More quotes

This time from Robert Brimlow’s What About Hitler? Wrestling with Jesus’ Call to Nonviolence in an Evil World.

“The main difficulty in accepting the implications of our call to be peacemakers is our fear of death and dying, born of a weakness of faith.”

and:

“The gospel is clear and simple, and I know what the response to the Hitler question must be. And I desperately want to avoid this conclusion. … We must repay evil with good; and we must be peacemakers. This may also mean as a result that the evildoers will kill us. Then, we shall also die. That’s it. There is nothing else…. We are called to live the kingdom as he proclaimed it and be his disciples, come what may.”

From “War Is a Racket” by Smedley Butler, for Memorial Day

Memorial Day is generally difficult for me in the abstract. I abhor the very idea of “celebrating” the “sacrifices” of people who might better said not to have sacrificed their lives but rather to have been murdered, murdered by the people who profit from the abstractions that are bandied about to mobilize money and man-and-woman-power in order to steal, kill, and destroy. It is not that I bear ill will to the soldiers themselves; rather, I mourn the fact that they are caught up in the spiral of violence and even have come to believe there is glory in it. The only true glory is in serving the Prince of Peace, and I’m pretty sure when he said “love your enemies” he didn’t mean kill them.

This year Memorial Day is especially difficult because only a few days ago we buried a friend who had just returned from Iraq in a flag-draped casket. My own brother is over there right now, and I hope and pray he doesn’t come back to us the same way.

War is not glorious, and warriors are not the highest class of men (contrary to the speech the general gave at Joe’s memorial service). The highest calling is being a part of the emergence of the New Creation, anticipating the day when finally the work is complete in God’s mysterious ways and the veil is lifted to reveal Christ fully to us again, just as the Eleven saw him ascend to heaven (Acts 1) – the time when the trumpet sounds, the Lord descends with a shout, and we rise up in the air to meet him and escort him, as befits a royal Prince, down to earth to survey his domain. [It should be noted at this point that much of what I’m describing actually has very little to do with what passes as popular Christian belief among certain segments of the population today – the Biblical imagery is clearly about the creation itself being redeemed and transformed, not about a certain class of privileged people “escaping” it.]

This is from the first chapter of Smedley Butler’s work War Is a Racket. Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC (Ret.), is the most highly decorated soldier in US history, one of only 19 people to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor twice. After retiring from the Corps he came to see his “service” as truly only being in the service of making the rich richer at the expense of the thousands for whose deaths and suffering he felt responsibility. He embarked on a speaking tour of the country, and the speech he gave was expanded and published as War Is a Racket in 1935.

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [World War I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few — the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

[Butler goes on to describe the state of the world in 1935, describing the ongoing processes of militarization that would eventually erupt into World War II]

Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the “open door” policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.

Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war — a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit — fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn’t they? It pays high dividends.

But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

War Is a Racket full text

Training for war

“Military planners operate on the basis of military expediency, and individual soldiers are trained to operate on the basis of unquestioning obedience to their military superiors…In the realm of copybook distinctions it may be a simple matter to divide the bombing of a city into separate acts of willed destruction of a war production plant and unwilled (though fully known and foreseen) destruction of thousands of innocent noncombatants. But it demands too much to believe that the man who loosed the bombs availed himself of such convenient moral schizophrenia—or that he saw any need for doing so. Our intensive military-training programs are designed to free men from the necessity of making such calculations by establishing in them as nearly automatic systems of stimulus-response patterns as possible. As far as the victims of his acts are concerned, our bomber friend had been rigorously trained to think of them either as purely expendable units or in terms of hatred or fear-inducing stereotypes which makes those victims fully deserving of their fate…

The military-training program is crucial here, in that it may be seen as a set of social controls designed to subject the individual trainee to a process of systematic depersonalization in the interest of increased military efficiency. The self-image of the morally responsible person vanishes and is replaced by a new orientation, in which the individual sees himself as an agent of destructive force completely responsive to the decisions and directives of his military superiors. This new “self-image”—and the awareness that his enemy counterpart has undergone the same change—makes it possible for him to assume the role of professional killer and to perform acts which, under other circumstances, he would have found unthinkable. How else could he bridge the gap between the friendly repairman and the soldier spraying fiery death upon his screaming victims, between the playful collegian and the aviator lowering a blanket of death upon a flame-rimmed city? Certainly not by coldly rational calculations of good and evil effects. The secret lies in conditioning and not in conviction. The depersonalized agent sees no alternative; like Pilate, he washes his hands of all responsibility, leaving that to those who made the decisions and issued the orders. It also helps if he can be conditioned to regard the objects of his kill as similarly depersonalized agents—as the abstraction he knows simply as “enemy”—not as men with bodies that bleed and burn, with families and friends to mourn them, with loves and hopes and fears like his own. Once this level of conditioning is achieved, all things are possible. Men will follow orders to “take no prisoners”; or, having already taken them, to “deliver them to Paris, and be back in ten minutes.” It becomes possible for them to liquidate innocent hostages in reprisal for a guerilla raid without suffering too many troubling qualms of conscience. In a very real sense, atrocities are the hallmark of the perfectly accomplished military-training program, for they represent the ultimate of obedience to military discipline.

