VFP-111 Monthly Chapter Meetings Are Postponed
(Until Further Notice)
WHEN: Friday, ????, 6 p.m.
WHERE: Bellingham Food Co-Op Connections Building
405 E. Holly St, Room 103
2020 Annual VFP Convention
First Ever Virtual Gathering
First Ever Virtual Gathering
This year we have an entirely separate convention website.
Click here to check it out!
Having trouble with registration? Check out our step-by-step guide on how to complete your registration!
Click here to check it out!
Having trouble with registration? Check out our step-by-step guide on how to complete your registration!
Vietnam War Veteran & VFP Co-Founder Lee Thorn Dies
Joe Rosenthal / The Chronicle 1972
The Vietnam War left a terrible mark on Lee Thorn, searing him with post-traumatic stress disorder from guilty memories of loading bombs onto jets to rain fiery death upon Laos. So he committed himself to peace — first by co-founding Veterans for Peace and then working to try to heal the nation he helped devastate.
In 1998, Thorn read a newsletter article by Bounthanh Phommasathit, a Laotian woman who had fled the village of Phon Hong in the 1970s to become a social worker in Ohio. She wanted to help her people back home. Thorn and a friend delivered medical supplies to Phon Hong, and soon after he founded the Jhai Foundation with Phommasathit’s help.
Thorn expanded his efforts in Laos to pedal-powered wireless computers, exporting coffee beans to America, installing wells, and supporting efforts to clear unexploded U.S. bombs and mines from the countryside.
“I tried to do the best I could to make up for what we’d done there,” he told The Chronicle by phone from his hospice bed at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, where he died of cancer at 77 on June 25. “I wish I could have done a lot more.”
Read more.
Listen to Peter Hartlaub’s interview with Lee Thorn and his son, podcast host Jesse Thorn.
DoD - Defund, or Dismantle
June 17, 2020
June 17, 2020
humansarefree.com
Before the smoke and tear gas have even cleared from the next militarized police de-escalation failure, Americans should be gearing up for the annual Theatre of the Absurd on Capitol Hill, known formerly as the Senate and House Armed Services Committee markup discussions for the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). But they’re mostly not.
The thing is, most Americans don’t follow this Civics 101 process, or could care less. Perhaps if they knew that 63% of the US discretionary budget is allocated to the arms industry so our military can obliterate brown people for our freedom, they might pay closer attention. A lot of us have either succumbed to grounded prospects and the futility of dealing with the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex or caved to the bloated economics of media fear cards and the military elite narrative. The rest of us are still pushing our boulders uphill, futilely persisting with Sisyphean expectations of reasonable reductions (read: crumbs) to Pentagon spending. On the other hand, things might be looking up. With an economy on life support in the middle of a global pandemic, with streets convulsing with police abuse and racial protests, and no end in sight, at least it’s taken our minds off of our catastrophic climate collapse. And so far, no threat of an asteroid collision.
Here’s a bizarre concept for a new normal. What if our empathetically bereft House and Senate Armed Service Committee number crunchers ignored Defense industry donors for once and threw the rest of us, including the marginalized, the poor, and the disenfranchised, some of those reallocated domestic crumbs? There has never been a more fitting time. Social distancing or no social distancing, a tsunami of righteous indignation is a clear indicator that enough has never been more than enough than now, today, if the smoke ever clears.
And here are just a few of the numbers, reasonable reductions to the Trump Pentagon budget that could significantly fulfill domestic priorities, thanks to People Over Pentagon and a bill introduced in the House this week by Representatives Barbara Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal to cut $350 billion worth of waste from the Pentagon budget to invest in our local communities.
At $740 billion per year, this year’s budget for the Pentagon and related agencies is at one of its highest levels since World War II – more than the next seven nations in the world combined, five of which are US allies.
Just as we are exposing the rot in our militarized police and calling for its defunding and dismantling, so we must expose the rot in our interventionist foreign policy and call for the moral imparity of defunding the Pentagon. Decreasing Pentagon funds would allow for greater investments at home – healthcare and infrastructure, confronting militarism and racism, quality education, affordable housing, renewable energy and more. Recent polling indicates that a majority of American voters finally agree.
Mark Twain wrote of US interventionism, “Trampling on the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”
Today enduring with apathy is no longer an option for the donor class. A sincere social compact with working people and marginalized communities can be readily achieved by legitimate Congressional oversight and annual reallocations of Pentagon funds. This new normal will end wasteful spending that only benefits Pentagon contractors and their wealthy shareholders, resulting instead in human security for the rest of us. With the murder of George Floyd and its justifiable outcry, the near and future ramifications of dismissing such a compact now and in a post-pandemic world, are clearer now than ever before - with or without an asteroid.
Comment on Tipping the Scale.
The thing is, most Americans don’t follow this Civics 101 process, or could care less. Perhaps if they knew that 63% of the US discretionary budget is allocated to the arms industry so our military can obliterate brown people for our freedom, they might pay closer attention. A lot of us have either succumbed to grounded prospects and the futility of dealing with the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex or caved to the bloated economics of media fear cards and the military elite narrative. The rest of us are still pushing our boulders uphill, futilely persisting with Sisyphean expectations of reasonable reductions (read: crumbs) to Pentagon spending. On the other hand, things might be looking up. With an economy on life support in the middle of a global pandemic, with streets convulsing with police abuse and racial protests, and no end in sight, at least it’s taken our minds off of our catastrophic climate collapse. And so far, no threat of an asteroid collision.
Here’s a bizarre concept for a new normal. What if our empathetically bereft House and Senate Armed Service Committee number crunchers ignored Defense industry donors for once and threw the rest of us, including the marginalized, the poor, and the disenfranchised, some of those reallocated domestic crumbs? There has never been a more fitting time. Social distancing or no social distancing, a tsunami of righteous indignation is a clear indicator that enough has never been more than enough than now, today, if the smoke ever clears.
And here are just a few of the numbers, reasonable reductions to the Trump Pentagon budget that could significantly fulfill domestic priorities, thanks to People Over Pentagon and a bill introduced in the House this week by Representatives Barbara Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal to cut $350 billion worth of waste from the Pentagon budget to invest in our local communities.
- Don’t create a Space Force—save $2.6 billion. Does the US really need a Starship Fleet Command before we join the United Federation of Planets and actual choose to conduct deep space exploration, research, defense, peacekeeping, and diplomacy. Creating a new space bureaucracy will undermine effectiveness and increase costs and is unlikely to significantly add to US capabilities in this domain.
- Eliminate the Overseas Contingency Operations account—save $68.8 billion to $174 billion. There is bipartisan consensus that the overseas contingency operations account has become nothing more than a slush fund for Pentagon programs that have no connection to emergencies or contingencies.
- Cut service contracting by 15 percent—save $26 billion. Several analyses, including one conducted by the Project on Government Oversight, have found that hiring private contractors to perform work that would otherwise be performed by civilians, or not at all, has increased costs.
- End use-it-or-lose-it contract spending—save $18 billion. Branches of the military are afraid that if they spend less than their budget allows, Congress might send them less money in the next year. They often try to spend everything that’s left instead of admitting they can operate on less.
- Defer or cancel development of the B-21 Bomber—save $3 billion. The Air Force currently operates a fleet of 157 long-range bombers, which will be able to keep flying until at least 2040. The Air Force estimates the new B-21 would begin operating about five to ten years from now. This manned bomber would be entirely irrelevant, looking for a mission.
- Replace future F-35s with F-16s and F-18s—save $2.4 billion. The F-35 program has already fallen nearly a decade behind schedule with a price tag that has more than doubled, $80 to $100 billion per. Nothing is slowing down the acquisition of the most expensive lemon in DOD history, despite flaws and huge cost overruns.
- Cancel the Ford-class carrier program—save $1 billion. Knowing the role carriers play in projecting power, US adversaries have been developing and deploying weapons to keep them at bay. Aircraft carriers are sitting ducks to adversaries’ anti-ship missiles, placing more than 5,000 US sailors in enemy crosshairs in every potential confrontation.
- Authorize a Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process—save $2 billion per year. Multiple administrations have requested that Congress authorize a BRAC round to improve capabilities and get rid of excess capacity. Any BRAC round should also include adequate funding for the Office of Economic Adjustment to help affected communities transition.
- Reduce our active troop presence in Europe to 40,000—save $1.5 billion. Cold War I is so over. The Soviet “Evil Empire” has collapsed, Eastern Europe has switched sides, and America’s European allies now possess a collective GDP and population larger than the US. Why are American military personnel still stationed on the continent?
At $740 billion per year, this year’s budget for the Pentagon and related agencies is at one of its highest levels since World War II – more than the next seven nations in the world combined, five of which are US allies.
Just as we are exposing the rot in our militarized police and calling for its defunding and dismantling, so we must expose the rot in our interventionist foreign policy and call for the moral imparity of defunding the Pentagon. Decreasing Pentagon funds would allow for greater investments at home – healthcare and infrastructure, confronting militarism and racism, quality education, affordable housing, renewable energy and more. Recent polling indicates that a majority of American voters finally agree.
Mark Twain wrote of US interventionism, “Trampling on the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”
Today enduring with apathy is no longer an option for the donor class. A sincere social compact with working people and marginalized communities can be readily achieved by legitimate Congressional oversight and annual reallocations of Pentagon funds. This new normal will end wasteful spending that only benefits Pentagon contractors and their wealthy shareholders, resulting instead in human security for the rest of us. With the murder of George Floyd and its justifiable outcry, the near and future ramifications of dismissing such a compact now and in a post-pandemic world, are clearer now than ever before - with or without an asteroid.
Comment on Tipping the Scale.
Barbara Lee Unveils Plan to Cut Up to $350 Billion From Pentagon
Jake Johnson,
Common Dreams
Published
June 16, 2020
Jake Johnson,
Common Dreams
Published
June 16, 2020
Demanding that Congress “prioritize our safety and our future, not more war,” Rep. Barbara Lee on Monday unveiled a resolution proposing up to $350 billion in cuts to the Pentagon budget by closing U.S. military bases overseas, ending ongoing conflicts, scrapping weapons programs, and eliminating President Donald Trump’s Space Force.
“Redundant nuclear weapons, off-books spending accounts, and endless wars in the Middle East don’t keep us safe,” the California Democrat said in a statement. “Especially at a time when families across the country are struggling to pay the bills — including more than 16,000 military families on food stamps — we need to take a hard look at every dollar and reinvest in people. It’s time to cut weapons of war and prioritize the well-being of our troops, anti-poverty programs, public health initiatives, and diplomacy.”
Lee’s resolution (pdf) comes as the House of Representatives is scheduled to begin marking up the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2021 next week. The Senate version of the NDAA calls for $740.5 billion in military spending, a budget Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has proposed cutting by 10%.
Read complete article on Truthout.
“Redundant nuclear weapons, off-books spending accounts, and endless wars in the Middle East don’t keep us safe,” the California Democrat said in a statement. “Especially at a time when families across the country are struggling to pay the bills — including more than 16,000 military families on food stamps — we need to take a hard look at every dollar and reinvest in people. It’s time to cut weapons of war and prioritize the well-being of our troops, anti-poverty programs, public health initiatives, and diplomacy.”
Lee’s resolution (pdf) comes as the House of Representatives is scheduled to begin marking up the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2021 next week. The Senate version of the NDAA calls for $740.5 billion in military spending, a budget Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has proposed cutting by 10%.
Read complete article on Truthout.
Deploying Federal Troops in a War at Home Would Make a Bad Situation Worse
June 2, 202
By Zoltan Grossman
June 2, 202
By Zoltan Grossman
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
As the George Floyd Uprising intensified in Minneapolis on Friday and Saturday, President Trump asked Acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper for options to deploy federal troops to the city. He signaled to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, “We have our military ready, willing and able if they ever want to call our military, and we can have troops on the ground every quickly.” Military Police soldiers from Fort Bragg (North Carolina), Fort Drum (New York), Fort Carson (Colorado), and Fort Riley (Kansas) were ordered to be ready to deploy for crowd and traffic control duties, if the state National Guards could not quell the unrest.
On Monday, Trump put Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley “in charge,” lambasted state governors, and said he would soon order active-duty federal troops into U.S. cities to “quickly solve the problem for them.” He also indicated that he would soon be deploying active-duty military forces in the District of Columbia, where he has the direct authority to do so.
Although the National Guard has often been used against civil rebellion, deploying federal military forces within the U.S. is a drastic and historically rare move. I’ve studied the history and geography of U.S. military interventions from the “Indian Wars” to the Middle East, and have documented only a handful of times that Army, Marines, or federalized National Guard forces have been used against U.S. citizens over the past century. For Trump to take such a profound leap would be an admission, as Gov. Walz stated, that a conflict at home is being equated to an “overseas war.” Sending in soldiers trained for combat will only make a bad situation worse, by launching a war at home against domestic dissent.
Finish article in Counterpunch.
On Monday, Trump put Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley “in charge,” lambasted state governors, and said he would soon order active-duty federal troops into U.S. cities to “quickly solve the problem for them.” He also indicated that he would soon be deploying active-duty military forces in the District of Columbia, where he has the direct authority to do so.
Although the National Guard has often been used against civil rebellion, deploying federal military forces within the U.S. is a drastic and historically rare move. I’ve studied the history and geography of U.S. military interventions from the “Indian Wars” to the Middle East, and have documented only a handful of times that Army, Marines, or federalized National Guard forces have been used against U.S. citizens over the past century. For Trump to take such a profound leap would be an admission, as Gov. Walz stated, that a conflict at home is being equated to an “overseas war.” Sending in soldiers trained for combat will only make a bad situation worse, by launching a war at home against domestic dissent.
Finish article in Counterpunch.
Memorial Day Remembrance In Isolation:
For George
May 24, 2020
By Gene Marx
For George
May 24, 2020
By Gene Marx
have thought a lot about George lately, one of my ghosts from a past that has been lucky enough to span decades. Luckily, George has never been a triggered recollection, just a benign spectral from my misdirected youth. And at least for now, for this letter to the Wall, just call him George, although his full name and rank are etched in black granite on Panel 26E, Line 48.
