Category: gmoses

By Greg Moses

IndyMedia North Texas / GlobalResistanceNetwork
/ BellaCiao / DissidentVoice / UrukNet

“That’s Cindy Sheehan,” points the Vietnam War veteran from his seat at the table. “She lost her son Casey in Iraq. And I’m going to follow her to Crawford. You coming?”

Looking up from my plate, I take the vet’s direction and turn to see Sheehan standing on the grass, stage left, mixing with three generations of veterans who have gathered this evening for peace and Bar-B-Que.

Twenty-four-year-old Casey Sheehan was killed at Sadr City on April 4, 2004 during the historic uprising (16 months ago to the day). Cindy blames the President for “creating that insurgency by his failed policies,” and on Saturday morning she is going to attempt to visit Bush at his vacation ranch in Crawford, a couple hours’ drive to the South.

The vet I’m sitting with was born and raised in California. His tan slim face looks perfectly fit for Hollywood, the place where he was born. After High School he joined the Army to see Japan and Hong Kong.

“If you’ve ever been in a war situation,” says the vet, “imagine what it must be like to find out while it’s still going on. That they lied. While you were into it.” He looks at me directly, shakes his head slowly, and digs at some food on his plate. He’s talking about the Downing Street memo, and he references AfterDowningStreet.Org.

“And as for Karl Rove,” says the vet, “in boot camp they used the word traitor. Loose lips sink ships. He’s just spitting in everyone’s face.” Rove, the so-called brain of the Bush regime, has been widely identified as the most likely source for the public ‘outing’ of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

“Saturday I’m going,” says the vet again, talking about Sheehan’s plan to confront the President at Crawford. “I’m going to follow her down there.” And you can tell by the slight grin on his face that he’s proud to have the opportunity. This is the 20th Annual convention of Veterans for Peace, and tonight this big, wide tent is a swirl of activists in motion.

A few minutes later we are joined at the table by Susan Van Haitsma, a peace activist and writer from Austin. And the vet tells her, too. He’s going to Crawford Saturday with Cindy Sheehan.

“Have you read Sheehan’s article about visiting the President?” asks Van Haitsma. “Bush comes walking into the room saying, ‘Well, who are we here to honor today?’ Sheehan says it was like looking at someone who was vacant inside.”

Meanwhile our ample round table has been joined by three more vets, John Perth of South Jersey, Bob Heberle of Minneapolis, and Robert Moses Hunt of (where else?) Hunstville, Alabama. Sam Foster from the Twin Cities sits with us briefly as he makes the rounds.

As it turns out, Hunt’s great grandfather was part of the Confederate Army, but since he refused to carry a gun, he was ordered to drive supplies instead. And, as the story goes, one day by a river near Decatur, the Yankees fired a cannonball at his wagon and missed. So he got down off the wagon, picked up the cannon ball, waved, and drove off. Hunt remembers seeing that cannonball as a kid, prior to great-grandfather’s death in 1928.

And while we’re on the subject of Dixie pacifists, at the archives of Alabama online you can find a record of “The Incident at Looney’s Tavern, ” a musical tale of romance and heartbreak involving a schoolteacher named Christopher Sheats who in 1861 was elected by the folks of Winston County to go to Montgomery and vote against the damn war. According to the archives he ended up in prison. But Hunt is not forgetting to tell the story here tonight.

What’s important about the story, says Hunt, is that the people of Alabama were not all that eager to start a war in the first place. History is a push and a pull. The closer you get to it, says Hunt, the more you can see how, “it all hangs by a thread!” Here under a big tent overlooking Dallas, three generations of veterans have gathered to blow the embers of a Dixie pacifist revival. Could it be a thing that catches fire?

The Vietnam vet is happy to see how young veterans from Iraq today have a place to meet and talk to people. “When we came back from Vietnam, nobody could talk to you,” he says. “Your best friend couldn’t talk to you. My parents wouldn’t talk to me. Then ten years later, my parents decided they wanted to talk to me about Vietnam, but I’m not talking about it. I’m sick of it.”

The Vietnam vet was there in ’70-’71, late in terms of the number of years that the war lasted, but right where the fat part of the wall starts if you’re reading names of people you know at the Washington DC memorial. “Right about the middle of the wall, that’s where my friends are.” He lifts a finger to touch the names in the air.

“I can see it on the young guys’ faces,” says the Vietnam vet, looking at their war from inside out. As he heads back home for the night, he asks again, “You coming to Crawford?”

