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 2 Aug 2006 @ 17:19
For those of you who think that "We are all one" is a meaningless platitude to be toyed with because there are "good" reasons to ignore it, I offer you more "POSITIVE" reasons to see yourselves as separate and continue to compete, abuse, fight and kill....
I'd like to hear what you would say if you were living on the other side of the bigger/biggest military powers in the world. It stands to reason that you would hate just as much or more than they do and probably want to do worse then their efforts of suicide bombers and the like....
Today ---------- 2 August 2006
News & Analysis
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Slaughter in Lebanon enters fourth week
What way forward in the struggle against war?
[link]
Tel Aviv and the Qana massacre: anatomy of a propaganda campaign
[link]
Fierce fighting escalates in Sri Lanka
[link]
Over a million march to demand recount in Mexican election
[link]
Blair, Murdoch and the oligarchy
[link]
China's "overheating" threatens economic instability
[link]
Bad-faith Democratic Party effort further exposed
Examination of SEP petitions begins in Illinois
[link]
Workers Struggles
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Workers Struggles: The Americas
[link]
Correspondence
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A letter from Morocco on the Qana massacre
[link]
Letters on the Israeli war against Lebanon
[link]
Letters on the Queens and St. Louis blackouts
[link]
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and for your continued viewing...more positive and wonderful reasons to deny, lie and fight...
WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East
Slaughter in Lebanon enters fourth week
What way forward in the struggle against war?
Statement of the Socialist Equality Party
2 August 2006
Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author
This article is available as a PDF leaflet to download and distribute
As the brutal US-Israeli war against the Lebanese people enters its fourth week, there is no sign that the massacre of innocent civilians is about to end. On the contrary, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), backed by air strikes and artillery fire, are pressing deeper into Lebanon, with the apparent aim of advancing 18 miles to the Litani River, either killing or driving out the entire population between it and the Israeli border.
Israeli ground forces have also entered the Bekaa Valley, near Lebanon’s border with Syria.
There is every reason to believe that the horrors of the past three weeks—the bombardments that have reduced much of south Lebanon and southern Beirut to rubble and crippled a large part of the country’s infrastructure, claiming some 700 lives, wounding thousands more and turning over three quarters of a million people into refugees—is only the prelude to an even greater slaughter. The war crime that claimed the lives of more than 60 people—most of them children—in the village of Qana is to be repeated throughout the region in the coming days and weeks.
The Israeli government has already ended the so-called 48-hour bombing moratorium declared in the wake of the Qana massacre—which it largely ignored by continuing to strike targets at will—proceeding on Wednesday morning with the resumption of a full-scale air war against Lebanon. For the first time, Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets even north of the Litani warning villagers that they too could expect to be struck by bombs and missiles if they did not flee their homes.
Witnesses in the Bekaa Valley town of Baalbek have reported that Israeli helicopter gunships bombed a hospital filled with people wounded in earlier attacks.
Israeli Trade Minister Eli Yshai, a member of the government’s security cabinet, told army radio that there was little danger that the United Nations would vote on a ceasefire this week, and even if it did, Israel would ignore it.
“Israel is not obliged to stand at attention and cease its operations if the United Nations decide on a ceasefire,” he declared. He said the Israeli government had no intention of accepting any ceasefire “except on our conditions,” and added that “our American friends will veto in such a case,” referring to Washington’s power as a permanent member of the UN Security Council to veto any resolution. He and other Israeli officials indicated that the war of aggression will continue for at least several more weeks.
The Israeli regime has every reason to be confident that its patron in Washington will continue to back its war against Lebanon. There is every indication that the Bush administration is not merely backing Israel, but prodding it to escalate its offensive until it achieves the stated aim of smashing the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement.
What has shocked world opinion even more than the savage character of Israel’s military offensive is the shameless and unqualified support Washington has provided for a war that has inflicted 30 Lebanese civilian casualties for every one suffered by Israel, and has set Lebanon as country back by decades.
Even prominent former officials of the Bush administration, such as Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, and Richard Haass, the State Department’s head of policy and planning during Bush’s first term, have expressed dismay at the administration’s failure to maintain even a pretense of even-handed diplomacy.
Again and again, Bush and other top US officials have declared their opposition to an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon, calling instead for a “sustainable peace.” This means that an end to hostilities is acceptable only on the basis of the US and Israel achieving their war aims in full. Similar “ceasefires” were imposed by the Third Reich in Poland, France and elsewhere in the 1930s and 1940s.
