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.

Hate War - Always - we must - part 2

(MG) Writing at TruthDig.com, Scott Ritter indicts the American people for their passive acceptance of the lies leading to the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

May 11, 2007 by TruthDig.com
The Good American
by Scott Ritter

I joined the American Legion a few years back. As a veteran of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, I was eligible to do so for some time but always hesitated, perhaps out of a sense of trying to deny that my days as an active-duty combatant were long past. Every year, on Memorial Day, my fellow firefighters and I would gather in the basement of the local American Legion hall before we paraded before the town we protect. I would look around at the uniforms and faded patches and ribbons worn by the veterans who joined us in the hall and realize that they, too, were deserving of a great deal more support than simply being wheeled out once a year to participate in a parade. So I sent in my application and was accepted.

One of the fringe benefits of membership in the American Legion is a subscription to its monthly journal, The American Legion, billed as “the magazine for a strong America.” It quickly became apparent that The American Legion magazine was a sounding board for many holding quite militaristic and jingoistic opinions based on their rather limited personal experiences, many dating back to World War II. The war in Iraq, together with the overarching “global war on terror,” seems to be viewed by many in the American Legion as an extension of their own past service, and much effort is made to connect World War II and the Iraq conflict as part and parcel of the same ongoing American “liberation” of the world’s oppressed.

It’s a shame for these Legionnaires that the Iraqis couldn’t have turned out to be blond, blue-eyed Germans who looked like us, and whose women could be wooed with chocolate and nylon stockings by the noble American liberator and occupier. Or, short of that, passive Japanese, who freely submitted their women to the massage parlors and barracks of their American conquering heroes while their men rebuilt a shattered society. The simplistic approach of many of the American Legion’s most hawkish advocates for the ongoing disaster in Iraq seems to be drawn from a selective memory which seeks to impose a carefully crafted past experience dating back to the last “good war” (i.e., World War II), expunged of all warts and blemishes, onto the current situation in Iraq in a manner which strips away all reality.

It turns out that the Iraqis aren’t like German or Japanese people at all, but rather a fiercely independent (if overly complex) nation deeply resentful of a so-called liberation which has brought them nothing but pain and agony, primarily at the hands of those who have, unbidden, “freed” them from their past. The fact that the Iraqis resent the ongoing American occupation, and choose to express this resentment through violent resistance instead of submissive passivity, is in turn resented by many of the Legion’s membership. “War has been declared on the United States by those who are envious of our freedom, and they won’t stop until we are under their heel,” writes one Legionnaire in a letter published in the May 2007 issue of “the magazine for a strong America.” The juxtaposition of Iraq with those who perpetrated the events of Sept. 11, 2001, implied in this statement is reflective of a level of ignorance that boggles the mind. Iraq never declared war on the United States, the salesmanship exhibited in our promotion of “freedom” in Iraq leaves nothing to envy, and the Iraqis will stop resisting when we leave their country.

Don’t try telling that to the blustery former Marine who authored the letter in question, however. He, like the majority of the Legion, is tired of hearing about “Bush’s war.”
“Death, Not in Vain” is the title of the feature article of the May 2007 issue. The story revolves around how the parents of one Marine who died in Iraq seek to define their son’s sacrifice. “People may not agree with the reason we went to war,” the mother of the fallen Marine is quoted as saying, “but while our troops are over there, we can’t be telling the world what they are doing is wrong. If we say we support them, we have to support what they are doing.” Of course, the nature of the “disagreement” surrounding the Iraq war is never fully articulated in the article. There is no mention made of the discredited claims by President Bush and other war advocates about weapons of mass destruction or connections between Saddam Hussein’s government and al-Qaida. Instead, the reader is told repeatedly about how fallen American service members gave their lives for America and a “free Iraq.” Quoting their fallen sons, the families of Marines killed in Iraq speak proudly of bold statements such as “We need to be there, but it’s going to be hard, and it is going to be a long time.” Yet they never explore the actual “need” cited.