I almost never know what prompts my high school version of George to show up. I was listening to some Stones and Creedence last week from a favorite Vietnam era playlist…perfect self-isolation rock. Also Memorial Day is coming up, so who knows? Our lifelines barely crossed, only once as a matter of fact, in the summer of 1965. We were both non-essential workers, stuck in a fast food restaurant, slogging out our last summer at minimum wage before we had to take LBJ’s draft seriously. Neither of us were Fortunate Sons, obviously, both just navigating the grinds of adolescence, topped off by the daily preoccupations and upheavals of a foreshadowed war in Vietnam.
Aside from the shared angst of uncertain futures we had virtually nothing in common. Hometown parents and teachers must have loved George, a reserved, hard-working math-club type, straight A student, from a no-frills, Catholic family. Two years older, my life was his parallel universe in miniature. I was an unbridled college freshman, committed to nothing more than a draft-deferred C+ average, the next weekend, and a military aviation career like my father. Nonetheless, a year at Tech and the suspect worldliness that went with it were street credentials enough for George to look up to me.
After hours of flipping burgers and scraping grease, our idle conversation occasionally touched on our tenuous prospects, like this one time. “Hey, man, thought about where you’re going to college?” A National Honor Society and California Scholarship Federation standout like George should be able to write his own ticket.
“I think I’m going to help my folks out, Gene, and sign up with the Marines.” Scholarship or not, things were tight at home and George thought the extra bucks and the GI Bill would really help. The sky was the limit after that, and he was probably right.
“George, come on, man. You gotta be shitting me!” It was all I could come up when I could take a breath. Tact was not a strong suit of mine at nineteen. “George, do the math, that’s your thing. Nam’ll be history before you can even graduate. Get your ass in Berkeley, or Notre Dame, wherever, for chrissake. Wait it out.”
I think he said he had five or six brothers and sisters, that it was just not that easy. It made me feel like I actually was “a fortunate son…the fortunate one.” The way things turned out who could argue? Decades later I still wish I would have pushed the issue, but given George’s circumstances, would it have made any difference? Probably not. I knew damn well, though, that there was a gunny sergeant out there, somewhere, who would eat him alive, scholarship or no scholarship.
It was two years later when I read of George’s death - “Killed in action from small-arms fire September 10 in Quang Tri, South Vietnam” - in a casualty listicle below the fold of our local daily. By that time, a dispassionate subscriber would also learn that George “served as a rifleman with an unknown unit...his remains were recovered.” Always missing were the details that mattered: the impact on his family, shattered dreams, the untapped potential. Barely nineteen, George had been in Vietnam for less than a month.
Years ago in an alternate reality, my generation was engulfed by another geopolitical pandemic, one tracked not by epidemiologists but militarists, and spread by the lies of American hubris. While the Vietnam War was nothing more than a nightly news distraction at first, over time it mutated into a more dominant strain, finally killing millions. Some, like George, and so many others sharing a common betrayal, are arrayed in Constitution Gardens. Like COVID-19, there was never an end in sight and surviving such random chaos seemed like just as much of a crap shoot then, as it is now…but with much better music.
Article can also be found on ANTIWAR.
I almost never know what prompts my high school version of George to show up. I was listening to some Stones and Creedence last week from a favorite Vietnam era playlist…perfect self-isolation rock. Also Memorial Day is coming up, so who knows? Our lifelines barely crossed, only once as a matter of fact, in the summer of 1965. We were both non-essential workers, stuck in a fast food restaurant, slogging out our last summer at minimum wage before we had to take LBJ’s draft seriously. Neither of us were Fortunate Sons, obviously, both just navigating the grinds of adolescence, topped off by the daily preoccupations and upheavals of a foreshadowed war in Vietnam.
Aside from the shared angst of uncertain futures we had virtually nothing in common. Hometown parents and teachers must have loved George, a reserved, hard-working math-club type, straight A student, from a no-frills, Catholic family. Two years older, my life was his parallel universe in miniature. I was an unbridled college freshman, committed to nothing more than a draft-deferred C+ average, the next weekend, and a military aviation career like my father. Nonetheless, a year at Tech and the suspect worldliness that went with it were street credentials enough for George to look up to me.
After hours of flipping burgers and scraping grease, our idle conversation occasionally touched on our tenuous prospects, like this one time. “Hey, man, thought about where you’re going to college?” A National Honor Society and California Scholarship Federation standout like George should be able to write his own ticket.
“I think I’m going to help my folks out, Gene, and sign up with the Marines.” Scholarship or not, things were tight at home and George thought the extra bucks and the GI Bill would really help. The sky was the limit after that, and he was probably right.
“George, come on, man. You gotta be shitting me!” It was all I could come up when I could take a breath. Tact was not a strong suit of mine at nineteen. “George, do the math, that’s your thing. Nam’ll be history before you can even graduate. Get your ass in Berkeley, or Notre Dame, wherever, for chrissake. Wait it out.”
I think he said he had five or six brothers and sisters, that it was just not that easy. It made me feel like I actually was “a fortunate son…the fortunate one.” The way things turned out who could argue? Decades later I still wish I would have pushed the issue, but given George’s circumstances, would it have made any difference? Probably not. I knew damn well, though, that there was a gunny sergeant out there, somewhere, who would eat him alive, scholarship or no scholarship.
It was two years later when I read of George’s death - “Killed in action from small-arms fire September 10 in Quang Tri, South Vietnam” - in a casualty listicle below the fold of our local daily. By that time, a dispassionate subscriber would also learn that George “served as a rifleman with an unknown unit...his remains were recovered.” Always missing were the details that mattered: the impact on his family, shattered dreams, the untapped potential. Barely nineteen, George had been in Vietnam for less than a month.
Years ago in an alternate reality, my generation was engulfed by another geopolitical pandemic, one tracked not by epidemiologists but militarists, and spread by the lies of American hubris. While the Vietnam War was nothing more than a nightly news distraction at first, over time it mutated into a more dominant strain, finally killing millions. Some, like George, and so many others sharing a common betrayal, are arrayed in Constitution Gardens. Like COVID-19, there was never an end in sight and surviving such random chaos seemed like just as much of a crap shoot then, as it is now…but with much better music.
Article can also be found on ANTIWAR.
VFP-111 Co-Hosts Online Webinar
US Sanctions on Venezuela and Iran in the time of Covid-19
Sunday at 3 – 4:30 PM
US Sanctions on Venezuela and Iran in the time of Covid-19
Sunday at 3 – 4:30 PM
We hope to build a strong northwest movement in Washington State and Oregon to change US policy towards Latin America. Please join us as we focus this discussion on the history of sanctions on Venezuela and Iran and the current crisis that these peoples are suffering under this pandemic caused by covid-19. What can we do to change US foreign policy into a more humane policy? What can we do to strengthen our movement? How can we build an intersectional movement in this period of covid-19? Register on Zoom here.
Ron Baker commons.wikimedia.org
John Prine’s lyrical one-liners could take your breath away
Steve Kolowich
April 8, 2020 at 7:26 a.m. PDT
John Prine once had a job dusting pews and shoveling snow at an Episcopal church. Walking to work early one Sunday to clear the steps after a snowfall, he heard sirens near the train tracks. An altar boy, heading to serve Mass at a different church, had been lost in a reverie and was struck from behind by a slow-moving commuter train.
Anxious confusion colored the scene. “There was a bunch of mothers that didn’t know where their kids were, and they didn’t know — they hadn’t identified the kid yet,” Prine recalled a few years ago. “And that’s stuck in my mind.”
He eventually wrote that memory into a song called “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow).” It’s about maintaining your center of gravity while moving through a world that bombards you with senseless tragedies: “You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder, throw your hands in the air and say what does it matter, but it don’t do no good to get angry — so help me, I know.”
Those words stick in our minds today as we gaze out at the wreckage of the coronavirus pandemic: thousands dead, thousands more hospitalized. An economy in the icehouse. Millions huddled in debt and in doubt. The train crept up while we were in a daydream, and now a new victim has been identified: John Prine died on Tuesday of complications from covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. He was 73.
Before he was an American songwriting legend, Prine was a mailman with a hobby. He gigged around Chicago and one night, at a saloon in Old Town, he managed to impress Kris Kristofferson. Later, when Prine was in New York, Kristofferson invited him to play to a star-making crowd at a Greenwich Village club. Prine sang three songs, including “Sam Stone,” a song about a heroin-addicted Vietnam War veteran that has maybe the most brutal couplet in the American songbook: “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes; Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose.”
Prine mastered the art of shrinking tragedy and comedy down to where he could balance both on his tongue at the same time. His most iconic songs were bar-napkin sketches of uncanny depth, featuring at least one casually brilliant phrase that would jump out at you from the blind corner of a rhyme.
“Father, forgive us for what we must do; you forgive us, we’ll forgive you.”
“My head shouted down to my heart, ‘You’d better look out below!’ ”
“Ain’t it funny how an old broken bottle looks just like a diamond ring.”
Ain’t it funny. It’s less a question than a riddle that runs down the spine of human experience, and through Prine’s body of work. He wrote silly lines into sad songs and vice versa. “The airlines lost the elephant’s trunk,” he laments on “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone,” a bleak and bizarre song about the child actor from “The Elephant Boy” being sent on a publicity tour to the Midwest in winter. Does Prine take the opportunity to rhyme “child actor” with “wind chill factor”? You bet. But the smirk in his voice is imperceptible.
He didn’t shrink from darkness but seemed at home in the light. “Life, to me, in general, is humorous,” he told Peter Cooper in a 2014 interview at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “The world is humorous.”
Death, too — the idea of it, anyway. On “Please Don’t Bury Me,” Prine imagines arriving in heaven unexpectedly. A receiving party (angels, presumably) informs him of what happened: He slipped on the kitchen floor and hit his head. Just like that. The rest of the song is an ode to organ donation via wordplay: He bequeaths his knees to the needy, his feet to the footloose, his ears to the deaf — that is, “if they don’t mind the size.”
All the funnier: a death wish. On “That’s the Way the World Goes ’Round,” the radiator fails while Prine is having a bath; freezing and in despair, he hopes for death to deliver him from the tub where he sits, “naked as the eyes of a clown.” Just as suddenly, sunlight breaks through the window and corrects the temperature — oops, cancel that death! And cue the chorus: “That’s the way that the world goes ’round: you’re up one day, the next you’re down, it’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.”
And now? The coronavirus has collapsed the distance between panic and actual danger: Covid-19 might amount to a half an inch of water for some, but if it’s in your lungs then you might really drown. The world has stopped on its axis, and we’re left to gaze out the window and wonder how Prine would have spun it.
Maybe he would be drawn to the light, if only for balance. “If I can make myself laugh about something that I should be crying about, that’s pretty good,” Prine told NPR two years ago. The hospitals are overflowing with stories as maddening as the altar boy’s train-track trauma, as numbing Sam Stone’s lonely overdose. Elsewhere, the social distancing protocols — God bless their lifesaving, curve-flattening effects — have produced a positively absurd state of affairs. We’re dodging each other like lepers on a sunny spring day, prospecting for toilet paper in the grocery aisles, washing our hands until they become wounds unto themselves. We’re tormented by facial itches we dare not scratch, driven insane by constant proximity to the loved ones we fear to lose. Ain’t it funny.
Felled by the bat flu, that’s rich. Prine had beaten cancer twice. Once in the late ’90s, although it cost him a chunk of his neck and some nerves in his tongue; then again nearly two decades later when it showed up in a lung. His enunciations lost some detail and his vision of the afterlife gained some. On “When I Get to Heaven,” from his 2018 album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” he laid out a whole plan: He’d wear out God with gratitude, pour a vodka and ginger ale, smoke a gigantic cigarette, kiss a girl on a carnival ride, start a band, spend time with family. Funny, the afterlife seemed to resemble the one he’d enjoyed here on Earth. Maybe that’s the idea.
He departed a world that, like Prine with his cigs, has temporarily given up certain pleasures for health reasons. The clubs are quiet. The pews are gathering dust. We wait for the morning when we can rise with our shovels and start digging out. For now, we cultivate our memories.
Here’s one: In 2017, Prine played DAR Constitution Hall, in Washington, and it was hard not to wonder about how much life he had left. Though a warm presence onstage, he appeared to have become his own statue — body calcified by age, voice creaky, chin drooping to his chest. Then, as the band was jamming on its last song before the encore, the old man slipped off his guitar, placed it on the stage and started to dance. He was light on his feet, wiggling his hips and flirtatiously circling his instrument. Caught by surprise, the audience whooped and cheered him on. Prine sashayed out of view. The joke was on us.
Steve Kolowich
April 8, 2020 at 7:26 a.m. PDT
John Prine once had a job dusting pews and shoveling snow at an Episcopal church. Walking to work early one Sunday to clear the steps after a snowfall, he heard sirens near the train tracks. An altar boy, heading to serve Mass at a different church, had been lost in a reverie and was struck from behind by a slow-moving commuter train.
Anxious confusion colored the scene. “There was a bunch of mothers that didn’t know where their kids were, and they didn’t know — they hadn’t identified the kid yet,” Prine recalled a few years ago. “And that’s stuck in my mind.”
He eventually wrote that memory into a song called “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow).” It’s about maintaining your center of gravity while moving through a world that bombards you with senseless tragedies: “You can gaze out the window, get mad and get madder, throw your hands in the air and say what does it matter, but it don’t do no good to get angry — so help me, I know.”
Those words stick in our minds today as we gaze out at the wreckage of the coronavirus pandemic: thousands dead, thousands more hospitalized. An economy in the icehouse. Millions huddled in debt and in doubt. The train crept up while we were in a daydream, and now a new victim has been identified: John Prine died on Tuesday of complications from covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. He was 73.
Before he was an American songwriting legend, Prine was a mailman with a hobby. He gigged around Chicago and one night, at a saloon in Old Town, he managed to impress Kris Kristofferson. Later, when Prine was in New York, Kristofferson invited him to play to a star-making crowd at a Greenwich Village club. Prine sang three songs, including “Sam Stone,” a song about a heroin-addicted Vietnam War veteran that has maybe the most brutal couplet in the American songbook: “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes; Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose.”
