Ahmdinejad: Axis of evil? (Image: Shahram Sharif / Flickr)

There’s some divergence of opinion on Ahmadinejad.  The New York Daily News on Tuesday called Ahmadinejad “a pure evil crackpot Holocaust denier who wants to see Israel obliterated from planet Earth.”

In contrast, a Jewish lawyer addressing the dinner gathering said that a friend had told him not to come on Yom Kippur when he should be home atoning for his sins.  “I’m going to go,” he said he told his friend, “and atone for the sins of Israel.”

The media tells us that Ahmadinejad is “an existential threat to Israel.”  Let’s consider that.

I start from the assumption that an existential threat to a human being is a greater concern than an existential threat to a government.  Denying a past existential threat to millions of human beings is offensive and dangerous.  Creating a new existential threat to millions of human beings is worse — is, in fact, the danger we try to avoid by properly remembering the past.

President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that no speech, not even a video attacking Islam, should be censored, and no speech can justify violence.  But the absence of speech, in Obama’s view, can justify war.  The Democratic Party Platform calls for war on Iran if Iran does not cease violating the nonproliferation treaty.  Obama declared on Tuesday that if Iran were to develop nuclear weapons it would destroy the nonproliferation treaty.  It would start a nuclear arms race.  Iran would be, or rather it already is, a threat to Israel’s existence.

But how exactly can Iran stop violating a treaty that it is not violating?  What can it say to prove it does not have what even the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates say it does not have and is not working to produce?  How can Iran prove a negative?  Many of us still recall that impossible task being assigned to Iraq in 2003.
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(photo: f-l-e-x / flickr)

One of the most inspiring events thus far at the Veterans For Peace National Convention underway in Miami was a presentation on Thursday by several veterans who have refused to participate in war. Typically, they have done this at the risk of significant time in prison, or worse. In most cases these resisters avoided doing any time. Even when they did go behind bars, they did so with a feeling of liberation.

Gerry Condon refused to deploy to Vietnam, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, escaped from Fort Bragg, left the country, and came back campaigning for amnesty. President Jimmy Carter pardoned resisters as his first act in office. Condon never “served” a day, in either the military “service” or prison.

Jeff Paterson of Courage to Resist refused to fly to Iraq, choosing instead to sit down on the tarmac. Ben Griffin from VFP’s new chapter in the U.K. refused to participate in our nations’ wars and has been issued a gag order. He’s not permitted to speak, and yet he speaks so well. Mike Prysner of March Forward and Camilo Mejia of VFP here in Miami described their acts of resistance.

Mejia did us all the enormous favor some years back of putting his story down in a book — an extreme rarity, sadly, for peace activists with great stories to tell. Mejia’s book “Road From Ar Ramadi” is a terrific introduction for anyone wondering why someone would sign up for the military and then refuse to kill people. Mejia, who now works on domestic civil rights issues in Miami while remaining part of the antiwar movement (another rarity), is a co-convenor of the VFP convention.

In October 2003, Mejia was the first U.S. soldier to publicly refuse to fight in Iraq. At that time only 22 members of the U.S. military had gone AWOL from that war, a number that would quickly climb into the thousands as the war worsened and as belief in the various rationales offered for the war evaporated. Soldiers also began to refuse particular missions that would be likely to kill civilians or to put themselves at risk for no purpose other than the advancement of a commander’s career — a commander safely giving orders from a base. Veterans of the Iraq War would soon work with Veterans For Peace to form a new organization, Iraq Veterans Against the War. But at the time of Mejia’s refusal to fight he stood virtually alone.

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Remarks delivered at Peacestock 2012

I want to thank Bill Habedank for inviting me here and everyone who’s been involved in setting up this wonderful event, which ought to be replicated all over this country. Almost our entire population claims to favor peace. At least three quarters of us favor getting the U.S. military out of Afghanistan and ending that particular war, which by the way isn’t ending. When carefully surveyed and shown what the federal budget is, a large majority of U.S. residents favors cutting huge amounts of money out of the military and putting it to better use.

But those doing anything about peace as part of a peace movement are a tiny fraction of a percent of the country. I have been lucky enough to see some of my cousins from this part of the country on this trip, and one of them referred to me as her famous cousin who speaks at events and writes books. There are others here much more famous than I within our little movement. But I’m willing to bet at least 99% of the country has never heard of any of us. Maybe the wonderful Coleen Rowley who made it onto the cover of Time Magazine. Maybe a few others.

Thank you also to Veterans For Peace for being the best peace organization I know of, and to its president Leah Bolger for being here. Leah and I and some others here were occupying Washington, D.C., last fall, and I’ve just now finally had criminal charges that were brought against me for speaking in a public hearing in the U.S. Senate dropped this week, just in time to hang out with the good people of Peacestock, which brings a certain risk of arrest in itself. Raise your hand if you’re an undercover law enforcement officer.

That’s all right. But please pay attention, because I’m going to be talking about some laws that are going unenforced. When I say our movement is small, I don’t mean it’s entirely without influence. And it was much bigger back in 2005 and 2006, when those who oppose wars had, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us, those who oppose Republican wars. There is a big gap, however, between those who oppose all wars, and those who oppose particular wars, be it for partisan or other reasons. President Obama used to oppose dumb wars. We came to find out he favors imbecilic wars, because there are more syllables involved. The thing is, people who oppose particular wars don’t usually put as much energy into it as people who oppose all war. Perhaps they’re hoping that a bad war will evolve into a good war, perhaps by escalating it, perhaps by electing a different president — or maybe they just have other priorities.

The title for my remarks today is “Abolishing War: One Last Step.” I’m willing to bet that even we in the peace movement are fairly unaware of some of the previous steps. In St. Paul, Minnesota, there’s a house listed as a National Historic Landmark because Frank Kellogg lived there. There’s also a Kellogg Boulevard in St. Paul. But Kellogg’s grave is in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Frank Kellogg had a long career, but there is one thing he did, and only one thing he did that made his house historic, named a boulevard for him, and put his ashes in the National Cathedral. I’m willing to bet most people living near St. Paul don’t have the slightest idea what it was. Do you? Raise your hand if you know. And please don’t say he invented corn flakes.

Well, this is not a typical crowd. All the children are above average here. And yet, some of us don’t know.

Frank Kellogg was a pudgy, five-foot-six, Republican lawyer with a glass eye and hands that shook. He was not one to turn down a drink, prohibition or no prohibition, and he was best known for his fiery temper and the use of language that the FCC would not have tolerated. Kellogg was 70 years old in 1927. He’d been a trust buster. He’d been president of the American Bar Association. He’d been a U.S. senator from the great state of Minnesota. He’d voted in favor of entering World War I and against the League of Nations, but in support of pulling U.S. troops out of Russia.

Come 1927, when Kellogg was 70 years old, he was the U.S. Secretary of State. During his tenure, the U.S. Marines went into Panama, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and Kellogg threatened Mexico with war in the interest of U.S. corporations. Kellogg lacked any big following of supporters among the people or the elites. H.L. Mencken called him –quote — a “doddering political hack from the cow country.” I apologize to all the cows around here. Kellogg himself had unkind words for others. In 1927, he called the French a bunch of bleep bleep fools. But Kellogg added that those he hated most were the bleepity bleep bleep pacifists.

