Rules of War sound like something straight from 1984. If these rules were followed much of what the United States has carried out in the name of war will have discounted their own rules. Tut-tut. .

::::::::

Military necessity.

(Do not assume my complicity.)

Humanity.

(What morality preserves your sanity?)

Proportionality.

(Grotesque contortion of reality.)

Distinction.

(Cold-blooded extinction.)

Honor.

(How innocent the goner?)

.......................

My original intention was to write a much more serious, thoughtful but scathing "answer" to the Rules of War, but I burned a lot of my octane for this project in poring over the edits and addenda of these rules. It's not so much that the basic thinking behind the rules has changed but the language has - certainly not the rightness or wrongness of fighting wars. That is not up for revision. It's all still deep inside the box of the warrior mentality, which is completely unfathomable to me. Anyway, I had so little energy left after studying this work-in-progress, which now includes fighting in space, that I decided something is better than nothing, just to be on record for how I feel, which borders on nauseated.

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(Article changed on Sep 17, 2021 at 8:04 AM EDT)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.