[HCCN] Fwd: Vigiling and Occupying

[Judy_Robbins]

> Please read. This letter appeared last week in at least one local newspaper. Thanks to Dud H. for sharing it with our lists.
> 
> Vigiling and Occupying
> 
> For over a decade several residents of our little island off the Maine coast have faithfully stood in protest of on-going U.S. wars and this country’s continuing commitment to militarism at a weekly vigil.  Though we’re in solidarity with scores of similar public testimonies across the state and thousands in the country our numbers really haven’t grown since the obscene “Shock and Awe” signaled the advent of a crime against humanity of extraordinary magnitude.  Only a distorted history could cast our misadventure in Iraq as anything less than a debacle and a colossal mistake.  The same can be said with regards to the quagmire, what else could we call it, in Afghanistan, which we know has spilled over into Pakistan.  So why?  Why aren’t more citizens saying, “NO MORE WAR?”
>  
> Week after week I revisit my reasons for committing so much time to what would seem to be an exercise in futility, a fool’s errand.
>  
> The reason that rises to primacy may vary from week to week, but my resolve is rooted in my history as a volunteer, nay, strike that, as a dupe of the Vietnam war. Revisionist history and outright denial may enable us to dismiss the 2-3 million (MILLION!!) Vietnamese casualties and the stomach-turning legacy of Agent Orange—some 3 million victims suffer today as will millions more as the toxins in the soils continue to leach into the food supply.  It’s a little more difficult for the xenophobes among us to shrug off the 58,000 American lives lost.
> 
> It may be ancient history, but, trouble is, our war-making today is no more defensible than it was half a century ago.  Just as My Lai was a war crime and irrefutable proof that in war combatants on all sides will lose their humanity, so was Fallujah, so was Haditha, so are drone attacks and other targeted assassinations.
> 
> The disclosure that reaffirmed my intent to stand in witness last week may have been a reminder that 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died since our invasion (and over a trillion dollars spent).  It may have been the more complete picture we have of the U.S. embassy, more accurately a $750 million dollar obscene monument to audacious imperialism, on a 104-acre compound in Baghdad. (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/02/07/world/middleeast/20120208-BAGHDAD-2.html)
> 
> The week before it may have been the reports of 24 Pakistan civilians killed by yet one more drone attack gone astray. 
> 
> This week it may have been the fate of eight young shepherd boys on an Afghan mountainside, killed (mistakenly and with the almost comically routine subsequent apologies) by NATO airstrikes.
> 
> Next week—it’s hard to say.  We know of the more or less clandestine warfare happening in Yemen, in Somalia, and Syria and the drumbeat quickens toward open hostilities against Iran.   It’s shear madness!  Daily we’re assaulted by ever-more-dire reports from our mainstream media of Iran ratcheting up the tension.   But, if you really pay attention you know the U.S. has virtually encircled Iran with military installations—41 at last count in nearly every neighboring country, we have imposed sanctions, we have sent the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln thru the Strait of Hormuz along with its escort of warships bristling with enough armament to set Iran back a century or two.  This is being done while insisting that Iran is intending to build nuclear weapons—to date an unproven assertion.  Small wonder if it were true, given the picture painted here and that nuclear-armed neighbors include Pakistan, India, and an increasingly belligerent Israel, which is generally known to have a nuclear arsenal yet has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  It’s discouraging and telling that relations are devolving in the absence of any diplomacy.  When Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen stepped down last September he said, “We haven’t had a connection with Iran since 1979.”
> 
> Some of this is unknown to many Americans, but the behavior has not occurred in a vacuum.  In a “plugged-in” world it’s a well-known portrait of America embellished by various equally notorious declarations of our leaders:
> 
> “There are only 90,000 people out there.  Who gives a damn?”  Henry Kissinger speaking of the casualties visited on Marshall islanders by our atomic bomb testing.
> 
> “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”  Madeleine Albright, when asked about the deaths of a half million children due to U.S. sanctions against Iraq.
> 
> “We owe Vietnam no debt because the destruction was mutual.”  Jimmy Carter while insisting in 1977 that we would not pay the $3.3 billion dollars we had agreed to pay in the Paris Peace Accords.
> 
> “I’ll never apologize for the United States of America.  Ever.  I don’t care what the facts are.”  George H.W. Bush in response to an Iranian commercial airliner mistakenly shot down by missiles launched from a U.S. warship sending 290 passengers and crew to their deaths.
> 
> “The American way of life is not negotiable.”  George H.W. Bush stated unequivocally, while dismissing the Rio Earth Summit of 1992.
> 
> The world-at-large knows this record and knows that America has lost the moral authority it once enjoyed. 
> 
> So, again, why aren’t more Americans saying, “NO MORE WAR”?  Well, in fact they are.  They are embedded in the Occupy movement.  The Occupy folks’ broad focus is bringing to our attention just how broken our country is.  It’s a country with no moral compass under the control of corporate interests invested with Supreme Court granted power, unchecked in their greed and unapologetic for hypocrisy and arrogance.  As occupiers and vigilers alike know “normalized” militarism is a part of it. The vigiling will continue and the occupying will grow, all of us demanding accountability.
> 
> Dud Hendrick
> Past President
> Maine Veterans for Peace
> Deer Isle Maine
> February 22, 2012
> 
> 
> ______________________________________________________________ 
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mainetalk.org/pipermail/hccn_mainetalk.org/attachments/20120305/cbf9985e/attachment.htm>