Fortunately, the “ideal” is rarely achieved, despite the total mobilizing of psychological talent and resources. But it is achieved often enough—or, even when the finished product falls short of that ideal, the partial success is sufficient—to justify firm theological condemnation of that violation of God’s proudest creation which such depersonalization and dehumanization represent.

A very specific example, which again is in no sense hypothetical, may be in order here. A few years ago, a network radio program devoted a Sunday to on-the-scene interviews at one of the nation’s basic training centers. One such interview featured the instructor charged with the task of training the young recruits in the use of the bayonet. He complained that he encountered a great deal of resistance from the trainees, who were naturally repelled by the idea of plunging this weapon into the vitals of a living human being. But he had solved his pedagogical problem in a rather ingenious fashion. Experience had shown that this initial resistance faded away if the men were induced to imitate the roars and snarls of wild beasts as they charged the training dummy. To conclude the interview, a microphone was attached to the dummy so that the listening public might be entertained by the sound of the recruits as they growled and ripped away at their mock victim. This, one assumes, is the much-praised “making of men” that only recently was recommended by one of our leading bishops as the solution to the problem of juvenile delinquency. Perhaps the use of this technique [for solving the juvenile delinquency problem] is not widespread. But, widespread or not, this “making of men into beast” is thoroughly in keeping with the demands of modern war.”

Dr. Gordon Zahn, from his book War, Conscience, and Dissent

Early morning, April 4, a shot rings out in the Memphis sky…

As you’re probably aware, on this day 40 years ago Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

Fewer people are aware of this speech he gave 41 years ago, today.

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 4, 1967

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

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

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

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

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

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia.

Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they can play in a successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reason to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

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

personal update

This weekend my brother, a 2nd lieutenant in the U.S. Army, leaves to deploy to Iraq. His specialty is communications, which means he’ll likely be going out with patrols as a radio man – not exactly a “safe” job.

I must confess as to being somewhat conflicted as to how to pray about this – I obviously want to see him come home safely, but at the same time I do not want to fall into the trap of praying for the safety of those who go under the American flag at the expense of those who gather under other banners. I believe Christ calls us to transcend such tribalistic identity-markers.

My usual prayer in such circumstances is to pray not for the safety of particular people, but rather to pray that guns would jam, bombs would fail to explode, that soldiers would lay down arms and walk away from the field, and that people would refuse to engage in this ridiculous business of war any longer. I do pray that for my brother, but I also want him to come back home to us.

Thank you for your prayers and thoughts.

Ironic quote about the efficacy of war

“The blood shed on the European continent in the course of the last three hundred years bears no proportion to the national result of the events. In the end, France had remained France, Germany Germany, Poland Poland, and Italy Italy. What dynastic egotism, political passion and patriotic blindness have attained in the way of apparently far-reaching political changes by shedding rivers of blood has, as regards national feeling, done no more than touched the skin of nations. It has not substantially altered their fundamental characters. If these states had applied merely a fraction of their sacrifices to wiser purposes the success would certainly have been greater and more permanent.”

— Adolf Hitler, in a speech intended to reassure the European powers of Germany’s benign intent in remilitarizing, which was against the provisions of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, May 21, 1935. On the same day Hitler spoke those words he had secretly approved a secret Reich Defense Law which put Germany on a war economy and revived the Army’s General Staff organization – also forbidden by the Treaty. Four years later Hitler would invade Poland, setting off World War II in Europe.

Support our troops?

This morning, my grandfather sent me an email “action alert” from the American Family Association urging protest of the recent Berkeley, California City Council resolution that declared the downtown Marine recruiting office “unwanted” and urged the recruiters to leave town. This article does not respond to that issue, but rather to the subject line of the email he forwarded from the AFA, which was “Support our troops”.

