Discontented Soul

By Scott Galindez
Truthout / Perspective

Let's face it, the Republicans won this election in middle America. They won this election in churches and diners in rural America. The Democrats have to work very hard over the next four years to make in roads in small towns in the Midwest and the South.
What people in rural America said was that they liked George Bush's morals.
The Challenge over the next four years will be to paint many Republican policies as immoral and against the interests of rural America. It is not time as some suggest to move to the right — that has been tried and has been a failure. What is needed is a concerted effort to communicate to people that liberal policies are in their interest. Democrats must stop running away from the word liberal and instead make it a good word again.
Democrats must stand up and say that universal health care, a living wage, protecting the environment, and protecting social security are liberal values and they are in the interest of rural America.
Democrats can not wait until the next round of elections to make the case — a massive rural outreach campaign must start now. Congressional elections are only two years away. An effort must be made to recruit candidates who will make the case that Democratic Party values are American values and the Republican party does not have rural America's best interests at heart.
Those who argue that a move to the right is needed should look at the results of the Senate elections this time. Brad Carson, Erskin Bowles, and others ran on conservative platforms against weak candidates and still lost. When Democrats try to run as conservatives, the voters choose the real Republican not the Democrat trying to act like one.
It is time to look at people like Senator Tom Harkin and realize that he is a populist liberal and is able to win in Iowa. It is time to stop trying to mould candidates for the electorate they are facing and run candidates that will move the electorate.
Instead of running from the liberal label, it is time to make the electorate liberal again. There is nothing wrong with being liberal, the problem is that liberals, instead of making the case for liberalism being right, have instead tried to make the case that they are not as liberal as their opponent claims. This is a formula for disaster, since the voter is going to choose the real conservative in a race where both candidates are trying to run as conservatives.
America is a liberal country. The Republican Party has done a great job of marketing conservatism, while the Democrats have not defended liberalism.
The time has come to make conservative a bad word.

by Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.
Sunday morning came — next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams — visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabres, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbours and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honour, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation
“God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!”
Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honour and glory…
An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting.
With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"
The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside — which the startled minister did — and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:
"I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import — that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of — except he pause and think.
"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! Lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbour at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbour’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
"You have heard your servant's prayer — the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it — that part which the pastor — and also you in your hearts — fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our
hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.
Amen.”
(After a pause) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

by Molly Ivins
Published on Thursday, November 18, 2004 by the Boulder Daily Camera

Whilst the punditry wanders weak and weary in the deep fogs of the "moral values debate," what say we pay some attention to what is going on, eh?
According to Newsday, "The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden ..."
Bad Nooz. In the first place, the concept of "purge" has not hitherto played much part in our history, and now is no time to start. Considerable pains have been taken to protect the civil service from partisan pressure.
"Disloyalty to Bush," or any president, is not the same as disloyalty to the country. In fact, in the intelligence biz, opposing the White House is sometimes the highest form of loyalty to country....

by Johnathan Schell
Published on Thursday, November 18, 2004 by TomDispatch.com

When the attack came, the first target was Falluja General Hospital. The New York Times explained why: "The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties." If there were no hospital, there would be no visible casualties; if there were no visible casualties, there would be no international outrage, and all would be well. What of those civilians who remained? No men of military age were permitted to leave during the attack. Remaining civilians were trapped in their apartments with no electricity or water. No one knows how many of them have been killed, and no official group has any plans to find out. The city itself is a ruin. "A drive through the city revealed a picture of utter destruction," the Independent of Britain reports, "with concrete houses flattened, mosques in ruins, telegraph poles down, power and phone lines hanging slack and rubble and human remains littering the empty streets."
..."They made a wasteland and called it peace," Tacitus famously said. It was left to the United States, champion of freedom, to update the formula: They made a wasteland and called it democracy.

Iranian Americans are dismayed by glib neocon talk of regime change.
By Jeet Heer and Laura RozenBased in Toronto, Jeet Heer frequently writes for the Boston Globe and the National Post. Laura Rozen reports on foreign affairs and national security issues from Washington, D.C.
November 15, 2004
With President Bush elected to a second term, and the neoconservative architects of the Iraq war firmly in the driver's seat of U.S. foreign policy, Iranian Americans are contemplating a stark choice similar to that faced by Iraqi Americans a few years ago — whether they want to work with Washington to liberate their home country...

