David Swanson's Blog, page 125
December 13, 2013
99 Years Ago: A Pause in the War on Christmas
Frank Richards recalled:
"On Christmas morning we stuck up a board with 'A Merry Christmas' on it. The enemy had stuck up a similar one. Platoons would sometimes go out for twenty-four hours' rest -- it was a day at least out of the trench and relieved the monotony a bit -- and my platoon had gone out in this way the night before, but a few of us stayed behind to see what would happen. Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads. Two of the Germans done the same and commenced to walk up the river bank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench.
"Buffalo Bill [the Company Commander] rushed into the trench and endeavoured to prevent it, but he was too late: the whole of the Company were now out, and so were the Germans. He had to accept the situation, so soon he and the other company officers climbed out too. We and the Germans met in the middle of no-man's-land. Their officers was also now out. Our officers exchanged greetings with them. One of the German officers said that he wished he had a camera to take a snapshot, but they were not allowed to carry cameras. Neither were our officers.
December 12, 2013
There Are No Bad Bears
When he was a tiny little bear cub, Nelson would scamper over to be close to his mother when he heard any loud noise. When he got a little bigger, if something scared him he would growl. Bigger still, and he would stand up on his hind legs, growl, and wave his paws about. And when he got even bigger than that -- when he began to look like a full-grown bear -- if Nelson heard something that might be dangerous, he would stand calmly still and listen harder.
Nelson's cubhood was a happy one. His mother and the other big bears taught him to run and climb, and how to find the berries that were good and wouldn't make you sick. They taught him how to settle arguments with other bears. Growling was only for show, Nelson's mother always told him.
A bear must never attack another bear
But only growl and attack the air.
She told him that little poem many times.
At the end of each day, Nelson's mother would read him stories before he went to bed in the cave. He especially liked "Goldilocks and the Three Humans." When Nelson got a little bigger his mother sometimes let him listen to stories told to a big circle of bears by the best bear storytellers in those mountains. All of Nelson's friends listened to the stories, so Nelson's mother let him do so too. Nelson found the stories -- full of fights and adventures -- to be tremendously strange but tremendously exciting.
Nelson knew that the bears around him in his woods and mountains were not the only bears in the world. He knew other bears lived far way, and others even farther away on the far side of the world. And yet Nelson was never taught a name for his bears until he was nearly full-grown. And when he was taught the name, it was a name he had heard before in movies and books. The name was: the Good Bears.
Nelson was happy to be a Good Bear, but the Bad Bears worried him. He was told where they lived, and he was horrified at the thought that Bad Bears might come into the Good Bears' area. He imagined what the Bad Bears looked like. They must have horns and scales. Some said the Bad Bears breathed fire. Nelson began to grow afraid again, just as he had been afraid of everything when he had been a tiny cub. And at the same time, Nelson was excited by the idea of the Bad Bears. At any noise, Nelson would jump, his hair would stand up, he would rise and growl and wave his claws through the air fast enough to have ripped through a brick wall had there been a brick wall in the middle of the woods.
There was nothing human in the woods until the day the truck came. Nelson knew nothing of trucks. They hadn't been in any stories. He also knew nothing of guns. So, when the forestry department came to help the bears by drugging them to sleep, inspecting them all over, sticking tags on them, and letting them go again, Nelson only knew that a large and noisy thing was nearby and getting closer. He sprang into action.
While Nelson stood his tallest and roared his loudest at the truck, the truck did not talk back to him or retreat. The truck stopped. A human got out with something in his hands. There was a noise. And then Nelson felt a sharp pain in his left rear leg. Nelson felt dizzy. He was spinning. Or the forest was spinning. Or the clouds were spinning. Nelson heard voices, human voices. They were saying he might be sick. He must be tested. They must help him.
