Feeling the Unthinkable, Vol. 2: War and Democracy- War on Democracy

By Donald Gutierrez

Amador Publishers, LLC is proud to release Feeling the Unthinkable, Essays on Social Justice by Donald Gutierrez in a 4-volume collection of e-books for ease of reading and reference. Each of the four volumes follows exactly its corresponding Part in the print edition. Each e-volume is introduced with relevant excerpts from the Author's original Introduction to the consolidated print edition.

"War and Democracy - War on Democracy" deals with problematic, even crucial, areas of America's democracy including militarization of the U.S., war, political language, universal jurisdiction over war crimes, and the threat of nuclear war not only to democracy but to all life on earth.

"This is a must-read collection for social justice activists. In these short essays and reviews, Gutierrez punctures America's wrongfully inflated sense of self. He sharply challenges our militarization, our repeated wars, and our promotion and acceptance of torture. He condemns our toleration of economic injustice and our blindness to our maintenance of the largest prison system in the world. But Gutierrez does not just critique, he promotes human rights as well as personal and communal solidarity. He calls us to respect human rights, to promote solidarity with others, and to change our world while we still have the chance." --William P. Quigley, Professor of Law, Loyola University New Orleans School of Law, and Director of the Law Clinic and Gillis Long Poverty Law Center

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amador Publishers, LLC
• Release date: Sep 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301992805

Donald Gutierrez

Donald Gutierrez was a member of the University of Notre Dame English Department faculty from 1968 to 1975, then joined the English Department at Western New Mexico University in Silver City. He retired from WNMU in 1994 and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico with his wife Marlene Zander Gutierrez. He received a "New Mexico Eminent Scholar Award" in 1989.Gutierrez has published six books of literary criticism, two of which focus on D. H. Lawrence and and one on Kenneth Rexroth. Since retirement, he has published over fifty essays and reviews, most of which concern social justice and American state terrorism abroad.

Book preview

FEELING THE UNTHINKABLE

Essays on Social Justice

by Donald Gutierrez

edited by Zelda Leah Gatuskin

Collection Copyright © 2012 by Donald Gutierrez

All essays used by permission of the author.

Volume 2

War and Democracy - War on Democracy

published by

AMADOR PUBLISHERS

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication

To my wife-artist Marlene

(April 1932 - August 2011)

Cover Art: detail from

Illuminating the Dark Side by Marlene Zander Gutierrez

Collage and acrylic, 24.5x 40.5

Feeling the Unthinkable Volume 2

War and Democracy - War on Democracy

Contents

Author's Preface

About the E-Edition

Introduction to Volume 2

Chapt. 1. Patriotism and Country Versus State

Chapt. 2. Review: Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

Chapt. 3. Review: Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

Chapt. 4.George Orwell and Washington's War Rhetoric

Chapt. 5. Review: Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger

Chapt. 6. Review: Vincent Bugliosi, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

Chapt. 7. Universal Jurisdiction and the Bush Administration

Chapt. 8. Review: Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letters of Warning to a Young Patriot

Chapt. 9. Feeling the Unthinkable

Chapt. 10. Review: Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex

Chapt. 11. The Great Military-Defense Industry Swindle of America

Chapt. 12. American Global Democracy and the Militarization of America

Chapt. 13. Fuck and Death Metals

Chapt. 14. Review: Seymour Hersh, Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome: the War Between America's Ailing Veterans and Their Government

Chapt. 15. Review: Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic

Bibliography

…if way to the Better there be,it exacts a full look at the Worst.

Thomas Hardy, In Tenebris: II

Author's Preface

The essays and reviews in this book were written during fifteen years of retirement beginning in 1994, a few of them before that year. All but one of them have been published in a variety of venues, and most of them in at least two or three different publications.

Feeling the Unthinkable is not a scholarly study or an organically structured work. It is a collection consisting of essays and reviews and one memoir. Nevertheless, the various pieces are, I feel, sufficiently interrelated in subject and polemical stance to lend Feeling a certain unity of voice, tone and social-political humanist outlook. That unity is based on the implication that a revolution in sensibility is essential to changing and repairing the world, and that that revolution could be brought about by coming alive in our feeling states and imagination to the social evil abounding in the modern era, no little of it created by governments (certainly ours) and the elites they serve.

We can think about the unthinkable, but feeling it is a challenge reaching to the depths of our being. Who knows what we become after that immersion into personal darkness. That is the ultimate challenge of Feeling the Unthinkable. [Donald Gutierrez, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2012]

About the E-edition

Amador Publishers, LLC is proud to release Feeling the Unthinkable, Essays on Social Justice by Donald Gutierrez in a 4-volume collection of e-books for ease of reading and reference. Each of the four volumes follows exactly its corresponding Part in the print edition (that is, Volume 1 has the same articles in the same order as Part I; Volume 2 as Part II, etc.). However, the chapter numbers have been changed in Volumes 2, 3, and 4 so that the first essay in each e-book is Chapter 1 and those that follow are numbered sequentially.

