Discontented Soul

They Fight and Die, But Not For Their Country - Why Soldiers Make the Ultimate Sacrifice
by Ted Rall
Published on Wednesday, December 1, 2004 by Ted Rall

On Veteran's Day, Kyle Burns of Laramie, Wyoming lost his life in Iraq. At his memorial service, the Associated Press reported, he was remembered "as a marine who died for his country." Another fallen American was honored in Topeka the same week. Clinton Wisdom, said a reporter for Channel 13 news, was "a soldier who had died for his country." There was another service in Belington, West Virginia, for Romulo Jiminez, killed at age 21 in Fallujah. "He not only died for his country, he died for each one of us individually to preserve freedom," said the funeral director. Wisconsin lost three men in Iraq that week, including Todd Cornel, 38. "What he did was what he wanted to do, and he died for his country, for our freedom," said his father.
Did he? Have any of the Iraq war dead really "died for their country"?
At a time when every other Arab oil-guzzling SUV bears a yellow "support our troops" sticker and probable antiwar liberal Dan Rather "salutes fallen heroes" of Iraq on the evening news, the red-blue divide hasn't altered traditional perceptions of military service. But with 1,500 U.S. soldiers dead in Afghanistan and Iraq and influential Bushists calling for invading Iran, the question bears asking: What does it mean to fight (or die) for the United States?...

Shame and Determination on World AIDS Day
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Published on Wednesday, December 1, 2004 by Common Dreams.org

Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day, a chance to take stock of how the world is doing at confronting the worst pandemic of the last 500 years.
It is an unbearably grim situation. The death toll and shattering of communities across Africa -- and increasingly other areas where the epidemic is skyrocketing -- defies description. And yet world leaders, in rich and poor countries alike, are letting the problem worsen, as they let corporate greed, ideology, homophobia and incompetence get in the way of solutions.
The only good news is that activism has stopped the situation from being worse than it is, and holds out hope of making it a lot better...

Looking The Other Way
by Kathy Kelly

Published on Wednesday, December 1, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

...This morning, columnists in major US papers will continue alerting US people to possible wrongs, even crimes, committed by UN officials in the course of the “oil for food” program which coordinated and monitored sales of Iraqi oil, while economic sanctions ravaged Iraq. These economic sanctions constituted the most comprehensive state of siege ever imposed in modern history. It’s not likely that Saddam Hussein ever missed a meal, but children, hundreds of thousands of children, suffered gruesomely. Their suffering and death can be likened to child sacrifice, certainly the most egregious instance of child abuse in modern times. They’d committed no crime, yet they were brutally - and lethally - punished for the government of the country into which they were haplessly born. You aren’t likely to find this story in the current exposés of UN wrongdoing.
In fact, many UN officials tried valiantly to put an end to the economic sanctions. Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday resigned their posts and crisscrossed the globe educating people about the effects of the economic sanctions which Halliday termed “genocidal.” UNICEF’s Executive Director, Carole Bellamy, held a 1999 press conference to announce the release of a “Situation Analysis of Women and Children in Iraq” which carefully explained that the economic sanctions contributed to the “excess deaths” of over 500,000 Iraqi children, under age five. Not one US television network aired coverage of the press conference. Only two of 50 leading US papers reported the actual shocking number of one half million “excess deaths” of children. The Wall Street Journal asserted that it was all Saddam’s fault. The New York Times echoed this in an 800 word story quoting Jamie Rubin of the State Department questioning the study’s methodology .
The sanctions punished children while Saddam’s regime profited through smuggling: Many Westerners who traveled to Iraq tried to communicate this to people in their home locales. The smuggling and the rake-offs were no secret, especially in the final years of the sanctions when there were many reports of lucrative kickbacks and inflated prices. Many witnessed the sanctions actually strengthening Hussein’s control, as the regime became the only source of food and stability for an increasingly desperate and disempowered population.
The children were punished. When the pictures of those little ones, writhing in pain, wrinkled with wasting, desperate and bewildered, ...held by equally despairing and tortured parents...when those pictures were held up, sometimes as we fasted, sometimes while we were being led off in plastic handcuffs, sometimes at press conferences in front of the UN in Baghdad, sometimes in the middle of Basra cesspools and cemeteries...when those pictures were held up, many people looked the other way.
When I try to understand why columnists in far away places wouldn’t take on the story of these worthy victims, I try to remember that there are many worthy victims and one person can’t undertake care and concern for every devastating, brutal injustice. Pick your battles. But I can’t for the life of me understand how a steady stream of columns have appeared on op-ed pages, in the NYT and other papers, alerting us to possible crimes committed by UN officials in the course of the “oil for food” program while there has been no mention of the crime of child sacrifice in Iraq.
The concern generating reams of verbiage at this point is that UN officials may have looked the other way as Saddam Hussein and a number of collaborators pocketed rake-offs in underhanded dealings using profits from Iraqi oil sales. I’m not equipped to comment on those charges. But is there no columnist who will remind us that 500,000 children under age five died as the US used the UN to wage economic warfare against children?
Let’s consider the UN workers who stood a chance of getting food and medicine into Iraq – were they to look Iraqi families straight in the eyes and say, "sorry, we'll have to prevent these contracts from going through because you, in your pitiful weakness, can’t prevent the dictator that rules you from getting rake-offs on the deal. We can't compromise our principles...

