Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
George Amabile
Winnipeg, Canada
George Amabile’s work has appeared in The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, Saturday Night, The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review, Poetry Australia, Sur (Buenos Aires), Poetry Canada Review, and Canadian Literature. He has published eight books, edited two magazines and won two national prizes.
Crimes against Humanity
They are only crimes if you lose the war. If you win they are courageous decisions like Hiroshima, Nagasaki. No other country has ever exploded nuclear weapons of mass destruction among civilians before or after the U. S. A. This is a sign of our time-tested genius for innovation, which we’re proud of, also it saved lives. How many lives did Osama bin Laden save by destroying the World Trade Center? If he stopped Commerce for even one day it was thousands, but they don’t count, they’re invisible like “the disappeared” in San Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Chile, like the victims of our friends, those defenders of freedom, those strong leaders, Baby Doc, Papa Doc, Pinochet and Marcos, Mobutu, Batista and the War Lords of Afghanistan, the ones who reminded Reagan of our founding fathers, and made The Taliban look like saints or saviours. Then there’s our old pal, our buddy, Saddam Hussein, whom we armed to the teeth, and the Shah whom Democracy died for. The list is a long and revered Who’s Who of celebrity terrorists we have loved and admired for half a century and more. Not only for their style, their impeccable manners at Summits, but for the absolute honesty with which they administer programs of patient but resolute genocide, also their take charge ability to extract information with the most up to date technologies, both physical and psychotropic, from those who can’t read or write, and don’t know anything. We’ve already begun to emulate their firm commitment to political stability, and have taken steps toward a more open and widespread employment of threats, illegal confinement, invasion of the home, the telephone, the doctor’s office, deadly force and its power to clear the air of dissident voices, though we are still a bit squeamish about these things after all our talk in public about civil rights and the pursuit of assets. No one believed it for a minute, but it sounded a lot like the lies our fathers told, and we would never contradict, even implicitly, those giants of history who are credited with so many deaths and so much misery, they must be seen to have transcended the merely human. As we contemplate these things, it becomes clear and to our credit that The Axis of Evil has always run through The White House, its deep thrill charging our bones through our pockets.