Now Is Not the Time For National Unity!

by Nicholas von Hoffman
Published on Wednesday, November 17, 2004 by the New York Observer

...The Christian clergy of the United States was either pro-Bush or silent. When Mr. Kerry was condemned by a group of bishops in his own church, there was no countervailing group of bishops stepping forward to defend him. Organized Christian religion is either controlled by the other side or indifferent, or too weak and spineless to defy Republican godliness. Mr. Kerry, having to deal with the hostility of organized religion, chose to play the other side’s game. You cannot blame him for going publicly pious in self-defense: No significant Democratic voice took on religion. The major figures, as much intimidated as Mr. Kerry, shut up and played pious, too. Mr. Kerry was reduced to telling the world that when he was fighting in Vietnam he carried a rosary in his pocket. How undignified is that? But given how he was left out to dry, he cannot be fairly criticized.
Taking on religion, and the superstition and obscurantism which characterize it, is not the job of somebody running for public office in America. Somebody else had better start fighting back, however, before a new species of the Dark Ages is upon us, and faith-based mobs begin breaking into scientific laboratories and smashing the test tubes. If the Republicans want to talk values, then let us talk values, because some of their values are pretty damn ugly.
Let us talk about religion and reaction in America, now and then. The alliance between the Republicans and the churches is no new thing: The Christian clergy has a long history of siding with the big money and the powerful. Be meek and get your butt kicked. The job of taking on organized religion should not be left to well-meaning but ineffectual groups working on keeping church and state separated. This is much bigger, more insidious and more dangerous than dragging a stone with the Ten Commandments on it in front of the courthouse.
From defeat, if we can take nothing else, take disunity, division and a refusal to shut down the liberal spirit. And one more thing: The next time you hear a politician call for prayer or give a "God bless," boo!

One of the most amusing lies told be the Suits of the business community is that, if they pay less tax, they will be able to invest more and thus employ more people.
Why can’t they be honest, just once? Lower taxes for business means higher profits for investors and higher salaries for CEOs — end of story.
Ooops, maybe not. There MAY be more jobs – but they will be located in a “Special Economic Zone” in China, where workers are locked in their factories and paid less-than-subsistence wages. Such are the benefits of globalization!

by Howard Zinn
Published on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 by TomDispatch.com