I have to admit being somewhat perplexed by the exhortation to “support our troops”. Whose troops are they? They certainly aren’t mine – I’m not sending them anywhere, and they don’t represent me or my thoughts. It seems to me that the designation “our troops” implies a kind of kinship between us and the troops that does not really exist. Certainly it is true that my (step)brother is among those who are being sent over there, but it is not on my behalf that he is being sent, just as it is not on my behalf that any of them has been sent.

This entire enterprise of war in foreign lands has very little to do with the protection and preservation of American values, but it has everything to do with protecting and preserving business interests that profit heavily from maintaining a forced subordinate status in certain nations around the world. The United States has done the same thing for over a century now in Latin America, and has long maintained an official policy that essentially says “if you have something we want, a resource we ‘need’, then as far as we’re concerned it belongs rightfully to us, not to you”. This is the only rational explanation for the military interventions in Hawai’i for pineapples; in Guatemala for bananas; in Iran for oil (with the deposition of a popular government in order to reinstate the Shah, a move on our part whose eventual consequence was the Islamic Revolution of 1979); in Iraq not only for oil but also to create a living experiment in extreme neoliberal free trade as an example (and warning) to the rest of the world that consumer corporate “democracies” will have what they want from the “developing nations”, and we can get it the easy way or the hard way.

This critique stands regardless of one’s religious persuasion, but it is much more pertinent for me as a follower of Jesus, the prince of peace and king of all creation who urged his followers not to retaliate when evil was done to them, but rather to turn the other cheek. The unanimous response of the early church to persecution was not to respond by fighting back for their own gain, even in defense of their own personal liberties, but rather to witness to those who tormented them by showing the same attitude of Christ – loving and forgiving their attackers in the hope that they would be transformed. They believed the cross of Christ is the hope for the transformation of all doers of violence and opponents of God. To suggest that the idea of premeditated war for the economic gain of certain sectors of society (the corporate management classes first, and then to a lesser extent the consuming classes – which is to say that yes, you and I likely are beneficiaries of the violence), which was sold as a preemptive (or preventative, depending on who you ask) war to ostensibly “protect our way of life against the terrorists” would never have even occurred to them as a valid option for Christians.

Even three centuries after Christ when the church went from being a persecuted minority to the triumphant majority with the imperial sanction they did not develop a theology of warfare that went so far – instead, Augustine’s formulation of Just War doctrine carried the day. It is important to note that even Just War doctrine does not actually justify war for self-defense, to say nothing of preemptive warfare. Therefore, even on the less-strict Christian stance on war than that of Jesus himself, the type of activities in which the U.S. military has engaged in Iraq cannot in any way be construed as representative either of me or of my Lord.

They are not “our” troops, they are troops under the command of people in the thrall of the American political/business system which “make[s] unjust laws. . . deprive[s] the poor of their rights, withhold[s] justice from the oppressed. . . [makes] widows their prey, and [robs] the fatherless” (see Isaiah 10:1-2 in the NIV). They are being asked to die for a cause that, in the words of Alisdair McIntyre, is rather like being asked to die for the telephone company. They are not my troops, they are my fellow-human-beings being manipulated and exploited in more ways than they realize, and rather than praying for success in their mission I simply pray for an end to war and for the desire of men and women to make war. I pray that guns would jam and bombs would fail to explode, and that soldiers on all sides would simply lay down their weapons and refuse to engage any longer in this silly business of war. I support people, not troops, and I support them as potential brothers and sisters in the new world that God is creating even in the midst of this world of bloodshed and hatred, a new world of people from every tribe, language, people, and nation who walk in the ways of God’s shalom.

Guest article: America the Fascist

My friend Steven Kippel wrote this post, and I requested permission to reproduce it here. Just so no one who has a loved one involved with the military will hear this the wrong way, my brother is in the last stages of mission training before going to Iraq – so this is quite a personal issue for me. — Jason

This is originally a discussion on Facebook:

I’ve got an idea though, instead of being insulted because a statement might include your family, how about we think in the abstract for a while.

Just because someone you love and respect is doing something they feel is honorable, does it automatically mean it can’t be put under a critical microscope? Can we not address this issue and tease out certain moral issues?

First we should define fascism, and then we can see how it applies to the USA: Fascism, according to the American Heritage Dictionary (1983) is “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.” Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile’s entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana read: Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. No less an authority on fascism than Mussolini was so pleased with that definition that he later claimed credit for it.