It is by now clear to all but the willfully blind that Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers July 12 was not the cause of the present war, but merely the pretext for launching a long-planned aggression. Nor was this war simply determined by the government of Israel, with Washington providing its blessing after the fact. On the contrary, it represents an extension and deepening of the US imperialist intervention in the Middle East launched with the invasion of Iraq more than three years ago.
The aims of this war are not merely to secure Israel against Hezbollah, but to further US strategic goals in Central Asia and the Middle East, using the so-called “global war on terrorism” as the justification for a predatory policy directed at establishing Washington’s stranglehold over the oil reserves concentrated in the region. This, in turn, is seen as critical to US imperialism’s goal of achieving global hegemony.
With the Bush administration’s unqualified support for the war against Lebanon, US imperialism has dropped the democratic and pacifist pretensions with which it has historically cloaked its real objectives. War and the slaughter of innocent civilians are once again being legitimized as tools of foreign policy.
All of the talk of Bush and Cheney about “preemptive war” and “the new wars of the twenty-first century” now can be seen in their true light. The invasion of Iraq was only the beginning of a far broader utilization of military violence and terror to secure the global interests of America’s corporate and financial elite.
US support for the Israeli war against Lebanon is merely a stepping stone for future military campaigns aimed at bringing about “regime change” in Syria and Iran. Washington intends to allow no regime that poses even a potential challenge to its global ambitions to remain in power.
In the wake of the Second World War and the horrific crimes carried out by fascism and imperialism in Europe and Asia, the world’s powers formally foreswore military aggression as a means of furthering national interests. The United Nations was established, declaring in its founding charter that it would “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind,” and vowing that “armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest.”
These lofty words are now a dead letter. War has once again been legitimized by the world’s premier power as an acceptable means of achieving political aims. The slaughter of innocent children is to be duly regretted in hypocritical statements to the press, but dismissed in practice as mere “collateral damage,” an inevitable and acceptable price to be paid for the realization of strategic objectives.
In a very real sense the historic clock has been turned back. The methods of international lawlessness, aggression and militarism that dominated world affairs during the 1930s, in the run-up to the Second World War, have been revived with a vengeance.
This is not merely a matter of Bush, Cheney and a cabal of “neoconservatives” imposing some deviant and reactionary policy upon the US government. The Democrats, the ostensible party of opposition, have attempted to outdo the administration in their support for Israel’s war, in some cases criticizing the administration from the right. Politicians such as Senator Hillary Clinton of New York declare their unconditional support for Israel’s “right of self-defense,” explicitly endorsing any and all actions by the Zionist regime, even as it is slaughtering women and children.
There is a no significant opposition within the American political establishment. Within the media, support for the continuation of the war is nearly unanimous. The Wall Street Journal, reflecting the views of US finance capital and the Bush administration, declared Tuesday: “We hope that, while [Secretary of State] Rice pursues diplomatic options, privately Mr. Bush is telling [Israeli Prime Minister] Olmert that Israel must finish the job he started against Hezbollah—including a ground invasion of southern Lebanon if that’s what it takes.” It added only that Israel must demonstrate “the will to prevail as rapidly as militarily possible.”
The Washington Post, just days after the Qana massacre, lamented the “predictable focus by media outlets around the world on Israel’s mistakes and excesses,” and urged a continuation of a war until victory. “The trick is determining how much of this should be left to Israel’s ongoing military campaign, how much to the international force the United Nations will be asked to authorize for Lebanon,” the Post editorial stated.
It continued by giving voice to the wider objectives of the Lebanon war: “In the coming weeks both the Iranian and Syrian governments need to hear a consistent message: A decision to cooperate in stabilizing the Middle East, from Iraq to Lebanon and Gaza, will ease their present isolation. But attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction or wage proxy war through groups such as Hezbollah will be answered with strength, not appeasement.”
In other words, submit to US-Israeli diktat or face the same fate as Lebanon.
The major international institutions have proven absolutely impotent in opposing the US-Israeli war drive. The United Nations resembles nothing so much as the League of Nations, to which Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie appealed in vain when his country was overrun by Italian fascism in the 1930s.
The European Union confirmed the spinelessness of the European bourgeoisie when it failed Tuesday to pass a resolution demanding a ceasefire in Lebanon, instead bowing to Bush’s principal ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in opting to call for a “cessation of hostilities,” an ambiguous formulation meant to give the Israeli military weeks more to conduct its scorched-earth campaign.
The events in Lebanon have the most ominous implications for working people not only in the Middle East, but in the United States and internationally.
How long will it be before the draft is reinstated in the US and young people are dragooned into the army to fight Washington’s ever-widening wars of aggression abroad?
