Friends,
As
we mark Memorial Day, I share an article I wrote at this time
in 2014. Sadly, the US is lashing out more aggressively than four years
ago and the world is an even more dangerous place as a result. As we
relax and enjoy the long weekend, let's double down on our efforts for
peace and justice. Solidarity,
Andy
Memorial
Day and Everywhere
is War
by Andy Piascik
Summer approaches and the stench of war is all around. Or, as the great Bob
Marley put it, Everywhere is War. Start with the commemorations over a
five-week span of Memorial Day, Flag Day and Independence Day, all presented
varyingly as celebrations of our war dead, symbols of our greatness, the
freedoms we love so dearly and seek to export to every corner of the world and,
perhaps most important, the unquestioned rightness of our cause.
In reality, the celebrations are of imperialist war, with the talk about the
hallowed dead just so much cover for the murderous nature of US foreign policy.
Celebrating the dead – note that the dead celebrated are just the American
dead, not any of the millions killed by US aggression or client states – is a
no-lose proposition designed to render anyone who asks the wrong questions a
traitor or a terrorist. The notion that the US regularly commits war crimes and
that polished, well-educated men like John Kennedy and Barack Obama are war
criminals is unthinkable; war criminals look like Osama bin-Laden and Saddam
Hussein and those other nasty people far away, over there.
World
War One Centennial
It’s also the summer of the centennial of the start of what in its time was
known as the Great War, the greatest blood-letting in history except for that
of the Second Great War barely two decades later. Of one thing we can be sure
and that is that the lessons drawn from mainstream discussions of World War One
will be all the wrong ones. Worse, the spectacle of the intelligentsia waxing
eloquent about the horrors of war while unflinchingly cheering on the warmakers
in Washington will be accepted by one and all of their kind as perfectly
reasonable – as beyond discussion, in fact.
In recent weeks, meanwhile, mainstream commentators have been shocked to
discover that things in Iraq are not alright, in fact are worse than at any
time since the second US blitzkrieg in 2003. Gee, who knew. Who knew that an
invasion predicated on a lie of weapons of mass destruction, designed to secure
control of massive oil supplies, would go wrong? The political class and
intelligentsia didn’t, or at least they pretended they didn’t, but millions
around the world who demonstrated against the invasion in the weeks before it
was launched certainly did. And one of the points those demonstrators
underscored was that a US invasion would fuel sectarian divisions and violence,
precisely as has happened. Al-Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq prior to the
invasion, now flourishes while a new group, the Islamist State of Iraq and
Syria (ISIS), rampages through the country.
The response of many elites in the US, naturally, is for more war. Calls from
certain factions for a third US invasion are growing louder and, true to his
preference for violence over diplomacy, Obama has sent a strike force to Iraq.
Whether the people of the United States can come together as we did last summer
when we rose up and prevented Obama from attacking Syria remains to be seen. We
must at least try.
Disgraceful
Treatment of Veterans
Also on the war front is the Veterans Affairs’ disgraceful neglect of
ex-soldiers in need of medical care. For years, political elites have been
slashing benefits for veterans while increasing spending on weapons and cutting
taxes for the Super Rich. That the problem came to a head with a Democrat in
the White House is simply an accident of timing, and it is especially
outrageous that the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of the illegal Bush-Cheney
invasions, as well as reductions to the VA’s budgets and the tax cuts for 1%,
now pretend that they care about soldiers.
Equally farcical is the commencement of yet another round of hearings on the
deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Such hearings would certainly be valuable
if everything related to US actions in Libya since the launch of the 2011
assault were up for review, but there is virtually no chance of that happening.
The deaths of tens of thousands of Libyans in yet one more illegal military
strike, as well as the resulting chaos and violence in that country, is of no
concern to those who long for the good old days of Bush-Cheney and are interested
only in scoring political points.
Bowe
Bergdhal
Then there is the saga of the much-vilified Bowe Bergdhal, a heroic young man
who came to see the criminal nature of the US invasion of Afghanistan. The
refusal of working class youth to fight for Empire is the ruling class’s
biggest nightmare and the attacks on Bergdahl, like the show trial that
convicted Chelsea Manning, show how far they will go to punish those in uniform
who dare challenge their objectives. A hidden aspect of the movement that ended
US carnage in Southeast Asia is that it was the widespread opposition of
soldiers, both as embodied by organizations like Vietnam Veterans Against the
War as well as active duty resisters, that decisively turned the tide.
So alarming was this development that two massive disinformation campaigns were
immediately launched: the myth of the hostility of the anti-war movement for
returning soldiers that sought to drive a wedge between active duty and
homefront resistance (see, for example, Jerry Lembcke’s outstanding book The
Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam); and the completely
fraudulent MIA blitz (expertly exposed by Bruce Franklin in MIA, or Mythmaking
in America) concocted by the Nixon Administration to shift attention away
from the death and destruction wrought by the US to the plight of nonexistent
prisoners of war.
Because preventing any similar development of resistance among soldiers is
central to imperial objectives, discussion has largely avoided what Bergdahl
actually said about his service in Afghanistan, including his telling
declaration in a 2009 e-mail to his parents, as quoted by Amy Goodman on Democracy
Now!: “The future is too good to waste on lies and life is way too short to
care for the damnation of others as well as to spend it helping fools with
their ideas that are wrong. I've seen their ideas, I'm ashamed to even be
American. The horror of the self righteous arrogance that they thrive in.”
Rather than joining in the Bowe Bergdhal lynch mob, US soldiers everywhere, not
to mention those with loved ones in the military, would do well to heed his
words and experience.
The
Supreme International Crime
Lastly, the same standard that applies to the war crimes of others applies to
the US. As articulated by Robert H. Jackson, chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg,
a war of aggression such as committed by the US against Afghanistan and Iraq
“is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime,
differing only from all other crimes in that it contains within itself the
accumulated evil of the whole.” In such a circumstance, what Bergdahl did was
proper and, it could be argued, obligatory for anyone party to war
crimes. So amidst the flag waving and speechifying that glorifies imperialism,
we should support him and prisoners of conscience like Chelsea Manning. We
should demand that all services veterans require be provided, that US bases
around the world be closed, that soldiers be returned home and that the US
cease its campaign of endless aggression. And as enticing as the military may
seem in such desperate economic times, we should counsel young people to stay
away no matter how bleak the alternatives may be.
Andy
Piascik is an award-winning author whose novel In Motion was recently published by
Sunshine Publishing. He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com.