Prine mastered the art of shrinking tragedy and comedy down to where he could balance both on his tongue at the same time. His most iconic songs were bar-napkin sketches of uncanny depth, featuring at least one casually brilliant phrase that would jump out at you from the blind corner of a rhyme.
“Father, forgive us for what we must do; you forgive us, we’ll forgive you.”
“My head shouted down to my heart, ‘You’d better look out below!’ ”
“Ain’t it funny how an old broken bottle looks just like a diamond ring.”
Ain’t it funny. It’s less a question than a riddle that runs down the spine of human experience, and through Prine’s body of work. He wrote silly lines into sad songs and vice versa. “The airlines lost the elephant’s trunk,” he laments on “Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone,” a bleak and bizarre song about the child actor from “The Elephant Boy” being sent on a publicity tour to the Midwest in winter. Does Prine take the opportunity to rhyme “child actor” with “wind chill factor”? You bet. But the smirk in his voice is imperceptible.
He didn’t shrink from darkness but seemed at home in the light. “Life, to me, in general, is humorous,” he told Peter Cooper in a 2014 interview at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “The world is humorous.”
Death, too — the idea of it, anyway. On “Please Don’t Bury Me,” Prine imagines arriving in heaven unexpectedly. A receiving party (angels, presumably) informs him of what happened: He slipped on the kitchen floor and hit his head. Just like that. The rest of the song is an ode to organ donation via wordplay: He bequeaths his knees to the needy, his feet to the footloose, his ears to the deaf — that is, “if they don’t mind the size.”
All the funnier: a death wish. On “That’s the Way the World Goes ’Round,” the radiator fails while Prine is having a bath; freezing and in despair, he hopes for death to deliver him from the tub where he sits, “naked as the eyes of a clown.” Just as suddenly, sunlight breaks through the window and corrects the temperature — oops, cancel that death! And cue the chorus: “That’s the way that the world goes ’round: you’re up one day, the next you’re down, it’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.”
And now? The coronavirus has collapsed the distance between panic and actual danger: Covid-19 might amount to a half an inch of water for some, but if it’s in your lungs then you might really drown. The world has stopped on its axis, and we’re left to gaze out the window and wonder how Prine would have spun it.
Maybe he would be drawn to the light, if only for balance. “If I can make myself laugh about something that I should be crying about, that’s pretty good,” Prine told NPR two years ago. The hospitals are overflowing with stories as maddening as the altar boy’s train-track trauma, as numbing Sam Stone’s lonely overdose. Elsewhere, the social distancing protocols — God bless their lifesaving, curve-flattening effects — have produced a positively absurd state of affairs. We’re dodging each other like lepers on a sunny spring day, prospecting for toilet paper in the grocery aisles, washing our hands until they become wounds unto themselves. We’re tormented by facial itches we dare not scratch, driven insane by constant proximity to the loved ones we fear to lose. Ain’t it funny.
Felled by the bat flu, that’s rich. Prine had beaten cancer twice. Once in the late ’90s, although it cost him a chunk of his neck and some nerves in his tongue; then again nearly two decades later when it showed up in a lung. His enunciations lost some detail and his vision of the afterlife gained some. On “When I Get to Heaven,” from his 2018 album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” he laid out a whole plan: He’d wear out God with gratitude, pour a vodka and ginger ale, smoke a gigantic cigarette, kiss a girl on a carnival ride, start a band, spend time with family. Funny, the afterlife seemed to resemble the one he’d enjoyed here on Earth. Maybe that’s the idea.
He departed a world that, like Prine with his cigs, has temporarily given up certain pleasures for health reasons. The clubs are quiet. The pews are gathering dust. We wait for the morning when we can rise with our shovels and start digging out. For now, we cultivate our memories.
Here’s one: In 2017, Prine played DAR Constitution Hall, in Washington, and it was hard not to wonder about how much life he had left. Though a warm presence onstage, he appeared to have become his own statue — body calcified by age, voice creaky, chin drooping to his chest. Then, as the band was jamming on its last song before the encore, the old man slipped off his guitar, placed it on the stage and started to dance. He was light on his feet, wiggling his hips and flirtatiously circling his instrument. Caught by surprise, the audience whooped and cheered him on. Prine sashayed out of view. The joke was on us.
'Collateral Murder’
10 Years Later: Who Among You Forgets?
It was the hope of traumatized veterans that we would learn from the Wikileaks video, but sadly the lessons seem lost.
10 Years Later: Who Among You Forgets?
It was the hope of traumatized veterans that we would learn from the Wikileaks video, but sadly the lessons seem lost.
April 6, 2020|
6:04 pm
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Ten years ago this week—April 5, 2010 in fact—Wikileaks published a 2007 video that depicts three consecutive strikes by two American Apache helicopters tearing into a group of people on the ground in Baghdad, Iraq. When the smoke cleared there were at least 12 people dead, including two Reuters journalists. Others were wounded, including two children who had been riding in a minivan that had pulled up to assist the victims. It is probably one of the eeriest visual depictions of U.S. empire in the 21st Century (aside from Lynndie England holding that leash): an imperious slaying from a few hundred feet above. It’s a minimalist presentation—the crackle of the communications and gunship pilots’ macabre banter, the view of the scattered individuals through the cockpit camera, the spray of fire. The remains.
Read complete article on theamericanconservative.com.
6:04 pm
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Ten years ago this week—April 5, 2010 in fact—Wikileaks published a 2007 video that depicts three consecutive strikes by two American Apache helicopters tearing into a group of people on the ground in Baghdad, Iraq. When the smoke cleared there were at least 12 people dead, including two Reuters journalists. Others were wounded, including two children who had been riding in a minivan that had pulled up to assist the victims. It is probably one of the eeriest visual depictions of U.S. empire in the 21st Century (aside from Lynndie England holding that leash): an imperious slaying from a few hundred feet above. It’s a minimalist presentation—the crackle of the communications and gunship pilots’ macabre banter, the view of the scattered individuals through the cockpit camera, the spray of fire. The remains.
Read complete article on theamericanconservative.com.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
A Time to Break Silence, also referred as the Riverside Church speech, is an anti–Vietnam War and pro–social justice speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated. The major speech at Riverside Church in New York City, followed several interviews and several other public speeches in which King came out against the Vietnam War and the policies that created it. Some, like civil rights leader Ralph Bunche, the NAACP, and the editorial page writers of The Washington Post and The New York Times called the Riverside Church speech a mistake on King's part. The New York Times editorial suggested that conflating the civil rights movement with the anti-war movement was an oversimplification that did justice to neither, stating that "linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion." Others, including James Bevel, King's partner and strategist in the Civil Rights Movement, called it King's most important speech. It was written by activist and historian Vincent Harding.
US veterans confront Joe Biden over his record of supporting war
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Joe Biden owns Iraq, and he continues to shamelessly use his son Beau to cover his complicity. This confrontation between Biden and an angry anti-war vet should be the scene everyone remembers from Super Tuesday. Biden should be remembered for his role in making sure the Iraq war and occupation happened. He did not just vote for it, he led the effort as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. If he had opposed it, it would not have happened, instead, he pushed to make the war happen. |
THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS
A Secret History of the War
In a cache of previously unpublished interviews and memos, key insiders reveal what went wrong during the longest armed conflict in U.S. history.
By Craig Whitlock, Leslie Shapiro and Armand Emamdjomeh Dec. 9, 2019
A Secret History of the War
In a cache of previously unpublished interviews and memos, key insiders reveal what went wrong during the longest armed conflict in U.S. history.
By Craig Whitlock, Leslie Shapiro and Armand Emamdjomeh Dec. 9, 2019
Moises Saman/Magnum Photos
For 18 years, America has been at war in Afghanistan. As part of a government project to understand what went wrong, a federal agency interviewed more than 400 people who had a direct role in the conflict. In those interviews, generals, ambassadors, diplomats and other insiders offered firsthand accounts of the mistakes that have prolonged the war.
The full, unsparing remarks and the identities of many of those who made them have never been made public — until now. After a three-year legal battle, The Washington Post won release of more than 2,000 pages of “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Those interviews reveal there was no consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end the conflict.
To augment the previously undisclosed interviews, The Post also obtained hundreds of confidential memos by former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld from the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute. Known as “snowflakes,” the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon leader dictated to his underlings as the war unfolded.
Together, the interviews and the Rumsfeld memos reveal a secret, unvarnished history of the conflict and offer new insights into how three presidential administrations have failed for nearly two decades to deliver on their promises to end the war.
Read complete article on washingtonpost.com.
The full, unsparing remarks and the identities of many of those who made them have never been made public — until now. After a three-year legal battle, The Washington Post won release of more than 2,000 pages of “Lessons Learned” interviews conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Those interviews reveal there was no consensus on the war’s objectives, let alone how to end the conflict.
To augment the previously undisclosed interviews, The Post also obtained hundreds of confidential memos by former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld from the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research institute. Known as “snowflakes,” the memos are brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon leader dictated to his underlings as the war unfolded.
Together, the interviews and the Rumsfeld memos reveal a secret, unvarnished history of the conflict and offer new insights into how three presidential administrations have failed for nearly two decades to deliver on their promises to end the war.
Read complete article on washingtonpost.com.
5,520 U.S. flags, placed by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America, an advocacy group trying to draw awareness to the issue of veteran suicide, represent veterans and service members who died by suicide in 2018, in a photo taken on October 4, 2018, in Washington, D.C.
Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post via Getty Images
By
Andrea Mazzarino, TomDispatch
Published
November 25, 2019
There is some incongruity between my role as an editor of a book about the costs of America’s wars and my identity as a military spouse. I’m deeply disturbed at the scale of human suffering caused by those conflicts and yet I’ve unintentionally contributed to the war effort through the life I’ve chosen.
I am the co-editor with Catherine Lutz of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new volume of social science research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. At the same time, I am a practicing therapist-in-training and I specialize in working with veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Through the scholarly research I review and the veteran clients I have seen, I am committed professionally to bearing witness to the human costs of America’s forever wars, and to alleviating suffering where I can.
I am also married to a submarine officer in the Navy. We are so fortunate in so many ways. We have two beautiful children, pets, loving friends, and extended family. We both have graduate degrees. While our finances take hits from relocations without adequate job and childcare support, we don’t face the continuous fears that many military families experience when a loved one is sent into a war zone. In many respects, my family’s life does not look like that of most American military families profiled in my book.
And yet I have misgivings.
During one of my husband’s deployments, I was relieved to hear our 2-year-old son talk about war in a way that, despite his innocence, was more nuanced than the usual tales of “sacrifice,” “honor,” and “fighting terror” that one hears routinely in the mainstream media and in local command newsletters.
It was spring 2017 and we had just seen Kim Jong-un displaying one of North Korea’s new missiles on the TV news. Our son asked me what a war is. I gave my best explanation and his reply, undoubtedly garnered from preschool discussions about conflict resolution, was: “They don’t use words? They hit?”
Sort of, I told him. I did my best to explain what a weapon was, a description I suspect that many of my liberal mom friends would balk at. In our military community, however, such imagery is all around us. Real missiles and replicas are, for instance, often used as decorations lining the streets of naval bases or as lampposts or even wall hangings in military family households.
My son did his best to take it in. Later, at the waterfront near our home, he tossed a piece of his donut into the ocean and told me it was for his father who, he insisted, was under the water “playing hide-and-seek.” Of course, he doesn’t connect the relentless training and deployments characteristic of our military life with the fighting of war itself, though our family feels the strain and implicit sense of danger in our daily lives.
In writing my recent book on the costs of this country’s post-9/11 wars, I learned about Afghan war widows who use heroin to make it morally possible to live amid grief and poverty after seeing their spouses and children killed; about NGO workers who leave their own families, facing threats of kidnapping and death, to aid refugees in the Pakistani-Afghan borderlands. And I read about the experiences of the million war-wounded, ill, or traumatized American combat veterans, the sorts of patients my therapy will someday (I hope) help, who have sought health care and social support and so often come up desperately short.
As I do this, there’s always a low buzz of guilt somewhere in my gut, even about my own voluntary, unpaid work in support of other military spouses, even after I’ve relinquished travel assignments in my work as an activist that would have compromised my husband’s security clearance, even as I abide by harsh security restrictions in my personal life. I worry, in other words, about aiding the very military that, 18 years after the 9/11 attacks, still continues to rack up war’s costs without an end in sight.
The Costs of War at Home
I see firsthand trends affecting all military communities in the United States. Deployments during these wars have come more frequently and often last longer than in past American wars. The specter of death by suicide hangs over all our lives, because everyone in such communities knows someone who has died that way or has threatened to do so.
In 2012, for the first time in our history, American service members began to die by suicide at higher rates than civilians. Today, they are more likely to take their own lives than to perish in combat. As anthropologist Kenneth MacLeish points out, military suicides are most prevalent among those who have deployed to our war zones just once or not at all, or who left the military involuntarily with a “bad paper discharge” or other than honorable discharges of some kind. Moreover, mental illness is rampant among active-duty military service members. According to the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness, in 2014 roughly one in four active-duty service members showed signs of mental illness, including mood and trauma disorders such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety (though this figure is conservative, given that the study did not include the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries among combat vets. Many soldiers seek relief from the stresses of training and combat through alcohol and other drugs and, in our military community, it’s common knowledge that seeking professional support for such problems can place you at risk of social stigma.
Read complete article on TomDISPATCH.
Andrea Mazzarino, TomDispatch
Published
November 25, 2019
There is some incongruity between my role as an editor of a book about the costs of America’s wars and my identity as a military spouse. I’m deeply disturbed at the scale of human suffering caused by those conflicts and yet I’ve unintentionally contributed to the war effort through the life I’ve chosen.
I am the co-editor with Catherine Lutz of War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new volume of social science research from Brown University’s Costs of War Project. At the same time, I am a practicing therapist-in-training and I specialize in working with veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Through the scholarly research I review and the veteran clients I have seen, I am committed professionally to bearing witness to the human costs of America’s forever wars, and to alleviating suffering where I can.
I am also married to a submarine officer in the Navy. We are so fortunate in so many ways. We have two beautiful children, pets, loving friends, and extended family. We both have graduate degrees. While our finances take hits from relocations without adequate job and childcare support, we don’t face the continuous fears that many military families experience when a loved one is sent into a war zone. In many respects, my family’s life does not look like that of most American military families profiled in my book.