In 1928, Kellogg worked night and day to do exactly what the pacifists told him to do. He brought most of the powerful nations of the world together and created a treaty banning all use of war. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, known as the Kellogg-Briand pact. (The vote was 85-1, with the 1 being a senator from Wisconsin who apparently wanted a stronger treaty, but who was censured by the Wisconsin legislature for his vote.) Briand was the French foreign minister, with whom Kellogg had worked on the treaty.

Frank Kellogg was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Briand already had one. This was in the pre-World War II days when the Nobel Committee still paid some attention to the requirements of Alfred Nobel’s will, including that recipients of the prize have worked for the abolition or reduction of standing armies. Quick, can you name the last Nobel Peace Prize recipient who had worked to abolish standing armies? I think there have only been a handful in recent years who would have even stood for the idea, even in theory, much less have worked to advance it in reality.

Most groups, clubs, projects, etc., that promote peace today propose finding peace in our hearts. I’m reminded of Woody Allen’s remark: I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. Well, I don’t want to achieve peace through my heart. I want to achieve peace through ending war and abolishing armies.

Left to his own devices, Frank Kellogg would have had nothing to do with peace. But in 1927 there was a major peace movement in this country, united around an idea pushed by a Chicago lawyer named Salmon Oliver Levinson. The movement was called the Outlawry Movement, and the goal was to outlaw war. As slavery and blood feuds and dueling had been abolished, so would war be. And the first step would be stigmatizing war as no longer legal. Remember, war was not against the law. Nobody was prosecuted for World War I or any other war, because war making was not a crime. Particular atrocities could be crimes, but not war itself. Levinson opposed what we might call anachronistically the NATO model of banning war, in which the primary tool for preventing war is, of course, war. There were isolationist strains in the U.S. peace movement after the disaster of World War I that echo in some of today’s libertarians. Agreeing with various allies to all go to war if one of them went to war was not a recipe for peace. The Outlawrists’ plan was to make war illegal, to establish written international law and courts for settling international disputes, and to move world culture beyond acceptance of war.

Duelling had been done away with, said Levinson, and not just aggressive duelling. We didn’t keep defensive duelling around. We set the whole barbaric procedure behind us. Thus must it be with war. The Outlawrists did not distinguish good or just wars from bad or unjust wars, any more than we distinguish just cases of rape, good uses of slavery, or humanitarian cases of genocide. War was the most evil thing created, and arranging to end war by means of war left everyone preparing for more war. So, the Kellogg-Briand Pact renounced all war.

There’s a song from 1950 — maybe we can sing it later — that begins “Last night I had the strangest dream I’d ever dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. I dreamed I saw a mighty room, and the room was filled with men….” That scene had actually happened on August 27, 1928, with the signing of the Peace Pact. It was probably the biggest news story that year. This is not secret CIA history I’m describing. Raise your hand if you’re with the CIA. Well, thank you for coming anyway. No, this is forgotten history, intentionally buried history. Frank Goetz, who may be here, and others are pushing to have August 27th made a holiday.

After the Pact was signed, nations stopped recognizing claims of war, gains of territory made through war. Wars were prevented and halted. The world turned against the horror of war, at least war among wealthy nations. Colonizing poor nations was still very much acceptable. And when World War II happened, Roosevelt directed that the Kellogg Briand Pact be used to prosecute the Germans and the Japanese for the brand new crime of making war. And they were thus prosecuted. And the rich nations never went to war with each other again, at least not yet. Europe, amazingly, finally stopped attacking itself. But the common interpretation became the bizarre notion that Kellogg-Briand had been erased by its failure to prevent World War II. Imagine setting up a legal ban on anything else, and then tossing it into the trash the first time it was violated, and while simultaneously enforcing it. I suppose the Ten Commandments, by that logic, must have been erased by being violated quite some time back now. After World War II the Peace Pact was twisted to prosecute aggressive war, rather than simply war, and it was imposed as victor’s justice. But the Kellogg-Briand Pact, as written, remained on the books, as it remains on the U.S. State Department’s website. Ssh. Don’t tell Hillary.

This week Ralph Nader published a list of 11 books that he thinks everyone should read, and one of them was my book “When the World Outlawed War,” which tells this story. It’s probably the shortest on the list, too, so you can read it tonight and only have 10 books left to go.

World War II was the worst event that has occurred on planet earth, but trends away from war and violence observable in recent centuries continued. New institutions and cultural habits reinforced this. But legally, the U.N. Charter took a step back from Kellogg-Briand by sanctioning wars if they are defensive or U.N.-approved. An example of a defensive war would be the 2003 attack on the impoverished unarmed nation of Iraq thousands of miles from our shores. An example of a UN-approved war would be the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya and overthrow of its government. The UN had authorized a cease-fire, and NATO decided that was the same thing as authorizing bombing of the capital until the president was killed. In other words, the two loopholes opened up by the UN Charter have permitted unlimited warmaking and erased from our culture the idea that war is a crime.

The Geneva Conventions played their part as well, by establishing the idea that wars could be legal if conducted in a particular manner. The Conventions of 1949 look absurd today, as they distinguish participants in war from civilians. Wars today are not fought on distant battlefields, but in inhabited towns. Should those who fight back really lose legal protection? The Conventions do outline permissible conduct for occupying armies, but they require that the occupiers care for the occupied population much better than our governments care for their own populations back home. Of course, nobody takes seriously the idea of complying with this. Governments are permitted to kill huge numbers of civilians, but the killing has to be an accidental, even though foreseeable, byproduct of an effort to kill even bigger numbers of non-civilians or to accomplish some other military objective, such as gaining control over the civilians and non-civilians alike, should they manage to remain alive. Under this rigorous legal standard, José Luis Moreno Ocampo, prosecutor for the ICC — or what I like to call the ICCA, the International Criminal Court for Africans — found the U.S. slaughter of Iraqis to be legal, regardless of the fact that the United Nations had found the invasion of Iraq itself, the greater purpose at stake, to be illegal. The Catholic Church no longer sells indulgences, I suspect because it just can’t compete with the United Nations.

And if the Geneva Conventions weren’t bad enough, we created the CIA and NATO. While the world has turned against war, the United States has created a war-based economy with huge permanent standing armies standing in our own and most other countries around the globe. We’ve empowered a military industrial complex beyond Eisenhower’s worst nightmares. In the 1920s war could be blamed on Europe. Now opposing war is almost treasonous. We’ve given presidents such powers that the Declaration of Independence would have to be three times as long if we were to attempt a new overthrow of tyranny. We’ve legalized election bribery, concentrated almost all our wealth in a very few hands, and in most cases swallowed whole the obvious lie that activism can have no impact. We face collapse of representative government, of civil liberties, of our natural environment, of our culture. We face nuclear apocalypse, weapons proliferation, and a vicious cycle of countering terrorism with precisely the policies that produce terrorism.

Last fall I helped organize a conference of experts on various areas of damage being done by the military industrial complex, resulting in the book, “The Military Industrial Complex at 50.” We concluded that this monster, guarded by patriotism, McCarthyism, and financial corruption, is the number one opponent of most campaigns for things decent and good, certainly of campaigns against poverty, for education, against homelessness, for civil rights, against environmental destruction, for peace and prosperity. It’s not a coincidence that the United States spends several times the next approaching country on the military while trailing a great many countries in measures of education, health, security, and happiness. If every movement that should rightfully be targeting the military industrial complex were to do so, it would fall. We would convert, retrain, retool, and prosper. But it’s difficult for narrow interests to act on the big picture. Why should the ACLU oppose the military funding that produces the drone strikes and torture cells, when it can oppose the drone strikes and torture cells indefinitely? Why should the Sierra Club oppose the single largest consumer of oil when it can oppose institutions completely lacking flags and hero-worship?