Nelson woke up in a place he'd never seen or imagined. There were huge hard bars on all sides of him, and above him. Nelson roared like mad. Humans came near to his cage but were afraid to come all the way up to it. Nelson's rage and fury were limitless. Nelson nearly went insane with fear and anger and hatred. He roared and roared and smashed himself against the bars. Afterward, he had no idea how long this had lasted. It ended when the cage was loaded onto a truck, taken into the woods, and opened. Nelson was free!
But something was wrong. The trees were not the same as before. The mountains were not the same shape. It was as if the world had been twisted sideways somehow. And then Nelson figured out what had happened. The humans had released him into the wrong woods. They had put him in the land of the Bad Bears. Nelson shook with fear. It was one thing to imagine fighting the Bad Bears with all the Good Bears standing at your side, like in the stories told to bear cubs. It was another thing to be alone, the only Good Bear in a world of vicious Bad Bears seeking to destroy you.
Nelson heard and smelled something. He looked quickly around for a place to hide, but it was too late. A bear was coming close, and the bear had seen him. But Nelson was in luck: this didn't look like a Bad Bear at all. This was another Good Bear just like him. They would be together now, two Good Bears against all of the Bad. "Greetings, fellow Good Bear," growled Nelson. "How did you come to be in these woods?"
"I was born in them," said the bear. "But I haven't met you before. Where do you come from?"
Nelson was confused but answered, "I come from over that ridge and across the next valley, of course. Don't all Good Bears come from there?"
The other bear began to back away slowly and the hair to rise on his back. "You come from the land of the Bad Bears?" he growled. "Are you a Bad Bear then?"
"What are you talking about?" growled Nelson. "Do I look like a Bad Bear? Do I breathe fire? Where are my scales? Where are my horns? I'm a Good Bear, just like you."
"That's true," said the other bear, whose name was Steven. Nelson and Steven relaxed a little and began to trust each other, but both were puzzled and confused. Each of them thought the other must be a Bad Bear, but both could see it wasn't true.
Nelson stayed with Steven's family that night, planning to begin traveling home the next day. In the morning Steven, who did not want Nelson to leave, said he would travel with him, at least half way. And so, the two friends moved quickly through the day and crossed the mountain ridge. And not long after crossing the ridge and beginning down the other side, they heard the most frightening noise in the world. They heard the noise of war coming. They heard it coming from in front of them and behind.
Hundreds of bears were roaring and stomping and screaming and smashing against the trees. They all seemed to have gone insane, a huge line of them moving up from Nelson's woods. And another gigantic group of mad crazy bears ready to kill was coming up the mountains from Steven's home. Nelson and Steven stood perfectly still, listened, smelled, and thought. And they thought well, without even quite knowing they'd done so, and without having to tell each other what to do.
Together, Nelson and Steven raced back to the top of the ridge. They could see the armies of bears advancing up both slopes toward them. Nelson faced the bears from his home. He saw bears he knew, friends and family. "Stop!," he roared. "Who do you think you are attacking?"
"Stop!" roared Steven at his own bear nation. "Who are you coming to kill?"
"The Bad Bears!" said Nelson's countrybears.
"The Bad Bears!" said Steven's bear kin.
"They don't exist," roared Nelson and Steven.
"Look," roared Nelson. "Look at this bear next to me. He is from the land of what you call Bad Bears, but he is just like you and me. His bears have been told that YOU are the Bad Bears. And you know that isn't true."
Steven told his bears the same thing. But meanwhile the bears had been advancing quickly and were nearing the ridgetop. "Look at them," pleaded Nelson and Steven. "Look at them! They're Good Bears the same as you. Bad Bears are only in stories. Things in stories aren't always real. Bear cubs know that! And bear cubs know that growling is only for show. You must never attack another bear, but only growl and attack the air."
The two bear friends were telling whole armies of angry bears what every bear mother had told every one of those bears when they had been young cubs. Some of the bears were roaring like mad at their enemies. Some of the bears were beginning to listen. Some of the bears were stopping and looking carefully at the bears in front of them.
