Hate War, always. We must. pt 10

(MG) This post picks up from the latter parts of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King's Time to Break Silence speech delivered 4 April, 1967. Its message resound today, echoing down from time across the rubble of Iraq, and the cesspool of the rotting American soul.

...

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing...part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary. Meanwhile... meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality...and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word" (unquote).

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong

Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.

If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Hate War - Always we must - part 9

(MG) Of all the the people who have come to oppose war, few if any, had as much to lose as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Even today, to read his Time To Break Silence speech, delivered 4 April, 1967, at the Riverside Baptist Church, exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated, makes one ask: "How did this preacher man, so focused on the civil rights of black American citizens, come to have such an intimate knowledge of and understanding of the forces at work ravaging the people and country of Viet Nam?"

(MG) I've excerpted portions that make the hairs on my arms stand at attention, or bring tears streaming from my eyes. Always, reading this speech, or listening to it, my reactions are identical. I am in the presence of a prophet, a voice crying out in the wilderness, a holy man of God trying to save his country, trying to save its peoples -- from themselves.

(MG) It causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble ...

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I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence *in 1954* -- in 1945 *rather* -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

(MG) If I had the power to make the rules governing what is to be taught to public school children in the U.S.A., the memorizing of this speech would be at the top of the list.

(MG) And if one were to change the words Viet Nam to Iraq, and change the word Vietnamese to Iraqis, how much would one have to alter this speech to produce as cogent a plea against the invasion and occupation of Iraq today?

(MG) We have all been here before. My, how quickly we forget.

Hate War - Always - we must - part 8

(MG) Melanie, posting at Just a Bump in the Beltway, brings this article by Harold Meyerson to our attention.

The Reality-based Community

Dying for an Iraq That Isn't

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, May 30, 2007; A13

Of all the absurdities attending our unending war in Iraq, the greatest is this: We are fighting to defend that which is not there.

We are fighting for a national government that is not national but sectarian, and has shown no capacity to govern. We are training Iraq's security forces to combat sectarian violence though those forces are thoroughly sectarian and have themselves engaged in large-scale sectarian violence. We are fighting for a nonsectarian, pluralistic Iraq, though whatever nonsectarian and pluralistic institutions existed before our invasion have long since been blasted out of existence. In the December 2005 parliamentary elections, the one nonsectarian party, which ran both Shiite and Sunni candidates, won just 8 percent of the vote.

Every day, George W. Bush asks young Americans to die in defense of an Iraq that has ceased to exist (if it ever did) in the hearts and minds of Iraqis. What Iraqis believe in are sectarian or tribal Iraqs -- a Shiite Iraq, a Sunni Iraq, an autonomous Kurdish Iraqi state, an Iraq where Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani or Moqtada al-Sadr or some other chieftain holds sway.

These are the Iraqs for which Iraqis are willing to kill and die.

Whatever their merits and their shortcomings, they are at least rooted in reality. These Iraqs have adherents and territory. The Iraq for which Bush compels Americans to fight has neither.

One of the mysteries of the current discussion of how best to get out of Iraq is that so many otherwise clear-eyed critics of administration policy say we should withdraw our combat troops but leave units behind to train Iraqi forces. As rational policy, it's vastly preferable to leaving combat forces there as well, but it leaves unanswered the question of which Iraqi forces, exactly, we should train. Those of the current Shiite-dominated Nouri al-Maliki government, which has employed Shiite forces to terrorize Sunni areas? What exactly would we train these forces to do? Be more tolerant of the Sunnis? Would that we could, and would that we could train Sunnis to be more tolerant of the Shiites, but these are matters not subject to training.

When Gen. David Petraeus testifies to Congress in September, he should be asked how many nonsectarian units the Iraqis are fielding, in actions that effectively build a nonsectarian Iraq. If the answer is zero, Congress could declare that it is U.S. policy to bolster Shiite Islam -- or, alternatively, Sunni Islam -- with the force of our arms. Or maybe, just maybe, it could begin mandating the withdrawal of American forces.

This is facing reality. Iraq's future is, and always was, in the hands of the Iraqis. It is blinkered American exceptionalism in the service of a right wing myth of American superiority which limits Bush's (and the press's) ability to see reality plain.

