After Auschwitz

"Support our troops." We have all seen the sticker stuck on the back of a usually gargantuan SUV, usually next to a "Bush/Cheney 2004" sticker. I live in Bush country, so of course, I saw it again in the parking of a coffee shop.

Yeah.

After Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Fallujah and Haditha, all we should be able to say is "Fuck the troops."

We all know what Theodor Adorno said. "After Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbaric." We also know his retraction. "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream... hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz." The only act of barbarity is silence.

Fuck our troops.

Of course, I had my reservations. It was not the soldier's fault that he was in Iraq fighting an unjust war. The only war criminals were Bush, Blair, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, ... But that was before Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Fallujah, the use of white phosphorus and Haditha. You are just as complicit and guilty of an atrocity by remaining silent and by not standing against it.

Some right-winger wrote me:

ALL THAT I AM ASKING IS DON'T HATE THE TROOPS WE ARE JUST TAKING ORDERS IF WE DIDN'T WE WOULD GO TO JAIL PLEASE TAKE THIS GROUP DOWN AND CHANGE IT TO SOMETHING MORE SENSIBLE LIKE FUCK THE PRESIDENT

"Just taking orders." Where have we heard this one before? (This was followed by many invectives about my Frenchness, the fact that I would be speaking German if not for the American military and threats of violence, all of which I found quite funny; his girlfriend later wrote me the same things)

Albert Camus wrote in L'homme révolté:

slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judgment. On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence — through a curious transposition peculiar to our times — it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself.

Adorno also said: "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals."

Should we be surprised that American troops are committing atrocities when we tell them that they are the liberators and that they are bringing democracy to the huddled masses? Translation: The Iraqi are too inferior to fend for themselves and the Americans are here to teach them how to be.

Except there is nothing to teach or what is being taught is worse than what was before.

What we call the "insurgency" is a Resistance, like the Résistance Française of 1940 or the Popular Front of the Spanish Civil War telling the American occupier "¡no pasarán!" And a Resistance knows no political demarcations, no difference between left wing and right wing. François de la Rocque was as much of a member of the Resistance as Marc Bloch or Albert Camus. The only distinction is collaborator/resistant.

This is what this has come to. As much as Bill O'Reilly is a noxious moron, he got one thing right (although unvoluntarily). The American military is behaving like the Wehrmacht. Being American does not excuse any behavior. Nothing does.

The Germans overlooked Auschwitz and Treblinka because Hitler kept them "safe" from the Communists, helped the economy and built highway. Bush doesn't even have that.