DECEMBER 2007

THIS ONE SENTENCE
This one sentence pretty much wraps up the current situation:
“From the emergence of the Neocons as an ideological power base dominant over U.S. foreign policy, to destruction wreaked on the Bill of Rights by illegal surveillance of citizens, to the senseless creation of the bureaucratically monstrous Department of Homeland Security and passage of the Patriot Acts, to the initiation of “wars of choice” leading to the devastation of two nations and the killing or displacement of perhaps a million Middle Eastern non-combatants, to violation of international treaties and conventions against wars of aggression and torture of prisoners, to presiding over an economy ruined by the continued export of manufacturing jobs and the creation and deflation of the housing bubble, to the wrecking of the federal budget by over a trillion dollars of wartime expenditure, to the abandonment of the city of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, to tax cuts for the most wealthy while the income of the middle class has drastically eroded, and to threats to start another war, this time against Iran, based on deceptions similar to those which preceded the Iraq invasion, the Bush/Cheney administration has brought the U.S. to the brink of catastrophe.” 

I DISAGREE

    The “empire” analysis glosses over the actual, well-recorded, primary factor in the events of the past seven years – an extension of what has been going on for decades.  The virtually unprotested ethnic-cleansing of Palestine – silently approved by US progressives – is the pilot-light of the entire conflagration: it is hypocritical and self-serving of leftists and progressives to blame “empire” for the results of their own silent support for that flagrant racist violence.

    Please recall:
    On September 28, 2000, the representatives of international Zionism sent Ariel Sharon to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Palestine, to kick off the final phase of the Zionist ethnic-cleansing (massive, overt, expressly racist violence) which had been going on in broad daylight, for over fifty years, financed by US voters and taxpayers, at an ever-increasing rate which, in the past decade, has reached about ten million unconstitutional dollars a day – without an audible peep of protest by any leftist, progressive, or other organization of US taxpayers and voters.

2000: 'Provocative' mosque visit sparks riots Palestinians and Israeli police have clashed in the worst violence for several years at Jerusalem's holiest site, the compound around Al-Aqsa mosque. The violence began after a highly controversial tour of the mosque compound early this morning by hardline Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon. Under heavy guard, Mr Sharon entered the compound with a right-wing Likud party delegation. He crossed from the west side of the compound to the east and back again, to the sound of enraged protests from demonstrators outside.

   In Fall 2000, the attacks on Palestine continued, with an average of six Palestinian children being systematically murdered each week, in their own neighborhoods and schoolyards, to a total of 84 dead Palestinian children in January 2001, before the first Palestinian suicide-bombing and first killing of an Israeli child.  The ratio among adults was almost equivalent.  All the relevant data is public domain.

    Throughout that time, most of these murders were reported in US corporate newspaper headlines, yet they received virtually no comment at all from the progressive, leftist, or anti-war organizations – even at meetings which discussed the ten-year-old sanctions against Iraq: an issue far more closely related to Palestine than the openly Zionist speakers at these meetings wished anyone to realize.
    We few who tried – working meticulously through due process – to penetrate that Zionist (not corporate) (not governmental) propaganda-grip were shouted down and openly assaulted by Zionists at “anti-war” organizational meetings – with no particular objection from the rank and file “anti-war” folks.

    The few Americans who had been paying attention all along were also quite aware that Ariel Sharon’s kick-off also meant the long-awaited, corresponding big drive for conquest of those Middle East states which still represented their populations’ wishes to prevent continued Zionist atrocities and expansion in the area.  The intended wars against the Taliban, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria – with Iran next in line – were perfectly obvious in October 2000.  Their inevitability and a global bogus “war on terror” became obvious in the following months, prior to 9/11, when not one single significant element of the US progressive or leftist or anti-war scene made any noteworthy statement against overt Zionist atrocities in Palestine. Even Bush II’s public chastisement of Zionist policies brought no support at all from any faction of the US population, but they were jeered and derided by Zionists and totally ignored by Israel.

    US public sentiment was being tested, and the neo-cons were finding that it would be safe for them to begin making their influence quite obvious.  All of this was clear, at the time, to anyone who noticed the significance of open, US-financed, racist violence against civilians in Palestine passing without any objection from progressives.  So, on the morning of 9/11, we were scarcely surprised at all.  The green light had been given thoroughly, some larger kick-off was inevitable.
 
