[Peace-discuss] May 31, 2016 AWARE on the Air

[Karen Aram]

Great show guys, I just finished watching and I was very impressed. The focus on war and it's interconnectedness with climate change, national militarism was very informative, I am so pleased I feel compelled to comment and encourage anyone who hasn't watched the program to do so.


Ron, I'm pleased you didn't choke when reading from the WorldSocialistWebSite, a sign of real progress, in my estimation. Peter Symonds is the first person from whom I heard anything in relation to Obama's "Pivot to Asia", though it wasn't called that, he simply reported the US troops and military base being set up in Australia. No one was talking about it, or concerned except me, until Carl referred to it on AOTA, and the spiral downward since then has continued non stop with US provocations, troops, and battleships in the S. China Sea.


Harry, you were very good, your movement with S.T.E.M. is so important and inspiring. I'm currently communicating with a potential relative, a physicist with Livermore, not to quit his job, yet, but to open his eyes to what is being constructed in their labs and the danger they pose, small nuclear bombs with supposedly better capability to target, but so much easier to utilize.

And, I loved your song, so relevant. You are quite right, the sixties music was an important tool encouraging activism, something I bemoan every time I turn on the radio, and listen to todays music, of as little relevance to the world as that which existed in the fifties. Hootenannies were the start with Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and John Lennon.


David, I recently had a well respected socialist, tell me that the SWP Socialist Workers Party made a mistake by focusing too much on the anti-war movement in the sixties and early seventies. While I think they made some mistakes that resulted in their demise as an organization, I totally disagree that it was a result of focus on the anti-war movement.

I believe in addition to labor abuses, the immorality of war which encourages people to become politically active is the  door opener or first step in the process to a final analysis that unless we defeat capitalism we will always have wars.


Stuart, bringing up and reminding us of the militarism of our own community is quite valuable, and needs no explanation.

________________________________
From: Liggett, Jason <jcliggett at urbanaillinois.us>
Sent: Thursday, June 2, 2016 6:35:22 AM
To: C. G. Estabrook; Karen Aram
Cc: Harry Mickalide; Peace Discuss; Ron Szoke
Subject: RE: [Peace-discuss] May 31, 2016 AWARE on the Air

Here's a playlist with past episodes of AWARE on the Air https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF2B283336F85E5A0

The most recent episode will be on top. In this case, episode #366 which was taped on May 31st.
________________________________
From: C. G. Estabrook [carl at newsfromneptune.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 1, 2016 10:36 PM
To: Karen Aram
Cc: Harry Mickalide; Peace Discuss; Ron Szoke; Liggett, Jason
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] May 31, 2016 AWARE on the Air

This episode (May 10) is up at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeBrNt5yqyY&index=3&list=PLF2B283336F85E5A0<redir.aspx?REF=aEeAoSCTFbAAOkPLvp0b2h_gFz3LQDispawFrZ9NbTP-zAjP2YrTCAFodHRwczovL3d3dy55b3V0dWJlLmNvbS93YXRjaD92PXllQnJOdDV5cXlZJmluZGV4PTMmbGlzdD1QTEYyQjI4MzMzNkY4NUU1QTA.>>.

Yesterday’s (May 31) doesn’t seem to be posted yet. —CGE


On Jun 1, 2016, at 9:44 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<redir.aspx?REF=4qWEWe9LoZsfv2xi2sn7Kn0BlzCIpleboIz9JTyIzOz-zAjP2YrTCAFtYWlsdG86cGVhY2UtZGlzY3Vzc0BsaXN0cy5jaGFtYmFuYS5uZXQ.>> wrote:

Harry, it doesn't appear to be. Sometimes it takes a couple days.
________________________________
From: Harry Mickalide <mickalideh at gmail.com<redir.aspx?REF=mx98nwsB6kytZUjcEogRka6a1UUyiDK5ev7yAQ-4hdNWLwvP2YrTCAFtYWlsdG86bWlja2FsaWRlaEBnbWFpbC5jb20.>>
Sent: Wednesday, June 1, 2016 9:21:12 PM
To: C. G. Estabrook
Cc: Karen Aram; Peace Discuss; Ron Szoke; Jason Liggett; Stuart Levy; Karen Medina; David Green; David Johnson
Subject: Re: May 31, 2016 AWARE on the Air

Has last episode been put online?