Posted by Melanie on May 30, 2007 03:47 PM

(MG) The myth of American exceptionalism feeds hearts and souls of wings both right and left, plus a good portion of the center, too. It's a foundation myth, harkening back to John Winthrop's preaching that America should be like a beacon on a hill, a light shining forth unto the nations.

(MG) The myth is pernicious. The myth is insidious. The epic battle for the American soul is contested on both the left and the right -- and on both sides there are those who believe that America should be an example and those who believe America should act as an implement to render change in the world.

(MG) The first strikers, those who view American military might as the way to truth and justice clearly "win" the propaganda battles required to hype the GAP (Great American Public) into war-gasmic fever pitch.

(MG) But what good is military might when you have no moral ground to stand on?

(MG) And what kind of an example are we to the nations?

(MG) Well when you ask such questions of a Muslim immigrant, you get an answer. "This is a free country. If you do good here, nobody bothers you. If you call the police, they come. You don't have to pay bribes like in my [former] country."

(MG) We take for granted a system that has been corrupted, and appears to be crumbling before our eyes. But that's an infrastructure issue. We the people need to get out and fix it, from the bottom up. The true power ultimately resides at the base. Like building a new house. The first place you have to muck it up is the hole into which you intend to pour the foundation.

Hate War - Always - we must part 7

(MG) Juan Cole reports on the deaths of 10 US troops on Memorial Day.

Guerrillas Ambush, Kill 10 US GIs

As best I can piece it together, Sunni Arab guerrillas in Iraq ran a sophisticated sting on US troops in Diyala province on Memorial Day, killing 8 GIs. First, they shot down a helicopter with small arms fire. Two servicemen died in the crash. The guerrillas knew that a rescue team would come out to the site. So they planted a roadside bomb that killed the rescuers. And, they knew that yet another rescue team would come out to see what happened to the first. So they planted roadside bombs and destroyed the second team, as well. Altogether 6 rescuers were blown up in this way. The guerrillas run this routine on Iraqi police and troops in the capital all the time. As US troops increasingly take on policing duties, they become vulnerable to the same operations that have wrought such mayhem on Iraqi security forces.

(MG) Can someone explain this to me, please? With 123,000 mercenaries subcontracted by the U.S. government, why are US troops "increasingly [taking] on policing duties"? Is this what they signed up for? Is this what the GAP wants our troops to be doing?

(MG) Damn all the Democrats who voted for the funding of the war bill to hell. (There is already a special circle reserved for the republicans)

(MG) Get our troops out NOW.

Hate War - Always - we must - part 6

(MG) I quote extensively from Daniel Ellsberg's 1972 Book Papers on the War. The final chapter of the book is entitled The Responsibilities of Officials In A Criminal War. As all readers of this blog (both of you) know, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a criminal enterprise from the start. Based on lies, our troops invaded a nation that had caused us no harm. These lies were transparent from the start. But the nation sat transfixed to the tube, watching with detached interest while the networks and cable news provided us with another video game war.

(MG) In fact, there were preemptive strikes AGAINST dissent to the war, with right-wing hate-talk radio (and cable TV) accusing dissidents of treason (which brings a death sentence upon those found guilty of it), or not supporting the troops, etc, et.

(MG) Had the invasion "turned out better", of course there would have been celebration in the streets. The non-existent weapons of mass destruction have been eliminated (except for the car bombs, of course), the evil dictatorial leader Saddam Hussein removed from power and executed, and "free and democratic" elections have been held. But Iraqis continue to do the things "insurgents" do - they resist the occupation. For this very reason, in other wars, people resiting occupiers were called "resistance fighters" or "underground".

(MG) Ellsberg's last chapter begins with quotes from Albert Spear's book, Inside The Third Reich.

... not to have tried to see through the whole apparatus of mystification--was already criminal. At this initial stage my guilt was as grave as, at the end, my work for Hitler. For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences--from the very beginning.

... In the final analysis I myself determined the degree of my isolation, the extremity of my evasions, and the extent of my ignorance ... Whether I knew or did not know, or how much or how little I knew, is totally unimportant when I consider what horrors I ought to have known about and what conclusions would have been natural ones to draw from the little I did know. Those who ask me are fundamentally expecting me to offer justifications. But I have none. No apologies are possible.