The complete print edition Table of Contents with corresponding e-book volume and chapter numbers is available online: http://amadorbooks.com/books/xrpftu0.htm

The complete Bibliography has been published at the end of all four e-volumes.

Each e-volume is introduced with relevant excerpts from the Author's original Introduction to the consolidated print edition. This complete Introduction is also available online: http://amadorbooks.com/books/xrpftu1.htm

The Afterword and other back matter are published at the end of Volume 4.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the periodicals which previously published, in slightly different forms, the essays and reviews collected herein. Their credits appear at the end of each chapter.

The print edition of Feeling the Unthinkable is available from Amador Publishers.

Feeling the Unthinkable

Introduction to E-edition Volume 2

War and Democracy - War on Democracy

There is no such thing as was; if was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. --William Faulkner

Feeling may be briefer than thought but, sufficiently deep, can electrify what we think is important in life. Yet who wants to think about, let alone feel, the 1981 El Mozote Massacre in El Salvador: an entire village is slaughtered by the Salvadoran military, all the men tortured before being killed, and the larger number of the slain being children. Who wants to hear about such - and hundreds of other - horrors that have been perpetrated decade after decade in modern times? Yet Washington - our government - facilitated many of these atrocities through School of the Americas instruction as well as through funding, arms and intelligence delivery, and encouragement provided to demonic regimes, sometimes communicated by American embassies, as in the incredible Indonesian mass-murders during the 1960s. Supposedly, all this aid was designed to halt the spread of communism; instead, it actually undercut the activism of union organizers, peasants, students, religious and other groups trying to democratize the extremely concentrated wealth and power traditionally held in a vise-grip by the upper class and the military in so many Latin American countries.

War and Democracy - War on Democracy deals with problematic, even crucial, areas of America's democracy, including Chris Hedges' study of war, which indicates that there is nothing redeeming about any war; the application of George Orwell's definitive remarks on the corruption of political language to military conduct in America's more recent wars; the relation of the concept of universal jurisdiction to war crimes committed by the White House; the ominous threat to democracy and creeping fascistization of America outlined in ten steps in Naomi Wolf's The End of America; the sinister militarization and psychic regimentation of the country in the essay American Global 'Democracy' and the Militarization of America, and two pieces dealing with the threat of nuclear war not only to democracy but to all life on earth, Dr. Helen Caldicott's The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military- Industrial Complex and the book-title essay Feeling the Unthinkable, in part a polemic against a rational approach to nuclear war conceptualized by Rand Corporation theorist Herman Kahn.

A substantial amount of material in Feeling is about the past. Some might say, then, that the past is past, no longer significantly with us. That of course is not true, as some of that past remains with everybody. For some categories of people, however, the past is all too unforgettable. Let us recall William Faulkner's There is no such thing as 'was' if 'was' existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. For victims of torture, combat-experienced soldiers, war-stressed civilians, victims of family violence, misogyny, racial or ethnic prejudice and others, Faulkner's apothegm is overpoweringly true. For these types of individuals, the past and the present are virtually seamless. The past and its suffering and horror occasioned well up like an uncontrollable flood, re-animating terror, anxiety, helplessness, not to mention rage against tormenters. And if the torturers, for example, represent the state, the victimization might feel all the deeper, as one's antagonist(s) are shadow figures of a larger, dark, inaccessible authority.

Volume 2 - Chapter 1

Patriotism and Country Versus State

War Is the Health of the State

--Randolph Bourne, The State

War is the State

--Kenneth Rexroth, The Dragon and the Unicorn

As the U.S. Patriot Act (October 26, 2001) ominously implied that the true patriot had best keep his or her mouth shut about his government's actions no matter how evil, patriotism has become a word that would benefit from an iconoclastic embrace. One's immediate definition of patriotism is likely to be love of and dedication to one's country. This definition, though, is less one of instinct than of indoctrination encountered as part of one's upbringing. The indoctrination shifts us into something ultimately darker or narrower when patriotism is further defined or implied to mean the approval of the foreign economic interests and political-military authority of one's country. The problem emerging at this point is that the idea of country has subtly changed into another societal concept, the formidable abstraction and reality called the state.

One can love one's country in the form of, say, San Francisco's cultural liberalism, New Mexico's green chile, climate and mountains, the Midwest's festive sense of Halloween, autumn trees in Vermont, the New York theatre, art or baseball world - or individuals, such as Thelonius Monk, Theodore Dreiser, Franz Kline, Eugene Debs, Dorothy Day, Susan Farrell, Cesar Chavez or Amy Goodman. If, however,