So we want a first woman president? How about a first anti-Monsanto president. Or a first Antiwar president. Or a first anti-usury president. How about those firsts FIRST? How about the first people-first president FIRST!
Happening upon a Middle Eastern restaurant advertising itself to be Israeli-owned, I wondered, as a BDS-adherant promoting boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure the state of Israel to abandon apartheid and illegal occupation, if this business fell under the BDS dragnet. BDS targets Israel and not just products from the Occupied Territories as moderates might prefer. At times BDS also focuses on prominent Zionist enterprises whether they be Israeli or American. Very likely these proprietors evangelize for Israel, but I thought a broader principle suggested itself: LET’S DO SUPPORT ISRAELIS WHO DON’T LIVE IN ISRAEL! Wouldn’t that be precisely the goal?! But a word about other Israelis for whom BDS is asked to make an exception, the oft-celebrated Israeli Left. Are we supposed to be reassured that many Israelis do not support the ethnic cleansing perpetuated by their right wing government? What of the purported majority of Americans who oppose our continued wars and our drone extrajudicial executions? If populations cannot prevent the crimes perpetrated in their name, indeed the responsibility falls to who other but them, does their objection earn any points until they act?
Rand Paul, like his dad, Ron Paul, has built his stature up with the constant myth amongst so many US gullibles, that he is supposedly somehow Mr. Antiwar! But it is all skin deep this picture of what Hard Right Rand is really about. This Business Insider report Inside Rand Paul’s Overnight Transformation Into A Pro-Israel Defense Hawk kind of spills the beans about this prospective Republican candidate for President next election time. Rand Paul is no more antiwar than Barack Obama and his cabinet are. To believe that he might be so is akin to believing in the Tooth Fairy.
The US government is allied militarily with some of the rattiest dictatorships of the world, as our criminal politician leaders tell us that it is them who supposedly are bringing democracy to the rest of the world! US backed Pakistan dictatorship halts Pakistani citizen antiwar demonstration against bombing by the US of their own country! See reporting about how the thuggish Pakistani government has stopped a protest against the US government’s bombing of its own citizens. Does that look like democracy in action either in the US or Pakistan? It doesn’t to us here at Not My Tribe. Pakistan halts anti-drone protest led by ex-cricketer Imran Khan.
Many in the US government and European governments would like for Turkey to go and duke it out in Syria, but ordinary Turkish citizens are not in support of this war fever. See Protesters March Against War in Istanbul as Tension With Syria Escalates … The Obama regime has done little in its four years in office to diffuse the Pentagon sponsored war making in the Middle East and Asia. In fact, the Obama Administration seems to be using Syria as a stepping stone for a coming attack against Iran.
Just kidding, about the anatomical reference giving offense. Not kidding about Code Pink “Women for Peace” thinking with their vaginas, making it the theme to their callout for the Tampa RNC in August. Agreed, men thinking with their reproductive organ is far more common, and generally dishonorable, but turnabout is fair play isn’t it? Usually formidable antiwar powerhouse Code Pink is dropping its protest of drones and military intervention for the RNC, in favor of conferring legitimacy to the GOP’s 2012 wedge issue, the War on Women. Does this presage a tempered message at the DNC, a la DNC 2008, where Barack Obama got a pass from Code Pink though he was the antiwar candidate in hope only?
The propaganda is now flowing full time, all designed to convince the US and European populations that a war against Syria and Iran is a necessary imperialist intervention. BUT IT IS NOT, and Russia and China are blocking the geo-political attack of the US Empire against them, by way of the US fomenting war against Syria and Iran as well. Vladimir Putin's spokesman has said Russia is not considering changing its stance on Syria and that any attempts to apply pressure on Moscow are "hardly appropriate".
What is most disgusting is to see that much of the US and European Left is also engaged in a campaign of hatred against the Syrian government of Assad, too, along with the corporate Pentagon fed press. While the guy Assad is hardly any sort of saint, the pathetically tiny US Left which has utterly failed in showing any of its own participation in building an Antiwar Movement against the militarism of their own governments, now is actively mobilizing itself in support of the imperialist campaign for more war and against the Syrian government of Assad! How sad is this?
