A Not-So-Glorious Fourth

Many of my fellow rednecks may be outraged by saying such a thing. But do you realize that it was this type of attitude that made America’s founding heroes decide to address the power and control of another empire? To rebel?

When Satullo says we have sinned, there have never been truer words. We have “missed the mark” of what America was founded to be (and what it was surely meant NOT to be). We, Americans (including every redneck alive today) are complicit in this mess.

As much as I love what the flag stood for, it has become a representation of torture and murder. We have allowed them to brainwash us just like the Germans were brainwashed during Nazi days into believing that we are superior, allowing us to do shit we denounced just a few decades ago. Or, perhaps as bad, lulled them (and us) into a complacency of “who gives a damn” and we do the best we can for ourselves.

We have let down our Founding Fathers and the intent they had for a nation that would never become what we rebelled from. We have done just that.

h/t goes to and video comes from jperryam (he recites the Satullo piece below: please visit the site). I still hope that your holiday is happy and enjoyable, but simply for the sake of gathering with friends and family. I can’t see how it could be “glorious” with what has happened to America.

Chris Satullo: A not-so-glorious Fourth

Put the fireworks in storage.

Cancel the parade.

Tuck the soaring speeches in a drawer for another time.

This year, America doesn’t deserve to celebrate its birthday. This Fourth of July should be a day of quiet and atonement.

For we have sinned.

We have failed to pay attention. We’ve settled for lame excuses. We’ve spit on the memory of those who did that brave, brave thing in Philadelphia 232 years ago.

The America those men founded should never torture a prisoner.

The America they founded should never imprison people for years without charge or hearing.

The America they founded should never ship prisoners to foreign lands, knowing their new jailers might torture them.

Such abuses once were committed by the arrogant crowns of Europe, spawning rebellion.

Today, our nation does such things in the name of our safety. Petrified, unwilling to take the risks that love of liberty demands, we close our eyes.

We have done such things, on orders from the Oval Office. We have done them, without general outrage or shame.

Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. CIA secret prisons. “Rendition” of prisoners to foreign torture chambers.

It’s not enough that we had good reason to be scared.

The men huddled long ago in Philadelphia had better reason. A British fleet floated off the Jersey coast, full of hands eager to hang them from the nearest lampposts.

Yet they pledged their lives and sacred honor - no idle vow - to defend the “inalienable rights” of men. Inalienable - what does that signify? It means rights that belong to each person, simply by virtue of being human. Rights that can never be taken away, no matter what evil a person might do or might intend.

Surely one of those is the right not to be tortured. Surely that is a piece of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

This is the creed of July 4: No matter what it costs us, no matter how it scares us, no matter how foolish it seems to a cynical world, America should stand up for human rights.

No, not even the brave men who picked up a quill, dipped it in ink and signed the parchment that summer day in Philadelphia lived up perfectly to the creed. But they did something extraordinary, founding a new nation upon a vow to oppose all the evil habits of tyranny.

That is why history still honors them.

But what will history think of us, of how we responded to our great challenge? Sept. 11 was a hideous evil, a grievous wound. Yet, truth told, it has not summoned our better angels as often as our worst.

We have betrayed the July 4 creed. We trample the vows we make, hand to heart.

Don’t imagine that only the torturer’s hand bears the guilt. The guilt reaches deep inside our Capitol, and beyond that - to us.

Our silence is complicit. In our name, innocents were jailed, humans tortured, our Constitution mangled. And we said so little.

We can’t claim not to have known. The best among us raised the alarm. Heroes in uniform, judges in robes, they opposed the perverse logic of an administration drenched in fear, drunk on power.

But did we heed them? Hardly. Barely . . .

We were so busy. Soccer practice at 6. A credit card balance to fret. The final vote on Idol.

We left it to those in power to keep our precious selves from harm. Whatever it took.

We took the coward’s way.

The world sees this, even if we are too dim to grasp it. We’ve lost respect. We’ve shamed the memory of Jefferson, Adams and Franklin.

And all for a scam. The waterboarding, the snarling dogs, the theft of sleep - all the diabolical tricks haven’t made us safer. They may have averted this plot or that. But they’ve spawned new enemies by the thousands, made the jihadist rants ring true to so many ears.

So put out no flags.

Sing no patriotic hymns.

We deserve no Fourth this year.