    When the problem of Zionist ethnic-cleansing – and the daily murders of Palestinian children – was raised in “progressive” and “leftist” organizational meetings, in Fall 2000, the most active leaders and members angrily shouted down any discussion – expressly because it threatened the official “Jewishness” of “the Jewish state.”  And the other leaders and members let them get away with it.  That is the crucial reality in the ongoing catastrophe which inevitably resulted – just as some of us tried to warn at the time.

    As the inevitable consequences of that complicity geared up, through impending attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, the same pattern of violent and slanderous Zionist censorship prevented the formation of a viable anti-war movement – one that would not silently approve of increasing racist violence in Palestine.

    The pro-Zionist consensus at all such meetings was that we must not “divide the movement” by criticizing Israel.  In other words, the active racists “within the movement,” threatening to depart and reduce the head-counts at the demonstrations, were able to prevent “the movement” from using the one argument which would make sense of the situation to ordinary Americans.
    It was and is simple subversion.

    This means that, on this particular issue, the representation of “progressive” and “anti-war” opinion has been actively or absent-mindedly racist.  Naturally, the public in general cannot do better than the progressives on such issues – even as much of the public awaits some alternative view or dissent before deciding that further thought is necessary.  So the bulk of US opinion has been steered by openly racist elements in the US population – in the mass-media, in the editorial policies of all local Jewish newspapers, and in the anti-war movement itself, to support the official “Jewishness” of “the Jewish state” and thus to defend the flagrant racist violence which becomes “necessary” against Palestine.

    This has been a grass-roots position, expressly propagated by grass-roots Zionists: blaming it on “the government” and “the empire” is a Zionist diversion, having nothing to do with observable reality, and INTENDED to divert attention from the actual, popular, Zionist source of the problem.

    Our politicians are quite aware of all this.  They feel nothing but amused contempt for the US activists who deride them, while conspicuously failing to address Zionist racism in Palestine – and who thus guarantee the proliferation of the wars they like to protest.  

    While the US population is so eager to finance openly racist violence in Palestine, the effects and ramifications of this vast racist machine must naturally favor the proliferation of broader “imperialist” violence, nor is there any way for any US politicians or corporate leaders to stand up against this popular racism.

    While international commerce is a fact of nature, and while it is likely to produce conglomerates which can be called “empire,” it can be argued that the old slash-and-burn process of colonial-military bargain-hunting has been falling into decline since long before World War II – being gradually and erratically, but inexorably replaced by more “sustainable” economic conquest, which inherently favors development of thriving, sustainable, global markets, or “peace.”

    Regardless of how ready one is to comprehend that process, there has been one – and only one – international conglomerate which is overtly and very violently opposed to equality and peace in the Middle East.  The openly-expressed fundamental principle of international Zionism is to create and maintain an ever-expanding, officially “Jewish” state in multi-ethnic Palestine – and to crush any opposition to that openly racist and patently violent program.

    Even IF Israel were merely being used by US “imperialist” elements in a larger strategy, the open racism of the Zionist program would be the most virulent, obvious, morally vulnerable element in the entire campaign, and it would be an ideal place to focus protests against “imperialist” policies and machinations.  This would be quite obvious in any other case.  But the Zionists who control the anti-war movement use the “anti-imperialist” argument to divert attention away from the Zionist program – so that the one, most powerful anti-war argument has been scrubbed out of the anti-war movement – and that is why it has failed so miserably.  The “anti-war movement” has been made into an indefensible Zionist whitewash.

    One cannot expect to make progress against an expanding series of openly racist wars, by using arguments that refuse to properly address the open racism at the core of the conflict, for fear of dividing the racists from “the movement.”  Nor can one pretend to be surprised when giving a green light to racist violence in Palestine also happens to promote racist war-interests against all of the racists’ regional opponents.  Nor can we pretend to be surprised when the first direct recipients of the “imperialist” benefits of such conquest prove to be Zionist imperialists.

    Global peace cannot arrive until the winning opinion among American voters and taxpayers is to give Zionist racism the same primary emphasis and zero tolerance that is applied to all other cases of openly-declared racist conquest.  This is simply the challenge of racism or realism in our own time and place.  Making an exception – for any reason – is complicity in the racist violence of our own mainstream, now.

