Ms. Flanders also references the words of Ralph Nader about the President’s speech on Democracy Now – well worth hearing/reading as well.

Published on Thursday, January 26, 2012 by The Nation

© 2012 The Nation

Laura Flanders was the founder and host of GRITtv and is the author of the books BUSHWOMEN and Blue Grit. She’s the editor of At the Tea Party

The video of US marines urinating on Afghan corpses does not shock me. Though their behavior is disgusting and unacceptable, I find the public’s reaction to this video far more troubling. People are not outraged that there are dead Afghans; they are outraged at the manner in which the dead are treated. This is indicative of our culture’s tolerance for war and war crimes – as long as they are done in a gentlemanly fashion.

As it appeared on this website:

http://carolynbaker.net/2011/11/23/the-spiritual-backfire-of-war-by-michael-meade/

on November 23rd, 2011

  Having just seen a one-man show of O’Brien’s THE THINGS THEY CARRIED a week ago, which followed by a couple of weeks an event I participated in because Northampton is currently reading his outstanding book, it seemed altogether fitting that he would be the one she references to give the last word about how we can best serve our veterans as well as all those men and women who won’t have to be veterans if we can end war…

Published on Friday, November 11, 2011 by the Baltimore Sun

What veterans need most from us is a commitment to keep them from going to war in the first place

By Richard Eskow

Created 11/01/2011 – 12:09am

Make no mistake about it: The struggle between Wall Street and “the 99 percent” is a culture war. It’s a war over our values, our beliefs, and rights. That’s why Occupy Wall Street has been so wise not to proclaim specific policy demands.

The movement is trying to change the way we view ourselves and our society. That has started a war: a war of communication, a war of education, a war of perception. It’s a war to remind us who we are as a people – or better yet, who we would wish to be.

Here are six pictures from that culture war:

#1: Warriors

After Marine and Iraq War vet Scott Olsen was wounded by police at #Occupy Oakland, a page sprang up called “How I feel, as a United States Marine, about what occurred in Oakland. [1]” Here are some of the comments to be found there 24 hours later, along with the picture above:

Red Leader; Semper Fi.

I am ashamed of my country. I softly weep for the pain that awaits us all.

I’m a former Marine: 1963 – 1967; Chu Lai, Vietnam: 1965 – 1966. I wholeheartedly agree: YOU DID THIS TO MY BROTHER. And you will find out just how many brothers Scott Olsen has.

Semper Fi brothers, and remember who you are. Protectors of a great nation, not politicians or wealthy money grubbing bankers and the like. When it comes time, I know we’ll stand strong.

“I “Name” do solemnly swear to protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and DOMESTIC”. I remember that oath. Former Active Duty Marine, 0311 3rd Bat 6th Marines, Afghan/Iraq Vet … I’m not sure if law enforcement has to do the same oath, but I was an active member of my local sheriff’s department search and rescue team and I had to swear in with that same oath.

RED LEADER, STANDING BY.

Big red, standing by

Red Sangria, standing by.

Red October, shtanding by

Red Fox, standin’ by.

Red Dawn, standing by…

The messages keep coming, even now, one after the other.

#2: Monster Mash

One of the “foreclosure mill” law firms that made millions evicting people from their homes had a Halloween Party, and a lot of the partiers dressed up as homeless people. From the New York Times website [2]:

On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party … it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

… A former employee (said) that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set. “There is this really cavalier attitude,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their homes.” Nor does the firm try to help people get mortgage modifications; the pressure, always, is to foreclose … In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

… A third photograph shows a corner of Baum’s office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Another shows a sign that reads, “Baum Estates” — needless to say, it’s also full of foreclosed houses. Most of the other pictures show either mock homeless camps or mock foreclosure signs — or both.

Theirs is the largest law firm of its kind in New York.

#3: In your face, Chile!

There’s a new report called “Social Justice in the OECD: How Do the Member States Compare? [3]” The report outlined ” A cross-national comparison of social justice in the OECD,” based on a series of factors the authors describe as “the six dimensions of social justice”: Poverty prevention , Access to education, Labor market inclusion, Social cohesion and non-discrimination, Health, and Intergenerational justice.