The ordinary party member was being taught that grand policy was much too complex for him to judge it. Consequently, one felt one was being represented, never called upon to take personal responsibility. The whole structure of the system was aimed at preventing conflicts of conscience from even arising.

(MG) These are rather remarkable ideas. Speer clearly has looked into the mirror and hated what he has seen. But he HAS faced the evil in himself, and he pleads - GUILTY as charged. Immediately following, Ellsberg offers quotes from Milton Mayer's book They Thought They Were Free.

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people: Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people little by little to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the Government has to act on information which the people could not understand or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him made it easier to widen this gap, and reassure those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from the people, this widening of the gap took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms to) so occupied the people they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of the Government growing remoter and remoter."

(MG) Ellsberg then begins the narrative, his remarks having first been made at a lecture given in Boston, 23 May, 1971.

I find myself ... thinking a great deal about Germany in the 1930's and 1940's. I have felt compelled ... to try to define the responsibilities of the citizens and officials of our country in terms related to the German experience; and I find myself doing this not as a Jew but as an American.

One of the first times I felt challenged in just this way was a little more than a year ago, when I was invited, in the spring of 1970, to a conference in Washington sponsored by ten Congressmen on the subject of "War Crimes and the American Conscience."

On the second day of the conference, I looked around a very large seminar table of participants ... and it came to me that I was the only person present who was a potential defendant in a war crimes trial ...

... How could it be that our country has for the last ten years--twenty years would be more accurate-- remained engaged in the brutality of our policies in Indochina? How could our leaders--honored and respectable men--have involved us so long in this hopeless butchery? How could we have let them, with so little protest?

... [these questions] deserve close attention. We are too likely to dismiss them just because they are painful, not because the answers are really obvious.

The Germans face a somewhat different question: "How could we have allowed such an obvious gang of criminals to rule over us for so long and to do the things they did?" They can reply to their own young people: "Well, it was the Nazis' criminal willingness to use terror against us--on their own people--that's the answer. We could do nothing except at the risk of our lives, we were prevented from knowing any of the truth by a totally censored press, etcetera."

But as Americans, we don't have so easy an explanation. To begin with, as Townsend Hoopes has pointed out, "It is well to remember that the advisers [of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson] were widely regarded when they entered government as among the ablest, the best informed, the most humane and liberal men who could be found for public trust. And that was a true assessment."

I must say that I think it's necessary to do what Townsend Hoopes does not do: to reexamine his judgment of these individuals--and of the Eastern Establishment from which they largely wre drawn, whose values and perspectives they truly represented--in the light of what we now know they have done over the last decade. But this reexamination will not give us the excuse that their values greatly differed from those of large parts of the population.

So the question remains: How could such respected, "humane, liberal" people--and through them, all of us--have beeninvolved in the burning of villages; herbicides; defoliation; torure; the creation of millions of refugees; air and ground invasions; and the dropping of over six million tons--six megatons, they would say at the Rand Corporation--of explosives from the air, and another six million tons of artillery shells, on the people of Indochina since 1965?

...

As my background indicates, I cannot view the question of the responsibility of officials from the perspective of someone who has held himself aloof from what the government was doing, much less of one who can say that he had opposed this war or seen through it from the beginning. On the contrary. So, rather than address the question as an outsider, I think it is better for me to do what a few Germans after the war were led to do. That is to think very hard--as Albert Speer put it to himself as he began his memoirs back in 1945--about how it could have taken me so long to see the wrongness of what we were doing, and to make some guesses about my colleagues and superiors in office.

I know of very few Americans as y et who have really confronted that question closely. And I think it is not too early to do so, even though the war is not over--because some of the officials now in office are as "liberal," as "humane," as any we've had in the past, with assistants as conscientious as I was helping them, and they are still continuing th war. Still keeping secrets well, still lying and killing. And I think they and others like them are likely to continue this for a long time, for many of the same reasons as in the past, unless we develop new standards both for them and for ourselves in our relation to them. So I will not wait for the others to do it; let me begin and ask myself how these things looked to me.

To go back to the question: "How could we ...?" I think the answer goes back in part to an event we all remember, in August, 1945. ... the month in which the United States ended a World War with an unprecedented act of genocide, unleashing the power of the sun on the people of Hiroshima.

