October--November 2004

The Storm, the Whirlwind and the Earthquake

Speak Truth to Politics

   By Sarvananda Bluestone

            It was just a heartbeat ago. She was eight years old. Her crime was that her skin was a few shades darker than that of most Russians. After all, she was from Tajikistan. She was holding her father's hand as they walked down the street in St. Petersburg. A gang of skinheads approached with knives and chains. They beat her father unconscious and then mortally stabbed her eleven times.

            I listened in horror to this broadcast on the morning news. The police of St. Petersburg dismissed this as a “random murder”. Random murder? Police political expedience. And then a Communist Party delegate spoke. The old radical in me said, “maybe there'll be some sanity here.” But the Communist deputy called for the elimination of “undesirable foreign elements”. Presumably the murdered eight year old girl was an undesirable element. Politicians!

            The news was full that morning. In England, a courageous former member of the Cabinet told the media that the Blair government had spied on United Nations officials, including the Secretary General. The good Prime Minister labeled her irresponsible and implied that criminal charges might be brought for telling the truth. And another former member of the government faced criminal charges for asserting that the Blair government had altered the facts on Iraq to justify the invasion. Politicians !

            Nowhere has truth and politics been more opposite than in the United States. George Orwell, himself would be speechless to see the utter perversion of language in the ruling politicians of our country.

            It's hard to know where to begin. Take Iraq. Two years ago the politicians in Congress voted to give the president full authority to wage war against Iraq when he felt it was necessary. It was unprecedented, as Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia pointed out. No Congress has ever given the president authority to declare war on a country at his own discretion. Reason? The White House told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The White House told us that Saddam Hussein had connections with Al Qaeda and was responsible for the September 11 tragedies.

            At the very same time, former weapons inspectors like Scott Ritter clearly stated that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. And anyone who knew anything at all about the Middle East knew that Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist comrades detested the secular regime of Saddam Hussein.

            These were no great intelligence secrets. These were no classified pieces of information available only to a select few. It was public information, available to all who looked, that showed clearly that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

            At the time, two years ago, the politicians in Congress had as much access to information as I did. At that time the politicians in Congress could have read the reports of the weapons inspectors. Instead, they chose to close their eyes and vote for war. It was bipartisan hypocrisy.

            Big liberals like Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer of New York voted this outrageous carte blanche of war. Only a handful of Congressmen, led by Senators Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota spoke their truths.

            Oh, of course, when things turned out differently, the “intelligence” community took the fall and the C.I.A. director gracefully resigned. But it is clear to anybody that wanted then or now to look that the White House put pressure on the intelligence agencies to support the myth of weapons and Al Qaeda ties even if the information didn't.

            Now, two years later, some one thousand dead American soldiers later, some untold thousands of killed Iraqi's later, the whole premise of this war has proved to be a hoax. There are no weapons of mass destruction. The bipartisan September 11 commission clearly states that there were no connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda or between Iraq and 9/11.

            It is too easy to blame George Bush for the war in Iraq. Oh, yeah, he did lie us into war. His pants were on fire. But, after all, he admits that he doesn't read newspapers or things like that. Presumably he does what he is told. This is not about individuals. It is about politics. It is about the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the political “process”.

            Again, there are not weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And there were not weapons of mass destruction when Congress voted to give the President license to wage war. Again, there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, no connection between Iraq and the Twin Towers attack.

            If we want to look for connections between 9/11 and the Middle East, we had best look to the loyal allies of the United States government, the Saudi's. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. The remaining four came from Egypt, the United Emirates and Lebanon. Nobody from Iraq.

            So what are the reasons that the United States declared war on Iraq and invaded? Oil? Well, like they said in 1991, during the First Gulf War, if the major product of Kuwait was broccoli, the Iraqi's would probably still be there. Lots and lots of money are in that war. Billions upon billions.  Halliburton still pays its former C.E.O. Dick Cheney a six figure annual stipend and it is getting all kinds of contracts without the messy process of bidding competitively with other corporations. But I wouldn't want to get conspiratorial.