The report found that “The United States, with its alarming poverty levels, lands near the bottom of the weighted index, ranking only slightly better than its neighbor Mexico and new OECD member Chile.”

#4: The Condition of Everything

Front doors were being locked up and down K Street, where many of the lobbying groups and political organizations are based, when the Occupy DC’ers came marching through. One security guard turned to his colleague, who was old enough to have remember the District of Columbia during its most segregated era, and asked what the marchers were protesting.

“I’m not sure,” he older man said. “But I think they’re objecting to …” – he made a broad circle above the air with his hand – “… the condition of everything.”

That’s pretty close to the sentiment expressed in the now-famous words of one Wall Street protester’s sign: “Sh*t is all f**ked up.”

Every successful social movement has been exactly that – social, not political. India won its independence because the movement illustrated the fact that the British presence there violated a basic, very human sense of justice and fair play. The civil rights movement accomplished so much because spotlighted injustice, bigotry, and violence in a thousand ways, large and small.

At the height of the British Raj, 6,000 British residents exerted absolute political control over 100 million Indians.Eventually the Indians came to realize that they were unable to guide their own destinies as human beings should, so long as they were ruled by others. They made the world see it, too.

And the impossible happened.

The civil rights movement transformed this nation the same way: nonviolently and peacefully, but within the clear glow of the moral force behind their cause. Once that moral force (Gandhi called it “satyagraha,” “truth/soul/force,” which some translate as “soul force” or “the power of truth”) is channeled, it can stir the hearts of millions.

That moral force isn’t found by demanding better regulations or new taxation policies. Those important changes come afterwards, after a society has reaffirmed it’s underlying sense of its own values and ethics, of its beliefs about right and wrong – and about itself.

That requires the ability to understand what’s wrong with the social and moral condition … of everything.

#5: We Are the 0.99%

Last week the CBO report on wealth inequality drew a lot of media attention. As the New York Times [4] put it, that report showed that since the 1970′s “the top one percent of earners doubled their share of the nation’s income.” The Times also noted that “government policy has become less redistributive since the late 1970s, doing less to reduce the concentration of income.”

The CBO report echoed findings that were developed using data from the Social Security Administration’s payroll and tax records. As Daniel Pereira [5] explained, “The median wage for the 150 million workers surveyed in 2010 was just $26,363.55 per person. For comparison, the poverty line for an average 4-person household is set at $22,350, while the line for a single person living alone comes in at $10,890. ”

That means that half the working people in the United States earned less than that amount. The blue line is lifting away from the red line in the chart because the rich are getting richer while everyone else is struggling. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that average hourly wages haven’t increased in fifty years.

The Economic Policy Institute [6] found that “The top 1 percent of households have secured a very large share of all of the gains in income–59.9 percent of the gains from 1979-2007, while the top 0.1 percent seized an even more disproportionate share–36 percent. ”

The highest one percent saw their income go up 224% percent during this period, which is consistent with the CBO’s finding for the same years. But the top 0.1% saw their income rise by nearly 400%! Can we expect a new “Occupy” movement led by millionaires who aren’t skimming as much cream as their uber-rich compatriots? They could call it “We are the 0.99%.”

Both the EPI’s figures and the CBO’s cover the period ending in 2007. That was before the crash – and the bailout.

#6. Frightened Failures

Bankers taunted Occupy Chicago demonstrators [7] by distributing a sheet of paper that included the words of an email that circulated around Wall Street a while back. The email/leaflet said things like this:

We are Wall Street. It is our job to make money.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. . What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5 am and work til 10pm or later … We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. we don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plate, we’ll eat that.

Do you really think we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive.”

I responded to this email [8]when it came out so I won’t repeat myself. But yes: We think, in fact we know, that you’re incapable of teaching third graders or doing landscaping. Or of patrolling a dangerous neighborhood, or caring for a sick patient, or any of the useful jobs other people do.

Why? Because it’s real work.

In fact, without the indulgence, generosity, and charity of people who do work, along with that of the unemployed millions who are willing to work, you’d be out of a job altogether.

