The Banality of War in America

“That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn [from the trial] in Jerusalem.”
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil

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Many things have puzzled me since returning to the United States of America. It started with small, usually neutral observations, like 64 ounce cups in gas stations and stores the size of apartment blocks. Even the size of quarters caught my eye. “They’re just so….small,” I remember muttering to a confused cashier. On my third morning back I suddenly found the volume at which most Americans speak jarring.

I am, in some ways anyway, a stranger in my own land. And I have to be honest, this has become a scary place to be a stranger.

To be clear, I found relief in many parts of American life. After living under a kleptocratic dictatorship for more than a year, my understanding of and appreciation for freedom has gathered depth and breadth that I would never have imagined. I don’t mean civil religion’s version of the word, screamed into meaninglessness by warmongering, xenophobic pundits. I’m talking about tangible freedoms that were glaringly absent from life in Damascus. A free press, free speech, free practice of religion, and free elections (though I’m afraid that last one seems to have faded in America after the Citizens United decision) are things I no longer take for granted. In fact, I’m proud of these aspects of my country. I’m not always proud of how they are used, but I’m proud and grateful to enjoy these rights.

With these freedoms, however, comes the tendency toward complacency and thoughtlessness. Very few normal, every day Americans care about politics. Why would they? There’s very little they can do to change it, and, in the words of a friend, it’s all too complicated anyway. I can understand this sentiment; I feel it in my bones sometimes, too. But for many around the world, American policies are not just a matter of extended unemployment benefits or increased consumer protections (important though such things are); they are the difference between life and death.

Few know about the US and UK militaries’ use of depleted uranium rounds. They are titanium shell casings fortified with nuclear waste. Due to the radioactive metal’s extraordinary strength, it allows a shell or bullet to pierce bunker walls or tank armor. But while exceptionally effective, its effects on the health of both soldiers and people who are left to live in these contaminated areas have been intentionally obfuscated by the Pentagon and the UK’s Ministry of Defense. After the US-UK joint operation ‘Phantom Fury’ in 2004, according to a study by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, residents of Fallujah have been suffering from cancer “similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout.” According to a harrowing article by Maggie O’Kane in the Guardian, after heavy use of DU throughout the first Iraq War “health authorities say that at least three times more children are being born with congenital deformities than before the Gulf war.” In that same article, an Iraqi doctor has chilling words regarding the continuing legacy of US and UK ‘interventions’ using DU rounds. “If it is not a child without a brain, then maybe it’s one with a giant head, stumpy arms like those of a thalidomide victim, two fingers instead of five, a heart with missing valves, missing ears.” The US military rightly takes great pains to dispose of its own DU-contaminated vehicles and equipment – effectively admitting that the substance, when fired, is highly toxic. Yet despite international outcry, proposed legislation, and numerous independent studies, the Pentagon has not made even the most basic admission of DU’s danger like the one stated succinctly by veterans’ advocate Dan Fahey, that “science and common sense dictate it is unwise to use a weapon that distributes large quantities of a toxic waste in areas where people live, work, grow food, or draw water.”

Consider cluster bombs, which blindly disperse an average of 2,000 separate explosives over a wide area. There are many types, all with different functions; anti-personnel, anti-tank, anti-runway, and those that scatter chemical weapons are just a few. Cluster bombs are morally repugnant in the same way as any other weapon of indiscriminate destruction, but made all the worse by the high rate of unexploded bomblets, which resemble small toy balls, left on the ground. Since the end of the Vietnam war 36 years ago, 500 Vietnamese children have been killed and more than 4,000 have been injured in one province alone from contact with unexploded ordinance, a term which encompasses unexploded cluster bomblets, mines, and other live explosives left by American and Vietnamese forces. Laos has it even worse. The most bombed country in human history, Laos today is the resting place for an estimated 80 million unexploded cluster bomblets – all dropped by the military of the United States of America. The US, Russia, and Israel are some of the only countries in the developed world which have yet to sign an international treaty outlawing their use. It’s not difficult to guess in which countries the main manufacturers of cluster munitions are based.