Bears growled, but they didn't attack. They stopped and looked. They understood that Steven and Nelson were right.
Nelson and Steven had stopped a war.
Later, at Nelson's cave, Steven said to his friend, "Do you know why I'm glad you're not really a Bad Bear?"
Nelson nodded. "I do," he said. "Because then I wouldn't exist. And you'd be a Bad Bear too and not exist either."
"Exactly," growled Steven. "There'd be no more bears if we weren't all Good Bears, as of course we are!"
"I'm glad," growled Nelson.
Who's Excited About Another Decade in Afghanistan?
With 196 nations in the world and U.S. troops already in at least 177 of them, there aren't all that many available to make war against. Yet it looks like both Syria and Iran will be spared any major Western assault for the moment. Could this become a trend? Is peace on the horizon? Are celebrations of Nelson Mandela's nonviolence sincere?
The glitch in this optimistic little photo-shopped storyline starts with an A and rhymes with Shmafghanistan.
The U.S. public has been telling pollsters we want all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan "as soon as possible" for years now. We're spending $10 million per hour, and $81 billion in the new annual budget, on an operation that many top officials and experts have said generates hostility toward our country. The chief cause of death for U.S. troops in this operation is suicide.
And now, at long last, we have an important (and usually quite corrupt) politician on our side, responding to public pressure and ready -- after 12 years -- to shut down Operation Enduring ... and Enduring and Enduring.
Oddly, this politician's name is not President Barack Obama. When Obama became president, there were 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. He escalated to over 100,000 troops, plus contractors. Now there are 47,000 troops these five years later. Measured in financial cost, or death and destruction, Afghanistan is more President Obama's war than President Bush's. Now the White House is trying to keep troops in Afghanistan until "2024 and beyond."
Sadly, the politician who has taken our side is not in Washington at all. There are a few Congress Members asking for a vote, but most of their colleagues are silent. When Congress faced the question of missiles into Syria, and the question was front-and-center on our televisions, the public spoke clearly. Members of both parties, in both houses of Congress, said they heard from more people, more passionately, and more one-sidedly than ever before.
But on the question of another decade "and beyond" in Afghanistan, the question has not been presented to Congress or the public, and we haven't yet found the strength to raise it ourselves. Yet someone has managed to place himself on our side, namely Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Like the Iraqi government before him, Karzai is refusing to agree to an ongoing occupation with U.S. forces immune from prosecution under Afghan laws. Before signing off on an ongoing military presence, Karzai says he would like the U.S. to stop killing civilians and stop kicking in people's doors at night. He'd like the U.S. to engage in peace negotiations. He'd like Afghan prisoners freed from Guantanamo. (Of the 17 still there, 4 have long since been cleared for release but not released; none has been convicted of any crime.) And he'd like the U.S. not to sabotage the April 2014 Afghan elections.
Whatever we think of Karzai's legacy -- my own appraisal is unprintable -- these are remarkably reasonable demands. And at least as far as U.S. public opinion goes, here at long last is a post-invasion ruler actually engaged in spreading democracy.
What about the Afghans? Should we "abandon" them? We told pollsters we wanted to send aid to Syria, not missiles. Humanitarian aid to Afghanistan -- or to the entire world, for that matter, including our own country -- would cost a fraction of what we spend on wars and war preparations (51.4% of the new federal budget), and could quite easily make us the most beloved nation on earth. I bet we'd favor that course of action if we were asked -- or if we manage to both raise the question and answer it.
December 11, 2013
Why Andy Shallal Should Be Mayor of D.C.
It would make a tremendous difference nationally and internationally to have a real activist, progressive, populist, and democrat as mayor of our nation's capital. Imagine a leading opponent of war as mayor of the world center of war making. Imagine major public initiatives to address the massive poverty and racial disparity in the headquarters of the greatest wealth machine on the planet. Imagine the model set in Washington for school systems elsewhere based on public community schools rather than corporate commodification of mis-education.