And yet I have misgivings.
During one of my husband’s deployments, I was relieved to hear our 2-year-old son talk about war in a way that, despite his innocence, was more nuanced than the usual tales of “sacrifice,” “honor,” and “fighting terror” that one hears routinely in the mainstream media and in local command newsletters.
It was spring 2017 and we had just seen Kim Jong-un displaying one of North Korea’s new missiles on the TV news. Our son asked me what a war is. I gave my best explanation and his reply, undoubtedly garnered from preschool discussions about conflict resolution, was: “They don’t use words? They hit?”
Sort of, I told him. I did my best to explain what a weapon was, a description I suspect that many of my liberal mom friends would balk at. In our military community, however, such imagery is all around us. Real missiles and replicas are, for instance, often used as decorations lining the streets of naval bases or as lampposts or even wall hangings in military family households.
My son did his best to take it in. Later, at the waterfront near our home, he tossed a piece of his donut into the ocean and told me it was for his father who, he insisted, was under the water “playing hide-and-seek.” Of course, he doesn’t connect the relentless training and deployments characteristic of our military life with the fighting of war itself, though our family feels the strain and implicit sense of danger in our daily lives.
In writing my recent book on the costs of this country’s post-9/11 wars, I learned about Afghan war widows who use heroin to make it morally possible to live amid grief and poverty after seeing their spouses and children killed; about NGO workers who leave their own families, facing threats of kidnapping and death, to aid refugees in the Pakistani-Afghan borderlands. And I read about the experiences of the million war-wounded, ill, or traumatized American combat veterans, the sorts of patients my therapy will someday (I hope) help, who have sought health care and social support and so often come up desperately short.
As I do this, there’s always a low buzz of guilt somewhere in my gut, even about my own voluntary, unpaid work in support of other military spouses, even after I’ve relinquished travel assignments in my work as an activist that would have compromised my husband’s security clearance, even as I abide by harsh security restrictions in my personal life. I worry, in other words, about aiding the very military that, 18 years after the 9/11 attacks, still continues to rack up war’s costs without an end in sight.
The Costs of War at Home
I see firsthand trends affecting all military communities in the United States. Deployments during these wars have come more frequently and often last longer than in past American wars. The specter of death by suicide hangs over all our lives, because everyone in such communities knows someone who has died that way or has threatened to do so.
In 2012, for the first time in our history, American service members began to die by suicide at higher rates than civilians. Today, they are more likely to take their own lives than to perish in combat. As anthropologist Kenneth MacLeish points out, military suicides are most prevalent among those who have deployed to our war zones just once or not at all, or who left the military involuntarily with a “bad paper discharge” or other than honorable discharges of some kind. Moreover, mental illness is rampant among active-duty military service members. According to the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness, in 2014 roughly one in four active-duty service members showed signs of mental illness, including mood and trauma disorders such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety (though this figure is conservative, given that the study did not include the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries among combat vets. Many soldiers seek relief from the stresses of training and combat through alcohol and other drugs and, in our military community, it’s common knowledge that seeking professional support for such problems can place you at risk of social stigma.
Read complete article on TomDISPATCH.
Vietnam v. Afghanistan - Reflections on Matched Mayhem and Ceaseless War
By Gene Marx
November 15, 2019
By Gene Marx
November 15, 2019
globalvillagespace.com
Between the fading bugles of Veterans Day weekend and the crass rants of Black Friday, my day-long musings invariably return to Vietnam, but this year there was a new wrinkle to my abstractions. You see, my granddaughter, Kaya, turns 14 next week and she has never lived in a time when her country wasn’t waging an unrelenting interventionist war somewhere. Not for one single moment, and I couldn’t let it go.
So, what does that have to do with Vietnam? Well, as I grew up and unavoidably served in combat, I never thought “my war” was ever going to end. Never. It was always the mainspring of my very existence, and that of my contemporaries. It was also a monster with an insatiable appetite that devoured friends, relationships, plans and dreams, and no one could – or would – kill it, not a diplomat, not an elected Congress or President, no one.
Today we know our bloody intervention in Indochina was also very much like its evil twin, the disastrous war in Afghanistan - an illegal occupation to prop up a corrupt government, fueled on hubris, with no discernible end state. Still, US forces avoided calling the war in Vietnam unwinnable 50 years ago, just as Pentagon talking points mandate for its ongoing Afghanistan mess. Such military myopia is incessant, but when I first set foot in Da Nang in 1971, it was clear to me the best and the brightest had failed. The American military by any standards had lost in ignominy, thousands of US lives before I had even arrived, with still no end in sight.
Moreover, as historian and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich emphasized in a recent op-ed, “With the sole exception of Vietnam, the ongoing Afghanistan war represents the greatest failure in U.S. military history. Today, all but a few diehards understand that Vietnam was a debacle of epic proportions. With Afghanistan, it’s different: In both political and military circles, the urge to dodge the truth remains strong.”
Not surprisingly, dodging the truth is still paramount for the perpetrators. Selling even a hopelessly failed Afghan war continues to fuel exponentially the war machine’s bottom line, House and Senate campaign coffers and burgeoning defense budgets. Yet, after eighteen years, untold casualties, and $1 trillion in the short term – another trillion over the next 40 years for post 9/11 veterans’ care - it would seem the “master” planners and unbloodied patriots on Capitol Hill owe the rest of us a long-overdue explanation, if not an apology. But don't hold your breath. Neither outreach is expected, while the repercussions of unrestrained hegemony continue to plunder future generations.
Just recently, as if a reverberation from my Vietnam reveries, social justice and environmental activist Jean-Louis Bourgeois noted, “For Americans to withdraw from Afghanistan is not a reason for shame. This is not about America; in fact, this is where American exceptionalism gets us into trouble. The shame is to deny the reality of the situation.”
Someday, when the existential consequences of perpetual war are well beyond catastrophic, culpable elders will be tasked with explaining to my granddaughter Kaya and her contemporaries why once again, a half century after Vietnam, those that could – elected Chief Executives, Congress and all the Presidents’ men and women, as well as a shamelessly complicit corporate media - did nothing to kill their monster.
So, what does that have to do with Vietnam? Well, as I grew up and unavoidably served in combat, I never thought “my war” was ever going to end. Never. It was always the mainspring of my very existence, and that of my contemporaries. It was also a monster with an insatiable appetite that devoured friends, relationships, plans and dreams, and no one could – or would – kill it, not a diplomat, not an elected Congress or President, no one.
Today we know our bloody intervention in Indochina was also very much like its evil twin, the disastrous war in Afghanistan - an illegal occupation to prop up a corrupt government, fueled on hubris, with no discernible end state. Still, US forces avoided calling the war in Vietnam unwinnable 50 years ago, just as Pentagon talking points mandate for its ongoing Afghanistan mess. Such military myopia is incessant, but when I first set foot in Da Nang in 1971, it was clear to me the best and the brightest had failed. The American military by any standards had lost in ignominy, thousands of US lives before I had even arrived, with still no end in sight.
Moreover, as historian and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich emphasized in a recent op-ed, “With the sole exception of Vietnam, the ongoing Afghanistan war represents the greatest failure in U.S. military history. Today, all but a few diehards understand that Vietnam was a debacle of epic proportions. With Afghanistan, it’s different: In both political and military circles, the urge to dodge the truth remains strong.”
Not surprisingly, dodging the truth is still paramount for the perpetrators. Selling even a hopelessly failed Afghan war continues to fuel exponentially the war machine’s bottom line, House and Senate campaign coffers and burgeoning defense budgets. Yet, after eighteen years, untold casualties, and $1 trillion in the short term – another trillion over the next 40 years for post 9/11 veterans’ care - it would seem the “master” planners and unbloodied patriots on Capitol Hill owe the rest of us a long-overdue explanation, if not an apology. But don't hold your breath. Neither outreach is expected, while the repercussions of unrestrained hegemony continue to plunder future generations.
Just recently, as if a reverberation from my Vietnam reveries, social justice and environmental activist Jean-Louis Bourgeois noted, “For Americans to withdraw from Afghanistan is not a reason for shame. This is not about America; in fact, this is where American exceptionalism gets us into trouble. The shame is to deny the reality of the situation.”
Someday, when the existential consequences of perpetual war are well beyond catastrophic, culpable elders will be tasked with explaining to my granddaughter Kaya and her contemporaries why once again, a half century after Vietnam, those that could – elected Chief Executives, Congress and all the Presidents’ men and women, as well as a shamelessly complicit corporate media - did nothing to kill their monster.
Listen with VFP-111 as Assumption Church bells ring to celebrate end of World War I and Reclaim Armistice Day
My Lai — app. 450 men, women, and children massacred by US troops.
My birthday is tomorrow (November 12), which makes Veteran’s Day (November 11) “special” to me, because when I was a young lad, caught up in probative masculinity and Cold War propaganda, I joined the Army and volunteered for the Infantry in Vietnam. This set me on a course, circuitous at times, to becoming a lifer , a career military man, who would go to seven other conflict areas between January 1970 and February 1, 1996, when I was officially retired out of 3rd Special Forces Group. When I enlisted, and every time I re-enlisted afterward, I took this oath to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
It’s a pro forma exercise, or the entire military would have to go on strike — because in Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Somalia, and Haiti . . . others can chime in from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria . . . I never met a single enemy of the Constitution of the United States. In every single instance, I had one small role or another in prosecuting wars against poor people.
November 11th was originally a celebration of the end of war — WWI specifically — and it was celebrated by pacifists for that very reason. I wish we could do that now, and maybe use the day to reflect on the curse, the malignancy, the abomination of war and remember its victims . . . most of whom are not combatants at all. Like an international day of contrition.
Originally called All Veterans Day, to indicate veterans of more than one war and one nation, and it explicitly honored veterans, living and dead . . . as human beings, among many, who had perished or survived in a horrific folly. But after WWII, the US changed the name to Veterans Day, and turned it into a celebration of jingo militarism.
I wonder if we’ll ever have a Civilian Casualties Day, honoring those who were killed, maimed, driven mad, or displaced by war for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, being the wrong nationality, or just being handy when some pack of grunts decides they want to engage in thrill-kills, rape, and arson.
But this is not all veterans, you may say, and I agree. It happens far more often than you think, unless you’re one of us whose seen it, even experienced it . . . the fact that war morally degrades us. Why, then, “veterans”?
Why are veterans — all veterans, regardless of what they did in the military, or what they didn’t do — celebrated based on the single criterion of having a DD-214? “Veterans” is a slippery trope, and when we look more closely at it and how it is used, we begin to apprehend the hypocrisy of Veterans Day and the rot at the center of this thing called the United States of America.
Is it because of risk, or in the sacramental language of American nationalism, “sacrifice” and “service”? Nope.
Military members, on average, are killed in job-related activity at an annual rate of 41 per 100,000 since 1980. Loggers are killed at a rate of 136/100,000/yr. Commercial fisherfolk are killed at a rate of 86/100k/yr. Aircraft pilots and flight engineers are killed at a rate of 55/100,000/yr. Roffers are killed at a rate of 48.6. Why don’t we have Logger’s Day, a Commercial Fishing Day, a Pilot’s Day, or a Roofer’s Day? Is a nation not better served by lumber, fish, and roofs than it is by deploying troops at trememdous expense to destroy the materials, food, and homes of strangers on the other side of the world?
It’s a pro forma exercise, or the entire military would have to go on strike — because in Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Somalia, and Haiti . . . others can chime in from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria . . . I never met a single enemy of the Constitution of the United States. In every single instance, I had one small role or another in prosecuting wars against poor people.
November 11th was originally a celebration of the end of war — WWI specifically — and it was celebrated by pacifists for that very reason. I wish we could do that now, and maybe use the day to reflect on the curse, the malignancy, the abomination of war and remember its victims . . . most of whom are not combatants at all. Like an international day of contrition.
Originally called All Veterans Day, to indicate veterans of more than one war and one nation, and it explicitly honored veterans, living and dead . . . as human beings, among many, who had perished or survived in a horrific folly. But after WWII, the US changed the name to Veterans Day, and turned it into a celebration of jingo militarism.
I wonder if we’ll ever have a Civilian Casualties Day, honoring those who were killed, maimed, driven mad, or displaced by war for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, being the wrong nationality, or just being handy when some pack of grunts decides they want to engage in thrill-kills, rape, and arson.
But this is not all veterans, you may say, and I agree. It happens far more often than you think, unless you’re one of us whose seen it, even experienced it . . . the fact that war morally degrades us. Why, then, “veterans”?
Why are veterans — all veterans, regardless of what they did in the military, or what they didn’t do — celebrated based on the single criterion of having a DD-214? “Veterans” is a slippery trope, and when we look more closely at it and how it is used, we begin to apprehend the hypocrisy of Veterans Day and the rot at the center of this thing called the United States of America.
Is it because of risk, or in the sacramental language of American nationalism, “sacrifice” and “service”? Nope.
Military members, on average, are killed in job-related activity at an annual rate of 41 per 100,000 since 1980. Loggers are killed at a rate of 136/100,000/yr. Commercial fisherfolk are killed at a rate of 86/100k/yr. Aircraft pilots and flight engineers are killed at a rate of 55/100,000/yr. Roffers are killed at a rate of 48.6. Why don’t we have Logger’s Day, a Commercial Fishing Day, a Pilot’s Day, or a Roofer’s Day? Is a nation not better served by lumber, fish, and roofs than it is by deploying troops at trememdous expense to destroy the materials, food, and homes of strangers on the other side of the world?
We are not celebrating veterans — a very diverse group with little in common except a DD-214 and the ability to march in formation. We celebrate war and the national masculinity. We celebrate martial nationalism — the truest religion of the United States.
Religion? you ask.
Read complete article on medium.com.
Religion? you ask.
Read complete article on medium.com.
Bellingham’s Veterans For Peace Celebrate Armistice Day 2019
Monday, November 11, 10:30 AM
at the Church of the Assumption, 2116 Cornwall
Of the war that, in retrospect, ended peace, Winston Churchill said, “Both sides, victors and vanquished, were ruined.”
