[HCCN] fwd: More on Vets for Peace White House Civil Resistance

[Judith Robbins]

"How is the War Economy working for You?" -- Veterans for Peace



Good video from Real News (thanks to Marta Daniels for this link):
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php? 
option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6017



 From Bruce Gagnon's blog:
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2010/12/up-against-fence.html
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2010
UP AGAINST THE FENCE
There were 131 arrested at the White House today as hundreds turned  
out in the cold and snow for the Veterans for Peace action calling  
for an end to the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We waited holding onto the fence for over an hour before the Park  
Police began arresting us. They loaded three city buses with the  
resisters and drove us about six miles to the headquarters of the DC  
Park Police where we were quickly processed and released. We were  
given two options: pay a $100 fee and be done with it or instead  
plead not-guilty and be scheduled for a trial at some point down the  
road - likely in the spring. I chose the latter and all of us who  
plead not-guilty have to return to the Park Police HQ tomorrow to get  
our date to return for arraignment.

I then made my way back to the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House  
where I stayed last night and will stay again tonight. Also here are  
seven women from Northampton, Massachusetts (including 91 year old  
activist legend Frances Crowe) who all got arrested today as well.

In the beginning of the video you can see me in a blue jacket - I was  
one of the first to jump over the barrier that the police had put in  
place in order to try to keep us away from the fence. The police were  
actually quite good to us today, very gentle and friendly, with many  
of them smiling and putting our handcuffs on very loose. I was able  
to slip out of mine quite easily after I was put on the bus.

There was alot of international and alternative media covering the  
action today but we saw no sign of any of the corporate network TV  
being there. No surprise really in America where information is  
tightly controlled.

The best speech of the day, at the rally that kicked off the event,  
was by award winning journalist Chris Hedges. He has often been  
criticized for his strong and direct analysis of the current  
situation in the U.S. (his book called "The Death of the Liberal  
Class" being one example) but today he challenged us using the word  
"hope" over and over again. He told us that civil resistance to the  
empire, at a time when reform is dead inside the halls of Washington  
DC, is the only way to create hope.

So essentially in answer to his critics Hedges is challenging them to  
either put up or shut up. You want hope he is saying, then get off  
your arse and go out and organize non-violent resistance to the war  
machine!

It was a special experience to be with so many veterans in this act  
of truth. Dan Ellsberg, who helped turn me into a peace activist with  
his release of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, was  
beaming like a lighthouse along the rocky Maine coastline as he hung  
onto the fence.

Our job now is to extend this energy into our local communities -  
places like Maine where the newly elected Republican controlled state  
legislature is going to cut $800 million more out of the budget -  
most of it will come from social programs.

We've got to increase our efforts to connect the dots between war  
spending and social collapse.