“We’ve got to support the troops and the mission,” the article quotes one family member as saying. “The two are dependent on each other.” I’m all for supporting the troops. But blind support for a mission of such nebulous origin? This is a much different matter, one requiring more introspective investigation. I don’t think it was the magazine’s intent, but a foundation of such an investigation was laid in the very same issue. In his article “Minimizing the Holocaust,” Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz slams those who seek to dismiss Nazi Germany’s effort to commit genocide against Europe’s Jews. It is a very difficult article to digest, not because of the legitimate premise that those who seek to deny or minimize the Holocaust are deserving of condemnation, but rather for the ease with which the moralistic Dershowitz explains the bombing of Dresden in 1945 as a “legitimate act of belligerent reprisal for the relentless bombings of civilians in London and elsewhere,” or the dismissive waving-off of the systematic starvation of 1 million German prisoners of war by the United States after the surrender of Germany as an inconvenient result of a “food crisis across Europe, a result of the continent’s decimation,” and being a “far cry from the 6 million innocents who perished at the hands of the Nazis with absolutely no military justification.”


I would be curious to know how Dershowitz would judge how the families of German soldiers deployed in combat operations should have viewed the Second World War. What if a mother of a young panzer grenadier fighting on the Russian front was to say, “The troops are the mission, and we cannot separate our support for either”? Should blind support for the fighting men likewise have blinded the families of German soldiers to the illegitimacy of their cause? Certainly Dershowitz would favor the “good German,” one who would have sought to deny facilitation of the Holocaust by refusing to support the war which empowered it. Would he so favor the “good American,” one driven by a sense of moral responsibility to speak out against acts perpetrated in Iraq and elsewhere by American fighting forces ostensibly in support of freedom, but in reality an extension of illegitimate policies reeking of global hegemony and American empire? Or would he choose to explain away Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, the CIA’s secret gulag of torture as “legitimate acts of bellicose reprisals” for the events of Sept. 11, 2001? In Dershowitz’s tortured legal brain the events at Haditha and elsewhere, including the Marine massacre of civilians in Afghanistan, likewise assume legitimacy in this newfound legal defense of “legitimate bellicose reprisal.”


In the end, Dershowitz’s opinions are irrelevant. The disturbing reality, however, is that his mind-set is not limited to the soap box he enjoys as a teacher of jurisprudence at one of America’s finest institutions of higher learning but rather is increasingly embraced by American service members deployed in harm’s way. A recent U.S. Army survey shows that some 40 percent of American soldiers and Marines support the use of torture as a means of gathering intelligence. Some 66 percent would refuse to turn in a fellow soldier or Marine for abusive actions against civilians, and less than 50 percent believe that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect. Ten percent of those surveyed actually admitted to abusing civilians and their property for no reason whatsoever. While acknowledging that this mind-set is at complete odds with official policy concerning the conduct of military personnel in a combat zone, the Pentagon did its best to portray the survey results as clear evidence that there was, in fact, “good leadership” in place, since the desires of the troops had not manifested themselves in large-scale acts of abuse or torture. True, but the survey is also clear evidence that when such abuse or torture does occur, it is not the result of a few “bad apples,” so to speak, but instead indicative of a trend that could easily spiral out of control on any given day.


The survey results should not come as a surprise to anyone. The innumerable home movies shot in Iraq and Afghanistan, some immortalized on YouTube, some in documentary film, some simply shared with friends and family, all show the same disturbing trend. Whether it is a Marine singing the lyrics to the self-written “Hadji Girl,” or soldiers speaking disparagingly about “ragheads” or “sand niggers,” or any other dehumanizing remark imaginable, the reality is our troops aren’t in Iraq to liberate the Iraqi people. We’re there to kill them and we do an extraordinarily good job. The British government recently certified as “sound” the methodologies used by the study published in the medical journal The Lancet which estimates the number of deaths (as of 2006) that can be directly attributed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath at 655,000. If anything, this number has grown by leaps and bounds since the study was conducted.


One can point to sectarian violence as a major contributor to this total, but as an American I tend to reflect on the American-on-Iraqi violence, such as the barely mentioned deaths of Iraqi children in a recent air-delivered bomb attack against suspected Iraqi insurgents. I’m sure Dershowitz and those American service members desensitized to their own acts of depravity can explain the deaths of these innocents as “legitimate acts of bellicose reprisal.” I call it murder, even if these deaths occurred in time of war.


Every mother and father of every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine deployed in Iraq should reflect on this as well. “Little Johnny” may write home about what he says is a “just war” that “needs to be fought,” but before one embraces the words of someone in harm’s way in desperate need of self-justification for the things he has seen and done, re-examine the area of operations your loved one is serving in or, worse, has perished in. Are they “living among the Iraqi people,” as some would have you believe? Or are they sequestered away in base camps or fire bases, forced to conduct patrols out among a population that for the most part hates them and wants them gone from Iraq? Does “Johnny” himself call the Iraqis ragheads? Does he give a frustrated kick at the Iraqi male he just apprehended, not because of any crime or offense committed, but simply because he was there? Does he point his rifle and scream expletives at the mother or wife or daughter who cries out for a loved one? Does he break a lamp or table to emphasize his point? Or does he do worse, allowing his emotions and frustration to break free as he beats, shoots or rapes those he now hates more than anything else in the world? Freedom? Get real. The mission of our military in Iraq is survival, and that is no military mission at all.