I remember feeling, at fourteen, some uneasiness about one aspect of that event--the very evident lack of uneasiness in the announcement by our President, Harry Truman. I remember his voice on the radio as he announced in a euphoric tone the great technical achievement of the United States in using this power to save American lives and to end the war. Even then I had a feeling that this was as decision that would better have been made in anguish.

... the backgournd to that lack of anguish is known to all of us who lived through that war. Although the atom bomb did begin a new era in the technical capabilities of wiping out mankind, that event was not in itself totally unprecedented by the usual quantitative standards which we used, then as now, to measure such achievements: the body count. As a matter of fact, the atom bomb did not kill as many people as the fire raids on Tokyo, during a period of a day or two earlier that year. Those raids created a firestorm: people who took refusge in the canals were boiled alive; the asphalt in the street boiled; and the city of Tokyo was destroyed. And that holocaust had been preceded by similar ones: the firestorm in Dresden; the firestorm in Hamburg; and the raids which were comparably destructive on Cologne and Berlin.

These were things that we had been doing for several years. That period was an education process for the United States: it taught us that there were simply no limits to what was permissible for the United States President to order and carry out--without consulting Congress or the public--once he determined that the stakes were sufficiently high. We emerged from that education potentially a very dangerous nation.

There is an idea that fascinated Dostoevski's Ivan Karamazov: If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. In the four years after 1941, Americans learned: Hitler exists, therefore everything is permitted. There was no limit at all--we learned from our own actions--to what one could justifiably do against such an enemy: one who threatened our existence, who used deception and terror, who stopped at nothing--one who carried out actions each more terrible than the last. Even before we learned of the nearly complete destruction of the European Jews, we knew that twenty million Russians were dying in that war, and not in gas chambers. The Japanese, meanwhile, had attacked us directly. So it seemed very clear in fighting such enemies--in fighting for one's life--that secrecy, deception of the public along with the adversary, concentration of power in the Executive, mobilization of all resources, and the use of absolutely unlimited violence were all justified, even required.

Albert Speer tells us he has no doubt that if Hitler had been given the atom bomb, he would have used it against England. but we have no doubt what WE would have done with the atom bomb, since we did get it, and used it.

All of this created a supreme experience for many Americans, but particularly for officials close to the President. Their role had come to seem absolutely central in the world. ... The role of Congress ... is much diminshed, and so is that of the courts and of the press. War is the health of the Presidency, and of the departments and agencies that serve it, the Executive branch. In no other circumstances can the President and his officials wield such unchallenged power, feel such responsibility and such awful freedom.

So what we learned--especially members of the Executive--in those four years from 1941 to 1945 was how exhilarating, in a certain sense, it was to have an opponent like Hitler, if one were to have an opponent at all. And we have not lacked for opponents, in the thirty years since 1941, as our officials took on what they perceived to be the challenge and responsibilities of leading half the world.

But in the last quarter of a century, Hitler has not existed, so it has been necessary to invent him. And we have invented Hitlers again and again. Stalin made a plausible one; Mao, somewhat less so. Even Fidel Castro. Ho Chi Minh, Nasser, and other nationalist leaders of obstreperous former colonies have taken on the guise of Hitler in the eyes of various Western powers seeking to maintain their rule, however exaggerated the image may have seemed to their own allies. Thus, Eisenhower, hoping to keep the French fighting in 1954 by united U.S./U.K. support, suggested to Churchill that the challenge posed by Ho Chi Minh at Dien Bien Phu--for example, to British interest in Malaya--was equivalent to that of Hitler in the Rhineland or at Munich.

If I may refer again to history' we failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini, and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of start tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson? ...

Eden and Churchill--men of some authority on the dangers of "appeasement"--refused to rise to this rather blatant appeal to their own past. Eden deprecated Dulles' warnings of Ho's military and expansionist potential and rejected, almost curtly, both the analogy and linkage of the security of French interest in Indochina to those of the British in Malaya: "French cannot lose the war between now and the coming of the rainy season however badly they may conduct it"; Referring to the rest of Southeast Asia, [Eden] said the British were confident that they had the situation in Malaya in hand ... He said there was no parallel between Indochina and Malaya ... Eden said there was obviously a difference in the United States and the United Kingdom estimates and thinking ..."