Love One Another? Not on NBC, CBS

by John Nichols
Published on Wednesday, December 1, 2004 by The Nation

The Rev. John Thomas, who serves as general minister and president of the United Church of Christ, is having a hard time figuring out why the same broadcasters that profited so handsomely from airing the vicious and divisive attack advertisements during the recent presidential election are now refusing to air an advertisement from his denomination that celebrates respect for one another and inclusiveness.
"It's ironic that after a political season awash in commercials based on fear and deception by both parties seen on all the major networks , an ad with a message of welcome and inclusion would be deemed too controversial," said Thomas. "What's going on here?"...

Truth and Consequences in Ukraine

by Katrina vanden Heuvel
Published Tuesday, November 30, 2004 by The Nation

A Russian friend once said to me, "You Americans are an odd people. You love our liberals, but you don't like your own liberals." He added, "You should support your local liberals too."
My friend's words came to mind this past week as I watched the extraordinary street protests in Ukraine. Anyone who cares about citizens fighting corrupt regimes can't help but be moved by scenes of thousands of demonstrators, many of them students, standing for hours in Kiev's Independence Square in sub-zero temperatures - waving banners, chanting and protesting what they believe is a rigged election.
When the Bush Administration rushed to celebrate the protesters' courage and tenacity, I thought - what rank hypocrisy. These same officials have shown no respect for American pro-democracy protesters, and, if they have their way, they'll probably lock their political opponents out of central Washington when Inauguration Day rolls around...

A No-Win Situation
by Erin Solaro
Published Tuesday, November 30, 2004 by the Baltimore Sun

To win thein Iraq, President Bush needs two mandates. He claims both. Neither exists. And because neither exists, he cannot win the war in Iraq.
The lesser mandate, that of the American people, cannot be inferred from an election in which the fundamental choice was between the man whose chief virtue was that he was not Mr. Bush and the man whose chief virtue was that he was not John Kerry. Whatever mandate there may be will last only until the bills come due. They'll be coming due soon enough. The money, the horrors and the issue that just won't go away: conscription.
Nor can the greater mandate, that of the Iraqi people, be inferred, no matter how ardently the administration wishes it to be so. Opinion polls and anecdotes mean nothing here. Neither will elections. The one thing that would prove an Iraqi commitment to freedom is the one thing that the people of Iraq will not do...

