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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (May 1, 2006)
NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, (MAY)JUNE 2006 disguise the contradiction that supporting a soldier’s warlike duty is a sure way of killing him (or her). “There is no good war and no bad peace,” Benjamin Franklin said. But peace is also distinguished as a period between wars, a time to bury the dead, lick wounds, produce more and newer weapons, sow newer crops of human fodder to continue the genocides of their fathers. The questions of how to end warfare are ancient but never as popular as promoting it. The very few who raise the issue of abolishing war have been imprisoned, exiled or executed through the centuries. At the very least they are ostracized. Pacifism exudes an odor of weakness and appeasement, and pacifists are accused of being agents or dupes of an enemy. Pacifists are themselves in conflict. The central most agonizing question is whether some principles are worth the risk of annihilation. Human life and possibly all organic existence is conceivably so rare in the universe that its loss as a result of dispute over abstract principles peculiar to a point in time would be more intolerable than the loss of those principles, which, human in origin, would just as surely evaporate in a holocaust. “What difference does it make to the dead,” Gandhi asked, “whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" Solutions to warfare have been ambiguous, insipid and often ridiculous. Most pacifists agree that the only end to warfare will be a world state of some form, but One World theories range from a loose federation of states not unlike the United Nations with the exception that its laws would be binding, to naked utopias and otherworldly Edens, or more ominously, Orwellian or Huxlean nightmares of rigid authority and mind control (as well as perpetual war). Most solutions acknowledge the necessity of alternatives to warfare to engage its immense energies. William James suggested in 1914, the year World War 1 began, that there ought to be a “moral equivalent to warfare,” and although his idea that society exhibit the pomp and circumstance of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta was rather silly (but not out of context with his pompous era), he also thought that “so long as the anti militarists propose no substitute...no moral equivalent to war... the duties, penalties and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military minded." That is exactly the point. Militarism rules the planet. Military values are taught at every level of education and are incorporated in the root systems of societal values. Militarism is the antithesis of liberty and democracy and its justice is based on obedience and servitude. The economies of most nations are poured into war machines that posture as defensive instruments and world leaders blackmail their populations with terror, force them to surrender their lives and their children's futures, their wealth and liberties if they possess either, to the gross appetites and deadly illusions of military power. Nightmares of doom are disguised as dreamworlds of prosperity. Armageddon is the place for the last battle at the end of the world. Almost all religions and myths prophesize a final PAGE 15 which is, after all. the shrine of their profession. “War is to a man what childbirth is to a woman," Benito Mussolini was fond of saying. DEVON BOWMAN conflict or cataclysm that will terminate human life, and our history has propelled us to the savage frontier of our most primitive fears. Military castes have been as irresponsible as priests in exhorting doom — they speak of themselves as guardians of peace but prepare the methods for final combat Putting an end to warfare will not end human conflict or greed, but war should be put aside as a toy of our youth. The ancient assumption that war weeds out the weak, unfit and unlucky to insure strengthened future generations has been disproved by the enormous and indiscriminately devastating wars of the 20th century. A general who commanded the largest armies in history and who as President of the USA warned the world of the sinister and possibly obliterative consequences of the military/industrial mafia (his original inclusion of Congress was dropped), Dwight Eisenhower once said that "People want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of the way and give it to them.” The United States commemorates its war dead on Memorial Day, which is at the end of May. It would be the proper occasion to pierce the illusions and deceptions and remember that the hallowed dead would bitterly protest being used to kill others, and to take note of something written by Boris Van: “The day nobody comes back from a war it will be because war has at last been properly organized.” History’s dark glare shines on an Earth too fragile for the titanic clashes of its past. Humanity, however, responds quicker to hatred and opportunity than to peace for its own sake, and never are these traits more