On Monday, November 11 at 10:30 AM Bellingham's Veterans For Peace and supporters of peace will be gathering in tribute to commemorate the anniversary of the end of the First World War, across the street from the Church of the Assumption, 2116 Cornwall Ave.
Over one hundred years ago this month the world celebrated peace as a universal principle. All the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War went silent during the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of that eleventh month. Nations mourning their dead collectively called for an end to the butchery of all wars. Armistice Day was born and designated as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated." On June 28, 1919 Germany and the Allied powers signed the Treaty of Versailles, declaring an end to “the war to end all wars.”
After World War II, the U.S. Congress decided to rename and designate November 11 as a national holiday, Veterans Day. Sadly, commemorating a forever end to hostilities eventually morphed into glorifying military service and justifying the next war. Armistice Day was flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.
Next Sunday thousands of churches at home and abroad, including Bellingham’s Church of the Assumption, will ring their bells 11 times slowly in solemn remembrance at 11 in the morning to mark the end of the war that, in retrospect, ended peace. With the US now waging seemingly endless war, it’s time now, more than ever, for Americans to reclaim Armistice Day.
Join us once more in silent commemoration, with worldwide millions.
VFP-111 and Whatcom Peace & Justice Center to Co-Host Documentary
An Endless War? Getting OUT Of Afghanistan
“For Americans to withdraw from Afghanistan is not a reason for shame. This is not about America, in fact this is where American exceptionalism gets us into trouble. The shame is to deny the reality of the situation.”
VFP Chapter 111 and Whatcom Peace & Justice Center are co-hosting award-winning filmmaker Bob Coen’s latest release An Endless War? Getting OUT of Afghanistan in Bellingham Food Co-Op Community Connections Classroom 103, on Friday, November 15 at 6:00 PM.
The 1 hour-long documentary deconstructs the reasons why the Afghanistan conflict was doomed to fail from its start more than 18 years ago and why it has dragged on for so long. The film features interviews with former commanding officers of the US military, combat veterans, political analysts and American and Afghan peace activists – including FCNL’s Shukria Dellawar, Congressman Walter Jones and IPC Fellow Matthew Hoh. Director Coen and executive producer Jean-Louis Bourgeois also offer solutions on how the United States can exit Afghanistan and not make this an endless war.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker and experts featured in the documentary.
Parking is available behind the Community Connections Building.
October 10, 2019
Major Media Bury Groundbreaking Studies of Pentagon's Massive Carbon Bootprint
Joshua Cho
In 2010, Project Censored (10/2/10) found that the US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported.
Almost a decade later, Project Censored’s observations are still applicable, with two major studies published in June remaining buried by most major media outlets. The first study, Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War, by Neta Crawford for Brown University’s Costs of War Project, confirmed previous findings that the US military is “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001, and that from the beginning of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to 2017, the US military emitted approximately 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
The second study, “Hidden Carbon Costs of the ‘Everywhere War’: Logistics, Geopolitical Ecology, and the Carbon Bootprint of the US Military,” published by Oliver Belcher, Benjamin Neimark and Patrick Bigger from Durham and Lancaster universities in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (6/19), found that if the US military were a country, its “fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.”
Read complete article in fair.org.
Major Media Bury Groundbreaking Studies of Pentagon's Massive Carbon Bootprint
Joshua Cho
In 2010, Project Censored (10/2/10) found that the US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported.
Almost a decade later, Project Censored’s observations are still applicable, with two major studies published in June remaining buried by most major media outlets. The first study, Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War, by Neta Crawford for Brown University’s Costs of War Project, confirmed previous findings that the US military is “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001, and that from the beginning of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to 2017, the US military emitted approximately 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
The second study, “Hidden Carbon Costs of the ‘Everywhere War’: Logistics, Geopolitical Ecology, and the Carbon Bootprint of the US Military,” published by Oliver Belcher, Benjamin Neimark and Patrick Bigger from Durham and Lancaster universities in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (6/19), found that if the US military were a country, its “fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.”
Read complete article in fair.org.
Susan Schnall Has Been Resisting War Since Dropping Antiwar Leaflets From A Plane
By Courage to Resist
August 25, 2019
By Courage to Resist
August 25, 2019
While on active duty, Lt. Susan Schnall dropped antiwar leaflets over five military installations and an aircraft carrier from a small plane, held a press conference, and lead a mass peace march while in uniform. She’s been resisting war ever since.
“It became more and more obvious to me as I took care of these guys and physically got them better that I couldn’t heal them psychologically, and I certainly couldn’t heal their souls. And I thought, “I’ve become a part of the military. I need to do something about this, and we need to end this war.”
“It became more and more obvious to me as I took care of these guys and physically got them better that I couldn’t heal them psychologically, and I certainly couldn’t heal their souls. And I thought, “I’ve become a part of the military. I need to do something about this, and we need to end this war.”
TRANSCRIPT
Susan Schnall: It became more and more obvious to me as I took care of these guys and physically got them better that I couldn’t heal them psychologically, and I certainly couldn’t heal their souls. And I thought, “I’ve become a part of the military. I need to do something about this, and we need to end this war.”
Matthew Breems: This is the Courage To Resist Podcast. My name is Matthew Breems. This Courage to Resist Podcast is produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure Effort of Veterans For Peace. Susan Schnall is the guest today. Susan served in the Navy as a nurse throughout the Vietnam conflict. As she cared for GIs returning from Vietnam, she quickly became an antiwar activist. Susan began coordinating peace rallies and volunteering at GI coffeehouses. Her activism continues today through her involvement with Veterans for Peace and working towards legislation for individuals exposed to Agent Orange.
Susan, I’m excited to be talking with you this evening and to hear your story and your involvement in the antiwar movement. Why don’t you take us back? How did you come to a place where resisting the war, specifically the Vietnam War, became such a life obsession for you?
Susan Schnall: Let me start by talking about war, because it is an entity that I’ve lived with my whole life. My dad was in the Marine Corps in the Second World War and was killed on the island of Guam, 1944. I went into the Navy as a nurse and felt that I would be taking care of those who were harmed and hurt in a war in Southeast Asia. I was never someone who was for the war, because I went into nursing to heal and to take care of those who were injured.
I joined in 1965 when I was going to Stanford Nursing School. I graduated in 1967 and went to, I guess it was Officers’ Indoctrination School. They had us nurses, and they wanted to teach us how to be members of the military. Then I was sent to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, where I took care of the guys who were coming back from Vietnam, from Southeast Asia. And I heard their stories, their pain. I heard their stories of how they viewed the Vietnamese and heard how they were trained to be killers and trained to hate people who looked different from the way that they did.
I don’t know why I was so naïve, but I didn’t quite expect that, and I was very much a peace activist before I went into the Navy. I had taken part in antiwar demonstrations. But it seems that that was not important to the Navy, and they heard about my history and still sent me on to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. It was startling to me, and it was an education to me to hear stories first hand from men who had been to war. They were young; they were 18, 20, 21 years old. They told me their stories, that they had participated in war, how some of them had learned to hate “the enemy.”
And there were other stories I heard from young guys who were in the Navy, who worked with the civilian population, who didn’t have that fear and hatred. But I also heard very much their physical and psychological pain. We had one unit that was called the Amputee Unit, and I will never forget it. It was an open ward that had about 30, 35 young men on it. They all had amputations, whether upper extremity or legs, and what was left, their stumps were hanging by butcher-like contraptions that held their limbs aloft. They were in pain, they were terribly infected, and I would hear their cries from one end of the unit to the next, when they would cry out for pain medication.
Read complete interview and listen to podcast on Vietnam Full Disclosure.
Susan Schnall: It became more and more obvious to me as I took care of these guys and physically got them better that I couldn’t heal them psychologically, and I certainly couldn’t heal their souls. And I thought, “I’ve become a part of the military. I need to do something about this, and we need to end this war.”
Matthew Breems: This is the Courage To Resist Podcast. My name is Matthew Breems. This Courage to Resist Podcast is produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure Effort of Veterans For Peace. Susan Schnall is the guest today. Susan served in the Navy as a nurse throughout the Vietnam conflict. As she cared for GIs returning from Vietnam, she quickly became an antiwar activist. Susan began coordinating peace rallies and volunteering at GI coffeehouses. Her activism continues today through her involvement with Veterans for Peace and working towards legislation for individuals exposed to Agent Orange.
Susan, I’m excited to be talking with you this evening and to hear your story and your involvement in the antiwar movement. Why don’t you take us back? How did you come to a place where resisting the war, specifically the Vietnam War, became such a life obsession for you?
Susan Schnall: Let me start by talking about war, because it is an entity that I’ve lived with my whole life. My dad was in the Marine Corps in the Second World War and was killed on the island of Guam, 1944. I went into the Navy as a nurse and felt that I would be taking care of those who were harmed and hurt in a war in Southeast Asia. I was never someone who was for the war, because I went into nursing to heal and to take care of those who were injured.
I joined in 1965 when I was going to Stanford Nursing School. I graduated in 1967 and went to, I guess it was Officers’ Indoctrination School. They had us nurses, and they wanted to teach us how to be members of the military. Then I was sent to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, where I took care of the guys who were coming back from Vietnam, from Southeast Asia. And I heard their stories, their pain. I heard their stories of how they viewed the Vietnamese and heard how they were trained to be killers and trained to hate people who looked different from the way that they did.
I don’t know why I was so naïve, but I didn’t quite expect that, and I was very much a peace activist before I went into the Navy. I had taken part in antiwar demonstrations. But it seems that that was not important to the Navy, and they heard about my history and still sent me on to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. It was startling to me, and it was an education to me to hear stories first hand from men who had been to war. They were young; they were 18, 20, 21 years old. They told me their stories, that they had participated in war, how some of them had learned to hate “the enemy.”
And there were other stories I heard from young guys who were in the Navy, who worked with the civilian population, who didn’t have that fear and hatred. But I also heard very much their physical and psychological pain. We had one unit that was called the Amputee Unit, and I will never forget it. It was an open ward that had about 30, 35 young men on it. They all had amputations, whether upper extremity or legs, and what was left, their stumps were hanging by butcher-like contraptions that held their limbs aloft. They were in pain, they were terribly infected, and I would hear their cries from one end of the unit to the next, when they would cry out for pain medication.
Read complete interview and listen to podcast on Vietnam Full Disclosure.
Letter to the Editor of the Irish Examiner:
Shannon Airport is a 'de facto US military base'
Shannon Airport is a 'de facto US military base'
Sir,
Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Afghanistan before that, transport aircraft, chartered by the US military, have shuttled almost 3 million troops through Shannon Airport. My youngest son and his gun truck company made the stopover trips to the carnage twice, in 2003 and 2004; even disembarking for the terminal lounge in full battle dress while their aircraft was being refueled. There was never an attempt by the soldiers to hide this unwitting disregard for Irish neutrality. To my son’s knowledge there was never a search of the planes and his troops were armed to the teeth, in violation of not only the Irish constitution but also the Hague Convention.
Last St. Patrick’s Day two US veterans, longtime anti-war activists and Veterans For Peace members Ken Mayers and Tarak Kauff, attempted to expose this clear breach of international law at Shannon by unfurling a large banner on the apron that read Respect Irish Neutrality, U.S. War Machine Out of Shannon Airport! As one would expect, my peace-vet friends were abruptly apprehended by airport security and Gardaí, and long story short, their passports were confiscated and they are still in Ireland awaiting trial. More than four months now, one excruciating delay after another with no end in sight. It’s as if the US Justice Department’s treatment of dissidents might be rubbing off on the Irish courts. My great-great-grandfather Mícheál Smyth of County Mayo has got to be freaking out.
Your readership deserves far more coverage of this international law violation than it has received thus far. Polls continue to show that nearly six out of every ten Irish citizens oppose the U.S. military co-opting Shannon Airport, “a de facto American military base,” in Dublin TD Clare Daly’s words. The Irish government however seems content to allow this occupation of County Clare to continue, with not only Irish neutrality at stake but Ireland’s rich heritage of resisting imperialism the obvious collateral damage.
It is far past time to end this thing. Please support the VFP veterans’ bail to include a promise to return. Rest assured they’ll be back. There is nothing they would like more now than a trial.
Gene Marx
Past National Board of Directors Secretary, Veterans For Peace
Bellingham, Washington
America
Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Afghanistan before that, transport aircraft, chartered by the US military, have shuttled almost 3 million troops through Shannon Airport. My youngest son and his gun truck company made the stopover trips to the carnage twice, in 2003 and 2004; even disembarking for the terminal lounge in full battle dress while their aircraft was being refueled. There was never an attempt by the soldiers to hide this unwitting disregard for Irish neutrality. To my son’s knowledge there was never a search of the planes and his troops were armed to the teeth, in violation of not only the Irish constitution but also the Hague Convention.
Last St. Patrick’s Day two US veterans, longtime anti-war activists and Veterans For Peace members Ken Mayers and Tarak Kauff, attempted to expose this clear breach of international law at Shannon by unfurling a large banner on the apron that read Respect Irish Neutrality, U.S. War Machine Out of Shannon Airport! As one would expect, my peace-vet friends were abruptly apprehended by airport security and Gardaí, and long story short, their passports were confiscated and they are still in Ireland awaiting trial. More than four months now, one excruciating delay after another with no end in sight. It’s as if the US Justice Department’s treatment of dissidents might be rubbing off on the Irish courts. My great-great-grandfather Mícheál Smyth of County Mayo has got to be freaking out.
Your readership deserves far more coverage of this international law violation than it has received thus far. Polls continue to show that nearly six out of every ten Irish citizens oppose the U.S. military co-opting Shannon Airport, “a de facto American military base,” in Dublin TD Clare Daly’s words. The Irish government however seems content to allow this occupation of County Clare to continue, with not only Irish neutrality at stake but Ireland’s rich heritage of resisting imperialism the obvious collateral damage.
It is far past time to end this thing. Please support the VFP veterans’ bail to include a promise to return. Rest assured they’ll be back. There is nothing they would like more now than a trial.
Gene Marx
Past National Board of Directors Secretary, Veterans For Peace
Bellingham, Washington
America
vfpbellingham.org
Letter to the Wall 2019: Lies Redux
Gene Marx
May 24, 2019
In 2012 President Barack Obama announced his government was willing to spend $63 million on a series of commemorations of the American War in Vietnam stretching over a decade, we in Veterans For Peace knew we had to respond.
