By Jack Holloway

On March 16, 1968, soldiers of the US Army entered the My Lai hamlet in the village of Son My in central Vietnam and systematically attacked and killed hundreds of noncombatant Vietnamese. The Army’s report stated “at least 175” people were killed, but a tablet at the memorial site in Vietnam lists 504 victims. While the order to attack the village came from Captain Ernest Medina, only Lieutenant William Calley, leader of one of the Platoons that carried out the attack, was found guilty, and he was only charged for killing 22 persons.^[1]

In a CBS television interview on November 24, 1969, U.S. soldier Paul Meadlo answered questions about his participation in the My Lai massacre. When Meadlo described the moment when he and the other started shooting, the interviewer  Mike Wallace asked, “Men, women, children?” Meadlo replied, “Men, women and children,” after which the interviewer clarified, “And babies?” to which Meadlo confirmed, “And babies.” This quote was soon featured in an anti-war poster by the Art Workers’ Coalition. The coalition used a photograph of the massacre by US Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle for the poster, and they imprinted the words “Q. And babies? A. And babies” over the victims.

The hardcore punk band Discharge, from Stoke-on-Trent, England, paid homage to this poster in their song, “Q. And Children? A. And Children.” The music is repetitive, with guitars grinding back and forth over short, spiraling chord progressions. The monotonous snare hits tap into the ears like throbbing veins. As the music numbs the mind, Kelvin “Cal” Morris screams out at the listener:

In agony they cry and scream!

And children and children!

What for Paul Meadlo was recited as impersonal factual information—the inclusion of children among his victims—in Discharge’s hands became a tormented cry of trauma and mourning.

Tim O’Brien, author and Vietnam veteran, reflected on the My Lai massacre and said, “Even at the time, most Americans seemed to shrug it off as a cruel, nasty, inevitable consequence of war.” Always, as soon as atrocities in war are committed, people are ready with rationalizations and excuses. Discharge’s song rejects any attempt to resolve the violence. Like the AWC poster, they sit with the irreducibility of the bloodshed and refuse to let us look away. 

Humans wage war with disturbing consistency. And this consistency, along with war’s basic absurdity, feeds into the theological problem of evil, or theodicy. Theodicy highlights the mutually exclusive claims between divine benevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience. If God is loving and all-knowing, then God cannot be all-powerful; for if a loving God were all-powerful, they would stop war from occurring. If God is all-powerful, then God cannot be loving, for a God who could stop war but doesn’t would not be a loving God.

In the Bible, the fact that evil and suffering persist occasions lament, a complaint against God for God’s failure to prevent injustice. Lament often comes in the form of the question, “Why?” Discharge also practice lament and beg, “Why?” But Discharge’s lament does not concern theodicy. As emotionally distressing as it can be, theodicy is an abstract, conceptual problem. It tells of a cognitive dissonance: what is believed about God gets contradicted by lived experience, and the believer’s inability to resolve their experience with their theological framework is the reason for their question, “Why?” Discharge are not concerned so much with theodicy. Theirs is a more concrete “Why?” It corresponds to human activity:

Besides her man she kneels

Holds him tight and begins to cry

Why why why but why

Her loved one’s just another piece of meat

On the battlefields

Why why why but why

            (“Why?,” 1981)

Napalm tumbles from the sky

Cries of help, cries of pain

Cries of help, cries of pain

Skin looking like bloody hardened meat

Cries of help, cries of pain

Cries of help, cries of pain

            (“Cries of Help,” 1982)

In these songs of lament, the image of roasted human bodies forces agonizing cries of help and pain. Comparing human casualties of war to roasted meat seems almost irreverent toward the victims, but this startling image is the real thrust of their protest. The critique within the comparison of bodies to meat is that war is a kind of cannibalism. In war, human beings are dehumanized and laid to waste. Humans are treated as expendable, “just another piece of meat.”

Dehumanization is central to the human problem of evil. We are aware of the humanity of those we kill, and yet we kill. Instead of asking, why would God let this happen—as if we need a scapegoat, or as if the possibility of war is some kind of riddle—Discharge’s Why is more cutting. To approximate: Why have we so dehumanized each other that we have made this possible?

In a live performance of “Why?”, preserved as a hidden track on side 2 of the Havoc records reissue of their Why EP, the band unravels through the course of the song. By the end, the music erupts into total mayhem, as Morris screams “Why?” over and over, in utter pathos, sounding positively hysterical. The studio recording does not come close to the depth of feeling on this live recording. It demonstrates the extent to which their music is the music of lament.