In America, We Would Rather Just Fight About It

by Thomas G. Palaima
Published Monday, November 29, 2004 by The Statesman (Austin, Texas)

I recently participated in a weeklong forum on violence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. It removed any small doubts I had about how thoroughly violence permeates American society.
For six days, papers, presentations, performances and documentaries started at 9 a.m. and did not finish until 10 p.m. Many of the participants are devoting their lives to helping battered women, abused children, children kidnapped by one of their parents, children who lost their fathers in war, children who are or were urban gang members, soldiers and veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress, civilian victims of the violence in Northern Ireland. Latin American poets and musicians bore witness to the results of U.S.-supported governmental violence in Argentina and Chile.
People who have done violence and had violence done to them spoke with brutal honesty about their experiences. Experts in video game violence; medical researchers studying violence and the human brain; journalists covering the crime beat and covering Marines at Camp Pendleton and in Afghanistan; scholars of ancient Athens, Hiroshima, and modern Cambodia - all spoke with equal passion and clarity...
I spent the week after the violence forum as a distinguished visiting lecturer at the University of Victoria. The contrast was extreme. Canada is a country whose violence meter is set well below ours. It has no death penalty, no equivalent to our areas of urban poverty and perpetual violence, no national policy of preemptive warfare. Canadian citizens have not been set against one another for political gain on issues affecting the rights of women, gays and lesbians, the poor and the uneducated - or the defining right to keep religion out of politics...
[Here we get a list of recent US examples of violence.]
You have read about these things. You are aware that we are by now almost pathologically incapable of acknowledging the elephants stampeding through all areas of modern American life. [O]ur own president uses gun-slinger metaphors while proclaiming "our" right to do far more than "sucker punch" a sovereign foreign nation whom we suspect might have intentions to harm us. We ourselves possess countless weapons of mass destruction and yet are deeply concerned about nuclear weapons in Iran. Do we all agree that Iran would be fully justified in attacking us?
President Bush and John Kerry repeatedly stated their resolve to "hunt down and kill" terrorists. Whatever happened to capturing and bringing to a due communal process of justice those suspected of terrorism? After World War II, we were scrupulous about putting on fair and open trial those who participated in the most abominable crimes in the history of mankind. Now we no longer even take the law into our own hands. We preach and practice vigilantism...

And now we will have as US attorney general the man who argued, apparently in some mental and moral alternative universe, that the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners are "obsolete." He also wrote the first 57 execution summaries for then-Governor Bush, exhibiting a single-mindedness oblivious to extenuating circumstances or even the possibility of innocence...
[W]hat we need is our own national makeover, and it needs to be deep down in our hearts and souls.

If You Read the Gospels, the Religious Right is Most Often Wrong

by Rick Mercier
Published Monday, November 29, 2004 by the Free-Lance Star / Fredricksburg, Virginia

Was Jesus a big winner in the last election?
You'd sure think so. If the pundits and Religious Right zealots are correct, the Son of God scored a knockout victory on Nov. 2. We've had it drilled into our heads that something known as "moral values" was decisive in the election. Some worked-up commentators have even said we're on the brink of a second Great Awakening.
All this hype about the God talk swirling around in our culture prompted me to do a little research (a big departure from how I usually prepare for writing a column). I cracked open my Bible and started rereading the Gospels.
And you know what? I can't see what all this sanctimonious values rhetoric has to do with Jesus. I've compared what I read in Gospels with what I've been hearing from the Religious Right, and I've concluded that the holier-than-thous must have traded in their red-letter editions of the Good Book for red-state versions that omit most of Jesus' teachings.
The truth is, if you depend on the Christian right for your theological sustenance, you probably won't recognize the Jesus of the Gospels.
Jesus was quite a troublemaker. In fact, I'm thinking the Bush administration would have a special place for Jesus were the swarthy Nazarene to take up his ministry today in the US of A - in a cell with other Middle Eastern men awaiting deportation...