I often read reports of the pilotless drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which, sadly, have more than tripled under President Obama’s administration. A few weeks ago, a traditional jirga was hit. It was a meeting of tribal elders of which, upon further investigation by journalists, had little to no connection to militant groups. 34 people were killed. There was hardly a peep of protest from even the ‘liberal’ American newspapers – save for an editorial in the New York Times that mentioned the strike as an instigator of anti-Americanism but failed to question its basic legitimacy.

The United States sold, has sold, and currently sells arms to nearly every Western-friendly dictatorship under the sun. I understand that realpolitik, the idea that politics needs to be based on power and practicalities rather than ideology, often ensures stability. But if that status quo makes systemic injustices permanent, as it did in Egypt for 35 years under Mubarak, there must be room for a higher ideal. Obama has made an honest, though inadequate, effort to change this sort of relationship with post-Mubarak Egypt and post-Ben Ali Tunisia, but Bahrain’s dictatorship still enjoys US State Department and Pentagon support – despite a brutal, torturous crackdown on dissidents and the doctors who treat them.

There is no shortage of similar examples of an American foreign policy led not by the high ideals of freedom, justice, and equality but instead by the interests of weapons manufacturers, multinational corporations, and a fast-imploding imperial philosophy.

I know that to many I will sound like a bleeding-heart, mindless simpleton for saying these things, but the depressing truth is that my country has been at war for almost half my 24 years. And as war drags on, reports of the killing of people with brown skin becomes a shriller, more ignorable background noise. To the American public, what are 34 innocent people in Pakistan anymore but nameless, faceless, Muslims? Talk of cutting defense spending in favor of broader social programs like universal health care is couched in economic, rather than humanitarian, language. Why cut weapons spending when the defense industry supports so many hundreds of thousands of American jobs? No matter the fact that the United States spends more on ‘defense’ than the next 17 countries combined. This is what Americans know. This is what we are comfortable with. This is what has become normal.

These attitudes make up the basis of what philosopher Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Adolf Eichmann, of one the most important cogs in the Nazi death machine, was put on trial in Jerusalem after being kidnapped by the Israeli Mossad in Argentina. Arendt caused huge controversy with her observations of the proceedings. She wrote, “the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” While the world wanted to see a monster, Arendt, in her reports for the New Yorker, saw a normal, even banal man who worked extremely hard to complete the tasks that were given to him. She concludes that Eichmann lived his life without critically analyzing the monstrous system surrounding him. This willful thoughtlessness, she says, allowed him to complete tasks like the transfer of more than 430,000 Hungarians – Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and political dissidents – to the gas chambers.

I know that to use a Nazi as my point of comparison is problematic. In no way am I equating the crimes of the Nazis to those of the American empire. I recognize that American imperialism, war profiteering, and human rights abuses are all part of a hopelessly complex, intertwined, and relatively unstable global system that could well collapse upon a massive US shift in foreign policy. But I don’t see any other option. People are dying in my name – Americans, Iraqis, Afghans, Vietnamese, Libyans, Israelis, Palestinians, the list goes on – under weapons made, used, and sold by my country.

My aim here hasn’t necessarily been to make each reader go out and campaign on behalf of the 34 innocent Pakistanis killed by America’s pilotless drone on March 17th, though I think a wider campaign against drone attacks, cluster and DU munitions, and the wider ‘defense’ industry is certainly needed. I write this to challenge myself, and perhaps others as well, to think, criticize, and, most importantly, act. In a country where our votes count, where our voices can be heard, we are responsible for the actions of our government. And yes, this applies to important domestic issues just as much as international ones. But when it comes to bombs, labeled ‘Made in USA,’ dropping on innocent people, we cannot sit back and accept it as our reality – as just the way things are. There is a better way forward. There has to be.

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