The utter cluelessness of this email is striking. Who retires at fifty with a pension these days? And these parasites don’t put in long hours because they’re hard workers. They put in long hours because it ain’t real work! And they put in long hours because they’re addicted to the buzz that sociopaths get when they rip off a client (yes, I said a client) and subtract a tiny bit more from the sum total of human happiness.

I offered to debate the author of that email back when it came out – or to suggest one of the many other people who could probably do it better. But they won’t confront any of us. They won’t even come out in the open where they can be seen, because they’re frightened. And they’re right to be frightened. Put them up against those Marines, or against a group of schoolteachers or firefighters or nurses, and it’s not easy to guess who would be “lunch.”
___________________________

The Marines – and all of the demonstrators, and most of the people in this country – have the power of solidarity, of brotherhood and sisterhood, of community. People like the bankers who wrote that leaflet have only their own inexpressible craving and endless, restless, roaming hunger. They’re like a pack of wild hyenas, raiding society’s trash cans and begging for a handout when even that fails.

Want to know why they’re so worried right now? Because somewhere, deep in their hearts, they know what they’re up against. They’re up against something more powerful than wealth or technology or even numbers. They’re up against morality. They’re up against the power of the truth. They’re up against “soul force.”

Those are forces that nobody can resist forever. Not even them, the wealthiest and most privileged human beings in history. Not even them, with all the resources at their command.

Published on Saturday, September 10, 2011 by The Ottowa Citizen (Canada)

Americans were failed by their leaders before Sept. 11, and in the 10 years since

So when I saw the article in www.commondreams.org that I have included second in this post, “Lemmingly, We Roll Along,” by Ray McGovern, I was immediately struck by the stance he took, which took me to the article that preceded the one I first found.  This one, “They Died in Vain; Deal With It,” touched on so many of the themes I had developed in CALLED TO SERVE, themes that Mr. McGovern also saw paralleled in the War in Vietnam.  These themes, involving our fighting wars that are both unnecessary and unwinnable, keep recurring, because our leaders, the ones who send our young men and women into these preemptive wars that only serve to polarize our people and wreak havoc abroad, refuse to learn from history and continue to succeed in persuading so many of the rest of us, with the assistance of clergy, the media (he calls them the FCM – the Fawning Corporate Media), etc… that these deaths are the payment for some greater cause, some greater good.  McGovern and many others refuse to accept this basic lie as well as the fear that underpins it.  I feel strongly that his views deserve our attention.  See what you think…

Published on Monday, August 8, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

They Died in Vain; Deal With It
by Ray McGovern

Many of those preaching at American church services Sunday extolled as “heroes” the 30 American and 8 Afghan troops killed Saturday west of Kabul, when a helicopter on a night mission crashed, apparently after taking fire from Taliban forces.  This week, the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) can be expected to beat a steady drumbeat of “they shall not have died in vain.”

But they did.  I know it is a hard truth, but they did die in vain.

As in the past, churches across the country will keep praising the fallen troops for protecting “our way of life,” and few can demur, given the tragic circumstances.

But, sadly, such accolades are, at best, misguided — at worst, dishonest.  Most preachers do not have a clue as to what U.S. forces are doing in Afghanistan and why.  Many prefer not to think about it.  There are some who do know better, but virtually all in that category eventually opt to punt.

Should we fault the preachers as they reach for words designed to give comfort to those in their congregations mourning the deaths of so many young troops?  As hard as it might seem, I believe we can do no other than fault — and confront — them.  However well meaning their intentions, their negligence and timidity in confronting basic war issues merely help to perpetuate unnecessary killing.  It is high time to hold preachers accountable.

Many preachers are alert and open enough to see through the propaganda for perpetual war.  But most will not take the risk of offending their flock with unpalatable truth.  Better not to risk protests from the super-patriots — many of them with deep pockets — in the pews.  And better to avoid, at all costs, offending the loved ones of those who have been killed — loved ones who can hardly be faulted for trying desperately to find some meaning in the snuffing out of young lives.

Best to Just Praise and Pray

Far better to pray for those already killed and those who in the future will “give the last full measure of devotion to our country.”  In sum, by and large, American preachers are afraid to tell the truth.  They lack the virtue that Thomas Aquinas taught is the foundation of all virtue — courage.  Aquinas wrote (to translate into the vernacular) that all other virtue is specious if you have no guts.