represented than through a war’s victors arguing over spoils of a defeated enemy. Civilizations have profited immensely from wars, and warfare has progressed civilization's expanse and technologies. Yet war has also turned out the lights of civilization. Humanity has been set back centuries by its predilection for war — long periods of decline and retrogression. Generations denied opportunities of learning and rebuilding. Interminable cycles of darkness. Human antipathy does not go away easily or for very long Old hatreds scab over only briefly and soon re-erupt. Someone somewhere covets something possessed by a neighbor — land, wealth, power. An insurgency plans an assault or ambush. Terrorists target innocents and guilty deliberately. A newly established nuclear power readies to flex it on an old enemy. Big War stuff trickles down from defunct Cold War arsenals into the grabby little hands of schoolchildren who arm themselves in the manner of gunfighters or gangsters. Peace loving peoples commit genocide upon rivals. Large parts of the world act as laundries for ethnic or pious cleansing. Countries or persons publicly declare themselves as pacifist yet act as vicious as attack dogs. Peace is not on the earth but a few feet under it for millions who are slaughtered by fellow humans for reasons peripheral and perishable. “With them in hell," wrote Wilfred Owen, regarded the best poet of World War 1 (and perhaps the best war poet ever), killed a week before the Armistice: “the sorrowful dark of hell Whose world is but the trembling of a flare And heaven but as the highway for a shell." WINTER SOLDIERS April 19, the day the American Revolution began in 1775, was the date that nearly 1,000 members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War gathered in Washington, D C. from virtually every state In the USA thirty-five years ago in 1971 to protest the war they had fought in and turned against. They likened themselves to the ‘Patriots’ who fought for liberty and freedom in the Revolution and called themselves “Winter Soldiers." For the week they occupied the mall across from the Capitol, the killers remained peaceful, spreading like fire through the city, assaulting neighborhoods with guerrilla theater of mock search & destroy that was so realistic people screamed in fear and anger as uniformed men with toy M-16s pretended to beat and kill others dressed in pajamas and cone hats. Some of the actors were hurt because the former soldiers sometimes forgot it was not for real, but they had accepted the risk from the start. Throwing their war medals at Congress was the last act of their show. A goodly portion of the American people thought the finale was an audacious and tragic gesture that “won their hearts and minds.” The next day a huge march of 500,000 people from just about every type of job, union, church and political group from all over the USA tramped through the streets of Washington in opposition to Vietnam (the official bodycount of U.S. forces in Vietnam was 500,000). Then the vets dug in for May Day, which was a week away. The plan was to commit mass civil disobedience by creating mass chaos in Washington. War resisters migrated to the city from all over the country in the following week. Although most of the W A W vets had gone home a few stayed, scattered among various delegations that planned to blockade the main targets of highway bridges into Washington and traffic circles inside the city to prevent federal workers from reaching their jobs for as long and as often as possible. Those who wanted to act together as vets struck the Pentagon with an estimated 100 pounds of fresh chickenshit gathered in nearby Maryland chicken farms and distributed among 20 vets in plastic bags. They reached the Pentagon through every obstruction put in their way, moving as if in combat patrol, and delivering smelly little bombs of chicken scat on the front porch of the Pentagon. They were of course arrested and after most of the day spent in federal prison in Arlington, Virginia, were released with the threat that if they didn’t leave Washington within three hours they would spend 90 days in jail. Most stuck around, however, and avoided getting caught again. Few who participated in May Day expected to seriously interrupt the government or that the war would end as a result. What mattered was that several thousand American citizens were determined to commit civil disobedience on a scale never attempted in the cduntry, with possible exception of the Civil War. Most who took part intended to be arrested so that they could fight the war in court. That hope did not materialize. The “fowl defecation distribution” campaign by the vets was apparently the last major assault on the Pentagon prior to 9/11 — and it was done in a sense of mirth because anyone who has ever been in the armed forces knows why the vets chose chickenshit as their weapons of mass defecation. And they did it in a sense that as veterans, they were truly bringing the war home. Antiwar veterans movements have been virtually unnoticed in American history. Yet that