Paxton defines Fascism as “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign `contamination.”

1. Overwhelming crisis: Communism, terrorism
2. Playing the victim: “Attacking our way of life” “attacking freedom”
3. Natural leader: Bush has a “unitary” legal outlook placing himself above the law, and he’s frequently talked about how his judgment should be trusted as he is the decider
4. Dominate others: Nation-building in South America and Asia, et al
5. Foreign contamination: Currently the big thing in politics is the immigration issue.

Now that we have defined Fascism and started to place it into our context of the modern USA, let’s further explore this:

The US leaders – who have placed dictators in power in Chile, Velezuela, Columbia, El Salvador, Vietnam, and all the other places we have crushed public, democratic movements in other countries to sustain our “way of life” in America – will tell you that our nation-building efforts were to maintain US industry and US dominance over world markets. Our military has been used all over the world to support US corporate expansion in the global market. This is nothing our government hides from us, they tell us it is good to have military in place in certain places as it benefits our economy. This is a merger of government and corporations: corporatism, also known as fascism.

Corporations can’t use military force to push their goals, so they have a relationship with the government to do this for them.

If your family is in the military it doesn’t mean they’re bad people. They can have pure motives, but when you look at the macro situation, the US has been using military force for the last 60 years to promote US business in the global economy to “preserve the US way of life.” This means we need to have cheap coffee because the American way of life is to drink coffee, so we go into countries and set up unjust wage systems so the foreigners can’t succeed against our business and we can have cheap coffee at the expense of their wellbeing.

Originally posted by Steven Kippel at Glocks Out.

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

This is one of King’s most important speeches and yet one of his most little-known. Delivered on April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated, this speech provides a scathing denunciation of the practices of the American government on the world stage, particularly in Vietnam. King extends his methodology of nonviolent action to the nation-state, famously saying “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

We have institutionalized King, making him into an icon of the supposedly American ideals of freedom and justice and neglected to remember his enormously potent critique of America’s very failure to live up to those ideals. He has been turned into some kind of fuzzy saint and placed high in the pantheon of “America’s greats^TM,” a would-be tool for those whose violence he denounced. It is imperative that we drink deeply from King’s critique of the violence of American society and extend it to the present-day situation, to the actions and even very nature of corporations as well as nation-states and revolutionaries, exploring the ways violence breeds violence and a violent reaction destroys our humanity just as surely as does oppression. We must inhabit his vision for reconciliation through loving our enemies. The following story, taken from Walter Wink’s The Powers That Be, demonstrates the depth and revolutionary power of King’s vision through the action of his comrades in the SCLC:

One evening, during the turbulent weeks when Selma, Alabama, was the focal point of the civil rights struggle in the American South, a large crowd of black and white activists was standing outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church, singing to pass the time. Suddenly a funeral home operator from Montgomery took the microphone. He reported that a group of black students demonstrating near the capitol just that afternoon had been surrounded by police on horseback, all escape barred, and cynically commanded to disperse or take the consequences. Then the mounted police waded into the students and beat them at will. Police prevented ambulances from reaching the injured for two hours. Our informant was the driver of one of those ambulances, and afterward he had driven straight to Selma to tell us about it.

The crowd outside the church seethed with rage. Cries went up: “Let’s march!” Behind us, across the street, stood, rank on rank, the Alabama state troopers and the local police forces of Sheriff Jim Clark. The situation was explosive. A young black minister stepped to the microphone and said, “It’s time we sang a song.” He opened with the line, “Do you love Martin King?” “Certainly, Lord!” the crowd responded. . . “Do you you love Martin King?” “Certainly, certainly, certainly, Lord!”

Right through the chain of command of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference he went, the crowd each time echoing, warming to the song, “Certainly, certainly, certainly, Lord!” Without warning he sang out, “Do you love Jim Clark?” The sheriff?! “Cer-certainly, Lord” came the stunned, halting reply. “Do you love Jim Clark?” “Certainly, Lord” – it was stronger this time. “Do you love Jim Clark?” Now the point had sunk in: “Certainly, certainly, certainly, Lord!”

The Rev. James Bevel then took the mike. We are not just fighting for our rights, he explained, but for the good of the whole society. “It’s not enough to defeat Jim Clark – do you hear me, Jim? – we want you converted. We cannot win by hating our oppressors. We have to love them into changing.”