The war in Iraq is as immoral a conflict as the United States has ever been involved in. Past wars were fought in a day and age where information was not readily available on the totality of issues surrounding a given conflict. One could excuse citizens if they were not equipped with the knowledge and information necessary to empower them to speak out against bad policy. Not so today. For someone today to proclaim ignorance as an excuse for inactivity is as morally and intellectually weak an argument as can be imagined. The truth about those who claim they simply “didn’t know” lies in their own lack of commitment to a strong America, one founded on principles and values worth fighting for, and one where every American is committed to the defense of the same. Ignorance is bad citizenship. In this day and age, bad citizenship carries ramifications beyond the environs of our local communities. Given America’s dominant role in the world, bad American citizenship has a way of manifesting itself globally.


I’m not calling the parents of those who have fallen in Iraq and who continue to voice their blind adherence to the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq bad citizens. I understand their need to come to grips with their loss the best way possible, which is to try and extract some meaning from the sacrifice their family has had to make. But I draw the line when these families allow their suffering to translate into blanket suffering for others. As The American Legion magazine quoted one such individual who advocated in favor of the Bush administration: “Are more servicemen and women returning the way my son did, in a casket, as a result of our words and actions? I believe the answer is yes. The perception of a weak American military, should we lose, will make our enemy stronger than we ever imagined. Because we don’t want to be at war any more doesn’t mean the war is over.”


Thus, in a blind effort to find meaning in her son’s death, this mother is willing to inflict suffering on other American families. (MG) this is the problem with "an eye for an eye" ... there are presently more American soldiers dead from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than there were civilians murdered in the 9/11 attacks ... and THIS is what an eye for an eye leads to ... to avenge the loss of one eye ... we poke out our other ... This may sound like a harsh indictment, but she indicts herself. The same mother concludes the article with the following quote: “I told President Bush last summer that the biggest insult anyone could hand me would be to pull the troops out before the job is complete. If we’re going to quit, at that point I’ll have to ask, ‘Why did my son die?’ ” The question she should have been asking long before his death was, of course, “Why might my son die?” That she failed to do so, and now seeks to send others off to their death in a cause not worthy of a single American life, is where she and those of her ilk stop receiving my sympathy and understanding.


The American Legion magazine, in its May 2007 issue, belittles those who speak out against the war. “While our forefathers gave us the right and privilege to challenge our leaders,” one father of a fallen Marine writes, “the manner and method that some people have chosen to use at this time only emboldens the enemy.” Reading between the lines, freedom of speech is treasonous if you question the motives and actions of those who got us involved in the Iraq war. Alan Dershowitz can only wish that there had been more “good Germans” speaking out about the policies of Adolf Hitler before the Holocaust became reality.


I yearn for a time when “good Americans” will be able to stop and reverse equally evil policies of global hegemony achieved through pre-emptive war of aggression. I know all too well that in this case the “enemy” will only be emboldened by our silence, since at the end of the day the “enemy” is ourselves. I can see the Harvard professor shaking an accusatory finger at me for the above statement, chiding me for creating any moral equivalency between the war in Iraq and the Holocaust. You’re right, Mr. Dershowitz. There is no moral equivalency. In America today, we should have known better, since we ostensibly stand for so much more. That we have collectively failed to halt and repudiate the war in Iraq makes us even worse than the Germans.

(MG) In the Chicago Tribune op-ed pages, prior to the invasion, Scott Ritter warned that there WERE no WMD in Iraq. His voice is one that needs to be heeded. And this indictment will NOT set well with most Americans ... but until one looks into the mirror of guilt, and professes one's guilt, one's culpability, and by our inactions were ARE culpable ... until such moments as that ... well, we may expect more of the same, ever more of the same

Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from 1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of numerous books, including “Iraq Confidential” (Nation Books, 2005) and “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2006)

© 2007 TruthDig.com

Hate War - Always - we must

(MG) Military.com has this article which came to my attention via Melanie Mattson's Just a Bump in the Beltway Blog. Why do we the people let our elected / appointed officials drape themselves in the flag and hide behind the troops to wage our never-ending imperialist invasions and occupations (wars of choice)?