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By Susan Van Haitsma

Just after dark on August 8, 2004, I watched from the leafy banks of Barton Creek as a beautiful, ephemeral fleet of luminarias floated silently upstream from Lou Neff Point. Each handmade luminaria had been carefully launched by participants in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Ceremony of Remembrance held in the Zilker Park Peace Grove. Although the night was still, there must have been a faint breeze out on the water that moved the glowing lanterns quietly, steadily against the current.

Across town, another image of peace appeared last year in relation to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Installed as a permanent mosaic outside Brentwood Elementary School and created by local artist, Jean Graham in collaboration with Brentwood students and teachers, the artwork depicts a flock of beautifully diverse birds flying together around the words, “I will write peace on your wings, and you will fly all over the world.”

This quotation from Sadako Sasaki, who died of radiation poisoning at age 12 as a result of the Hiroshima bombing, comes from the well-known story of Sadako’s passion for life as she strove to fold the 1,000 origami cranes she believed would heal her. When she died, her friends completed the task, and a statue to Sadako’s memory in Hiroshima Peace Park is strung with origami cranes that persons all over the world continue to send. Inscribed on the monument is a plea from the children of Japan, “This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world.”

This month, feature articles in Time, Smithsonian and National Geographic magazines commemorate the 60th anniversary of the test of the A-bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, its use three weeks later against the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945. Every story credits the bomb with ending the war. Claims the Time cover story, “An awful weapon had saved lives; a terrible instrument of war had brought peace.”

One of the Smithsonian articles, entitled “It’s Over!” is a compilation of readers’ mostly enthusiastic accounts of where they were and how they responded when Japan surrendered. Only one response, sent by a Japanese-American, mentions effects of the atomic bombings on the
people of Japan.

Another Smithsonian article, adapted from the new book, “American Prometheus,” about atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, recounts the dramatic moments leading up to the test and use of the A-bomb. While recognizing the moral dilemma faced by Oppenheimer and his colleagues, emphasis is clearly on the “success” of what Oppenheimer benignly called “the gadget.” Only briefly noted are the estimated 70,000 people killed instantly in Hiroshima. The article does not give a number for deaths in Nagasaki or for the tens of thousands more who died from radiation sickness.

Entitled, “Living With the Bomb,” the National Geographic story includes four dramatic photographs of nuclear weapons tests, one captioned with a description of the “terrible beauty” of the mushroom cloud. The article refrains from describing the effects of the bombs on human beings. Only Time magazine offers photographs and accounts of Japanese Hibakusha, survivors of the A-bomb.

Significantly, the Time and Smithsonian features discuss the critical shift in US policy leading to justification of the atom bomb. Citing the massive incendiary bombing of Japanese cities during the spring of 1945 that killed an estimated 100,000 in Tokyo alone, Time author and historian, David Kennedy concludes, “The US had already crossed a terrifying moral threshold when it accepted the targeting of civilians as a legitimate instrument of warfare.”

Smithsonian agrees, “The firebombings were no secret. Ordinary Americans read about them in their newspapers.” Today, when ordinary Americans read about ordinary Iraqis killed by US military forces, the underlying justifications that have propelled such policies for 60 years continue to give the message that the lives of Americans are worth more than the lives of others.

Americans decry terrorist bombings that target civilians. But we must also acknowledge how we intentionally target civilians through military force. On this 60th anniversary of the use of atomic weapons, will we continue to insist that bombs save lives? Or can we take an honest look at the human costs of every lethal weapon, affirm our most basic American principle that all lives have absolutely equal value, and conclude that no life can be traded for any other. Our cry and prayer, the words written on our wings and pushing us steadily upstream, must include this essential truth if we are ever to replace terrorism and militarism with lasting peace.

Susan Van Haitsma is active with Nonmilitary Options for Youth and Austin Conscientious Objectors to Military Taxation.

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / Dissident Voice / Global Resistance Network

For this Fourth of July, I’m sitting with young Dylan at a reading room in the New York Public Library scrolling through newspapers from 1855-1865: “There is a riot in New York where two hundred people are killed outside the Metropolitan Opera House because an English actor has taken the place of an American one.”

In the build-up years to the Civil War newspapers portray a certain would-be Senator from Illinois as a baboon. No way to suspect what Lincoln would become. “Anti-slave labor advocates inflaming crowds in Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Cleveland, that if the Southern states are allowed to rule, the Northern factory owners would then be forced to use slaves as free laborers.” Defeat the South, save our jobs! “This causes riots, too.”