When we tried to impeach or prosecute Bush or Cheney, well, two things. First, one of the best activists we had was Daniel Fearn who is now doing poorly in a hospital in Minneapolis. I bet a bunch of you know him. I hope you’ll visit him. Can we all applaud the great work that Daniel Fearn did?

Second, when we tried to impeach Bush and Cheney, we were often told we hated those men or acted on partisan interests, and I always replied that if Bush was not punished for his crimes, the next president would do worse. It wouldn’t matter whether the next president was black or white, male or female, Republican or Democratic. It would only matter whether power still corrupted and whether absolute power still corrupted absolutely. As it turns out, nothing has happened to change that rule. The illicit abuses of Bush are now open and official policy. We’re spied on without warrants and can be locked up without charges, tortured without consequences, and sent to war without Congress. Our president keeps a list of nominees for being murdered. It includes Americans and non-Americans, children and adults. He works his way down the list. He says it costs him not a moment’s worry. He jokes about it to the White House Press Corpse, and they laugh it up. And we run around like chickens with our heads cut off and our souls ripped out registering voters for him because we don’t want to risk having a racist put in charge of our national program of murdering dark skinned Muslims. Even while peace activists have their homes raided by the FBI. Sometimes when we speak out we’re told that we must be in the pay of the Mitt Romney campaign. The irony of the you’re-trying-to-help-Romney-win response to criticism of our current government is that if Romney does win then the people using that line will themselves start objecting to presidential abuses, but it will be too late.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military is bigger than ever, in more nations than ever, more privatized than ever, more profitable than ever, more secretive than ever, more at odds with more of the world than ever, and more recklessly than we’ve seen in decades antagonizing both Russia and China for no good reason whatsoever. I don’t consider the fact that Russian fossil fuels with which to destroy our atmosphere will become more readily available as our destroyed atmosphere melts the ice a good reason. Nor do I consider the fact that China owns our grandchildren’s unearned wages a good reason. We just discovered how large a part the U.S. is playing in destroying the nation of Mali when three U.S. Special Forces troops drove off a bridge, killing themselves and three prostitutes. Have you ever wondered what makes special forces special? The only thing I can see that makes them special is that someone whispers in their ears: “You don’t have to obey any laws.” But that’s becoming less and less special in Washington these days.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was just over in Laos helping to expand the U.S. Asian presence, but — as Fred Branfman pointed out — not seriously attempting to pick up the 80 million cluster bombs the U.S. left in Laos where they continue to kill and maim. Clinton opposes signing the Cluster Bomb Treaty, even though 111 countries have signed it, and cluster bombs serve very little humanitarian purpose, unless you count blowing the legs off children as humanitarian.

Alliant Tech Systems, which as moved to Virginia but is also still here in Minnesota, makes money off cluster bombs. It could make that money off something decent if it chose.

Clinton met a young man in Laos whose hand she couldn’t shake. Phongsavath Souliyalat lost both his hands and his eyesight when a friend handed him a cluster bomb on his 16th birthday while walking home from school. These bombs have killed 20,000 farmers and their children since the bombing ended in 1973. Clinton is lobbying other nations against the treaty banning cluster bombs. The United States has used cluster bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and as recently as June 7, 2010, when we used them to kill 35 women and children in Yemen. A journalist reported on that horror, and Obama ordered the president of Yemen to lock him up, calling into question why Obama doesn’t order other people in Yemen locked up rather than killing them and whoever’s too close to them with missiles.

In Laos this week Clinton said, “We have to do more. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here today, so that we can tell more people about the work that we should be doing together.” But she’s not investing a fraction in bomb clean up of what she’s putting into a new embassy in Laos. The lesson of 1927 is that what she does next was not determined by the genes she was born with. Clinton could be Kissinger or she could be Kellogg, depending on what we do. Kellogg, after all, would never have been Kellogg if peace activists hadn’t forced him to.

We have a harder task today, I admit. We’re up against the military industrial complex, and we’re up against the idea of humanitarian war.

Humanitarian war makes as much sense as a benevolent hurricane or a charitable looting. Humanitarian war is based on the following premises:
1. There are evil things happening in the world.
2. We can do nothing or we can bomb people. There are no other options.
The conclusion, of course, is that we must bomb people. But the second premise is faulty. Nonviolent assaults on tyranny are far more successful and long-lasting than violent ones. Even more effective is refraining from funding and empowering the tyrants for decades prior to switching sides, or what is called “intervening.” Turning to violence amounts to deciding that the times have gotten tough and we must therefore resort to a less effective tool much less likely to succeed. That many want to do so suggests other motivations, some of them not very flattering. The same is suggested by blatant inconsistency. In Bahrain we send over our top cops to lead the skull-cracking. In Syria we aid murderous terrorists and child soldiers in the name of human rights, working with such models of democracy as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. By “we” I mean, of course, the regime in Washington. Governments are beyond reproach, and regimes can be overthrown, so we should probably call them all regimes. Washington is quite open about wanting to overthrow the Syrian government or regime because of its ties to the Iranian government or regime. It is much less forthcoming, however, about how doing so would work out any better than Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Cambodia, South Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, the Philippines, and so on.

That wars must be marketed as humanitarian is a sign of progress. That we fall for it is a sign of embarrassing weakness. The war propagandist is the world’s second oldest profession, and the humanitarian lie is not entirely new. But it works in concert with other common war lies, some of which used to be more dominant. I tried to collect them all in my book “War Is A Lie.” A few major themes are:

First, that only war will address the incredible evil of the chosen enemy, almost always an enemy made more evil by racism and other forms or bigotry and distancing.

Second, that war is a form of defense, even if we provoked the enemy’s attack, even if the enemy hasn’t attacked, even if the enemy is incapable of attacking, even if the enemy hasn’t yet thought to develop the capacity to attack. We’re one step ahead, that’s how smart we are.

Third, that war is a generous sacrifice, the noblest deed imaginable, something so beautiful it ought to be multiplied a thousand fold, and so we only go to war as an absolute last resort in order to benefit the evil dark people who need to be wiped off the face of the earth.

It doesn’t matter if the reasons for war conflict. It doesn’t matter if they change through the course of a war. If an individual believes that the war makers mean well — these being the same politicians that nobody would trust as far as they could thrown them on any other topic, and if he believes that warriors are heroes who must be cheered for no matter what they do, and if he takes some vicarious pleasure in the primitive notion that lashing out makes him safe, then it doesn’t much matter what the pretense is. Let some back war as philanthropy and others as enlightened genocide, as long as enough of them back it or tolerate it, it will get started. And once started, it must be continued for the sake of the soldiers doing most of the killing and a little bit of the dying.

In Afghanistan, the top killer of U.S. troops is suicide. Continuing a war so that our troops will not have been killing themselves in vain brings a new level of blindness to the question of what types of destructive madness are simply and unavoidably in vain. Of course, U.S. troops are in Afghanistan to spread democracy, while the vast majority of U.S. residents oppose keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and the casus belli has been assassinated and given a proper Muslim sea burial, according to our president, who occasionally brags about such killings while refusing to officially say whether they exist. He has said, however, that we’re leaving Afghanistan, and the primary way in which we’re leaving is, oddly enough, by staying, at least for the next two and a half years, after which we’re staying in an unspecified smaller way for another 10 years. Then we’ll see.