On Wed, Jun 1, 2016 at 1:55 AM, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com<redir.aspx?REF=koL8slTR5gsojnypHYNWMva7XwtgWHChALRjs0NKBl5WLwvP2YrTCAFtYWlsdG86Y2FybEBuZXdzZnJvbW5lcHR1bmUuY29t>> wrote:

[Here's a recent opening comment for AWARE ON THE AIR]

1] Good evening and welcome to AWARE on the Air, a unrehearsed panel discussion of the US government’s wars and the racism they inspire.

[2] We are recording this at noon on Tuesday May 10 in the studios of Urbana Public Television, Urbana, IL. Our program is presented by members and friends of AWARE, a local peace group.
The name AWARE stands for “anti-war anti-racism effort.” I’m Carl Estabrook.

[3] AWARE is part of the national and intentional anti-war movement, against the wars waged by the Bush and Obama administrations - unfortunately, in a consistent US tradition:
US presidents have killed, wounded or made homeless well over 20 million human beings, mostly civilians, since the 1960s - far more than any other government in the world.

[4] Today President Obama says he is fighting terrorism in the Mideast, but the real reason is what it’s been for a long time - control of the region’s energy resources. The US doesn’t need oil from the Mideast, but Mideast gas and oil are needed by America’s economic competitors in Europe and Asia, and so control over them gives the US a major advantage over China, Germany, and other countries. That control benefits only the American economic elite - the one percent - and not Americans in general, who’ve seen wealth concentrate in fewer and fewer hands at an accelerating rate over more than a generation - in a general economic and political program that has been called “neoliberalism.”

[5] The neoliberal programs of the past generation in both US political parties have concentrated wealth and power in far fewer hands while undermining functioning democracy, but those programs have aroused opposition as well, in the US and abroad.

[6] In Europe mainstream parties have been rapidly losing members to left and to right. There is a mood of angry impotence as the real power to shape events largely shifted from national political leaders (who, in principle at least, are subject to democratic politics) to the market, the institutions of the European Union and corporations, quite in accord with neoliberal doctrine. Very similar processes are under way in the United States, for somewhat similar reasons, a matter of significance and concern not just for the country but, because of US power, for the world.

[7] The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often fails to accept the role of “spectators” (rather than “participants”) assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people.”

[8] General Washington was so anxious to sideline the fighters he despised that he came close to losing the Revolution. Indeed, he might have actually done so had France not massively intervened and saved the Revolution, which until then had been won by guerrillas — whom we would now call “terrorists” — while Washington’s British-style army was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.

[9] A common feature of successful insurgencies like the American ‘War of Independence’ is that once popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the “dirty and nasty people” who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites’ contempt for “the lower class of these people” has taken various forms throughout the years. In recent times one expression of this contempt is the call for passivity and obedience (“moderation in democracy”) by American politicians reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the popular movements of the 1960s.

[10] For example, global opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was overwhelming. Support for Washington’s war plans scarcely reached 10% almost anywhere, according to international polls. Opposition sparked huge worldwide protests, in the United States as well, probably the first time in history that imperial aggression was strongly protested even before it was officially launched. The front page of the New York Times reported that “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”

[11] Unprecedented protest in the United States was a manifestation of the opposition to aggression that began decades earlier in the condemnation of the US war in Vietnam, reaching a scale that was substantial and influential, even if far too late.

