie Furuhashie, a feminist scholar
with whom I have corresponded off and on for about four years,
had the temerity to point out on a feminist listserv (that was
quickly taken over by men) that these stories were questionable.
A male on the list replied with reflexive outrage, "What
proof do you have that the Serbs did not use mass rape as a conscious
policy of genocide and terror in Bosnia and Kosovo?"
Note the detailed specificity of his
construction.
There is an argument from intimidation
in this challenge where he not only demands that Yoshie prove
a negative (Prove that there is no God.), but he issues the challenge
with a kind of sanctimonious outrage that implies any question
of the veracity of the rape camp claim is tantamount to holocaust
denial.
Yoshie cited numerous sources that demonstrated
these were demonizing fictions, targeting Western feminists as
an audience, to mobilize support for an imperial war to further
break up Yugoslavia disguised as a war against demonic Serbs.
The demonization of the Serbs with this
strategy is little different than the similar demonization of
African Americans and German Jews, also systematically and effectively
portrayed as sub-human sexual predators. Now it was the Serbs'
turn.
Diane Johnstone, former European editor
of In These Times ("Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass:
Politics, Media, and the Ideology of Globalization", 1999)
and Karen Talbot, of Covert Action Quarterly ("Backing Up
Globalization with Military Might", 1999), both journalists
with a high index of suspicion when imperialist adventures dovetail
so nicely with shocking stories of women-as-victims issued by
the male-dominated imperial press, looked into the stories of
"rape camps" and found that for the hundreds of stories
about them, there appeared to be a singular original source:
Ruder Finn, Inc., yet another public relations outfit, al la
Rendon Group and Hill & Knowlton, working for the US government
through proxies in Bosnia and Croatia.
Ruder Finn convinced the world of the
existence of Serbian rape camps, which was disproved by Martin
Lettmayer, a German journalist who spent months trying to find
any actual evidence of these rape camps, and came up empty handed.
Nick Mamatas ("The Public Relations Firms of Dictators",
2001), describes one public relations coup manufactured by Ruder
Finn: "Pictures can fool the world, and recently, one of
them did. In 1992, an Independent Television News team led by
journalist Penny Marshall shot footage of men staring out from
behind barbed wire. They were Bosnian prisoners inside a Serbian
concentration camp, ITN explained. The picture was very misleading:
the ITN photographers were actually inside the compound, and
their subjects were outside the fence, looking in. LM, a libertarian
magazine that had been founded by some disaffected former Marxists,
pointed this out, and was promptly sued out of existence thanks
to Britain's stringent libel laws."
Ruder Finn's president, Jim Harff, unapologetically
proud of his accomplishments, boasted in public interviews that
his firm had targeted liberals, feminists, and Jews, wagering
on a generalized ignorance of Balkan history, in their efforts
to gain support for Euro-American interventions in the Balkans.
Catherine Sameh, in Against the Current,
"The Rebel Girl: The War, The Women, The West," responded
to similar attempts of the Bush administration to appeal to feminists
for support of the war against Afghanistan:
"Let me be clear that I DO NOT in
any way support the Taliban regime as defenders of Afghanistan
against neocolonial domination, nor do I endorse a silence from
the left on this issue. I strongly condemn the Taliban's oppression
of women and all Afghan citizens, as I believe any thoughtful
antiwar, global justice movement must.
"But I do oppose a decontextualized,
exclusively Western discussion of women under the Taliban or
the position of women in the Middle East (as if there were one
position). From Oprah to "Frontline" to the Feminist
Majority, the discussion spins on a highly out-of-context, sensationalist
view of Islamic societies and Muslim people_which simultaneously
reinforces the Islamic-fundamentalist framing of their political
regimes as the one true Islam, and the Orientalist framing of
Arab and Muslim societies that further silences women's voices
and agency."
This tactic is proving effective in many
venues, and the paradox of it is that while it is directed at
feminists, it also serves as an appeal to an anachronistic patriarchal
protectionism that often defines women as sentimentalized property.
Jessica Lynch is now being yet again
redefined by Bragg's totally unsubstantiated allegations of rape.