The Hour of the Beast

by Joel Kovel
Published Monday, November 29, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

In this sour, apprehensive, and Bush-inflicted month of November, we should remember the great surge of activism set going by the vain attempt to stop the Republican juggernaut. If we are to honor its promise, though, we need to learn its lesson, and understand more deeply the nature of the enemy. For we have been here before.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . .” The poet Yeats saw it coming, remarkably, as long ago as 1919. Since for Yeats history was cyclic, he saw it as coming again and again, building and rebuilding itself from the disintegration of society. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.” He foresaw the perversion of the Christian eschatology by the monstrosity of war: not Christ, but a beast would return, even a beast claiming direction by Jesus. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” Our apocalyptic Right--half Christian fundamentalism, half capitalist rapacity—is the beast for the moment. It is the abomination against which it warns, for the beast is nothing more than the human form become monstrous and ecologically nihilistic.
In the midst of these gloomy forebodings, one feature of the recent election especially sticks in the throat: even allowing for voter fraud, the propaganda machine, and the like, the fact remains that millions of what for want of a better word we must call “ordinary people” gave consent to, indeed, believed in, a man who is beyond doubt the worst president in American history, and certainly the one most harmful to their material interests, not to mention, those of humanity as a whole. It is as though Yeats’ beast has been reborn in the American soul, confounding, once again, the threadbare hope that workers will sensibly vote their class interests.
What can be wrong with so many? As London’s Daily Mirror blared after the election—picking up on a quip of H.L. Mencken, who once opined that nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people: How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB? But the affection for W. is not a question of being “dumb” in the sense of feeble-mindedness. It is rather a kind of bemusement, of being led astray by an inner force. It is an affair of the heart—that heart of which Pascal said that it had reasons of which Reason knows not. The Left has always been uncomfortable looking inward, and has paid dearly for being so. Again and again it crash lands with its economism, its rendering of “interests” in crudely materialistic terms, and its forgetting what “meaning” means in human existence.
In 1790 , William Blake, roaming the streets of London, did “mark in every face I meet/Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear”
It is not just being crushed by circumstance and misinformed, then; we need to take into account an active, self-imposed bondage, an inner crippling. In 1927, Wilhelm Reich, in his “Mass Psychology of Fascism,” identified these manacles in the context of the patriarchal German family structure, which produced “armored” and sex-negative characters primed to submit to a Fuehrer. People tend to remember Reich as the proponent of “orgastic potency” as the cure-all for humankind’s woes, but they misinterpret him as recommending a kind of sexual athleticism. This is surely no answer in itself—and indeed, it was not the answer for Reich, either, who was a good Communist and insisted that the precondition for inner emancipation, including the emancipation of the flesh, was democratic control of the means of production. This conviction, which he called “work democracy,” stayed with Reich after his expulsion from the Communist Party, and throughout his spectacular and doomed career as the mad apostle of Orgone Energy. Even as he was led off to Federal prison in 1957 Reich continued to hold to the belief.
What Reich taught was that the “sexual question” and the “family question” as well are not distractions from the real business of politics; they are rather the side of politics that opens onto nature and human nature. The grousing about how the stupid Bush voters allow themselves to be distracted with non-issues like gay marriage or abortion when what really counts are the mangling of the deficit, the lack of health insurance and the nightmare of Iraq, is profoundly short-sighted. The masses who voted for W because of “moral values” may be deluded in their judgements about sex and morality. But they are not deluded in taking these things seriously, nor in demanding that spiritual coherence be given to politics.
Why are we puzzled that religion in class society should take class forms? Or, looking further into the matter, that ruling class religion should be hostile to life, or that it has to find ways of hooking itself into the lived existence of the masses, and needs to resort to delusion in order to do so. After all, there is a fundamental class opposition that needs to be mystified if the illusion of an organic society is to be sustained. The key to consent, as ever, is getting subaltern classes to auto-repress, to forge their own mental manacles out of their own best hopes, to take every authentic virtue and turn it into a curse without it ceasing to seem virtuous to the deluded mind.