Discharge’s lament is like a specific kind of lament in the Bible—prophetic lament. This form of lament is not about resolving the conceptual difficulty which evil creates for theism, nor is it worried about cognitively justifying God. Prophetic lament calls humans to account and highlights the absurdity of human behavior in an intense expression of dismay. The “Why” of the prophets corresponds to missed opportunity and self-fulfilling doom. Why when we could have peace do we have war? It is not the human’s question to God, but God’s question to the human.

In his landmark study of the biblical prophets, The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann described the prophetic task to “evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”^[2] In a context of feudalism, where the king boasts a monopoly on right and eclipses all political alternatives, the prophet’s work is “to criticize in dismantling the dominant consciousness,” and “to energize persons and communities” to pursue an alternative future.^[3]

In contrast to this prophetic consciousness, Brueggemann says, “The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death.”^[4]  Imperial actions demand a certain disassociation from the realities of death, as state violence is never far off, and the dead ancestors on whose backs the king gained his power serve to remind the people of royal injustice.

Referring to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Brueggemann underlines the way in which failure to properly reckon with the realities of death results in widespread denial and numbness. As Robert Jay Lifton found in his study of cultural responses to Hiroshima, many experienced a “psychic closing-off,” where they “ceased to feel” and came to “accept death as a matter of course.”^[5]

Accordingly, Brueggemann wrote, “The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception.”^[6] “I believe,” he continued, “that grief and mourning, that crying in pathos, is the ultimate form of criticism, for it announces the sure end of the whole royal arrangement.”^[7] Publicly grieving the deaths of the innocent in Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitutes an indictment of the order which caused those deaths. Further, reckoning with the realities of death constitutes an indictment of all processions to war. Brueggemann cites Jeremiah for a prime demonstration of this indictment:

My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain!

Oh, the walls of my heart!

My heart is beating wildly;

I cannot keep silent;

for I hear the sound of the trumpet,

the alarm of war.

            Jeremiah 4:19

Compare this to lyrics from Discharge’s song “Visions of War”:

My head is filled with fear of war

Fear and threat of war

Horrific disturbing visions of war

Fill my head

The language of grief is the prophet’s weapon against the powers that be. By highlighting the awfulness of the status quo, and forcing people to reckon with the realities of death in the balance, prophets raise consciousness and ignite resistance.

Discharge’s intensity of expression corresponds to the gravity of suffering at play. Their debut album, Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, is strikingly bleak, and relentless in its expressions of grief. For the entire length of the album, the band refuses to shift gears. They stay in the moment of crisis, peak panic attack. It is anti-war music as uncompromising as war itself. Guitars rage, drums blast, and in every song, Morris is shouting instead of singing.

Men, women, and children groaning in agony

From the intolerable pain of their burns

 A hell on earth! Hell on earth!

That’s what war is: a hell on earth. Every generation needs renewed appreciation of this fact. Discharge’s music helps frame the issue appropriately. The level of panic, rage, and distress they inject into their sound is unparalleled. While government officials and talking heads in the media focus on justifications for warfare, Discharge zones in on the realities: bombs, death, bloodshed, trauma, cries of pain.

We need this reminder in our time. As American bombs are dropped in Gaza, we need to reflect on the realities on the ground. Like prophetic laments, Discharge’s lament-filled music is knowingly upsetting, because it is designed to destabilize and change human behavior. The band has embraced the descriptor: Noise Not Music. It is not pleasant. It is designed to break through the numbness that keeps people at peace with war.

Photo caption: Pictured is a poster Discharge produced for a raffle fundraiser for Medical Aid for Palestinians. It features lead singer Kelvin “Cal” Morris, guitarist Rufus “Rainy” Wainwright, and a projection of Leila Khaled, a Palestinian political activist.

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Notes

^[1] Joachim J. Savelsberg, Ryan D. King, Rajiv Evan Rajan, and Lacy Mitchell, “Constructing and Remembering the My Lai Massacre,” in American Memories: Atrocities and the Law (Chicago: Russel Sage Foundation, 2011), 34—52.

^[2] Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 3.

^[3] Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 3. Cf. 40: “The vocation of the prophet is to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”

^[4] Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 41.

^[5] Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991), 31-32.

^[6] Brueggemann, 45.

^[7] Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 46.