Part of a Veterans For Peace campaign to counter the Pentagon’s effort to rewrite history includes a letter writing campaign. Over the past four years we have collected and delivered, on Memorial Day, 400 letters written to The Wall. We print the letters out and then put them into envelopes marked "Please Read Me." At 10:30am on Memorial Day we descend into The Wall in Washington, DC to solemnly place these letters where they belong at the feet of the names on that memorial. They are read by visitors to The Wall throughout the weekend and then are placed into the National Parks Archives. We take this ceremony very seriously. It is not a political gimmick. It is an act of reverence.
So, if you reading this, that’s a good start. Let me tell you something about this sacred place, something you would have never known otherwise. For me it begins with line 122 of the panel you’re facing, knee-high and to your left. That’s where my name should be, somewhere close to my best friend, had another detonation taken place. But that’s a much longer story.
My friend Captain Richard C. Halpin was never going to have a long story, much like every name arrayed on these polished granite panels to your left and right. His was ended instantaneously by a surface-to-air missile on March 29, 1972, near Tchepone, Laos. (I ran into one of Dick’s wingmen years later and learned that Dick had volunteered to fly this sortie in place of a fatigued roommate.) His combat tour was over. His bags - as it turned out, his personal effects - were packed for home. He was listed as missing in action for years until teeth fragments of his were found in 1986.
Dick had dreams. Survive this deployment, get home to California in one piece, catch up with friends, do some surfing, and eventually teach high school history. Like most of us, he was behind the power curve. He had a lot of catching up to do, but he’d have been great. Unlikely famous, but his students would have never forgotten “Mr. Halpin,” a funny, engaging guy, always piquing their curiosities. What a waste.
Gene Marx
May 24, 2019
In 2012 President Barack Obama announced his government was willing to spend $63 million on a series of commemorations of the American War in Vietnam stretching over a decade, we in Veterans For Peace knew we had to respond.
Part of a Veterans For Peace campaign to counter the Pentagon’s effort to rewrite history includes a letter writing campaign. Over the past four years we have collected and delivered, on Memorial Day, 400 letters written to The Wall. We print the letters out and then put them into envelopes marked "Please Read Me." At 10:30am on Memorial Day we descend into The Wall in Washington, DC to solemnly place these letters where they belong at the feet of the names on that memorial. They are read by visitors to The Wall throughout the weekend and then are placed into the National Parks Archives. We take this ceremony very seriously. It is not a political gimmick. It is an act of reverence.
So, if you reading this, that’s a good start. Let me tell you something about this sacred place, something you would have never known otherwise. For me it begins with line 122 of the panel you’re facing, knee-high and to your left. That’s where my name should be, somewhere close to my best friend, had another detonation taken place. But that’s a much longer story.
My friend Captain Richard C. Halpin was never going to have a long story, much like every name arrayed on these polished granite panels to your left and right. His was ended instantaneously by a surface-to-air missile on March 29, 1972, near Tchepone, Laos. (I ran into one of Dick’s wingmen years later and learned that Dick had volunteered to fly this sortie in place of a fatigued roommate.) His combat tour was over. His bags - as it turned out, his personal effects - were packed for home. He was listed as missing in action for years until teeth fragments of his were found in 1986.
Dick had dreams. Survive this deployment, get home to California in one piece, catch up with friends, do some surfing, and eventually teach high school history. Like most of us, he was behind the power curve. He had a lot of catching up to do, but he’d have been great. Unlikely famous, but his students would have never forgotten “Mr. Halpin,” a funny, engaging guy, always piquing their curiosities. What a waste.
Capt. Richard Halpin’s name should have never been in this death pool, for so many reasons. The crewman he replaced has lived with his own moral injury for decades, having co-opted Dick’s slot in history. And family and friends will continue to die a little every time they visit Panel 2 West. Most of the other visitors to other panels on future Memorial Days will never understand why anyone fought and died in that faraway conflict. Why Vietnam? Who lost, who won. Go ahead, ask someone. I couldn’t have told you in 1972, not really, Dick either. It was just our war, but the lies and treachery of Truman to Nixon fed the grinder.
Just walk away; knowing full well that The Wall is the last memorial of its kind. Our 21st century interventionist conflicts are much too numerous to even track, much less memorialize future KIAs. Soon a Global War on Terrorism Memorial, not far from where you’re standing, will serve as an altar to this country’s first multigenerational war without end. Our first living war memorial, built on the same lies.
Now do yourself and your family a favor. Read two books, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse.
You’re welcome.
The author of this post is Gene Marx from Bellingham, Washington. Gene is a Vietnam veteran and former Naval Flight Officer with VAQ-135 aboard the USS Coral Sea in 1971-72. Past Secretary of the VFP National Board of Directors, Gene is currently a member of VFP-111. Letters to The Wall is a project of VFP's Vietnam Full Disclosure campaign.
Just walk away; knowing full well that The Wall is the last memorial of its kind. Our 21st century interventionist conflicts are much too numerous to even track, much less memorialize future KIAs. Soon a Global War on Terrorism Memorial, not far from where you’re standing, will serve as an altar to this country’s first multigenerational war without end. Our first living war memorial, built on the same lies.
Now do yourself and your family a favor. Read two books, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse.
You’re welcome.
The author of this post is Gene Marx from Bellingham, Washington. Gene is a Vietnam veteran and former Naval Flight Officer with VAQ-135 aboard the USS Coral Sea in 1971-72. Past Secretary of the VFP National Board of Directors, Gene is currently a member of VFP-111. Letters to The Wall is a project of VFP's Vietnam Full Disclosure campaign.
War With Iran Must Be Stopped at All Costs
Maj. Danny Sjursen
May 21, 2019
This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com.
What if they called a war and no one came? Well, now’s the time folks. The apparent march to war with Iran represents a pivotal moment in the historical arc – the rise and fall – of our republic come empire. This potential war is so unnecessary, so irrational, that it borders on the absurd. Still, since the U.S. now fields a professional, volunteer military, few citizens have “skin in the game.” As such, they could hardly care less.
Unlike in past wars – think Vietnam – there is no longer a built in, established antiwar movement. This is unfortunate, and, dangerous for a democracy. See the US Government operates with near impunity in foreign affairs, waging global war without the consent of the people and, essentially, uninterested in what the people have to say at all. It should not be thus in a healthy republic. People should not fear their government; governments should fear their people.
So let me propose something seemingly ludicrous. It’s this: since Americans only trust the military among various branches of government, and since that military is both over adulated and ultimately responsible for waging these insane wars, it is within the military that active dissent must begin. That’s right, to stop the war America needs clean cut, seemingly conservative, all-American soldiers and officers to start refusing to fight. The people will back them; trust me. These guys are heroes after all, right? I mean few will pay attention to some aging hippie protester – even if he or she is correct – but even Republicans might tune in to hear what a combat vet has to say.
Remember, we soldiers take an oath not to a particular president or a certain government but to the Constitution. And that constitution has been violated time and again for some 75 years as US presidents play emperor and wage unilateral wars without the required, and clearly stipulated, consent of Congress, I.e. the people’s representatives. Thus, one could argue – and I’m doing just that – that a massive military “sit-down-strike” of sorts would be both legal and moral.
Sure, it’s a long shot. But there is historical precedence for dissent within the US military. It is an unknown but vibrant history worthy of a brief recounting. Back in the mid-19th century, many US Army officers were so appalled by the futility and brutality of the three American attempts to subjugate the Seminole tribe in Florida that a staggering portion of the young subalterns simply resigned.
There was also dissent in the ranks during the Mexican-American War of conquest. Though they did their duty, many officers were appalled by the blatant aggression of their country. A young lieutenant – and future general / president – named US Grant stated that he knew “the struggle with my conscience during the Mexican War. I have never altogether forgiven myself for going into that. I had very strong opinions on the subject. I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” It’s unlikely that very many Americans even know that prominent statesmen, too, have often been against wars.
Read complete opinion piece on Truthout.
May 21, 2019
This piece originally appeared on anti-war.com.
What if they called a war and no one came? Well, now’s the time folks. The apparent march to war with Iran represents a pivotal moment in the historical arc – the rise and fall – of our republic come empire. This potential war is so unnecessary, so irrational, that it borders on the absurd. Still, since the U.S. now fields a professional, volunteer military, few citizens have “skin in the game.” As such, they could hardly care less.
Unlike in past wars – think Vietnam – there is no longer a built in, established antiwar movement. This is unfortunate, and, dangerous for a democracy. See the US Government operates with near impunity in foreign affairs, waging global war without the consent of the people and, essentially, uninterested in what the people have to say at all. It should not be thus in a healthy republic. People should not fear their government; governments should fear their people.
So let me propose something seemingly ludicrous. It’s this: since Americans only trust the military among various branches of government, and since that military is both over adulated and ultimately responsible for waging these insane wars, it is within the military that active dissent must begin. That’s right, to stop the war America needs clean cut, seemingly conservative, all-American soldiers and officers to start refusing to fight. The people will back them; trust me. These guys are heroes after all, right? I mean few will pay attention to some aging hippie protester – even if he or she is correct – but even Republicans might tune in to hear what a combat vet has to say.
Remember, we soldiers take an oath not to a particular president or a certain government but to the Constitution. And that constitution has been violated time and again for some 75 years as US presidents play emperor and wage unilateral wars without the required, and clearly stipulated, consent of Congress, I.e. the people’s representatives. Thus, one could argue – and I’m doing just that – that a massive military “sit-down-strike” of sorts would be both legal and moral.
Sure, it’s a long shot. But there is historical precedence for dissent within the US military. It is an unknown but vibrant history worthy of a brief recounting. Back in the mid-19th century, many US Army officers were so appalled by the futility and brutality of the three American attempts to subjugate the Seminole tribe in Florida that a staggering portion of the young subalterns simply resigned.
There was also dissent in the ranks during the Mexican-American War of conquest. Though they did their duty, many officers were appalled by the blatant aggression of their country. A young lieutenant – and future general / president – named US Grant stated that he knew “the struggle with my conscience during the Mexican War. I have never altogether forgiven myself for going into that. I had very strong opinions on the subject. I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.” It’s unlikely that very many Americans even know that prominent statesmen, too, have often been against wars.
Read complete opinion piece on Truthout.
Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP
Trump Vetoes Yemen War Powers Resolution
Trump vetoes bill to end US military support for Saudi-led war in Yemen
Bipartisan resolution passed by Senate in March was seen as rebuke of Trump’s alliance with Saudi forces
Guardian staff and agencies
Tue 16 Apr 2019 20.42 EDT
Donald Trump has vetoed a bill passed by Congress to end US military assistance in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.
The Senate had passed a bipartisan resolution on 13 March in a 54-to-46 vote, in a move that was largely seen as a rebuke of Trump’s alliance with the Saudi forces leading military action in Yemen. The House voted on the resolution in early April, passing it with 247 votes to 175.
“This resolution is an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities, endangering the lives of American citizens and brave service members, both today and in the future,” Trump wrote in explaining his veto.
Read complete article on theguardian.com.
Two VFP Veterans Bailed from Limerick Prison
Veterans for Peace members Tarak Kauff and Ken Mayers out on bail, restricted from airports
Veterans for Peace members Tarak Kauff and Ken Mayers out on bail, restricted from airports
Photograph: Alan Place
Updates on Tarak Kauff and Ken Mayers
March 29, 2019
Action Points
Resources
Photos
Tarak and Ken walked out of jail at about 12:35 Irish time–Ed Horgan was literally waiting outside the jail for hours after all the paperwork was done.
Tarak spoke briefly with Ellen Davidson and said they were very glad to be out, but that they had made some good friends in the prison, among both the guards and the prisoners. “The memory of 1916 is very real to them,” said Tarak, “and both guards and prisoners encouraged us to keep protesting.” They will probably be busy in the upcoming days–the Irish Times has been asking for an interview with them, and there will be other media as well.
Their passports, as was expected, have been confiscated and they have been told they must stay in Ireland for the trial. We will be organizing support for a campaign to bring them all the way home in the next weeks, but we need to get a clearer picture from the lawyer about what it will take. In the meantime, they will be housed and fed by our great allies on the ground over in Ireland.
Their next hearing is Wednesday, April 3, but it is not related to their bail conditions. It will be an important hearing, however, because the lawyers are going to make the case that the trial should be moved to Dublin, since it’s clear that there is no justice in County Clare for anyone protesting at Shannon (the U.S. military refueling stops are quite lucrative, and Shannon Airport is a major economic driver in the region). There is precedent for moving such cases, as Ed Horgan and three other activists have had their venues changed for this reason.
For now, it’s a celebration, but there’s going to be more organizing needed to get them out of Ireland and home. Watch this space!
March 29, 2019
Action Points
Resources
Photos
Tarak and Ken walked out of jail at about 12:35 Irish time–Ed Horgan was literally waiting outside the jail for hours after all the paperwork was done.
Tarak spoke briefly with Ellen Davidson and said they were very glad to be out, but that they had made some good friends in the prison, among both the guards and the prisoners. “The memory of 1916 is very real to them,” said Tarak, “and both guards and prisoners encouraged us to keep protesting.” They will probably be busy in the upcoming days–the Irish Times has been asking for an interview with them, and there will be other media as well.
Their passports, as was expected, have been confiscated and they have been told they must stay in Ireland for the trial. We will be organizing support for a campaign to bring them all the way home in the next weeks, but we need to get a clearer picture from the lawyer about what it will take. In the meantime, they will be housed and fed by our great allies on the ground over in Ireland.
Their next hearing is Wednesday, April 3, but it is not related to their bail conditions. It will be an important hearing, however, because the lawyers are going to make the case that the trial should be moved to Dublin, since it’s clear that there is no justice in County Clare for anyone protesting at Shannon (the U.S. military refueling stops are quite lucrative, and Shannon Airport is a major economic driver in the region). There is precedent for moving such cases, as Ed Horgan and three other activists have had their venues changed for this reason.
For now, it’s a celebration, but there’s going to be more organizing needed to get them out of Ireland and home. Watch this space!