When I decided, in the late 1970s, to write A People's History of the United States, I had been teaching history for twenty years. Half of that time I was involved in the civil rights movement in the South, when I was teaching at Spelman College, a black women's college in Atlanta, Georgia. And then there were ten years of activity against the war in Vietnam. Those experiences were not a recipe for neutrality in the teaching and writing of history.
But my partisanship was undoubtedly shaped even earlier by my upbringing in a family of working-class immigrants in New York, by my three years as a shipyard worker, starting at the age of eighteen, and then by my experience as an Air Force bombardier in World War II, flying out of England and bombing targets in various parts of Europe, including the Atlantic coast of France.
After the war I went to college under the GI Bill of Rights. That was a piece of wartime legislation that enabled millions of veterans to go to college without paying any tuition, and so allowed the sons of working-class families who ordinarily would never be able to afford it to get a college education. I received my doctorate in history at Columbia University, but my own experience made me aware that the history I learned in the university omitted crucial elements in the history of the country.
From the start of my teaching and writing, I had no illusions about "objectivity," if that meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, from an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.
There is an insistence, among certain educators and politicians in the United States, that students must learn facts. I am reminded of the character in Charles Dickens's book Hard Times, Gradgrind, who admonishes a younger teacher: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life."
But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world -- by a teacher, a writer, anyone -- is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts are not important and so they are omitted from the presentation.
There were themes of profound importance to me that I found missing in the orthodox histories that dominated American culture. The consequence of these omissions has been not simply to give a distorted view of the past but, more importantly, to mislead us all about the present.
For instance, there is the issue of class. The dominant culture in the United States -- in education, among politicians, in the media -- pretends that we live in a classless society with one common interest. The Preamble to the United States Constitution, which declares that "we the people" wrote this document, is a great deception. The Constitution was written in 1787 by fifty-five rich white men -- slave owners, bondholders, merchants -- who established a strong central government that would serve their class interests.
That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us, rich and poor and middle class, have a common interest.
Thus, the state of the nation is described in universal terms. When the president declares happily that "our economy is sound," he will not acknowledge that it is not sound for forty or fifty million people who are struggling to survive, although it may be moderately sound for many in the middle class, and extremely sound for the richest 1% of the nation who own 40% of the nation's wealth.
Class interest has always been obscured behind an all-encompassing veil called "the national interest."
My own war experience, and the history of all those military interventions in which the United States was engaged, made me skeptical when I heard people in high political office invoke "the national interest" or "national security" to justify their policies. It was with such justifications that Harry Truman initiated a "police action" in Korea that killed several million people, that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon carried out a war in Southeast Asia in which perhaps three million people died, that Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada, that the elder Bush attacked Panama and then Iraq, and that Bill Clinton bombed Iraq again and again.
The claim made in spring of 2003 by the new Bush that invading and bombing Iraq was in the national interest was particularly absurd, and could only be accepted by people in the United States because of a blanket of lies spread across the country by the government and the major organs of public information -- lies about "weapons of mass destruction," lies about Iraq's connections with Al Qaeda.
When I decided to write A People's History of the United States, I decided I wanted to tell the story of the nation's wars not through the eyes of the generals and the political leaders but from the viewpoints of the working-class youngsters who became GIs, or the parents or wives who received the black-bordered telegrams.
I wanted to tell the story of the nation's wars from the viewpoint of the enemy: the viewpoint of the Mexicans who were invaded in the Mexican War, the Cubans whose country was taken over by the United States in 1898, the Filipinos who suffered a devastating aggressive war at the beginning of the twentieth century, with perhaps 600,000 people dead as a result of the determination of the U.S. government to conquer the Philippines.
What struck me as I began to study history, and what I wanted to convey in my own writing of history, was how nationalist fervor -- inculcated from childhood by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, waving flags, and militaristic rhetoric -- permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own.
I wondered how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or cluster bombs on Afghanistan or Iraq, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children.
The Spoken Word as a Political Act
When I began to write "people's history," I was influenced by my own experience, living in a black community in the South with my family, teaching at a black women's college, and becoming involved in the movement against racial segregation. I became aware of how badly twisted was the teaching and writing of history by its submersion of nonwhite people. Yes, Native Americans were there in the history, but quickly gone. Black people were visible as slaves, then supposedly free, but invisible. It was a white man's history.
From elementary school to graduate school, I was given no suggestion that the landing of Christopher Columbus in the New World initiated a genocide in which the indigenous population of Hispaniola was annihilated. Or that this was the first stage of what was presented as a benign expansion of the new nation, but which involved the violent expulsion of Native Americans, accompanied by unspeakable atrocities, from every square mile of the continent, until there was nothing to do but herd them into reservations.
Every American schoolchild learns about the Boston Massacre, which preceded the Revolutionary War against England. Five colonists were killed by British troops in 1770. But how many schoolchildren learned about the massacre of six hundred men, women, and children of the Pequot tribe in New England in 1637? Or the massacre, in the midst of the Civil War, of hundreds of Native American families at Sand Creek, Colorado, by U.S. soldiers?
Nowhere in my history education did I learn about the massacres of black people that took place again and again, amid the silence of a national government pledged by the Constitution to protect equal rights for all. For instance, in 1917 there occurred in East St. Louis one of the many "race riots" that took place in what our white-oriented history books called the "Progressive Era." White workers, angered by an influx of black workers, killed perhaps two hundred people, provoking an angry article by the African-American writer W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Massacre of East St. Louis," and causing the performing artist Josephine Baker to say: "The very idea of America makes me shake and tremble and gives me nightmares."
I wanted, in writing people's history, to awaken a great consciousness of class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality, and national arrogance.
But I also wanted to bring into the light the hidden resistance of the people against the power of the establishment: the refusal of Native Americans to simply die and disappear; the rebellion of black people in the anti-slavery movement and in the more recent movement against racial segregation; the strikes carried out by working people to improve their lives.
When I began work, five years ago, on what would become a companion volume to my People's History, Voices of a People's History of the United States, I wanted the voices of struggle, mostly absent in our history books, to be given the place they deserve. I wanted labor history, which has been the battleground, decade after decade, century after century, of an ongoing fight for human dignity, to come to the fore. And I wanted my readers to experience how at key moments in our history some of the bravest and most effective political acts were the sounds of the human voice itself. When John Brown proclaimed at his trial that his insurrection was "not wrong, but right," when Fannie Lou Hamer testified in 1964 about the dangers to blacks who tried to register to vote, when during the first Gulf War, in 1991, Alex Molnar defied the president on behalf of his son and of all of us, their words influenced and inspired so many people. They were not just words but actions.
To omit or to minimize these voices of resistance is to create the idea that power only rests with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth, who own the newspapers and the television stations. I want to point out that people who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women -- once they organize and protest and create movements -- have a voice no government can suppress.
America's Missing Voices
Readers of my book A People's History of the United States almost always point to the wealth of quoted material in it -- the words of fugitive slaves, Native Americans, farmers and factory workers, dissenters and dissidents of all kinds. These readers are struck, I must reluctantly admit, more by the words of the people I quote than by my own running commentary on the history of the nation.
I can't say I blame them. Any historian would have difficulty matching the eloquence of the Native American leader Powhatan, pleading with the white settler in the year 1607: "Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love?"
Or the black scientist Benjamin Banneker, writing to Thomas Jefferson: "I apprehend you will readily embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions which so generally prevails with respect to us, and that your Sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are that one universal Father hath given being to us all, and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also without partiality afforded us all the Same Sensations and [endowed] us all with the same faculties."
Or Sarah Grimké, a white Southern woman and abolitionist, writing: "I ask no favors for my sex. . . . All I ask of our brethren, is that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Or Henry David Thoreau, protesting the Mexican War, writing on civil disobedience: "A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart."
Or Jermain Wesley Loguen, escaped slave, speaking in Syracuse on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850: "I received my freedom from Heaven and with it came the command to defend my title to it. . . . I don't respect this law -- I don't fear it -- I won't obey it! It outlaws me, and I outlaw it."
Or the populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease of Kansas: "Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street."
Or Emma Goldman, speaking to the jury at her trial for opposing World War I: "Verily poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world? . . . [A] democracy conceived in the military servitude of the masses, in their economic enslavement, and nurtured in their tears and blood, is not democracy at all."
Or Mississippi sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer, testifying in 1964 about the dangers to blacks who tried to register to vote: "[T]he plantation owner came, and said, 'Fannie Lou. . . . If you don't go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave . . . because we are not ready for that in Mississippi.' And I addressed him and told him and said, 'I didn't try to register for you. I tried to register for myself.'"
Or the young black people in McComb, Mississippi, who, learning of a classmate killed in Vietnam, distributed a leaflet: "No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Vietnam for the White Man's freedom, until all the Negro People are free in Mississippi."
Or the poet Adrienne Rich, writing in the 1970s: "I know of no woman -- virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate -- whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves -- for whom the body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meanings, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings."
Or Alex Molnar, whose twenty-one-year-old son was a Marine in the Persian Gulf, writing an angry letter to the first President Bush: "Where were you, Mr. President, when Iraq was killing its own people with poison gas? . . . I intend to support my son and his fellow soldiers by doing everything I can to oppose any offensive American military action in the Persian Gulf."
Or Orlando and Phyllis Rodriguez, opposing the idea of retaliation after their son was killed in the Twin Towers: "Our son Greg is among the many missing from the World Trade Center attack. Since we first heard the news, we have shared moments of grief, comfort, hope, despair, fond memories with his wife, the two families, our friends and neighbors, his loving colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald/ESpeed, and all the grieving families that daily meet at the Pierre Hotel. We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet. We cannot pay attention to the daily flow of news about this disaster. But we read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son's death. Not in our son's name."
What is common to all these voices is that they have mostly been shut out of the orthodox histories, the major media, the standard textbooks, the controlled culture. The result of having our history dominated by presidents and generals and other "important" people is to create a passive citizenry, not knowing its own powers, always waiting for some savior on high -- God or the next president -- to bring peace and justice.
History, looked at under the surface, in the streets and on the farms, in GI barracks and trailer camps, in factories and offices, tells a different story. Whenever injustices have been remedied, wars halted, women and blacks and Native Americans given their due, it has been because "unimportant" people spoke up, organized, protested, and brought democracy alive.

