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The cocaine presidents
Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II
Israeli mob celebrates savage beating of Palestinian man, shouts racist slogans
Anonymous vows to ‘destroy’ Westboro Baptist Church over Sandy Hook picket plans
“Your impact and cause is hazardous to the lives of millions and you fail to see the wrong in promoting the deaths of innocent people,” an “Anonymous” video featuring a computerized voice says over ominous music. “You are self-appointed servants of God who rewrite the words of his sacred scripture to adhere to your prejudice. Your hatred supersedes your faith, and you use faith to promote your hatred.”
Three Progressive Ways to Reduce Medicare Costs orporate lobbyists and their allies on Capitol Hill have a terrible new idea: hiking the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67. This would save the federal government about $5.7 billion a year, butcost seniors $11.4 billion over the same period.
Freedom Of The Press Foundation Launches To Support WikiLeaks, Increase Transparency
Increased government scrutiny and criticism from lawmakers prompted several companies, including MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, to stop processing donations to the non-profit organization. WikiLeaks eventually suspended publication due to the “bank blockade.”
Michigan Right-to-Work: All Money and Influence Can Buy
The Right to Know
In December 2010, WikiLeaks started publishing a selection of leaked U.S. State Department cables through the New York Times, the Guardian, and other traditional media, opening a deep crack in the thickening wall of secrecy that has been forming worldwide around the internal processes of democracy since 9/11. They helped catalyze the "Arab Spring." They struck a blow for the right of citizens everywhere to know what is being done in our names. And they thoroughly freaked out the U.S. Government, sending it into a security spasm of Cold War proportions.
The December 14 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. that left 28 people dead — including 20 children — has sent shock waves through our society. It penetrated the elaborate defenses that we as individuals and as a culture have erected to live with the internal contradictions of the bargain we have made to both oppose and embrace violence. Occasionally reality exposes and trumps the cognitive dissonance of this uneasy but deeply embedded arrangement.
How the US Intelligence Community Came Out of the Shadows
Weren’t those the greatest of days if you were in the American spy game? Governments went down in Guatemala and Iran thanks to you. In distant Indonesia, Laos, and Vietnam, what a role you played! And even that botch-up of an invasion in Cuba was nothing to sneeze at. In those days, unfortunately, you -- particularly those of you in the CIA -- didn’t get the credit you deserved.
Regulations recently signed into effect by Attorney General Eric Holder allow the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to monitor records of citizens for any potential criminal activity, without a warrant and without suspicion.
As he aggressively seeks the sources of news media leaks of government secrets, President Obama might want to pay close attention to an important and overdue new report that he ordered on classified information from the Public Interest Declassification Board.
re we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?" -- Barack Obama, Newtown Address, December 16, 2012. That sentence, uttered by President Obama in his Newtown Address, may turn out to be a turning point in American history. http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/416-gun-control-/15076-focus-the-price-of-our-freedom
The Woes of an American Drone Operator A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people. But then, one day, he realizes that he can't do it anymore. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33337.htm
"We Can’t Tolerate This Anymore": Obama Vows Action After Worst Grade School Massacre in U.S. History
To condemn all violence on moral grounds means condemning the violence of the oppressed slave equally with that of the oppressing slaveholder.
CRITICS OF socialism often condemn revolutionaries for being "in favor" of violence. Coming from politicians and military leaders, this is rank hypocrisy.
The U.S. ruling class sees no contradiction between punishing murder during peacetime with death--and rewarding large-scale killing during wartime with medals.
As a first line of defense, the ruling class appeals to "universal" laws--that killing is bad, violence solves nothing, etc.--which they flout at every turn. But it's hard to take seriously President Clinton's 1999 warnings to youth after the Columbine killings that violence isn't a way to solve problems--since at the same time, he was "solving" his own problems in Serbia by raining bombs on Belgrade.
Those in power reserve the right to use violence wherever and whenever they consider it necessary--including against those who might use violence to challenge their power.
Thus, they consider it perfectly reasonable for the U.S. to commit terrorist acts overseas--like the leveling of an entire poor neighborhood in Panama City in 1989 to bring down former U.S. ally Gen. Manuel Noriega or the deliberate bombing of a TV station in Belgrade in 1999 because it was broadcasting "lies." Yet it's the most unspeakable horror for individual terrorists to blow up an American target.