Writer James Hollingsworth hit the nail on the head:  “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”  Like the truth.

Those who often seem to ache the most in the face of unnecessary death are mothers.  Many mothers do summon the courage to say — and say loudly — ENOUGH. Yes, my son (or daughter) died for no good purpose, they are strong enough to acknowledge, painfully but honestly.  He (she) did die in vain.  Now we must all deal with it.  Stop the false patriotism.  And, most important, stop the killing.

Cindy Sheehan, whose 25 year-old son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, is one such mother.  She and others have tried to put a dent into the strange logic that attempts to translate unnecessary death into justification for still more unnecessary death.  But they get little air or ink in the Fawning Corporate Media.  Rather, what you will hear in the days ahead from the FCM is well honed rhetoric not only about how our troops “cannot have died in vain,” but also that Americans must now redouble our resolve to “honor their sacrifice.”

President Barack Obama set the tone on Saturday:

“We will draw inspiration from their lives, and continue the work of securing our country and standing up for the values they embodied.”

Gen. John R. Allen, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, also primed the pump for the FCM, saying Saturday, “All of those killed in this operation were true heroes who had already given so much in the defense of freedom.”

And Joint Chiefs Chairman went even further in professing to know “what our fallen would have wanted” us to do — namely, “keep fighting.”  Mullen added that, “it is certainly what we are going to do.”  All this was duly reported in Sunday’s Washington Post and other leading U.S. newspapers —without much comment.

Over the next several days, TV viewers will get a steady diet of this kind of disingenuous logic from talk show hosts feeding on the grist from Obama, Mullen, Allen, and others.  After all, many pundits work for news organizations owned or allied with some of the same corporations profiteering from war.

Too bad CBS’s legendary Edward R. Murrow is long since dead; and the widely respected Walter Cronkite, as well.  Taking the CBS baton from Murrow, who had challenged the “red scare” witch hunt of Sen. Joe McCarthy, Cronkite gradually saw through the dishonesty responsible for the killing of so many in Vietnam.  He finally spoke up, and said, in effect, any more who die will have died in vain.

(The very long hiatus between Cronkite and Scott Pelley, newly appointed “CBS Evening News” anchor, has been particularly painful.  The jury is still out, but I harbor some hope that Pelley may try to follow CBS’s earlier, prouder tradition, if by some miracle his corporate bosses allow him to.  Given today’s prevailing atmosphere of obeisance to Establishment Washington, Pelley certainly has his work cut out for him.  We shall have to wait and see if he has it in him to take the risk of rising to the occasion.)

Corporal Shank & Specialist Kirkland

Five years ago I was giving talks in Missouri, when the body of 18 year-old Cpl. Jeremy Shank of Jackson, Missouri (population 12,000) came home for burial.  He was killed in Hawijah, Iraq on September 6, 2006 while on a “dismounted security patrol when he encountered enemy forces using small arms,” according to the Pentagon.

Which enemy forces?  Two weeks before Shank was killed, Stephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s national security adviser, acknowledged that the challenge in Iraq “isn’t about insurgency, isn’t about terror; it’s about sectarian violence.”  Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Makiki added, “The most important element in the security plan is to curb the religious violence.”

So was Shank’s mission to prevent Iraqi religious fanatics from blowing up one another?  What do you think; was that worth his life?

On September 7, 2006, the day after Shank was killed, President Bush, in effect, mocked his unnecessary death by drawing the familiar but bogus connection between 9/11 and the “war on terror,” of which he claimed Iraq was a part.  Bush said, “Five years after September 11, 2001, America is safer — and America is winning the war on terror.”

Flowery Funeral Words

Back at the First Baptist Church in Jackson, Missouri, Rev. Carter Frey eulogized Shank as one of those who “put themselves in harm’s way and paid the ultimate sacrifice so you and I can have freedom to live in this country.”

Correction:  It was not Cpl. Shank who put himself in harm’s way; it was those who used a peck of lies to launch a bloody, unnecessary war — first and foremost, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, not to mention the craven Congress that authorized it and most of the FCM that led the cheerleading for it.

