“Rectify the Names”
Desecration and the Terror Wars
Gary Corseri
Kung Fu-tzu, whom we know as Confucius, challenged by a Princeling to sum up his philosophy in just three words, smiled with sad compassion as he pulled his long moustaches. Surely, the proud prince thought, he’d upstage the troublesome thinker, whose musings ran the gamut from domestic tranquility and neighborly peace to universal justice, friendship, familial obligations, rites and rituals, words, symbols and hidden meanings. Softly the sage responded, with a voice that rippled a fishbowl’s water: “Rectify the names.”
Fast forward 2500 years. The silk rustling of the Chinese court is gone; the rough ligatures of power and Empire remain. “Now we are engaged in a great Civil War,” Lincoln said, but today it’s global: war pitting modernity (or call it “Westernity” because it’s of a particular genus) against tradition, Islam against Judeo-Christianity, barbarism against barbarism. This war crosses borders and ideologies and even the world’s great languages stretch to breaking to find words and ideas to contain it.
Let’s rectify the names. This isn’t a “War on Terror” (as though war could be made on an abstract noun), these are Terror Wars, snaking back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Conquest of the Americas, the Crusades, the sacking of Rome, Babylon and Sumeria, the fall of Abel at Cain’s bloody feet.
In her remarkable book, The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler describes the civilization of Old Europe, the matriarchies that dwelled in the valleys of the Balkans, the Greek peninsulas, and along the Danube. For thousands of years they lived in peace in cooperative, male and female "partnership" units. Then the invaders came with their Sky Gods and WMD—bronze spears to enforce patriarchalism, ideologies of hate, separation, rapacity. The serpent’s shadow hissed on the bough in the Garden; the real beast writhed in the human heart.
For thousands of years we have fought the Terror Wars and always Humanity loses. Whether it is State or organized Terror versus guerilla or resistance Terror it is always Abel, always innocence, whose blood is spilled, and Humanity always diminished and self-damned.
Last week, in a footnote to the Endless War, four mercenaries were killed and their bodies mutilated in Fallujah, Iraq. Suddenly the word “desecration” was everywhere. Horrible pictures were waved in the air to pump up the crowds—Look what we’ve done! Look what they’ve done! And both sides cry revenge.
Suddenly our talking heads, discovering a new word, like the way it hisses on the tongue and they say it over and over: desecration, desecration, desecration.
I look it up: “Desecrate: To abuse the sacredness of; to profane (de—away from+(con)secrate: com, intensive + sacrare—to make sacred).” It is a turning away from sacredness; a profanation; polluting the moral order.
Caught in passing: a snarling Joe Scarborough, former Congressman, MSNBC talking suit, describing the mob (mostly children) who vented their rage on the Blackwater Corporation’s corpses as “subhuman thugs.” Subhuman, hence, killable, kill-worthy, targetable, grasshoppers.
Add another word to the lexicon of words too powerful to be used by any but our appointed wordmeisters, word-assassins. But…
Is the desecration of corpses more heinous than the desecration of a child’s body?
A child or youth watches as companions are blown apart in suicide bombings or targeted assassinations; bystanders, collateral damage, they are condmned to live decades in tortured, twisted bodies. Is this not desecration?
A bus blows up in Haifa, killing and maiming dozens. A train blows up in Madrid, killing and maiming hundreds. A half-blind sheik, wheeled out of a mosque, is blown to smithereens by an Israeli pilot in an American helicopter. Students raised in a culture of violence and obsessive materialism kill a dozen classmates in Columbine, Colorado. A junkie dies in a street in Harlem. A prostitute dies of AIDS in Mombasa. Poverty, ignorance, hatred—all desecrations.
All war, by definition, is desecration. The holocaust, the genocide against Native Americans, the Rawandan genocide of ten years ago; the Colonial wars that brought slaves to America and opium to China in exchange for tobacco, rum, sugar, silk and spices; walls of apartheid and occupation—desecrations of the human spirit that composes symphonies and poems, nurtures the young, loves spring sunshine and clean water, and greets the unknown wayfarer at the door with ancient wisdom, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”
But the old words slide away; new voices sound like brass. Following the Fallujah attacks, Brig General Mark Kimmit, chief spokesman for the US military command, declared: “Despite an uptick in local engagements, the overall area of operations remains relatively stable with negligible impact on the coalition’s ability to continue progress in governance, economic development, and restoration of essential services.”
Somewhere, Kung Fu-tzu watches and waits…
Perhaps he weeps.
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