Writes Dylan, “You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies.” What was the Civil War about? For Dylan’s friend Van Ronk, “It was one big battle between two rival economic systems is what it was.” Slave system vs. imperialist capital.

If Van Ronk was correct post-war Reconstruction in the South would stand for imperialism at its progressive best — the kind of thing one might believe could work better in Baghdad than it did in Dallas. But then again, Baghdad had no General Lee. On Lee’s word and Lee’s word alone, writes Dylan, “America did not get into a guerilla war that probably would have lasted ’til this day.”

For Dylan’s friend Ray who was a “nonintegrator and Southern nationalist” the Civil War was a useless war, a tragic reversal of history. Sure slavery was evil Ray agreed, but it would have died a natural death anyway, Lincoln or no Lincoln. “I heard him say it,” recalls Dylan, “and thought it was a mysterious and bad thing to say, but if he said it, he said it and that’s all there is to it.” Ray was as much anti-slavery as he was anti-union (as in anti-United States.) And he smoked opium.

If you took a Van Ronk angle on Ray, between slavery and imperial capital, there was no comfortable choice, and certainly no historic destiny worth living for. From the reconstruction period Southern white gents simply learned to seize the post-colonial attitude, re-making their racial order in the image of credit banking. In return for Lee’s peace pact, token attempts at de-Dixification died quickly in Washington from lack of zeal, just as de-Baathification would fall hard on its face in Washington were a General Lee good enough to appear in Falluja.

For Dylan himself, the Civil War was also a battle between two kinds of time: “In the South, people lived their lives with sun-up, high noon, sunset, spring, summer. In the North people lived by the clock. The factory stroke, whistles and bells.” It must have been a Southerner who coined the term “New York minute” to describe the Northern kind of time — yes the kind of time that forges capital into imperialism, post-colonialism, and oh-so-helpless-hand-wringing-witness to Jim Crow or Abu Ghraib, whichever.

“After a while,” says Dylan, “you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course.” And the archetype for this sort of story is found in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. “Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The god-awful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.”

Resurrection without synthesis. Crucifixion upon the cross of the Fourth of July. This is the underlying song of the great American folksinger. Why he must die in his shoes.

“In American history class,” recalls Dylan, “we were taught that commies couldn’t destroy America with guns or bombs alone, that they would have to destroy the Constitution — the document that this country was founded upon. It didn’t make any difference though. When the drill sirens went off, you had to lay under your desk facedown, not a muscle quivering and not make any noise.”

“Living under a cloud of fear like this robs a child of his spirit,” says the author of Masters of War. “It’s one thing to be afraid when someone’s holding a shotgun on you, but it’s another thing to be afraid of something that’s just not quite real. There were a lot of folks around who took this threat seriously, though, and it rubbed off on you. It was easy to become a victim of their strange fantasy.”

Dylan’s counterpunch against the “lame as hell big trick American mainstream culture” was the folksong. “There was nothing easygoing about the folksongs I sang. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.” He foraged the songs from fellow singers, from 78 records, from archives. He would pitch them fast and hard to his audiences, practicing live in front of people because he couldn’t bear up to the experience of practicing alone in some room somewhere rehearsing for who knows who?

In Irish folksongs especially, Dylan found the rebel voice. “There were songs like that in my repertoire, too, where something lovely was suddenly upturned, but instead of rebellion showing up it would be death itself, the Grim Reaper. Rebellion spoke to me louder.” But Ireland was not an American landscape, and in order to translate the rebel songs he turned to the library. “I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say.”

As we know, everything worked out pretty well. Dylan became that composer he was looking for. America was ready to rock. And in a passage that I’m having difficulty locating right now, Dylan says acid was helping to move history in the right way.

But what happens next is really hard to say. Dylan describes a life run over by American feet, grabbed up by American hands, and tossed around by American voices. The composer who would write resurrection songs for rebel America found himself projected into some kind of leader. Identity he had created was made into identity he needed to destroy. So he rebelled against his own alienation.

At this point you have to know more than is possible to know, but I think about the scene in the Oliver Stone movie The Doors when Jim Morrison gets the quivers in the experience of a chanting crowd. There is a quasi-fascist tingle in American adoration that the strongest leaders know to reject. To Dylan’s credit, he got really sick of it, as if the very thing that his songs rejected was being taken up, stitched together and brought to him to wear.

