War & Poetry Issue on Sale Now!

Bringing back grace from the future, by Djelloul Marbrook

The human mind keeps reaching into the future to bring back grace in evolution, and this gives us heart. But at the same time the human mind digs into the darkest past to dredge up the disgrace of war, and this dements us.

No nation can justify the hypocrisy of condemning another for war and exploitation while exonerating itself. Mankind is universally complicit. People after people, empire after empire, nation after nation oppress their neighbors, steal their wealth and desecrate their legacies.

No amount of indignation among Arabs for the evils Israelis have done, or rage among Israelis for the wrongs of Arabs, or Shia grievances against Sunnis, or Sunni grudges against Shias, or communist complaints against capitalism, or capitalist indictments of communism, or Christian, Muslim and Jewish attacks on each other will free a single human being on the face of the earth from the onerous burden of responsibility for violence countenanced against each other.

When the Macedonians hellenized the world was it worth the destruction of Persepolis? When the Romans imposed their sense of order on their neighbors was it worth the destruction of Etrusci or Macedonia or Carthage? How did the imperialists, whatever flag they flew—and there were many—justify slavery? The same way corporate globalization now justifies exploitation of the poor. Hypocrisy always smells putrid. It doesn’t matter if it’s Rome’s or Halliburton’s or Exxon’s or Tehran’s.
The smell is always the same, and to our mutual disgrace we call it perfume. That is the very measure of our disgrace.

It is not an accident that this issue of Arabesques, devoted to the subject of war, that seemingly incurable disease, should also be dedicated to Daniel Pendergrass, the American poet whose first and only
volume of poetry, 23 Istanbul Karabitsi, was published by Arabesques. dedicated to the memory of Daniel Pendergrass. Daniel, a teacher at the American University in Dubai, died suddenly in the middle of his life last month. He was one of those people who reach into our future to bring back a means by which we all transcend our past.

_______________

Also Read Hugh Pope's

exclusive Interview

with Daniel Pendergrass

That is what our poets, artists, scientists and mathematicians do. Their visions are the engines we ride into the future. Their example is what encourages us to take heart, to believe we can do better. What do

the war-makers, servants of greed, do? That is what we should be asking ourselves, and it is what these writers you will find here are doing.

We say we kill each other to defend ourselves, our interests, our ideals, our religions, but we never admit our cause is rapine, that we want what someone else has. We are good at inventing excuses for the

harm we do, but we go to absurd lengths to absolve ourselves of the greed that metastasizes across the globe.

We blather on, all of us, in every nation, about war crimes, corruption, injustice, poverty, disease, but the greatest crime is that the great nations of the world—the United States, China, Russia, India, and most of the smaller nations—cannot bring themselves to abstain from the crime of bankrupting themselves on militarization when the money could be spent to redress all the ills for which they blame each other.

They know that arms and greed fit each other hand in glove—war is profitable—but they go on blaming each other for their common disgrace.

Thomas Jefferson foresaw this when he wrote, “I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”