[Peace-discuss] The Day They Arrested President Roosevelt
(comfortable living in your empire...)
Stuart Levy
slevy at ncsa.uiuc.edu
Sun Jul 19 14:56:57 CDT 2009
On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 01:43:22PM -0500, John W. wrote:
[...]
> My contribution was to suggest that there is no POLITICAL system on earth
> that does not produce war criminals. War is a POLITICAL act, but it has
> ECONOMIC justifications and ramifications. I went on to suggest that not
> only does the POLITICAL act of war not negate the ECONOMIC good that a
> President may do, but more importantly, war is one of the primary engines
> that has actually made it possible for all of us in America to enjoy the
> ECONOMIC privileges which we have enjoyed and still to a large degree enjoy.
Ah. Yes very good point.
In Amos Oz's "In the Land of Israel", which is a bit like Studs Terkel's "Working"
in that he travels all over Israel, interviewing people with many points of view...
one is a Jewish farmer who said, more or less, that his generation of Israelis
should just go ahead and wipe out the Arabs. Their grandchildren would
revile them for it, he said, but they would have left them a safe & cozy
place to make that judgement from.
Reading that I was appalled, but then understood that he simply had
a clear historical vision.
> It's not difficult to draw the implication that, unless we are literally
> willing to "put our money where our mouth is" and renounce our economic
> privileges - e.g., our gas-guzzling automobiles - we are ALL complicit as
> war criminals, just as Carl wants to hold the average German accountable for
> Hitler's atrocities (and equate me, for rhetorical effect, with the average
> German during World War II). Most of us are not in a position to totally
> alter our lifestyle, so it seems rather pointless and hyprocritical to me to
> make a list of Presidents who ordered others murdered so that we in America
> could all live better.
Well said.
But I do enjoy having a quiet place to live... having things to give away...
and engaging work to do... and internet communication... and having fresh
produce available all year 'round... and not having to farm for a living,
or fight over the land or water needed to do it. Living near the
prosperous tip of the pyramid has been an awfully comfortable place to be.
How much do I have to give up?
Still... may I recommend Derrick Jensen's piece in Orion magazine
(republished in Alternet this week) -- with an environmental focus,
but I think closely tied to what we're saying here:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801
FORGET SHORTER SHOWERS
WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler,
or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the
eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would
have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked
around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act
of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all
the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely
personal “solutions”?
[...]
I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply.
I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not
buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a
powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary.
It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.
[...]
Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary
to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least
four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political
act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do).
The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that
humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political
act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans
can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams,
we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can
disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an
extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy
that is destroying the real, physical world.
The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it
incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially
to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to
those who actually wield power in this system and to the system
itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist
what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as
individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve
them.”
The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition
of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition,
we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not
consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance
tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office,
pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and,
when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.
The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind
simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within
an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop
this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question
(much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical
infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy
to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will
cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.
The good news is that there are other options. We can follow
the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult
times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United
States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they
actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow
the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is
not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity
as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.
>
>
> > --- On *Fri, 7/17/09, John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com>* wrote:
> >
> >
> > From: John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] The Day They Arrested President Roosevelt
> > To: "Ricky Baldwin" <baldwinricky at yahoo.com>
> > Cc: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
> > Date: Friday, July 17, 2009, 7:14 PM
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 5:52 PM, Ricky Baldwin <baldwinricky at yahoo.com<http://us.mc449.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=baldwinricky@yahoo.com>
> > > wrote:
> >
> > Nice list (if 'nice' is the right word for an accounting of such heinous
> >> crimes).
> >>
> >> We could go back further, of course - right to Washington, if I'm not
> >> mistaken. Pretty close, anyway.
> >>
> >> Ricky
> >>
> >> "Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn
> >
> >
> >
> > To the point where it's utterly moronic to make such a list. What's the
> > point, if every President we've ever had made decisions that led, directly
> > or indirectly, to the instigation or escalation of some war? Wars are
> > instigated by virtually every other nation and tribe and culture and people
> > on earth as well. The human race is insufferably brutal and selfish, and
> > humans kill fellow humans every day to get what they want. You yourself,
> > gentle and precious reader, may not kill directly, but you very definitely
> > consume the things and enjoy the lifestyle that war and brutality make
> > possible, just like everyone else. Wake me up the day one of you figures
> > out how to eliminate human aggression and self-centeredness. Until then,
> > wake me up when one of you figures out a better system of government, in
> > terms of your ONE stupid binary criterion of war/not war.
> >
> > John Wason
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >> --- On *Fri, 7/17/09, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu<http://us.mc449.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=galliher@illinois.edu>
> >> >* wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu<http://us.mc449.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=galliher@illinois.edu>
> >> >
> >> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] The Day They Arrested President Roosevelt
> >> To: naiman.uiuc at gmail.com<http://us.mc449.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=naiman.uiuc@gmail.com>
> >> Cc: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<http://us.mc449.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=peace-discuss@lists.chambana.net>
> >> >
> >> Date: Friday, July 17, 2009, 2:33 PM
> >>
> >>
> >> Of course, it might have been a good idea to arrest
> >>
> >> --Truman before he bombed Japan;
> >> --Eisenhower before he overthrew the governments of Iran and Guatemala;
> >> --Kennedy before he invaded Cuba and South Vietnam;
> >> --Johnson before he attacked North Vietnam and the Dominican Republic;
> >> --Nixon before he attacked Cambodia and domestic dissidents (e.g., Fred
> >> Hampton, not G. McGovern);
> >> --Ford before he allowed the attack on E. Timor;
> >> --Carter before he increased military aid to near-genocidal Indonesia;
> >> --Reagan before he killed tens of thousands in LA and Lebanon;
> >> --Bush before he launched wars in Panama and the Gulf;
> >> --Clinton before he attacked Iraq and Serbia;
> >> --Bush jr. before he invaded Iraq
> >> --Obama before he devastated AfPak...
> >>
> >> and perhaps even Roosevelt in 1937, before he manipulated an anti-war
> >> populace into war with Japan.
> >>
> >> We might also have noticed that the Constitution nowhere gives the Supreme
> >> Court the right to overrule an act of Congress.
> >>
> >>
> >> Robert Naiman wrote:
> >> >
> >> > What a dark day for American democracy it was - February 5, 1937, the
> >> day the
> >> > crisis over President Roosevelt's struggle with the Supreme Court's
> >> blocking
> >> > of the New Deal was "resolved" when Roosevelt was deported to Canada.
> >> How
> >> > might America be different today, if minimum wages, the National Labor
> >> > Relations Act, and Social Security had not been overturned by the
> >> Supreme
> >> > Court? Maybe 60% of our fellow citizens wouldn't still be living in
> >> poverty.
> >> >
> >> >
> >> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/the-day-they-arrested-pre_b_237678.html
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/7/17/112828/523
> >> >
> >> > http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/265
> >>
> >>
> >
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