Let us atone, in quiet and humility. Let us spend the day truly studying the example of our Founders. May we earn a new birth of courage before our nation’s birthday next rolls around.

B’Man’s Patriot Watch: Impeachment On or Off The Table? You decide

Impeachment: Why is it “Off the Table”?

On June 9th, Thirty-five Articles of Impeachment detailing high crimes and misdemeanors were presented to the American people by Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

It takes wisdom and courage to stand up and be counted.

Courage to stand up for what is right, whether or not it is popular, or politically expedient.

Dennis Kucinich did! Will you?

Congressman Kucinich has created a path for “We the People” to take immediate action to reclaim our civil rights, our Constitution and our democracy.

It is only through the tools of impeachment that we can hold the administration to full accountability.

Impeachment ON or Off the table”? You decide.

Sign the Official Impeachment Petition.

No President, corporation or individual is above the law.

Produced by Russell Parker
Edited by Chad Ely

A NEW Declaration of Independence

Declaration of Independence

Presented at the “Building a New World” Conference

May 22, 2008

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, a decent respect for the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that the entirety of humanity, the entire creation, constitutes one family in which no individual has been given the right to hoard wealth while the remainder of the family dies for lack of a handful of grain; in which no individual has been given the right to mass murder, in the name of perverse patriotism, for a small piece of this planet; in which no individual has been given the right to exterminate countless animal and plant species in the pursuit of profit. Rather, we affirm our commitment to fulfill our responsibility to every member of our family as part of our human family values.

We further hold that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable political and human rights – among them the right to free speech, free assembly, free press, free worship, trial by jury, and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. These are our most fundamental rights to life and liberty. We assert that as all human beings are created equal, there can be only one chosen people, and that is the entire human and ecological family. No member of this family can be considered an outcast, heathen, foreigner or exploitable natural resource.

We further hold that all human beings are endowed with the inalienable right to be provided with the five basic necessities of life – including food, clothes, housing, free health care and free education. Fundamental morality demands that no human being be denied these five basic necessities of life.

We further hold that all human beings are endowed with certain inalienable economic rights – among them the right to adequate purchasing power. These are our rights to economic security and economic independence – an absolute necessity in the pursuit of happiness.

Inalienable economic rights include the right to a useful and remunerative job; the right to earn enough to provide adequate food, shelter, and clothing; the right of every farmer to raise and sell his produce at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; the right of every person to join a business cooperative in their locality; and the right to full protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, with those governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government.

Prudence will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; experience has also shown that human beings are more disposed to suffer, so long as oppression is sufferable, than to abolish the systems to which they are accustomed and which are the source of their oppression. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same goal, evinces a design to reduce the people under them to absolute despotism, it is the right of the people, it is their duty, to throw off such a government, and to bring strict moralists and lovers of humanity to positions of leadership for the welfare of all.

The history of the American Presidency has been one of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having as its direct object absolute tyranny over the common people. It is an unholy fusion of corporations, governments and organized crime networks. To prove this, let the Facts be submitted to the oppressed American people. — The American Presidency is the single most dangerous institution in the world. The President has the power to murder, and obliterate by bombing, anyone, anytime, anywhere. The President is bound by no laws, domestic or international. To speak of obliterating other nations is to be a global tyrant. We are no longer a nation and planet of laws – we are at the mercy and whim of Presidential tyrants, for whom constitutions and the rights enshrined therein are mere pieces of paper. This cannot be reformed or controlled by the electoral process. — The Government has adopted a policy of serial, imperialist wars, for the sole goal of profit for members of the military-industrial complex. The cry of “terrorism” is a hoax and a fraud to hoodwink the people of America and the world. The US Government has long supported terrorists who are allies of the Empire. The government lures the people to fight its brutal and bloody wars and calls it patriotism. While committing such crimes against humanity, they propose to be our moral instructors. — The American president is now the Torturer-in-chief, who presides over a vast network of illegal torture prisons in the US and around the world, all the while piously presiding over prayer breakfasts. — The Government promotes covert military actions that include illegal drug trafficking, illegal weapons trade and assassinations. It maintains nearly 700 military bases in other countries, often against the wishes of the population. — The Government uses depleted uranium, napalm, phosphorous and laser weapons in direct violation of international law, hence relegating itself to the status of a renegade country, and rendering its leaders open to war crimes trials. — The President repeatedly subverts legislation with signing statements and uses presidential orders to override constitutional rights. It has built more than 600 new prison camps in the U.S. in order to imprison people who might be regarded as enemies of the Government.

