[Peace-discuss] Johnson's staged event

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I think we made a tactical error tonight, although I didn't
see it until it was done.  With that crowd -- perhaps any
crowd -- and that format, the presenter can control the
discussion almost completely, within the limits established by
the concison of the event.  Instead of participating (or
perhaps, in addition) we should have picketed and leafleted as
we do on Prospect or Main.  We primarily want to address not
Johnson -- who knows perfectly well what the facts are -- but
the people who turn out for these things. We don't need to
"speak truth to power" (power knows the truth and wants to
hide it) but to those whose consent has been manufactured. 
I've sent the following to the N-G in response to tonight's
festivities. --CGE]


In brief and superficial remarks to a PR-oriented “town
meeting” on August 1, Representative Timothy Johnson managed
to avoid the one question that Americans are now telling
pollsters is the most important facing this administration. 
That is the war in Iraq.  Recently people have begun to say
that the war is even more important than jobs, which used to
be in first place.

His evasion is not new.  Johnson refused to say what his
position on the Iraq war was, up until the Congressional
resolution that supposedly authorized it, in October of 2002.
 Then he voted in favor of that resolution.

Now that he has the blood of thousands and thousands of people
on his hands, we his constituents should demand to know what
he will do to stop this illegal war -- and to punish those who
lied to us in order to begin it (as the recently-revealed
Downing Street minutes show). 

At the end of the Second World War, the Nuremberg Tribunal
declared that “to initiate a war of aggression ... is not only
an international crime; it is the supreme international crime
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains
within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”  The German
people, of course, had little say in what their government did
then.  We have much more -– and therefore a correspondingly
greater responsibility to force our representatives like Mr.
Johnson to end their complicity in war crimes. 

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