[Peace-discuss] Draft of flyer for 'Main Event' 5/7

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Text below / formatted copy attached / comments welcome. --CGE]


*The Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana
~ A.W.A.R.E. ~
is a group of local citizens who for almost ten years have been demanding that
the US government cease its Long War for oil against the people of the Mideast.


About 10 years ago a bunch of psychotic killers crashed planes into buildings.* 
A tall skinny guy who took credit said he was protesting the presence of US 
troops in Saudi Arabia, US support for Israel's war on Palestinians, and the 
sanctions that were causing starvation in Iraq. That wasn't going to hold up in 
a court of law as a justification for mass-murder. But the U.S. government had 
already, before 9-11, turned down offers from the Taliban to put Osama bin Laden 
on trial in a third country, and it turned those offers down again.
*
Instead, the US president said he had no interest in bin Laden,* but proceeded 
to encourage Americans to be afraid of their own shadows. He used that fear to 
help launch a war without end. We've now had nine-and-a-half years of pointless 
horrific murderous war in Afghanistan and eight years of the same in Iraq, plus 
a drone war in Pakistan, a new war in Libya, and smaller wars and special 
military operations in dozens of other countries.
*
We watched people in the Mideast on television dancing in the streets* and 
celebrating the crimes of 9-11 and we thought how evil and barbaric they must 
be. Knowing nothing about the decades our government had spent exploiting and 
occupying their countries, toppling their democratic leaders, and kicking in 
their doors, we assumed that these subhuman monsters were celebrating the 
killing of Americans because they just happened to dislike us or because their 
religion told them to.
*
Of course, we used to have lynch mobs in this country.* Ask the freedom riders 
who left for the Deep South 50 years ago this month. But we had outgrown that. 
We were not driven by blind vengeance. We were civilized. The reason we locked 
up far more people in prison than any other country and killed some of them was 
a purely rational calculation dealing with prevention, deterrence, and 
restitution. We weren't monsters. We didn't torture or cut people's heads off.
*
But those beasts whom we started locking up in Guantanamo, they were a different 
story.* They clearly could not be reasoned with. They had to be tied up like 
animals just to control them. Our government wouldn't do that to people if it 
didn't have to, so clearly it had to. To think otherwise would be inappropriate, 
disloyal, disobedient. It was best to think what we were told to think, and if 
most of those people in Guantanamo turned out to be innocent, well at least they 
weren't real people like us.
*
And so we gave up 800 years of civil rights.* We tore up the Magna Carta. 
Because people should have the right to a trial only when the government doesn't 
tell us they are guilty. We gave up our opposition to torture. We abandoned our 
trepidation regarding aggressive wars. We sat silent as President Obama declared 
his right to assassinate Americans and threw a whistleblower, naked, into a 6' x 
12' cell in Virginia. We asked Congress to obey the president and the media to 
cheer for our team. And we watched lots of movies.
*
And in movies and on TV shows, torture works.* Completely unlike reality, the 
torture victim always tells the truth in movies. And killing people works great 
too. It doesn't disturb the killer at all or have any nasty side effects. People 
backing the same cause as the victim never appear as the credits are rolling. 
Happily-ever-after is what comes from killing people. The best thing for us to 
do, unless we're busy shopping, is to cheer and scream like deranged maniacs 
whose team just won the Big Game.
*
So, after 10 years of shredding the rule of law,* hiring mercenary armies, 
invading helpless unarmed countries, causing the deaths of over a million 
people, and learning to love torture, all of this warfare did absolutely nothing 
to locate Osama bin Laden - who was hiding near the capital of a country to 
which we'd given billions of dollars and helped to build illegal nuclear bombs. 
We fought a war in Iraq on the pretense that Iraq was giving bin Laden nuclear 
weapons, while bin Laden was hiding out in a nuclear nation, almost certainly 
with the knowledge of that nation's military. Pakistan is now on call should 
Saudi Arabia need any troops to kill its own people, the United States having 
heeded bin Laden's demand and pulled its troops out to deploy them elsewhere in 
the region -- a region in which our government supports and arms dictators until 
they are nonviolently overthrown or, as in Libya, a rebel force led by a CIA 
stooge can be backed instead. Only massive ignorance can continue to ask "Why do 
they hate us?"*

And so, after nearly a decade, our government bothered to look for bin Laden,* 
found him, and murdered him. But what choice did they have? A truly fair trial 
would always involve the risk of acquittal. A semi-fair trial would have risked 
bringing up undesirable topics, such as the US failure to prevent 9-11, our 
decades-long support for bin Laden, bin Laden's evasion of the US in 2001 and 
ever since, bin Laden's reasons for 9-11, and the question of precedent. If we 
gave bin Laden a semi-fair trial, how would we explain denying one to so many 
other people? And a truly unfair military trial would have made the United 
States look even worse. A member of the CIA said this week that killing him was 
"cleaner."
*
We don't try people as we tried the Nazis.* We don't lock people up and torture 
them ... as much as we did. We kill them. It's cleaner. And then we dance in the 
streets cheering for the killing. But killing Saddam Hussein didn't bring peace. 
Killing Muammar Gadaffi will not bring peace any more than killing his children 
and grandchildren has. Killing Osama bin Laden will bring no peace and is no 
justice. Nonviolently overthrowing the governments of Tunisia and Egypt and 
Yemen points us in a better direction, if we can break through our government's 
propaganda.
*
In 1969, less than ten years after the US government launched a war against 
South Vietnam,* about 70% of the public had come to regard the war as 
"fundamentally wrong and immoral," not "a mistake." The Obama administration is 
working desperately to keep Americans from reaching that conclusion today, but 
it's not working.  Two-thirds of the US population now thinks the US war in 
Afghanistan "is not worth fighting."
*
If you object to the Obama administration's conducting an unjustified war in the 
Middle East* - and misrepresenting the reason for it - while doing nothing about 
the economy except aiding the rich, tell your representatives in Congress. 
Congressman Tim Johnson, and Senators Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk, can be reached 
through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. /Your protest makes a 
difference: local congressman Tim Johnson, who voted for the invasions of 
Afghanistan and Pakistan, decided that he was wrong to do so and refuses to vote 
for any more money for war in the Middle East. He has kept his promise, while 
our senators continue to vote for war. Now Rep. Johnson has joined other members 
of the House to initiate legislation calling for an end to the Libyan 
intervention unless Congress approves it. You can call him and thank him for his 
stance against the war at 217-403-4690.
/*
AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana,* meets every Sunday 
at 5pm in the McKinley Foundation, 5th and Daniel Streets in Champaign, near the 
UIUC campus. We discuss the war and what can be done against it. Visitors are 
welcome - and see our Facebook page. We also present AWARE on the Air each 
Tuesday 10-11pm on Urbana Public Television, channel 6. Each week we bring you 
comments by members and friends of AWARE about the war and the opposition to it, 
locally and nationally, by Americans who oppose our government's betrayal of our 
democratic principles.*    ###*
/
(Prepared by C. G. Estabrook, from a text by David Swanson, 6 May 2011) /
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