Evidently the president’s trip to India created an option too perfect
to pass up: The man who has led the world in violence during the
first years of the 21st century could pay homage to the world’s
leading practitioner of nonviolence during the first half of the 20th
century. So the White House announced plans for George W. Bush to lay
a wreath at the Mahatma Gandhi memorial in New Delhi.
While audacious in its shameless and extreme hypocrisy, this PR
gambit is in character for the world’s only superpower. One of the
main purposes of the Bush regime’s media spin is to depict reality as
its opposite. And Karl Rove obviously figured that mainstream U.S.
media outlets, with few exceptions, wouldn’t react with anywhere near
the appropriate levels of derision or outrage.
Presidential rhetoric aside, Gandhi’s enthusiasm for nonviolence is
nearly matched by Bush’s enthusiasm for violence. The commander in
chief regularly proclaims his misty-eyed pride in U.S. military
actions that destroy countless human lives with massive and continual
techno-violence. But the Bushian isn’t quite 180 degrees from the
Gandhian. The president of the United States is not exactly committed
to violence; what he wants is an end to resistance.
“A conqueror is always a lover of peace,” the Prussian general Karl
von Clausewitz observed. Yearning for Uncle Sam to fulfill his
increasingly farfetched promise of victory in Iraq, the U.S.
president is an evangelist for peace -- on his terms.
Almost two years ago, in early April 2004, the icy cerebral pundit
George Will engaged in a burst of candor when he wrote a column about
the widening bloodshed inside Iraq: “In the war against the militias,
every door American troops crash through, every civilian bystander
shot -- there will be many -- will make matters worse, for a while.
Nevertheless, the first task of the occupation remains the first task
of government: to establish a monopoly on violence.”
The column -- headlined “A War President’s Job” in the Washington
Post -- diagnosed the problem and prescribed more violence. Lots
more: “Now Americans must steel themselves for administering the
violence necessary to disarm or defeat Iraq’s urban militias, which
replicate the problem of modern terrorism -- violence that has
slipped the leash of states.” For unleashing the Pentagon’s violence,
the rationales are inexhaustible.
In an important sense, it’s plausible to envision Bush as a lover of
peace and even an apostle of nonviolence -- but, in context, those
sterling invocations of virtues are plated with sadism in the service
of empire. The president of the United States is urging “peace” as a
synonym for getting his way in Iraq. From Washington, the most
exalted vision of peace is a scenario where the occupied no longer
resist the American occupiers or their allies.
The world has seen many such leaders, eager to unleash as much
violence as necessary to get what they want, and glad to praise
nonviolence whenever convenient. But no photo-op can change the
current reality that the world’s most powerful government is also, by
far, the most violent and the most dangerous.
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Norman Solomon’s latest book is “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits
Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com