In contrast, there is a section of the US Antiwar Movement that has mobilized its forces against the NATO Summit in Chicago, and by extension against the US plans for war against Iran and Syria. See Thousands march against NATO summit: Stop US and NATO war plans for Syria VIDEO: Brian Becker speaks on US and NATO War Plans for Syria
ANSWER represents the activist portion of the US Left, as opposed to the sit around and do mainly nothing section of the armchair ex Troskyist Left Overs, that at one long distant time ago in the past actually were anti-imperialist in their organization and once led the Movement against the Vietnam War way back then. But that was yesterday and today is today.
Stand up to the US government and oppose imperialist war against Iran and Syria! Don’t just sit around the comp and babble about how bad Assad seems to you. Where were you ‘socialists’ when it came time to build the antiwar movement? Were you asleep? Luckily the Russian and Chinese governments are not as stupid as the liberal and Socialist Democratic mindset Western Left seems to mainly be.
So, it was on or just before ANZAC Day four years ago, the last veteran of Gallipoli died. And I truly do get a bit sad and angry, betimes, when these guys are held up as a reason FOR more wars, more militarism, more police state bullshit. Sometimes I choke when singing Eric Bogle’s song, “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. There were 2 sections of the song:
“I looked at the place, where me legs used to be” and “But as year follow year / More old men… disappear / Someday no one will march there at all.”
Which happened this February. The last WWI Veteran, an English nurse who joined when she was 14. Funny how such things run in cycles.
When she was born, the “old men disappearing” were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars of which we in America got a teenie weenie bit part, not even onstage really, more like the orchestra pit. We didn’t actually win, got a “mutual non-aggression pact” with the British, who among other “losses” they incurred, took a “beating” at Baltimore where they bombed the living Hell out of Fort McHenry, but didn’t actually capture it. Burned Washington D.C. (Why is the White House white? Because after they almost burned it down it was repainted with the cheapest and only paint available) and a small expeditionary force didn’t take New Orleans at a time when it wouldn’t make a gnat’s eyebrow worth of difference because our part of the war was already over.
Kind of like we only got our collective arse beat pink instead of shiny red. A country song called “The Winner” from 1973 leaps to mind:
“But I left that person cursing, nursing
Seven broken bones
And he only broke… uh, THREE of mine.
Guess that makes me the Winner.”
Gee, we only got whooped a little so let’s make Songs out of it. “The Star Spangled Banner” and “The Halls of Montezuma” have a lot in common there.
When those “victories” were accomplished, two other famous nurses were growing up, Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale. Women doctors? Not in the “civilized” world, you betcha, Red Ryder.
They didn’t even allow women to work in hospitals, the only “nursing” they were allowed to do professionally involved renting their nipples to rich women who couldn’t be bothered to do it for their own kids.
Women in the military? Ha to the Ha-Ha!! They were “allowing” children into the Army, hanging kids for petty theft, too… long before they accepted women in any kind of uniform. In fact, on “Haunted London” tours you get the story of a ghost at Old Bailey who was hanged in 1911, when SHE was 8.
For those who are actually counting, Bravo!! and those who dropped out in 2nd grade, for you I’ll do the math. The nurse who just left our Vale of Tears was 11 in 1911, and three years later she enlisted unless I’m doing the math wrong. They started enlisting women as nurses primarily because they were using the men in important jobs like collecting bullets and shell fragments.
After the war, women could still be imprisoned, hanged and beaten to death by their husbands, but couldn’t vote or own property, so you didn’t actually come a long way, baby.
The biggest gain, allegedly, for any group has been for some reason being accepted as cannon fodder.
There is an awfully twisted logic to that. “Congratulations, you got the job!! Which by the way involves YOU being killed by someone who has been honored with THE SAME JOB.” Luck, that is.