Veterans For Peace Stands In Solidarity with Central American Asylum Seekers
November 30, 2018
Members of San Diego Veterans For Peace marched to the border with Tijuana, Mexico on Sunday, November 25, as part of a San Diego coalition expressing solidarity with and support for thousands of Central American asylum seekers. VFP members were on both sides of the border and joined in with a march of asylum seekers on the Mexican side. So we had a good look at the crisis which was contrived by the Trump administration to make it look like there was indeed an "invasion" of "criminals" and "terrorists."
A perfectly peaceful march turned into chaos when the legal entry point to where the asylum seekers were headed was closed off by Mexican authorities, presumably at the request of Homeland Security. When some marchers then surged toward the border wall, Customs and Border Protection (CPB) officers wasted no time in firing multiple CS (tear gas) canisters across the border into Mexico, causing great chaos as mothers fled with their choking children. As if on cue, U.S. authorities then totally shut down the busiest border crossing in North America, an exercise they had been practicing during the week. Soon Marine helicopters were landing on the railroad tracks next to the border, and Marines, apparently armed, were fanning out along the border fence. At the same time, 300 Army soldiers with shields and clubs stood menacingly behind CPB officers.
A number of arrests were reportedly made on both sides of the border. Curiously, the U.S. says the 46 people it arrested will not be prosecuted. Mexican police, who were noted for the low key presence and nonviolence during this contrived event, also reported arresting several dozen people whom they say will be deported back to their home countries in Central America (primarily Honduras, where government death squads and violent gangs await their return).
In the meantime, rains and a shortage of food and shelter for the asylum seekers in Tijuana are turning an already difficult into a serious humanitarian crisis. As many as one-third of the 6,000 or so asylum seekers are suffering from respiratory and other illnesses. Mexico's federal government has provided no aid, and the mayor of Tijuana says that the city can provide little further assistance.
NGO's on both sides of the border are doing what they can to help, but so far their efforts are insufficient. The Unified U.S. Deported Veterans chapter of Veterans For Peace has also been helping asylum seekers who are camped out at the border, only about a half-block from their office. The Deported Veterans have experience with this, as they have helped previous caravans of asylum seekers as well. They are supplying food, water, blankets, and now seek to provide much needed tarps. San Diego VFP is helping out with this. Ultimately, they would like to provide backpacks filled with essential items.
Most needed are dollars, which can be used to purchase essential items in Mexico.
You can donate directly through a special link on the VFP website. Just indicate that your donation is for the asylum seekers.
VFP members who work with the Deported Veterans to assist the asylum seekers will be welcomed in Tijuana. San Diego Veterans For Peace will also be participating in a series of solidarity actions at the border, along with immigration justice groups, human rights groups, churches, peace groups and the Poor People's Campaign. VFP members will also be reaching out to soldiers and Marines to let them know they will have our support if they refuse to obey immoral or illegal orders.
Tucson Veterans For Peace will be part of a coalition of groups who will protest outside the Davis-Monthan Airforce Base in Tucson (Saturday, Dec. 1, 9-11 am) that is also housing Army troops that Trump has deployed to the border.
There are also discussions about organizing a Christmas holiday vigil outside the children's detention center at El Paso, Texas. All of these plans are in formation. VFP members who are interested in joining border actions in California, Arizona or Texas should email Gerry Condon at gerrycondon@veteransforpeace.org or phone him at 206-499-1220.
Members of San Diego Veterans For Peace marched to the border with Tijuana, Mexico on Sunday, November 25, as part of a San Diego coalition expressing solidarity with and support for thousands of Central American asylum seekers. VFP members were on both sides of the border and joined in with a march of asylum seekers on the Mexican side. So we had a good look at the crisis which was contrived by the Trump administration to make it look like there was indeed an "invasion" of "criminals" and "terrorists."
A perfectly peaceful march turned into chaos when the legal entry point to where the asylum seekers were headed was closed off by Mexican authorities, presumably at the request of Homeland Security. When some marchers then surged toward the border wall, Customs and Border Protection (CPB) officers wasted no time in firing multiple CS (tear gas) canisters across the border into Mexico, causing great chaos as mothers fled with their choking children. As if on cue, U.S. authorities then totally shut down the busiest border crossing in North America, an exercise they had been practicing during the week. Soon Marine helicopters were landing on the railroad tracks next to the border, and Marines, apparently armed, were fanning out along the border fence. At the same time, 300 Army soldiers with shields and clubs stood menacingly behind CPB officers.
A number of arrests were reportedly made on both sides of the border. Curiously, the U.S. says the 46 people it arrested will not be prosecuted. Mexican police, who were noted for the low key presence and nonviolence during this contrived event, also reported arresting several dozen people whom they say will be deported back to their home countries in Central America (primarily Honduras, where government death squads and violent gangs await their return).
In the meantime, rains and a shortage of food and shelter for the asylum seekers in Tijuana are turning an already difficult into a serious humanitarian crisis. As many as one-third of the 6,000 or so asylum seekers are suffering from respiratory and other illnesses. Mexico's federal government has provided no aid, and the mayor of Tijuana says that the city can provide little further assistance.
NGO's on both sides of the border are doing what they can to help, but so far their efforts are insufficient. The Unified U.S. Deported Veterans chapter of Veterans For Peace has also been helping asylum seekers who are camped out at the border, only about a half-block from their office. The Deported Veterans have experience with this, as they have helped previous caravans of asylum seekers as well. They are supplying food, water, blankets, and now seek to provide much needed tarps. San Diego VFP is helping out with this. Ultimately, they would like to provide backpacks filled with essential items.
Most needed are dollars, which can be used to purchase essential items in Mexico.
You can donate directly through a special link on the VFP website. Just indicate that your donation is for the asylum seekers.
VFP members who work with the Deported Veterans to assist the asylum seekers will be welcomed in Tijuana. San Diego Veterans For Peace will also be participating in a series of solidarity actions at the border, along with immigration justice groups, human rights groups, churches, peace groups and the Poor People's Campaign. VFP members will also be reaching out to soldiers and Marines to let them know they will have our support if they refuse to obey immoral or illegal orders.
Tucson Veterans For Peace will be part of a coalition of groups who will protest outside the Davis-Monthan Airforce Base in Tucson (Saturday, Dec. 1, 9-11 am) that is also housing Army troops that Trump has deployed to the border.
There are also discussions about organizing a Christmas holiday vigil outside the children's detention center at El Paso, Texas. All of these plans are in formation. VFP members who are interested in joining border actions in California, Arizona or Texas should email Gerry Condon at gerrycondon@veteransforpeace.org or phone him at 206-499-1220.
Community Celebrates 100th Armistice Day
Veterans for Peace and allies stand across from the Church of Assumption in silence
By Alexia Suarez
November 14, 2018
Veterans for Peace and allies stand across from the Church of Assumption in silence
By Alexia Suarez
November 14, 2018
Photo by Alexia Suarez
The bells at the Church of Assumption in downtown Bellingham rang 11 times at 11 a.m. on Sunday, November 11. Their slow, rhythmic beats commemorated the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. Local activist organization Veterans for Peace and Armistice Day supporters stood in silence across the street, flags for peace waving in the crisp autumn air.
The first Armistice Day at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of November 1918 signaled the halt of World War I and the start of a new era of peace, said Stan Parker, Army veteran and a member of the Veterans for Peace Board of Directors.
The Bellingham celebration was organized by the Veterans for Peace Chapter 111. Among them was Gene Marx, a Vietnam Navy veteran and Veterans for Peace local communication coordinator.
“I’d like people to realize Armistice Day’s original intent was to venerate peace; this was supposedly the war to end all wars,” Marx said. “And as it turns out, it was the war that ended all peace.”
Parker said he came to the rally in remembrance of those who lost their lives in war and also those affected by war. His call-to-action: war is not the answer to the problems of the world.
“There was a time in the world’s history when we really believed we could have world peace, where war was not the answer, and world peace was possible,” Parker said.
Today, Armistice Day is celebrated in countries across the world. Across the Canadian border on Sunday, crowds of citizens wore red poppy pins as they gathered. The flower is a symbol of remembrance of the emotional and physical expenses of war. The United States made the decision to replace Armistice Day with Veterans Day in 1968, even moving the holiday to a Monday to encourage commerce, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Lisa Distler, whose late husband, Bill Distler, was a Vietnam veteran and a founding member of Veterans for Peace, said the message of Armistice Day is one simply of peace; to put one’s arms down and come to an agreement that we as humans shouldn’t kill one another to solve our issues. She believes the newer U.S.-coined holiday has lost that message.
She said Veterans Day glorifies the act of going to war which is counterproductive to having a more inclusive and peaceful world, or recognizing the trauma that violence can inflict.
Daniel Kirkpatrick describes himself as a lifelong pacifist who comes from a long line of pacifists. His father was a conscious objector to World War II – his brother, an objector to the Vietnam War.
“We need a shift in a big way, we need a huge shift in our patterns of funding and supporting militarism and we need to shift towards a peace orientation that will bring prosperity to people across the world,” Kirkpatrick said.
The community remains optimistic.
“Until we get to the point where we want to have peace and our congressional representatives worry more about having peace, more than they’re concerned with their profits, then we will have an end to the fighting,” Marx said. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe peace couldn’t be attainable.”
Veterans for Peace meets on the third Friday of each month at the Community Connections building, part of the Community Food Co-op downtown. More information can be found on their website, www.vfpbellingham.org.
The first Armistice Day at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of November 1918 signaled the halt of World War I and the start of a new era of peace, said Stan Parker, Army veteran and a member of the Veterans for Peace Board of Directors.
The Bellingham celebration was organized by the Veterans for Peace Chapter 111. Among them was Gene Marx, a Vietnam Navy veteran and Veterans for Peace local communication coordinator.
“I’d like people to realize Armistice Day’s original intent was to venerate peace; this was supposedly the war to end all wars,” Marx said. “And as it turns out, it was the war that ended all peace.”
Parker said he came to the rally in remembrance of those who lost their lives in war and also those affected by war. His call-to-action: war is not the answer to the problems of the world.
“There was a time in the world’s history when we really believed we could have world peace, where war was not the answer, and world peace was possible,” Parker said.
Today, Armistice Day is celebrated in countries across the world. Across the Canadian border on Sunday, crowds of citizens wore red poppy pins as they gathered. The flower is a symbol of remembrance of the emotional and physical expenses of war. The United States made the decision to replace Armistice Day with Veterans Day in 1968, even moving the holiday to a Monday to encourage commerce, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Lisa Distler, whose late husband, Bill Distler, was a Vietnam veteran and a founding member of Veterans for Peace, said the message of Armistice Day is one simply of peace; to put one’s arms down and come to an agreement that we as humans shouldn’t kill one another to solve our issues. She believes the newer U.S.-coined holiday has lost that message.
She said Veterans Day glorifies the act of going to war which is counterproductive to having a more inclusive and peaceful world, or recognizing the trauma that violence can inflict.
Daniel Kirkpatrick describes himself as a lifelong pacifist who comes from a long line of pacifists. His father was a conscious objector to World War II – his brother, an objector to the Vietnam War.
“We need a shift in a big way, we need a huge shift in our patterns of funding and supporting militarism and we need to shift towards a peace orientation that will bring prosperity to people across the world,” Kirkpatrick said.
The community remains optimistic.
“Until we get to the point where we want to have peace and our congressional representatives worry more about having peace, more than they’re concerned with their profits, then we will have an end to the fighting,” Marx said. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe peace couldn’t be attainable.”
Veterans for Peace meets on the third Friday of each month at the Community Connections building, part of the Community Food Co-op downtown. More information can be found on their website, www.vfpbellingham.org.
VFP-111 Pays Tribute to Armistice Day Centennial
Silent Tribute During Annual Ringing of the Bells at the Church of the Assumption
Bellingham's Veterans For Peace, with more than twenty other supporters of peace, gathered on a brisk, sunny morning last Sunday in solemn commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of the end of the First World War. At 11 am - the 11th hour of the 11th month - the bells of the Church of the Assumption slowly tolled, along with thousands across the country. Heads were bowed in tribute in remembrance of the millions slaughtered needlessly in the "War to End All Wars".
An annual observance by VFP-111, this year's observance was part of the VFP International Reclaiming Armistice Day campaign This education effort was initiated to call attention not only to end of hostilities in 1918 but also to the fact that Armistice Day, originally designated to the cause of world peace, was co-opted by the US government and renamed Veterans Day, now a national holiday venerating not peace but military service in our endless wars.
True words of inspiration that resonated on this solemn occasion came from founding member Bill Distler's widow, Lisa:
I feel, this Armistice Day anniversary is a most profound moment, for us to stop for even one moment, a possible, sacred sixty seconds, that might allow us to silence the cyclonic, squall of insanity that portends our own Manchurian reality.
So for this weekend, give us peace. Lay down the fear of all that desperately conspires to destroy our peace of mind, sanity, and courage. Ring the Bells!!! That is the only sound I think most of us might be able to really hear, right now.
To VFP - Thank you kindly for making this happen.
Silent Tribute During Annual Ringing of the Bells at the Church of the Assumption
Bellingham's Veterans For Peace, with more than twenty other supporters of peace, gathered on a brisk, sunny morning last Sunday in solemn commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of the end of the First World War. At 11 am - the 11th hour of the 11th month - the bells of the Church of the Assumption slowly tolled, along with thousands across the country. Heads were bowed in tribute in remembrance of the millions slaughtered needlessly in the "War to End All Wars".
An annual observance by VFP-111, this year's observance was part of the VFP International Reclaiming Armistice Day campaign This education effort was initiated to call attention not only to end of hostilities in 1918 but also to the fact that Armistice Day, originally designated to the cause of world peace, was co-opted by the US government and renamed Veterans Day, now a national holiday venerating not peace but military service in our endless wars.
True words of inspiration that resonated on this solemn occasion came from founding member Bill Distler's widow, Lisa:
I feel, this Armistice Day anniversary is a most profound moment, for us to stop for even one moment, a possible, sacred sixty seconds, that might allow us to silence the cyclonic, squall of insanity that portends our own Manchurian reality.