— The Government has willingly allowed itself to be infiltrated and criminalized by corporate and elite regimes that now direct all branches of government to serve purposes wholly contrary to the true and proper purpose of government. — The Government promotes economic profit over humanity by failing to punish corporations that participate in sweatshop slavery, agricultural slavery and sex trafficking in America and around the world. It engages in economic wars to destabilize nations that resist corporate takeover. Millions have died due to US economic terrorism and genocide.

— The Government has carried out a campaign of heightened racism, evidenced by ruthless police brutality directed at minorities and the poor. It keeps inner cities in conditions of acute poverty, passes laws designed to incarcerate generations of African-American youth, whom corporations then exploit inside prisons. On their release, they are denied the right to vote, to be educated and to return to their families. They are forced back into a life of crime, and ultimately, back into prison. — The Government has turned over control of United States currency to private individuals, operating through the Federal Reserve, who manipulate it for their own personal gain rather than for the benefit of the world. — The Government supports corporate financial strangulation of the American masses who labor in poverty, often forced to work at two or more jobs and working up to 80 hours per week, only to profit those who do no labor. Furthermore it supports a judicial system that passes laws which serve to keep the working class perpetually chained in poverty, neglect, vice, disease and soon starvation. — The Government has made the word “democracy,” for which our ancestors fought and died, into a mockery, by giving corporations control over our legislators. Through this control, speculators have freed themselves from all regulatory controls and have made immense fortunes while bringing the global economy to its knees. It has blocked state governments from prosecuting criminals responsible for the current economic crisis and coming Great Depression. Instead, the Presidency has financed the survival of these corrupt financial institutions with the money of the American people. If a hungry man robs a store, he is jailed as a criminal, but if a financial executive robs millions of people of millions of dollars, he is bailed out by the Government and his debts are paid by the American public. This is the morality of our plutocracy. Those criminals who made money in the housing bubble now speculate on the prices of food and fuel, while people in this country face inflation and people in American economic colonies face starvation.

— The Government has created a global economic order in which countless people face starvation so that a few nations can monopolize the world’s resources. Developing countries, in the process of raising their own living standards, now keep their own raw materials out of the grasp of Western countries. It is the greatest threat to the American Empire, and hence the US Pentagon, in the name of democracy and freedom, bombs those who resist. — The Government has accrued a national debt of over one trillion dollars, potentially causing untold economic suffering to future generations.

— The Government forces struggling people to pay an inordinate share of the taxes, which are used to carry out the criminal activities of the Government, including wars, assassinations and domestic oppression.

— The Government has promoted a medical-industrial complex that provides obscene profits to pharmaceuticals, private hospitals, doctors and insurance companies, and has silenced development of far less profitable but often far safer alternative medical treatments. Senators and congressmen who vote to deny health care to millions, while provided their own health care at taxpayer expense, are complicit in the premature death, nay murder, of thousands of American citizens.

— The Government has intentionally promoted a system of education that keeps the people dumbed down rather than developing their vast intellectual potential. There is a total lack of accountability to parents and student and communities in the inner cities and a diluted accountability elsewhere. The Government has further allowed corporations and organized religions to control school curriculums.

— The Government has deliberately employed deceit and violence to rob the indigenous people of America of their lands and their resources. It has deliberately sponsored puppet leaderships in these communities so that their members continue to live in conditions of abject poverty and exploitation. — The Government has promoted an unsustainable culture of waste that multiplies corporate profits while devouring natural resources and producing mountains, rivers and seas of toxic wastes. It further allows corporations to carry out unbounded torture of cows, pigs and poultry, destroy groundwater and farmlands, carry out rampant deforestation, and create dependence on pesticides and fertilizers that eviscerate economies but rake in huge profits for those corporations.

— The Government colludes in the monopolization of the world’s media by a handful of corporations, which promote a culture of violence and vulgarity throughout the world. These corporations first debased American culture and now market that pseudo-American culture to the rest of the world. They encourage their minions in other countries to debase their own cultures. While criminalizing dissent, the Government allows criminal networks to globalize pornography, which promotes violence against women. — The Government, in an unholy nexus with corporations, promotes the infiltration of GM organisms into the general food chain, for the express profit of those corporations and potential endangerment to humanity.