Imagine Congress forced to work in a place with living wage laws, wise environmental practices, free mass transit, perhaps a public bank -- a place where the quality of life rises for all and trickledown propaganda can't utter its first syllable without being mocked. Imagine the home of the U.S. government as a living breathing counterexample to every acontextual ahistorical anti-intellectual claim for the benefits of violence over diplomacy, monopolistic capitalism over the social good, and brutal pigheadedness over civic engagement and innovation.
I hardly ever promote candidates. We're not going to vote our way to peace and justice -- much less vote our way to clean, open, verifiable elections with public financing and free, fair media time. But Washington, D.C., is actually a place where Andy Shallal has a chance to get himself elected. He's in a 7-way race, and people want a newcomer.
Andy Shallal! Most of you know who this is. Andy has been a leading opponent of wars and militarism, of racism, and of extreme materialism. Andy has testified before Congress, rallied crowds, and gone to jail for justice. He's helped keep Northrop Grumman from living off DC taxpayers. He's pushed for higher wages from Wal-Mart, and paid them at his own restaurants. He's the owner of four -- soon to be six -- Busboys and Poets restaurants, the places where all the best organizations and campaigns find a free space to meet, strategize, communicate, and entertain -- spaces that always seem a bit more integrated by age, race, and background than anywhere else in DC.
Andy is not just a personality, not just a backstory, not just an aura or a brand name. He has proposals ready to work on. He wants a moratorium on school closings. He wants money put back into the minimum wage (what's commonly and misleadingly called "raising" it). He wants the voting age dropped to 17. Andy is on the board of trustees of the Institute for Policy Studies. That's like having your own cabinet already formed, but formed by geniuses and actual small-d democrats.
I can think of another major city where a mayor was recently elected with great fanfare and great expectations, but the disappointments came quickly. I don't know how that will work out, but I know that Andy won't disappoint. He also would not want public activist pressure to go away. We'll need to pressure Andy and the D.C. City Council, we'll need to organize and educate and listen to and learn from our neighbors. We'll need to keep doing what we do, but we'll do it with the mayor on our side, the mayor of an international city, a city with sister cities on every continent, a city with great influence on public discussion at home and abroad.
This is a campaign for us all, no matter where we live.
Andy is the guest this week on Talk Nation Radio. Listen here.
His own website is at http://Andy4DC.org
I hate to say it, but we really need you to make a small or large contribution right here.
December 10, 2013
Social Justice Groups Demand Congress Slash Military Budget, Spend Money on People, Peace, Planet
Glen Davis, Jill Stein (back row), Kymone Freeman, Cheri Honkala, Leslie Ortiz (front row)
In spite of heavy, wet snow falling on Capitol Hill, a coalition of peace, anti-hunger, anti-poverty, environmental and community groups came together to voice its objections to what it calls “runaway, dangerous military spending.”
In a press conference in the Cannon Office Building, speakers called on the Congressional Budgetary Committee to pass a budget resolution that re-directs military spending to domestic needs that serve “people, peace and the planet.” They then presented their proposed budget and supporting petitions to staffers of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Co-Chair of the Budgetary Committee.
After a stand-off on the budget resulting in a government shutdown in October, the Committee has until December 13 to re-negotiate some of the automatic sequestration cuts coming up next year. As it is, the Pentagon budget is due for about a 10% reduction, or $52 billion. Jill Stein of the Green Party’s Shadow Cabinet said that’s not nearly enough.
“We cannot both feed the hungry and feed our children, feed our elders, feed us and fill this absolutely bottomless pit of the military machine,” she said.
In its proposed “Peace-People-Planet” budget, the coalition outlines ten ways to slash military spending by 25 to 50%, including changing U.S. military policy (“stop policing the world”), ceasing to buy unnecessary weapons systems, and auditing wasteful practices at the Pentagon.