Health Care System Puts Troops at Risk

Associated Press | May 04, 2007

WASHINGTON - The military is putting already-strained troops at greater risk of mental health problems because of repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, a Pentagon panel said Thursday in warning of an overburdened health system.

(MG) and in present day warfare, guerrilla wars waged against innocent civilians in countries that never asked us to be there, the daily grind of warfare is SO different from "the big one (II)" where troops cannot distinguish friend from foe (face it, at this juncture, they are all opposed to our presence) where troops cannot let their guard down for one minute ... but where mostly it is about waiting ... waiting in anticipation the pressure of battle is ever-present ... these wars of choice take a HUGE psychic toll ... and think about how many of our troops are reservists, and national guardsmen ... these are NOT soldiers who have signed on for this type of never ending battle

Issuing an urgent warning, the Defense Department's Task Force on Mental Health chaired by Navy Surgeon General Donald Arthur said more than one-third of troops and veterans currently suffer from problems such as traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

(MG) the only even REMOTELY hopeful thing about this article is that post-traumatic stress disorder is now recognized as debilitating ... there were huge debates over PTSD and Viet Nam vets ... because the cost of providing counseling IS so high ... and the costs of not providing counseling ... well, that simply is higher ... and this is the absolute bare bones minimum we need to do for our troops

With an escalating Iraq war, those numbers are expected to worsen, and current staffing and money for military health care won't be able to meet the need, the group said in a preliminary report released Thursday.

"The system of care for psychological health that has evolved in recent decades is not sufficient to meet the needs of today's forces and their beneficiaries, and will not be sufficient to meet the needs in the future," the 14-member group says.

More Wounded Warrior News

Branding Pentagon policies overly conservative and out-of-date, the task force called for more money and a fundamental shift in treatment to focus on prevention and screening - rather than simply relying on Soldiers to come forward on their own.

It cited a significant stigma in which Soldiers believe they would be ridiculed or their careers damaged if they were to acknowledge having problems.

(MG) the taking of a life of another human being is as unnatural an act (for most humans) as can be imagined ... the losing of the life of a soldier-in-arms is devastating ... plus survivor's guilt ... that good 'ole boy "tough it out" attitude causes SO much damage ... when one buries one's feelings, those feelings are buried ALIVE, and they will claw and scratch and fight their way to come out to light, to fresh air .. and WHEN (or if) they finally resurface, there is no guarantee that they will resurface human

The four-page summary of findings, which will be incorporated in a final report to Defense Secretary Robert Gates in June, comes amid renewed attention on troop and veterans care following recent disclosures of shoddy outpatient treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The task force found 38 percent of Soldiers and 31 percent of Marines report psychological concerns such as traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from deployment.

(MG) traumatic brain damage -- so many more troops SURVIVE head wounds today (than in Viet Nam) because of the rapidity with which they can be flown to specialty hospitals ... many of these troops would have died in wars past

Among members of the National Guard, the figure is much higher - 49 percent - with numbers expected to grow because of repeated deployments.

In recent weeks, several U.S. senators have pointed to problems in the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs' mental health care, citing the Army's Fort Carson in Colorado where some troops have said their pleas for mental health care went unanswered or were met with ridicule.

(MG) it's inbred .. that macho culture

In its report, the task force - which visited 38 military bases in the four armed services within the past year - underscored many of the lawmakers' fears. Without citing specific examples, it said Soldiers too often don't seek the care they need.

Care for family members also needed improvement, the report said.

Many base mental health programs have had to limit their practices to active-duty military, shutting family members out or forcing them to try to access civilian providers through the cooperative program known as TRICARE. But in many places, the list of TRICARE providers is small, inadequate or even incorrect.

Both the VA and the Pentagon in recent weeks have acknowledged a need to improve mental health treatment. Jan Kemp, a VA associate director for education who works on mental health, has estimated there are up to 1,000 suicides a year among veterans within the VA system, and as many as 5,000 a year among all living veterans.

(MG) although there are discrepancies in the reported numbers, I have read that the number of Viet Nam veterans who have committed suicide is greater than the number killed in combat ... there are no memorial walls to the suicides - but they too have given their lives, serving their country

A recent investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that just 22 percent of U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who showed signs of PTSD were being referred by Pentagon health care providers for mental health evaluation, citing inconsistent and subjective standards in determining when treatment was needed.