And Jim Clark did change. Realizing he could not be reelected without the black vote, he began courting black voters and later confessed that he had been wrong in his bias against blacks.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. realized that the vision had to include more than just improving the status of oppressed people – that it includes loving the oppressors and consistently applying the critique of violence to areas beyond our immediate sphere. As globalization increasingly brings us into the living rooms of people in Sri Lanka, China, and Bangladesh (and vice versa), we must become aware of our relationships with them, with the ways our affluent lifestyles do violence to them, and ways we can oppose violence and purveyors of violence while yet showing the love of Christ which transforms the most wretched sinners into beautiful saints.

May we, like Dr. King prays, know the world in which we live and how to be ministers of reconciliation, agents of the Kingdom of God within it.

by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 4, 1967

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

Defense threatens layoffs in war spending standoff

Washington Post article

What do you think? Who’s playing games with whose jobs at this point?

For my money I think the Administration would prompt Defense to encourage layoffs because they’ve already shown so little concern for the average American in all this that… well, what’s buggering a few more?

I think it’s good to see Congress finally trying to put some teeth into the campaign promises to promote a change in course regarding Iraq, but is this the way to do it?

For once I don’t have terribly strong thoughts of my own, I’m still processing. Regardless, though, as in most cases when one part of the government contends with the other, expect the losers to be regular people like you and me.

Hidden costs double war bill

Washington Post article

Ignoring for a moment the hypocrisy of the Democrats criticizing the cost of the wars when they overwhelmingly voted for them in the first place and continually approve funding for endless “emergency” appropriations, here’s an excerpt from the article:

The economic costs to the United States of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far total approximately $1.5 trillion, according to a new study by congressional Democrats that estimates the conflicts’ “hidden costs”– including higher oil prices, the expense of treating wounded veterans and interest payments on the money borrowed to pay for the wars.

That amount is nearly double the $804 billion the White House has spent or requested to wage these wars through 2008, according to the Democratic staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee. Its report, titled “The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War,” estimates that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have thus far cost the average U.S. family of four more than $20,000.

$20,000 would just about pay for a bachelor’s degree at USI, the local public university. Even if one disputes the figure cited by the study, just the amount so far requested by the administration would cover 2 years, or an associate’s degree at Ivy Tech, the local community college.

And, as Space Cowboy at Shakesville put it, “Even if you want to call bullshit on this report, how can you sit there and tell me that you’re ok with our shoveling out $804 billion for this shit?”

The report also cites the war’s pulling reservists and National Guardsmen away from their jobs and the effect in terms of their incomes being essentially taken out of the economy.

While it is difficult at best to calculate the impact of the Iraq war on oil prices, and so that part of the report may be questionable, it is clear that the price tag just in dollar terms is far higher than even the already-staggering figures put forth by the administration indicate – not to mention the cost in human terms. In fact, Congressional Democrats also reported possible costs of $3.5 trillion if the debacle goes on to 2017.

All this and they still can’t/won’t take care of those they have sent to fight who come back broken, whether physically, mentally, and/or spiritually. In fact, the number of homeless Iraq vets is steadily rising.

While I advocate tax resistance as a protest against the violence perpetrated by the government, it is clear from this report that the financial cost alone to the average person goes far beyond taxes. The effects shown by this report should present a clear reason for us to engage alternative economic practices in as many ways as possible. It is useless for us to talk about peace when so much of what we spend goes to fund violence – whether it is the violence of war or of the sweatshop.

The problem with war

The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson? — A.J. Muste

I wouldn’t say this is the ONLY problem with war, but I think the statement is certainly true as far as it goes.

World War II and American Empire

“The formulation of a statement of war aims for propaganda purposes is very different from formulation of one defining the true national interest… If war aims are stated, which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world, and will be vulnerable to Nazi counter-promises. Such aims would also strengthen the most reactionary elements in the United States and the British Empire. The interests of other peoples should be stressed, not only those of Europe, but also of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This would have a better propaganda effect.” — US Council on Foreign Relations report, April 1941.

This policy recommendation directly affected the Atlantic Charter, an agreement between the US and Britain in August 1941, the public war aims statement of the US-UK alliance, months before the US would enter the war.