>>
>> Bitter Memories of War on the Way to Jail
>>
>> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/ 
>> bitter_memories_of_war_on_the_way_to_jail_20101220/
>>
>> Posted on Dec 20, 2010
>>
>> By Chris Hedges
>>
>> The speeches were over. There was a mournful harmonica rendition  
>> of taps. The 500 protesters in Lafayette Park in front of the  
>> White House fell silent. One hundred and thirty-one men and women,  
>> many of them military veterans wearing old fatigues, formed a  
>> single, silent line. Under a heavy snowfall and to the slow beat  
>> of a drum, they walked to the White House fence. They stood there  
>> until they were arrested.
>>
>> The solemnity of that funerary march, the hush, was the hardest  
>> and most moving part ofThursday’s protest against the wars in  
>> Afghanistan and Iraq. It unwound the bitter memories and images of  
>> war I keep wrapped in the thick cotton wool of forgetfulness. I  
>> was transported in that short walk to places I do not like to go.  
>> Strange and vivid flashes swept over me—the young soldier in El  
>> Salvador who had been shot through the back of the head and was,  
>> as I crouched next to him, slowly curling up in a fetal position  
>> to die; the mutilated corpses of Kosovar Albanians in the back of  
>> a flatbed truck; the screams of a woman, her entrails spilling out  
>> of her gaping wounds, on the cobblestones of a Sarajevo street. My  
>> experience was not unique. Veterans around me were back in the  
>> rice paddies and lush undergrowth of Vietnam, the dusty roads of  
>> southern Iraq or the mountain passes of Afghanistan. Their tears  
>> showed that. There was no need to talk. We spoke the same wordless  
>> language. The butchery of war defies, for those who know it,  
>> articulation.
>>
>> What can I tell you about war?
>>
>> War perverts and destroys you. It pushes you closer and closer to  
>> your own annihilation—spiritual, emotional and, finally, physical.  
>> It destroys the continuity of life, tearing apart all systems,  
>> economic, social, environmental and political, that sustain us as  
>> human beings. War is necrophilia. The essence of war is death. War  
>> is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and  
>> destruction. It is organized sadism. War fosters alienation and  
>> leads inevitably to nihilism. It is a turning away from the  
>> sanctity of life.
>>
>> And yet the mythic narratives about war perpetuate the allure of  
>> power and violence. They perpetuate the seductiveness of the  
>> godlike force that comes with the license to kill with impunity.  
>> All images and narratives about war disseminated by the state, the  
>> press, religious institutions, schools and the entertainment  
>> industry are gross and distorted lies. The clash between the  
>> fabricated myth about war and the truth about war leaves those of  
>> us who return from war alienated, angry and often unable to  
>> communicate. We can’t find the words to describe war’s reality. It  
>> is as if the wider culture sucked the words out from us and left  
>> us to sputter incoherencies. How can you speak meaningfully about  
>> organized murder? Anything you say is gibberish.
>>
>> The sophisticated forms of industrial killing, coupled with the  
>> amoral decisions of politicians and military leaders who direct  
>> and fund war, hide war’s reality from public view. But those who  
>> have been in combat see death up close. Only their story tells the  
>> moral truth about war. The power of the Washington march was that  
>> we all knew this story. We had no need to use stale and hackneyed  
>> clichés about war. We grieved together.
>>
>> War, once it begins, fuels new and bizarre perversities,  
>> innovative forms of death to ward off the boredom of routine  
>> death. This is why we would drive into towns in Bosnia and find  
>> bodies crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated, burned and  
>> mutilated. That is why those slain in combat are treated as  
>> trophies by their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of  
>> performance art. I met soldiers who carried in their wallets the  
>> identity cards of men they killed. They showed them to me with the  
>> imploring look of a lost child.
>>
>> We swiftly deform ourselves, our essence, in war. We give up  
>> individual conscience—maybe even consciousness—for the contagion  
>> of the crowd and the intoxication of violence. You survive war  
>> because you repress emotions. You do what you have to do. And this  
>> means killing. To make a moral choice, to defy war’s enticement,  
>> is often self-destructive. But once the survivors return home,  
>> once the danger, adrenaline highs and the pressure of the crowd  
>> are removed, the repressed emotions surface with a vengeance.  
>> Fear, rage, grief and guilt leap up like snake heads to consume  
>> lives and turn nights into long, sleepless bouts with terror. You  
>> drink to forget.
>>
>> We reached the fence. The real prisoners, the ones who blindly  
>> serve systems of power and force, are the mandarins inside the  
>> White House, the Congress and the Pentagon. The masters of war are  
>> slaves to the idols of empire, power and greed, to the idols of  
>> careers, to the dead language of interests, national security,  
>> politics and propaganda. They kill and do not know what killing  
>> is. In the rise to power, they became smaller. Power consumes  
>> them. Once power is obtained they become its pawn. Like  
>> Shakespeare’s Richard III, politicians such as Barack Obama fall  
>> prey to the forces they thought they had harnessed. The capacity  
>> to love, to cherish and protect life, may not always triumph, but  
>> it saves us. It keeps us human. It offers the only chance to  
>> escape from the contagion of war. Perhaps it is the only antidote.  
>> There are times when remaining human is the only victory possible.
>>
>> The necrophilia of war is hidden under platitudes about honor,  
>> duty or comradeship. It waits especially in moments when we seem  
>> to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when the  
>> intoxication of war is at its pitch to be unleashed. When we spend  
>> long enough in war, it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal  
>> and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation with  
>> our own destruction. In the Arab-Israeli 1973 war, almost a third  
>> of all Israeli casualties were due to psychiatric causes—and the  
>> war lasted only a few days. A World War II study determined that,  
>> after 60 days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving  
>> soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties. A common trait  
>> among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a  
>> predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities.” In  
>> short, if you spend enough time in combat you go insane or you  
>> were insane to begin with. War starts out as the annihilation of  
>> the other. War ends, if we do not free ourselves from its grasp,  
>> in self-annihilation.
>>
>> Those around me at the protest, at once haunted and maimed by war,  
>> had freed themselves of war’s contagion. They bore its scars. They  
>> were plagued by its demons. These crippling forces will always  
>> haunt them. But they had returned home. They had returned to life.  
>> They had asked for atonement. In Lafayette Park they found grace.  
>> They had recovered within themselves the capacity for reverence.  
>> They no longer sought to become gods, to wield the power of the  
>> divine, the power to take life. And it is out of this new  
>> acknowledgement of weakness, remorse for their complicity in evil  
>> and an acceptance of human imperfection that they had found  
>> wisdom. Listen to them, if you can hear them. They are our prophets.
>>
>> The tears and grief, the halting asides, the catch in the throat,  
>> the sudden breaking off of a sentence, is the only language that  
>> describes war. This faltering language of pain and atonement, even  
>> shame, was carried like great, heavy boulders by these veterans as  
>> they tromped slowly through the snow from Lafayette Park to the  
>> White House fence. It was carried by them as they were handcuffed,  
>> dragged through the snow, photographed for arrest, and frog- 
>> marched into police vans. It was carried into the frigid holding  
>> cells of a Washington jail. If it was understood by the masters of  
>> war who build the big guns, who build the death planes, who build  
>> all the bombs and who hide behind walls and desks, this language  
>> would expose their masks and chasten their hollow, empty souls.  
>> This language, bereft of words, places its faith in physical acts  
>> of nonviolent resistance, in powerlessness and compassion, in  
>> truth. It believes that one day it will bring down the house of war.
>>
>> As Tennyson wrote in “In Memoriam”:
>>
>> Behold, we know not anything;
>>
>> I can but trust that good shall fall
>>
>>
>> At last—far off—at last, to all,
>>
>>
>> And every winter change to spring.
>>
>>
>>
>> So runs my dream: but what am I?
>>
>> An infant crying in the night:
>>
>>
>> An infant crying for the light:
>>
>>
>> And with no language but a cry.< p>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> *  See Bruce Gagnon's account of the civil disobedience that he  
>> was also part of last Thursday in Washington DC.  Click on his  
>> blog at   http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2010/12/up-against- 
>> fence.html
>>
>>
>> Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
>> PO Box 652
>> Brunswick, ME 04011
>> (207) 443-9502
>> globalnet at mindspring.com
>> www.space4peace.org
>> http://space4peace.blogspot.com/  (blog)
>>
>>
>> Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the  
>> earth.  ~Henry David Thoreau
>

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