How long will it be before nuclear weapons are used against one of Washington’s chosen enemies—an option already proposed within the administration in relation to Iran’s nuclear program—raising the specter of a real-life Armageddon?
And how long will it be before the militarization of US society leads to the outright suspension of democratic rights, the jailing of political opponents, and the use of martial law powers against the American people?
Every day there are new indications that such a shift in the methods of rule by America’s corporate and financial elite is approaching. The mood within the US government found noxious expression at a White House press conference last Friday. Responding to an unusually aggressive question from a reporter who asked why US influence was waning in the Middle East, Bush said it was the fault of the “terrorists,” adding, “They kill innocent people to achieve their objectives... They get on TV screens and they get people to ask questions about, well, this, that or the other.”
The clear implication was that any journalist who questions the policies of the administration in the Middle East is an accomplice of terrorism. The logical conclusion is that they should be jailed and their publications shut down.
This follows the revelation that the Bush administration is promoting legislation that would extend the methods of Guantánamo—indefinite detention and trials by drumhead military commissions—to American citizens as well as “enemy combatants.”
If the tragedies that befell humanity in the 1930s—global war and fascism—are not to be repeated on an even more horrific scale, the working class must advance its own alternative. It is not enough to feel revulsion for the killing that is being carried out every day in Iraq and Lebanon and the lies that are told to justify it. Neither is it enough to protest these crimes. A new political force must be created that can put a stop to them.
This can be accomplished only through the building of new political movement of the working class, independent of the existing big business parties and based on the perspective of uniting working people internationally—including the Arab and Jewish workers of the Middle East—in a common struggle for the socialist transformation of society.
This is the fundamental objective of the campaign being waged by the Socialist Equality Party in the United States in the November midterm elections. Our candidates are running to give voice to the deep-rooted opposition that exists within the working class to the policies of war, social inequality and political reaction that characterize both the Democratic and Republican parties.
We urge all those who oppose the bloodbaths in Iraq and Lebanon and want to take action to bring them to a halt to study the program of the Socialist Equality Party, participate in the campaign to place our candidates on the ballot, and join with our party in the fight to build a new revolutionary leadership in the working class.
See Also:
Following Qana massacre
Israel escalates Lebanon offensive with US backing
[1 August 2006]
The Qana massacre: Slaughter of innocents in Lebanon
[31 July 2006]
Rice leaves bloody footprints in Lebanon
[26 July 2006]
The real aims of the US-backed Israeli war against Lebanon
[21 July 2006] More >
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26 May 2006 @ 15:31
The corruption and social crisis which dominate this society are coming to a boil. If anyone had any doubt up to now as to the validity of Modern Americana, such revelations as these ought to put them to rest permanantly.
Do you share the same values in your own life as those which underlie this corruption, (greed and egotism)?
*************
From WSWS:
Constitutional crisis over FBI raid on US congressman
By Joe Kay and Barry Grey
26 May 2006
The conflict between the US Congress and the Bush administration over the FBI raid on US Representative William Jefferson’s congressional office has rapidly escalated into a constitutional crisis. The episode highlights the contempt with which the Bush administration views such fundamental issues as the separation of powers and the autonomy of the legislative branch. It also reveals the atmosphere of crisis and tension which pervades the American political system.
The May 20 raid was carried out by more than 15 FBI agents, who barred the House of Representatives general counsel and the sergeant at arms from the rooms they were searching. It was the first federal search of a sitting congressman’s office in US history.
Denunciations of the Justice Department by Republican as well as Democratic legislators reached such a pitch by Thursday that President Bush felt obliged to directly intervene. The previous day, the Republican speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, and the Democratic minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, issued a joint statement denouncing the raid as unconstitutional and demanding that the Justice Department return all of the documents and records removed by the FBI.
Bush sought to mollify congressional critics while insisting that the raid was legal and that the Justice Department had every right to use documents and records seized in the 18-hour search to pursue an investigation of Jefferson on allegations of bribe-taking.
In a remarkable acknowledgment of the sharpness of the confrontation between the executive and legislative branches, Bush said, “Our government has not faced such a dilemma in more than two centuries.” He noted that the “bipartisan leadership of the House of Representatives believes this search violated the constitutional principle of separation of powers and the speech and debate clause of the Constitution.”
He announced that the documents seized would be sealed for 45 days, during which time investigators would be prevented from examining them, and called for negotiations between congressional leaders and the Justice Department to work out a protocol for obtaining such documents in connection with federal criminal investigations. He insisted, however, that any resolution to the dispute had to ensure “that materials relevant to the ongoing criminal investigation are made available to prosecutors...”