In one made-for-TV movie from the 80s, Cicely Tyson had this really cool line, about the Army being integrated across the “color” barrier.. “Oh, Lord! They fond found out we make good soldiers!”
Now they’re saying that it’s a major milestone that gay People can openly serve in the military. Great big whoop-di-diddly-do. Here I was thinkin’ to myself, what would be a REAL major milestone would be to, you know, NOT kill people who are historically marginalized groups. Or anybody else.
Just, you know, sayin’. But what really brings it back around to ANZAC is this was the first time Australian and New Zealand soldiers were allowed to serve under Australian and New Zealand officers. Yippee for everybody!!
From another Bogle song “Green Fields O’ France”:
“Well the sorrow, the suffring’, the glory and pain
The killin’ a’ dying was all done in vain.
For Young Willie MacBride it all happened again
And again, and again, and again.
Those who scorn weeping for the dead, are those who lack the courage to morn or to love.
Those who mock as madness peace, are those who have taken the coward’s path, killing their own souls rather than face their insane fear of seeing anyone as their brother.
There is no glory in war. Never was. Especially obvious now when “our” country government is preparing to invade have other people invade yet another country, following the P.N.A.C. agenda plan two decades ago to economically dominate the world for the ben’mefit of the very few. They also said boasted they would be able to get enough Americans to back their plans, even surrender their liberties, using simple lies, like the WMD lie they’re recycling for the Iran war.
And that American people are way too stupid to doubt a lie even when we’ve been told in advance and by the exact same liars, that they’re going to do so.
Funnier still, (I’m laughing so hard it looks like I’m just staring in disbelief at the morons, Ok, for those incapable of understanding sarcasm, no I’m not laughing, but AM staring in disbelief) Winston Churchill and some of his fellow Demon Span had issued a similar agenda, to liberate the Persian and Arabian oil fields for the Crown Corporation which is now called British Petroleum. “Liberate” them from the iron grip of the Turks using as pawns the French, Jews, Persians, India and the Australia-New Zealand Auxiliary Corps, IN 1915.
Under the command of Sir Winston Churchill, whose first order of business (after igniting a war by having an Austrian cousin of the British King assassinated in Turkish ruled Sarajevo, Serbia) was to take the Turkish Dardanelles, at Gallipoli, on Suvla Bay.
“Johnny Turk, he was waitin’, aye, he’d primed himself well
They rained us with bullets, an’ shot us with shells
And in Five minutes flat they blew us all to Hell
Nearly blew us right back to Australia.”
Churchill resigned his command and took a commission as a field officer on the Green Fields o’ France. Maybe he should have enlisted as a private. Guess not. Aristocrats aren’t supposed to be cannon fodder, that’s what peasants are for, eh wot?
Ah, well…
Could have/Should have/What ifs and such are parlor games which are now revived via computers. One scenario suggested that if Alexander the Great had been hit one inch to the left by a Persian battle axe, early in his conquests, his bodyguard wouldn’t have been able to save him. His empire and subsequently the Ptolemaic Dynasty, the Etruscan civilization, Carthage and Rome might not have arisen and Jesus would have just been a street preacher in a dusty backwater of the Persian Empire.
My favorite is one Senator Al Franken wrote for SNL back before it was just initials, “What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?”, which ended up as no difference. “What if Superman had landed in Germany instead of Kansas?”, the allies would have developed the Kryptonite ray, no difference. The one they had lined up next was “What if Custer had a Sherman Tank?”, but they didn’t keep it going.
What if Churchill had been killed? What if the ANZACs had mutinied? But my mom taught me a saying about IF: “If a frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his rump with every jump.”
Frogs don’t fly, the War went forth with so many “oopsie” moments the Crown went bankrupt, Every Soldier has not died, and War has ground on every stinking day since.
Aye, Willie MacBride, I can’t help but ask “Why?” Or did those who died here know why they died?
“for the sorrow, the sufferin’, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying was all done in vain.
For Young Willie MacBride, it all happened again
and again, and again, and again.”“Did they beat the drum slowly?
Did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death march as they lower ye down?