Was separating Shia from Sunni a mission worth what is so facilely called the “ultimate sacrifice,” or — for other troops — the penultimate one paid by tens of thousands of veterans trying to adjust to life with brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and/or missing limbs?

Despite the self-serving rhetoric about “heroes,” the young, small-town Shanks of America stand low in the priorities of Establishment Washington.  They are pawns in the war games played by generals and politicians far, far from the battlefield.

Even in the Army in which I served, troops were often referred to simply as “warm bodies;” that is, at least before they became cold and stiff.  But that term was normally not accompanied by the mechanistic disdain reflected in the memo by a Fort Lewis-McCord Army major that came to light last year.

On March 20, 2010, Specialist Derrick Kirkland, back from his second tour in Iraq, hanged himself in the barracks at Fort Lewis-McCord, leaving behind a wife and young daughter.  Kirkland had been suffering from severe depression and anxiety attacks, for which he had to bear severe ridicule by his comrades.

Expendable

As for his superiors, it was Army policy to do everything possible to avoid diagnosing PTSD.  And so, Kirkland ended up becoming a new entry on a little-known statistical table; namely, the one that shows that more active-duty soldiers are currently committing suicide than are being killed in combat.

Not a problem for Maj. Keith Markham, Executive Officer of Kirkland’s unit, who put the prevailing attitude all too clearly in a private memo sent to his platoon leaders.  “We have an unlimited supply of expendable labor,” wrote Markham.

And, sadly, he is right.  Because of the poverty draft (aka the “professional Army”), more than half of U.S. troops come from small towns like Jackson, Missouri and the inner cities of our country.  In both these places, good jobs and educational opportunity are rare to nonexistent.

I suspect that one factor behind the very high suicide rate is a belated realization among the troops that they have been conned, lied to — that they have been used as pawns in an unconscionably cynical game.  I would imagine that corporals and specialists, as well as high brass like the legendary two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Marine Gen. Smedley Butler, often come to this realization belatedly, and that this probably exacerbates the pain.

Butler wrote “War is a Racket” in 1935, describing the workings of the military-industrial complex well before President Eisenhower gave it a name.  It is not difficult for troops to learn that the phenomenon about which Eisenhower warned has now broadened into an even more pervasive and powerful military-industrial-corporate-congressional-media-institutional-church complex.  Small wonder the suicide rate is so high.

And for what?  Please raise your hand if you now believe, or have ever believed, that the White House and Pentagon have sent a hundred thousand troops to Afghanistan for the reason given by President Obama; namely, “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” the 50 to 100 al-Qaeda who U.S. intelligence agencies says are still in Afghanistan.

And keep your hands up, those of you who fear you might throw something at the TV screen the next time Gen. David Petraeus intones that wonderfully flexible phrase “fragile and reversible” to describe what he keeps calling “progress” in Afghanistan.

Troops returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan know better.  It must be particularly hard for them to hear the lies about “progress,” and then be ridiculed and marginalized for having PTSD.  It seems a safe bet that some of those have read Kipling, and on occasion wish they had found release by following his morbid advice — awful as it is:

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your gawd like a soldier.”

The Establishment Church

I added “institutional church” into the military-industrial-corporate-congressional-media-institutional-church complex coined above because, with very few exceptions, the institutional church is still riding shotgun for the system — and the wars.

I find that most men and women of the cloth avoid indicting “wars of choice,” even though such wars were quite precisely defined at the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal as “wars of aggression” and labeled the “supreme” international war crime).  They know that in such wars thousands upon thousands die — civilians as well as military.

But then fear seems to walk in, for preachers all too often fall back on platitudinous, fulsome praise for those who “have given their lives so that we can live in freedom.”  And, as the familiar phrase goes, they say/think, “I guess we’ll have to leave it there.”

And there continue to be relatively few outspoken folk like Cindy Sheehan, painfully aware that courage and truth are far more important than fear, even when that fear includes the painful recognition that the life of a beloved young son was ended unnecessarily.  There are some who dare to point out that the mission given our troops has made us less, not more, safe at home, and ask what is so hard to understand about Thou Shalt Not Kill?  The FCM ignores these Justice folks, so all too few know of what they say and do.

