William L. Partridge

Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education
Professor of Human and Organizational Development &
Professor of Anthropology
Peabody College

A war crimes tribunal will surely be needed following the human disaster about to be perpetrated by George Bush. It is important that the mistakes made at Nuremberg not be repeated, where military officers were tried but

• Not the corporations that manufactured the military machinery
• Not the contractors that built the gas chambers
• Not the bankers who financed it all
• Not the Germans who worked in the war industry.

We will need to put on trial the US corporations that foment war – beginning of course with Halliburton, Cheney’s major war contractor, but including providers of combat boots, field tents, golf courses, tanks, officers clubs, bombs, airplanes, lobster bisque for officers clubs, guns and bullets, soap, limousines, asphalt, rockets, gasoline, beer, first aide kits, cement, sports equipment, computers, trucks, aircraft carriers, housing and barracks, drugs for the troops, not to mention the tons of food supplied daily – a strategic dispersal of federal contracts to make millions of citizens dependent on permanent war in every state of the union.

As Barbara Kingsolver observed, the US has been at war overtly or covertly every day of my life – 60 years of violence. And for 60 years it didn’t hurt most of us … until 9/11. People say that everything changed on that day. I submit to you that nothing has changed. Just as millions of US citizens believed – incredibly – that we could bomb every village of men, women and children in Southeast Asia that supported independence for Vietnam into submission, today many US citizens feverishly believe that in the Middle East they can destroy every house, every school, every storefront, every church and mosque, every mud hut where boys and girls are taught to hate the US or, more precisely, hate US culture of State violence.

It is a hatred born of desperation so wild, poverty so profound, and a lopsided distribution of power so enormous that every assassination produces another 10 heroes and martyrs to take their place, every demolished village germinates 100 fully-armed sons and daughters to avenge their parents, every bomb unleashes scores of dragons. As in the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts: from each of the teeth of the Dragon slain by Jason’s sword sprang forth another dragon so that each blow multiplied the number of dragons twenty-fold.
To be sure we need to prepare for Bush’s trial. Simultaneously, we need to confront the constituency for State violence in our midst, embedded so firmly in the culture of our nation. With William James, we need to construct a moral alternative to the culture of violence in our land. Or like from those bombed-out mud huts in the third world or Jason’s slain dragon, there will arise 10 more like him to take George Bush’s place.