John Foster Dulles was so offended by their skepticism that diplomatic relations were strained. But only two years later, Eden convinced himself that the destruction of Port Said from the air and the invasion of the Canal Zone were required and justified because he was fighting an Arab Hitler in Nasser. Surely, from the perspective of the Israelis threatened by Nasser, the analogy was not far-fatched at all. But that was scarcely the perspective of the British, concerned about the loss of imperial control of the Suez Canal, or of the French, concerned about imperial control of Algeria.

...

Even earlier, I had come to believe substantially all the Cold War premises, which linked nearly every "crisis" ultimately to our confrontation with the Soviet Union, and identified that with the challenge we had faced before and during World War II. If I accepted then an official American interpretation of events that now seems, at best, ideological and misleading, it was not because I had grown up as a conservative. ... Nor had my thinking been influenced by Senator McCarthy. But what McCarthy and his fellow thugs were exploiting, in fact, was in part a credibility gap that had opened on the Left in those same years.

Just as conservatives had lost both credit and confidence in the Depression, and "isolationists" likewise with Pearl Harbor--tow developments that weakened Congress in its later relations with the Executive--much of the Left suffered similarly in the late forties from reflexes that led to an implausible and apologetic stand with respect to Stalin's actions. My own political awareness did not begin much before the Truman Doctrine ... and as I read the news in subsequent years of Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade, political trials, Korea, and uprisings in East Europe, official U.S. Government interpretations simply came, increasingly, to seem more plausible and reliable than those of "radical" critics who defended Soviet foreign policy. (I wish now that the range of available interpretations in those days had been broader--allowing for great skepticism toward both sides ...)

Hate War - Always - we must - part 5

(MG) Writing in the Boston Globe, James Carroll addresses the damage the invasion and occupation of Iraq has done to we, the people. In this piece, Carroll fails to describe the scope of murder, mayhem and misery inflicted upon the Iraqi peoples.

May 29, 2007 by The Boston Globe

Sacrifice, Pain, and Grief

by James Carroll

This article was published on Monday, May 29 - Memorial Day, 2007:

The nation pays its respects today to those who have fallen in America’s wars. The central ritual of our communal bereavement takes place with a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington , Va. Because those remains are anonymous, they are fitting representatives of the entire legion of war dead, who are the focus of affection on Memorial Day.When we send men and women off to battle for the sake of the nation’s greater good, we promise that, should they not return, their sacrifice will always be remembered. It is the minimum such heroes are due. But because the nation is at war today, the observance has special poignancy, and added pain. Like numerous graves at Arlington, the grief of all too many families is fresh. Given the kind of war this is, however, the mourning is for more than departed individuals.

Is it presumptuous to imagine we can know something about those whose lives were lost, perhaps even the “unknowns”? The military women and men who have been killed in war wanted more from life than they got. They began by believing in a higher cause, but ended up, from every frontline report, caring most about the buddies to their right and left. They saw the horrors of combat, but what really frightened them was the threat of moral collapse as feelings of anger, fear, and, perhaps, revenge replaced the stately cohesion of the drill.

Trained in glory, they died in absurdity. On Memorial Day, can we pay tribute to the dead without falsifying what befell them?

“If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted,” the Vietnam novelist Tim O’Brien wrote, “or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.” O’Brien says that the hallmarks of truth, when it comes to war stories, are obscenity and evil. “You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you.”

Such dark notes are struck by the chroniclers of every war, going back to Homer, but they seem especially apt when those being mourned have fallen in a war that, even before its end, has already shown itself to have been mistaken from its first trumpet.

That recognition compounds American grief on this Memorial Day. In addition to the bright faced young men and women for whom taps has sounded, “a secure sense of the goodness of the social order is irretrievably lost and must be mourned.” The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, treating veterans, wrote that in response to Vietnam, but the observation applies equally to Iraq.

Even the most diehard of American commanders and politicians show signs of recognizing the strategic and (therefore) moral futility of the war in Iraq, which is why they are tangled in the impossible snares of what-to-do-now. The nation, meanwhile, has a larger problem, which is only apparently less pressing: How to reckon with the strategic and moral damage the United States has done and is still doing to the shared well-being of the human family?