    Blaming the government and the imperialists for the results of our own silence is merely a false denial of our own culpability.  Peace requires us to do better than that, and it’s worth it.

    The one sentence against “empire” is just another of the countless such sentences we have been hearing for decades, which have always have covered up the core of this conflict and assured its increase.

    Dave Kersting

Bruce Springsteen on America
  from radio producer Mike Stark of Lakewood CA:  

In the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Bruce Springsteen talks about his view of America today and what is in our future.  I've pulled some of his key segments from the article - the points that rang truest for me.   It is troubling that a guy who's primarily viewed as an entertainer makes more sense than ANY politician out there today.  "Shut Up and Sing", indeed.

Bruce Springsteen:

On America today:

I’m optimistic as far as people go and pessimistic as far as the government goes, for pretty clear reasons. In 2006, the American people said “Throw these bums out!” They would have voted Bush out at that moment if they could have. There was a clear message about the war in Iraq, and yet we sit here today with no front-running presidential candidate on either side who’s going to take us out of there.......To think that the country could veer this far rightward or that no one has addressed poverty since Lyndon Johnson – with the exception of John Edwards, who makes it a big part of his campaign – I find that disappointing. I don’t believe you can create a great society, a real American civilization, with an enormous percentage of the people in the country suffering, left out, disempowered. And isn’t that what we’re trying to do? Wasn’t that the idea when those guys sat down at the start?

On the Internet:

There’s a democratizing effect to the Internet, but it has a runaway dynamic of its own that makes you very frightened. On one hand, there’s enormous access to information. On the other hand, there’s so much damn noise, you can’t find it. There’s an enormous amount of nonsense and idiocy.

I think what it calls for is new skills to be taught to children, interpretive-media skills. The educational system hasn’t caught up with some of the essential changes in technology.....There needs to be classes in those things that begin with children at a very young age. Otherwise, there’ll be the recurrence of a lot of what we’ve experienced over the past few years, where bold lies come off as truth. From here on in, the fight against the Orwellian nature of things is going to be a constant battle. The only thing that’s going to help that is an educated and wised-up citizenry. You need a bunch of optimistic skeptics out there. 

On issues facing America over the next 20 years: 

Race, poverty – those things get lost, and not unintentionally, through the use of other issues. There is an issue with national security that’s real. But the movement has been toward a plutocracy. People say, “We’re in a second Gilded Age.” There’s a price to pay for that. It weakens the foundation of the country, and it denies us freedoms, denies us connection with our own neighbors and citizens. Those are big issues that have failed to be addressed for so many years.

Race and poverty clearly are major issues. And what’s so disappointing is that they were major issues forty and fifty years ago, yet at least then they were part of the national conversation. It feels as though the conversation about those things has stopped at this point.

I’ll tell you when it wasn’t stopped – when a guy that doesn’t care that much about it had to say something about it. When people turned on the television during Hurricane Katrina and said, “Where did all those poor people come from?” And why wasn’t it stopped then? Because you were seeing them. This is an explosive issue that is hidden on a daily basis intentionally by the dynamics of the system. And you could feel its explosiveness when you saw those images, those people. The president had to come out and say, “Uh . . . we’ve got to do something about that poverty.” Then that was the last you heard of it. It shamed people. It shamed him. Not easy to do. It shamed us as Americans. Those are issues that need to be addressed.

How do you think this time will be remembered forty years from now?

Many parts of it will be remembered with the same degree of shame as the Japanese internment camps are remembered – illegal wiretapping, rendition, the abuse of prisoners, cutting back our civil rights, no habeas corpus. I don’t think most people thought they’d ever see the country move far enough to the right to see those things happen here. And I don’t believe those are things that strengthen us. The moral authority to stand up and say, “We are the Americans,” is invaluable. It’s been deeply damaged, and it’s going to take quite a while to repair that damage, if we can.

This will be remembered as a low point in American history – as simple as that. People are going to go, “Was everybody sleeping?” But people get frightened, and when they get frightened, they get crazy. You wonder where political hysteria can take you – I think we’ve tasted some of that.

All I want to do is be one of the guys that says, “When that stuff was going down, I threw my hat in the ring and tried to stand on what I felt was the right side of history.”