Taxpayer dollars should be used instead to fund social programs, job initiatives and actions to combat climate change, press conference speakers said.
December 9, 2013
War Is Over, if you want it
By Nathan Schneider, http://wagingnonviolence.org/2013/12/war-want/
Even in his proposal for “perpetual peace,” Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant lamented that war “seems inborn in human nature.” Yet he believed it possible to overcome and outlined a strategy for doing so. Just as ambitious today is veteran activist and writer David Swanson, who is part of a group that is beginning to build a coalition broad and strong enough to bring an end to the practice of war as an instrument of ordinary policy. His most recent book, to that point, is War No More: The Case for Abolition. And while he recognizes that challenge of ending war is a daunting one, he argues that it may be less difficult than many of us would think.
What exactly is it that you’re proposing, in a sentence?
We’re organizing groups in the United States and around the world to make a re-energized — and we hope broader and more diverse — push toward the total abolition of the institution of war.
What would a world that had abolished war actually look like?
There would be $2 trillion, roughly $1 trillion of it from the United States, invested in something other than war every year. You can imagine how that might transform health and well-being, sustainable energy, education, housing, or all of the above, and many other things. That redirection of resources would also be likely to spread wealth among more people, as compared to the concentration of wealth facilitated by war spending. Very likely many more lives would be saved by redirected funds than would be spared from dying in wars. But that benefit is not to be minimized. War has become a very deadly form of one-sided slaughter, murdering men, women, and children by the hundreds of thousands. That would end if war ended. One of the greatest sources of environmental destruction would end if war ended — as well as that tremendous waste of resources needed for environmental protection.
Gone too would be the justification for secrecy in government. Civil liberties could no longer be stripped away in the name of fighting an enemy. With enemies gone, international cooperation would flourish. With imperialism gone, it would be possible for the international community to aid abused minorities around the world and assist in natural (so-called) disasters in a way that cannot happen now. Of course, conflicts would remain, but they would be taken to courts, to arbitrators and to the correcting tools of nonviolent action. And of course there are many steps along the way to this final war-free vision, including the step of making militaries actually defensive, rather than offensive — a step that would reduce the U.S. military by at least 90 percent. A world beyond war would benefit from the disappearance of a hugely influential example that teaches groups and individuals the utility of violence.
What makes you think that now is a time when this can happen? It has been tried before, right?
I recently read a proposal to abolish war written in 1992. The authors believed that that was an opportune moment. I’m sure they honestly believed it was. And I’m sure that it, in fact, was — even if there’s a tendency to find such a remark comical in retrospect. Strategic-minded people want to know why 2013 is such a moment, and they can be pointed toward many indicators: opinion polls, the rejection of the proposed missile attack on Syria, increased awareness of war propaganda, the diminishment of drone attacks, the ever-so-slight reduction in military spending, the possibility of peace in Colombia, the growing success of nonviolent conflict resolution, the growing and improving use of nonviolent movements for change, the existentially urgent need for a shifting of resources from destroying the planet to protecting it, the economic need to stop wasting trillions of dollars, the arrival of technologies that allow for instant international collaboration among war resisters. But just as many indicators were available in 1992, albeit different ones, and nobody has developed the means for quantifying such things.
Here’s the key question, I think: If all of those predecessors to Rosa Parks — the many heroes who resisted segregated busing over many decades — hadn’t acted, would Rosa Parks have ever been Rosa Parks? If not, then isn’t the strategic time for a moral and necessary campaign always right now?
What’s the basic strategy?
There are many angles for approaching this task, including education, communications, counter-recruitment, lawsuits, cultural exchange, legislation, treaties, campaigns to resist particular wars or tactics or weapons, and efforts to organize economic interests in support of transition to peaceful industries. Our goal is to strengthen and expand existing efforts by building a broad coalition, influencing the culture, shaping people’s understanding. We need to convincingly make the case that war can be ended, should be ended, is not going to end on its own, and we can make it happen. Our perspective will then change.