Howard Zinn is the author with Anthony Arnove of the just published Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) and of the international best-selling A People's History of the United States. This piece is adapted from the introduction to the new Voices volume.
© 2004 Howard Zinn

by Robert Fisk
Publisheded on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 by the lndependent/UK

So the death of Yasser Arafat is a great new opportunity for the Palestinians, is it? The man who personified the Palestinian struggle - "Mr Palestine" - is dead. So things can only get better for the Palestinians. Death means democracy. Death means statehood. That the final demise of the corrupt old guerrilla leader should be a sign of optimism demonstrates just how catastrophic the conflict in the Middle East has now become...

Should Canada Indict Bush?

by Thomas Walkom
Published on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 by the Toronto Star

When US President George W Bush arrives in Ottawa — probably later this year — should he be welcomed? Or should he be charged with war crimes?
It's an interesting question. On the face of it, Bush seems a perfect candidate for prosecution under Canada's Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act.
This act was passed in 2000 to bring Canada's ineffectual laws in line with the rules of the new International Criminal Court. While never tested, it lays out sweeping categories under which a foreign leader like Bush could face arrest...

For most of the twentieth century, Capitalism has been sclerotic, and one would have thought that, now that its primary ideological opponent, the USSR, is no more, our wonderful free-enterprise system would have tottered peacefully to its grave. But, as Ronald Reagan demonstrated, old things fight all the way against the Death Goddess. So we are being treated to the warm-and-fuzzy mediaeval terminology of 'the marketplace' and, now, 'the workplace' while at the same time, like an old man trying to cover his baldness by brushing his few remaining hairs across his head, Capitalism is trying to return to its vigourous youth by playing divide-and-conquer with its workers - promulgating voluntary unionism, enterprise unions and individual contracts - in the name of creating 'a level playing field'.
What is the point of this indivialistic ideological raving? The point is this - THERE CAN BE NO 'LEVEL PLAYING FIELD' BETWEEN EMPLOYEES AND EMPLOYERS/MANAGERS! None of us as individuals has either the knowledge or the resources to compete on an equal footing against a big corporation, or indeed against a government determined to grind its own workers into the mud! BUT, we who belong to a UNION do have a group which has the expertise, the resources and the necessary independence, criticality and objectivity to stand up for us. That is why I would still insist on being represented at the 'bargaining table' by my employee organization, and urge even non-Union members to 'come on board' and place yourselves under the Union's aegis.
As you may guess, I support conpulsory unionism (Oops, I think I've just said something illegal! You'll never take me alive, copper!). I find it ironic that no non-union member has ever said, "No, I haven't even contributed union dues - I don't deserve the conditions that the union has obtained! I know my employer will look after me!"