He then declared, “Those who violate the law—including a member of Congress—should be held to account”—an utterance of stunning hypocrisy from a president who has demonstrated contempt for both US and international law during his entire tenure. This bit of cynicism was designed to uphold the pretext for the administration’s assertion of virtually limitless executive power and its denigration of Congress: That the raid was carried out in order to root out corruption and uphold the law.
Corruption—bribe-taking, influence peddling, fraud—is indeed rampant in Washington, where corporate lobbyists routinely reward their congressional minions with money and other favors in return for voting the “right” way, and seats in the House and the Senate are purchased for vast sums, collected as campaign donations from corporate sponsors. Both parties are involved, and there is no reason to believe that New Orleans Congressman Jefferson, a Democrat, is any less corrupt than his colleagues.
But corruption has long been a feature of American politics, and no previous administration has raided the office of a sitting congressman in the name of conducting a criminal probe. The reasons for the raid on Jefferson’s office have nothing to do with fighting corruption, and everything to do with the drive by the clique around Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to intimidate and silence critics, forestall any investigation into the administration’s own illegal actions, and move toward the establishment of a form of presidential dictatorship.
Hastert and Pelosi welcomed Bush’s announcement on Thursday and said the House counsel was ready to begin negotiations with the Justice Department over the dispute. However, other Republican congressmen predicted the matter would end up before the US Supreme Court, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, a Republican, announced he would hold hearings next Tuesday under the heading: “Reckless Justice—Did the Saturday Night Raid of Congress Trample the Constitution?”
Jefferson, for his part, filed a motion in US District Court demanding the return of the material—two boxes of documents and a computer hard drive—confiscated during the search.
The rapidity with which the dispute has escalated reflects the intensity of the political crisis that underlies it.
Jefferson has been under investigation for months and was videotaped in a sting operation apparently accepting bribes from an FBI informant. The Justice Department raided two of his residences last August and issued subpoenas for documents, but Jefferson has challenged the subpoenas.
The provocative nature of the decision to raid his office is underscored by the fact that the House counsel was handling his legal dispute with the Justice Department over the contested documents. Thus the legal wrangle between Jefferson and the Bush administration had already become an institutional standoff between the executive and legislative branches when the administration decided to dramatically assert its supremacy by raiding the congressman’s office.
Only hours after Wednesday’s joint statement by Hastert and Pelosi, ABC World News Tonight, citing unnamed US law enforcement officials, reported that Hastert was under investigation by the FBI in connection with the influence peddling and bribery scandal surrounding convicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Hastert immediately issued a statement branding the ABC News report as false and demanding that the network retract it. The Justice Department soon after issued its own statement declaring the ABC News report to be false and saying Hastert was not under investigation.
The following morning, however, Hastert gave an interview to WGN radio in Chicago in which he charged that the ABC News report had been deliberately leaked by someone in the Bush administration to intimidate him and retaliate for his denunciation of the FBI raid on Jefferson.
“This is one of the leaks that come out to try to, you know, intimidate people,” he said. He essentially reiterated the allegation later in the day Thursday. When asked if he thought the Justice Department was retaliating against him by leaking the report, Hastert replied, “All I’m saying is, here are the dots. People can connect any dots they want to.” He added, “I thought it was an interesting sequence of events.”
ABC News has refused to retract its Wednesday night report, and Hastert has threatened to sue the network for defamation. For its part, ABC reported on its web site that the Justice Department statement was intended to deny that Hastert was a formal target or subject of the investigation, but federal officials had confirmed to the network that various members of Congress “including Hastert, are under investigation.”
Hastert’s remarks are indicative of the bitter in-fighting and the atmosphere of fear, intrigue and crisis that pervade official Washington.
The tensions between Hastert and the White House reflect divisions, in particular, within the Republican Party. With Bush’s poll numbers continuing to fall as popular opposition to the Iraq war and the economic situation mounts, Republican leaders in Congress are increasingly concerned that their party may lose control of one or both houses in this November’s midterm election, and forfeit the White House in 2008.
This is certainly one reason why the same Republicans, such as Hastert, who have supported all of Bush’s anti-democratic measures—from the Patriot Act, to the Homeland Security Department, to massive domestic spying programs—have reacted so sharply to a precedent they fear could be used against them should the Democrats gain control.
Long-time columnist and Republican insider Robert Novak published a column May 18 on Hastert’s relations with the White House that gives some sense of the poisoned state of relations within the Republican Party and the political establishment as a whole. Novak reported that Hastert “engaged in a high decibel rant” in a meeting with Vice President Cheney after he learned that his former House colleague and friend Porter Goss was being forced out as CIA director.
