The Politics of Indifference

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
-- William Blake

When Vice President Cheney was told last week that 2/3 of Americans see the Iraqi war as a lost cause, as not worth fighting, his response was, “So?” One wonders what his response would be if told that it is our precious sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, 4,000 of them that have sacrificed their lives for Cheney’s indifference. But who cares about the 4,000 dead soldiers, the real proof that the war has been a wasted effort is evidenced by the 4$ a gallon my Hummer requires to get to the mall.

When Noam Chomsky wrote in 1967, “It hardly is necessary to resort to the ‘new economics’ [defense spending] to show that such measures can reduce unemployment and keep the economy functioning,” the corporate illusion was in place--an illusion that serves to delude the public--that the military industrial complex might facilitate a redistribution of income, a new responsibility to the public good, and a dissolution of corporate political power. Chomsky recognized just how crucial the maintenance of this myth was to American hegemony, and how it disguised plutocracy in the cloak of democracy: “[it] requires little political insight to see why the government is likely to expend the resources it commands on research and development that yield an immediate profit, on missiles and ‘fast-deployment logistic ships’ rather than on a mass transportation system that conflict with the needs of the oil companies and automotive industry, on nerve gas and manned orbital laboratories rather than on farming the oceans (while wealthy farmers and farm industries are subsidized to cut back agricultural production). It is reasonably clear that unless the commercial and industrial system comes under some sort of popular democratic control, political democracy will be a sham and state power will continue to serve inhuman ends.”

America’s stooge media has been instrumental in portraying the post 9/ll political zeitgeist as a “clash of cultures,” the righteous against the infidels, Christian against heathen, a false set of binary oppositions that the American public is, at least was, more than comfortable with. The civilizing westward expansion that systematically displaced and annihilated the indigenous peoples (Indians), was valorized by an oral tradition, and then disseminated in literature and film representations of heroic trappers, cattlemen, and homesteaders reedeeming the pagan wilderness by shedding christian blood. Further, it was legitimated by virtue of the sacred assumption that, since the "chosen" were descendants of a superior Western European culture, they had a God-given right to appropriate the “frontier,” a convenient culturally constructed phrase for Indian lands and territories. It takes just a skip, hop, and a jump to move from social Darwinism to manifest destiny. And in following the ancient Germanic tradition of the “Volk” (see Herder, Spenser, Wagner), the same political philosophy co-opted by Hitler to justify the Holocaust, the American political psyche assimilated the belief that, as Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies put it, “violence is a redemptive act of justice by which civilization is secured and advanced”(172). The scant coverage given to collateral damage and civilian casualties--the destruction to the Iraqi infrastructure is near irrevocable and the civilian dead are at 600,000 plus--is understandable when one considers why the vanquished are unmourned: “they do not require the reflex of regret, for as agents of evil they are by definition of less human worth”(174).