It takes a Basque, with
an intact moral center to write Hellfire
from Paradise Ranch: on the front
lines of drone warfare. It takes an
unimpaired moral compass to confront those ethical accommodations to which two-party-system
Americans have become Pavlovized with moral corrosion over more than two
centuries of temporizing with that old bugbear, “the lesser of two evils.” This
book is dynamite. It names names, the names of the good, godly, American
shibboleths—people like Obama, McNamara, Westmoreland, and Albright—we have
come to enshrine, whose cynicism has raised their fiats to levels of criminal
atrocity.
Joseba Zulaika has been a
frequent participant in anti drone demonstrations at Creech AFB in Nevada along
with Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, the Nevada Desert Experience, local people
from Las Vegas and Indian Springs, and other groups, all Americans of
conscience. He has been arrested there, and spent time in that notorious horror
pit, the Clark County Jail, (see Brian Terrell) where as he writes, “Compared to [the] truly jailed, the homeless and
defenseless, the poor of Las Vegas, the wretched whose freedom is uncertain at
best…our [incarceration] was ritual….”
Although Zulaika is now
emeritus, his day job was as a respectable Professor of Anthropology at the U.
of Nevada, Reno, where he also taught Basque in the only American University to
recognize the key importance of a language which may very well derive from once-peaceful
Europe’s original language, before the Kurgan conquest of (mas o menos) 3000 BC whose depredations made of the “Europeans” the
imperialist killers they became. In fact 1492 may very well be the extension of
that first invasion, when sailing ships made it technologically possible to
spead it’s genocidal depredations into the New World.
Hellfire is
a virtuoso performance both as ethnography and documentation of horror that
nauseates; at the same time it’s a well documented text that seethes with the
good, ethical Basque outrage of its author. It quotes a bloodied
butcher-aproned Obama with a “Yes, we can.” With its
glance at assassination porn, it encounters a level of atrocity the depth of
which defies encounter. And Zulaika brings it off dressed in the words of great
poets Garcia Lorca, and in a final coup de théatre, Homer himself. As Zulaika
meets the horror of our epoch full square, at the same time he celebrates years
of resistance at Creech and at the Nevada test site.
The narrative strategy of the
Epilogue is quite astonishing. It takes an original mind to see the points of
tangent in Obama‘s and Al-Awlaki’s lives, initially parallel, eventually
vastly unconverging. The comparison raises the narrative to the level of Greek
tragedy, implying that both killer and victim are blinded by delusion and their
lack of clarity makes of the them the stuff of tragedy.
While Zulaika accepts
unquestioningly the received narratives of 9-11 and the Boston marathon, he
rejects that of the burial at sea of bin Laden, a mythology it took the journalism of Seymour Hersh to explode. But these reservations become all but irrelevant in
the larger scope of the narrative.
The major omission I find, although skirted in the Epilogue with discussion of ritual burial,
would have addressed how drone
warfare destroys a civilization, what Zulaika refers to as “what holds
everything together,” the dailyness of planting
crops, tending sheep, or weaving rugs, or going to school, or market, or to the
well for water, or to celebrate a wedding, or bury a friend, or attend the
Friday mosque—to observe the rituals of a society by which it describes itself.
Because the constant
buzzing overhead implants fear in the heart, and inhibits the basic contact and the very acts of human cohesion which
allow us to remain alive; under the constant surveillance by drones, one by
one, they die, paralyzed by fear.
This is genocide.
Zulaika has written a
colossus of a book, and much as I found his earlier Bilbao Moon interesting for its multi-leveled narrative, this book
clamps the heart in a vise.
Hellfire From Paradise Ranch: on the front lines of drone
warfare. 2020, Oakland, CA, University of California Press, 289 pages.
Read the article about drone resister Brandon Bryant
published by the Independent, UK at
Please sign this appeal to
east Bay Community Energy to shun nuclear energy powered by Diablo Canyon at:
tinyurl.com/KeepEBCENuclearFree2020
In all probability, Arizona
and Nevada are the key states that decide the next election because a
million of their residents are being purged from the voter rolls. If you are a
resident of one of those states, the time is now to canvass door to door,
verifying that folks are registered to vote.
Morales and Arce bid to outperform right-wing forces and
undo regime change in Bolivia.
Switzerland halts rollout of 5G over health concerns, and
why can’t we?
Korea ramps up anti-Japan propaganda ahead of nuclear
Japanese Olympics.
Cross-Canada passenger and freight trains shut own by
Mohawks in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders.
Venezuela accuses U.S. of crimes against humanity at the
International Criminal Court.
Senate passes war powers resolution to stop #45 from
launching attack on Iran.
Ilhan Omar unveils bold proposal for U.S. foreign policy
deeply rooted in justince.
Nevada State Democratic party officials say they’ll abandon
the use of two different apps from the
same vendor that failed in Iowa, and are looking to revert to paper-based
voting and counting process.
Polling shows Sanders extending lead among Hispanics ahead
of Nevada caucuses.
Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses show medicare for all and
climate crisis top all other issues for Democratic voters in 2020.
Federal Appeals Court strikes down #45 “work-or-die" Medicaid
requirements in Arkansas.
Facing skyrocketing rents, Sta. Cruz CA students go on strike.
Turning up heat for integration, N.Y.C. students plan city-wide school boycott.
Sanders and Warren join writing letter to AG Barr to resign
immediately over Roger Stone case.
Nine Senate Dems call on Barr to resign over violation of duty.
Rank and file teachers’ movement takes on asbestos and lead
in schools.
Progressive DC
candidate Jessica Cisneros picks up union endorsements.
Civil rights groups file federal free speech lawsuit against
State of Georgia’s unconstitutional Israel boycott law.
Rising Tide reports local Boca Raton organizers and allies
shut down the GEO group private prisons headquarters.
North Dakota’s GOP settles voter ID lawsuit in huge victory
for Native American voting rights.
Georgia to stop discriminating against Puerto Rican U.S.
citizens apply for licenses.
