[Peace-discuss] ron paul, teabaggers, and some of their best friends

[John W.]

A very good speech, Carl.



On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 2:41 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:



> On 5/5/10 1:55 PM, David Green wrote:
>


>  One book that brilliantly describes the student movement is "The Radical
>> Probe" from 1971. One of its primary themes is the suppression of the
>> movement by primarily liberal faculty members--triangulating as usual. It
>> also devotes plenty of attention to the Black rebellion on campuses.
>> http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Probe-Logic-Student-Rebellion/dp/0689703406
>>
>
> I recently attended a commemoration of a student protest that fits that
> description, at the University of Notre Dame, 40 years ago.  There, as
> across the country, (most) faculty and administration were pressing for the
> policies that led to the Kent State murders, a few weeks later.
>
> The Notre Dame Ten were students who sat-in (they'd learnt from the civil
> rights
> movement) against the war in the fall of 1969 and were rusticated for their
> pains. Several of them returned to campus for the anniversary and invited me
> to give introductory remarks to their convocation, viz. & to wit:
>
>    MISE(RY)-EN-SCENE: REMARKS ON THE NOTRE DAME TEN, FORTY YEARS LATER
>                Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis
>                acciderit id est semper esse puerum.
>
> "Not to know what happened before you were born - is to be a child
> forever,"
> wrote Cicero, just before the beginning of the Christian era.
>
> We'll be talking tonight about things that happened before many of you were
> born, and our purpose is that you not be a child all your life, in spite of
> quite strong forces in our society that encourage just that.
>
> We'll be talking about some people I was privileged to know when they were
> practically children - on this day forty years ago when they decided not to
> be -
> and suffered for it.
>
> And we'll be talking about institutions - government, corporate, academic,
> and
> ecclesiastical - that caused great suffering by committing crimes and by
> being
> actively and passively complicit with them.
>
> The Notre Dame Ten and many others called our attention to those crimes.
>  And
> they continue to do so.
>
>        *       *       *
>
> In order to understand the story we have to go back to the generation after
> the
> Second World War, roughly from 1945 through 1969.  The United States was
> the
> only undamaged major country to emerge from that war.  Russia had won the
> war
> against Germany but had been devastated in the process.  The US had
> devastated
> Japan from the air, not just with atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
> and
> the US acquired what was left of the empire of our putative ally, Britain,
> notably in the Middle East.  In the year after the end of the war, half of
> what
> the world produced was produced by the United States.
>
> What American planners (Republican and Democrat) were thinking was set out
> clearly in 1948 in a secret State Department policy planning document [PPS
> 23 2/48]:
>
> "We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of
> its
> population.... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy
> and
> resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of
> relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of
> disparity.... We
> need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism
> and
> world-benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and... unreal
> objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and
> democratization.... we are going to have to deal in straight power
> concepts. The
> less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."
>
> [Noam Chomsky comments,] "recall that this is a Top Secret document. The
> idealistic slogans are, of course, to be constantly trumpeted by
> scholarship,
> the schools, the media, and the rest of the ideological system in order to
> pacify the domestic population."  And the most idealistic slogan - and the
> biggest lie - was that the US had to oppose the dire threat of communism,
> emanating from the Soviet Union.
>
> The USSR up to its collapse twenty years ago never controlled an economy
> even
> half the size of that of the US.  In the years after World War II, when the
> US
> insisted that it had to defend  Europe against Soviet attack by controlling
> European armies through Nato, the mechanized divisions in the Russian army
> were
> horse-drawn.  But dominant social groups in the US wanted to control the
> world
> economy that had fallen into their laps, and the Cold War was born.
>
> The Cold War was in fact functional for both the US and the USSR because it
> gave