— The Government, in an unholy nexus with other governments, promotes the rise of a global police state in which every person will be monitored with cameras, ID cards, thumb prints, retina scans and microchips. Much dissent is either criminalized, suppressed or punished in any number of ways.

— The Government consistently legislates in favor of a petro-based economy that multiplies corporate profits while causing ecological havoc in the form of greenhouse gases, to the point that entire humanity is threatened with the dire effects of global warming and consequent climate change. The Government has bound us to filling our gas tanks with oil laced with Iraqi blood or ethanol made from food taken from the mouths of the starving in Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines.

In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by newer and greater oppressions. The American Presidency, when characterized by acts of tyranny, is unfit to rule the people. We have warned the government repeatedly regarding their flaunting of the constitution. We have reminded them repeatedly of the fundamental rights of all human beings as laid down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and numerous other treaties and conventions of international law. We have appealed repeatedly to their sense of justice and magnanimity, but have been met only with inhuman injustice. The government has been deaf to the call for equity and justice by millions of Americans and our brothers and sisters around the world who have suffered the most from its crimes. While our government builds concrete walls at home and abroad, we the people assert that our hearts recognize no borders, because we believe that to live is to love without limits.

If we define evolution as gradual change and revolution as accelerated change, then we the people declare that the time has come for radical, accelerated change – a revolution - in America and in the world. The criminal nature of the present government leaves the moral, law-abiding citizens no alternative. The network of global tyranny mandates that the multitudes of humanity must unitedly resist and remove the dictatorship of multinational corporations and the governments they own. We start this process today by facing the corporate government of America with this Declaration of Independence.

We, therefore, the people of the United States of America, having the sanctity of all life as the basis for our intentions, do, in the name and authority of fundamental human decency and dignity, declare that we the people are absolved from all allegiance to the present government, as well as to any future government that continues to deny the people their political and economic rights; that all political connection between the government and the people is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as interdependent states, we will endeavor to promote economically sovereign and sustainable bioregions.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. Signed: William Blum, Mitchel Cohen, Tom Feeley, Garda Ghista, Stephen Lendman, Larry Pinkney, Ralph Poynter, Lynne Stewart, Charles Sullivan, Clark Webb, William Woodward ************************************************** For those wishing to join us as endorsers, please fill out the following information and send to wpaeditor@gmail.com. Name __________________________________________________________________ Street __________________________________________________________________ Town/State _____________________________________________________________ Zip Code _______________________________________________________________ Telephone Number _______________________________________________________ Email Address __________________________________________________________

B’Man’s Patriot Watch: Iraqi Soldiers

Ouch, McInsane! That has gotta smart, a bit.

They don’t even want to discuss the possibility of a Republican candidate. NONE of them.

CNN’s Kyra Phillips asks Iraqi soldiers who they prefer as a US president and which party is best for the future of Iraq.

They are “living the Republican war” and they “need change”. Yeah, no shit. So do we, buddy.

Oh, how the McBushie Fools must be gnashing their teeth and throwing ashes upon their own heads.

So much for the “conservative” movement… it just stopped dead in its tracks. Poor, pitiful, stupid-assed bastards.

B’Man’s Patriot Watch: Auburn, Alabama’s Matthis Chiroux

B’Man: I have said this on numerous occasions: it will be the armed forces that stop our imperialization efforts. It will be from within that finally stops these attempts at world domination. You have heard from many retired officers (who were NOT paid by the government to mislead you like may were) that have come out verbally against the illegal occupation.

You have heard from groups like IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War) and the “winter soldiers” (service members from that group who tell their harrowing stories) who have been verbal since their tours and service was over.

In this case, we have a guy who is being called “stop-loss” back into an area he knows (and the majority of Americans know) to be illegal and wrought with war crimes that he doesn’t care to be a part of (nor would any other decent human being). If he knows this “war” to be bogus and wrong, he would be un-American to go… knowing what was being done by a few maniacs in high places in his name was so horrible.

To me, Alabama should be proud of this young man.

From Alternet:

U.S. Sergeant Refuses to Go to Iraq: “This Occupation is Unconstitutional and Illegal”

By Karin Zeitvogel, Middle East Online.

