This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind.                   

      

Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out chapter and verse. Like those church hymns that you were forced to sit through (when you would have rather been outside playing before you got that good dose of religion which made the hymns make sense), like the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first does of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year, or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things. One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind.    

Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square (and got full program play complete with folk DJs and for a time on television via the Hootenanny show) that is not where I first heard or learned the song. No for that one song I think the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school where Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his, rock and roll) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before the dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him. Almost everybody covered him then, wrote poems and songs about him, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way that he took song to entertain the people with.                 

It was not until some time later that I got the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land. That is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that keep on moving thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath  as he went along. Wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of true to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent called America and how this land was ours, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.             

The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! -Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! No One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!

 

Click below for link to the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) website for more information about various anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist actions around the country.

https://unacpeace.org.

Markin comment: 
 
A while back, maybe last year as things seemed to be winding down in the Middle East, or at least the American presence was scheduled to decrease in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and before  Ukraine, Syria, Gaza and a number of other flash points erupted I mentioned that every once in a while it is necessary, if for no other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. I also mentioned at the time that while endless marches are not going to end any war the imperialists decide to provoke the street opposition to the war in what appeared then to be the fading American presence in Afghanistan or whatever else the Obama/Kerry cabal has lined up for the military to do in the Middle East, Ukraine or the China seas as well as protests against other imperialist adventures had been under the radar of late.

Over the summer there had been a small uptick in street protest over the Zionist massacre in Gaza (a situation now in “cease-fire” mode but who knows how long that will last) and the threat of yet a third American war in Iraq with the increasing bombing campaign and escalating troop levels now expanded to Syria. Although not nearly enough. As I mentioned at that earlier time it is time, way beyond time, for anti-warriors, even his liberal backers, to get back where we belong on the streets in the struggle against Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama’s seemingly endless wars. And his surreptitious “drone strategy” to "sanitize" war when he is not very publicly busy revving up the bombers and fighter jets in Iraq, Syria and wherever else he feels needs the soft touch of American “shock and awe, part two.”

The UNAC for a while now, particularly since the collapse of the mass peace movement that hit the streets for a few minutes before the second Iraq war in 2003, appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-drone, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise, or support but the key ones of late are enough to take to the streets. More than enough to whet the appetite of even the most jaded anti-warrior.

And as we hit the fall anti-war trail:

As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing”    Beat The War Drums-Again- Stop The Escalations-No New U.S. War In Iraq- No Intervention In Syria! Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries!  Stop The U.S. And Allied Bombings! –Stop The Arms Shipments …

Frank Jackman comment:

As the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama, abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate as well as internationally, orders more air bombing strikes in the north and in Syria,  sends more “advisers” to “protect” American outposts in Iraq, and sends arms shipments to the Kurds, supplies arms to the moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to, guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world might very well be excused for disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation. And all the time saying the familiar (Vietnam era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, cannot rely on the Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to get whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be? Now not every event in history gets exactly repeated but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time vets might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq –Stop The Bombings- No Intervention In Syria! 

***
Here is something to think about:  

Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden. 

 
Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! Not One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!

BostonUNAC.org | 781-285-8622 | BostonUNAC(S)gmail.com

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Artists’ Corner-George Grosz

George Grosz

Kohlentraeger, 1928
Galerie Merrow
Price on Request

George Grosz

Kohlentraeger, 1928
Galerie Merrow
Price on Request

George Grosz

Kohlentraeger, 1928
Galerie Merrow
Price on Request

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the Academy spoke the pious words when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or lying their own heads down for some imperial mission. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as they marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high tea. Jesus what a blasted night that Great War time was.   

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams filled with lovely matrons and high symbolism and blessed Eve women to fill the night, Adam’s night after they fled the garden, like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes, circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep space for a candid world to fret through, fret through a long career, and like poor maddened rising like a phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz puncturing the nasty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real dough and their overfed dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated military and their fat-assed generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells, like Picasso, yeah, Picasso taking the shape out of recognized human existence and reconfiguring the forms, the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like, Braque, if only because if you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to the tether too.           

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….            

ISRAEL:  Whose Election Was it Anyway?

 

The strangest thing about the Israeli elections – from a US perspective – was not its outcome but the obsessive volume of press coverage here and around the world. The balloting in a smallish country thousands of miles away, was treated as though it were a crucial event in our own political life and dominated the headlines all over our mainstream media.  Nothing could better illustrate the bizarre influence of Israeli politics on our domestic scene.

