In the famous last picture of Hitler decorating members of the Hitler Youth in Berlin, the boys are as young as twelve. American tank units edging forward in the Ruhr were frequently ambushed by child soldiers. Colonial Roland Robb remembered one case when they were stalled by an artillery unit manned by children of twelve and younger. They refused to surrender, and all were killed. This incident, and others like it, was deeply traumatic for all the Allied troops forced to shoot these children for their own protection. It is a final, macabre testimony to the success of ideological conditioning in the wars of the twentieth century.
Andrew Pettegree, The Book of War
He describes himself as "'the guardian of justice'". A man who wants to build an "'ideal country'", Mounir speaks to us, the reader, as doing so with a gun. He wants, he claims, to deprive the undeserved of freedom, life--with his vision of a just world.
On the 13th of April 1975, writes the author of Sitt Marie Rose, Etel Adan (1982), many like Mounir envision a just world too; in turn, they have initiated a civil war in Lebanon, a conflict between Christians and Muslims, in which the Palestinians are the scapegoat.
Mounir is a Christian, head of his militia, and he, Adan tells us, thinks of nothing but "blowing up" things. For him, a militia is "absolute order"; it's the belief in "absolute power" for the purpose of bringing about this just world. "'I've reduced all truth to a formula of life and death,'" he states.
And as I read Sitt Marie Rose, A Novel, I thought about the Palestinian women and children suffering from starvation. Today! Experiencing the most horrendous situation a human could possibly experience, Palestinians are subject to the whim of the Israeli government led by folks who certainly don't care about the Palestinians. Regardless of professed, religiously, the government doesn't seem to care about all children. But by the same token, I wonder if Americans, Christian, a good many, care enough about all children, given that Americans are paying for the slaughter of children. Palestinian children!
Mounir tells us that he can't understand how a woman, such as Sitt Marie Rose, a Christian, can stand alongside Palestinians. More than that Sitt Marie Rose teaches the deaf and mute--Palestinian deaf and mute! She is a Palestinian resister, and she isn't a Palestinian... She, once a classmate of his, is now the enemy.
Mounir and Marie Rose, Adan writes, "'became strangers to each other'". Mounir knows that as "enemy", Marie Rose can never be regarded as an "'ordinary person'". In the end. He kills her and kills her students. Children. Guardians of justice, these men! After all, in the pursuit of that just world at the end of his machine gun, he shrugs his shoulders and continues to count the bodies.
As for Marie Rose, she admits that she is trapped. Captured, she is subjected to Mounir's lectures about his vision and his bewilderment about her vision of truth. His just world is on the other side of dead Palestinian bodies. She notes that those militia men like Mounir "'hold absolute power that is as cold as their guns'". She would do better, she admits, to speaking directly with the guns! "'They [the militia] think of one thing only: growing up and fighting.'"
Sitt Marie Rose can lecture too. But when she lectures, when she tells Mounir that what he is doing, the war he is waging, is but an "absolute evil", he begins to lecture her about the Bible, what's written in the Bible. "'It's written in the Bible that God hates the enemy.'" And, Marie Rose adds, that when she ask Mounir and the militiamen about this God, who is he and where does he reside, "'they throw themselves against my chest, kissing me, and ceasing to understand'".
Love isn't comprehensible. But violence is all too familiar.
"'They have turned those among them that were poor against the poor of others.'" When they no long want to hear Marie Rose, they call her a "criminal", and Mounir prepares for the day he will have her executed. He knows it's coming because, for him, she is stubborn. She won't budge.
So let the slaughter begin again. Mounir and the men under him see in Sitt Marie Rose a "'tree to be cut down and they cut it down'".
And why not? For all Mounir sees is a threat to his dream of a just world. "'They [the Palestinians] are occupying our country and she wants to help them.'"
Sitt Marie Rose stands and looks them in the eye. "'God, whoever you are, protect the future generations from the genocide that awaits them.'"
And there are the children. "'In the classroom, held in their bewildering simplicity, is the group of justices, Mounir, Tony, Fouad, and Boune Lias. Before them, Marie Rose beneath the extinguished electric light bulb, hung by a cord, and the deaf mutes.'"
"When power translates itself into tyranny," writes James Baldwin in No Name in the Street, "it means that the principles on which that power depended, and which were its justification, are bankrupt." Power, then, is defended by "thugs and mediocrities and the seas of blood".
In turn, lies substitute for truth. "All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism." Baldwin continues, what it all means it "that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority".
As a global phenomenon, the lie, "coldly", excludes "a considerable part of humanity from enjoying what is bought" into existence by today's technology. It keeps part of humanity playing the depraved victim/criminal/enemy. These segments of humanity are "robbed of the minerals", "which go into the building of railways... TV sets and Jet airlines and guns and bombs and fleets," equipment and the means of delivering weapons of mass destruction. Weapons for raging war. And everyone seems to be begging for more weapons and killing for more victories of the patriots.
Everyone seems to be seeking the role of the tyrant, not, it seems, just this former orange president of the US, who wants to be a dictator for real. Even while "victims" are depleted of food and drained of their lives and that of future generations for a dream of the just world, ordinary American citizens go about their lives, paying taxes, and never question the right of the Palestinians to exist. The victims, it is said, are too depraved, too depraved to dream of building adequate housing, too depraved of building hospitals and schools. "Their reaction to their misery is described to the world as criminal."
And is anyone taking note of those in the dominant caste whose dream excludes, even by force?
Hunger, Baldwin writes, "has no principles, it simply makes men, at worst, wretched, and at best, dangerous".
In the meantime, the people are trying to survive and by survive "forge a new mentality to create", in turn, "the principles of which a new world will be built".
And
that building won't require weaponry, or any number of guns to secure
the nuts and bolts of this building. Nor will this building require
tyrannical power from a dictator who will subdue citizens into
numbness.
Just justice, free to think and work on behalf of all of us!