> them an excuse to control restless client states.  When the US wanted to
> overthrow a recalcitrant government in Latin America, we said we were
> "stopping
> communism."  When the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in
> 1968, it
> was to stop the reestablishment of capitalism.  But we can see now from the
> distance of another generation, that the dominant partner by far in this
> malign
> conjunction was always the Untied States.
>
> "In 1955 the Communist threat was defined, very perceptively, in an
> extensive
> study ... that involved a representative segment of the tiny élite that
> largely
> determines foreign policy, whoever is technically in office. The primary
> threat
> of Communism is the economic transformation of the Communist powers ‘in
> ways
> which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial
> economies of the West’. Communism, in short, reduces the ‘willingness and
> ability’ of underdeveloped countries to function in the world capitalist
> economy" dominated by the US.
>
> That was the danger in South Vietnam, when President Kennedy decide to
> invade in
> 1962.  The people of South Vietnam (where most of the war was fought)
> didn't
> have the good grace to accept the government that the US government had
> picked
> out for them (as Latin American countries were taught to do).  They had the
> temerity to resist, and the Kennedy administration decided to make an
> example of
> them.  We killed four million people to demonstrate the Mafia principle
> that no
> one was allowed to run independent operations in territory that we
> controlled.
>
> It was in fact hard to see the real situation then, through the mass of
> propaganda that the American government and media put forth throughout the
> 1960s, but the critical spirit grew throughout that decade.  (That's why
> the
> Sixties have to be condemned by all sides today - see for example Barack
> Obama's
> book.)  By 1969, when the Notre Dame Ten bravely and non-violently took on
> the
> criminal complicity of the University of Notre Dame with that war, about
> 70% of
> the public had come to regard the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral,"
> not
> "a mistake."  University officials too knew what side they were on.
>
> In the years after the Ten's demonstration, the US withdrew its troops from
> SE
> Asia, but it didn't lose the war.  The American military had so destroyed
> and
> poisoned the land and the people that the independent development that the
> US
> had meant to forestall was indeed impossible.  The US did not achieve its
> maximum war aims, but Vietnam and all SE Asia was forced into a subservient
> role
> in a world economy dominated by the US.
>
> There were three things that brought the war to an end:
>   [1] the bravery and sacrifice of the Vietnamese people's resistance to
> the
> invader;
>   [2] the mutiny of the American conscript army in Vietnam, which led to
> the
> withdrawal of American troops and the hasty end of the draft; and
>   [3] the opposition of  the American people, like the Notre Dame 10.
>
> "The protest movement began largely on campus, in very scattered ways. Each
> effort seemed completely alone, and almost hopeless, in the face of
> enormous
> antagonism [such as that shown by the ND administration]. But students
> persevered, and small efforts inspired others, and finally grew to a major
> mass
> movement ... largely as a result of the impact of student protest on
> general
> consciousness. And that mass opposition compelled the business community
> and
> then the government to stop the escalation of the war." [Chomsky]
>
> And it is by the way a myth that the draft was the principal reason for the
> protests.  The draft was always class-based - it caught people from the 80%
> of
> the population who were poor and working class.  The 20% of the population
> who
> went to college could always mange to escape it.  The student leaders of
> protests were not in much danger of being drafted.  That's not why they
> protested.
>
> Again, in the next decade, the wide-spread protests against the Reagan
> administration's murderous wars in Latin America - protests that were
> perhaps
> even more broadly based than those of the 1960s - grew up without any
> threat of
> a draft. And that itself was a result of the '60's protest.  When the
> Reagan
> administration came into office in 1981, they modeled themselves on the
> Kennedy
> administration, twenty years earlier, in many ways.  One was that they
> wanted to
> put US troops into Latin America, as Kennedy had put troops into SE Asia.
>  But
> the Republicans in the 1980s found that they could not invade other
> countries as
> easily as the Democrats of the 1960s.  The Reagan foreign policy was driven
> underground, as in the vicious war against Nicaragua, directly as a result