And did the bank play “The Last Post” in chorus?
And did the pipes play “The Flow’rs o’ the Forest?”
This will be the first ANZAC Parade with absolutely none of the Great War veterans attending or watching. In May, it will be our first memorial day and come November, Armistice Day will have lost its last feeble grip on reality. 9-11 lost it on or about 9-10-01, but that’s another story.
The theme keeps going, rambling, but still making an order of magnitude more sense than the ongoing rambling war.
The pro-death contingent appear to have targeted Tribe as “anti-soldier”, imagine that if you will. Just can’t BUY better publicity, but they’re giving it free of charge. They keep regurgitating the same vomit they’ve spewed last month, and the month before and the months before, ad infinitum, but they can’t be Pro-Death AND Pro-Life, be it of soldiers or the unborn. One of the most remarkable journalistic “oopsie” moments of the Operation Iraqi Freedom Removal was the admission live on camera, about two hours before the bombs started dropping and six hours before the official deadline, that the ONLY businesses open in Baghdad were gun stores and obstetricians. Striking a triple whammy to Extremist Dogma.
One point was that Saddam had kept women ignorant, like “our” allies in Saudi and Kuwait. While insisting that a WOMAN epidemiologist (I’m terrible with names lately) nicknamed “Lady Germ” and, like Tariq Aziz, a christian, was doing advanced bio-terror… as advanced as, say, the US does. Hmm… and all the OB-GYN DOCTORS, mostly women, just appeared out of nowhere, or were sent to US and British medical schools and returned voluntarily to the bad ol’ Islamist slavery…
The gun shops even EXISTING, far less being open at all… kind of screams “LIARS!” at the NRA and fellow travelers. They insist that tyranny can only be accomplished with an unarmed public. The insistent and strident shrieks that “only the Ba’ath minority were armed!” should long ago have been drowned out by the sound of Shi’ite, Kurdish, and other non-Sunni gunfire.
Then there’s the reason all the OB-GYN DOCTORS were kept so busy… the knowledge gained from Luftwaffe, RAF and USAF statistics about the “spontaneous abortions” dramatically increasing during and after bombing attacks on civilian population centers.
Now, the Standard Warmonger Answer is that, clearly, Saddam was a “coward hiding behind civilians”, which begs the question, Were the USAF and RAF bases, and the airmen therein, “cowards, using the citizens of London and other cities as Human Shields”?
More pointedly, I was raised in the looming shadow of US (and RAF) based, some of the largest or most dangerous targets: Mendenhal RAFB, the Lackland-Fort Sam Houston-Laughlin and ten other major US bases in Texas’ complex, Carswell USAFB in Fort Worth which was the largest SAC base in terms of B-52 “nuclear umbrella” long range bombers, and the Fort Bliss-White Sands- Los Alamos_Holloman AFB complex in far West Texas and Southern New Mexico.
Were they “cowards, hiding behind 20 million human shields”?
The Denver-Colorado Springs-Pueblo corridor host dozens of military bases, along with most of the population of Colorado, like Peterson AFB.
My Mom, my niece, her husband and their 4 kids, lived right at the end of the flight line, off base. The planes on takeoff or landing would be maybe 200 yards up. The front gate was across the highway, about a half mile “as the crow flies”, or a mile “as the dog trots”. Across the street and down a couple blocks is Christa McCauliffe Elementary School and a day care center. Were they, like the kids both born and unborn, of Baghdad, “held hostage, human shields for a brutal regime which invades other nations at will”? Anti-soldier, or not?
The reader will draw whatever conclusion the reader desires.
The Soldier him/herself is forbidden to hold or express questions of conscience. As Bush and the Penta Goons said, the soldiers chose to enlist, right? And any talk of an “economic draft” where they’re given but one choice, join of live in poverty… dismissed as Lefty Loon talk.
Except, of course, in the con job commercials where they tell impressionable youth, recruiters even showing up at Kindergarten and Sunday Schools functions, telling them repeatedly from potty training until their 18th birthdays (17 if their parents sign a waiver to enlist) that they have no chance. That they are worthless on their own and the only way to rise above that is by selling their souls to the Recruiter.