Matthis Chiroux is the kind of young American U.S. military recruiters love.

“I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school,” the now 24-year-old said.

“I was ‘filet mignon’ for recruiters. They started phoning me when I was in 10th grade,” or around 16 years old, he added.

Chiroux joined the U.S. army straight out of high school nearly six years ago, and worked his way up from private to sergeant.

He served in Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines and was due to be deployed next month in Iraq.

On Thursday, he refused to go, saying he considers Iraq an illegal war.

“I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq,” Chiroux said in the sun-filled rotunda of a congressional building in Washington.

“My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation… I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation,” he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.

Minutes earlier, Chiroux had cried openly as he listened to former comrades-in-arms testify before members of Congress about the failings of the Iraq war.

The testimonies were the first before Congress by Iraq veterans who have turned against the five-year-old war.

Former army sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith told a half-dozen US lawmakers and scores of people who packed into a small hearing room of “lawless murders, looting and the abuse of countless Iraqis.”

He spoke of the psychologically fragile men and women who return from Iraq, to find little help or treatment offered from official circles.

Goldsmith said he had “self-medicated” for several months to treat the wounds of the war.

Another soldier said he had to boost his dosage of medication to treat anxiety and social agoraphobia — two of many lingering mental wounds he carries since his deployments in Iraq — before testifying.

Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from the psychological traumas of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.

A group of veterans sitting in the hearing room gazed blankly as their comrades’ testimonies shattered the official version that the US effort in Iraq is succeeding.

Almost to a man, the soldiers who testified denounced serious flaws in the chain of command in Iraq.

Luis Montalvan, a former army captain, accused high-ranking U.S. officers of numerous failures in Iraq, including turning a blind eye to massive fraud on the part of U.S. contractors.

Ex-Marine Jason Lemieux told how a senior officer had altered a report he had written because it slammed U.S. troops of using excessive force, firing off thousands of rounds of machine gun fire and hundreds of grenades in the face of a feeble four rounds of enemy fire.

Goldsmith accused U.S. officials of censorship.

“Everyone who manages a blog, Facebook or MySpace out of Iraq has to register every video, picture, document of any event they do on mission,” Goldsmith said after the hearing.

“You’re almost always denied before you are allowed to send them home.”

Officials take “hard facts and slice them into small pieces to make them presentable to the secretary of state or the president — and all with the intent of furthering the occupation of Iraq,” Goldsmith added.

Chiroux is one of thousands of U.S. soldiers who have deserted since the Iraq war began in 2003, according to figures issued last year by the US army.

But while many seek refuge in Canada, the young soldier vowed to stay in the United States to fight “whatever charges the army levels at me.”

The US army defines a deserter as someone who has been absent without leave for 30 days.

Chiroux stood fast in his resolve to not report for duty on June 15.

“I cannot deploy to Iraq, carry a weapon and not be part of the problem,” he said.

Watch video footage of Matthis Chiroux’s announcement here.

Attack Iraq!

We Spent The Fourth of July in Bed

h/t to Manila Ryce:

Suheir Hammad

 ”We Spent The 4th Of July In Bed”

from episode 1, season 3 of Def Poetry Jam

True Lies by Tallam Acey

From the opening of the award winning documentary ‘American Blackout’, Tallam Acey recites his amazing spoken word poem… “True Lies“

Thanks to my good friend…

For Eli… submitted without comment

Andrea Gibson

Rev Jeremiah Wright: Traitor or Patriot?

A BuelahVideo Commentary explaining the truth about the good reverend’s message without the Fox News Right-Wing Agenda Bullshit.

Actually, what occurs to me as I listen to this man is that he is simply another, older version of me (much more intelligent and knowledgeable), in that, he has the same message I do… that our country’s leadership is hypocritical and has manipulated the masses to go along with its rhetoric, even when that rhetoric defies Jesus and His message of hope and love.

He is saying that it is NOT “of God” that we murder innocents, whether or not you are a “gang-banger” or a leader of this country. That we should not replace the Bible’s version of God with that of our government) because they change, fail and lie (all three have happened under Bush’s watch).

I just don’t see how anything is that controversial, especially when it is dead on correct.

