-----Original Message-----
From: John Perry Barlow
Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2003 9:05 PM
Subject: [BarlowFriendz] 9.2: War and Paz, the View from Brazil


CONTEMPLATING WAR IN THE LAND OF PEACE



I was deep in the heart of Brazil when I got the news.

I was in a serene little jewel of a former diamond-mining town called 
Lençois. It's located in a remote part of Brazil's Bahia state called 
the Chapada Diamantina, improbably beautiful country that would look 
like Monument Valley if the buttes and spires of Southern Utah rose 
from a blanket of rain forest.

I had been completely out of touch with the rest of the world for 
three days at the International Rainbow Gathering, held even deeper 
in the Chapada, eight hours of astonishingly bad road away from 
Lençois.

But even if I'd been in downtown São Paulo, the events in Baghdad 
would have seemed distant. Brazil is a floating world, a parallel 
universe of such size and cultural density that little enters or 
escapes its gravitational field. It is well accustomed to shrugging 
at Northern madnesses and continuing to pursue its own profoundly 
complex affairs.

Brazil is the world's largest Inside Joke. It is, to those who get 
it, sufficiently involving to render even such external 
considerations as the possible outbreak of Armageddon slightly 
irrelevant.

Besides, it seems to have an instinct for peace that runs the length 
of its history and is wisely aware that even opposing the bellicose 
behavior of less enlightened cultures adds energy to the cyclone of 
war. Brazil doesn't study war no more. The only organized conflict 
Brazil is likely to enter involves no weapon more lethal than a 
soccer ball.

The cobble-stoned streets of Lençois were filling with the nightly 
promenade of beautiful, chocolate-skinned young people when my cell 
phone rang. "The war has started," said Lotte, my former Swedeheart, 
in a voice as bleak as a Strindberg play.

Immediately, I lunged for a fat information feed, but there was 
little to be had. The pousada where I was staying didn't have a 
phone, so I couldn't jack my computer into the Internet. I found a 
television, which is never hard to do in Brazil, but of course I 
couldn't find one with any English programming. Why waste a channel 
on CNN? Absolutely no one here speaks English and they certainly 
don't need any more hallucinatory propaganda from The North.

What news I could find in Portuguese seemed to regard the outbreak of 
American aggression against Iraq as just another news story. It was 
nothing worth preempting the evening's soap operas over. I went to 
bed even more in the dark than usual.

I had another 8 hour drive to Salvador the next day. I scanned the 
radio constantly for news and heard little. I did hear President Lula 
de Silva making a statement in the matter, which I later leaned 
contained this perfectly reasonable statement:  "All of us want for 
Iraq not to have atomic weapons or weapons of mass destruction," he 
said, "but that does not give the United States the right to decide 
by itself what is good and what is bad for the world." 

Now I'm Rio. I know everything that CNN and the New York Times web 
site permit me to know, which seems to include things that might not 
be true.

I know that, according to the Gallup poll, 76% of the American people 
support the attack on Iraq. (Since I can only think of 5 people in my 
considerable multitude of diverse acquaintance who share this 
opinion, I have to wonder about this figure.)

I know that we can turn Baghdad - a town with 2 and a half million 
children - into telegenic Disney Hell with several thousand tons of 
high explosives and injure only Bad Guys. (Indeed, watching CNN, one 
might wonder if anyone gets injured at all in this marvelously 
surgical new form of war.)

I know that we have a lot of really cool toys in our arsenal. I know 
that A-10 Warthog can fire over a thousand rounds a minute. (Though 
no one in the media has mentioned that each of these bullets consists 
of depleted uranium that will be radiating birth defects into the 
Iraqi gene pool for many generations.)

I know that the only truly powerful country on the planet is 
continuing to manufacture the perilous, conscience-stunting myth that 
technology can make war relatively safe. Indeed, we are so delusional 
on this subject that we believe that bombing the shit out of the 
Iraqis is a humanitarian act.

This is a continuation of the same national system of denial that we 
began to construct during Gulf War I. Ask a knowledgeable American 
how many people died in that conflict and you will probably be told 
that the death toll was somewhere around 150. (I seem to recall 138 
American fatalities.)

You will probably not hear about the roughly 400,000 Iraqis we killed 
during that bully outing. You will almost certainly not hear about 
the retreating column of almost 50,000 Iraqi soldiers that were 
incinerated on the highway from Kuwait on the orders of war 
criminal-turned-Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey. While I think that Gulf 
War I may have been justified and even necessary, the fact that we 
were able to conduct it with so little empathic memory does not bode 
well for Gulf War II. We should still be in mourning for all the 
unwilling conscripts who died at the point of our surgically sharp 
sword rather than wielding it again with so much less moral 
justification.