Anti-American, Anti-Soldier propaganda? Sure is, but it’s coming from the Penta Goon’s own badly boldly lying mouths, and echoed here, minus the sugar-coating.
The reader may decide and even utter Anti-American slur, shrill voices whining and sniveling, against any American who dares to resent and oppose being treated as a disposable and stupid dupe.
You might want to lay off the threats though. Aside from badly Meth-ed up lunatics like Adkisson, Von Brumm, Roeder, Rudolf, Jared Laughner, the Warmonger Extremists are content to shriek their childish threats from behind lines of heavily armed Police-state Goon Squads… While seeking to deny a similar right to any Americans who happen to disagree.
As to the references to Iraq, which many consider to be a closed book, well..
The Iraqi Army and Puppet Police are committing the same atrocities ascribed to Saddam, and Gaddafi, and the Ayatollahs and Syria, only backed by American money, troops and a guarantee of veto for any Security Council sanctions against their crimes. In Iraq, as well as America, the protesters are branded Traitors and Insurgents, hustled away to Torture Chambers, shot, gassed and clubbed in the streets maimed or killed in the streets (like the IVAW guy who had his skull popped by the police-state “non-lethal” weapons”), punishments the Anti-Peace protesters have demanded for Eric and Jonah and Ed and Tony and Patty and Rita and anybody who DARED point out the Endless War as being propagated by LIES, at public expense and for purely the private gain of the Elitist 1%.
The same LIES about WMDs now being propagated against Iran, combined with one or two sentence sound bites from a very few Iranian clerics, their version of bitter toothless Extremists like the ones who infest City Hall, or Pat Robertson or Michelle Malkin or “Gunny Bob”, anti-American fanatics who demand, in the name of God and Freedom that we be punished, even KILLED, for using those rights, which they insist we were given by them.
Ant-Soldier, really? Those who placed American soldiers into the range of Iranian or Indian or Chinese missile strikes, to threaten those nations into submission, are the Anti Soldier, Anti-Freedom, Anti-Americans. Turn your wrath on the REAL enemy within. The REAL murders of our military husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter.
We’re not the ones who lied to start the war, the meat grinder into which thousands of American Soldiers have marched to their deaths, and the literally countless soldiers wounded, and literally countless foreign soldiers and civilians killed or maimed. Countless because the Warmongers don’t consider them worthy of being counted.
The WMDs were known by the Bu’ush Regime to be a lie, long before the first bomb fell on Baghdad.
And the same perverters of all things Holy or good, like the rabid dogs “Gunny” Bob and Malkin, Limbaugh and O’Reilly, Lamborn, the list is long…
These same wild-eyed fanatics said then, just as now, that we were “Anti-Soldier” for daring to oppose and expose their lies.
They have, once more in the name of the Prince of Peace, preached war and threaten to kick open the gates of Hell for friend and foe alike on holy days of Christians, Muslim and Jews. Passover, Easter and the Hajj, all at one fell swoop. American soldiers included, for the same agenda of greed and using the same pathetic lies.
Anti-Soldier, indeed.
In protesting war, it’s not enough to say you “support the troops”, even as you advocate to “bring them home”. Soldiers see criticizing war as directed at them because it underminds the purity of spirit they want to go about their destructive missions. Don’t expect to get anywhere with trying to explain legal or moral issues. Their military indoctrination omits understanding war crimes like collective punishment, disproportionate force, massacre, murder, and by the looks of it, even rape of your fellow female soldiers. No, today’s soldiers want enablers to help them “embrace the carnage” so they can “do what they have to do” wherever they’re deployed. Even stationed stateside, they’re unencumbered by critical thought, they certainly don’t want to hear yours.