Will the third poorest nation in the world be able to keep fighting off our loving embrace, night raids, and drone strikes for 12.5 more years? It will if we keep paying for it. Imagine how many of that last 25 percent of Americans would turn against this war if they knew they were paying for both sides of it while their schools and fire stations and ecosystems collapse. A report by the congressional Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, chaired by Rep. John Tierney, found that $360 million per year was being handed over by the Pentagon to insurgent groups or their warlord front men for the safe passage of truck convoys carrying US military supplies, from one trucking contract alone. We’re paying for permission to drive down roads without being shot at. What a war! Imagine if the British had thought of that in 1776. Maybe we could still be colonies.

We don’t need to abandon Afghans, or Libyans, or Syrians, or for that matter Bahrainis or Saudis. But effective financial aid and reparations would support nonviolence and independence. As Ralph Lopez has been pointing out, there are good examples of humanitarian programs in Afghanistan that could be built on. Most foreign aid, however, is a scam, with 40 to 50 percent never reaching Afghanistan. Aid profiteers rival war profiteers in their greed, while 60 percent of Afghan children are in various stages of starvation and 23 froze to death last winter outside Kabul. And half the so-called aid money has gone to training soldiers and police. I remember the late Richard Holbrooke telling Congress that civilian operations in Afghanistan were subordinate to the military. That dooms them to failure, and Afghans to suffering.

I went to Afghanistan last year with Kathy Kelly and Voices for Creative Nonviolence. I met there a man named Hakim who has organized a group called Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. Last week I heard from Kathy that he wanted to visit the United States but had been denied a visa. So, Voices and Global Exchange and Fellowship of Reconciliation and the group I work for RootsAction.org flooded the State Department with emails and calls. And they reversed their decision and gave Hakim a visa. He’ll be here soon. Sometimes our voice is loud enough. Other times it’s just one tiny little whisper short and we imagine it’s nowhere close.

Our voice was loud in 2005 and 2006. It was loud enough to prevent an attack on Iran in 2007. We’ve been helping to hold off an attack on Iran for years, since our 1953 overthrow of its government and our aid to Iraq in killing Iranians in the 1980s. Now we hear that Iran may have nuclear weapons, or nuclear weapons facilities, or nuclear weapons program capabilities, and Iran was behind 9-11, and Iran is criminally threatening to put up a fight if attacked again, plus Iran hired a Mexican drug gang to assassinate a Saudi ambassador in D.C. and then called it off just to make us look bad for catching them. There’s no limit to the Iranians’ evil, which is why we should take an action that the war proponents themselves say would fail on its own terms. Bombing Iran would do no more than the murderous sanctions already in place or the assassinations of scientists already committed to overthrow the government. And for the U.S. to allow Israel to attack Iran would only fool people in a single nation: ours. Iran would strike back at U.S. troops, and it would be a U.S. war by day two.

War is not just reserved for poor nations now, but it has — in other ways — changed almost beyond recognition. Mostly the elderly and children die in wars now, mostly civilians. The wars happen where they live. Almost entirely non-Americans die in U.S. wars. Sometimes the U.S. warriors are seated in air-conditioned offices in the United States. Drones are better than armies, someone told me recently, because with drones nobody gets killed. Imagine the terror produced by the buzzing of a drone over your house night and day, able to take your life and the lives of your loved ones at any moment. But don’t bother to protest. You’re nobody. You’re not listed in the war casualty reports in U.S. newspapers. When drones kill, nobody dies, and you — you 95 percent of humanity — you are nobody. Harold Koh says that bombing houses is neither a war nor hostilities, under the War Powers Act. Unless Americans are under the bombs, they are not hostile bombs. Perhaps they are friendly bombs, or bombs that are good for people whether they know it or not.

The military now wants to give medals to drone pilots. I picture them as bronzed joy sticks. I actually think there’s something unfair about this idea. I think our brave drones themselves should be getting the medals. They show the absolute least hesitation to kill. Or what about the ants fighting in my back yard? They sacrifice their lives and abandon their comrades with complete efficiency. If we’re handing out medals for desk jobs, what about the guys who pay the protection fees on Afghan roads? Or the guy who catches Petraeus when he faints in Congressional hearings? Why should some people get medals and others not? “War will exist,” wrote John F. Kennedy, “until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.” Therefore, I say, scrap all the medals except for those who refuse to fight.

The key, I think, to getting to that distant day when resisters are honored and warriors are not, is that we stop justifying or ignoring mass-murder. The deaths of 95 percent of the victims of our wars are the most closely guarded secret. The deaths of so-called civilians, of those not understood to be fighting back in defense of their homes, of those not male or fighting age. (Fighting-age males are posthumously declared combatants whenever our government kills them). This is the most forbidden information, because it brings down the war machine. The war machine depends for its existence on being something other than murder on a larger scale, even as it strives to reduce itself to exactly murder on a recognizable scale. Our sacred troops are the war machine’s best defense, since whatever they do must be brave and therefore good. And yet some of those troops are the gravest threat, not only because they can refuse to fight, or can speak out in opposition, but because some of them persist in producing videos and photos of themselves posing with, mutilating, and urinating on the bodies of people they kill.

And then we’re told to be outraged by the urination. But when you get outraged that someone has peed on the body of a man they just murdered, what does that convey about your attitude toward the murder itself? Surely most of us would object more to being killed than to being peed on after we’re dead.

The forbidden thought is that all killing is regrettable, immoral, and criminal. This is the thought of which Lockheed Martin, David Petraeus, General Electric, Buck McKeon, and your neighbors are frightened.

It’s all right to call a war a failure and the failure a SNAFU and incompetence the order of the day. The military money machine can generate even more money out of that. It could have done better with another trillion or two to spend.

It’s all right to point out the injustice, hypocrisy, and shame in our society’s treatment of veterans after they’ve served their war-making purpose. People can devote their time and energy to bake sales for veterans’ needs. That only furthers the acceptance of war in many minds, while a few are awakened. And the Pentagon can shift to fighting its wars with robots.

It’s all right to point out the economic trade-offs at stake, the standard of living we could have if we gave up some bombers and some billionaires. I make this point all the time. A few will understand, but the military industrial complex will counter by calling itself a jobs program and threatening congress members with unemployment in their districts.

What is not all right is finding out that our wars are one-sided slaughters of helpless families, and that over a million Iraqis lie dead in a devastated society where the first question any mother asks in areas poisoned by our weapons is “Is it normal?”

Veterans For Peace put out a statement last week in response to a United Nations communication to the U.S. government expressing concerns about our country’s treatment of children in war. Included were concerns about the recruitment of children into the U.S. military, the U.S. killing of children in Afghanistan, the U.S. detention and torture of children labeled “combatants,” and the provision of weapons by the United States to other nations employing child soldiers. I suspect it is the senseless killing of children abroad that will ultimately sway the most minds, but recruitment — or at least the cost of it — if an issue that is gaining traction.

