I know a little about trauma, and how it afflicts one after the events, how it can linger and contaminate one's life ever after. For some the impact is worse than for others, because we are all different. Comparisons are less than useful unless they are attended to with great empathy.
Luck, accident of birth
Propaganda, lies and The War Against Terror.
I have a reverbnation account that allows me to present MP3 files of my songs, for listening and for downloading, all for free and there's more than 50 there. The first six are arranged as my proPeace songs written in response/reaction to 9/11.
Below are descriptions of each song, why I wrote it, what the context was for each. Folk music is story telling.
I will be doing a few live stream shows this weekend, from my Facebook Page and I will record them and put them up on youtube.
The theme will be this : Peace is more than the absence of war. Why can't we have Governments that avoid avoidable harms to human beings, to our shared environment, to the species that live with us? Is peace too much to ask for?
I understood the pain, the trauma, the anger - on all sides.
Professional violence at the behest of the English parliamentarians has a long tradition, indeed. Ever since the New Model Army, and before. None of it is honourable. The two world wars erupted because the prevailing culture was a culture of violent Empire. Every war since then has emerged from the same dynamic. In that context no-one fights for ordinary people's freedoms - wars are fought to preserve violent hierarchies. That is why they fight.
The tax bill to pay for war means all that cash and effort is not being directed into nurturing healthy communities, abolishing poverty, making life better for ordinary people.
Witnessing the appalling invasion of Iraq, in which it was already clear that it had brought, at great expense, chaos, blood, gore and horror to the people of Iraq and vast profits to Corporate America, I was really furious, and also terribly sad. I also safe in a new rented social housing home of my own after a long time of homelessness, and I was imagining the unfortunate, innocent people of Iraq, so many displaced, surviving in camps, homeless due to the violence of USUK.
How lucky am I to live here, and not there, I would tell myself every morning, as I ate breakfast and took in the news.
4. DARK DESERT HIGHWAY. September 2003
A rewrite of Hotel California inspired, if that's the right word, by the images of US Military convoys on darkened desert roads heading towards Baghdad.
5. DEPLETED URANIUM BABIES May 2001
Inspired by Brian Haw's protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London. There were an inordinate or excessive degree of birth deformities post Gulf War I, across areas of Iraq exposed to aerial bombing with DU munitions.
Depleted Uranium munitions have been in use since the 1990s, in Iraq, The Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq II, Libya, Syria and elsewhere by US and NATO forces.. Arguments rage about the health impacts to troops and civilian populations exposed to DU. Typically exposure occurs within a war, where there exist multiple potential contaminants and stressors and not enough research has been diligently pursued to give definitive answers. The precautionary principle ought at the very least led to an examination of toxic effects before such munitions were ever deployed. No such examination was undertaken.
Written after I read reports about an armoured 'charge' of US Military Battle group into Baghdad, The Thunder Run, which apparently involved competition between battlefield commanders for the glory of being the first to 'conquer' Baghdad. As the column was travelling through urban areas, they shot the shit out anything that moved or appeared in front, to the sides.... thousands of innocent civilians and their homes were raked with live rounds..
Then a year later it was being discusse in heroic, glowing terms as a suitable subject for a Hollywood movie.
7. ALL WAR IS CHILD ABUSE December 2018
My response to the odious 'celebrations' of the 'Victory' claimed by British Empire in November 1918. Nobody wins in war, apart from the war supplies industries. I wrote this song that summer, and blogged it in November 2019, with a more detailed piece exploring all the ways in which warfare is related to child abuse, from training young boys to become killers, to towns and cities destroyed, from comics and propaganda to toy soldiers and war movies.
We had known that environmental degradation, air pollution, climate change and poverty were becoming immense problems that really needed to be addressed. But no.
Afghanistan 2021 - USUK end the 20 year war, but deny it's harms.
In truth, nobody ever wins war. Everyone exposed to it loses, apart from the weapons suppliers and other material production logistics essential to the prosecution of any war.
Now, in August 2021, as the disastrous, pointless USUK and NATO war in Afghanistan is supposedly coming to an end and we witness yet again the reckless nature of the Governments involved. As it happens White Christian English Europeans have been importing war into Afghanistan for close on 200 years.
Given the most recent utter folly exposed in the awful, bungled, stupefyingly callous mismanagement of the 'withdrawal' of USUK/NATO Military forces (even as they still hold the threat of air warfare over the incoming Taliban as a future 'bargaining chip)' it should be blatantly obvious that the entire premise of imposing Democracy at the point of a gun is just a banal evil.
Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Johnson, May, Cameron, Brown and Blair and their Cabinets are all War Mongering Hierarchs to the core. Watching the English Parliament discuss Afghanistan last week was sickening. Repeated claims that the mission was honourable defy all notions of honesty. These people are utter hypocrites. They do not represent ordinary, decent people and their dishonesty is repugnant, makes a mockery of the very idea of a healthy and honest democracy.
Refusing to acknowledge that their war mongering allows evil behaviour to prevail, collecting a wage from the tax payers.
Clive Lewis
Here's an honest interview with MP Clive Lewis, who was in the Territorials, a Reserve of the British Army, and who is a combat veteran of Afghanistan, where he did one three month tour of duty.
One three month tour of duty, among men who had to do, who were ordered to do many, many more. I feel for the terrible burden those troops have to bear, to know they were placed where they had to kill or be killed, to endure loss, pain, woundings and grief and rage, and it turns out to have been a failure, because it was wholly illegitimate, even as they fought in good faith.
He speaks openly and honestly, informed by that experience and a wider understanding of the issues evolved since then. The theme was Afghanistan and his exclusion from being asked to speak in the House of Commons.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
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