Have Americans ever been so deluded before? At the last Occupy Colorado Springs activity I was at, person after person came up to me as I held a sign saying PEACE and informed me all knowingly that ‘The War’ was now all over with. When I replied to them that it surely was not, they shook their heads with disgust that I should be so ignorant as to think that! And even as the US is at war with much of the world and preparing for new ‘interventions’ in multiple places, 
many of the American public seemingly believe that the Republicrats are presenting them with 2 outstanding and shining Peace candidates for the presidency. Have we all fallen down the rabbit hole into Alice’s Wonderland? I begin to wonder?
Here is the New York Times trying to pull the wool over our eyes with this story about Obomber, The supposed Peace President in his starring role… Obama Warns Against ‘Loose Talk of War’ , as if by talking out of both sides of his mouth at once, that somehow can make him Super Peace Man while the Republican opposition mainly rattle their wannabe collective sabers!
But the Republicans have their fake-o Peace guy, too, and he is the Love Business, Ayn Randite from Texas called Ron Paul. Ron, per his Vote Me website is claiming to represent the Tea Party much better than Rick Santorum is… SUPPORTING SANTORUM MEANS REJECTING THE TEA PARTY, as if anybody in their not Right Winger mind would ever believe that the Tea Party is pro Peace? He, too, talks out of both sides of his mouth, just like Barack. Too damn weird that so many Americans continue to see Ron Paul, grand saviour of the Tea Party Movement, as being an ‘antiwar’ sort of guy! But they do! They really do. Unbelievable delusion, is it not?
Here is more from the vote Ron Paul website… ‘Kathleen Miller, wife of popular former Tea Party U.S. Senate candidate, “proudly” stands with Paul- ANCHORAGE, Alaska 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul was endorsed today by Kathleen Miller, wife of Joe Miller, a popular Tea Party Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in the state of Alaska during the 2010 election.’
What a strange Peace Now guy this Ron Paul must be? Here he is once again per his web site…
‘In Congress, Ron Paul voted to authorize military force to hunt down Osama bin Laden and authored legislation to specifically target terrorist leaders and bring them to justice.’
So he backed those drones that have been killing innocent people as often as not, in foreign countries though it is against international law! He backs those drones that have killed multiple innocent enough children, and did it while preparing to run as the Tea bagger version of the Peace candidate! How can so many Americans buy this kool aid laced with cyanide? How can they?
The plain fact is that the US government is at war constantly, and neither Obomba nor Ron Paul would change any of that. Buy their pro corporate bullshit if you will, but do not come and then pretend to us that these American Big Business stooges are Peace guys. They simply are not. Stop playing be-stupids, America! The world knows what you are. STUPID.
SUPPORT THE TROOPS? Oh let’s address this buggaboo straight off. Apparently you can’t protest war without disrespecting the troops, that criticizing the soldiers’ mission means to criticize them for following their orders. Okay… if it is indeed all grey area for those lacking grey matter, then I suppose you can’t support the troops. And so I WON’T, NOT A LICK. The killing needs to stop. Expressing “support” for those doing the killing gets you more killing. Here are two complementary banners to protest the use of drones to increase our remote killing:
Paired with the followup below, because what’s an antiwar message today without the obligatory “support the troops” nonsense:
OCCUPIED COLORADO SPRINGS– On February 4, OCS joined the international day of protest to decry NO WAR ON IRAN!
The Occupy Wall Street NO COMMENT art show reminded me of the antiwar gallery exhibit we featured at our own peace encampment in 2005. Among my favorite pieces was an interactive self-performance piece called HAVE YOUR CAKE, which featured a festive party table adorned with a sheet cake whose icing featured the likeness of a wounded Iraqi boy, into whom attendees had to cut to have a slice. Of course, no takers.
From Cindy Sheehan, Facebook, Aug 29, 7PM PST: “I just got a notice from the IRS that I owe them 104 grand and they are going to levy my bank accounts and property. I don’t have any property and there’s less than 150.00 in my bank accounts. Looks like Fed Prison is in my future. I would rather go to prison than fund the crimes of this government. I am going to send them a notice that they owe me infinity dollars for killing my son.”