            Certainly, Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. But he was, for a while, a brutal dictator that served the interests of the United States when, during the Iran-Iraq war, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney conveyed to him our blessings and support. United States foreign policy has supported brutal dictators over and over again. Take Pinochet in Chile. In 1998 the august British House of Lords catalogued the vast crimes committed by this ally of the United States. Take the Shah of Iran, put in place by the C.I.A.. His secret police created new chapters in the annals of state supported brutality. And, by the way, the government that the C.I.A. overthrew was the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh. He wanted to nationalize the oil fields of Iran so that the people of that country might enjoy some benefits from their own natural resource. Funny how the U.S. government keeps getting involved in the countries where there is oil. I wonder if it's coincidence.  The U.S. masterpiece of planning in Iran ultimately resulted in the overthrow of the Shah and the fundamentalist Islamic state that presently exists. Or take Trujillo in the Dominican Republic or “Papa Doc” Duvalier in Haiti. All were brutal dictators supported by the United States government.

            Or take the new “democratic” US.-supported leader of Iraq, Iyad Allawi.  Recent reports indicate that, more and more Iraqis view him as a tyrant. Last July several news reports indicated that he personally blew the brains out of six captured insurgents. He just lined them up against the wall, pulled out his pistol and killed them. I guess he wanted to show the Iraqi people that he was a strong man—presidential. Good PR. Maybe Karl Rove will take the cue and suggest that our president go to Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib and blow a few brains out with a good old Texas six shooter. Sounds a lot like Saddam Hussein to me.

            Despite all of the evidence—the overwhelming evidence—to the contrary a recent poll shows that forty per cent. of Americans believe that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda terrorists of 9/11. These people believe that the war against Iraq was a war against the terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers and killed three thousand people.

            It is an old political truth that if you repeat a lie again and again and again people will believe it's the truth. Hitler did not invent it. But he refined it. “Iraq-9/11, Iraq-9/11, Iraq-9/11”. There is hypnosis here.

            “Sentence first. Verdict afterwards,” shouted the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. Alice said, “nonsense”, but the politicians in our Congress authorized a war that had no basis—a sentence first. The verdict has come much too late. And it was not just Republicans. Again, it was big “liberals” like Senators Hillary Clinton, Charles Schumer, Christopher Dodd, Joseph Biden and, yes, John Kerry voted to wage war based on a pack of untruths.

            Twenty-nine Democratic Senators joined the Republicans and voted for war. What were they thinking about? Their own derrieres. Nothing more. Nothing less.

            Certainly with their legions of eager beaver researchers these politicians could have come up with the same information that I had. I'm not an expert. I'm not privy to classified information. The information was out there. It was not concealed. It was not classified. It was readily available.

            The politicians on both sides of the aisle leaped onto the bandwagon. There was no concern for truth. There was just an obscene concern with image. Only twenty-three out of one hundred senators had the guts to vote on the basis of veracity amid a tidal wave of polls, “patriotism” and pig manure let loose by the spinmasters of the White House.

            Politics has nothing to do with the truth. And, if I didn't personally know two notable exceptions, I would say that a politician with integrity is an oxymoron.

            It is hard not to feel despair. But despair is not my thing. Even in the 1950's in the midst of the McCarthy period, I had hope. For me this was not the juiced up time of “Happy Days” or “Grease”. No, this was a time where people ratted on their left wing friends to save their own skins. A congressional House Committee on Un-American Activities forced people to give up names of people whose “crime” it had been to exercise their constitutional rights of free speech and assembly. It was a time of mass paranoia. It was the reds. The reds! They were under every bed. Your best friend could be one.

            The thing about the McCarthy witch hunts was that McCarthy didn't do it by himself. He had able bodied politicians in both parties who wanted to show just how patriotic they were. Big liberals like Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Rep. Emanuel Celler of New York jumped on the witch hunt bandwagon even as McCarthy himself was losing influence.

            Libraries burned books. Why, a member of the Illinois State Board of Education proposed that the story of Robin Hood be removed from all libraries since stealing from the rich and giving to the poor was a Communist idea.

            The McCarthy period taught me several things. First, it showed me, the adolescent son of radical parents, that politicians were, as a genre, despicable. They were generally spineless. Above all they were followers, not leaders. Democrats, Republicans, liberals or right wingers—they sailed with the prevailing winds.

            The second thing that this period of temporary madness showed me was that the American people can reclaim their sanity. Within five years of the death of McCarthy, the whole society seemed to breathe more freely. The 1960's were underway.

