Everywhere Is War
Jamaican singer/songwriter Robert “Bob” Nester Marley is internationally known for his music. Prior to his death in 1981, Marley sang in resistance to the oppression, grief, and pain he witnessed across the world. Marley was one of many artists who used and continue to use the gift of song and art to speak to the powers of the day, writing songs that speak and live across time and space. Songs that provide warning, art that renders atrocity, poems that visualize truth, books that document the need for change and resistance. And then, there are the courageous among us, those who dare to speak truth to power in their time, some heard and others ignored, some killed and others persecuted and rejected for the truths that they dare to speak when no one else will.
The lyrics of Marley’s song “War” are often sung, made palatable by the accompanying pulsating rhythms of reggae. Hands in the air, feet to the ground, dancing in abandon, masses still sing this song which was released in 1976: “Until the philosophy which hold one race/Superior and another Inferior/Is finally/And permanently/Discredited/And abandoned/Everywhere is war/Me say war”.
The lyrics of Bob Marley’s song come verbatim from the 27th paragraph of a speech given at the United Nations on 4 October 1963 by His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia. In the speech, the Emperor was calling for world peace. He had also addressed the League of Nations in 1936 calling for peace and assistance in the escalating atrocities being rained on Ethiopians by the Italians, following the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. In 1936, he spoke of the use of tear gas, mustard gas, and other chemicals to destroy all things living in Ethiopia. His speech before the League of Nations was to bring the attention of the world to the atrocities being inflicted on Ethiopia.
He said to the world: “The object was to scatter fear and death over a great part of the Ethiopian territory. These fearful tactics succeeded. Men and animals succumbed. The deadly rain that fell from the aircraft made all those whom it touched fly shrieking with pain. All those who drank the poisoned water or ate the infected food also succumbed in dreadful suffering. In tens of thousands, the victims of the Italian mustard gas fell. It is in order to denounce to the civilized world the tortures inflicted upon the Ethiopian people that I resolved to come to Geneva.”
While social scientists, military writers, analysts, and those who study war have a variety of words and ways for defining war, the escalation of conflict to the use of weapons, including weapons and tactics of mass destruction are present among us today – as they were years ago.
Weaponization of food. Torture. Suffering. Othering people to the point that they are unseen and rendering them as lacking humanity was present then and is present now. Everywhere is war.
“Everywhere is war” seems a bit excessive, a focal point which distracts from the identification of racism and supremacy as root causes of war, and from the need for the permanent dismantling and destruction of the philosophies and structures that perpetuate the dehumanization of people. In these days in which we live, when the cries coming from systems of oppression seem to be everywhere, Marley’s words are no longer an exaggeration; the manifestation of aggression is all around us. War is the armed conflict between nations, it is the conflict or hostility between people groups, it is the struggle or competition between forces toward a particular end. Locally and globally, war is being waged in degrees of suffering and degradation, violence perpetuated against the people.
War, by dictionary definition, is a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state. These armed conflicts result in death and atrocities, crimes against humanity that are somehow overlooked in the escalation of unresolved differences over natural resources, including land, and as a tool of oppression to subjugate people and take what they have.
War, by definition, is also a state of competition, conflict, or hostility between different people or groups. This infighting is where some civil wars are bred. The hostility between people groups is a recurrent narrative in the beginning of what becomes an escalation of conflict. People wage “war against each other” or are “at war with”, polite sounding epithets that evade the vicious and destructive results of war.
War is evident in the global conflicts that exist, escalated conflict that causes people to shoot at, to bomb, to starve, and to kill another group of people. “Rules of war” is an oxymoron, there is no politeness in war, only hate and fear, dehumanization and suffering, and possible escalation resulting in crimes against humanity. Genocide is a spawn of war and conflict, the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. The conflicts in Gaza and Sudan have moved beyond the rules of war to genocide among us. There are too many cases of acknowledged and yet to be acknowledged places where genocidal actions are documented.
And then, there are the conflicts that seem to pale in comparison to the global atrocities. The war on people groups in communities, those deemed less than or less deserving. The war on immigration and immigrants rages in the United States and in other parts of the world. The months of mass deportation and detention of undocumented immigrants has been a wide net that has resulted in the detention and arrests of permanent residents, those seeking asylum and refugee status, with the accompanying rhetoric which blames many of the nation’s problems on immigration. The addition of cruelty as a weapon wielded openly in the separation of families and the deportation of individuals to third party countries are violations of universal human rights and border on crimes against humanity.
Now, there is the planned deployment of the National Guard in Washington, DC. The militarization of the nation’s capital has been framed in the narrative of reducing crime, at a time when crime is at an all-time low. The targeting of the homeless and the order for them to leave Washington, DC or risk arrest comes mere weeks after the Executive Order Ending Crime and Disorder which targeted and criminalized the homeless and unhoused.
The call for justice is local and global, an attention to the ways in which the rights of individuals are being negated, the ways in which people’s humanity is being stripped, and the unchecked actions of governments to displace and demonize people groups. The call for justice is for the dignity of all persons.
Palestine. Sudan. Myanmar. China. Ukraine. Congo. For the masses displaced and seeking asylum and refuge in other countries. For those whose lives are lived on the margins of communities. For those who live with the threat of displacement. For those whose human rights are eroding.
27. …that until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned. until there are no longer any first-class and second-class citizens of any nation, until the colour of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes, until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all, without regard to race-until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.
Until then… everywhere is war and the fight for justice continues.
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