Pointing out this hypocrisy doesn't directly answer the question of activists who consider themselves pacifists. They often frame their views by saying that violence begets violence--and that we would be "lowering ourselves to their level" of our side were to use violence.
There is, of course, one immediate argument against the blanket condemnation of allviolence--that of self-defense against a violent attacker. Most people aren't pure pacifists and will allow exceptions like this.
But the bigger problem with pacifism is that it fails to make a distinction between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed.
Can we really equate the violence of the Nazis seeking to exterminate all Jews with the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto who used violence to resist extermination? Likewise, can we equate the violence of American Indians resisting removal and genocide with the violence of the U.S. state bent on "pacifying" them?
Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote:
History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War.
A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains--let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE U.S. itself was established by the use of revolutionary force--first in 1776 against British tyranny, and then again on a more bloody scale during the Civil War against the Southern slavocracy.
Throughout history, force on a mass scale has been used in two ways--as a means for ruling classes to conquer and enslave and fight over the wealth and territory of other rulers. Or it has been used by the oppressed to resist--and sometimes overthrow--their oppressors.
The condemnation of all violence on moral grounds means, if applied consistently, that you must condemn the violence of the oppressed slave equally with that of the oppressing slaveholder.
So you must condemn equally the violence of the paramilitary death squads in Colombia with the peasant youth who takes up arms to resist that violence. You must condemn equally African Americans who use violence to defend themselves and the violence of the Klansmen aiming to lynch them.
Ultimately, a call to "turn the other cheek"--and deny the oppressed the right to use force--is to condone the force used to keep them down.
That is why anyone who genuinely opposes injustice and inequality must reject pacifism. For socialists, rejecting pacifism doesn't mean the opposite-an appeal to any and all acts of violence.
Whatever particular tactics are necessary to achieve fundamental change, they are meaningless without the involvement of millions. Throughout history, the chains of oppression were never broken by individual acts of violence--but by the action of masses of people seeking their own liberation.
First published in the January 5, 2001, issue of Socialist Worker.
was in Iraq in ’03, and what I saw there crushed me,” former U.S. Army sergeant Ash Woolson told thousands of people last Sunday afternoon from a makeshift stage at the edge of the security perimeter around Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center, where the NATO summit was being held.
As the international meeting was getting underway that day, thousands marched for peace through the city’s downtown. They were led by contingents of U.S. veterans like Woolson organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, 40 of whom eventually mounted the ad hoc stage, where they brought the symbolic and tangible purpose of the week’s protests into sharp focus by attempting to publicly return their service medals, including their Global War on Terror awards.
Just before Woolson lobbed his medals in the direction of the NATO gathering (the organizers had requested that an official accept them, but this was turned down), he added: “I don’t want us to suffer this again, and I don’t want our children to suffer this again, and so I’m giving these back!”
This was the largest organized medal return since April 1971, when more than 800 veterans deposited their medals on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to dramatically repudiate the Vietnam War. Like that event four decades ago, Sunday’s ceremony was moving and powerful. It crystallized in a clear but visceral way the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time it spelled out the critical importance of undertaking deliberate and potentially risky resistance for healing and nonviolent change.
This riveting event could well have become the indelible image of this week’s NATO protest. Even more importantly, it might have prompted a renewed national focus on the realities and costs of the last dozen years of war-making.
So far, neither has happened. Although there was some media coverage of the medal return ceremony (including a piece on local television and extensive reporting on Democracy Now!), it was largely overshadowed by the clash between police and protesters that took place almost immediately after the vets exited the stage. The march permit expired and most of the thousands of marchers drifted away, but a couple of hundred people stayed put in the streets. Hundreds of police in riot gear then flooded into the area. As an Associated Press story reports:
Some of the most enduring images of the event were likely to be from the end — when a small group of demonstrators clashed with a line of police who tried to keep them from the lakeside convention center where President Barack Obama was hosting the gathering. The protesters tried to move east toward McCormick Place, with some hurling sticks and bottles at police. Officers responded by swinging their batons. The two sides were locked in a standoff for nearly two hours, with police blocking the protesters’ path and the crowd refusing to leave. Some protesters had blood streaming down their faces.
