DOREMUS OBSERVES : MATTERS OF INTEREST Doremus Jessup, editor of the
Fort Beulah The Daily Informer, in Sinclair
Lewis' famous book "It Can't Happen Here", at
its conclusion, "drove out, saluted by the meadow
larks, and onward all day, to a hidden cabin in the
Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news of
freedom.....still Doremus goes on, into the sunrise, for
a Doremus Jessup can never die......
US War Crimes and the Legal Case for
Military Resistance
by Paul Rockwell
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0503-25.htm
"Whensoever
the general Government assumes undelegated powers, its
acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force."
Thomas Jefferson
May 10th is a national day of action for GI resisters. A
newly formed group, Courage-To-Resist, is organizing
veterans, military families, and community activists in a
campaign to support military objectors. Demonstrations to
support sailor Pablo Paredes, who faces a court martial
in San Diego May 11th, are in the making.
On December 6, 2004, Navy Petty Officer Pablo Paredes
refused to board his Navy ship. In his press statements,
he called attention to the intrinsic wrongs of war, the
gross illegality of the invasion of Iraq, and the ongoing
pattern of U.S. atrocities in Iraq.
Kevin Benderman is also facing a court martial at Fort
Stewart, Georgia, May 11th. On January 5th, 2005,
Benderman refused to deploy for a second tour of duty
with his Third Infantry Army Division in Iraq. (Seventeen
other soldiers from his unit went AWOL. Two tried to kill
themselves). Benderman witnessed atrocities and
unforgettable brutality in Iraq. "U.S. military
personnel," he said, "are increasingly killing
non-combatants. On my last deployment in Iraq, elements
of my unit were instructed by a Captain to fire on
children throwing rocks at us."
Both Paredes and Benderman are conscientious objectors to
war. So far the military has refused to acknowledge their
acts of conscience. Both resisters face jail time and
lost of pay and benefits.
The moral justification for refusing to participate in
unjust wars is not difficult to grasp. We tend to forget,
however, that acts of conscience are also affirmations in
the rule of law. Camilo Mejia, Stephen Funk, Jeff
Paterson (Gulf War objector), Carl Webb, Abdulla Webster,
Michael Hoffman, Jimmy Massey, David Blunt, Aidan
Delgado, Diedra Cobb, Jeremy Hinzman, Brandon Hughey, and
dozens of other war resisters are not only heroes of
peace, they are vindicators of the Constitution, the U.N.
Charter, Nuremberg Conventions and the Geneva Conventions
as well.
American commanders promote a widespread misconception
that, once American youth sign an enlistment contract,
they are obligated to participate in any kind of war,
whether it is based on fraud or truth, whether it is a
preemptive invasion or a genuine war of self-defense. In
a "voluntary military," Rumsfeld said at a
recent press conference, soldiers have no right to
complain.
That's preposterous. No soldier owes absolute allegiance
to any military system. The prevailing doctrine of blind
obedience is a fascist, not a democratic, doctrine of
military service. Of course all military systems require
discipline, and all operate through a chain of command.
But the legal authority of command depends on adherence
to the rule of law. As sailor Pablo Paredes noted
recently, the U.S. Military Code of Justice says that,
while soldiers are obligated to obey all legal orders,
the same soldiers have a right, even a duty, to disobey
illegal orders. That is the essence of the legal case for
military resistance.
Once unrestrained leaders, in their lust for power and
world domination, place our military system beyond
domestic and international law, the obligation of
soldiers to serve the military in its state of
lawlessness is dissolved. Long ago Thomas Jefferson
captured the spirit of legal resistance when he wrote:
"Whensoever the general Government assumes
undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void,
and of no force." ...
In the annals of collective terror and reprisal, the U.S.
siege of Fallujah, a city leveled by U.S. air power,
ranks with the fascist bombing of Guernica in Spain in
1937.
Prior to the onslaught against Fallujah, U.S. commanders
drove nearly 200,000 Fallujans out of their own city,
bereft of housing, food and water. Those who remained in
their homes were trapped in a rain of death. The siege
began with an attack on the Fallujah general hospital.