            Let's not romanticize the 1960's. It was a time of conflict. It was a time of celebration. It was a time of lies and deceit. It was a time of hope. It was a time when the police chief of Birmingham, Alabama let loose attack dogs on black school children. It was a time when politicians on both sides of the aisle supported a full scale war against a people over eight thousand miles away. And Curtis Le May, General of the United States Air Force, urged his pilots to “bomb them back into the stone age”. And let's not forget that it was the Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson that conducted this war.

            Today, there are few Americans in their right minds who will justify the war in Vietnam. In fact there is something almost surrealistic about the Vietnam discussion going on today. KarlRove/GeorgeBush/SwiftBoatVeteransforTruth are bent on discrediting John Kerry's valor in Vietnam. He is bent on defending it. His real valour, for which he received no medals at all, was when he returned from the war and openly opposed it. That was courageous.

Even Robert McNamara, architect of the war against the Vietnamese, has recently acknowledged that it was a “mistake”. Forty years late on that one, Bob. And to think that they used to call him a “Whiz Kid”. Today, there are few people who would support using dogs to attack black school children for simply going to a predominantly white school.

            Things do change. On August 7, 1964, the congress of the United States passed the “Gulf of Tonkin” resolution allowing the President to escalate U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. And the Congress, made up, of course, of followers, voted 416 to 0 in the House and 88 to 2 in the Senate to support the President. Only Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska voted against it. Today it is clear that the justification for this measure was a unwholesome mixtures of lies and deceit. The President of the United States lied us into war. And Congress followed. Sound familiar?

            None of this was about lack of intelligence. It was about lack of integrity. It was about the fact, once again, that politicians follow. They do not lead. During this time, there were small groups of people who saw the lies and deceit and spoke the truth. There were people who researched and tried to find out what was going on and to think for themselves.  There were small groups of people who knew that the justification for war in Vietnam was a hollow lie—a lie that ended up costing over forty thousand American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives.

            Then, as now, the  media and the government seemed to be one. It seemed like an impregnable wall consisting of the politicians and the press. Against these, small groups of Americans formed their own truth teams when the Pentagon/State Department propaganda machine descended upon communities and college campuses with their “truth teams”.

            Those of us who spoke our truth against the war were a very tiny minority in 1964. In 1964 people accused the small group of people against the war in Vietnam of being unpatriotic and unsupportive of American troops. (They often overlooked the fact that a large part of the antiwar movement existed among those very troops.) In less than a decade the country and, following, the politicians, had come full circle.

            This is a country that I love so dearly that I devoted my academic life to its history. In its darkest hours the spark of its people has borne light. In the midst of colonial domination by the greatest power in the world there were the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In the midst of slavery there were the abolitionists. In the midst of the Depression there were the union organizers.

            This country has been shaped by those who spoke outside of the “mainstream”. It has been formed by those who spoke their truths to the power of the state and its media pets. It has not, nor will ever be, shaped by politicians. They follow. They follow. They follow. They do not lead.

            Today there is a queasy sense of déja vu. We have a president who lies about, well, just about everything. He lies about Iraq. He lies about the economy. He lies about the environment. He even lies about his lies. It's easy to hate George Bush. It's too easy.

            It's the sheer hypocrisy of it all. It's the Emperor's new clothes all over. And who is this emperor? Doesn't everybody know that there is very little that this person did without the assistance of his daddy or his daddy's rich friends? And Karl Rove has him say that he is “just folks” against his upper class opponent. Doesn't everybody know that, from his acceptance into Yale to his various business ventures—everything—he was just another privileged little rich kid who boasted about his privileges? Doesn't everybody know that his acceptance into the Texas National Guard really was just a way to avoid serving in a war that he ardently supported? The real George Bush is not what we see. What we see is a creation of the spinmasters.  He may be our first entirely plastic president. And he is the ultimate follower. Everything he does is the creation of his handlers and is dedicated to the support and good will of his corporate allies and his fanatical religious constituents. Everything he says is placed in his mouth via teleprompter by his spinmasters. These are the alchemists who can turn shit into gold, disease into health, war into peace, toxic emission into clean air and on and on.

