Uncivil War, I

No international security, no call of the righteous man   
Needs a reason to kill man, history teaches us so   
Reason he must attain, must be approved by his God   
His child, partisan brother of war  
--War?, S.O.A.D. 

 And I don't need your civil war 
It feeds the rich, while it buries the poor    
You're power hungry, sellin' soldiers  
  In a human grocery store, ain't that fresh?  
I don't need your civil war 

--Civil War, Guns n Roses 

 Mr. Lincon, 
I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, 
the city of Savannah 
--General Sherman
___________________

Some reflections 150 years after Gettysburg.

Our Civil War was bloody and vicious, but it was certainly ours alone. It is the historian's party line that we could not have cohered as a nation had we not fought it (though its wounds, deprivations and  divisiveness persist.) One thing we have not learned as a result of our exhaustive self-study is that Civil Wars are internal affairs.

We persist in our folly by intervening in the inevitable Civil Wars of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.  Adding ignorance to our folly, we consider it a good thing to do. As with "The Trauma of the Gifted Child", we actually think we can fix their problems or stymy the inevitable. Maybe we think being a tourniquet is good enough, and fancy that we can stanch the bleeding.

If our justification for entering these conflicts is that the behavior of the combatants is heinous, we should consider how our Civil War was fought. Both sides perpetrated inhumane conditions upon their prisoners of war and suffered them among the troops. Grant, Sherman and Sheridan brought the carnage to the citizens of the South, Sherman cutting a swath of destruction to the Sea as a gift to President Lincoln. Sheridan destroyed the Shenandoah Valley so thoroughly that "a crow flying across the valley needed to bring his own provisions."

It was a total war of unflinching destruction, with such animus that the scars are still felt, and yet we now wish to involve ourselves in the Civil Wars of other nations, peopled by citizens who follow practices and beliefs much more foreign to us than that which divided the North and the South. Why? Are we suffering a collective wish for atonement -- to get it right somewhere else? Is it our Christian sympathy with the perceived meek, whomever he is conceived of being and wherever he may be? Throwing ourselves into the lion's den certainly seems to be the action of the martyr, yetwe haven't the wisdom of Solomon to determine who actually is the meek (if anyone out-qualifies another.)

RangerAgainstWar's position is that there is misery and deprivation aplenty in the United States without needed to go foraging about for it in other lands. It might not make for a exotic photo op, but if cross you Divide Street in most towns you would find need without bottom. However, Americans like flash and gash. It is as though at 237 years young, we are already an enervated ideology.

If Syria were not enough to interest us, we still have Iran on the back burner, and as a recent article teased with full seriousness, "Is Africa the Next Afghanistan?"

Our nation transfixed with one single death in the Zimmerman trial, yet we as a nation are willing to become the "neighborhood watch vigilantes" for the world, not too much troubled by death orders of magnitude higher.

Do we see the hypocrisy?

--by jim