Among the hundreds of nameless and faceless Muslim captives at our Guantanamo penal colony, a bit over 250 are on a hunger strike, determined to starve to death rather than accept their situation.
Thirty men have been on hunger strike five months now, since August. Our ultimate response has been to hold them down once a day, forcing feeding tubes down their noses into their stomachs, and pumping nutrient fluids into them.
This will not keep them alive; it only prolongs the inevitable. They’re dying, and will pass away in the days just ahead. Dozens more are determined to follow them out of Gitmo.
Poor bastards. Their medical care is in the hands of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Republicans. Poor bastards, their fate is in the hands of Americans.
The quandary at the White House is what to do with all these skinny corpses. Muslim burials? Ship their bony bodies home? Disappear them, without any markers? Let their relatives call them just once before they expire? (It would be their first outside or familial contact in years.) And what to tell the world? What to tell voting Americans?
How to keep a lid on mass suicides in our most public concentration camp?
What will they do with thirty martyrs to liberty?
What will you do?
Gentle reader, what of your persuasion or politics or personal opinions about the great questions of our day? These thirty men are beyond that now. These men are already dead to this world, already across the river, already looking down on the quarrels of this world.
They’re in a whole other space.
Putting yourself down by starvation is not suicide. Suicide is some quick and easy pop, some deed that is irrevocable. You can lay back and say, “There, I’ve done it.”
Shotguns, pills, razors, high places, even setting off a Semtex vest — are all quick and irreversible choices. And they are cowardly compared to starvation. Digesting yourself is an infinity of raw moments spent choosing excruciating pain and weakness again and again, while the remedy lies always at your fingertips.
What could motivate a human being to actually carry that off? These men in Gitmo are damn close to doing just that.
What is this thing they do?
Try a 30-day water fast yourself. Very quickly you see this world as through a veil. You see it for what matters, and what does not. What used to be vital daily business doesn’t count in the least. There is no money, no entertainment, no pleasure that could distract you from food, and your choice not to eat it. You hold your life in your hands, and it is life that you think about.
It’s a very clear state of mind. Your senses are acute; you stand in your soul, utterly and intimately aware of the fragile membrane between life and death. You see a wide world full of human beings who are really only alive between one heartbeat and the next, yet they fight and kill over table scraps and creature comforts — and pleasures.
Will power only carries you through the early rounds. After the first week, your sole strength is your identity and mindfulness — your desire to transform yourself by this discipline — “I will not be as I was before.”
You spend your days on the further shore; like a caterpillar you keep vigil in your own world; you hold every living moment in your two hands; you listen to the many voices of your heart; you listen for one song.
At the far end, your entire strength is, “I await grace.”
That’s where fasting takes a human being. Inside, and beyond.
These thirty martyrs surely started with political and personal statements in mind, but to get this far means those initial incentives have long since been rinsed away in the rising tide of a deeper reality. The dead do not and cannot hate the living.
Their death vigil is a political statement only to us, now. To each of them, it is their one and only means of living their own life, by seeking to be with their own self only.
Their death vigil is a personal statement only to us, now. To each of them, it is choosing freedom over absolutely anything else.
What is this thing they do?
From out of the deepest hole in the meanest prison on this planet, they make themselves more free than we who are walking all around.
This thing they do for liberty.
– fasting – as the ultimate protest of the limbo that they have found themselves in. That really is no different, in the end, than the statement “Give me liberty or give me death!” Who understands anymore what liberty is? We have been drugged out of our minds by media representations – that flickering light. We have drugged ourselves on food – chocolate, fat, pizza, sodas, etc. We have self medicated ourselves with all kinds of preparations. And yet we have not found an answer to what liberty means to us. I cannot believe that liberty should mean an end to our constitution. I cannot believe that the heineous treatment that we have given others in this phoney war represents liberty. I cannot believe that Abramoff understood liberty, that Delay understands liberty, that Cunningham understands liberty. But soon they will understand the ABSCENCE of liberty.
I’m in awe. I’m in awe of the facts. I’m in awe of the way you wrote that. I’m in awe of my cowardice, knowing all of this for years, and not prepared to really risk my nice American life. No more words now.
in order to end his torture. That has probably fallen through now though, as Amrika has decreed that not being human, they have no recourse to what is left of the Amrikan courts.
Thank you, Antifa, for reminding, with some world class word writing, those with the financial and physical resources to do otherwise who have chosen to remain seated and watch the murder of these kidnap victims, seized in their name, tortured in their name, with their money, to contemplate what they would wish done were it their sons, their husbands, their brothers, who languish in these dungeons. American dungeons.
The popular pilot program at Guantanamo has been very successful in sending a clear message to the people of the world of the dangers of opposing US policies, or in the case of most, the dangers of being seized by Pakistani police and sold to Amrika for $50 a head.
May God be pleased with their martyrdom.
We are going to have to fight to even keep what freedoms we have now.
This has gone beyond voting on Diebold machines, writing letters, making phone calls, blogging, or talking.
What we cherish most of all is actively being stolen from under our noses.
This fight will come to us, whether we wish it or no.
My outrage meter went off the scale in 1972, hub says I need a new scale. So what do I do, get new weights?
I’ve been asking the same question and generally seem to find this
as the inevitable answer. We can and will keep working against the forces but at some point, everyone else has to catch up.
It will indeed,nobody is immune- why do not people realize this? “first they came for the Jews…..but I was not a Jew.. and on and on- ‘It ain’t mreso why should I care?’
FDives me nuts.
It’s driven me crazy over the past 4 years of daily outrage. Besides the ones disinterested in looking out for others, so many refuse to see the dangers and actually embrace them.
I never paid much attetion to the claims of comparing Bush to Hitler but the closer I look, the more accurate it is. The rise to power with the public support of fatal policy is the similarity that stands out strongest.
I have accepted that, so SunTzu baby!
What a moving, empathetic piece of writing!
Just what’s needed to cut through the cold analysis that can so easily paralyze the soul.
I was struck by the following:
Doing unto other human beings as these Guantanamo guards do in their 9 to 5 isn’t risk-free.
Doing unto other human beings while they are helpless, lost and weak, while they are under restraint, manacled, strapped down or tied up is still doing unto others.
It comes back at you, big time.
The Wehrmacht and SS had real problems with this when they set out to ethnically cleanse conquered territories to their East back in the early forties. It turns out a human being can only shoot or torture so many human beings before they start coming unglued. After he shoots a few score human beings in the back of the neck, the typical soldier became worthless for combat, worthless even for work detail. They just wanted — needed — to go off in a corner and consider things. Getting drunk didn’t assuage their remorse; vacations didn’t scratch it. These stout and staunch German soldiers couldn’t be happy — or function in any usable role — after just a few weeks of shooting duty.
America’s stout and staunch Guantanamo guards will want to pray sincerely some day, or raise a family, or enjoy a sunset, or just live in peace with themselves, and it won’t ever be there for them. A white sand beach and a tall gin fizz will still feel like Hell to these men; they will lie out their days trying to get back to who they were before they pulled that goddamned Gitmo duty.
What they are doing right now is compartmentizing their own biological and intuitive responses to the visceral human pain and fear and horror they have in their immediate presence. They stuff it.
They stuff it, thinking it has gone away.
It doesn’t go anywhere.
And there isn’t anywhere they can go to get away from it.