Rape by an enemy is the usurpation of male privilege by a subhuman,
and it must be avenged to restore the status of the victim in
the eyes of the father-husband. Rape becomes symbolic of the
enemy.
Men have to "protect" women,
and oftentimes, "our" women. This is the basis of the
Black rapist stereotype that was used to overthrow Reconstruction
and enforce Jim Crow.
Andrea Dworkin writes of lynching, "The
black male, in the South hunted at night to be castrated and/or
lynched, becomes in the racist United States the carrier of danger,
the carrier of rape. The use of a racially despised type of male
as a scapegoat, a symbolic figure embodying the sexuality of
all men, is a common male-supremacist strategy. .... And so,
among the women, night is the time of sex and also of race: racial
exploitation and sexual exploitation are fused, indivisible.
Night and black: sex and race: the black men are blamed for what
all men do..."
In Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington
Race Riot of 1898 and its Legacy, edited by David Cecelski (UNC
Press, 1998), describing the North Carolina coup d'etat against
the fusion governments of Black Republicans and white Populists
that signaled the last nail driven in the coffin of Reconstruction,
there is account after account of how the specter of the Black
Rapist was the absolute centerpiece of white Democrat propaganda
to marshal and mobilize ad hoc white militias against "Black
rule." As Dworkin points out, this is a "common male
supremacist strategy."
The Origin Myth--based fundamentally
on white supremacy--asserted itself in the minds of the white
Populists and when given the choice between their class peers
among Blacks and the white ruling class, they chose the latter.
(This is a lesson we cannot afford to forget about any form of
American populism.)
This provision of outrage is essential
to deploying troops into battle on imperial adventures. While
wars in defense of one's home, or wars defending oneself against
extermination are clear and unambiguous to combatants, wars of
offense generally require the emotional fuel of a morality tale.
It needn't have much of a half life either.
When I was in Haiti, my team allowed
themselves to feel the outrage at the FAdH baton beatings of
civilians when the mission was still defined as one that might
involve combat. Once the likelihood of combat passed, however,
within a month, several of my subordinates were longing for the
baton-wielding FAdH and would themselves have gleefully laid
into the raucous crowds of turbulent black bodies.
Which brings us to Shoshana Johnson,
Black, daughter of a Panamanian immigrant, and one of the captives
from the ambush of the 507th. There was never any reference,
however elliptical, to the possibility of Shoshana Johnson being
raped, as there was for Jessica Lynch even before CENTCOM learned
her fate. Indeed the issue of Black women being raped is extremely
dangerous in the United States because it hits too close to the
centuries-long American tradition of white masters raping their
slaves. This is not part of the U.S. Origin Myth. Quite the contrary.
There is much being made, and rightly
so, of the disparate treatment of Jessica Lynch and Shoshana
Johnson, but little remarked upon is what binds the two together
in mass consciousness.
They are both women. White supremacy
has been sniffed out by both sides of the race question regarding
Johnson and Lynch (who reportedly liked each other), judging
by the outrage of one side and the defensiveness of the other.
The issue of racial disparity is red
hot and will fought out in other venues, and I stand with Shoshana
Johnson in her demand to be treated equally, holding the military
and white supremacy as systems responsible, and not Jessica Lynch.
It is more important here, perhaps, to
point out what they had in common, and to include Lori Pitsewa:
an Appalachian woman, an African American woman, and a Hopi woman;
all in the Army, and all doubly colonized and plurally defined
by capitalist patriarchy.
Lynch and Johnson are now scheduled to
appear together on the cover of December's Glamour magazine as
the "Women of the Year." Get your head around that
if you want to see how deftly any seed of subversion is commodified!
This is the latest transformation, the latest account--two smiling
women warriors, salt 'n' peppa like the biracial buddy movies
Americans find so comforting, backgrounded by American flags
and yellow ribbons, our (militarized) social progress on display
in every supermarket.
How do these many accounts of them reflect
not on them as individuals, but on capitalist patriarchy in the
United States?
Stan Goff
is the author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti"
(Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full
Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a
member of the BRING
THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special
Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier.
Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
This article originally appeared on Freedom Road.
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Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
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