When the MF IRS goes after the highest visibility, loudest voice, friend of world leaders, first name world celebrity, icon of American antiwar and anti-imperialist movement… WHO CAN DISSENT and feel safe?
(Cindy- “Infinity” won’t compute and doesn’t allow for a ceiling, I’m sorry to suggest you put a value on Casey’s head, but how about 1.7 Trillion? Obviously they can manage that.)
Organizers meeting today to plan against next year’s G8 summit in Chicago hit the ground running –backward. On Friday a spokesperson for one of the coalition partners offered this assurance to the Chicago Tribune: “Our goal is a legal, permitted, family friendly march where people can come and have their voices heard in a safe environment.” Interesting. The objective of successful past anti-globalization protests has been no less than to shut the undemocratic summits down.
Nine months out, it appears activism’s old guard is determined to blunt all real resistance welling in American youth. The Tribune found another normalizing voice from UNAC which disavowed any recourse but nonviolence. WTF? It’s one thing not to encourage violence, another to promise to “back off from any violence.”
Hello? Activists with broken spirits need to STFD and STFU. Let younger, hotter heads give you a lesson in courage and purpose. If you are over thirty, hold yourselves among the fucks responsible for this mess. Who are you to deny the young their righteous rage?
As elder activists, precisely what wisdom is it you think you can impart? Have you stopped one war? Slowed imperialism? Ended nukes? Saved the whales? Halted global warming? Attended to anything but the erosion of democracy, the social safety net and the environment? Your exalted nonviolence neither delivered India from class exploitation nor ended racism in America. Stick with fundraising, educating, inspiring others, drawing your peers into social networking; lead, but not by edict, and not by a consensus dominated by your peers. Put your dogma aside for the young leaders, let them make their own mistakes. I hope you will at least admit they can’t fail more miserably than you.
At Sunday’s meeting, the United National Antiwar Committee spokesman acquitted himself when confronted by a young gentleman representing an anarchist entity. Committee member Ashley Smith’s full quote had been: “We will not be the ones to initiate or perpetrate any violence.” And: “We will back off from any violence.” But when pressed at the meeting, he explained that organizers hoped the event would be safe for families, but that younger militants could exercise their freedoms like anybody else. I paraphrase.
I’ll qualify my criticism by pointing out that a number of the organizers were personal victims of recent FBI home invasions, so they are fully justified in having to distance themselves from being interpreted as advocating violence. An additional challenge is presented by an adversarial corporate press determined to squeeze whatever soundbite it wants to discredit or hobble protest.
Of course I’d prefer activists recused themselves from addressing the subject of violence/nonviolence, instead of alienating potential allies by being deliberately exclusionary. And by potential allies, I mean the only allies that will get the movement anywhere, the NEXT GENERATION, because who else are you expecting?
This is a still from John Pilger’s THE WAR YOU DON’T SEE, recently blocked from its US debut in Santa Fe. Why? Because such images will stop war. In particular this shows a terrified Iraqi girl held at gunpoint as her home is searched. I wonder how many such scenes have been captured by embed cameras or GI cellphones. Western eyes are being inoculated to violence and gore, our victims dehumanized, foreign civilians reduced to collateral, but it appears our media managers worry Americans cannot yet resist the ordinary tears of children. Imagine such scenes of heartbreak gone viral across the web. Never mind atrocity or war crime, show us emotional responses with which we can identify. The mass of digital records could doubtless overwhelm Wikileaks. These are not top secret, yet nearly any have been leaked. My appeal to the cowardly US soldier, or the damnable media embed, leak the footage which haunts you already, your PTSD may be the contagion to end public support for our state sponsored terrorism.
How is an antiwar message advocating a metaphysical ideal any different than saying that My God is better than Yours? My pacifist colleagues have distilled their protest slogan to “Nonviolence Works” which I believe is as provable as “Jesus Saves.” Neither ideology can reduce beyond the afterlife. My god says love your neighbors. So what? Mine says kill my enemies. And what’s more, God forgives me, particularly what I do in His name. To assail American Christian crusaders with with the logic of moral superiority is to argue that my god can lick your god. Believe me, God America is kicking Muslim ass on that front every day. Beside which, at best you’re telling someone who wants to believe 2 plus 2 equals 3 that 3 & 1/2 is close enough.