It is a curiosity that the Bible and the teachings of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, seem to have become OBE (overtaken by events) and no longer inform the sermons of many American preachers.  Odd that the relevant teachings from this treasure trove seem to have become passé or, as former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said of the Geneva Conventions, “quaint” and “obsolete.”

I have this vision of Stephen Decatur smiling from the afterlife as he watches more and more acceptance being given in recent years to his famous dictum:  “Our country, right or wrong.”

Let me suggest that preachers consider drawing material from yet another source in thinking about the wars in which the U.S. is currently engaged.  Instead of fulsome encomia for those who have made “the ultimate sacrifice,” they might be directed to Rudyard Kipling for words more to the point, if politically and congregationally incorrect.

Two passages (the first a one-liner) shout out their applicability to U.S. misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and — God help us — where next?

“If they ask you why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.”

and

“It is not wise for the Christian white
To hustle the Asian brown;
For the Christian riles,
And the Asian smiles
And weareth the Christian down.
At the end of the fight
Lies a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased;
And the epitaph drear,
A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East.”

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Published on Monday, August 8, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
They Died in Vain; Deal With It
by Ray McGovern

Many of those preaching at American church services Sunday extolled as “heroes” the 30 American and 8 Afghan troops killed Saturday west of Kabul, when a helicopter on a night mission crashed, apparently after taking fire from Taliban forces.  This week, the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) can be expected to beat a steady drumbeat of “they shall not have died in vain.”

But they did.  I know it is a hard truth, but they did die in vain.

As in the past, churches across the country will keep praising the fallen troops for protecting “our way of life,” and few can demur, given the tragic circumstances.

But, sadly, such accolades are, at best, misguided — at worst, dishonest.  Most preachers do not have a clue as to what U.S. forces are doing in Afghanistan and why.  Many prefer not to think about it.  There are some who do know better, but virtually all in that category eventually opt to punt.

Should we fault the preachers as they reach for words designed to give comfort to those in their congregations mourning the deaths of so many young troops?  As hard as it might seem, I believe we can do no other than fault — and confront — them.  However well meaning their intentions, their negligence and timidity in confronting basic war issues merely help to perpetuate unnecessary killing.  It is high time to hold preachers accountable.

Many preachers are alert and open enough to see through the propaganda for perpetual war.  But most will not take the risk of offending their flock with unpalatable truth.  Better not to risk protests from the super-patriots — many of them with deep pockets — in the pews.  And better to avoid, at all costs, offending the loved ones of those who have been killed — loved ones who can hardly be faulted for trying desperately to find some meaning in the snuffing out of young lives.

Best to Just Praise and Pray

Far better to pray for those already killed and those who in the future will “give the last full measure of devotion to our country.”  In sum, by and large, American preachers are afraid to tell the truth.  They lack the virtue that Thomas Aquinas taught is the foundation of all virtue — courage.  Aquinas wrote (to translate into the vernacular) that all other virtue is specious if you have no guts.

Writer James Hollingsworth hit the nail on the head:  “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”  Like the truth.

Those who often seem to ache the most in the face of unnecessary death are mothers.  Many mothers do summon the courage to say — and say loudly — ENOUGH. Yes, my son (or daughter) died for no good purpose, they are strong enough to acknowledge, painfully but honestly.  He (she) did die in vain.  Now we must all deal with it.  Stop the false patriotism.  And, most important, stop the killing.

Cindy Sheehan, whose 25 year-old son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, is one such mother.  She and others have tried to put a dent into the strange logic that attempts to translate unnecessary death into justification for still more unnecessary death.  But they get little air or ink in the Fawning Corporate Media.  Rather, what you will hear in the days ahead from the FCM is well honed rhetoric not only about how our troops “cannot have died in vain,” but also that Americans must now redouble our resolve to “honor their sacrifice.”

President Barack Obama set the tone on Saturday:

“We will draw inspiration from their lives, and continue the work of securing our country and standing up for the values they embodied.”

Gen. John R. Allen, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, also primed the pump for the FCM, saying Saturday, “All of those killed in this operation were true heroes who had already given so much in the defense of freedom.”

