[Peace-discuss] Letters on a low, dishonest decade

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I sent the following letter(s) to the slender reeds upon which our 
representation to the federal government rests. --CGE]

September 1, 2007

Senator Richard Durbin
309 Hart Senate Building
Washington, DC 20510

[cc: Senator Barack Obama
713 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510]

[cc: Representative Timothy V. Johnson
1207 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515]

Dear Senator Durbin:

The rumored attack on Iran by the United States must be stopped, and it 
is your responsibility to do so.  You cannot acquiesce in the war crime 
that the Bush-Cheney administration seems about to commit.  Please do 
all that you can to prevent this enormity from occurring.

An attack on Iran would obviously violate the United Nations Charter, 
which forbids "the threat or use of force against the territorial 
integrity or political independence of any state."  American leaders 
would be guilty of what the German leaders were condemned for at 
Nuremberg -- "the planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war 
of aggression." In a famous passage from their judgment, the four judges 
of the tribunal (American, British, French and Russian) declared the 
crime of aggressive war to be "the supreme international crime, 
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself 
the accumulated evil of the whole" -- i.e., even worse than terrorism.

Of course the German leadership had excluded the legislature from the 
decision to wage aggressive war, so only the leaders were punished.  But 
if the Congress of which you are a member permits the executive to 
commit the supreme international crime, you too should be answerable 
before a new Nuremberg court.

Sincerely,

C. G. Estabrook

L. S. Estabrook

Enc.: W.H. Auden, SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

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SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
W.H. Auden
	
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
 From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

 From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.


Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

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