COLO. SPRINGS– Tough crowd at this week’s antiwar bannering: the usual plentiful honks of support, but now intermittent servicemen heckling in crew-cutted indignation. And we haven’t yet inaugurated our WARMONGERS GO TO HELL banner. The best the driver of a white van-load of them could muster was “Semper Fi” so they must have been Marines because they shout it like it means “America! Fuck Yeah!” Are they taught it’s abbreviated Latin for Always Faithful? I believe Fidelis is the root of Fido.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? Man’s faithful companion, the original boot-licker.
Faithful to what honestly? Not the Constitution, or law, liberty or the will of the American People. The US military boot-licking dogs pledge an oath to big oil and the rest of the corporate monied interests. Semper Bitches.
Another soldier-driver asked me with smug arrogance, where was my sign that read “Support the Troops?” Huh? I don’t support the troops. Does he support baby killers, rapists, torturers, drone-pilot-cowards and snipers? WTF. We parted calling each other names. Hippie. Blimp-neck enabler. Dirty hippie. Moron.
Do the other branches of the Defense Department resent the Marines because they don’t have their own pithy Latin je-ne-sais-quoi –literally– to represent their own mistaken-self identity? The Navy and Air Force already have a Native American name, he-who-shoots-from-cover. US Army GIs can modify the USM slogan: Semper Fuckers.
Every Friday at 4:30pm, at one of four key intersections downtown. The weekly sequence: 1) Cascade & Uintah, 2) Uintah & Nevada, 3) Nevada and I-25, and next week, 4) Bijou & Cascade. (Repeat)
COLORADO SPRINGS- Outnumbered! Though we comprised a perfectly respectable half-dozen on the hastily organized protest of FBI tactics meant to intimidate, scouting the city blocks which formed our periphery revealed motorcycle cops poised unseen behind corners. Is that merely obligatory, post-9/11, when activists speak out against intelligence agencies? Except for a building security guard who warned us the elevated planters along the sidewalk were private property, 
CSPD and state troopers kept an unobtrusive distance — well, enough to mask their number. Our sign-holding was the usual peaceful vigil, but our minders parked a solitary unmarked cruiser smack in our faces to keep up with [menacing] appearances. The proverbial chill on free speech.
COLORADO SPRINGS – JANUARY 25 – Protest the recent FBI raids and the DOJ grand jury subpoenas aimed at intimidating members of antiwar and Palestinian rights groups. Join Coloradans For Peace and compatriots beneath the windows of the FBI field office, located in the Plaza of the Rockies downtown, the complex where activists have been prevented from visiting their senator’s office, mostly a mall of investment bankers and brokerage firms. Not without irony, the main facade is named for war profiteer consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton. Come Tuesday Jan 25, from 4pm to 5pm. Meet on the NE corner of Tejon & Colorado.
Some consider the FBI to be the lesser of the US intelligence community’s seventeen known evils. Shall we draw the line at surveillance, infiltration and instigation of peace advocacy groups? Eric Holder’s Department of Justice won’t go after war criminals, torturers, or any facet of President Obama’s accelerated abuses on human rights. But they want to target humanitarian groups in hopes of tying their social causes to “terrorism, ” the traditional authoritarian label for political rival.
Does this need repeating every Martin Luther King Day? It’s all I can do to resist meeting my compatriots at the MLK breakfast this morning with signs to decry their tomfoolery. MLK was a man of action not sleep walking. He wanted to march against war, not with it, holding wind chimes. To host remembrances of MLK in the context of peaceably enabling military imperialism, you’d have King remembered as a Army chaplain. MLK knew complicity when he saw it.
SEPTEMBER 20 — Let he who is without complicity in the war crimes committed for Western Imperialism cast the first huzzah. It will be a small party. It is not the custom for murderers to attend the wake.