history abounds with veterans taking anns against their military masters from the very start. Former colonial veterans of the French & Indian War fought against their old army and set up a republic two centuries ago. The U.S. Army split down the middle in 1861 and comrade fought comrade for four immensely bloody years until the Union was restored. Of more subtle consequence was the Whiskey Rebellion’ of 1796. Revolutionary War veterans banded together to protest the taxing of whiskey by the embryonic U.S. govern ment. Their methods were radical yet peaceful, but the new U.S. Army was sent to suppress them with force at the order of President George Washington. Confederate veterans formed armed groups after the Civil War to resist the plundering ‘Recon structionist' governments that took up occupation in the defeated South — an entire Southern army division defected intact to Mexico but dissipated before it could fight because neither Juaristas nor occupation French wanted it: luckless ambition had been for its officers to lead a combined Confederate/Mexican army back across the border to fight Yankees again. In 1932 the ‘Bonus Army’, made up of World War 1 veterans, marched on Washington, D C. to demand promised war benefits as a desperate hope to survive the Great Depres sion. They built a shanty-city outside the Capitol and were forcibly evicted by the Army; a few were killed, many beaten. In World War 2, a U.S. Army division in Europe went on strike until some of its demands against intolerable conditions were met. The ringleaders were arrested. Following the war, almost the entire Pacific command nearly mutinied when it was learned several army divisions as well as naval forces were to be sent to China to combat the NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE A JOURNAL OF ART & OPINION PUBLISHED IN ASTORIA, OREGON 757 27TH STREET 97103 MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER . EDITOR & PUBLISHER communist forces of Mao Tse Tung. The mutiny was quickly averted by keeping the promise made at the start of the war (after Pearl Harbor) that troops would be sent home when it was over. Also after World War 2, thousands of servicemen angrily protested a year-long continuation of the draft and were only appeased when they were told that new draftees would replace them and they would get home sooner as a result. There have undoubtedly been countless such revolts against the military system, however limited in scope and action, whether or not successful. With the exception of renegade officers leading military coups and setting up dictatorships, the actions of soldiers turning against their nations’ military in the name of peace and anti-militarism have largely gone unknown — in that context it would seem that the only combat veteran in Western history known to attempt the philosophical collapse of militarism was Socrates. If there has ever existed a well-researched and documented history of rebellion within military installations objecting to militarism and the ethic of war, it has been well hidden from curious eyes. What information is known has been confined to obscure texts and memoranda However important the specifics may be in piecing together the pattern, the crucial significance is that revolt within the military machine is an enduring tradition in itself. Just as radical opposition has always existed at the core of every civil/political system, so it has inside every military arm of those systems. Within this tradition of revolt can be understood both the roots and vacuum of the rebellion against the Vietnam War by a number of its veterans. The roots lie in the constant insurrection throughout military history; the vacuum exists in the suppression of that history. Vietnam veterans who opposed the war had to start from scratch with little workable knowledge of precedent in what they attempted. Yet because they were left to their own imaginations, the members of W A W instigated the most significant revolt against war by war veterans in American history. The USA has a newer group of disaffected soldiers and veterans who act as conscience to the raw and sordid perpet uation of warfare. — Iraq Veterans Against the War IVAW is yet miniscule but already despised by the Bushite warmakers who disparage them as “misfits" and of course as “traitors." But they grow as more women and men return from the war, maimed in spirit and conscience as well as in body and mind. “Their opposition to the war they fought in has incredible symbolic force,” says Barry Romo, USMC lieutenant in Vietnam and current W A W national coordinator W A W has nurtured its offspring IVAW since birth, which might be an explanation for egregious attacks upon the W A W — the dread that today's war veterans are forming a similar opposition and have more force and support from lessons learned as a result of the precedent W A W set W A W should probably change its name to reflect newer crops of veterans, perhaps American War Veterans Against War (or For Peace) to encompass future wars as well as the most recent -MICHAEL McCUSKER I I »