[12] The antiwar movement of the 1960s and ‘70s did become a force that could not be ignored. Nor could it be ignored when Ronald Reagan came into office in the 1980s - determined to launch an assault on Central America. His administration mimicked closely the steps John F. Kennedy had taken 20 years earlier in launching the war against South Vietnam, but the Reaganites had to back off because of the kind of vigorous public protest that had been lacking in the early 1960s. Reagan’s assault on Central America was awful enough; the victims have yet to recover. But what happened to South Vietnam and later all of Indochina, where “the second superpower” - that is, the world anti-war movement - imposed its impediments only much later in the conflict, was incomparably worse.

[13] It is often argued that the enormous public opposition to the invasion of Iraq had no effect. That seems incorrect. Again, the invasion was horrifying enough, and its aftermath is utterly grotesque. Nevertheless, it could have been far worse. Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of Bush’s top officials could never even contemplate the sort of measures that President Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson adopted 40 years earlier largely without protest, like carpet bombing poor populations.

[14] We here at AWARE ON THE AIR want to encourage similar opposition to the Obama administration’s madly dangerous provocations of Russia and China, whom US planners see as challenging the United States and its “overall framework of order (in Henry Kissinger’s words) - as well as the new cold war simmering in eastern Europe, the Global War on Terror, American hegemony and American decline, and a range of similar considerations.

[15] Ever since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the overwhelming power of the U.S. military has been the central fact of international politics. This is particularly crucial in three regions:
~ East Asia, where the U.S. Navy has become used to treating the Pacific as an ‘American lake’;
~ Europe, where the United States, which accounts for a staggering three-quarters of NATO’s military spending; and
~ the Middle East, with its giant U.S. naval and air bases, as Ron Szoke has described on this program.

[16] And as Karen Aram has described here, Chinese leaders understand very well that their country’s maritime trade routes are ringed with hostile powers from Japan through the Malacca Straits and beyond, backed by overwhelming U.S. military force. Accordingly, China is proceeding to expand westward with extensive investments and careful moves toward integration. In part, these developments are within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes the Central Asian states and Russia, and soon India and Pakistan with Iran as one of the observers: the United States was called on to close all military bases in the region. China is constructing a modernized version of the old silk roads, with the intent not only of integrating the region under Chinese influence, but also of reaching Europe and the Middle Eastern oil-producing regions. It is pouring huge sums into creating an integrated Asian energy and commercial system, with extensive high-speed rail lines and pipelines.

[17] Finally to control the economy of Eurasia - the goal of US political leaders as long ago as the US Open Door policy in China in the late 19th century, and the US invasion of Russia in 1918 - the US today is largely responsible for nine wars now going on between north Pakistan and northwest Nigeria – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, southwest Turkey, Yemen, Libya, South Sudan, northeast Nigeria, and Somalia.

[18] Forty years ago, the U.S. government withdrew from an illegal war because Americans demanded it: by the late 1960s, polls showed that 70 percent of US citizens regarded the war in Vietnam as not “a mistake,” but as “fundamentally wrong and immoral.”

[19] We must begin to see today’s American wars as “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” We must demand that President Obama and his successor (probably Clinton)

(1) end the drone assassinations;
(2) bring all U.S. troops (and weapons) home;
(3) close the 1,000 foreign U.S. bases around the world (Russia and China together have no more than twelve);
(4) end the provocations of Russia (in eastern Europe) and China (in the South China Sea);
(5) end support for Israel's apartheid policy, and stop sending them money and weapons; and
(6) support negotiations among the U.S., Russia and their clients to end the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars.

[20] In a book on the last presidential campaign, Pres. Obama is quoted as follows:

“‘Turns out I'm really good at killing people,’ Obama said quietly. ‘Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.’”

However ironically he meant it, the quote has not been denied by the White House, and it turns out to be true: President Obama has attacked 8 countries (George Bush attacked only 6); his drone assassinations (for which he chooses the targets) have killed thousands of people, including US citizens and hundreds of children; and his special forces are active in no less than 3/4 of the countries of the world - their activities included kidnapping (“rendition”), torture, and murder.

There’s a lot of news about US government war-making this week, but you won’t hear much about it in the American media. We’ll mention some of it tonight...