Congresswoman Betty McCollum of Minnesota has won bipartisan support and passed through the Armed Services Committee a measure blocking the military from spending $80 million on sponsoring NASCAR drivers. We have a campaign at RootsAction.org to keep that measure in the bill. The U.S. Army says a third of its recruits come from motorsports sponsorships. Recruitment stations at racetracks help. But how does the Army measure the impact on our culture of sponsoring race cars? Dale Earnhardt, Jr., whom the National Guard has paid $136 million over the past five years to put a National Guard sticker on his race car and wear the logo on his uniform, predictably opposes cutting the funding, as do the biggest recipients of weapons money in Congress, none of whom have agreed to plaster their bodies with the logos of their sponsors. Military race cars have been featured in music videos, movies, and the shelves of toy stores. How can something so pervasive be measured? Well, we do know this: the total cost of advertising and recruitment per recruit is so much that we could have taken that money and simply given that young person and a bunch of his friends jobs doing something productive.

Those of us over on the left tend to think of cuts as bad and spending as good. For libertarians, cuts are good and spending is bad. This conveniently erases from the discussion the question of WHAT cuts and WHICH spending. We need to stop shouting “Jobs Not Cuts” and start shouting “Jobs Not Wars.” The U.S. military is so well funded, that it could be cut by half, remain far and away the best funded military in the world, and fund with those cuts every program any progressive group has ever dared to dream of for clean energy, education, housing, etc., and quite a few programs nobody has yet dared to dream. Or we on the left could make a deal with libertarians: we work together. We cut a half trillion out of the Pentagon — and I mean each year, not “over 10 years” as they like to say — and we put a quarter trillion into tax cuts and a quarter trillion into useful spending.

A massive urgent program, or what people unthinkingly like to call “a war,” is needed right now to prevent catastrophic climate change. Another is needed to rid the world of nuclear weapons and power. Another is needed to pull government out of the hands of plutocracy. And these aren’t movements aimed at making life a little bit better. Jeremy Brecher wrote recently of the need for a human preservation movement. This is what we need, a survival movement, part of which will be the full abolition of war.

The Occupy movement is a good start at bringing important issues together. But of course we need to carry with us into the occupy movement the distinctly minority understanding that war can and must be completely eliminated. We can learn from the Outlawry movement. It was moral, educational, non-electoral, and long-term with no expectation of succeeding even in a generation, and no trigger to collapse into despair if it didn’t.

We need to recognize that war is not in our genes. It’s a relatively new creation, sporadically present and absent in various societies, avoided when we choose and not otherwise. It’s not created by mystical forces of history or population or resource shortages or testosterone. It’s created by a culture’s tolerance for it, or tolerance for an unrepresentative government that engages in it. That’s our situation. War is a creation of the 1 percent that recruits members of the 99 percent to support it, as well as to do the dirty parts. War and the weapons barons and the oil oligarchs and the Wall Street banksters and the corporate media and the big business lobbies and the crowd of court jesters and sycophants in Washington who claim to be our government: they look more powerful than they are. They’re afraid of their own shadows. Six years ago they were secretly telling each other to end the wars before we gained more strength. Instead we switched parties and went home, while they breathed a sigh of relief. Yet, now, again they are scared of everything we do. They’re spying on every word, comprehending little. What they understand is resistance. Frank Kellogg never understood the Outlawry of War, but he didn’t have to. He just had to do what the people demanded. There are more of us in any small town than there are of them in the whole country. We need to realize our strength.

“And these words shall then become,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley,
“Like Oppression’s thundered doom
“Ringing through each heart and brain,
“Heard again – again – again -
“Rise like Lions after slumber
“In unvanquishable number -
“Shake your chains to earth like dew
“Which in sleep had fallen on you -
“Ye are many – they are few.”

Which came first, the oil business or the war machine that protects it? Who started this madness, the military that consumes so much of the oil or the corporations that distribute and profit from the filthy stuff?

Crude Awakening by Timothy Mitchell

An answer of sorts can be found in Timothy Mitchell’s book, “Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.”

Western oil corporations were never strong enough, Mitchell finds, to monopolize the flow or stoppage of Middle Eastern oil without major military and financial assistance. So, they began talking about their control of Middle Eastern oil as being an imperial interest. When “imperial” went out of fashion, the phrase shifted to “strategic interest.”

Early in the 20th century, the Anglo Persian Oil Company discovered that its oil stank. It contained high levels of sulfur, and people wouldn’t burn it for illumination. So, the oil company enlisted the British Navy, as a customer. In fact, it pretended the Navy was a major customer for a few years until it actually became one. The British empire thus developed an interest in protecting the company’s control of the oil of what is now Iran, in order to fuel the new ships of the Navy — a navy designed to protect Britain’s imperial interests.

The Royal Navy had another reason for shifting to oil-burning ships, according to Mitchell. Coal miners were developing the annoying habit of going on strike, effectively flicking off the light switch on the empire and all its toys. Coal mining involved more workers than oil drilling, and the movement of the coal, once mined, was more easily blocked en route. Coal, and the ease with which it could be sabotaged, was a driver of democracy, whereas oil would be its enemy.

Mitchell also describes British support for the Zionist settlement of Palestine in the 1920s as motivated by a desire to create a population in need of protection, protection that would involve controlling the flow of oil from Iran to the Mediterranean. Well, … that and a population to serve as protectors of the pipeline. In 1936-1939 the British created a force of armed Jewish settlers to guard the Haifa-Lydda railway line — a force that would form the nucleus of the army that seized control of Palestine in 1948.

Also in 1920 Winston Churchill proposed winning hearts and minds in what is now Iraq by bombing the place, to which the British secretary of state for war objected thus: “If the Arab population realize that the peaceful control of Mesopotamia ultimately depends on our intention of bombing women and children, I am very doubtful if we shall gain the acquiescence of the fathers and husbands.” Such logic would no more stop Winston Churchill than it would Barack Obama.

Read the rest of this entry →

Are you aware, I asked a friend, that the guy you’re registering new voters to vote for keeps a list of people he intends to kill? Oh well, he replied, you know.

Do I, now?

Weaponized drones should be banned, I tell a group of progressives. What? Oh no, drones are better than armies, because with drones nobody gets killed.

Is that so? Just how far do progressives have left to progress exactly?

How can we shake people out of their acceptance of murder, I ask peace activists. Easy. We’ll trumpet the news of the 2,000th U.S. death in Afghanistan.

We will?

Can you imagine the response of Afghans who’ve lost many, many times that number of lives, who’ve seen many, many times THAT number made refugees, who’ve watched their nation be destroyed, their people traumatized, their families ripped apart, their children’s bodies ripped apart? Hell, can you imagine the response of a human being who cared about other human beings even if they were Afghans, to the news that the war is objectionable because 2,000 people had now died?

People?

Who gets to be people?

And what the fuck are those of us who believe this entire cultural direction is as depraved as anything yet seen on earth? Are we people too?

We, some of us, headed over on Flag Day to protest a pro-war rally with messages of peace. And what did most of our group want? Good patriotism. Benevolent nationalism. Reclaiming of the flag for what it’s never been. Privileging nation over family, neighborhood, town, county, region, or continent because we should never allow the warmongers and xenophobes to appropriate the symbols of warmongering and xenophobia. Those are OURS dammit!

Where do I hop out of this handbasket, and has anyone noticed that the frogs we keep slandering felt the heat and hopped out long ago?