We may not oppose wars largely because of the damage done to the aggressor if we understand war as an evil imposed on the victim. We may not struggle against Pentagon waste so much as against Pentagon efficiency. We may not work to distinguish good from bad drone murders if eliminating drones is part of eliminating warfare. We may find that rejecting missiles into Syria was just a start. We may organize a massive program of conversion to peaceful jobs if we come to understand that war makes us less safe rather than protecting us. If this sounds like a vague strategy, that it in part because this campaign is just forming, groups that have not joined yet will have a major say in shaping it. We’re still settling on a name, and drafting a website. You’re getting a preview, in other words, of an idea whose time has almost come.
Who is involved so far? Who do you think needs to be involved?
Several great organizations are involved, and many terrific individuals. More are being added to our preliminary discussions almost every day. I don’t want to announce who is and isn’t involved yet, as that would seem to give more importance to those earliest on board. We’re really just starting to form what needs to be a global campaign, even while focusing on warmaking where it is found, recognizing that the United States is the world’s leading warmaker.
Involved must be the nations victimized, the nations pressured, the nations complicit, the nations making their own warfare on smaller scales, the nations abused by the presence of U.S. troops permanently stationed there. Involved must be environmentalists who overcome their patriotism and militarism in order to take on our largest consumer of oil, greatest creator of superfund sites, and greatest example of an energy-and-economy regime based on assault and exploitation. Involved must be civil libertarians who step back from treating the symptoms of torture and assassination to face the cause of military spending. Involved must be advocates of open government, of education and of all useful causes neglected by our pursuit of warmaking. Involved must be producers of trains, solar panels, schools and everything that stands to benefit from a transition to a law-abiding, cooperative approach to the world.
Do you expect to see an end to war in your lifetime?
Assuming that I live a long life, we will need to see war largely ended or there will be a huge risk of catastrophic wars, of nuclear apocalypse, and of environmental apocalypse aggravated by investment in war. So we’d darn well better see it end. And of course we can. When Congress was overwhelmed with opposition to dropping missiles on Syria, that was less than 1 percent of us overwhelming them. Imagine if 3 or 4 percent of us got seriously engaged in ending the greatest and most inexcusable evil ever devised. The task is not nearly as great as we imagine, and understanding that properly is not a path to naivety but to success.
The People's Budget Goes to Washington
Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.
NewLocation: Cannon House Office Building 402
Washington, DC 20002
Also, join a group photo op at 9:20-9:30 a.m., at Capitol's East Front, House Triangle, near Independence Ave. SE and New Jersey Ave.
Social and economic justice, peace, environmental and community groups are heading to Washington DC to tell Congress: We the People demand a budget that meets our critical needs - by cutting out-of-control, dangerous military spending.
Over one hundred organizationshave signed onto a letter outlining a plan to meet dire human and environmental needs by cutting the dangerous, runaway military budget by 25-50%.
Thousands of individuals have signed on to a petition calling for the same thing.
On December 10 we're delivering it to Congress! Join us and tell Congress this is the only way to end the ongoing financial and humanitarian crisis caused by this reckless and obsolete wartime budget.
Will they listen? We're not holding our breath. But we are going to tell them anyway! And we'll start building our power to compel a People's Budget in the future.
So if you can, come along to Congress on Tuesday. Bring a picture or drawing of something you personally are sacrificing in order to pay for the policy endless war.
Whether you can come or not, please ask your Congress members to attend!
202-225-3121
http://www.usa.gov/Contact/US-Congress.shtml
RSVP to info@greenshadowcabinet.us for updates.
See you there!
Jill Stein, Cheri Honkala, Mark Dunlea, David Swanson
Talk Nation Radio: Andy Shallal on Why He Should Be Mayor of Washington D.C.
https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-andy-shallal
Andy Shallal is running for mayor of Washington, D.C. Learn more and support him at http://andy4dc.com
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
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