Kali Tal

April 19, 2003

Worlds of Hurt: Between the Lines

Just uploaded the fourth chapter of my book Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. The chapter is called "Between the Lines: Reading the Viet Nam War," and it pretty much shreds pre-1995 studies of Viet Nam war literature. More chapters coming soon.

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April 2, 2003

First American Conscientious Objector from Iraq War

Stephen Eagle Funk, who is 20 years old and a marine reservist, has decided to become the first public conscientious objector on active duty in the U.S. armed forces. There's an article about him in the Guardian, reprinted on the ZNet site. The first Gulf War saw a record number of active duty refuseniks, and there is no reason to think that this war, which is even less popular with Americans, won't garner an equal or greater number. American refuseniks were dealt with harshly in Gulf War I, and many served prison terms. Retribution will likely be as swift and severe for Funk and others who stand up to the military machine. The only way to protect such conscientious objectors is to support the organizations that track them and provide legal defense for them.

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April 1, 2003

Eurocentric Bias in Scholarship on Trauma and Memory

I've been revising my 1996 publication, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge U Press), and have just posted a new chapter, "Remembering Difference: Working Against Eurocentric Bias in Contemporary Scholarship on Trauma and Memory." In this chapter I take on popular psychoanalytic literary critics Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub, and charge them with using and supporting racist and sexist analytic structures. There's a funny story behind this new chapter. I'd originally written it as an essay to be submitted to a collection on trauma and memory. It was rejected by the editor, who just couldn't understand why I insisted on "resisting" the psychoanalytic approach to trauma literature. He didn't like it that I contested Caruth, Felman and Laub, and sent me a copy of his own paper on race and trauma, in which he compared a character created by Toni Morrison with biographical and psychoanalytic material on Sigmund Freud. He got a bit huffy when I pointed out that his appropriation of the Morrison character in the service of praising Freud was an illustration of exactly the sort of racism I critiqued in my article. I've rewritten the article as a new chapter for Worlds because the Caruth/Felman/Laub school has made great strides since 1996, and I thought that it was necessary to provide a strong counterpoint.

There are currently three chapters of Worlds online. I'll be adding the six subsequent chapters as I have time.

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War Crimes

Came across an article at frontlines called "How Young Marines Were Made War Criminals and Massacred Civilians at Nasariya." The piece points to another article by Mark Franchetti of the conservative British daily, The Times. Franchetti describes in graphic terms the massacre of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops, and includes some very disturbing quotes by U.S. soldiers, including: "The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy... I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi. No, I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill him."

That U.S. soldiers have already commited, and will continue commit war crimes in Iraq is not surprising. We've seen a concerted effort on the part of the right wing--which controls this country--to roll back every gain that progressives have made since the 1960s. One of those gains was the explosion of conscience among active duty troops and combat veterans that helped bring to light the atrocities that our troops were perpetrating in Viet Nam.

Replacing the truth with lies, as conservatives have avidly done with the history of the Viet Nam war, inevitably dooms the United States to repeat previous mistakes. That these mistakes are graven on the bodies of Iraqi civilians, sacrificed in our national stampede to forget the lessons of the Viet Nam war, is shameful. Training the soldiers of this generation as if the crimes of the Viet Nam war never took place is simply unforgivable. Whether these young combatants realize it or not, the damage they are doing to Iraqis today will haunt many of them, and should haunt all of them, for the rest of their lives.

We should not be surprised that so many of our soldiers are able to dehumanize the enemy to the degree necessary to commit mass murder. After all, we Americans have a great deal of practice in dehumanizing our neighbors. American racism was at the heart of American war crimes in Viet Nam, and it is still at the center of American war crimes today. Prejudice against people with dark skins is easily transferred from African Americans to Iraqis, as the ubiquitous epithet "sand nigger" demonstrates. "Towel-head" and "rag-head" resonate uncomfortably with "dink" and "gook," and remind us that our righteousness in war depends on dehumanizing our enemies.

Many of our troops are African American themselves, and we can expect the same sort of cognitive dissonance in them that we saw during the Viet Nam War era, when black troops realized that their own situation back in the States resembled that of the Vietnamese they'd been sent to "liberate" from self-rule. The black slogan of the Viet Nam war might well metamorphose into "No Iraqi Ever Called Me Nigger." Contemporary African American soldiers have fewer resources than their Viet Nam war era predecessors, since there is no mass-based black liberation movement in American to educate them and give them perspective on their situation, but there is every reason to expect that, sooner or later, the irony of their situation will become too painful to bear--as it did for black soldiers fighting in Viet Nam--and we will see a rise of protest and resistance in the military (which will likely be treated as black resistance has traditionally been treated in U.S. civilian society--by incarceration and increased racism).

None of this paints a pretty picture, but I am past thinking that anything this political regime does can be described as pretty.

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