Senseless Criminality of Human Affairs

by Tom White
by Tom White

A mere 233 dead doesn’t seem very many does it? After all, Iraq was (is) a war, and we have gotten off so far with a mere 233 dead. Just a flick of the finger, as it were, as compared with something like Stalingrad – now, there was a battle. Or Okinawa. Or Antietam. Or perhaps, overall, World War I, with its crazy commanders hurling men into the front lines in a grinding action that wiped out a generation.

I happened to be reading today Arnold Toynbee’s preface to his abridged, one-volume illustrated A Study of History. He had this to say about his motivation as a scholar:

In 1915 and 1916, about half the number of my schoolfellows were killed, together with proportionate numbers of my contemporaries in other belligerent countries. The longer I live, the greater grows my grief and indignation at the wicked cutting short of those lives. I do not want my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to have the same fate. The writing of this book has been one of my responses to the challenge that has been presented to me by the senseless criminality of human affairs.

[The book he refers to is his 12-volume A Study of History, which he notes that he worked on from 1920 to 1972.]

As a grandfather I share his concern. As a WWII veteran I am ashamed that I was as stupid as I was 60 years ago. I am even more ashamed that my fellow citizens are choosing to remain stupid in the present era. I took to heart shortly after WWII some words of Ezra Pound’s (from "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley") which still seem to me a fair statement of the continuing case:

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before . . .
There died a myriad,
And of the best among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm smiling at the good mouth.
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

I checked out the list that was posted on LRC Blog and scrolled down the 233 names. It doesn’t somehow seem so "mere." Mad Mad Albright may have thought a half million Iraqi children were worth it (whatever "it" was). I have to say I do not think whatever we have got or are going to get out of our "conquest" of Iraq is worth a single one of the 233. Here are just a few of the "B’s." Note the ages.

Corporal Henry L. Brown, 22, Natchez, Mississippi; Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 64th Field Artillery Regiment, Fort Stewart, Georgia. Died April 8.
Private First Class John E. Brown, 21, Troy, Alabama; 2nd Battalion, 44th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Killed April 14.
Specialist Larry K. Brown, 22, Jackson, Mississippi, 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, Fort Riley, Kansas. Killed April 5.
Lance Corporal Cedric E. Bruns, 22, Vancouver, Washington; 6th Engineer Support Battalion, 4th Force Service Support Group, U.S. Marines, Eugene, Oregon. Killed May 9.
Specialist Roy Russell Buckley, 24, Portage, Indiana; 685th Transportation Company, Hobart, Indiana. Killed April 22.
Lance Corporal Brian Rory Buesing, 20, Cedar Key, Florida; 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Killed March 23.

Anyone who chooses to keep this up and arranges to keep himself out of the front lines (aka Iraq’s streets), as far as I am concerned is a blackguard, a bully, a blowhard, a barbarian, and a few more b-words I can’t use.

July 28, 2003

Tom White [send him mail] writes from Odessa, Texas.

Tom White Archives

Back to LewRockwell.com Home Page