(MG) about one out of five returning troops WHO SHOWED SIGNS of needing mental health care have been referred by Pentagon health care providers ... this is NOT what one would call supporting the troops

Where Progressives Fear The Unfamiliar

(MG) Writing in the Black Commentator (as fine an e-zine as I've found), Dr. L. Jean Daniels speaks on the sad, sorry state of the "white washing" of Madison Wisconsin's progressive movement.

Represent Our Resistance
Madison Wisconsin
Where Progressives Fear The Unfamiliar
By Dr. L. Jean Daniels, PhD
BC Columnist

I think people believe I am lucky to live in Madison, Wisconsin. After all, it is the home of a “progressive” movement that is the mother of all progressive movements, they tell me. But somehow I am not encouraged by this movement here. I have had to re-examine the definition of a progressive. I have had to consider the atmosphere surrounding a progressive foothold. Raised as a teen by the activism of Jesse Jackson and other older Black civic and political leaders, I was urged to stand strong and stay focused on “the least among us.” But "the least among us” are not so visible in Madison, Wisconsin.

(MG) The first writings of the "liberal (progressive) project" can be traced biblically to the Book of Exodus. The call to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, be hospitable to strangers, and take care of the widows and orphans resonates throughout the Bible, through the prophets (major and minor) and oh so clearly in the words of the carpenter, the teacher, the rabbi, the healer, Jesus of Nazareth. This IS the heart and soul of the liberal project and it is QUITE divorced from any racial limitations

As a member of an historically oppressed race, some of us have a “unique” position in the struggle for justice and equality. I strive to do my part to resist despair and degradation, while working to de-mystify the narrative of the imperialists. The progressive has a responsibility to work daily against oppression and toward a truly democratic way of life, one in which human needs are more important than profit for the individual or mega-corporations alike. It is a heavy responsibility to consider "the least among us" and the creation of a democratic society because it sets off those individuals or groups who would dare to stand up for the poor, working class, Mexican and Haitian immigrants etc.

Progressives need not always call attention to themselves and the work they do in the resistance movement. It will be duly noted. It will require critical intervention and generally such intervention will be risky and could jeopardize relations among family members and friends. People will know - for to call attention to the indigenous history of enslavement and genocide, to denounce the collective denial of this historical experience and its legacy, is to denounce the rumbling roar of America as Empire.

(MG) and to do so invariably brings forth the question my own son is so wont to ask, "Why do you hate America?" DAMN IT TO HELL, I don't hate America. What I hate are the imperialistic policies of our elected (and appointed) political leaders, the deceitful conceit of "American exceptionalism", the rampant racism, the war mongering military-industrial-educational-infotainmnet complex that FEEDS itself, GORGES itself at the corporate welfare teat of the U.S. governments coffers ... wrong is wrong, and this nation has been WRONG on so many issues of humanity, justice, truth that it simply boggles my mind (oh would some power the giftee gie us)

This understanding and attitude that comes with it represents the core construction of “certain kinds of human beings,” as Cornel West explains, who see this form of activism, this way of being in the world, in relationship to injustice and inequality, as “a calling” and not a career.

Unfortunately in Madison, in the practice of “activism,” of helping the “helpless,” the progressives silence the voices from the Progressive Movement’s heart and soul. It silences those who have a right and an obligation to stand witness. This state of affairs in Madison is normal. It allows for the illusion of bright and shininess, of safety and security, at least for the predominantly white students attending the UW Madison and the residents (90%-plus white) and the tourists (also predominantly white). This state of affairs provides a haven for businesses and mega-defense corporate folks. Madison stays on the list of the most progressive towns. All nice and all white - and the progressives never complain about this state of “normalcy” in Madison.

Certainly there are a few progressives in Madison sincerely dedicated to transforming the legacy of enslavement and genocide. But we are individuals who receive less attention in Madison, let alone in the world outside of Madison. We always have “bad” news, it seems. Our “joy” in resistance is translated into “bad” news, presenting us with the danger of recrimination and retaliation for soiling that which is so wonderfully, magically safe. Our focus on this litany of suffering and injustice is a scary thing in a town that would prefer to shine with optimism for the bright futures of so many of its residents.