We were not “drawn in” to the war by Pearl Harbor, it provided the impetus for beginning to implement what had already been planned . And the April 1941 CFR report should mitigate against the ridiculous notion that we entered WWII for some altruistic purpose, that of “saving the world” from Nazi aggression (indeed, it’s been argued by some historians that, public school history class propaganda to the contrary, the real US interest in WWII was the defeat of Japan and taking over the Far East sphere of influence). As post-war events would show, particularly in our relations with Latin American countries (support of military dictators and the training of and turning a blind eye to the operation of government-sponsored death squads in the region being just a couple of examples), the idea of supporting the right of peoples’ self-determination was at best only a propaganda statement, and at worst just an outright lie.

Only 3 years after WWII, in 1948, George Kennan wrote the following advice for US policy in the Far East:

. . . we have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population . . . In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. . . We should cease to talk about vague and… unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. — George Kennan, head of Dept. of State Policy Planning Staff, excerpted from PPS23. Declassified in 1974.

Years later, here we are still, in the words of Livy, trying to conquer the world for our own defense – we call it a War on Terror.

comments from Friedman and Abizaid at Stanford Forum

Stanford’s annual roundtable this year was on “Courting Disaster: The Fight for Oil, Water and a Healthy Planet.” Here are some comments from neoliberal economic architect Thomas Friedman and Gen. John Abizaid, US Army (Ret.) from the Stanford News Service.

Concerning the Middle East, Friedman blamed the United States for treating the region as a collection of cheap “gas stations” for the last 50 years. In exchange for low oil prices and a hands-off policy toward Israel, he said, the United States turned a blind eye to the entrenchment of ideological, authoritarian regimes. “It is my opinion that Osama bin Laden and 9/11 represented the distilled essence of everything that was going on out ‘back there,'” he said, referring to Western acquiescence to policies that preached intolerance and rejected equal opportunity for all citizens.

Abizaid said the dynamics in the Middle East, particularly the war in Iraq, are closely tied to oil. “We can’t really deny that,” he said. Furthermore, the rise of Sunni and Shiite extremists, the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict and global dependence on Middle Eastern oil have created problems with global implications.

“It is this dependency that can’t just be dealt with by military means,” Abizaid said. “We must adapt, as a matter of national security, a way to reduce our dependency on Middle Eastern oil.” Following enthusiastic applause from the audience, he said these problems are further complicated by the question of whether Pakistan can maintain control of its nuclear weapons and by the expansion of the terrorist group al-Qaida into a global phenomenon. “The problem for us is that we can’t deal with just military” solutions, he said. “We need to have economic, diplomatic and political components in a solution. The military is only 20 percent of the solution in the Middle East.”

The forum also covered issues related to climate change and renewable fuels.

 

The obligatory 9/11 post

I wasn’t going to do this, I was just going to let the post about Stirling Bridge stand as my statement about 9/11, but I just wrote this for my Livejournal and thought it was worth sharing here.

“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” – From the Project for a New American Century’s document Rebuilding America’s Defenses

Looks like they got it.

The document quoted above is a detailed summary of a strategy to project American military power across the globe and fits in nicely with the prospect of increasing American economic domination of essentially the whole world. Indeed throughout this and other PNAC documents, as well as other writings from neoconservative thinkers throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s the intersection of military and economic interests was argued for as an essential good or simply taken for granted. Preemptive war was touted as a strategy, and despite propaganda stating the alternative it was so clear to those in power that neoliberal (so-called “free trade”) economic policies lead to devastating economic inequalities that are likely to increase social unrest AND increase breeding grounds for potential “terrorists” that this was argued in later-declassified CIA and Defense Department documents going back to the 1990s. The neocons consistently argued that a force in Iraq would ensure stability of oil production and prices to help the US economic growth that would be necessary to sustain the project of empire (though they stopped short, so far as I am aware, of using that term).

Since 9/11 the rhetoric of terrorism and the war on terror has justified government-perpetrated atrocities, suspension of civil liberties, suppression of dissenting speech, and two stupid wars (Afghanistan and Iraq), situations where the reality and the rhetoric about why we should attack them did not often line up side-to-side. We have also seen increasing privatization of the military and its support functions. It is now estimated that, of combat personnel (that is, people who actually carry guns and shoot people), 1/3 of the “troops” in Iraq are contracted mercenaries, often referred to as “security personnel”. If you figure in the number of privatized support staff the number rises to over 1/2. These “troops” are accountable only to their corporate masters, and often they are there as a result of no-bid contracts and other shady business mechanisms. I’m sure most of you are at least somewhat familiar with the Halliburton scheme in which Dick Cheney’s former company was awarded billions in no-bid contracts, that is only one example. Rumors of graft, corruption, and human rights violations on a mass scale abound, directly linked to these corporate soldiers.