Every one of those 2,000 dead Americans is a tragedy and a murder. What of the far greater number of U.S. troops dead from suicide, the far greater number alive but ruined, the 3 million Americans locked up in cages, the 136,000 of those — at a minimum — who are innocent of the crimes for which they’ve been locked up? Why in the world is the United States not bombing itself to improve its human rights record? What of the 24,000 people in the United States dying from the burning of coal every year? What of the far greater numbers dying from unsafe work conditions, from automobiles, from senseless small-scale violence, from a broken but marvelously profitable healthcare system? What of the horrors facing the other 95% of humanity, including those living under our wars and those living under our banks?

Obama’s drones are killing people in nations where the United States had no troops on the ground, contemplated no troops on the ground, declared no war, but may soon have to put troops on the ground to follow through on the logic of and confront the damage and hostility created by the drones. Drones are facilitating seemingly easy and consequence-free murder in numerous nations. They are an escalation, not a de-escalation, of violence. The choice is between law enforcement and murder, not murder that risks U.S. deaths and murder that only kills foreigners and kills fewer of them.

In fact, drones do risk U.S. deaths. They are likely to produce blowback in a major way. They have produced blowback already. The future almost certainly holds foreign strikes of retaliation for U.S. drones conducted under the same legal standard, or absence thereof, established by the U.S. but against the U.S. with foreign drones. If drone murders become the new normal, expect to see them where you don’t want them as well as where you do. Expect our militarized police to use drones at home in ways established abroad as doable without serious objection from us. And expect to see even more U.S. military suicides. Drone “pilots’” PTSD rates are shooting through the roof, because they see their victims.

U.S. wars are one-sided slaughters. They’re murder by drone or mass-murder by army. A tiny fraction of the deaths, under 5 percent, are treated by the U.S. media as the entire death count. Who wouldn’t want to eliminate those deaths with drones, other than someone who gave a rat’s ass about the killing of human beings? Or someone who’d been part of the killing, stopped and thought about it, and had a break down?

At Flag Day, a giant inflatable soldier palled around with cub scouts, while boy scouts, ROTC child-soldiers-in-waiting, fresh recruits, and veterans all the way up to the very old listened to a Brigadier General talk about the glory, honor, and legality of war. Then a Marine hacked a cake in half with a sword, exactly as if slicing through a prisoner’s neck. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers for wars.

But where are the non-murder jobs for those kids? Non-killing jobs cost less than military jobs. Military spending is hollowing out our economy to the point where we spend enough on recruitment efforts per new recruit to have given a crowd of young people jobs just with the money spent convincing one of them to take a gig as an assistant assassin. Call it something else if you want, but look at who your commander in chief is when you take that oath to perform the utterly impossible task of simultaneously obeying the Constitution, the President, and whoever gives you an order.

Senator Carl Levin says that cutting 0.05% of a military budget that has doubled this decade will endanger us all. His funders smirk. His pimp nods. And good progressives look at each other uncertainly. We wouldn’t want to endanger our non-xenophobically defined Homeland, would we? Maybe we should stick to promoting Elizabeth Warren for Senate, along with her lies pushing war with Iran, and her claims that the Pentagon and the spy agencies have it wrong, that Iran really is building nuclear weapons and threatening our sacred patria. And I say that with good patriotism.

Let the bankers pay for part of the next war. That should set things right. The important thing is to register more voters. Shifting to an election campaign focus has worked out so well in Wisconsin and Egypt that anybody would be crazy not to jump on board. And if you end up working your tail off for a sociopath with a kill list, oh well, you know?

In the words of the great John Lennon, imagine all your tiny little country treating the rest of the world as expendable.

(photo: you are your atman/flickr)

The strict rule of law is an ideal and a fantasy.  Conflicting and archaic words must be interpreted, and doing so is an art, not a science.

But there is an enormous chasm between honest attempts to approach the ideal of compliance with written law, and open disregard for it.

It is becoming standard practice for our government to enforce laws selectively or not at all, to openly defy laws, to enact laws in violation of the higher law called the Constitution or in violation of the treaties which that Constitution defines as the Supreme Law of the Land.

At the same time, charades of legality degrade it as an ideal: the International Criminal Court is not international, military justice makes a mockery of justice, etc.  And anti-legal measures, like secret sections of the PATRIOT act that can be enforced against us but which we cannot be permitted to read in order to comply with, muddle for many people the very idea of lawfulness.

Law is losing respect among people as a result of government defiance.  Why should we protest, I’m asked, when Congress legalizes domestic propaganda, since our government already lies to us and goes unpunished?  What difference does it make to call that “legal”?

On top of this, it is becoming a violation of laws in many cases to assemble, speak, and protest.  When we try to nonviolently gather and march against mass murder, we’re greeted by masses of militarized law enforcement officers and undercover police who try to entrap us in sick evil plots they’ve dreamed up.

Meanwhile over half of our federal government’s discretionary budget goes to war and preparations for war, leaving those who morally object to funding such horrors with no choice but to violate the law requiring taxes — even while it is public knowledge that many of our wealthiest corporations and individuals pay little, no, or negative tax rates, and do so “legally,” many of them also profiting from the business of war, the business of imprisonment, or the “legal” business of destroying our atmosphere with fossil fuels.

The ideal of law, as if it were not in enough trouble, has suffered an additional blow from the U.S. government’s shift in policy from torture to murder.  A young man spent days in the capital of Pakistan and could easily have been arrested.  Instead, he was murdered, days after departing, by a U.S. drone.  He was never charged with any crime.  Was it law enforcement?  Then why is a career-criminal who was recess-appointed by an imperial president empowered to serve as judge, jury, and executioner, and to exercise his judicial power world-wide and in secret?  What sort of law is that?  If, on the contrary, such “strikes” are war, they are war with one army sitting at a desk thousands of miles away, with their drive home to dinner the most dangerous part of their day, while the other army is handcuffed and blindfolded on the battlefield with their kids and spouses and grandparents along.  And since when is war itself legal, much less an alternative to law enforcement?

By written law, the Kellogg-Briand Pact bans all war.  This treaty was put in place in 1928.  The U.S. State Department says 65 nations are committed to it.  Yet the very idea of actually complying with it elicits nothing but laughter in Washington, D.C.  The primary reason not to comply with it, I’m told, is that nobody complies with it.  Of course, many nations do.

The next reason is that it is a “failed” treaty.  It banned war.  We’ve still had wars.  Therefore it’s no good.  In fact, the typical argument is that it banned war, and World War II happened, and so it’s no good.  But we also still have murder.  Shall we legalize that?  When did a single violation of a law take on the power to erase the law?  Isn’t it normal practice to punish violations of laws and leave the laws in place until overturned by democratic process?  In fact, after World War II, the Kellogg-Briand Pact was used to prosecute war as a crime for the first time ever.  How could that erase the law utilized, as opposed to strengthening it — unless very powerful forces wanted it erased and everyone else tragically complied?

The next reason to ignore the illegality of war established by the Kellogg-Briand Pact is that the U.N. Charter supersedes it.  The U.N. Charter legalizes two categories of wars (defensive and U.N. authorized) that have been interpreted broadly and predictably to allow pretty much free warmaking by the most powerful warmakers.  The United Nations opened the world back up to legal war, just as the Geneva conventions civilized proper legal war fighting.  But the U.N. Charter cannot erase the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and many of our wars indisputably violate the U.N. Charter as well, not to mention the U.S. Constitution, the War Powers Act, etc.