On May 31, 2016, at 6:36 PM, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com<redir.aspx?REF=koL8slTR5gsojnypHYNWMva7XwtgWHChALRjs0NKBl5WLwvP2YrTCAFtYWlsdG86Y2FybEBuZXdzZnJvbW5lcHR1bmUuY29t>> wrote:

"Two Minutes Hate," from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a literally (and figuratively) Orwellian objection to what 'AWARE on the Air' was designed to do - i.e., aid awareness of the wars that the Obama administration is carrying on around the world, despite their largely successful attempt to direct attention away from them.

And in that attempt they’ve been aided by liberals employing identity politics - e.g., “You hate Obama!”

No, we hate Obama’s mass murders. He lied his way into the job (twice) by pretending he did too.

The point was made by the late Alex Cockburn, whom I’m proud to call a friend:

"'Is your hate pure?' he would ask a new Nation intern, one eyebrow raised, in merriment or inquisition the intern was unsure. It was a startling question, but then this was—it still is—a startling time. For what the ancients called avarice and iniquity Alex’s hate was pure, and across the years no writer had a deadlier sting against the cruelties and dangerous illusions, the corruptions of empire. But, oh, how much more he was the sum of all he loved.” [JoAnn Wypijewski <http://www.thenation.com/article/remembering-alex/<redir.aspx?REF=eb1Mxzj_g-43JAlun0FFwQepn-UjZjLFlvcc37eTZ0JWLwvP2YrTCAFodHRwczovL3VybGRlZmVuc2UucHJvb2Zwb2ludC5jb20vdjIvdXJsP3U9aHR0cC0zQV9fd3d3LnRoZW5hdGlvbi5jb21fYXJ0aWNsZV9yZW1lbWJlcmluZy0yRGFsZXhfJmQ9Q3dNR2FRJmM9OGhVV0ZaY3kyWi1aYTVyQlBsa3RPUSZyPXRmSHp3WkJjVExFdmVpZXdSaXEwT2RoRm1mUm1sdlpqcElCUzBBVUoydjAmbT1DRURINTZVUzg3UkExdjVGZndDcjd0QkFoeEJfNUJTNDBfekVfQ3hoTlFVJnM9M3pFb2wteVJwZzA2WERqRzZWWG9mTDB0VzNTY2VJTlJhamNGcm9URXg3SSZlPQ..>>]

But Ron is nevertheless correct about the format of 'AWARE on the Air': members and friends of AWARE are invited "to recite, declaim, denounce, rant & sing as you like for some 10–15 minutes, & we’ll see what comes out of the mix."

And I'll continue with an opening comment about what AWARE is attempting to do as part of the anti-war movement - and why that’s necessary.

—CGE

[…]
________________________________
From: Szoke, Ron <r-szoke at illinois.edu<redir.aspx?REF=oHHaEgzVNEVEjVhvbTIP_k3lC9hWc2d-MvJYX4Exto5WLwvP2YrTCAFtYWlsdG86ci1zem9rZUBpbGxpbm9pcy5lZHU.>>
Sent: Monday, May 30, 2016 4:55:15 PM
To: Jason Liggett
Cc: Stuart Levy; Karen Aram; Karen Medina; David Green; David Johnson; Harry Mickalide
Subject: Re: May 31, 2016 AWARE on the Air

Okay, thanks everyone, for all the warnings, suggestions & advice I’ve been receiving about what to do & how to do it.  We’ll be expecting  David G., Stuart L., Harry M., & possibly one or two other people.  I would like to dispense with the recital of a manifesto & the Two Minutes Hate that has preceded most past programs.

But please feel free to recite, declaim, denounce, rant & sing as you like for some 10–15 minutes, & we’ll see what comes out of the mix.

Lauren Q. of Mothers Demand Action (against gun violence) said she has a conflict this time.

Tuesday, May 31, noon-1 pm, at the Urbana city building, 400 S Vine St.

Best wishes,

~~ Ron Szoke

<Keep calm & carry on.jpg>





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