But this is just one aspect of how we have blunted our national 
conscience with media. Even more dangerous is our new willingness to 
believe that America's agenda is more important than the preservation 
of international law. The United Nations Charter explicitly prohibits 
one nation from attacking another except in self-defense or with the 
sanction of the UN Security Council. If our attack of Iraq is 
self-defense, then I would be equally innocent  if I returned to 
Wyoming and killed everyone in Pinedale who is well-armed, doesn't 
like me, and beats his wife. (This would require quite a killing 
spree...)

Even if this war is so sophisticated that very few "collateral 
damages" are inflicted, even if the Ba'ath regime folds immediately 
and our troops enter Baghdad festooned in the garlands of a grateful 
and liberated populace, even in the extremely unlikely event that we 
find a cache of Iraqi nuclear weapons, all packed up for delivery to 
Al -Qa'ida , it will still be illegal and immoral. Victory will not 
change that.

It is also profoundly impractical, when one considers the larger consequences.

Even if victory is swift and painless , we will have wounded, perhaps 
mortally, the peace-waging capacity of the United Nations.

We will have sewn deep discord within the European Union and badly 
damaged relations with two of our most important allies, France and 
Germany.

We will have destroyed remaining popular support for the governments 
of Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, our three most important allies 
in the Middle East.

We will have established - and not only for ourselves - the 
legitimacy of preemptive attack.

We will have radicalized half a billion young Muslims, transforming a 
monster into a martyr in their eyes.

We will have installed ourselves as the rulers of an energy colony 
that will not be easy to govern, given the bitter - and, to us, 
inscrutable - divisions that exist between its Shiites, its Sunni, 
and its Kurds.

We will have brought ourselves to the brink of active hostilities 
with Turkey, formerly a strong ally.

We will have bankrupted the teetering American economy.

We will have inserted long-term instability in world financial and 
energy markets.

We will have devalued the currency of American moral authority to the 
vanishing point. We will have turned America, long the hope of the 
world, into the most feared and hated of nations. We will have traded 
our national capacity to inspire for a mere capacity to intimidate.

And for what? To avenge 9/11 by punishing a regime that had no proven 
role in it? Out of humane concern for the Iraqi people, whom we have 
been, by our own policies,  starving and impoverishing for the last 
decade? In order to destroy possibly mythical "weapons of mass 
destruction"  in Iraq, even while we abide their proven existence in 
such potentially irrational countries as Pakistan, Israel, India, 
France, and, hardly least, the United States? The Administration 
attacked before it ever provided a justification that would satisfy 
any but the most TV-enchanted Christian soldier.

As you BarlowFriendz know, I thought Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld were 
bluffing. I still think they were.  But they painted themselves into 
a terrible corner by failing to recognize the irrationality and 
intransigence of Saddam Hussein as well as the powerlessness of his 
people. When all their terrorism failed to either frighten him into 
exile or frighten the Iraqis into thinking it would be safer to 
attempt his overthrow, they had no choice but to pursue bluster by 
another means, to paraphrase Von Clauswitz. (In his press conference 
today, Rumsfeld said, repeatedly, words that amounted to: "Ok, we're 
getting really mad now. If you don't pack up and go, Saddam, we'll do 
something truly shocking and awful." As if we hadn't already...

Now, of course, these events have acquired all the terrible machinery 
of tragedy. They have become horrible juggernaut that will roll 
across the world leaving horror and change, mostly for the worse, in 
its tracks. I doubt that even Dick Cheney could stop it now.

Meanwhile, life goes gloriously on in Brazil. While the North erupted 
on Saturday in war and angry protests against war, Brazil was mainly 
concerned with the championship match between São Paulo and 
Corinthes. Indeed, the only visible war protest I saw were some 
banners in the audience at the soccer game. (Though Michael Moore got 
a huge cheer from the Oscar party I attended tonight when he took 
after George Bush...)

As you might expect, I have much more to report from down here, where 
I've now spent an utterly transforming month. Until now, I've been 
having too much fun having adventures to spend my energies on turning 
them into information.

I have just taken what is almost certainly the best short course in 
Brazilian culture that anyone ever received. Just experiencing 
Carnival - in Salvador, Recife, Olinda, Rio, and São Paulo - in the 
immediate and continuous company of Gilberto Gil would have been a 
lot. In addition to being the Minister of Culture, Gil *is* Brazil in 
a way. In his music, his open heart, his sweetly melancholy optimism, 
his energy, he represents everything this place rightly loves about 
itself.

If Gilberto Gil were a member of our cabinet - if we had the kind of 
country that would make him a member of the cabinet - we would be 
waging peace rather than war and the world would be a lot more like 
Brazil. One can only hope that one day it will be.

Paz e Amor,

Barlow

-- 
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School
                      
Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

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O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth 
to battle-be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth 
from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O 
Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with 
our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms 
of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with 
the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste 
their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the 
hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to 
turn them out roofless with their little children to wander 
unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and 
thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of 
winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the 
refuge of the grave and denied it-for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, 
blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter 
pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, 
stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, 
in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is 
ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek 
His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

-- Mark Twain