So for this weekend, give us peace. Lay down the fear of all that desperately conspires to destroy our peace of mind, sanity, and courage. Ring the Bells!!! That is the only sound I think most of us might be able to really hear, right now.
To VFP - Thank you kindly for making this happen.
Reclaiming Armistice Day: A Day to Perpetuate Peace
As a veteran, I will not be misled and victimized once more by the militarists and war profiteers.
By Camillo Mac Bica
September 30, 2018
As a veteran, I will not be misled and victimized once more by the militarists and war profiteers.
By Camillo Mac Bica
September 30, 2018
Following World War One, up until then the bloodiest and most destructive war in the history of humankind, many of the beleaguered belligerent nations resolved, at least temporarily, that such devastation and tragic loss of life must never happen again. In the United States, on June 4, 1926, Congress passed a concurrent resolution establishing November 11th, the day in 1918 when the fighting stopped, as Armistice Day, a legal holiday, the intent and purpose of which would be to “commemorate with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”
In accordance with this resolution, President Calvin Coolidge issued a Proclamation on November 3rd 1926, “inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches or other places, with appropriate ceremonies expressive of our gratitude for peace and our desire for the continuance of friendly relations with all other peoples."
Disappointingly, despite its designation as “the war to end all wars,” and the intent of Armistice Day to make November 11th a day to celebrate peace, the resolve of nations to ensure that “good will and mutual understanding between nations” prevail, all too quickly faltered. Following another equally “destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war,” World War Two, and the “police action” in Korea, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a Proclamation that changed the designation of November 11th from Armistice Day to Veterans Day.
“I, Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States of America, do hereby call upon all of our citizens to
observe Thursday, November 11, 1954, as Veterans Day. On that day let us solemnly remember the
sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to
preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring
peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”
Though some continue to question Eisenhower’s decision to change the designation, upon analysis, his motivation and reasoning become apparent. Though far from being a pacifist, as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force during World War II, he knew and abhorred the destruction and tragic loss of life that war entails. Eisenhower’s Proclamation, I would argue, is an expression of his disappointment and frustration with the failure of nations to follow through with their Armistice Day resolve to avoid war and seek alternative means for conflict resolution. In changing the designation, Eisenhower hoped to remind America of war’s horror and futility, the sacrifices of those who struggled in its behalf, and the need to reassert a commitment to an enduring peace. Though the name was changed, the promise to promote friendly relations between all nations and all people of the world remained the same.
Finish the article on Common Dreams.
In accordance with this resolution, President Calvin Coolidge issued a Proclamation on November 3rd 1926, “inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches or other places, with appropriate ceremonies expressive of our gratitude for peace and our desire for the continuance of friendly relations with all other peoples."
Disappointingly, despite its designation as “the war to end all wars,” and the intent of Armistice Day to make November 11th a day to celebrate peace, the resolve of nations to ensure that “good will and mutual understanding between nations” prevail, all too quickly faltered. Following another equally “destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war,” World War Two, and the “police action” in Korea, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a Proclamation that changed the designation of November 11th from Armistice Day to Veterans Day.
“I, Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States of America, do hereby call upon all of our citizens to
observe Thursday, November 11, 1954, as Veterans Day. On that day let us solemnly remember the
sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to
preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring
peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”
Though some continue to question Eisenhower’s decision to change the designation, upon analysis, his motivation and reasoning become apparent. Though far from being a pacifist, as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force during World War II, he knew and abhorred the destruction and tragic loss of life that war entails. Eisenhower’s Proclamation, I would argue, is an expression of his disappointment and frustration with the failure of nations to follow through with their Armistice Day resolve to avoid war and seek alternative means for conflict resolution. In changing the designation, Eisenhower hoped to remind America of war’s horror and futility, the sacrifices of those who struggled in its behalf, and the need to reassert a commitment to an enduring peace. Though the name was changed, the promise to promote friendly relations between all nations and all people of the world remained the same.
Finish the article on Common Dreams.
Micro Militarism
Michael Schwalbe
My ATM receipts now tell me, beneath my checking account balance, that the North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union SUPPORTS THE TROOPS! The classical music station I listen to runs a dedication to “the men and women of our armed forces, who work so hard to protect us; without their sacrifices, none of our freedoms would be possible.”
When I browse for information about public universities in North Carolina, an ad pops up showing a young man in camouflage combat fatigues, holding a laptop computer. The text of the ad reads, “Advance Your Military Career with an MBA.” The ad is for an online MBA program at the University of North Carolina.
A few months ago the home page of my university, NC State, greeted viewers with an image of a young man in the cockpit of a U.S. air force fighter jet. The text, as I recall, was to the effect that NC State is training tomorrow’s leaders today. The fall issue of the university’s alumni magazine ran an adoring profile of army general Ray Odierno, a 1986 graduate.
The local weekly independent newspaper, which fashions itself as alternative and leftish, runs a feature called the “social activist calendar.” Events are grouped under headings such as Community, Environment, Politics, Government, and LGBTQ. In a recent issue, four events were listed under Troop Support.
Though the requests have abated lately, for a time earlier this year cashiers in grocery stores and gas stations consistently asked if I wanted to donate a dollar to support the troops.
The above are examples of what can be called micro militarism: pro-military practices squeezed into small cultural spaces. Any one such practice might seem trivial. Yet on the whole micro militarism does much to normalize militarism on a large scale.
Militarism on a large scale is what the U.S. is all about. This is militarism on the scale of foreign invasions and occupations; on the scale of maintaining hundreds of military bases around the world; on the scale of drone fleets used to carry out political assassinations wherever the enemies of empire might roam; on the scale of spending half of our nation’s collective wealth every year to pay for weapons and war; on the scale of an economy in which the profits of nearly every major corporation, and many small ones, derive in part from military contracts.
From the standpoint of political and economic elites, militarism on a large scale is a fine thing. It is how wealth is transferred from the working class to the capitalist class via taxes to pay for “defense systems.” It is also how U.S. corporations maintain access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets around the world. The problem is that, absent the fever of war, large-scale militarism generates popular resistance.
After a while, people begin to wonder why their sons and daughters are being killed and maimed in countries half a world away, countries that have not attacked us and with which we are not at war. People begin to wonder about the competence and morality of politicians who engage in imperial adventures that seem to have no clear purpose, no clear endpoint, and no clear benefits for anyone who doesn’t stand to make a profit on weapons, military supplies, mercenary services, or someone else’s natural resources.
People begin to wonder why there is not enough money for schools, public transportation, libraries, parks, and health care. They begin to wonder where our collective wealth is going, and why there is always enough money for the tools of war but not enough for the things that give regular people security and prosperity at home.
Read entire article on Counterpunch.
Michael Schwalbe
My ATM receipts now tell me, beneath my checking account balance, that the North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union SUPPORTS THE TROOPS! The classical music station I listen to runs a dedication to “the men and women of our armed forces, who work so hard to protect us; without their sacrifices, none of our freedoms would be possible.”
When I browse for information about public universities in North Carolina, an ad pops up showing a young man in camouflage combat fatigues, holding a laptop computer. The text of the ad reads, “Advance Your Military Career with an MBA.” The ad is for an online MBA program at the University of North Carolina.
A few months ago the home page of my university, NC State, greeted viewers with an image of a young man in the cockpit of a U.S. air force fighter jet. The text, as I recall, was to the effect that NC State is training tomorrow’s leaders today. The fall issue of the university’s alumni magazine ran an adoring profile of army general Ray Odierno, a 1986 graduate.
The local weekly independent newspaper, which fashions itself as alternative and leftish, runs a feature called the “social activist calendar.” Events are grouped under headings such as Community, Environment, Politics, Government, and LGBTQ. In a recent issue, four events were listed under Troop Support.
Though the requests have abated lately, for a time earlier this year cashiers in grocery stores and gas stations consistently asked if I wanted to donate a dollar to support the troops.
The above are examples of what can be called micro militarism: pro-military practices squeezed into small cultural spaces. Any one such practice might seem trivial. Yet on the whole micro militarism does much to normalize militarism on a large scale.
Militarism on a large scale is what the U.S. is all about. This is militarism on the scale of foreign invasions and occupations; on the scale of maintaining hundreds of military bases around the world; on the scale of drone fleets used to carry out political assassinations wherever the enemies of empire might roam; on the scale of spending half of our nation’s collective wealth every year to pay for weapons and war; on the scale of an economy in which the profits of nearly every major corporation, and many small ones, derive in part from military contracts.
From the standpoint of political and economic elites, militarism on a large scale is a fine thing. It is how wealth is transferred from the working class to the capitalist class via taxes to pay for “defense systems.” It is also how U.S. corporations maintain access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets around the world. The problem is that, absent the fever of war, large-scale militarism generates popular resistance.
After a while, people begin to wonder why their sons and daughters are being killed and maimed in countries half a world away, countries that have not attacked us and with which we are not at war. People begin to wonder about the competence and morality of politicians who engage in imperial adventures that seem to have no clear purpose, no clear endpoint, and no clear benefits for anyone who doesn’t stand to make a profit on weapons, military supplies, mercenary services, or someone else’s natural resources.
People begin to wonder why there is not enough money for schools, public transportation, libraries, parks, and health care. They begin to wonder where our collective wealth is going, and why there is always enough money for the tools of war but not enough for the things that give regular people security and prosperity at home.
Read entire article on Counterpunch.
Veterans For Peace rally in Washington, less than a month after 9/11. Credit: Elvert Barnes/Flickr
“Imagine there’s no heaven…and no religion too.”
A more useful line when it comes to our current wars may be “Imagine there’s no duopoly.” It’s hard to fault John Lennon for his idealism, of course. In his day, many blamed religion on the wars of history. But a much bigger obstacle right now, at least in the U.S., is partisanship. The two major political parties, in power and out, have been so co-opted by the war machine that any modern anti-war movement has been completely subsumed and marginalized—even as American troops and killer drones continue to operate in or near combat zones all over the world.
Aside from the very early days of the Iraq war, the anti-war movement has been a small, ineffectual pinprick on the post-9/11 landscape. A less generous assessment is that it’s been a bust. After liberals helped elect the “anti-war” Barack Obama, the movement all but disappeared, even though the wars did not. By putting a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Democratic face on his inherited wars, Obama expanded into new conflicts (Libya, Syria, Yemen) with little resistance, ultimately bombing seven different countries during his tenure. By 2013, Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin lamented, “We’ve been protesting Obama’s foreign policy for years now, but we can’t get the same numbers because the people who would’ve been yelling and screaming about this stuff under Bush are quiet under Obama.”
Read the rest of the article in the The American Conservative.
A more useful line when it comes to our current wars may be “Imagine there’s no duopoly.” It’s hard to fault John Lennon for his idealism, of course. In his day, many blamed religion on the wars of history. But a much bigger obstacle right now, at least in the U.S., is partisanship. The two major political parties, in power and out, have been so co-opted by the war machine that any modern anti-war movement has been completely subsumed and marginalized—even as American troops and killer drones continue to operate in or near combat zones all over the world.
Aside from the very early days of the Iraq war, the anti-war movement has been a small, ineffectual pinprick on the post-9/11 landscape. A less generous assessment is that it’s been a bust. After liberals helped elect the “anti-war” Barack Obama, the movement all but disappeared, even though the wars did not. By putting a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Democratic face on his inherited wars, Obama expanded into new conflicts (Libya, Syria, Yemen) with little resistance, ultimately bombing seven different countries during his tenure. By 2013, Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin lamented, “We’ve been protesting Obama’s foreign policy for years now, but we can’t get the same numbers because the people who would’ve been yelling and screaming about this stuff under Bush are quiet under Obama.”
Read the rest of the article in the The American Conservative.
Whatcom Peace & Justice Looking for AMS Volunteers
Interested in joining the Whatcom Peace & Justice Alternatives to Military Service volunteer crew? WPJC could really use veteran perspectives. The time commitment is up to you -- some folks volunteer for 2 hours per semester, and others put in more than 20.
Come and learn how to table with AMS and then sign up for shifts that work for you.
Whatcom Peace & Justice Center
1220 Bay St
Interested in joining the Whatcom Peace & Justice Alternatives to Military Service volunteer crew? WPJC could really use veteran perspectives. The time commitment is up to you -- some folks volunteer for 2 hours per semester, and others put in more than 20.
Come and learn how to table with AMS and then sign up for shifts that work for you.
Whatcom Peace & Justice Center
1220 Bay St
VFP-111 Supports Original Intent of Veterans Day
Veterans For Peace calls for the observance of November 11 to be in keeping with the holiday’s original intent as Armistice Day, to be “a day dedicated to the cause of world peace," as it was celebrated at the ending of World War I when the world came together to recognize the need for lasting peace. That desire for peace led ten years later to the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War (Kellogg-Briand) which made war illegal. The U.S. ratified the treaty and is bound by its terms pursuant to Art. 6 of the Constitution. After World War II, the U.S. Congress decided to rebrand November 11 as Veterans Day. Honoring the warriors quickly morphed into honoring the military and glorifying war. Armistice Day, as a result, has been flipped from a day for peace into a day for displays of militarism.
This year with a rise of hate and fear around the world it is as urgent as ever to ring the bells of peace. We in the U.S. must press our government to end reckless rhetoric and military interventions that endanger the entire world.
Instead of celebrating militarism, we want to celebrate peace and all of humanity. We demand an end to all forms of hate, patriarchy and white supremacy and we call for unity, fair treatment under the law and equality for all. We call for a tearing down of walls between borders and people. We call for an end to all hostilities at home and around the globe.
This year with a rise of hate and fear around the world it is as urgent as ever to ring the bells of peace. We in the U.S. must press our government to end reckless rhetoric and military interventions that endanger the entire world.
Instead of celebrating militarism, we want to celebrate peace and all of humanity. We demand an end to all forms of hate, patriarchy and white supremacy and we call for unity, fair treatment under the law and equality for all. We call for a tearing down of walls between borders and people. We call for an end to all hostilities at home and around the globe.
The Hidden Tragedy of the Vietnam War with Investigative Journalist Nick Turse
On Contact's Chris Hedges discusses the hidden tragedy of the Vietnam War with author of Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.
On Contact's Chris Hedges discusses the hidden tragedy of the Vietnam War with author of Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.
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Waging Peace
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