And one of the worst parts about it is the pain and suffering of those who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks is still being exploited to justify these atrocities. Support our troops? Yeah, support them… support them by encouraging them to apply for conscientious objector status. Support them by bringing them home, and never again sending them into harm’s way for the profit of a few fat cats and their multitude of minions. Support them by teaching them, from a young age, that the one and only purpose of a military is to steal, kill, and destroy (cf. John 10:10), and there are other options outside the military by which they might have life, and help others to have it also.

Now, with another potential war on the near horizon, this time with Iran, have we really learned anything, 6 years later? The media leads us right down the same path they did en route to Iraq, and “support the troops” is still a verbal mechanism used to squelch dissent, or at least it is in my part of the country.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis, dona nobis pacem.

Kyrie eleison.

This day in history, September 11

810 years ago, in 1297, the Scots under William Wallace and Andrew de Moray defeated the English under Edward I in one of the major battles of the First War for Scottish Independence. The Scottish army was vastly outnumbered, but after a number of the English had crossed the bridge they attacked and forcibly divided the army. The Scots destroyed those who had crossed the bridge, and the rest of the English army lost heart – they probably believed they were dealing with a rabble, not with a well-disciplined army. One English knight, the portly Hugh de Cressingham, was flayed after being killed in battle, the pieces of flesh divided among certain Scottish soldiers. Wallace himself supposedly took enough to make himself a new sword belt.

Stirling Bridge was a shattering defeat from the English and showed that, under the right circumstances, a disciplined infantry army could defeat a calvary force. Andrew de Moray died of wounds sustained in the battle, and in March 1298 Wallace had emerged with the title Guardian of Scotland, in large part due to his success at Stirling Bridge.

Perhaps next year on “This day in history, September 11” I’ll post about the Council of Agde, in AD 506.

Iran war began in 2005?

This article by Scott Ritter, hosted at Commondreams.org (originally published by Al-Jazeera) argues it did.

Americans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the ostensible excuse for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of that country by US forces), but also about the very process that led to war.

On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that “I have not ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary.”

We know now that this statement was itself a lie, that the president, by late August 2002, had, in fact, signed off on the ‘execute’ orders authorising the US military to begin active military operations inside Iraq, and that these orders were being implemented as early as September 2002, when the US Air Force, assisted by the British Royal Air Force, began expanding its bombardment of targets inside and outside the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq.

These operations were designed to degrade Iraqi air defence and command and control capabilities. They also paved the way for the insertion of US Special Operations units, who were conducting strategic reconnaissance, and later direct action, operations against specific targets inside Iraq, prior to the 19 March 2003 commencement of hostilities.

President Bush had signed a covert finding in late spring 2002, which authorised the CIA and US Special Operations forces to dispatch clandestine units into Iraq for the purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power.

The fact is that the Iraq war had begun by the beginning of summer 2002, if not earlier.

The violation of a sovereign nation’s airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence gathering phase. This timeline of events has ramifications that go beyond historical trivia or political investigation into the events of the past.

It represents a record of precedent on the part of the Bush administration which must be acknowledged when considering the ongoing events regarding US-Iran relations. As was the case with Iraq pre-March 2003, the Bush administration today speaks of “diplomacy” and a desire for a “peaceful” resolution to the Iranian question.

But the facts speak of another agenda, that of war and the forceful removal of the theocratic regime, currently wielding the reigns of power in Tehran.

As with Iraq, the president has paved the way for the conditioning of the American public and an all-too-compliant media to accept at face value the merits of a regime change policy regarding Iran, linking the regime of the Mullah’s to an “axis of evil” (together with the newly “liberated” Iraq and North Korea), and speaking of the absolute requirement for the spread of “democracy” to the Iranian people.

“Liberation” and the spread of “democracy” have become none-too-subtle code words within the neo-conservative cabal that formulates and executes American foreign policy today for militarism and war.

By the intensity of the “liberation/democracy” rhetoric alone, Americans should be put on notice that Iran is well-fixed in the cross-hairs as the next target for the illegal policy of regime change being implemented by the Bush administration.

But Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.

As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool’s dream.

The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.

The violation of a sovereign nation’s airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.

President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.

The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.

It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.

Perhaps the adage of “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” has finally been embraced by the White House, exposing as utter hypocrisy the entire underlying notions governing the ongoing global war on terror.

But the CIA-backed campaign of MEK terror bombings in Iran are not the only action ongoing against Iran.