Poets Against War

When I look around… I DO see and find people that are ‘taking a stand’ against wrongs.. When I came across this, I literally could ‘feel’ the ’strength of his conviction’ in his words. I thought I would share….

lrose

Commentary by Poet Sam Hahill
Five years ago this week, Poets Against War was born as the poets of the United States, almost unanimously, made the decision to stand together to speak publicly against the murderous intentions of our government. But this is, alas, an anniversary for which there is little reason to celebrate. Over the past five years we remained nearly impotent as we witnessed the greatest assault on our civil liberties since the Civil War; we have been nearly impotent in the face of mass murder in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, almost impotent in our opposition to the exploitation of fear as our government’s primary political tool of expediency, impotent in our opposition to torture. As any reasonable student of history must admit, the United States government is, and for more than a century has been, the world’s most accomplished terrorist organization.

The great nineteenth century historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, observed in 1893, “For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion,” predicting those policies, born in the genocidal solution to “the Indian problem,” would force overseas expansionism. The U.S. struggle for world dominance began with the Spanish-American War, where our government betrayed the trust of Cuban patriots struggling for democracy and our soldiers learned, in the Philippines, to pump salt water down the throats of people to make them talk. Whole towns and villages were razed, often with our soldiers killing every man, woman and child over the age of ten.

In 1902, when President José Santos Zelaya of Nicaragua refused to turn his country over to American businessmen wanting to built a canal between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, his government was overthrown by our government. In 1903, when Colombia refused to cater to the whims of Washington, our government invented modern “gun-boat diplomacy,” and carved a new country, Panama, out of Colombian soil. And from those years of carnage, the “American century” was born. And for more than one hundred years we have propped up murderous dictators and sabotaged democracies to make the world safe for U.S. corporate murderers and thieves.

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Smedley Butler, who twice received the Medal of Honor for his work in Central and South American, compared his work to that of Al Capone. Stephen Kinzer’s remarkable and thoroughly documented history of our corporate-government collaboration in worldwide terrorism throughout the 20th century, Overthrow, is chilling and compelling reading. It should be in every high school and college curriculum in our country.

To understand why the U.S. is so despised by so many Iranians, one needs to go back to 1953, when Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a progressive and democratic leader, decided that Iranians should share in the prosperity of their own natural resources, and nationalized his country’s oil industry that had been run by British corporations. He offered generous recompense, including a reasonable share in future profits. But the U.S. responded by creating chaos in his country, overthrowing his government and re-installing Mohammed Reza Shah on the Peacock Thrown, beginning Iran’s years of dictatorship and suffering that concluded in the eventual coup that brought Ayatollah Khomeini and fundamentalist Muslim fanatics into power. Our government (Reagan and Rumsfeld) followed these disgraceful actions by arming Saddam Hussein for his war against Iran.

The same stories have happened again and again: in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Argentina, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, and on and on. Choosing time after time a leadership that arrogantly and ignorantly proclaims, “We are the greatest country on earth!” and “God is on our side!” we have left in our wake a veritable tsunami of human suffering. It is humiliating and intolerable that time after time U.S. international corporations have stuffed their pockets with despicable wealth as a result of that human suffering. And in recent years we have become increasingly aware that these profits also come at the direct expense of endangering the entire planet.

Democracy depends on tolerance and dialogue. As a nation, we have demonstrated neither. Nor are we democratic: if we had been truly democratic, George W. Bush would never have taken up residence in the White House. We are the most powerful nation on earth. But there is no virtue in absolute power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The corrupt and powerful corporate Americans that have financed the overthrowing of democratic governments and the installation of tyrants around the world also control mass media in the U.S.A.— the very mass media responsible for the successful indoctrination of the people in the peddling of and pandering to the politics of fear and hate and murder. The “liberal” New York Times played a major role in the lead-up to the present disastrous war, as it has in so many others.

It is time to declare an end to “the American century,” time to face our own history of demagoguery and hegemony. We who are poets are among the most literate people of our nation. We owe it to our country and to the world to become better citizens of this world, to stand for truth and compassion in the face of terror and mass murder.

Last week, Reuters news service reported that more than one million Iraqis have died in George Bush’s war. It is virtually impossible for anyone to comprehend what one million bodies looks like, impossible for one mind to comprehend what misery and sorrow and rage follows in the wake of one million dead people. The Iraqi people had nothing to do with the events of September 11, 2001. The Iraqi people never threatened the people of the United States in any way. Now their country lies in ruins and the true death toll will never be known. And their blood is on our hands.