On the other hand, America has weak leaders too, who stitch together for themselves costumes of quasi-fascist adoration. They can be any kind of leader with a name. You praise the Lord in America if you don’t have one of these creatures for your boss. Whereas great folk songs from the Dylan point of view are ever busy tearing the clothes off of this kind of power, there is another kind of music that puts people in the marching mood.

So here I sit on the Fourth of July, slowing down my mind. On this day in particular, I want nothing of the marching kind, certainly none of that music. Give me a 22 verse folk song where a vicious hammer splits open a rebel’s resurrection, yes over and over again.

Source: Bob Dylan. Chronicles: Volume One. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

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By Greg Moses

Because Sen. Dick Durbin and his fellow Democrats are concerned about the human rights of American soldiers taken prisoner during armed conflicts, on FLAG DAY he called upon the Bush administration to set a humane standard of treatment for “enemy combatants” and to respect the human rights of prisoners at Guantanamo and other US prison camps.

Durbin’s remarks suggest that the best defense of human rights for American soldiers and citizens begins with the examples that Americans set. When it comes to respect for international conventions that uphold human rights, the American flag should stand on the side of these rights, not against them.

If we want a world where our rights are respected then we have to lead by example. What better message to send on Flag Day? Yet right-wing commentators who have little time to think for themselves piled onto Sen. Durbin’s comments with a recklessness that will only further endanger the general level of human rights for soldiers and civilians throughout the world.

“The idea of moral equivalence between the U.S. military at Gitmo and the 15 to 30 million who died in the Soviet gulags or the 9 million who died in Nazi concentration camps or the 2 million dead in the Cambodia killing fields is utterly outrageous.”

Such is the way that one right-wing commentator characterizes the comments by US Senator Richard Durbin, but it is a poor characterization at best. Not to bore anyone with the facts, but here are the relevant paragraphs from Durbin’s remarks from the floor of the US Senate:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here — I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold….On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

So here we see what evidence Sen. Durbin uses and to what extent he compares the practices of Guantanamo to infamous totalitarian gulags: If you read this and did not first know it was Guantanamo, then what would you think? You’d think this was some kind of gulag, that’s what you’d think.

Durbin did not say that one should compare the “scope” of atrocities between Guantanamo and Auschwitz. He simply said that certain dehumanizing practices found at Guantanamo were just the kinds of things that we expect to find at gulags.

“Senator Durbin and the looney left supporting him are slandering our military, our President, and our nation. It is a total outrage,” continues our right-wing commentator as if Durbin had said anything incendiary about “our military.” In fact, what Sen. Durbin argued in his carefully-worded remarks was that adherence by the US administration to Geneva Conventions regarding prisoners is the most prudent policy for PROTECTING our military in times of war.

Former Congressman Pete Peterson of Florida, a man I call a good friend and a man I served with in the House of Representatives, is a unique individual. He is one of the most cheerful people you would ever want to meet. You would never know, when you meet him, he was an Air Force pilot taken prisoner of war in Vietnam and spent 6 1/2 years in a Vietnamese prison. Here is what he said about this issue in a letter that he sent to me. Pete Peterson wrote:

>From my 6 1/2 years of captivity in Vietnam, I know what life in a foreign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the Geneva Conventions for my survival….This is one reason the United States has led the world in upholding treaties governing the status and care of enemy prisoners: because these standards also protect us….We need absolute clarity that America will continue to set the gold standard in the treatment of prisoners in wartime.

Abusive detention and interrogation policies make it much more difficult to win the support of people around the world, particularly those in the Muslim world. The war on terrorism is not a popularity contest, but anti-American sentiment breeds sympathy for anti-American terrorist organizations and makes it far easier for them to recruit young terrorists.

So what’s really outrageous and tiresome in these right-wing backlashes against Sen. Durbin is the outright intellectual dishonesty of the smear tactics in use. Once upon a time, a Senator from Illinois tried to call the nation to conscience and his very nerve was perceived as a total insult to the right-wing establishment of the USA.

I hope the voices of conscience will be able to help Sen. Durbin withstand the unjust tirade that has been deployed against his remarks.

If I showed you Sen. Durbin’s remarks and then showed you the reactions he received, would you think you were living in a freedom loving country? Or would you rather think you were living amongst the brown-shirts of times gone by?

NOTE: Sen. Durbin’s full remarks on Gitmo made on Flag Day 2005.