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CJ Werleman explains how the tables have unfortunately been turned on American citizens as they experience the Coronavirus pandemic – and how it should open their eyes to the damage inflicted by their country elsewhere.
Americans tend to not think about the human consequences of their Government’s military and geopolitical actions abroad – but not because they are uniquely indifferent to suffering and injustice, but because corporate-owned news media is acutely aware that it is unable to profit from portraying the US war machine as anything but Star-Spangled awesome. For this reason, it deliberately conceals the victims of American wars hidden from view, knowing all too well that footage of a US-fired or manufactured missile striking a school bus filled with Yemeni children is too much for viewers to bear and they’ll change the channel.
“People tend to turn away from disasters such as a war gone bad very quickly,” writes John Tirman, author of The Death of Others: The Fate of Civilians in American Wars. “They turn away because it bothers them morally, but also because the carnage challenges their strongly held self-perception that their country is a force for good in the world.”
It is for this reason that the logic underpinning the ‘War on Terror’ was custom-built for a flag-waving and war cheerleading news media, given that the George W. Bush administration argued that fighting a war over there means not having to fight one here, and thus sparing the public the physical, psychological and social horrors that accompany armed conflict and preserving self-perceptions of the country being a ‘shining city on a hill’.
“Flags, patriotic songs, a deification of the warrior and sentimental drivel drown out reality,” observes Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent. “We communicate in empty clichés and mindless, patriotic absurdities. Mass culture is used to reinforce the lie that we are the true victims. It re-creates the past to conform to the national heroic myth. We alone are said to possess virtue and courage. We alone have the right to revenge.”
Two decades later, however, the country is less concerned with an ongoing war against non-state militants, but rather what President Donald Trump calls the “invisible enemy”.
Thus, for the first time since the first shots were fired during the Civil War of 1861, the American public – through no fault of its own – is experiencing a mere sample of the kind of social, political and economic disruption and devastation its government has wrought and continues to wreak on peoples of other nations.
Since 9/11, the US has deployed its fleet of bombers, fighters and armed drones to bomb nine countries – including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, The Philippines, Pakistan, Mali and Libya. These benignly named ‘kinetic actions’ have toppled regimes, sparked civil wars and created failed states. Through both its military and diplomatic actions, including US-led sanctions and embargoes, it is impossible to calculate how many people in these countries have been displaced, maimed, and killed or left jobless and homeless.
As long as the lives of anonymous people in distant lands are being cut violently short or frozen in an incessant state of doubt and despair, we in the West do not mind.
Andrew Mitrovica
Although, a recent study concluded that 12.5 million Muslims have been killed by Western-led wars and Western-backed dictators during the past two decades – an unfathomable statistic that does little more than further sterilise the story of each and every one of our individual unnamed victims.
“Our homes destroyed, livestock destroyed, crops destroyed, and people obliterated,” a survivor, whose husband was killed by a US drone strike in Somalia last month, told me from an IDP camp in Mogadishu. “Our children and I faced so much agony and suffering after being forced to flee. And now we don’t even have a single bag, let alone a home to go to.”
Her nightmarish reality is but a single example of how the US has transformed human lives in profoundly and irreparable ways in lands many Americans are unable to locate on a map. Today, COVID-19 is unleashing the same kind of death and economic destruction the US military has long inflicted upon parts of the Middle East, Africa and Asia – including sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, which starved 500,000 men, women and children to death, and its military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in more recent times, which have led to the deaths of more than one million civilians.
In no way does this suggest or imply that Americans deserve the fate they have been dealt as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The fact that the virus has hit lower income-earning minorities – who are far removed from the corridors of political power – the hardest makes a fool of anyone who suggests otherwise.
The point is that our victims of war know all too well how death and disruption arrives abruptly and without warning. “But as long as the lives of anonymous people in distant lands are being cut violently short or frozen in an incessant state of doubt and despair, observes Andrew Mitrovica, “we in the West do not mind.”
“Now, the proverbial tables have indeed turned.”
Through a combination of negligence, mismanagement, arrogance and hubris, the US has become ground zero in the global fight against the Coronavirus pandemic, with the deadly virus on target to kill 147,000 Americans by the start of August.
Coupled with the loss of human life is a Great Depression-level loss of jobs, with more than 36 million Americans filing for unemployment assistance in the past two months. The fact that only 40% of the country can afford to pay an unforeseen bill of $400 or more underscores the country’s current dystopic reality.
Harder to measure, however, is the emotional cost that stay-at-home and lockdown measures have exacted on a large segment of the population. Spikes in calls to suicide hotlines and incidents of domestic violence suggest that Americans are experiencing the kind of psychological trauma that only war or foreign military occupations produce.
The rise and rapid growth of the anti-lockdown protest movement speaks to the public’s weariness with having their daily lives disrupted for a comparatively small duration of time. Americans are becoming desperately eager for a return of their pre- COVID-19 lives.
No less enthusiastic for some, however, are two million Palestinians who have been under a permanent lockdown and blockade since Israel and Egypt turned the Gaza Strip into the world’s largest open-air prison in 2004 – a fate sealed with the full backing of the Bush administration and every one since. During the past 15 years, numerous US-backed Israeli invasions and bombardment campaigns have reduced Gaza’s civil infrastructure to rubble and its economy to ruins, with one in two Palestinians currently out of work.
While Americans don’t often think or talk about the consequences of its ‘War on Terror’ or hegemonic power manoeuvres, we can only hope that after the threat of COVID-19 passes, they will remember what it was like to have their lives disrupted by a foreign or “invisible enemy” the next time their leaders bang the drums of war.