This description conveys little of the ferocity of the tense confrontation that erupted after the permit expired and a huge police contingent swarmed into the space, intent on pushing people out of the intersection and keeping them from moving toward the convention center. News accounts and video clips from the scene show that the police tactics were hugely confrontational and aggressive; the police attacked and pummeled many protesters. At the same time, video clips show objects being hurled at police officers, including a police barricade, and protesters pushing police. Both sides were confrontational, as this raw videoindicates.
My spouse Cynthia and I brought our two-year-old daughter Leah to this march. (The coalition website said that this event would be “family friendly,” and we took it at its word.) We were one block from the stage, but left a couple of minutes before the permit expired because Leah was getting hungry and thirsty; it had been a long, hot day. As we walked north, a long phalanx of police officers in riot gear were trotting single file toward the intersection, where only a few minutes later they would be swinging batons at marchers unwilling to budge. Some would be bloodied; others arrested.
There is no excuse for the actions of the police. At the same time, the lack of nonviolent discipline among the remaining protesters contributed to escalating this confrontation. The media frame on this story shifted almost immediately from “peaceful march” to “street fighting,” and the powerful action of the Iraq and Afghanistan vets was largely lost in the inundating shuffle.
Well before all of this, Suellen Semekoski and I were asked by Iraq Veterans Against the War to co-facilitate the nonviolent action training that would support the vets in preparing for their medal return. We were happy to do so, and on Saturday afternoon and evening we plunged into this process with them.
In our six hours together, we sensed the depth of hope that this public action was generating for them as individuals and as a community. Throughout the day the participants repeatedly stressed that nonviolence was going to be crucial to this event and that they were committed to maintaining this spirit. In addition, we were joined by three members of Afghans for Peace who were collaborating with IVAW on this event. They were also resolute about the importance of nonviolent discipline. The success of this action, they said, depended on it.
These survivors of war — U.S. veterans and Afghan peaceworkers — were creating a rare public space where they sought to call on the nation and the world to reflect deeply on the reality of this past, present and future destructiveness. They were very clear that nonviolent strategies, tactics and atmosphere would be vital to achieving this.
Unfortunately, there was little infrastructure in place to support that possibility. While many of us led numerous nonviolence trainings in the Chicago area in the run-up to the NATO mobilization, there were no agreed-upon nonviolence guidelines to serve as a foundation for nonviolent action. (The “Chicago Principles”did not serve this function.) Nor were there adequate numbers of peacekeepers prepared to intervene in order to maintain this nonviolent atmosphere. (In January, some of us had offered to train 500 peacekeepers, who would be equipped to respond to outbreaks of violence. This was based on the experience some of us had had in Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organization meeting, where 200 peacekeepers had been an inadequate number. We were told that the coalition was already training peace guides.)
There are many reasons such infrastructure was not in place, including a sensitivity to the now classic debate between nonviolence and diversity of tactics. Nevertheless, I suspect that we are at a crossroads as a movement for change and, at some point, we must make a difficult but important choice.
From my perspective, people power depends for its lifeblood on nonviolent discipline.
Nonviolent action is more effective than violent action — including the kind of heated scrum that took place in Chicago this past Sunday — because it keeps us on message (focused on the issue, rather than the tired tit-for-tat narrative), it is more likely to alert, educate and mobilize the population (the lynchpin of successful movements), and it communicates a vision of the kind of society we want (veterans creating the space of transformative healing and social change rather than the push-comes-to-shove dynamics of retaliatory violence).
If these things are true, then we must engage in nonviolent struggle with those for whom nonviolent struggle is dispensable. The challenges our world is facing are too grim to move forward without the strength and effectiveness of disciplined nonviolent people power. There are lessons everywhere - even from what went down in Chicago on Sunday.
was in Iraq in ’03, and what I saw there crushed me,” former U.S. Army sergeant Ash Woolson told thousands of people last Sunday afternoon from a makeshift stage at the edge of the security perimeter around Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center, where the NATO summit was being held.
