rules of war

this is serious, bitches, so if you can’t take it go elsewhere.

jonie v. , who now likes to refer to herself in the third person because of the nefarious influence of facebook, has given lots and lots of thought to the facts of a) so-called suicide bombers and b) shooters on a shooting spree that ends with the shooter’s suicide. and this is what jonie v. has concluded: that it’s all fucked. the rules of war and warriorship, which jonie v. finds an inherently male enterprise and (therefore implicitly) despises but has to reckon with nonetheless, are based on the principle that no one wants to get hurt.  since no one wants to get hurt, you can pressure your so-called enemies to do things they don’t want to do by threatening to hurt them or, even better, actually hurting them. once they are hurt enough, thus the theory goes, they’ll realize that they don’t like being hurt and will do whatever you want them to do, providing it’s not too unreasonable (the rules of war take care of this, too).

well, it doesn’t seem to work like this anymore. nowadays “warriors” do their warring by getting hurt. meaning, they hurt themselves (and others alongside). now some people, namely those people who go by the old rules of war, call these self-hurting warriors cowardly. i never got this. what’s cowardly in choosing to die to forward a cause? isn’t this the very definition of heroism? and you see that, in fact, those who are on the side of the self-hurting warriors (if such self-hurting warriors have anyone on their side at all) consider and proclaim them heroes.

this totally fucks up the concept of heroism and cowardice, because people no longer agree on their definitions, and we all know that when concepts are not agreed on it’s fucked up. another concept people no longer agree on is martyrdom and since i have always been pretty impressed by martyrdom, being catholic and all, i find this pretty fucked, too.

so here i am, trying to clarify things for everyone, in a handy fit-in-your-pocket easy-to-consult list:

• war sucks
• all violence against others sucks, but organized and self-righteous violence clad in nationalistic hymns and flags sucks even more, in fact, it sucks so much it basically sucks itself
• instruments of violence suck

and here is another short and easy to consult list that should guide us in understanding acts of self-huring warriorship:

• self-hurting warriorship is not worse than self-protecting warriorship in any respect whatsover
• it’s not better either
• self-hurting warriors are not heroes or martyrs, they are just fucked
• unself-hurting warriors are also fucked, if not individually, because the whole enterprise is fucked and they necessarily partake of this fuckedness

jonie v. would like to close this short and, she hopes, enlightening essay with an appeal to international cooperation and international basic decency, which, as the readers of this blog know, is not too difficult to attain if one actually gives it a try.

thank you.