The sexual sphere supplies the perfect raw material for the project, because its logic is heteronomous to that imposed by the regime of social production. Sexuality is ready-made for the nourishment of delusional thinking. In all its aspects it is a perpetual well of negativity; it is the instinct which refuses the real and can be twisted into innumerable fantastic shapes; it cannot be explained or rationalized without vanishing, and it will not vanish so long as the blood pulses in human arteries, Thus once the ruler succeeds in anchoring the regulation of sexuality in an enduring coercive institution like religion—especially if, like Bush, he can co-opt America’s cornucopia of populist evangelical faiths—he has created prime conditions for imposing mass auto-repression.
The remainder of this drama is played out on the larger social stage. How fortunate for the authorities that late capitalism draws on the potentials of Eros to spawn endless sex industries whose fantasies light up the circuits of advertising, entertainment, and fashion, whence they fascinate the sex-repressing mind. The drawing of sex into commodity circuits is an inherent potential of capitalist production; and under the conditions of late capitalism, with its ruthless expansive force, its overproduction, and its consumerist impulse, the potential becomes as fundmental an attribute of the system as competition or concentration of capital. We are, inevitably, a sexually inundated society, which is to say, one in which all of sex’s flamboyant negativity—the queer rejection of officially proscribed positions along with the negations of sex itself—coexist in furious combat, each thriving from the other. Consequently, the appearance of massive counter-erotic formations suitable for organization by repressive ideologues of the Right should not surprise. The nation which has gone the furthest in realizing the potentials of accumulation also maximizes the role of sexuality in accumulation, and in so doing becomes the nation with the most flourishing counter-sexualities. These seep upward from the ground of everyday life to nourish the Jimmy Swaggarts, Pat Robertsons and, most consequentially, the Karl Roves of this world, where they await a George W Bush, the born-again, “rough beast” President slouching toward Armageddon.
It is no accident that this complex affects those in the so-called heartland, whose principal identity is forged by backwardness with respect to modernity, with its empowerment of women and challenge to patriarchy. Typically, the legions of Bush supporters from this zone are more the victims than the beneficiaries of the system. Riddled with debt, their jobs crumbling, alienating and insecure, and subjected to the everyday terror of the health industries, they find a spurious salvation in projecting the sources of their anxiety outward to strangers, most notably Al-Qaeda, but also the “French,” instead of looiking inward and risking the dissolution of the belief–system that gives life a sense of wholeness and hope. Dwelling within a society whose innermost logic is to destroy community, their evangelical churches have typically become community centers, and sometimes soup kitchens as well. Thus religion for them is not only the “heart of a heartless world,” but also its stomach. They feel better when they ask God to bless America, because it makes them feel strong through identification with the awesome might of our military, and also enables them to forget for a moment their profound weakness in face of the monster that produces the need for the military and throws their children into its maw. They want to feel loyal because loyalty is a way of feeling whole and attached to something bigger than the self; and they don’t want to explore ways of thinking that might shatter this brittle world. They can identify with Bush, because like them, he is the object of derision of liberal elites. And they think of Bush as authentic, because he is the more honest imperialist and jingoist, however deceptive he has had to be in order to fake his way through the rigamarole of international rules of conduct (a French plot, after all) to get what he wants. And each of W’s triumphs allows them to feel whole.
The more adulation Bush receives, the more grandiose he becomes, and the more ruinous. Thus the more the people believe in him, the worse he reveals himself to be, the more alienated his subjects become and the more do they have to cling to their belief in order to not be shattered and face, alone, the truth about America. And if they have to sacrifice the rights of sexual minorities and the integrity of women to do so, well, so be it, for these are the immemorial victims of the God of the Fathers, the beast in whom we trust, Amen.
But here our lament must end. For there are other days after the days of defeat. And for these we need to recall the authentic wisdom of the Left, expressed in the words of its martyr, Joe Hill and its blessed Mother Jones: “Don’t mourn, Organize!”