> of
> the protests of the 1960s.
>
> But America is in fact a more civilized place than it was forty years ago.
> In
> the Middle East today the carpet bombing and chemical warfare that were the
> way
> the Vietnam war was waged are impossible.
>
> When the first Bush administration was able to arrange a foreign war in
> 1991,
> after the dissolution of the Soviet Union - and the resulting absence of
> the
> fake excuse for American wars since WWII: "stopping communism" - President
> Bush
> Sr. exclaimed that the real advantage of killing people in the Persian Gulf
> was
> that it showed "The Vietnam Syndrome is dead!"
>
> By the "Vietnam Syndrome" he meant the revulsion in the US populace against
> wars
> like Vietnam. US planners had to overcome at least that revulsion if the
> ongoing
> foreign policy of the American elite was to continue to be enforced by war,
> regardless of the reluctance of the American people.  And at the center of
> that
> foreign policy was the insistence of the American government that it
> control
> Mideast energy resources.  The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was actually to be
> called "Operation Iraqi Liberation"  until it was noticed that the acronym
> revealed too much...
>
>        *       *       *
>
> What the Pentagon calls the "Long War" (in the Middle East) did not begin
> with
> 9/11.  It stretches back deep into the twentieth century. During World War
> II
> the US State Department described the Mideast is the “most strategically
> important area of the world,” and the area's vast energy resources – oil
> and
> natural gas – as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the
> greatest material prizes in world history.” In the years since then, oil
> companies and their associates have reaped colossal profits; but, even more
> importantly to the US, control over two-thirds of the world’s estimated
> hydrocarbon reserves provides what every administration since WWII has seen
> as
> “critical leverage” over European and Asian rivals, what the State
> Department
> called “veto power” over them.
>
> The US does not need Mideast oil for domestic consumption, and we in fact
> import
> very little oil from the Middle East.  But we insist on controlling the
> region
> from Palestine to Pakistan, from the Caspian Sea to the Horn of Africa -
> and
> will kill a lot of people to insure it, with Israel as our "local cop on
> the
> beat," as the Nixon administration put it.
>
> And it should by now be clear that – whether we call them al-Qaeda,
> Taliban,
> insurgents, terrorists, or militants – the people whom we're trying to kill
> in
> the Middle East are those who want us out of their countries and off of
> their
> resources. In order to convince Americans to kill and die and suffer in
> this
> cause, the US government in successive administrations has repeatedly lied
> about
> the situation, the biggest lie being the current one, that the US is
> fighting a
> "war on terror," as they expand the war to Pakistan, which they see as the
> center of opposition to US control of the region.
>
> There are many differences between the US war in SW Asia today and the US
> war in
> SE Asia forty years ago, when the Notre Dame Ten acted against war and
> atrocity
> - which the officials of the University of Notre Dame supported.  But the
> war
> continues today, and from the same causes, the crimes of American
> institutions.
>
> And we need once again "to realize what this really means, not in terms of
> the
> ludicrous political theater of Washington and the media, not in the
> war-game
> fantasies of think-tankers and armchair warriors, but in the actual costs -
> the
> death and suffering of thousands of innocent people, the ruinous chaos and
> the
> violent hatred engendered, the massive financial corruption and gargantuan
> debt
> added to our already corrupt and bankrupt system, the further coarsening
> and
> brutalization and militarization of our society, and again, because it
> bears
> repeating, the physical and emotional destruction of countless human beings
> whose only crime was to be born in a region targeted by the Great Gamesters
> of
> the world, the warlords in turbans and those in Brooks Brothers suits, the
> gangsters in the alleys and in the corridors of power - this is a bitter
> and
> sickening thing” [Chris Floyd].
>
> I'll conclude with an observation from a book I'd read just months before
> the
> Notre Dame Ten took their action.  My ghostly father, the late Dominican
> theologian Herbert McCabe of Oxford, had written, "...the relevance of
> christianity to human behaviour is primarily a matter of politics, it is
> concerned first of all with the [forms] of communication, the structures of
> relationship in which people live."
>
> ###

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