[Peace-discuss] Paul Street remembers Urbana

[Brussel Morton K.]

…Last weekend I was on this peace and justice panel in Urbana, IL and this old time militant working class activist from central Illinois gets up and says (among other things) that "people think they got a black president with Obama but all they've really got is a green president – green as in money, not the environment.” “Obama,” the activist added, “is just another ruling class asshole." There was a brief hush around the room as everyone digested the comment and then it was like, "yeah, right on. You said it brother."
 …

…This last assault  [ that capitalism entailing a relentless profit-addicted, “cost-externalizing” business assault on livable ecology.] has reached the point where it is I think fair to say along with the great Hungarian Marxist Istvan Meszaros that “if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, then there can be no future of humanity itself.” We have come to a point where the really dangerous and unrealistic utopianism – the truly fantastic belief – is to think that we can advance the human and democratic prospect without getting rid of the eco-cidal rich and their filthy rotten profits regime, with its underlying unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire. "
…
…I want to conclude with a quotation from a young ex-soldier named Mike Prysner – a comment he made while speaking to Iraq Veterans Against the War last December.  After characterizing the Iraq occupation as Washington sending “poor and working in this country “to “kill poor and working people in another county [and] to make the rich richer,” Prysner focused on the real threat to “homeland security” in the United States.  "I threw families on to the street in Iraq,” Prysner said, “only to come home and see families thrown on to the street in this county in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis.” Prysner related his realization “that our real enemies are not in some distant land. They're not people whose names we don't know and whose culture we don't understand. The enemy is people we know …people we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable. The enemy is the CEOs who lay us off from our jobs when it's profitable. It's the insurance companies who deny us health care when it's profitable. It's the banks who take away our homes when it's profitable. Our enemy is not 5000 miles away. They are right here at home.” “Without racism,” Prysner noted, “soldiers would realize that they have more in more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war.” (See Prysner’s remarkable speech at www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8) 

 "Had he and I but met
        By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
        Right many a nipperkin! 

        "But ranged as infantry,
        And staring face to face,
I shot at him and he at me,
        And killed him in his place.

        "I shot him dead because – 
        Because he was my foe, 
Just so – my foe of course he was; 
        That's clear enough; although 

        "He thought he'd 'list perhaps, 
        Off-hand like – just as I – 
Was out of work – had sold his traps – 
        No other reason why. 

        "Yes; quaint and curious war is! 
        You shoot a fellow down 
You'd treat if met where any bar is, 
        Or help to half-a-crown."

 
That’s how actually radical American activists, workers, soldiers, and intellectuals have felt and thought since the first labor struggles in this country and up through the Haymarket Martyrs and Joe Hill and Eugene Debs and  Howard Zinn to the present day. In the 164 words I just read, the young veteran Mike Prysner spoke more genuinely radical, root-and-branch truth than the great bourgeois speechifier Barack Obama  has spoken in the hundreds of all-knowing, stealthily conservative orations he has given over the last eight years. Thank you very much.

See  http://www.zcommunications.org/socialism-by-paul-street    for Street's discourse on Socialism.



--mkb


 


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