Cheney was so alarmed he immediately scheduled a meeting between Hastert, himself and Bush in the president’s living quarters.
“But Hastert’s discontent goes beyond the CIA,” Novak noted. “The GOP mood on Capitol Hill, particularly the House, is poisonous. With pessimism rising over a contemplated loss of their majority in the 2006 elections, Republican lawmakers blame their parlous condition on Bush’s performance.” Novak went on to say that there was “basically non-communication between Bush and his fellow Republicans in Congress.”
Hastert’s assumption that the ABC News report was an act of intimidation and retaliation by the Bush administration—even were it to prove unfounded—says a great deal about the state of American politics. The titular head of the House of Representatives takes as a given that the top figures in the executive branch, and the leaders of his own party, would not hesitate to employ blackmail, character assassination and the threat of criminal prosecution to silence him and anyone else who stood in their way.
It is an open secret in Washington, discussed in private but concealed from the American people, that the US is heading in the direction of a police state, and that those who wield both corporate and political power have no democratic scruples.
See Also:
FBI stages unprecedented raid on congressman's office
[24 May 2006] More >
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 19 Apr 2004 @ 01:50
Kerry on “Meet the Press:” Democratic candidate reiterates support for Iraq war
By Patrick Martin
19 April 2004
In an hour-long appearance Sunday on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, reiterated his support for the US war in Iraq, while suggesting that it would take the election of a new president for Washington to succeed in mobilizing additional foreign troops and resources to reinforce its grip on the conquered country.
Kerry underscored his solidarity with the Bush administration’s policy of crushing the mass uprising that has brought together Sunni Muslims in the west-central area of Iraq and Shiites in Baghdad and the south in a common struggle against the occupation forces. Saying the US should send in more troops if necessary to defeat the insurgency and prevent a failure of the Iraq occupation, the Democratic candidate declared, “Number one, we cannot fail.”
“Meet the Press” interviewer Tim Russert asked Kerry about an op-ed column he wrote for the Washington Post last week, in which he stated: “Our country has committed to help the Iraqis build a stable, peaceful and pluralistic society. No matter who is elected president in November, we will persevere in that mission.” Kerry replied by repeating his unconditional endorsement of the American occupation, leading Russert to respond, “That sounds exactly like George Bush.”
The program began with Russert asking Kerry, “Do you believe the war in Iraq was a mistake?” Kerry replied, “I think the way the president went to war is a mistake.” This set the tone for the entire interview, as Russert asked no further questions about the decision to go to war and focused entirely on Kerry’s prescriptions for fighting the war more effectively.
Kerry made repeated criticisms of Bush’s conduct of the war. He said, “This administration misled America,” and declared that Bush “broke faith with his own promises to the country.” He added, “Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.” But Russert did not ask how a war based on such lies could be legitimate, and Kerry did volunteer an opinion.
Instead, Kerry again voiced a theme first raised in a speech last week in New York City: that the criteria for a successful completion of the US intervention in Iraq would be the creation of a stable regime, not the establishment of a democracy. Following Kerry’s pronouncement that “we cannot fail” in Iraq, the following exchange took place:
Russert: How do you define failure?
Kerry: Well, I think failure is the lack of a stable Iraq. I think a failed state in Iraq is failure.
Russert: An Islamic regime similar to Iran would be acceptable?
Kerry: You could even go further than what I just said and suggest that if we are stuck for a long period of time in a quagmire where young Americans are dying without a sense of that being able to be achieved, I think most Americans will decide that’s failure.
Russert: Could you accept a Shiite theocracy running Iraq similar to what we have in Iran?
Kerry: I think that what is important is to have a pluralistic representation. It doesn’t have to be, at least in the early days, the kind of democracy this administration has talked about, though that’s our goal and we should remain there. But what is critical is a stable Iraq.
In other words, a President Kerry would scrap the messianic and increasingly ludicrous rhetoric of the Bush administration about democratizing Iraq and the entire Middle East, and get down to business: creating the stable conditions required for American capitalism to extract super profits from Iraq’s oil resources, under some form of clerical/military dictatorship propped up by American troops.
In the course of the interview, Kerry also declared that if he is elected, there could well be 100,000 or more American troops in Iraq a year from now. Kerry went on to say, “Tim, let me be very clear to you: We are united around our troops. We support our troops. They’re extraordinarily courageous. We have the best military we’ve ever had in the history of our country, and they deserve a strategy that’s going to minimize the risk to them. But I am united, along with everybody else, in knowing that we have to have a success in not having a failed Iraq. That we are united in.”