And Joint Chiefs Chairman went even further in professing to know “what our fallen would have wanted” us to do — namely, “keep fighting.”  Mullen added that, “it is certainly what we are going to do.”  All this was duly reported in Sunday’s Washington Post and other leading U.S. newspapers —without much comment.

Over the next several days, TV viewers will get a steady diet of this kind of disingenuous logic from talk show hosts feeding on the grist from Obama, Mullen, Allen, and others.  After all, many pundits work for news organizations owned or allied with some of the same corporations profiteering from war.

Too bad CBS’s legendary Edward R. Murrow is long since dead; and the widely respected Walter Cronkite, as well.  Taking the CBS baton from Murrow, who had challenged the “red scare” witch hunt of Sen. Joe McCarthy, Cronkite gradually saw through the dishonesty responsible for the killing of so many in Vietnam.  He finally spoke up, and said, in effect, any more who die will have died in vain.

(The very long hiatus between Cronkite and Scott Pelley, newly appointed “CBS Evening News” anchor, has been particularly painful.  The jury is still out, but I harbor some hope that Pelley may try to follow CBS’s earlier, prouder tradition, if by some miracle his corporate bosses allow him to.  Given today’s prevailing atmosphere of obeisance to Establishment Washington, Pelley certainly has his work cut out for him.  We shall have to wait and see if he has it in him to take the risk of rising to the occasion.)

Corporal Shank & Specialist Kirkland

Five years ago I was giving talks in Missouri, when the body of 18 year-old Cpl. Jeremy Shank of Jackson, Missouri (population 12,000) came home for burial.  He was killed in Hawijah, Iraq on September 6, 2006 while on a “dismounted security patrol when he encountered enemy forces using small arms,” according to the Pentagon.

Which enemy forces?  Two weeks before Shank was killed, Stephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s national security adviser, acknowledged that the challenge in Iraq “isn’t about insurgency, isn’t about terror; it’s about sectarian violence.”  Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Makiki added, “The most important element in the security plan is to curb the religious violence.”

So was Shank’s mission to prevent Iraqi religious fanatics from blowing up one another?  What do you think; was that worth his life?

On September 7, 2006, the day after Shank was killed, President Bush, in effect, mocked his unnecessary death by drawing the familiar but bogus connection between 9/11 and the “war on terror,” of which he claimed Iraq was a part.  Bush said, “Five years after September 11, 2001, America is safer — and America is winning the war on terror.”

Flowery Funeral Words

Back at the First Baptist Church in Jackson, Missouri, Rev. Carter Frey eulogized Shank as one of those who “put themselves in harm’s way and paid the ultimate sacrifice so you and I can have freedom to live in this country.”

Correction:  It was not Cpl. Shank who put himself in harm’s way; it was those who used a peck of lies to launch a bloody, unnecessary war — first and foremost, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, not to mention the craven Congress that authorized it and most of the FCM that led the cheerleading for it.

Was separating Shia from Sunni a mission worth what is so facilely called the “ultimate sacrifice,” or — for other troops — the penultimate one paid by tens of thousands of veterans trying to adjust to life with brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and/or missing limbs?

Despite the self-serving rhetoric about “heroes,” the young, small-town Shanks of America stand low in the priorities of Establishment Washington.  They are pawns in the war games played by generals and politicians far, far from the battlefield.

Even in the Army in which I served, troops were often referred to simply as “warm bodies;” that is, at least before they became cold and stiff.  But that term was normally not accompanied by the mechanistic disdain reflected in the memo by a Fort Lewis-McCord Army major that came to light last year.

On March 20, 2010, Specialist Derrick Kirkland, back from his second tour in Iraq, hanged himself in the barracks at Fort Lewis-McCord, leaving behind a wife and young daughter.  Kirkland had been suffering from severe depression and anxiety attacks, for which he had to bear severe ridicule by his comrades.

Expendable

As for his superiors, it was Army policy to do everything possible to avoid diagnosing PTSD.  And so, Kirkland ended up becoming a new entry on a little-known statistical table; namely, the one that shows that more active-duty soldiers are currently committing suicide than are being killed in combat.

