[mobglob-discuss] Happy birthday, Prince of Peace (fwd)

[Tom_Childs at Douglas.BC.CA]

Geov Parrish does a fine job here in compilation of the evil that exudes
from Washington, D.C. and the phenomenal global resistance opposed...
...May all your days of resistance be merry and bright.    Saludos, Tom
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  ---- Forwarded message: ----From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner at interpac.net>
Subject: Happy birthday, Prince of Peace 
Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2002 11:39:12 -0800


http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=14283&CFID=4268505&CFTOKE
N=91255282
Happy birthday, Prince of Peace
Geov Parrish - workingforchange.com

12.24.02 - For the prospects of peace -- and particularly for Americans who
dream of Peace on Earth -- these are the worst, and best, of times.

Peace on Earth, you'll recall, was once a common sentiment in America during
the Christmas season, before it was supplanted by headlines about leaders'
desperate search for a pretext for war, followed by 47 pages of Bold New
Gift Ideas!. Over two billion people worldwide celebrate the birth of the
Prince of Peace this week, but peace itself remains a distant dream in many
of those lands, and in many of them, America is directly involved. A brief
and incomplete list includes:

Afghanistan, where U.S. troops present themselves as daily targets in their
newly established bases across the country, bases ostensibly devoted to
hunting Al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants, but instead mostly focused on
protecting themselves from rival warlord armies and gangs who resent their
presence and who completely control the entire country save the immediate
area around the capital city, Kabul. Meanwhile, the daily lives of women --
whose fate became the propaganda focus of pro-war cheerleading in the U.S.
once leaders realized producing bin-Laden's head on a stick was neither
likely nor desirable -- have been no better in the last year, and remain no
better today, than how Afghan women fared under the Taliban. That was the
conclusion of an exhaustively and sickeningly detailed new report by Human
Rights Watch, released last week and ignored in the U.S.

While the usual headline fare is how Iraq may or may not be attacked soon,
U.S. and British warplanes have been routinely bombing Iraq since 1998 on a
weekly, and more recently near daily, basis. Every time Iraqi radar either
locks on or fires at such planes, flying to enforce the unilaterally
declared "no-fly zones," the U.S. has been not only declaring a material
breach of last month's U.N. resolution (an interpretation disputed by the
rest of the Security Council) but bombing whatever's below. These bombings
raise an obvious question: If the Bush Administration knows that Iraq has
facilities producing and/or storing Weapons of Mass Destruction, why haven't
we bombed them, and announced it to the world? Meanwhile, of course, the
death-dealing economic sanctions also continue.

While it isn't a direct action of U.S. armed forces, most of the Islamic
world, and a lot of the rest of it, consider the United States to be the
force that makes the ongoing brutalization of Palestine possible. Israel is
the largest recipient of U.S. aid, most of it military, even though Israel,
with the world's fourth-largest military, hardly needs it. Much of the
year's military action by Israel has focused on the civilian population of
Palestine, -- with attacks on every major West Bank city, town, and refugee
camp -- and the systematic dismantling of its elected government, the
Palestinian Authority. Israel continues, with solitary but unquestioning
diplomatic backing from the U.S., its willful disregard of U.N. resolutions,
of demands for inspection of its (covert and illegal) nuclear arms program,
and of the American-brokered Oslo accords. Oslo in particular demanded a
moratorium on further expropriation of Palestinian land for the grotesquely
misnamed "settler" neighborhoods. (Hey, mind if I tear down your house and
"settle" there?) Israel instead continues to expand them. Virtually every
piece of shrapnel in every West Bank refugee camp has "Made in USA" on it.
Literally.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military continues to quietly expand its support of and
direct work with the military (and paramilitaries) responsible for the worst
human rights record in the Western Hemisphere: Colombia. While support was
until this year generally under the cover of War On Drugs defoliation
campaigns, U.S. advisors, weaponry, and private (and CIA) companies and
mercenaries are all lending support to the new far-right government there.
And in neighboring Venezuela, where the U.S. was by most accounts the force
behind the barely unsuccessful military coup attempt against the
democratically elected government of Hugo Chavez, another attempt to unseat
him is underway through a weeks-long strike led by business leaders,
especially in the oil sector. Not that the Bush Administration cares about
oil.