This declaration of unity is Kerry’s assurance to the American ruling elite that whatever criticisms he may make of the Bush administration’s tactics in the war—particularly its dismissal of the views of nominal allies like France and Germany, and its contempt for institutions like the United Nations—he is committed to maintaining US control of Iraq. With its strategic position in the center of the Middle East, and its vast oil reserves, a US-dominated Iraq has become a vital interest of American imperialism, and will not be given up lightly.
Reassuring the ruling class has been Kerry’s main focus all week. At a public forum at City College in New York, he seized on a question from a vocal critic of the war to underscore his support of the US occupation. Retired mathematics professor Walter Daum denounced the war in Iraq as imperialist, and warned that a President Kerry would quickly become as hated as Bush if he continued Bush’s policies in Iraq.
Kerry did not try to interrupt his antagonist—evidently welcoming the opportunity to distance himself from antiwar sentiment. He then replied, “I have consistently been critical of how we got where we are. But we are where we are, sir, and it would be unwise beyond belief for the United States of America to leave a failed Iraq in its wake.”
Later he gave a speech to a fundraising event that netted nearly $3.5 million from Wall Street fat cats and other corporate executives in which he flatly declared his opposition to “redistribution of the wealth,” and pledged a Kerry administration to fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction.
On “Meet the Press,” Kerry gave other assurances of the right-wing foreign policy his administration would pursue. Asked about the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Abdel-aziz Rantisi, he responded, “I believe Israel has every right in the world to respond to any act of terror against it. Hamas is a terrorist, brutal organization.” He also gave uncritical support to Bush’s decision last week to reverse four decades of American foreign policy by officially supporting Israeli retention of West Bank land illegally occupied by Israeli settlers.
Finally, Kerry made what amounts to a repudiation of the antiwar stance which first brought him to public attention during the Vietnam War. Russert played a tape of Kerry’s first appearance on “Meet the Press,” in April 1971, when the Democratic candidate was a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The young former Navy lieutenant showed considerable personal courage by going on national television to admit his own involvement in actions—search-and-destroy missions, the burning of villages and other atrocities—which violated the Geneva Conventions.
More importantly, the antiwar veteran compared the leaders of the US government to Lt. William Calley, who was tried and convicted of mass murder in the My Lai massacre: “All of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free-fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals.”
Thirty-three years later, as a senator who is auditioning for the position of war-criminal-in-chief, Kerry was called upon to make a public act of contrition. Under prompting from Russert, Kerry declared that “atrocities” was “a bad word ... an inappropriate word.” As for calling presidents Johnson and Nixon and their top generals war criminals, he told Russert: “It was, I think, a reflection of the kind of times we found ourselves in and I don’t like it when I hear it today.”
At the same time, Kerry tried to have it both ways. “There were breaches of the Geneva Conventions,” in Vietnam, he said. “There were policies in place that were not acceptable according to the laws of warfare, and everybody knows that.” He concluded: “I’m proud that I took the position that I took to oppose it. I think we saved lives, and I’m proud that I stood up at a time when it was important to stand up, but I’m not going to quibble, you know, 35 years later that I might not have phrased things more artfully at times.”
The issue, of course, is not artfulness, but truth. The young Lieutenant Kerry of 1971 gained national attention because he provided at least a glimpse of the brutal reality of imperialist war. The Senator Kerry of 2004 seeks to trade on his antiwar reputation to delude voters opposed to the current imperialist war in Iraq—a war, which, as the events in Fallujah are making clear, rivals Vietnam in its barbaric and wanton disregard for human life.
See Also:
Bush's press conference: evasions, lies and a promise of more bloodletting
[15 April 2004]
Socialist Equality Party US presidential candidate: "A vote for Kerry is a vote for war"
[14 April 2004]
The Democrats and "Bush's war"
[9 April 2004] More >
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 19 Jan 2004 @ 17:48
After Steve Downs was arrested for wearing a 'Give Peace a Chance' T-shirt, Mike Hersh writes: "I've read the history of authoritarianism and wondered how could people let it happen? In every case I've studied, people refused to face facts... They refused to face the fascism growing in their midst, much less stand up against it. Many people knew about the arrests and intimidation, the loss of liberty and the rising fear of the abusive 'authority.' ... What can we do? I suggest we collect and publish a litany of these authoritarian actions [that] our 'own' government - federal, state and local - commits or encourages. Include actions and statements of harassment and intimidation committed by unofficial but well-connected agents of the Bush Occupation in the mass media. Please join the effort.
Email reports of abuses to antifascism@mikehersh.com. I will compile, update and discuss them on my website.