In addition to the lives it has needlessly destroyed, the war has helped ignite the most volatile region on earth; it has polluted US relations with former allies; and it has resuscitated the armed suspicions of former enemies. What of more value has been lost than the golden opportunity at the end of the Cold War to further empty nuclear arsenals, to midwife international structures of law, to heal the planet’s poisoned environment, to address the global crisis of southern poverty?

Memorial Day is a time of social grief. We deliberately call to mind the names and faces of the dead. We attend to their selfless patriotism, and the courage with which they conducted themselves. We insist that, no matter how misbegotten the cause in which they died, they did not die in vain.

In the glorious past, that faith depended on carrying wars forward to the point of victory, which alone redeemed the mortal loss. But now, we eulogize the heroes without approving the war that killed them. Because today’s national desolation must include a larger grief for lost American virtue, the determination that the fallen not have died in vain requires that their sacrifice be taken as a fuller opening to the truths both of what our leaders have wrought, and of the responsibility that belongs to us all.

The proper memorial to the war in Iraq is its immediate end.

Hate War - Always - we must - part 4

(MG) On a piece appearing at the Common Dreams web site, Cindy Sheehan bows out of the limelight. She and I sadly share many of the same conclusions, in particular, how politicians of all stripes are using the invasion of Iraq and American troops for purely political purposes. This brave plain-spoken lady speaks and writes with great passion and great force. She has devoted her the last three years of her life trying to END the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. She is calling it quits. She has invested so much of herself, and now the deeper and most disturbing truths have been revealed to her ... and to us. What do WE do about it now?

(MG) Hold the war mongers accountable. Call them war mongers. VOTE them all the hell out of office.

I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes.

I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?

I have also reached the conclusion that if I am doing what I am doing because I am an “attention whore” then I really need to be committed. I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others. I have spent every available cent I got from the money a “grateful” country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.

I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.

Camp Casey has served its purpose. It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford, Texas? I will consider any reasonable offer. I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too…which makes the property even more valuable.

This is my resignation letter as the “face” of the American anti-war movement. This is not my “Checkers” moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.

Good-bye America…you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan who was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is a co-founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace and the author of two books: Not One More Mother’s Child and Dear President Bush.

Hate War - Always - we must - part 3

(MG) When I was much younger, every Memorial day our grade school band would march and play in the parade, through the heart of town out to the cemetery. These were reverent moments. But now, when I view Memorial day parades and fourth of July parades, I see the overt militarism and glorification of soldiers, warriors. I've had my fill of this pap. Do you want to know the face of war? Look at a baboon's buttocks. THAT is the face of war. And what are the soldiers fighting for? They are fighting for each other, while we sleep soundly, and life goes on. They are dying - for each other. And we, the people, have let this happen. Each military death of the Iraq / Afghanistan invasions and occupations has been a waste. They are all for naught. They are empty homes, empty beds, empty hearts in America -- the lives rent asunder. And the wounded who survived -- and the wounded whose scars cannot be seen, and whose scars will not heal, for what purpose have we sent our troops into harm's way?

There is neither glory nor honor in dying for an illegal war waged upon poor peoples in foreign lands. There is simply an emptiness, a loss of life, a loss of potential. Damn all the war mongering politicians to hell. Bring the troops home. The mission? Weapons of mass destruction - check. Regime change - check. Installation of a (more or less) democratically elected government - check. Mission accomplished.

Civil war and strife ensuing? It escalates daily - each and every day our troops remain, the situation worsens (and the situation is horrible beyond words). Do the math - two million Iraqis have taken refuge out of the country; two million Iraqis have been rendered homeless; Six-hundred and fifty thousand Iraqis have died because of our presence there. From a country of twenty-seven million souls.

Here's proportionality. If the ravages of war were distributed proportionally upon the US with it population of three hundred million, the numbers would be:

22,200,000 Americans taking refuge outside of America
22,200,000 Americans rendered homeless
7,200,000 American deaths resulting from a proportionate war on these shores

How do soldiers die? HORRIBLY. It's not like in the movies. Read below an account of how soldiers die.

Wilfred Owen

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.