            There is no question that this administration has takent deceit and falsehood to new depths. Just when you think that things can't get any more hypocritical, they do. And the media? If the media were one half as vigilant in pursuing this president for lying  us into war as they were in pursuing the last president for lying about having oral sex with an intern we would be in quite a different place. Is this Alice in Nightmare Land or what?

            There are certainly many differences between 1950, 1960 and 2004. One constant for me has been the knowledge that the people of this country are intelligent and respond to truth. This is true despite the various manipulations by politicians and media in all three periods.

            Now the election is around the corner. Many of the folks that I speak with do not speak for themselves. This was brought out most clearly, a few months back,  in a conversation that I had with a very dear friend. This person is brilliant and savvy. She had organized a local Dean for President committee where she worked. She had changed and was supporting Kerry because she had heard the master Republican spinmaster, Karl Rove,  say that the Republicans would like nothing better than to see Howard Dean to run for president.

            Something bothered me about this conversation, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Later I realized that my friend had unwittingly changed her position at the behest of Karl Rove. For the question is not what the Republicans want or don't want or what the Democrats want or don't want. The question is what we—“we the people”—each of us wants.

            If it is not we, the people of this country, who elect this government, who is it? But people seem to be talking about “they” the people. Who will “they” elect? The discussion shifted from issues to “who can beat Bush?” All of a sudden everybody became a political scientist (one of the all time great oxymorons, that). This rash of media sponsored political game playing is a distraction. It is disturbing to see so many people forgetting their own truths.

            It is a “we” not a “they” that constitute this country. At the risk of being repetitive, there are no leaders. Reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw recently on a beat up old pickup truck. The driver could have been a construction worker. There was a hard hat in the back ledge.  In big letters, the bumper sticker proclaimed “Vote Republican”. All of my prejudices popped up. I was certain this was just another redneck. One of “them” until I got closer to read the smaller print at the bottom which said, “It's easier than thinking”.

            Playing the game of political guessmanship is easier than thinking. It takes us outside of ourselves. No more are we supporting what we think is right. We are supporting what we think will win. And that is a sure recipe for losing.

            There are no leaders. Or, to put it differently, we must lead ourselves. It falls upon each and every one of us to lead ourselves—to remain true to ourselves—to speak our truths. We need to speak these truths without the calculation and deceit that constitute the very things we oppose.

            Oh certainly we must vote. And, yes, it is clear that John Kerry stands a greater chance of getting elected than Ralph Nader. However, we can certainly expect some big time pandering to corporate interests by Senator Kerry as the election approaches. He is, after all, one of the “insiders”. We must vote, but is that the full measure of our social power? I think not. Without pressure, politicians shilly and shally until they find out who to follow.  Lincoln in the White House would not have existed without John Brown at Harper's Ferry. George McGovern would not have had a voice without the small groups who grew and grew until they became an irresistible force.

            Let us leave the political games to the politicians. They play it very well--without integrity. And the exceptions like Paul Wellstone and Dennis Kucinich simply prove the rule.

            These are critical times. One of the easiest things about this time is that, no matter where one turns, the lines are drawn. Take your choice: environment; health; civil liberties; the economy; energy; war; social priorities. These are times for people to be speaking truth from their heart. It is time to speak clearly and loudly and not to compromise in the name of some fictional political “reality”.

            There are real issues that face Americans. Jobs are disappearing. Medical costs are soaring as the pharmaceutical and hospital corporations feed at the trough. The number of children without health care is growing. The economic life blood of the nation is draining into the war in Iraq as much as the blood of American soldiers and Iraqi's are soaking the ground of that country. The wealthiest one per cent of the people in this country are getting economic relief. The government is dismantling environmental laws that protect our land and our health. If everybody voted their own self interest we would see a landslide defeat of the present occupant of the White House and his Congressional allies.

            And “We the People,” as the maverick Texan Jim Hightower calls us, are a multitude that cross party boundaries and labels. We are a decent people. And people of good heart can begin talking to each other without enmity. For we have not created the party lines.

            History is made up of cycles. A century and a half ago almost four million Americans lived in slavery. The government—Congress, the President, the Supreme Court—all supported this institution. In 1852, Frederick Douglass, a former slave and antislavery orator, spoke his truth on the Fourth of July. His words are alive today.

            “At a time like this,” Douglass said, “scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed…”