[link]
More >
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 14 Jan 2004 @ 21:57
The World Mind and Consciousness
GM SERIES Part 4
Few would argue the fact that today's world is literally permeated with conflict at every level of society. Yet the governments and institutions of the world are, for the most part, unable to alleviate the pain and fear that is increasing among us. Most governmental efforts are aimed at psychological, political, institutional, material and monetary approaches, in an attempt to make social changes. These efforts are primarily misguided because they do not address the cause of social ills, only their symptoms. The real cause behind modern chaos is found within the study and science of consciousness. Regardless of what a person, community or nation thinks, or what they do on the material plane, it is their state of consciousness which truly determines moment to moment results. Regardless of what religion one adheres to, or to which life philosophy they may apply, the state of consciousness held in this very moment is what creates the ongoing reality for every person. As a nation or community, we may attempt to implement new social regimes through a variety of institutions and artificial measures, but so long as the level of public consciousness continues to degrade, so too will the state of society. Some of the major factors currently responsible for the degradation of public consciousness are the advertising world, gossip and trivia promoting publications, television programming and the materialistic ideals to which we are expected to adhere, in order to become a “success”.
Thus the questioning mind is prompted to ask, “What is consciousness and how can it be changed?” First of all it is important to understand that consciousness is a natural phenomena, and can be found in all forms of life to some type and degree. It is a fluid, permeable and highly self-interactive medium, that is composed of three primary elements. These elements are ENERGY, AWARENESS and INTENT. Our energy or “chi” as it is often called, has been recognized by martial artists, healers, shamans, mystics, and Eastern/alternative medicine, (among many others) for millennia. Awareness is that agency in us which focuses. It is that which utilizes all the senses, and is the “observer” behind all thoughts, emotions, and physical action. Intent is the guiding force behind energy and awareness. It is the decision-maker and catalyst for all action. When we change our intent we have a corresponding change of action, either internally, externally or both.
The meditator confirms for themselves after a time, the reality of personal energy, awareness and intent. They therefore validate the reality of personal consciousness and its components. At this point the practitioner realizes that when they change their intent, and/or their focus of awareness and level of personal energy, consciousness as a sum total also shifts. When consciousness shifts, so too does the moment to moment personal reality. The meditator realizes that they can, for instance, shift their intent away from the primarily unnecessary accumulation of money, and toward cultivating clarity, love and a harmony with nature. They see that a shift of awareness, (or focus) away from televised distractions or the taking of artificial, mood-altering chemicals to one of inner awareness, creates immediate improvements to daily existence. The meditator finds they can, through their ever-improving self awareness, draw additional energy or chi into the body, thereby supplying more vitality for all of life’s activities. In this way, the practitioner of natural laws not only gains self knowledge, (knowledge of consciousness) they also gain the ability to determine for themselves the state of being that is most personally desirable. They learn in essence, to guide their own destiny. This ability is known as gaining personal power or self mastery.
As self mastery is progressively gained, (especially through the practices of daily awareness of inner feelings and of meditation) it becomes obvious that any and all persons possess the capacity for similar self development. The individual realizes that a study and mastery of consciousness has every potential for the complete transformation of society. As more and more individuals raise their degree of consciousness, it will become progressively easier for many, many others to do the same. This fact has much to do with the group mind principle, and of course the psychic effects rendered from person to person. Since minds and bodies are connected by an invisible medium, (fields of subatomic particles which relay electromagnetic, mental and emotional impulses) the change of consciousness in one person, always renders some degree of change in the consciousness of others. In particle physics, there is much explicit and implicit work being done with the interaction of particles, and systems of matter across the “gulf” of space between them. Physicists know that there is actually no such thing as inactive, empty space between objects. They know that our world is filled with activity, the majority of which we do not perceive with the unaided eye, especially in the subatomic realm. All matter is based upon subatomic particles and their interactions. Thus the human form both radiates and receives particles on a variety of spectrums, as previously indicated. We are joined by a contiguous field of such particles, referred to by Einstein and particle physicists as the Unified Field. It is the unified field and the principles of physics that consciousness carries out, which make all psychic interaction possible. This is why occult study is truly “the applied physics of consciousness”.