Cabinet moves to consolidate control
In his choice of Rice as secretary of State and Gonzales as attorney general, President Bush prizes loyalty over change.
from the November 17, 2004 edition

By Peter Grier Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – The rapid turnover in President Bush's cabinet may further centralize decisionmaking power in an administration already notable for the extent of White House control.
Second-term presidents, largely freed from the pressure to balance geography and political constituencies in their cabinet construction, often staff some of these open posts with proven loyalists. That way they can feel more comfortable in cabinet meetings - while rewarding those close to them with a bump up in authority and prestige.

Recently a letter was published in my local community newspaper suggesting that we should not be afraid of the entry of Christian political parties onto the Australian scene. The author suggested that social problems might be solved by clinging to the 3Fs of "Family, Faith and Flag.

Three Fs — Family, Faith and Flag, huh?
There is a fourth F, [author's name withheld]. I suggest that you, and all those like you — Christian, Jew or Muslim — who would pollute the common arena with your narrow-minded morality of divisiveness shove your 3Fs up your collective Fundamental Orifices.

Understanding the 2004 Presidential Election:Beyond the Polarized Electorate, And The Republicans' Superior Voter Turnout
by John W. Dean
Published on Friday, November 5, 2004 by FindLaw.com

A large number of Americans are very unhappy - indeed, many are extremely depressed - about the 2004 presidential election returns. Countless supporters of Senator John Kerry are literally scratching their heads, unable to fathom how seemingly rational people voted for President George W. Bush to serve a second term. Given our poor economy, and the disastrous Iraq war -- with its bogus justification and its thousands of American casualties - Kerry supporters find it hard to imagine, let alone understand, the case for casting a Bush vote.
Political pundits explain the election as the result of a deep division within America. They note that we are a culturally polarized nation, with the red states and the blue states providing a map of the divide. Pundits also explain the election as a result of voter turnout: Conservatives, they say, proved themselves superior at getting their voters to the polls on November 2nd.
These explanations are doubtless correct, to some extent. But they are also dreadfully incomplete. Books will be written deconstructing and biopsying this 2004 contest. Hopefully they will reach farther than these surface explanations to understand what occurred...

The Democrats Need a Spiritual Left
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
Published on Thursday, November 4, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

For years the Democrats have been telling themselves "it's the economy, stupid." Yet consistently for dozens of years millions of middle income Americans have voted against their own economic interests to support Republicans who have tapped a deeper set of needs.
Tens of millions of Americans feel betrayed by a society that seems to place materialism and selfishness above moral values. They know that "looking out for number one" has become the common sense of our society, but they want a life that is about something more --- a framework of meaning and purpose to their lives that would transcend the grasping and narcissism that surrounds them. Sure, they will admit that they have material needs, and that they worry about adequate health care, stability in employment, and enough money to give their kids a college education. But even more deeply they want their lives to have meaning --- and they respond to candidates who seem to care about values and some sense of transcendent purpose.
Many of these voters have found a "politics of meaning" in the political Right. In the Right wing churches and synagogues these voters are presented with a coherent worldview that speaks to their "meaning needs." Most of these churches and synagogues demonstrate a high level of caring for their members, even if the flip side is a willingness to demean those on the outside. Yet what members experience directly is a level of mutual caring that they rarely find in the rest of the society. And a sense of community that is offered them nowhere else, a community that has as its central theme that life has value because it is connected to some higher meaning than one's success in the marketplace...

World Now Stands Far Away from US
by Haroon Siddiqui
Published on Wednesday, November 3, 2004 by the Toronto Star

The election that mesmerized the world is over.
It is time to summarize the legacy of the last four years and list the priorities for the next four.
After 9/11, the world stood with America and George W. Bush. Today, it stands as far away from it, and him, as possible.
Americans were united.
Now they are deeply divided, about half and half, along political, social, cultural and religious lines...