This year, the U.S. has also quietly expanded its military presence in a
number of other countries, such as: the Philippines, where Washington wants
to link a homegrown secessionist movement to Al-Qaeda because it is Islamic;
ditto in Indonesia, a country whose military is still run by the same
unpunished folks responsible for genocides in Timor (West and especially
East), Aceh, and other independence-minded parts of the archipelago;
Uzbekistan, a central Asian dictatorship (also with an Islamic opposition
movement) that the U.S. hopes will be a lynchpin against not just Central
Asian terror groups, but bordering China; Georgia, another ex-Soviet
republic, now with a dubious human rights record, that the U.S. announced a
military partnership with this year -- just as Georgia also announced
cooperation with Russia in Moscow's genocidal campaigns against civilians in
nearby Chechnya; Pakistan, the military dictatorship, supporter of terror
groups, and cozy new ally that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war
in its confrontation with India this summer; and Yemen, where U.S.
anti-terror cooperation with Yemeni authorities included the recent,
little-noticed Israeli-style assassination of a suspected Al-Qaeda aide,
convicted of no crime -- and the killings also of the four other low-level
opposition activists that happened to be in the car. All died when the U.S.
fired a Predator missile at the car as it sped along a desert highway.
Earlier, the U.S. had almost fired on another car before Yemeni authorities
convinced the Americans, correctly, that the U.S. had misidentified the
car's occupants.

All told, the U.S. military is now active in some 60 countries around the
world. These dozen examples are among the most egregious -- and what are we
doing fighting people in even a dozen countries? -- but they have several
factors in common: 1) No war has been declared against any government in any
of them; 2) none are on the same continent as the United States, and 10 are
not in the same hemisphere; 3) Ten (the exceptions being Iraq and Palestine)
represent either new conflicts or new or significantly expanded U.S.
involvement in the last two years; 4) All target Third World, civilian
populations; 5) In few of these cases have serious attempts been undertaken,
especially by the U.S. government, to find a just and peaceful resolution to
the situation; and 6) Most Americans know very little about any of them, and
national corporate reporting is generally either uncritical or, more
commonly, nonexistent.

With such an imposing and grim recitation, these can seem like dark times
indeed. However, the solstice has just passed; days are getting longer and
brighter. And so it is for prospects for challenging, and eventually
changing, the government and corporate priorities which make such reflexive
American warmaking possible.

The most obvious of these is the enormous movement, opposing a preemptive
invasion of Iraq, which has materialized seemingly from nowhere in the last
three months. Its coming-out party was the Congressional vote authorizing
force against Iraq, which looked like a unanimous kiss-kiss session until
the cards, letters, phone calls, faxes, visits, and e-mails started pouring
in -- millions of them, running in congressional offices anywhere from 80 to
99+ percent against the war. Most remarkably, no single organization, ala
the NRA, was orchestrating this flood; it was unprecedented and truly grass
roots.

Then there were the demonstrations: tens and hundreds of thousands of people
in major cities in Europe, Asia, and around the world; tens of thousands,
repeatedly, in major U.S. cities, thousands in smaller ones, hundreds in the
most improbable of small towns. In Sandpoint, Idaho -- a part of the country
most known for the Aryan Nations -- about a hundred marched; in Port
Townsend, Wash. (pop. 8,000) 800, fully 10 percent of the town, posed in one
anti-war photograph. In Iowa, Texas, Georgia, every large and small and
liberal and conservative part of the country, among young and old and
counterculture and buttoned-down alike, opposition has been substantial, and
when you add the numbers that support invasion only with international
support or few casualties -- both highly unlikely conditions -- it becomes
what in any national election would be called a landslide majority.

Most of these opponents are neither reflexively anti-military nor anti-Bush;
they don't want this country to become a permanent enemy of peace, freedom,
or common sense. And this is tremendously encouraging -- because it is
happening while we are all under an enormous and highly effective propaganda
barrage and an almost complete absence of contextual information from our
national media, and because it suggests that when basic, fundamental
questions are raised, our purportedly apathetic society does, in fact, care.