Now we read about the madness of returning veterans, about the lack of hospital and psychological care and treatment for returning veterans, about the homelessness and depression of returning veterans. It is, alas, a very old, sad story.

One year ago, it was my privilege to travel through Vietnam with the good people from The Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts and to observe as they conducted interviews with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation victims of Agent Orange. I watched people—young and old— dying horrible deaths by cancer and saw children born with horrendous birth defects crying constantly in grief and agony. And I realized that thirty or forty years from now this will all be repeated in Iraq, a consequence of the use of depleted uranium we used in our weapons of mass destruction in our unprovoked attack.

Read article: Agent Orange Deforming a Third Generation in Vietnam By Tom Fawthrop, Comment Is Free
If we do not hear the cries of suffering from this world, what kind of people will we become? What kind of people are we? We have, as a nation, a long deplorable history of turning our backs on the suffering we author, both at home and abroad. We have a long inglorious history of turning a deaf ear to the cries of pain and pleas for mercy that follow in the wake of our violence.

Traveling the world these past five years, I have heard again and again, “Americans simply don’t learn from history.” From Vietnam to Egypt, New Zealand to Lithuania, Italy to Colombia and Venezuela, it has been the same story. And they are right, of course. We seem to have learned nothing from the defeat of French colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria, nothing from the defeat of English colonialism in India and Africa, nothing from our own experience in Vietnam. We repeat the same redundant misery-making, the same arrogant slaughters, while the Haliburtons and the Bechtels pocket billions of dollars.

But only in the United States have I been told that “poetry doesn’t matter any more,” that “poetry is useless.” Only in the United States have I been asked by journalists, “Why can’t you poets just leave the politics out of it?” What a remarkably, stunningly illiterate question. The answer to the latter: “Because we are citizens of this country and of the world, and we are all in this world together.” The answer to the former declaration: “Because poetry has the ability to open people’s eyes and hearts, to change lives one life at a time.”

Poets Against War has friends and allies all over the world. Everywhere I have traveled I have heard heart-felt declarations and seen real tears of profound gratitude for the stand we have taken. When we began five years ago, we were in a minority in our opposition to the war in Iraq. Today, seventy-five percent or more of the American people agree with us. Our world is less safe and our country is less democratic and less respected than ever before. Five years ago, George Bush’s approval ratings stood at eighty-one percent; today it is in the twenties. Our terrible predictions have been painfully realized.

War criminals like Reagan and Rumsfeldt (who armed Saddam Hussein and sponsored Iran-Contra), Henry Kissinger (who is responsible for millions of deaths in Southeast Asia and in Central and South America), Bush, Cheney and Karl Rove never stand trial for their crimes against humanity while lining their pockets and those of their cronies with blood money. We who have pen in hand can allow the Republicrat-Demopublican party to revise history, like Soviet historians, or we can insist on truth. Ronald Reagan didn’t bring down the Soviet regime; bad government did. Bad government is bringing down the American empire as well. Our government tells us that we can afford to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the destruction of other peoples and countries, but we cannot afford a reasonable national system of health care—unlike every other industrialized country in the world. While the world addresses global warming and greenhouse gasses, the United States alone sabotages the Kyoto agreements.
We must condemn every act of violence, no matter the source, and insist that Palestinians and Israelis alike give up violence and accept borders as they were established many years ago. These children are the future of the world. We can teach them to hate and to kill, or we can insist that there is another way, a way that can be found only in mutual dialogue and in tolerance. And to those who say I speak of a utopian dream, I ask a simple question: How many murdered, maimed or orphaned children are enough?

In this election year, we will hear a lot about how “we live in the greatest country on earth.” Any politician who says such a thing is living proof to the contrary. There is no “greatest country on earth.” That is, in itself, an arrogant and infantile concept. We will become a great country only when we insist on real democracy, liberty, and the value of human life, only when we elect a government that believes truth and compassion—and a little humility—are the most meaningful ways to combat the politics of fear. It is time for us all—poets, farmers, business leaders, politicians, teachers, clerks—time for us all to become better citizens of the world. —Sam Hamill

 
“…Live Simply, Love Generously, Care Deeply,
Speak Kindly and Leave the Rest to God. …”