Greatest Fear Isn't Terrorists, It's Change
by Jay Bookman
Published on Monday, November 15, 2004 by the Atlanta-Journal Constitution

Democrats and Republicans don't agree about a lot, but they do agree that fear played a major role in the 2004 election. Millions of voters saw in President Bush what they did not see in John Kerry, the type of strong, decisive leader who would protect them and their families from a threatening outside world and would do so without asking the United Nations for permission.
But sifting through the exit polls and election results . . . it's a funny thing. The voters least likely to be terror targets — those in rural areas, small towns and the less populated states — tended to be most frightened by the prospect of a terror attack. Conversely, voters in major metro areas that would be logical targets of terror, including New York and New Jersey, were least likely to be frightened by it.
That oddity mirrors something I first noticed back in the mid-'90s, at a time when crime, not terror, was the hot political issue. In interviews with candidates and voters, the fear of random, unpredictable crime seemed most intense in places you wouldn't logically expect, such as suburbs far from the city center where people lived in gated, guarded communities surrounded by people much like themselves and where rates of violent crime were absurdly low.
Those people were scared, but it was hard to believe that crime was the real reason. It seemed more likely that they were scared by the cultural and economic changes going on around them, by TV shows that were penetrating the walls of their gated neighborhoods depicting a world they did not recognize, by the sense that the country they had known growing up was being robbed from them, replaced by something foreign and threatening. But unable to put a name to their unease, they attributed it to crime.
I think the same may be true today with terror, a theory that's bolstered by something else in the exit polling and other post-election data. Apparently, many voters supported Bush despite misgivings about his policies because they were reassured by his character and faith and believed that he shared their traditional values. They saw him as an ally against the things they feared the most, while Kerry, with his foreign-born wife and Boston accent, in many ways epitomized those fears.
That fear — that sense of being under assault in your own country — is a powerful thing. And it no doubt grows every time people see a TV commercial talk of four-hour erections, every time they go to the ATM machine and are asked whether they want to conduct business in Spanish or English, every time a business announces mass layoffs and a tax-subsidized move overseas.
However, the root cause of those changes is not government or even the cultural elite. It's just business, chasing a dollar with little or no attention to what its impact will be. The social, cultural, legal and regulatory controls that once limited what was acceptable in selling a product or running a company are largely gone now, and the result is a consumer society that worships nothing so much as the bottom line.
The biggest threat to traditional values today is greed.
So even though conservative politicians may depict themselves as culture warriors, they will do nothing to stop that pharmaceutical company from running erection commercials, because you don't interfere when there's money to be made. And while illegal immigration stirs fears among millions, no effective action will be taken because businesses find those immigrants a cheap and docile source of labor.
And of course, the sleaziest of the major TV networks, the outlet whose shows are most likely to disparage institutions such as marriage and traditional moral values, is Fox Broadcasting. The latest movie drawing the ire of religious and cultural conservatives is "Kinsey," a lurid biography of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, likewise distributed by Fox Searchlight.
And where will those deeply offended people turn for comfort, for reassurance that they are not alone in their dismay at all this cultural decadence?
They'll punch the clicker to Fox News, so Rupert Murdoch's employees can tell them that it's all the liberals' fault.

Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Mondays and Thursdays.
© 2004 Atlanta-Journal Constitution

Staying the Course
by Mary-Wynne Ashford
Published on Monday, November 15, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

This essay was written before the election for "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear"

I once borrowed five hours of tapes from a popular radio series about current environmental crises, and listened to them one after another over a weekend. By Monday, I was paralyzed with despair. Onto the weight of the nuclear arms race, I had now cemented over-population, ozone depletion, drift-net fishing, destruction of the rain forests, the Great Lakes dying. How do you find hope when there is no rational reason for optimism? How do you deal with evidence that the situation is worsening despite your best efforts? Does your life make any difference? How do you continue in the face of despair?...

Rewriting the Geneva Convention
by Christopher Brauchli
Published on Saturday, November 13, 2004 by the Boulder Daily Camera (Colorado)

A politician is one that would circumvent God.-Shakespeare, Hamlet
Herewith a bright spot on the political front. Some things would be the same had George Bush been elected (he was) and the Democrats had captured the Senate and the House. (They didn't.) One of the things that would be the same is the use of memoranda to sanction what an administration sensitive to human rights (this one isn't) would deplore.
One recent example was a memorandum written by attorney, now federal judge, Jay Bybee for Alberto Gonzales, counsel to Mr. Bush and soon to be attorney general. In it Mr. Bybee said that cruel, inhuman or degrading acts do not necessarily constitute torture. It is, said he, a question of the intent of the perpetrator. He said a coercive procedure cannot be considered torture unless it causes pain equivalent to that accompanying "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." His memorandum proved enormously useful in analyzing what went on at Abu Ghraib prison which, without the benefit of Mr. Bybee's analysis, might have seemed like torture. Indeed, the victims of that conduct, being unsophisticated and unable to read the memorandum (since it was written in English) may still believe they were being tortured.
Now another memorandum has surfaced that makes it appear that, contrary to what we've been told, the Geneva Convention does not necessarily apply to everyone captured in Iraq...

Where the People Voted Against Fear
by Eduardo Galeano
Published on Saturday, November 13, 2004 by The Progressive

From the January 2005 issue of The Progressive...

