Cease the abuse

What have we accomplished in 30 centuries of civilization? Aren’t we still as barbaric as we were 5000 years ago? Don’t we use our religions just to set ourselves apart from our fellow human beings? Don’t we use our intelligence just to better our own little selves in flagrant disregard of others? Is that the way of a civilised being or is the the way of a primitive animal? -George Monbiot’s discussion list

War Hair

‘Get your hair cut!’ Few men have not had that phrase thrown at them at one time or another. Other phrases like ‘long haired layabout’, and the social pressures against men who whose hair is ‘like girls’, have always intrigued me.

When I discovered that the basis of current attitudes to men and their hair is over 2000 years old I was surprised. Not many cultural attitudes endure for that long. The ones that do tend to have some value or they soon fade. It seems that the reason for long hair being favoured is that it has a strong connection to war and power and the related concept of civilisation. The Macedonians and Romans chose short hair initially because their warriors cut their hair so that an enemy could not get a hold of it in battle. Short hair then became associated with war and power so that a mark of a ‘civilised’ society [1] was one in which men have short hair. This also says a lot about the foundations of what we call civilised societies, in which the monopoly over state use of force has now become the routine use of force not for defence and maintaining order but for increasing geopolitical power and control over the supply of resources [2].

The notion that real men have short hair has remained in Western culture to this day. However, if people understood the roles of warfare and the centralised power that are inherent in the current configuration of civilised [3] societies, then many more men would be reluctant to cut their hair short. Short hair and business attire make the statements: I wear the uniform of the industrial-military complex; I am a fighting (competitive) man. I acquiesce to the expedient abuse of capitalism, competition, centralised power, warfare. I acquiesce to the ideologies associated with empire, exploitation, poverty, and the headlong technological and globalised rush to grab what is left of the earth’s resources before the planet’s ability to support six billion people collapses. Short male hair is associated with the future deaths of millions of children. Men: discuss this with your hairdresser/barber. Women: cut your hair short and expect a lot of negative attention for subverting the communication purpose of short hair, for appropriating our symbol of control.

1. I use the term civilised here alongside the term war because one aspect of civilised human society is that it is based on war and the centralisation of power. Those who engage in war are supported by the elites in society (centralised power) and aspects of the warrior mindset tend to be embraced by civil culture – e.g. corrupt business and public practices, competitiveness, might-makes-right, poverty, short hair, etc. The US administration’s Dick Cheney calls it ‘Our way of life’.
2. I use the term control over the supply of resources precisely. This does not mean ownership of resources. Ownership comes through other power differential processes which a state uses to attract the resources to itself, as if by right but usually by might and resulting in some aweful living and working conditions for those in the countries from where the resources are being stripped.
3. Civilised is used here to mean the distinction between the centralised power and political systems required for urbanised peoples and the distributed localised power and culture of pagans (the people of the fields).

Killing Children

The following excerpt from an account of the reality of warfare in Iraq has stuck with me since I read it. I felt I had to put it here in case you think that the oil is worth it. Call me what you like but I believe that when a child is killed in war then that war has gone too far; if it can’t be prosecuted without killing civilians then it should never have been started. From Zach Scott-Singley’s blog (March 2005): http://www.misoldierthoughts.blogspot.com/

I ran up and overheard the captain asking what had happened and why this soldier had opened fire. The soldier answered that he had seen a man holding an AK-47 in the back of the black truck. I was among the four, including the soldier who had fired, selected to go check on that truck. We were out of breath when we got to the gun-truck nearest to the black civilian truck. There were four Iraqis walking towards us from the black truck. They were carrying a body, a small boy no more than 3 years old. His head was cocked at the wrong angle and there was blood. So much blood. The Iraqi men were crying and asking me WHY?

Someone behind me started screaming for a medic. It was the young soldier who had fired. He screamed for a medic until he was hoarse. A medic came just to tell us what we already knew: The boy was dead.I stood there looking at that little child, someone’s child just like mine, and seeing how red the clean white shirt of the man holding the boy was turning. Then I realized I was speaking to them, speaking in a voice that sounded so very far away. I heard my voice telling them how sorry we were. My mouth was saying this but all my mind could focus on was the hole in the child’s head. The white shirt covered in bright red blood. I couldn’t stop looking even as I kept telling them how sorry we were.I can still see it all to this day. There were no weapons found and we accomplished nothing besides killing a child. I stayed as long as I could, talking to the man holding the child. I couldn’t leave because I needed to know who they were. I wanted to remember. The man was the child’s uncle, minding him for his father who had gone to the market. They were carpenters and what the soldier who had fired on the truck had seen was one of the Iraqi men standing in the truck bed, holding a piece of wood.

Before I left I saw the young soldier who had killed the boy. His eyes were unfocused and he was just standing there, staring off into the distance. My hand went to my canteen and I took a drink of water. That soldier looked so lost, so I offered him a drink. In a hoarse voice he quietly thanked me. Later that day we were filling out reports about what we had witnessed. The captain who had led the raid was angry: ‘Well, this is just great! Now we have to go give that family bags of money to shut them up … ‘ A family had just lost their beautiful baby boy, and this man is worried about having to pay for a family’s grief and sorrow. To this day I still think about that raid, that family, that boy. I wonder if they are attacking us now. I would be. If someone took the life of my son or my daughter nothing other than my own death would stop me from killing them.