Although it is true that we profoundly and often unwittingly affect the emotions and thoughts of others on a local basis, (by emanating our own) it is also true that our state of consciousness affects the entire world to some degree. The electromagnetic ocean in which we live provides a no-boundary environment, wherein intentions render some inevitable impact, (of like kind) upon the World and Earth Minds. By the same token, groups of people render psychic effects in accord with their general state of consciousness upon individuals, as do the natural areas of the Earth. Love for instance, propagates more states of love, and anger encourages the prevalence of anger. Validate for yourself the varying effects between natural group minds and those of the average human community. Try spending a week or so in a secluded forest without distraction, meditate every day, and notice the subtle details of your feeling experience there, body-wide. Then go straight to the downtown area of any major city, (or even a smaller one) and compare the distinct difference in the “background feeling” of each location. The difference in the psychic effects upon the body/mind, between that of a remote forest and a city, is such a stark contrast of feeling, that even the most psychically numb will have to admit the distinction is graphically obvious. Whether it is realized or not, most camping excursions are motivated by a desire for the healing, group mind influence of a forest, river, ocean or desert. If we listen carefully with our feelings and open minds, nature has profound lessons to teach, which the native peoples of the world have always taken the time to listen to. This they consider(ed) an integral part of their daily spirituality. In this system of occult study, the collective group mind of the planet on which we reside, shall be referred to as the Earth Mind. The Earth Mind is the group mind of the entire Earth and all of the natural creatures upon it, as a sum total, collective consciousness. This collective is named separately from the World Mind of humanity, for the simple reason that humanity has strayed a great distance from its rightful, natural alignment with natural laws, processes, and denizens. Were this not the case, and if society was not currently based upon fear instead of the natural love and positivity of nature, then there would be no need for these separate terms. As a species we must realign society with the processes and purposes of the Earth Mind, in order to realistically expect to survive the new millennium.
As personal awareness evolves, the ability to sense, (feel, perceive and know) the surrounding state of environmental consciousness also grows. When a certain point is reached in the practitioners’ self knowledge and degree of clarity, the ability to sense the World Mind, (or Earth Mind) becomes a fairly simple thing. The experienced meditator need only intend to feel the World Mind, and then focus awareness upon it, while monitoring the subtle feelings registered in the body/mind. In so doing the practitioner will note that the current World Mind is indeed permeated by fear, pain and anger, as well as a longing desire to change that state of consciousness, to one of love, trust, peace and mutual cooperation. Those who have a great deal of experiential knowledge of consciousness realize, that only a profound shift of world intent and awareness can truly remedy modern ills. Institutional, governmental and corporate actions can only act to aggravate the current World Mind condition, no matter how well designed the social programs they implement are, so long as the state of consciousness with which they are managed remains lacking. The experienced meditator knows this, because of their own personal experience in the shifting of consciousness and its resulting implications. Group meditational experience validates the truth that many individuals may shift their consciousness in tandem, for even more pronounced results. Such local experiences show us that this can be done on a much larger scale, even on a global level.
World peace meditations, vigils and demonstrations are a reflection on the part of the organizers and participants, of either the conscious or subconscious knowledge of group mind power. When thousands of people are simultaneously focused on changing global consciousness, this intent does result in beneficial effects for all humanity. Love can be projected to others by intending this psychic action to occur, and there are certain techniques that can be used which will amplify such intention. One of these of particular significance is the employment of thoughtforms, (visualizations that are energized by feeling and sent in motion by intent) which is a subject which will be addressed in upcoming monographs. Through the coordinated employment of occult principles, love and clarity can replace the currently fear-dominated psychic condition that currently occupies the World Mind, and which poisons all other efforts for reform. We can see a basic example of mutually projected, positive feelings and intent, in the case of two people being in love. Their felt, mutual affection and respect is psychically transmitted back and forth between each person, in a reciprocating manner. In this way a two-person group mind is formed, based upon the intent of love and mutual benefit. It does not ultimately matter if each person understands the principles involved as explained above. Natural laws function regardless of our knowledge of them, which is exactly what makes them natural, by definition. When we gain knowledge and commit ourselves to their wise employment however, our natural, occult powers of consciousness are greatly amplified, especially when they are used in accordance with natural law. Healthy family units function in the same general way, in that many people are projecting love, respect and consideration back and forth to one another. In so doing, each person contributes to the creation of a mutual state of consciousness, that is as enjoyable as it is mutually beneficial. Prayer and meditation groups take advantage of this ever-present opportunity to create mutual benefit, by holding positive intentions while in proximity to one another. The same can be potentially accomplished on a World Mind scale. The objective of a planetary transformation of consciousness, is one of the most worthy and spiritual intentions that one can employ. In order to accomplish any World Mind transformation however, we must first remember that the first priority of personal intent and awareness needs to be the maintenance of ones’ own state of consciousness. In order to project love, we must first be in a state of love. In order to “broadcast” clarity, this state of consciousness must first be cultivated within. This principle is also true of giving and teaching. In order to give we must first have, and in order to teach we must first know. Both having and knowing can be gained through the regular practice of meditation.
Matthew Webb visionquest@eoni.com
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