A Blowback Hurricane
January 29, 2013
Most violence we face we've provoked. Those confronting us with violence are exactly as wrong as if we hadn't provoked
them. But we are not as innocent as we like to imagine.
This seems like a simple concept awaiting only factual substantiation, but in fact it is dramatically at odds with most
people's ridiculously ill-conceived notion of how blame works. According to this common notion, blame is like a lump of
clay. Whoever holds it is to blame. If they hand it to someone else, then that person is exclusively to blame. If they
break it in half, then two people can each be half to blame. But blame is a finite quantity and the clay is very
difficult to break. So once the clay is attached to one person, everybody else is pretty well blameless.
I faulted President Obama for instructing the Justice Department not to prosecute anyone in the CIA for torture, and
someone told me that Attorney General Holder was in fact to blame, and therefore Obama was not. I faulted easy access to
guns for mass shootings, and someone told me that antidepressant medications were to blame, and therefore gun laws were
not. If you're like me, these sorts of calculations will strike you as bizarrely stupid. The question of whether Obama
is to blame is a question of what he has done or not done; Holder doesn't enter into it at all. The question of whether
Holder is to blame comes down to whether Holder acted against the interest of the greater good; it has nothing to do
with Obama. One or both or neither of them could be to blame. Or they could both be to blame and 18 other people be to
blame as well. We have problems with gun laws, psychiatric drugs, films, tv shows, video games, examples set by our
government's own violence, and many other elements of our culture; none of them erase any of the others.
Blame is unlimited. Rather than a finite lump of clay, blame should be pictured as water droplets condensing out of the
air on a cold glass. There is no limit to them. They appear wherever another glass is cold. Their quantity bears no
relation to the quantity of the harm done. A million people can carry the blame for a trivial harm, or one person can be
alone to blame and to blame only slightly for a most horrible tragedy.
Another type of example may help explain where the common conception of blame comes from. A man convicted of murder is
proven innocent, but loved ones of the victim want him punished anyway (and in proportion to the harm done). Another is
proven insane or incompetent or underage, but he is punished just the same. Blame is perceived as a burning hot ball of
clay that must be tossed from person to person desperately until it can be attached to someone deserving of it. Once
that is done, there is no rush to find anyone (or anything) else who might also be to blame. Blame is a concept that is
tied up in people's muddled minds with the concept of revenge. It's hard to seek revenge against numerous people or
institutions all bearing different types and degrees of blame. It's much easier to simplify. And once the demand for
revenge is satisfied in the aggrieved, it ceases to search for new outlets.
When hijackers flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they were given blame. Anyone who helped
them was given blame (after all, it's hard to seek revenge against the dead). But anyone who provoked or accidentally
permitted those crimes was deemed absolutely blameless. There wasn't any more clay to go around. To blame the U.S.
government for having spent years arming and training religious fanatics in Afghanistan and provoking them in Palestine
and Saudi Arabia would mean unblaming the hijackers. To blame the U.S. government for not preventing the hijackings
would mean unblaming the hijackers.
This kind of infantile thinking has prevented us from grasping anything like the true extent of blowback our nation has
encountered.
There are individual encounters in which zero-sum blame thinking appears to work. Someone who kills in self-defense is
given less blame than someone who kills an innocent victim. But translating this to the public or even international
arena seems to me to fail. Violent social movements are wrong and to blame even when they are resisting injustice.
Crimes of resistance by Native Americans and slaves can be seen as crimes even as we understand them as blowback. The
World War II era crimes of Japan create a great deal of blame for Japan, and that is unchanged by understanding the history of how the United States brought war making and imperialism to the Japanese. Often in U.S. history we have been
confronted by a Frankenstein monster of our own creation, and one intentionally provoked at that. This is different from the myth of our innocence and of the other's irrational random aggression. A more
informed understanding doesn't excuse the aggression. It erases our (the U.S. government's) innocence.
Saddam Hussein was our creature. So was Gadaffi. And Assad. "Intervene" is Pentagon-speak for "switch sides." Our
dictators remain guilty of their crimes when we learn that we funded them. Every graduate of the School of the Americas
who heads off into the world to murder and torture is to blame for doing so, and so is the School of the Americas, and
so are the taxpayers who fund it and the governments that send students to attend it.
We imagine that crazy irrational Iranians attacked us out of the blue in 1979, whereas the CIA's coup of 1953 made the
embassy takeover predictable -- a completely different thing from justifiable.
Britain and its apprentice / master-to-be the United States long feared an alliance between Germany and Russia. This led
to facilitation of the creation of the Soviet Union. And it led to support for the development of Nazism in Germany. The
goal was Russian-German conflict, not peace. When war is imagined to be inevitable, the great question is where to
create it, not whether. The post-World War I talks at Versailles laid the groundwork for World War II, helped along by
the West's financial and trade policies for decades to come.
Also at Versailles, President Wilson refused to meet with a young man named Ho Chi Minh -- an initial bit contribution
perhaps to a great deal of future blowback. The Cold War was of course provoked by lies, threats, and weapons
development.
Even if you assume that the United States should dominate the globe militarily, some of the military bases being built
right now are very hard to explain, except as thoughtless overreach or intentional provocation of China. One can guess how China is perceiving this. And
yet, while the U.S. military spends many times the amount of money spent by China's each year, Chinese increases
provoked by U.S. troop deployments, are being used in the U.S. media to justify U.S. military spending. Most Americans
have no more idea that their own government is provoking China than most Israelis have a remotely accurate conception of
what their government does to Palestinians. Watch these young Israelis exposed for the first time to their nation's occupation of Palestine. Their world is altered.
Imagine if people in the United States were to learn what their funding and weaponry are used for. U.S. weapons account
for 85% of international weapons sales. While the NRA bought a political party, Lockheed Martin bought two. We don't
talk about it, but many U.S. wars have been fought against U.S. weapons. U.S. wars like the recent one in Libya result
in more violence in places like Mali. U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and Afghanistan are generating intense
anger, and blowback that has already included the targeting and killing of drone pilots, as well as attempted acts of
terrorism in the United States.
When will we ever learn? The hacker group Anonymous replaces government websites with video games to "avenge" Aaron
Swartz, and we laugh. But vengeance is at the root of our inability to think sensibly about blame, which is in turn at
the root of our inability to process what is being done to the people of the world in our name with our funding. Because
war is not inevitable, everywhere we stir it up is somewhere that might have lived without it. We spend $170 billion per
year on keeping U.S. troops in other people's countries. Most people living near U.S. military bases do not want them
there. Many are outraged by their presence. The blowback will keep coming. We should begin to understand that it is
normal, that it is the theme of our entire history, that its predictability does not of course justify it, that we are
to blame, and that there's plenty of blame for anyone else who's earned it.
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David Swanson's books include "War Is A Lie." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works as Campaign Coordinator for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook. Subscribe or unsubscribe from David's email lists here.