Not a problem for Maj. Keith Markham, Executive Officer of Kirkland’s unit, who put the prevailing attitude all too clearly in a private memo sent to his platoon leaders.  “We have an unlimited supply of expendable labor,” wrote Markham.

And, sadly, he is right.  Because of the poverty draft (aka the “professional Army”), more than half of U.S. troops come from small towns like Jackson, Missouri and the inner cities of our country.  In both these places, good jobs and educational opportunity are rare to nonexistent.

I suspect that one factor behind the very high suicide rate is a belated realization among the troops that they have been conned, lied to — that they have been used as pawns in an unconscionably cynical game.  I would imagine that corporals and specialists, as well as high brass like the legendary two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Marine Gen. Smedley Butler, often come to this realization belatedly, and that this probably exacerbates the pain.

Butler wrote “War is a Racket” in 1935, describing the workings of the military-industrial complex well before President Eisenhower gave it a name.  It is not difficult for troops to learn that the phenomenon about which Eisenhower warned has now broadened into an even more pervasive and powerful military-industrial-corporate-congressional-media-institutional-church complex.  Small wonder the suicide rate is so high.

And for what?  Please raise your hand if you now believe, or have ever believed, that the White House and Pentagon have sent a hundred thousand troops to Afghanistan for the reason given by President Obama; namely, “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” the 50 to 100 al-Qaeda who U.S. intelligence agencies says are still in Afghanistan.

And keep your hands up, those of you who fear you might throw something at the TV screen the next time Gen. David Petraeus intones that wonderfully flexible phrase “fragile and reversible” to describe what he keeps calling “progress” in Afghanistan.

Troops returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan know better.  It must be particularly hard for them to hear the lies about “progress,” and then be ridiculed and marginalized for having PTSD.  It seems a safe bet that some of those have read Kipling, and on occasion wish they had found release by following his morbid advice — awful as it is:

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your gawd like a soldier.”

The Establishment Church

I added “institutional church” into the military-industrial-corporate-congressional-media-institutional-church complex coined above because, with very few exceptions, the institutional church is still riding shotgun for the system — and the wars.

I find that most men and women of the cloth avoid indicting “wars of choice,” even though such wars were quite precisely defined at the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal as “wars of aggression” and labeled the “supreme” international war crime).  They know that in such wars thousands upon thousands die — civilians as well as military.

But then fear seems to walk in, for preachers all too often fall back on platitudinous, fulsome praise for those who “have given their lives so that we can live in freedom.”  And, as the familiar phrase goes, they say/think, “I guess we’ll have to leave it there.”

And there continue to be relatively few outspoken folk like Cindy Sheehan, painfully aware that courage and truth are far more important than fear, even when that fear includes the painful recognition that the life of a beloved young son was ended unnecessarily.  There are some who dare to point out that the mission given our troops has made us less, not more, safe at home, and ask what is so hard to understand about Thou Shalt Not Kill?  The FCM ignores these Justice folks, so all too few know of what they say and do.

It is a curiosity that the Bible and the teachings of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, seem to have become OBE (overtaken by events) and no longer inform the sermons of many American preachers.  Odd that the relevant teachings from this treasure trove seem to have become passé or, as former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said of the Geneva Conventions, “quaint” and “obsolete.”

I have this vision of Stephen Decatur smiling from the afterlife as he watches more and more acceptance being given in recent years to his famous dictum:  “Our country, right or wrong.”

Let me suggest that preachers consider drawing material from yet another source in thinking about the wars in which the U.S. is currently engaged.  Instead of fulsome encomia for those who have made “the ultimate sacrifice,” they might be directed to Rudyard Kipling for words more to the point, if politically and congregationally incorrect.

Two passages (the first a one-liner) shout out their applicability to U.S. misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and — God help us — where next?

“If they ask you why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.”

and

“It is not wise for the Christian white
To hustle the Asian brown;
For the Christian riles,
And the Asian smiles
And weareth the Christian down.
At the end of the fight
Lies a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased;
And the epitaph drear,
A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East.”

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).Published on Saturday, August 20, 2011 by CommonDreams.org