Injured patients were forced out of their beds. Doctors
were prevented from treating, even reporting, casualties.
Today Fallujah is a wasteland. Robert Worth in the New
York Times reports, in the aftermath of the bombing
campaign: "Cars sit on the roofs of buildings. Lamp
posts lie at odd angles. Fire has blackened the face of
building after building." No type of
building-mosques, homes, medical facilities-was exempt
from aerial destruction. Five-hundred pound bombs are
utterly indiscriminate in their effects. A 1,000-pound
bomb obliterated the city's rail station, a transfer
point for all Iraq. Another strike turned a small
hospital into rubble. Mosques were assaulted. Entire
neighborhoods were flattened. Fires raged throughout
residential communities. American commanders openly
declared that Fallujah needed to be "taught a
lesson."
The people of Fallujah were murdered in their own homes,
their own streets, their own hospitals and mosques - in
their own homeland. They were not threatening any one
else's soil. Unlike their invaders, they never possessed
nuclear weapons. Unlike the CIA, they never aided Osama
Bin Laden. They possessed no air force, no satellite
systems, no anti-aircraft weapons, not even bullet-proof
vests. Fallujah had no modern means of self-defense
against industrial war and foreign aerial bombardment.
Paul Rockwell is a columnist
for In Motion Magazine. He can be reached at
rockyspad@hotmail.com
VALUE ADDED TAX FOR AMERICANS TO
FATTEN THE "P"RESIDENT'S WALLET:
In a stunning new development, the Bush Cheney Regime has
proposed yet another plan to increase the tax burden on
working class Republicans and Democrats.
In his column "New Bushonian Tax Fraud: Bush Cheney
Regime Wants Consumption Tax to Stave Off Social Security
Shortfalls," published on Al Martin Raw
(almartinraw.com, economic forecaster Al Martin writes
that the Bush Cheney Regime has decided to float the
concept of a new tax. It will be packaged and sold to US
citizens as a VAT Value Added Tax, Consumption Tax, or
National Sales Tax and pro-Bush Republicans claim it will
be necessary to keep the Social Security program solvent.
"In a CNBC interview on May 3rd, House Speaker
Dennis Hastert announced that the primary concern of the
Bush-Cheney regime is to guarantee Social Security
benefits for those who are currently age 55 and
above," Al Martin begins. "That is ALL that
could be guaranteed under the current structure. And this
shows the increasing disconnect between the pro-Bush
faction and working class Republicans.
- Learning To Be Stupid
In The Culture Of Cash
By Luciana Bohne
5-30-5
-
- You might think that reading about
a Podunk University's English teacher's attempt
to connect the dots between the poverty of
American education and the gullibility of the
American public may be a little trivial,
considering we've embarked on the first,
openly-confessed imperial adventure of senescent
capitalism in the US, but bear with me. The
question my experiences in the classroom raise is
why have these young people been educated to such
abysmal depths of ignorance.
- "I don't read," says a
junior without the slightest self-consciousness.
She has not the smallest hint that professing a
habitual preference for not reading at a
university is like bragging in ordinary life that
one chooses not to breathe. She is in my
"World Literature" class. She has to
read novels by African, Latin American, and Asian
authors. She is not there by choice: it's just a
"distribution" requirement for
graduation, and it's easier than philosophy -she
thinks.
- The novel she has trouble reading
is Isabel Allende's "Of Love and
Shadows," set in the post-coup terror of
Pinochet's junta's Nazi-style regime in Chile,
1973-1989. No one in the class, including the
English majors, can write a focused essay of
analysis, so I have to teach that. No one in the
class knows where Chile is, so I make photocopies
of general information from world guide surveys.