A few days before the election of the President of the planet in North America, in South America elections and a plebiscite were held in a little-known, almost secret country called Uruguay. In these elections, for the first time in the country's history, the left won. And in the plebiscite, for the first time in world history, the privatization of water was rejected by popular vote, asserting that water is the right of all people....

The Death of Arafat and the Myth of New Beginnings
by Mark LeVine
Published on Saturday, November 13, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

In the weeks leading up to Palestinian President Yassir Arafat’s death American politicians and pundits have repeatedly called on the Palestinian people to use the opportunity of his passing to transform the intifada from a violent uprising into a non-violent, democratic and pragmatic program for achieving independence. This is very good advice, needless to say, except for one small problem: Palestinians have been trying to build such a movement for the last two decades, and the Israeli Government, IDF and American policy-makers have done everything possible to make sure they did not succeed...

George Bush Re-declares War
by Larry Beinhart
Published on Saturday, November 13, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

The selection of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General is a declaration that this is to be, once again, the most divisive and partisan administration in modern history.
It is not just a declaration that the president and his party are at war with the Democrats. It is a declaration that they are at war with our liberal democratic past and it is a re-declaration that America considers itself to be above the law and beyond the law and will answer to nothing and nobody...

How Many More Iraqis Must Die for Our Revenge?
by Andrew Greeley
Published on Friday, November 12, 2004 by the Chicago Sun Times

The election is over and so we can forget about the Iraq war. It is no longer a political issue and hence matters to no one. The American electorate has followed the tradition of standing by a wartime president and thus endorsing the president's war. It was once his war. Now the election has made it our war. The issue is closed.
A recent report suggested that if one compares the number of deaths that usually occur in Iraq per year with the number since Bush's invasion, the cost of the war in dead Iraqis may be more than a hundred thousand human beings. Now Iraqi deaths don't count because they look funny and talk funny and have a funny religion. Besides they're Arabs, and we have a score to settle with Arabs because of their attack on the World Trade Center. Yet if we are able to sustain the number of deaths that have happened as a consequence of the invasion, we will soon have accounted for as many as Saddam Hussein did. That's a lot of dead Arabs -- and a lot of bereaved spouses, parents, children, other relatives and friends. How many before will we have to kill before we're satisfied with our revenge?...

Four Times Falluja Equals?
by Mark LeVine
Published on Thursday, November 11, 2004 by TomDispatch.com

As American forces penetrate ever deeper and more destructively into the city of Falluja, each of the major players in this violent drama is engaged in a complex, constantly shifting calculus involving ways of turning events to their advantage. Of the many possible outcomes to the battle of Falluja, the four which seem most plausible follow, starting with the one that might be viewed most positively by the Bush administration. In sum, they offer us a grim picture of how the window of success has closed on American strategists in Iraq. Even the "best" outcomes below (from the administration's point of view) have lost the trappings of freedom and democracy that helped justify the invasion nineteen months ago...

For Many, Iraq Becoming a Crusade
by Haroon Siddiqui
Published on Thursday, November 11, 2004 by the Toronto Star

While the people of Falluja were waiting for the American onslaught to begin, mosque loudspeakers were rallying the faithful with cries of "Allah is great" and, "Prepare for jihad."
On the outskirts of the city, some American soldiers were holding a service, invoking Christ and having their foreheads anointed with holy oil by a duty chaplain.
"The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja," declared a Marine lieutenant-colonel.
Allah vs. God? Muhammad vs. Jesus? No, only two warring factions finding solace in their respective faiths for the troubles ahead...

All the Makings of a War Crime - with Australia Silently Onside
A US-led attack on the Iraqi Sunni-stronghold will breach the Geneva conventions
by Tony Kevin
Published on Monday, November 8, 2004 by the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