To the north, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the US military is preparing a base of operations for a massive military presence that will foretell a major land-based campaign designed to capture Tehran.

Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s interest in Azerbaijan may have escaped the blinkered Western media, but Russia and the Caucasus nations understand only too well that the die has been cast regarding Azerbaijan’s role in the upcoming war with Iran.

The ethnic links between the Azeri of northern Iran and Azerbaijan were long exploited by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and this vehicle for internal manipulation has been seized upon by CIA paramilitary operatives and US Special Operations units who are training with Azerbaijan forces to form special units capable of operating inside Iran for the purpose of intelligence gathering, direct action, and mobilising indigenous opposition to the Mullahs in Tehran.

But this is only one use the US has planned for Azerbaijan. American military aircraft, operating from forward bases in Azerbaijan, will have a much shorter distance to fly when striking targets in and around Tehran.

In fact, US air power should be able to maintain a nearly 24-hour a day presence over Tehran airspace once military hostilities commence.

No longer will the United States need to consider employment of Cold War-dated plans which called for moving on Tehran from the Arab Gulf cities of Chah Bahar and Bandar Abbas. US Marine Corps units will be able to secure these towns in order to protect the vital Straits of Hormuz, but the need to advance inland has been eliminated.

A much shorter route to Tehran now exists – the coastal highway running along the Caspian Sea from Azerbaijan to Tehran.

US military planners have already begun war games calling for the deployment of multi-divisional forces into Azerbaijan.

Logistical planning is well advanced concerning the basing of US air and ground power in Azerbaijan.

Given the fact that the bulk of the logistical support and command and control capability required to wage a war with Iran is already forward deployed in the region thanks to the massive US presence in Iraq, the build-up time for a war with Iran will be significantly reduced compared to even the accelerated time tables witnessed with Iraq in 2002-2003.

America and the Western nations continue to be fixated on the ongoing tragedy and debacle that is Iraq. Much needed debate on the reasoning behind the war with Iraq and the failed post-war occupation of Iraq is finally starting to spring up in the United States and elsewhere.

Normally, this would represent a good turn of events. But with everyone’s heads rooted in the events of the past, many are missing out on the crime that is about to be repeated by the Bush administration in Iran – an illegal war of aggression, based on false premise, carried out with little regard to either the people of Iran or the United States.

Most Americans, together with the mainstream American media, are blind to the tell-tale signs of war, waiting, instead, for some formal declaration of hostility, a made-for-TV moment such as was witnessed on 19 March 2003.

We now know that the war had started much earlier. Likewise, history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran.

Scott Ritter is a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, 1991-1998, and author of Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America’s Intelligence Conspiracy, published by I B Tauris in 2005.

Pentagon draws up plans for air strikes against Iran

I wish I was surprised by this. From Democracy Now.

Report: U.S. Military Planning Massive Air Strikes Against Iran

The Sunday Times in London is reporting the Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive air strikes against twelve hundred targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days. Alexis Debat of the Nixon Center told the paper that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Instead, he said, military planners are talking about trying to take out the entire Iranian military. President Bush has recently intensified the rhetoric against Iran. Last week he accused Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

It’s only a matter of time, but then again who didn’t see this coming after we designated a major unit of their official national military a “terrorist organization”? As if it wasn’t already transparently clear that the so-called “War on Terror” is a fiction designed as a cover for the military-backed expansion of American interests.

Didn’t the Romans already try this whole military-economic imperial expansion thing? As I recall it didn’t work out too well for them in the long run…

Then there’s this very interesting video from FOX Attacks.

This isn’t even manufacturing consent… more like bludgeoning, figuratively speaking.

the flag of truth

I’m back from Michigan! Don’t forget to register for the Jesus Radicals conference. It’s free!

This is an amazing picture. I got it from Gavin at Make/Shift.

Sergeant Timothy John Westphal, 31, of Denver, 18th Infantry Brigade, 1st Infantry Division. In Tikrit on year-long tour beginning February 2004.

“If Soldiers Came From Another Country And Did This To My Family, I Would Be An Insurgent Too” – War Vet Describes Iraq House Raid. Transcript of an interview with Westphal and others at Democracy Now.

America’s image

“Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.” — unnamed Buddhist leader, quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his monumental speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence“.

I think it’s at least vaguely analogous to the current situation in Iraq. King immediately proceeds to say:

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

And then:

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

Quite prescient, Dr. King.