No one knows what socialism or fascism is, so I
spend time writing up digestible definitions. No
one knows what Plato's "Allegory of the
Cave" is, and I supply it because it's
impossible to understand the theme of the novel
without a basic knowledge of that work - which
used to be required reading a few generations
ago. And no one in the class has ever heard of 11
September 1973, the CIA-sponsored coup which
terminated Chile's mature democracy. There is
complete shock when I supply US de-classified
documents proving US collusion with the generals'
coup and the assassination of elected president,
Salvador Allende.
- Geography, history, philosophy,
and political science - all missing from their
preparation. I realize that my students are, in
fact, the oppressed, as Paulo Freire's "The
Pedagogy of the Oppressed" pointed out, and
that they are paying for their own oppression.
So, I patiently explain: no, our government has
not been the friend of democracy in Chile; yes,
our government did fund both the coup and the
junta torture-machine; yes, the same goes for
most of Latin America. Then, one student asks,
"Why?" Well, I say, the CIA and the
corporations run roughshod over the world in part
because of the ignorance of the people of the
United States, which apparently is induced by
formal education, reinforced by the media, and
cheered by Hollywood. As the more people read,
the less they know and the more indoctrinated
they become, you get this national enabling
stupidity to attain which they go into bottomless
pools of debt. If it weren't tragic, it would be
funny.
- Meanwhile, this expensive
stupidity facilitates US funding of the bloody
work of death squads, juntas, and terror regimes
abroad. It permits the war we are waging - an
unfair, illegal, unjust, illogical, and expensive
war, which announces to the world the failure of
our intelligence and, by the way, the creeping
weakness of our economic system. Every man,
woman, and child killed by a bomb, bullet,
famine, or polluted water is a murder - and a war
crime. And it signals the impotence of American
education to produce brains equipped with the
bare necessities for democratic survival:
analyzing and asking questions.
- Let me put it succinctly: I don't
think serious education is possible in America.
Anything you touch in the annals of knowledge is
a foe of this system of commerce and profit, run
amok. The only education that can be permitted is
if it acculturates to the status quo, as happens
in the expensive schools, or if it produces
people to police and enforce the status quo, as
in the state school where I teach. Significantly,
at my school, which is a third-tier university,
servicing working-class, first-generation college
graduates who enter lower-echelon jobs in the
civil service, education, or middle management,
the favored academic concentrations are
communications, criminal justice, and social
work--basically how to mystify, cage, and control
the masses.
- This education is a vast waste of
the resources and potential of the young. It is
boring beyond belief and useless--except to the
powers and interests that depend on it. When A
Ukranian student, a three-week arrival on these
shores, writes the best-organized and most
profound essay in English of the class, American
education has something to answer for--especially
to our youth.
- But the detritus and debris that
American education has become is both planned and
instrumental. It's why our media succeeds in
telling lies. It's why our secretary of state can
quote from a graduate-student paper, claiming
confidently that the stolen data came from the
highest intelligence sources. It's why Picasso's
"Guernica" can be covered up during his
preposterous "report" to the UN without
anyone guessing the political significance of
this gesture and the fascist sensibility that it
protects.
- Cultural fascism manifests itself
in an aversion to thought and cultural
refinement. "When I hear the word
'culture,'" Goebbels said, "I reach for
my revolver." One of the infamous and
telling reforms the Pinochet regime implemented
was educational reform. The basic goal was to end
the university's role as a source of social
criticism and political opposition. The order
came to dismantle the departments of philosophy,
social and political science, humanities and the
arts--areas in which political discussions were
likely to occur. The universities were ordered to
issue degrees only in business management,
computer programming, engineering, medicine and
dentistry - vocational training schools, which in
reality is what American education has come to
resemble, at least at the level of mass
education. Our students can graduate without ever
touching a foreign language, philosophy, elements
of any science, music or art, history, and
political science, or economics. In fact, our
students learn to live in an electoral democracy
devoid of politics - a feature the dwindling
crowds at the voting booths well illustrate.