We need to be clear on what is about to happen in the Iraqi city of Falluja, about 64 kilometers west of Baghdad and a key center of Sunni population in Iraq. This city has for many months held out as a center of Sunni-based political-military resistance, refusing to accept the authority either of the former US-led occupying authority nor, since July, of the interim Iraqi administration led by the Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi.
Falluja is now to be brought to heel by overwhelming military power. As I write this, the US attack on the city has begun. The message to Falluja from the US armed forces in Iraq and from Allawi was brutally simple: submit now to Baghdad's authority or face attack.
It is still possible that resistance in Falluja will melt away in the face of US attack. While this would be a more optimistic scenario, I think it more likely at this point that the insurgents will fight, because too much is at stake politically for them to accept a bloodless Allawi victory. I look here at the - in my judgment, now more likely - scenario that Falluja insurgents will dig in and defy the invasion force.
What I believe is then likely to be done to Falluja will be a war crime and crime against humanity, morally indefensible by any civilized standard or for that matter, by the Statute of the International Criminal Court (to which, conveniently, neither the US nor Iraqi Government adheres).
This will be no neat, surgical strike. To get the measure of this, think of the Warsaw rising in 1944, or the Russian Army's destruction of the Chechen capital, Grozny. In 1999 this already battered city (of originally 400,000 people) was finally destroyed by massive Russian bombardment. Today, insurgents still fight it out with Russian troops among the ruins.
Eighteen months ago, before the US-led invasion of Iraq, Falluja was a living city of 300,000 people. Now - depopulated of most of its civilians by intimidation and fear - what is left looks like it is about to be blasted out of existence, simply as a demonstration of overwhelming US power in Iraq.
Of course, the US Army has been for weeks "humanely" encouraging women and children to leave the encircled city through checkpoints while there is still time to save their lives.
The Russians did the same before and during the destruction of Grozny. In a few days, as the battle and the flight of civilians expands, there may be tens of thousands of new refugees in tent cities, and tens of thousands of women left without husbands, and children left without fathers.
If this attack goes ahead as appears inevitable, it will obviously breach the laws of war and the Geneva conventions. First, it will grossly exceed proportionality in terms of ends and means. What intended political or military objective could justify so much death, the creation of so many new refugees, and wholesale destruction of homes?
What threat does the city of Falluja pose to the Iraqi state at this point? Allawi has claimed that free elections cannot take place unless Falluja is subdued. What a spurious argument.
The truth is that this city, which has become a symbol of Sunni-Iraqi political resistance to the occupiers, is to be made an example of, to deter others. The message the siege of Falluja sends is brutally simple: resist us and we will destroy you. It is the same message that the Wehrmacht sent in Warsaw in 1944, and the Russian Army in Grozny in 1999.
This attack will also violate the rules of war and the Geneva conventions in having grossly indiscriminate effects on civilians and civilian homes and infrastructure. America's largely untrained in battle but over-armed forces will start their attack "humanely", but as they inevitably take numbers of lethal casualties, their tactics will quickly escalate to indiscriminate bombing and shelling of the city using their WMD armories.
Eventually, the attackers will flatten the city and kill everyone that still resists in it. Falluja will be the Iraqi people's Masada, and it will sow seeds of deep anti-Western hatred in the Middle East for decades to come.
The UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, understands all this, in pleading for a negotiated solution. And as usual, Washington is summarily ignoring his pleas.
As a military ally with our troops in Iraq, Australia is morally implicated in this. While Australian former SAS commanders, the Governor-General, Major-General Michael Jeffery, and the Australian Christian Lobby's executive chairman, Brigadier Jim Wallace, moralize about abortions and gay marriages, Australia's military ally is about to destroy a living city and its families.
An unnamed US military commander in the tightening military ring around Falluja proudly boasted (as heard on ABC Radio yesterday) that this battle will go down in US military history as another Hue. Indeed it will - who can forget the wholesale artillery destruction of that sacred, historic Vietnamese city? "We had to destroy it in order to save it" was the line at the time. Now it looks like our military ally in Iraq is about to do it all over again in Falluja.
What are Australian political leaders - Government or Opposition - saying to Washington at this point? Are they saying anything at all? We reap what we sow.
Tony Kevin, a former Australian diplomat, is a visiting fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra.
© 2004 The Sydney Morning Herald

Alberto Gonzales: The Torture Guy
by Maureen Dowd
Published on Thursday, November 11, 2004 by the International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON - During the U.S. presidential campaign, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney gave the ominous impression that there was a dire threat that terrorists could incinerate Americans at any time if that powder puff John Kerry got anywhere near the Oval Office.
We Americans felt the hot breath of the wolf pack bearing down on us. But only a week later, the alarums have dimmed.
The administration lowered the terror threat in New York and Washington on Wednesday, and the Capitol Hill police were dismantling the elaborate security checkpoints they had put on streets around the Capitol to thwart would-be bombers...

Win or Lose, Kerry Voters Are Smarter Than Bush Voters
by Ted Rall
Published on Wednesday, November 10, 2004 by Ted Rall

Democratic hand wringing is surrealy out of hand. No one is criticizing the morally incongruous Kerry for running against a war he voted for while insisting that he would have voted for it again. Party leaders have yet to consider that NAFTA, signed into law under Clinton, may have cost them high-unemployment Ohio. No, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, darling of the "centrist" Democratic Leadership Council, blames something else: the perception "in the heartland" that Democrats are a "bicoastal cultural elite that is condescending at best and contemptuous at worst to the values that Americans hold in their daily lives."
Firstly, living in the sticks doesn't make you more American. Rural, urban or suburban--they're irrelevant. San Francisco's predominantly gay Castro district is every bit as red, white and blue as the Texas panhandle. But if militant Christianist Republicans from inland backwaters believe that secular liberal Democrats from the big coastal cities look upon them with disdain, there's a reason. We do, and all the more so after this election...