(MG) But ultimately there can be no bright future for peoples who willfully refuse to face reality, to admit the sins of generations past ... there can only be an endless series of repeated past mistakes ... wars in Viet Nam, invasions in Iraqs, etc, etc

If Madison thinks about “the least among us” or thinks on race and class issues, it does so as an exercise in “diversity” learning! Yeah, moms and dads - with a pail of cleanser and scouring pads, let’s evoke the old days of the Civil Rights Movement, known as the good old days, when helping the “helpless” was great exercise too.

(MG) few things offend so-called "Progessives" / "Liberals" as much as being asked to do more than they are prepared to do ... case in point - President Lyndon Baines Johnson was inspired by the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King to pass Civil Rights Legislation ... BUT ... when King decried the American invasion and occupation of Viet Nam, LBJ took it as a personal affront

The heart and soul of this nation’s historical progressive movement is missing in Madison’s progressive movement. The spirit of this history is dead - expunged for a more pragmatic idea of individual and collective profit.

Economics. Like the conservatives in other cities such as Washington D.C., Madison puts profit before considering the welfare of “the least among us.” The progressive movement in Madison consists of residents for whom history of the left is history of white activism. (MG) history books tend to be published by predominantly white run publishing companies ... so, this is not surprising Some, I believe, know better. But there are others for whom the historical activism of Black Americans, whose ancestors, African women, threw babies and themselves overboard slave ships rather than acquiesce to enslavement, is some startling new information. Distinguishing Madison’s progressive narrative from the narrative of white supremacy is difficult, for they have in common the sacrifice of an entire struggle for justice and equality. An entire struggle silenced for the progress of economic development in the city.

In a college town with a high number of intellectual progressive minds, I am amazed at how many are unaware of a Black radical/progressive tradition. Beyond the superficial data espousing the polished glories of this or that Civil Rights Black figure (so many suffer from the permanent affliction of no long-term memory), the progressive movement in Madison caters to those “undereducated” leftists, who are done with Black folks and their problems, and want no further reminder of what they left behind when they returned to their own lives and families. For some progressives in Madison, to read Black radical thinkers is to give credence to a people whose memory of the historical is haunting and therefore a nuisance. It is unthinkable to credit people who need to be discredited. On the other hand, it is comparable to rejecting “family values” and the American way of life, the apple pie - and America, for heaven's sake!

Therefore, a history of THE progressive movement, in its entirety, starting with its core representatives, will not be found in Madison - and this state of affairs seals, while it conceals, the economic dominance of white interests.

It is a sad state of affairs in Madison, Wisconsin. The progressives are not particularly bad folks, but they are frightened that while turning a corner, their children or grandchildren will run into Chicago or Milwaukee (big monstrous images of gang bangers and drug dealers). Their fear of the unfamiliar has them afraid of what they will do in that close an encounter in that dark corner. Will they respond like the Bush administrations and the conservative administrations before that? Prevent and be saved. Thus, the progressives, visible and vocal members, offer prevention rather than intervention. For Madison, drug users come in Black skin. Crime comes in Black skin no matter your employment status or family status.

(MG) all over American, drug users come in Black skin ... just look at the statistics ... citing from memory, somewhat recently in Illinois, for one calendar year, more than 1,000 Blacks were incarcerated for drug / narcotic offenses ... the number of whites incarcerated for said offense was ... drum roll ... 24 ... leading one to conclude, possibly (erroneously to be sure) that the incidence of drug / narcotics usage within the Black Community is ... 40 times higher than in the Anglo Community? ahem ...

You are guilty until proven “innocent” - dead! It seems I have heard this phrase about the “best” Indian or the “best” Viet Con is a dead one. Death, sad to say, is promoted here - the death of African American children, drained of their heritage and left bloodless. It is tragic. So goes our culture and heritage here in Madison, so goes any hope of a future for this nation.

(MG) look at access to health care, look at how physicians "treat" their black patients as opposed to how they treat white patients ... it is separate ... it is unequal

Those of us, living among the progressives in Madison, arise in the morning, face the sun, and call to our ancestors to begin the struggle of another day. We go about our apartheid existence. We are lucky to be alive to struggle another day.

(MG) and white America NEEDS for you to continue this struggle, because until the day when all embrace the lifting up of the "least amongst us", until that day comes, NO citizen of this country can rest easy ... not even the wealthiest and most powerful ... as a matter of self-interest, this struggle needs to be taken up by ALL peoples, but more importantly, as a matter of MORALITY, and HUMANITY it is the right fight ... it must be fought, and we all need to unite as one

BC Columnist Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at Madison Area Technical College, MATC. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.