What enforces laws or tosses them aside is the collective decision-making of our culture.  One friend, whom I asked about his acceptance of “legal” status for war, responded that the “community of international lawyers” gets to decide.  But that is only true if people at large let them.  The same friend suggested I read a book called “Of War and Law” by David Kennedy, and I’ve just done so.  I now consider Kennedy an enemy of the very idea of law, and I see a need to argue for law’s value.  Kennedy’s entire book makes no mention of courts, judges, prosecutions, or punishments.  Legality in war, for Kennedy, is a subcategory of public relations.  Wars — and it is U.S. wars he is discussing, I don’t know whether he agrees with the ICC on the need to prosecute African warmakers –  look better to the extent that they can persuasively claim to be “legal.”

According to Kennedy, “determining the law governing military operations is not a simple matter of looking things up in a book, particularly for coalition operations, or for campaigns that stretch the battlespace across numerous jurisdictions. . . . once you begin thinking of the international legal order as backstopped by a ‘court of public opinion,’ or international norms being enforced through the decentralized process through which the ‘international community’ makes the political initiatives of those who are perceived to break the norms less legitimate and therefore more costly to undertake, the idea of ‘validity’ makes less sense.  There is no authoritative determiner of the norms and interpretations that are, in fact, valid.”  Might makes right.

“War has become an affair of rules,” writes Kennedy, fooling himself.  Legalistic rhetoric is not law.  And war includes as much finger-chopping, mutilating, rape, slaughter, suicide, and insanity as ever.  “No ship moves, no weapon is fired, no target selected without some review for compliance with regulation — not because the military has gone soft, but because there is simply no other way to make modern warfare work.”  Uh huh.  Now shout “Humanitarian war in Haditha” three times fast.

But don’t blame anyone.  Warmakers don’t make wars, Kennedy tells us.  Wars make the warmakers: “Neither the commander in chief nor the political culture of Washington controls the politics of the battlespace.  As often as not, it will be the reverse.”  Helpless though they may be, the warmakers are professional, Kennedy writes.  Even John Yoo’s memos were professional, thus putting them beyond reproach — likewise the use of nuclear bombs, extremely professional.  “War has become, in Clausewitzian terms, the continuation of law by other means,” according to Kennedy — the reversal, it should be noted, of the goal of the 1920s Outlawrists who created Kellogg-Briand.  War is illegal on paper, while in practice, in Nixonian terms, if the war does it then that means it’s not illegal.

Kennedy and I both want to eliminate the laws that govern the conduct of war.  But I want to do so by enforcing the law that forbids war entirely.  He wants to do so by treating laws as helpful suggestions and rules of thumb, with the ultimate authority on an action’s legality to be precisely whoever takes the action.  You can imagine how this would go over in domestic affairs.  You can imagine how it would go over if the nations where we fight our wars were inhabited by white, English-speaking Christians.  As it is, Kennedy’s assault on the rule of law is more insidious and more powerful than that of any anarchists shouting about their ownership of a street.

The rule of law was to replace the rule of kings.  Take it away and see what you’re left with.

There must be a special loophole in Hell reserved for war lawyers.

MAY 20, 2012, MILITARIZED CHICAGO — Next month in Baltimore they’re going to celebrate the War of 1812.  That’s what we do with wars.  We say they’re the last resort.  We say they’re hell.  We say they’re for the purpose of eliminating themselves: we fight wars for peace.  Although we never keep peace for wars.  We claim to wage only wars we have been forced into despite all possible effort to find a better way.  And then we celebrate the wars.  We keep the wars going for their own sake after all the excuses we used to get them started have expired.  The WMDs have not been found.  Osama bin Laden’s been killed.  Al Qaeda is gone from the country where we’re fighting it.  Nobody’s threatening Benghazi anymore.  But the wars must go on!  And then we’ll celebrate them.  And we’ll celebrate the old ones too, the ones that were fought here, the ones that were in their day not quite so heavily painted as last resorts or humanitarian missions.

Last year Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee persuaded Congress to create an Iraq-Afghanistan Wars holiday.  It’s on our calendars now along with Loyalty Day (formerly May Day), Veterans Day (formerly Armistice Day), Memorial Day, Yellow Ribbon Day, Patriots Day, Independence Day, Flag Day, Pearl Harbor Day, and of course September 11th, among many others.  Last week there was an Armed Forces Spouses Appreciation Day.  The military holiday calendar is like the Catholic saints’ days now: there’s something every day of the year.

But there’s no celebration of the times we avoided war. We claim to prefer peace to war, but we don’t make heroes of those presidents or Congresses who most avoided war.  In fact, we erase them.  Our history books jump from war to war as if nothing happened in between.  Nobody celebrates 1811, only 1812.  Even the peace movement doesn’t celebrate the past decade’s prevention, thus far, of a war on Iran.

Some might say that once an unavoidable war begins we have to celebrate the brave sacrifices of the soldiers and sailors.  Even if the war was a bad idea, we can’t blame those who participated in it.  They were too ignorant and obedient to do otherwise, but they were brave and loyal.  We weren’t in their shoes.  We had other means to pay for college.  So we are obliged to celebrate their moral failings.  We must value bravery and loyalty above intelligent independent thinking.  And, because they ignorantly and obediently supported the war, we must do so too — even if we honestly don’t.

As if there is not bravery, solidarity, and self-sacrifice to be celebrated in our history of nonviolent protest, labor struggles, women’s struggles, the environmentalist movement, and in resistance to war — in all the efforts that have improved and are improving our lives.  Freedom isn’t free, as the saying goes, but we don’t honor the work that actually achieves it. “War will exist,” President Kennedy privately wrote, “until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.”  And here’s the hard part of that: the conscientious objector will not be honored and respected as long as the warrior is.  We have to choose. Read the rest of this entry →

In 1939, Sebastian Haffner sat down and wrote a pre-history of Nazism.

Nazism had not been inevitable. It had not progressed steadily without setbacks. But it had been growing for many years, even before the name for it existed. It had been coming since the end of the Great War.

By the late 1920s, according to Haffner, “Berlin became quite an international city. Admittedly, the sinister Nazi types already lurked in the wings, as ‘we’ could not fail to notice with deep disgust. They spoke of ‘Eastern vermin’ with murder in their eyes and sneeringly of ‘Americanization.’ Whereas ‘we,’ a segment of the younger generation difficult to define but instantly and mutually recognizable, were not only friendly toward foreigners, but enthusiastic about them.”

The Stresemann Era, 1924-1929, saw Gustav Stresemann serve as Foreign Minister. He made peace with France, joined the League of Nations, won a Nobel Peace Prize, wandered the streets of Berlin unarmed and unguarded, and his signature is first at the bottom of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Who studies him today? His spirit is far more powerful in Germany now than Hitler’s, so powerful as to go unnoticed.

But Hitler was coming. When Stresemann died in 1929, “we were seized with icy terror. . . . The era of peace was at an end. So long as Stresemann had been there, we had not quite believed it. Now we knew.”

In 1930, Heinrich Bruning became chancellor, ushering in what we would today call “bipartisan austerity” or “fiscal responsibility,” something the United States and its allies helped to impose on Germany, just as the United States and Germany now help to impose it on Greece or Spain. Bruning cut salaries, pensions, social benefits, wages, interest rates, freedom to travel, freedom of the press, and the powers of the parliament. “Yet, paradoxically, his actions were rooted in the conviction that he was defending the republic. Understandably, the republicans began to ask themselves whether there was anything left to defend.”