News Media in the 60th Year of the Nuclear Age
by Norman Solomon
Published Monday, November 29, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Top officials in Washington are now promoting jitters about Iran’s nuclear activities, while media outlets amplify the message. A confrontation with Tehran is on the second-term Bush agenda. So, we’re encouraged to obliquely think about the unthinkable.
But no one can get very far trying to comprehend the enormity of nuclear weapons. They’ve shadowed human consciousness for six decades. From the outset, deception has been key...

How Can We Fight for Working Families?
By John J. Sweeney
In These Times

The overall fight is clear: We must rein in corporate power and fight for working families' core issues-good jobs, affordable healthcare, a secure retirement and strong communities.
In the next four years, we must stake out and reinforce these areas where we cannot allow the dam to break under the Bush administration. We must create political movements that take advantage of, and maintain, the vibrant political activism of the left in the 2004 presidential campaign. We have to launch proactive fights that are driven by principle and show what we stand for.
We can and will win a fight against privatizing Social Security. We will not allow this basic safety net to be dismantled so corporations can "get their slice." And we must expose the administration's tax breaks as golden cookie jars for the rich.
The entire progressive movement will need to fight back against attacks on workers. We expect to see efforts to strip workers of their freedom to choose unions and to weaken workers' organizations by launching Right to Work bills in many Republican-led states. Look for the administration to attempt, at corporations' behest, to cut overtime pay even further. Of course, they'll do it in the name of family values.
On the offensive front, we need to motivate voters in the middle class who largely succumbed to fear and voted against their own economic security.
We must be proactive about workers' rights. People of social conscience must take a stand when it comes to workers' freedom to form unions. This is a civil right fundamental to a just society, and it's a fight that we can ill afford to leave on the sidelines.
We must build support for the Employee Free Choice Act that both punishes ruthless employers who use illegal and immoral tactics when workers try to organize and allows employees to freely choose whether to form unions by signing cards.
And we must wage a real fight for affordable healthcare for all. About 45 million are without healthcare, and Americans understand fundamentally that healthcare for children is a moral issue. We must seize the high ground, and show how we stand for people's basic beliefs in this area.
We also must take on those employers that are leading the race to the bottom on wages and healthcare, like Wal-Mart. When the country's largest private employer offers good jobs with a voice on the jobs, decent wages and healthcare, we will all benefit. The labour movement and its partners already have succeeded in staying Wal-Mart's voracious growth in Los Angeles, Oakland and other communities. We can grow this fight.
The problem before us is not how to define the battle cry issue. Our dilemma is to learn how to show that our basic values are America's values and that corporate control of our social agenda poses a fundamental danger to our country and our democracy.

I just got it from a reliable source that this is going to be George W Bush's Inaugural Address Song (to the tune of "What a Wonderful World" by Sam Cooke)

Don't know much about history
Don't know much foreign policy
Don't remember how I got through school
I'm sure I didn't break the rules
But what's it matter 'cause my granny says
"Boy, if you want to you can be the prez
And what a wonderful world this will be"

Don't know much about the women's vote
Don't know much about the bill I wrote
Don't know much about the foreign vets
I've never voted for 'em yet
But I do know if your dad tries hard
He can get you in the National Guard
And what a wonderful place that can be

Now I never claimed to be an A student
But what's wrong with C's?
And maybe by knowing the names of my cabinet
I can win their love for me
Don't know much about air pollution
Don't know much about the constitution
Don't know much about th'economy
It never much affected me
But there's one thing that I know for sure
If the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor
What a wonderful world this will be

Don't know much about the national debt
I've never had to pay one yet
If we need to we can sell the States
To the Japanese at discount rates
But I do know if things get bad
Dick and I can always call my dad
And what a wonderful world this will be

I am amused by the lack of imagination shown by 99.9% of the human race, the tendency of most people to assume that whatever lies within their limited scope is the apogee of possible knowledge and experience.

Of course we have had "Miss Universe" contests for a long time now, but I was interested to see how, as we moved towards and just beyond the new Millennium, we have had contests for "the most beautiful baby OF ALL TIME" and, most recently, "the best song OF ALL TIME."

So, three million years of human history are nothing compared to the images captured by the technology of the past hundred-and-fifty or so years!