The Internet has made much of this possible. While the networks serve up
shallow soundbites, disinformation, and trivia, the gaps are filled by
alternative sites like workingforchange.com, alternet.org, zmag.org,
anti-war.com, commondreams.org; more mainstream sites like salon.com and
yahoo.com; Internet versions of major newspapers across the country; and the
Internet availability of foreign media outlets like the BBC, British
newspapers like the Daily Telegraph; guardian.co.uk (has been consistently
excellent); independent.co.uk (home of Robert Fisk, the single best
English-language Middle East reporter in the world); The Irish Times; and
The London Times. In every region of the world, national newspapers
generally have English-language daily or weekly editions on the Web. All of
this makes available a bonanza of information and perspectives for those
seeking it, and in no previous era or conflict has this been true. And it
was also the Internet that helped make the sudden Congressional lobbying
blitz and other high-speed organizing possible.

Where to go from here? There are, to be sure, more mass street protests in
the works -- major national ones are now slated for Jan. 18 in Washington,
San Francisco, and other cities -- but an encouraging number of other
examples are being generated by a generation almost entirely unaware of and
uninterested in "What They Did In The '60s." For numerous conflicts, citizen
peacemakers are offering nonviolent presence and accompaniment in the actual
countries where conflicts rage, particularly to great effect in Palestine.
New groups like the Nonviolent Peaceforce are organizing on the principle
that committed peacemakers should and can have the same self-discipline and
take the same personal risks in the name of peace that soldiers do for war.
Sister-city groups (now staples of local governments) and other church and
community initiatives help people travel to other countries -- both from
here to there and from there to here -- to describe and put a human face on
the terrible effects to real people that euphemisms like "collateral damage"
obscure.

Here at home, alternative media -- not just the Internet, but video and
community access TV; community, low power, and pirate radio; zines and
community newspapers; and political music, dance, and art -- are flourishing
under the radar. Humor is frequently a mainstay. New and revived forms of
organizing are energizing people not interested in traditional petitions,
lobbying of Congress or the White House, marches, meetings, and the Same Old
Chants. Here in Seattle -- to take only one example -- one of the two major
local anti-war coalitions, Sound Nonviolent Opposition to War (SNOW --
"We're Soft, Fluffy, and Shut Down the City!") -- drew 2,000 people to a
local high school gym two Sundays ago for the publicized purpose of signing
each attendee up for volunteer work, mostly organized by neighborhood --
with individual neighborhood groups then taking up whatever projects
(door-to-door outreach, regular vigils or banners, art, lobbying, media,
whatever) they chose. At least 12 such groups, in city and suburbs alike,
are already holding visible events; there seems to be at least a vigil a day
somewhere in King County. And in the same week as the high school gym
rally/sign-up, city high school students held teach-ins followed by a
one-day walkout in which over 500 marched downtown, provoking the sort of
welcoming and enthusiastic public response rarely generated by adult
protesters. The students' joyous enthusiasm and refusal to be cynical was
infectious.

That's one week in one city; there are hundreds more places and thousands
more groups and ideas. Listing organizations and resources for a better and
more peaceable world is fodder for another whole column (probably just after
the new year -- send in your suggestions!). Meanwhile, it's a season for
peace, and a season for hope -- not despair. Getting involved is the best
gift you can give.

===

Reclaim History!

Things that happened on Dec. 23 that you never had to memorize in school:

1617: First penal colony in North America established in Virginia.

1877: Birth of Luigi Fabbri, Fabriano, Italy. Professor, Italian anarchist,
theorist, writer. Escaped the fascist regime in 1926, seeking refuge in
France, Belgium, and, finally, after being expelled several times, in
Uruguay.

1946: University of Tennessee refuses to play Duquesne University, because
they may use a black player in the basketball game.

1947: Truman pardons 1,523 of 15,805 World War II draft resisters.

1950: U.S. signs an agreement with France, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to
provide military assistance in Indochina.

1975: The Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes of Maine win a court decision
upholding principle that the U.S. has an obligation to protect the land
rights of all tribes, whether recognized by the federal government or not.

1991: Prayers for peace in all churches, but a planned interfaith peace
rally is banned by Yugoslavian authorities.

2012: Great benchmark in Mayan calendar: "The Long Count cycle will return
to the symmetry of the beginning."

*** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes.***



-- 
Tom Childs - Audio/Visual Resources
Douglas College Library
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     "There's no way to delay, that trouble comin' everyday."
			--Frank Zappa