Word Wars

About my freshman year of high school, and within the space of one month, I encountered two versions of the same song. The song, adapted from a speech made by Haile Selassie, was originally recorded by Bob Marley, and later covered by Sepultura. Anybody who is familiar with Bob Marley and Sepultura can imagine the musical differences, and they’re all there, but the most important difference between the two is in the lyrics. The Bob Marley version is, presumably, very close to the original speech, and presents the same philosophical argument; so we have verses such as the following:

Until the philosophy
That holds one race superior
And another inferior
Is finally and permanently
Discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war

This has a fairly clear message, one which all the later verses follow: war is a byproduct of man’s irrational hatred of other men, and without getting rid of that hatred there can be no way to address the problem of war. Towards the end of the song, Bob sings

War in the East
War in the West
War up North
War down South

This provides the chorus to the Sepultura song, and the structure of the song is built around the logic of a chorus. There is a spoken, or muttered, verse and a yelled chorus. Since the chorus is the highlight and focus of the song, the verses need to be, and are, shortened to a few words. As I recall, it doesn’t make it to ‘inferior’ in the first verse. The words are mangled and the argument loses its sense.

But this is not a bad thing. The Selassie/Marley version fixes a simple explanation to a complex reality, reducing it in an attempt to make a cogent argument against racism. It’s an attack on racism using the means of war, and in doing so it makes war a simple phenomenon, one which may be explained by a single cause. But the truth is more like the Sepultura song: the words don’t make sense. They can’t contain the reality because this reality stands tauntingly on the other side of the limits of language. Wars occur for many reasons; removing any single factor will not remove the possibility of the result.

George Carlin noted that, since the Germans in World War II, the United States, and the West in general, have bombed only non-whites. This is true; since the fall of the Third Reich we have bombed people with skin that comes in a variety of yellows and browns. An aerial photograph pile of the victims would appear as an abstract painting in a variety of earth tones.

But the motivation was not that these people were of a different skin color than those of the people planning these bombings. We would have rather bombed Russia than Vietnam, but, like a blue-collar worker who would like to fire nails into his boss’s brain stem but kicks his dog instead, we knew Russia would nuke if provoked, and had to bomb the slopes instead. The racial aspect was secondary; of utmost importance was a political and economic battle of wills.

But even this doesn’t provide the entire answer. An understanding of French Indochina, of the dissolution of empires in the wake of the World Wars, of the rejection by Woodrow Wilson of Ho Chi-Minh’s appeal to the right of self-determination Wilson was perfectly willing to apply to the white peoples of Eastern Europe but not the yellow peoples of Asia, of the entire Cold War, and so on. There’s a lot to know and even then it can’t be thought of as a simple equation such as the following:

The United State + The Soviet Union + The People’s Republic of China + rivalry + Woodrow Wilson + Dien Bien Phu + Green Berets … = war

Similarly, we wouldn’t give a damn about the Middle East if it weren’t for economics. Christians, and the US is a very Christian nation at times, claim that the supreme torture in hell is that of being absolutely ignored by God; for that reason, the most sophisticated expression of hatred of which a Christian is capable is pretending that the despised party does not exist. The absolute removal of all attention and solicitude from that person or persons. This is why such stupid quotidian tactics as the silent treatment are actually as effective as they’re expected to be, and also why the United States ignores the countries and peoples it really hates in a racist way. I should note now that Wilson didn’t actually reject Ho Chi-Minh’s appeal; he didn’t bother to listen to it.

War is a different matter. Violence is a way to express racism, but this doesn’t make racism an explanation for violence. The existence of brown people is not offensive enough in itself to start a war; that they have a commodity on which we’re dependant and are more resistant than we’d like to our attempts to acquire it is much more offensive. And if racism does a little to explain why our relationship with them is disharmonious, it does only a little. Truth is never as simple as the coiners of handy phrases and moving speeches would have you believe, and, whatever one’s intentions, bleaching the truth out of a situation in the interest of forceful simplicity is collaborating with the enemy.

We’re in the shaky hands of simple men capable of crafting a simple narrative which they repeat so often and so emphatically that its familiarity discourages critical analysis. It’s so familiar that it no longer matters if we believe it. The people who recognize these tactics and the awful ends to which they’re turned determine to set themselves in opposition, and believe that the best way to do so is to adopt identical tactics with a different end. This is a problem. Turning a sock inside out leaves you with just a sock.

It can be argued that people as a whole are so stupid that the only way to reach them with any message is to simplify it until they can understand. But there are a few problems with that: It’s easy to make people stupid by treating them as such, and this simplification to some posited lowest common denominator of stupidity makes whatever genuine argument or point there may have been into a platitude. Listen to a speech and wait through the drivel to hear the disconnected phrases targeted at sound-bites, kernels of corn floating in liquid diarrhea.

What we need are people capable of recognizing a complex situation as complex and of acting in accordance with that recognition. A group of anti-war idiots doing damage to the truth is little better than a group of pro-war idiots doing the same, in the same manner and for surprisingly similar ends, however attractive it might be to find somebody who can extricate us from this shit. That’s a noble enough goal, but there’s no end to bullshit wars by piling up fresh bullshit. Just take that sentence literally, hold the image of it in your mind, and you’ll see what I mean.

And that, dear reader, is what I leave you with for this week.