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

[C. G. Estabrook]

I'm pleased and just a bit surprised at your response, John. Thank you.

On 5/5/10 4:34 PM, John W. wrote:
> A very good speech, Carl.
>
>
> On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 2:41 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu
> <mailto: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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