- The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
wrote that, in the rapacity that the industrial
revolution created, people first surrendered
their minds or the capacity to reason, then their
hearts or the capacity to empathize, until all
that was left of the original human equipment was
the senses or their selfish demands for
gratification. At that point, humans entered the
stage of market commodities and market
consumers--one more thing in the commercial
landscape. Without minds or hearts, they are
instrumentalized to buy whatever deadens their
clamoring and frightened senses--official lies,
immoral wars, Barbies, and bankrupt educations.
- Meanwhile, in my state, the
governor has ordered a 10% cut across the board
for all departments in the state - including
education.
- Luciana Bohne teaches film and
literature at Edinboro University in
Pennsylvania.
- http://www.marchforjustice.com/8.8.03.learning.php
- http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4428
PLEASE POST THIS WIDELY
RE: House Bill
6008 - Depleted Uranium Testing
From: LeurenMoret - Independent Scientist and
Radiation Specialist
Dear Rep. Denise Merrill and Sen.
Toni Harp,
"What is depleted uranium?" will be the cover
story on Wednesday morning in Crawford, Texas, home of
Pres. Bush in the nationally circulated LONE
STAR ICONOCLAST.
http://www.iconoclast-texas.com/News/19news02.htm
This is a serious journalistic piece on the depleted
uranium (DU) issue. In this article, the Texas
Legislature is asked to pass Connecticut Bill 6008.
Last week the Louisiana House voted 101-0 to pass it,
just two weeks after it was introduced - with an
implementation date of Oct. 2005. The
implementation date was changed from 2006 in the
Connecticut bill, to 2005 in Louisiana, in order to meet
the needs of 4500 troups returning to Louisiana from Iraq
next October. The bill is now on
the way to the legislatures of Nevada, Washington,
Montana, California, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, and
Oregon. As it continues on through the legislatures
of other states, and we expect it will be all the states,
it will be known as the "Connecticut
Bill". The importance of this bill will grow,
as awareness of the DU issue increases, and out of
concern for returning soldiers and veterans who might
have been exposed during military service.
In August of 2004, Terri Jemison of the Dept. of Veterans
Affairs told journalist Christopher Bollyn of the
American Free Press, that "Gulf-era veterans"
now on medical disability since 1991 number 518,739, with
only 7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year
period. The number of soldiers on medical
disability can only increase because of delayed effects
from DU exposure, and as soldiers continue to serve in
regions with increasing levels of DU contamination.
In fact, the interviews in the ICONOCLAST
article describe how atmospheric processes have now
spread this radioactive poison dust around the world,
exposing the global population.
A new film on the DU issue, BEYOND
TREASON, is about to be released by
the American Gulf War Veterans Association. This
documentary is nearly two hours long, featuring soldiers
exposed to DU who are now very ill, veterans, scientists,
and active military. Connecticut Bill 6008 is
presented in the film as "A call to arms"; to
help the veterans, soldiers, and their families who are
now suffering from the effects of DU exposure. The
Connecticut bill already has nationwide recognition, but
this film willspread it like wildfire as millions who
view it take action.
This summer Gulf War veteran Dennis Kyne and I will be
touring the cities, towns and villages of Connecticut
with this film - to inform the students, veterans,
citizens, and elected officials of Connecticut about the
DU issue. We hope you will join us, and that we
will have the opportunity to meet some of you and many of
your constituents as well as members of the mediain your
state. We would also like to thank, in person,
Melissa Sterry and Pat Dillon for their courageous
efforts to introduce this historic bill which already has
nationwide recognition.
I urge you to please hold an Appropriations meeting on
this bill and vote to pass it on behalf of the soldiers,
veterans, and their families in Connecticut. If this
bill is neglected, it may be hard to explain to citizens
not only in Connecticut but nationwide and
internationally, why the Connecticut Legislaturefailed to
pass this historic bill.
Please make Connecticut the nationwide leader in caring
for our troops. Our Patriots, who have put their
lives on the line, deserve our full support, and they
deserve your full support.
Leuren Moret
(510) 845-3139
2533 Dana Street
Berkeley, California 94704
<leurenmoret@yahoo.com>
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