Haffner makes an interesting observation at this point in his reminiscences: “To my knowledge, the Bruning regime was the first essay and model of a form of government that has since been copied in many European countries: the semi-dictatorship in the name, and in defense, of democracy against fully fledged dictatorship.”

As a U.S. citizen in 2012, of course, there is nothing whatsoever familiar to me in Haffner’s description of Bruning:

“Anyone who takes the trouble to study Bruning’s rule in depth will find all those factors that make this sort of government the inevitable forerunner of the very thing it is supposed to prevent: its discouragement of its own supporters; the way it undermines its own position; its acceptance of a loss of freedom; its lack of ideological weapons against enemy propaganda; the way it surrenders the initiative; and its collapse at the final moment when the issue is reduced to a simple question of power.”

I will admit that Haffner does pull out a phrase I have heard used in our own day: “Bruning had no real following. He was ‘tolerated.’ He was the lesser evil, the strict schoolmaster who accompanied the chastisement of his pupils with the words ‘This will hurt me more than you,’ rather than a sadistic torturer.”

And this logic does strike me as oddly clear, almost like something I might have seen somewhere before without paying sufficient attention: “One supported Bruning because he seemed to be the only bulwark against Hitler. Knowing that he owed his own political life to the threat posed by Hitler, Bruning had to fight against him, but at all costs refrain from destroying him.”

But Hitler was coming. Haffner saw him coming in the face of a policeman newly militarized: “This face seemed to consist entirely of teeth. The man had literally snarled at me, baring both rows of teeth, an unusual grimace for a human being. . . . I shuddered. I had seen the face of the SS.” Two days later the Reichstag burned. The next day everything changed. Civil liberties, the rule of law, the Constitution, civilization: it all oozed away. Soon such changes would be instituted without even bothering with Reichstag-fire-like excuses.

People went along out of fear, or belief in the system, or a desire to change the Nazi Party from within, or from the value they placed in doing their work well, whatever that work might happen to be. People went along as the mythical frogs on whom we impose human behavior in the story of the boiling water. They did not understand. They did not want to understand. They did not want to consider that young people who understood might be right. They slowly began speaking the language of brutal stupidity: Einsatz (strike force), Garant (pledge), fanatisch (fanatical), Volksgenosse (racial comrade), Scholle (soil), artfremd (racially alien), Untermensch (subhuman), Heimat (Homeland).

Now, history does not actually repeat itself. It’s far too complex and unpredictable. But a few facts leap out at us today:

We are at war with the world without end for the sake of war itself.

We have given power over from the Congress to the President.

We have allowed the Supreme Court to give power over the President to financial and weapons interests.

We have developed a central corporatist and militarist communications system.

Our government operates in great secrecy, censoring and prosecuting whistleblowers.

Our military conducts criminal trials that people strain themselves not to laugh at or condemn, thereby training themselves in a new kind of behavior.

Our president claims the power to imprison, torture, or murder.

Our society has labeled a class of people “illegals” and subjected them to a secondary and abusive status.

Our police have been militarized, nationalized, and empowered to strip-search us or assault us with tasers.

A soldier was just dismissed for speaking unacceptably of the President.

Our government and large corporate partners spy on everything we say on a telephone or near a cell phone, and everything we do or type on the internet.

Our government kills people all over the world with drones and is now putting drones in our own skies.

And we’ve advanced from lying about wars to joking about the lies about the wars to not even bothering with the lies or any legal pretense whatsoever.

Have we killed as many people as Hitler did? No, not in the same manner. But by sins of both commission (Iraqis bombed and shot, for example) and omission (children starving and suffering from preventable illness, for example) of course we have. And we have the potential to quite easily kill many more.

I can still write this.

I can still post this on marginal websites unseen by the masses.

I can still say these things openly on the street.

But reporters are being preemptively detained. Peace activists’ homes are being raided. And the number two excuse I get from people for their inaction (after futility, which is always number one) is fear (which is not always high on the list — it had to be put there).

Do you use these phrases? Illegal Alien. Underclass. Stakeholders. Defense Department. Humanitarian Intervention. Homeland. Targeted Strike. Collateral Damage. Evildoers. Islamofascists. Terrorists. Muslim Extremists. Status of Forces Agreement. Iranian Threat.

If you use those phrases, are they your own?

If you hear those phrases, do you object to them? Do you protest them?

Do you ever think that when they destroyed ACORN it didn’t affect you because you weren’t a poor person and you weren’t a community organizer? Is preventing union organization all right as long as you’re not in a union? Is it OK if they lock up Muslims for free speech but legalize political bribery in the name of free speech for corporations, as long as you’re not a Muslim and your food comes from a corporation? Is it OK to profile Latinos because your ancestors got here earlier? Are we safe packing the prisons with blacks because you’re white? Can whistleblowers be put away for life as long as the President says they were secretly helping evil foreigners who want us dead?

Or does that worry you a little?

Scott Camil, a veteran of the second-longest U.S. war in history, that on Vietnam, radically changed a discussion of the longest war in U.S. history, that on Afghanistan, on CNN on Sunday.

CNN’s Don Lemon tried repeatedly to explain troops posing with body parts as an inscrutable result of war, without questioning the justification of that war.  Repeatedly, Lemon instructed viewers not to judge soldiers.

A guest to whom Lemon devoted a great deal of time, Dr. Terry Lyles, followed Lemon’s leads and was praised by Lemon as the best guest he’d heard from on the topic.  Lyles suggested the problem was one of public relations: “We need to do a better job,” he said, “you know, with them psychologically to help them understand that the world is watching.  Be careful about what you do and what you capture while what you’re doing every day is very difficult.”

Scott Camil took a different tack, saying: “Well no we don’t know what it’s like to be in combat unless you’ve been in combat, but I think the real question is: you’re nit picking when you’re talking about things like people posing with bodies.  The real question should be why are we at war in the first place? Why are we killing so many people in the first place? The concern over posing with someone that’s dead, it seems to me the fact that that person is dead and that we’re killing people is more important than what happens after they’re dead.”

Camil’s comment was so effective that the next panelist to speak shifted to his topic.  Holly Hughes remarked: “Scott hit the nail on the head because now we’ve opened a dialogue.  What are we talking about now?  Shouldn’t we be more upset that we’re out there killing people? . . . Maybe we need to assess why we’re there in the first place.”

Camil continued: “What I understand is what it’s like to be in a war zone and I understand the behavior in a war zone.  And I would say that, first of all, that war is really an institution made up of criminal behavior.  When we as civilians want to solve our problems, we’re not allowed to murder people and burn their houses down.  I don’t see why war is an acceptable means of conflict resolution.  And furthermore, the majority of people that die are innocent civilians.”

Some fundamental truths are rarely spoken on television.

Watch the video
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2012/04/22/nr-corpses-trophies.cnn

Scott Camil was honorably discharged with 13 medals including 2 purple hearts following 20 months voluntarily spent as a Marine in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967.  He testified at the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971, and was a founding member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War Inc. He is an active member of Veterans For Peace and serves as the President of Chapter 014 in Gainesville, Florida.

Veterans for Peace was founded in 1985 and has approximately 5,000 members in 150 chapters located in every U.S. state and several countries. It is a 501(c)3 non-profit educational organization recognized as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) by the United Nations, and is the only national veterans’ organization calling for the abolishment of war.