 

Of course, this shouldn’t come as a great surprise, given the interpenetration of US and Israeli policies for decades and the weight of pro-Israel lobbying in our country.  Recently, it was regarded as an expression of great political courage – and risk – for Democratic members of Congress to abstain from cheering a partisan attack on the president of their own party orchestrated by the Prime Minister of a state which has received hundreds of billions of dollars in US aid.  Nearly all of the 60 or so Democrats who skipped Netanyahu’s Congressional address were at pains to justify their stand with undying loyalty to Israel.  Meanwhile, the Republican Party has become a virtual subsidiary of Israel’s Likud, financed to a large degree by US billionaires who profess loyalty to Israel.  The last two “Israeli” ambassadors to the US were in fact American-born immigrants who gave up their US citizenship to represent Israel.

 

Almost none of the vast commentary about the Israeli elections as an expression of “democracy” pointed out this simple fact:  Of the 12 million or so people who live under Israeli sovereignty around 4.5 million of them in the Occupied Territories had no vote whatsoever in the outcome – and another 1.5 Palestinian citizens of Israel could vote, but were effectively shut out from any real decision-making in the state and retain a permanent second-class status.

 

As to the Israeli election itself, despite all the hype about policy differences, in fact there was very little practical dispute among the parties as to maintaining this status quo.  Netanyahu’s statements about “a two-state solution” are endlessly parsed in our media, but the truth is that the Likud Party platform explicitly opposes a Palestinian state. And, with the possible exception of the tiny leftwing Meretz Party (4 seats out of 120 in the new Israeli Knesset), none of the Zionist parties is ready to offer conditions remotely acceptable to the Palestinians for a meaningful sovereign state in “the Land of Israel”.  The difference is mainly in how they talk about it.

 

“TWO-STATE SOLUTION”?

 

Some commentators noted the “clarifying effect” of the Israeli elections. At least now there will be no liberal Zionist façade, camouflaging Israel’s unwillingness to dismantle its colonial project.  (Israel, like the US, doesn’t have a colonial project – it is a colonial project).  It may be harder now for US constituencies – and the Obama administration – to close their eyes to the on-going reality that has existed for 50 or 80 years, depending on how you count.  And indeed, the White House has been hinting at some changes in “the special relationship” between our two countries.  That would be all to the good.  The reality is that there will be no self-determination for the Palestinians unless and until the US first declares its independence from Israel.

 

Obama says US rethinking Palestinian policy?

Obama also told Netanyahu that the US is reassessing its approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace in light of Netanyahu’s pre-election comments rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state, a White House official said… According to the White House, Obama “emphasized the importance the United States places on our close military, intelligence, and security cooperation with Israel, which reflects the deep and abiding partnership between both countries.”   More

A roundup of some US commentary here.

(More on Israel below)

 

*   *   *   *

DON’T LET CONGRE$$ (or ISRAEL!) DERAIL US-IRAN DIPLOMACY!

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had this warning for a Joint Session of Congress: “If this regime [Iran] …were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences… the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close… ladies and gentlemen, time is running out.” That was nineteen years ago. 

For almost two decades, the Israeli Prime Minister has sounded the same alarm and urged the same US response: ever-harsher sanctions backed by military threats and a policy that treats negotiation as appeasement.

Some critics of his latest address contend that the intended audience was actually the Israeli electorate; others say it was conceived as a rebuke to the Democratic Administration.  One audience was almost certainly the handful of US senators, including Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, who will be called on to vote for the Republican Senate’s two attempts to undermine the hard-won diplomatic progress made by the P5+1 in keeping Iran’s nuclear program in check.

 

Contact our senators and ask that they vote against bills aimed at derailing negotiations with Iran

and then vote to sustain President Obama’s promised veto.

 

Too Clever by Half: Netanyahu Strengthens Obama’s Hand

It’s still unclear whether the negotiators in Switzerland can decide on a “framework agreement” by the March 31 target date, presaging a finished document by the June 30 deadline. But if an agreement is reached, President Barack Obama is now in a far better position to carry it into effect than he was just a few days ago. To use another metaphor, Netanyahu has shot himself in the foot. The big guns were supposed to be directed elsewhere. With the help of House Speaker John Boehner, Netanyahu spoke before a rapturous joint session of the U.S. Congress to urge rejection of an agreement with Iran even before it was completed. And he pulled out all the stops in citing his version of historic parallels. He even used Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who did so much to make the world aware of the horrors of the Holocaust, as a stage prop. Then 47 Republican members of the Senate wrote an open letter to Iran’s leadership, lecturing them that any agreement that President Obama concluded with Iran could be revoked “with a stroke of a pen” by the next president. To say that this was irregular is an understatement, and it offended a lot of Americans who pay little or no attention to the Iranian nuclear issue but who do believe in the US Constitution.   More

 

DRAFT AGREEMENT CUTS IRAN'S NUCLEAR HARDWARE

The United States and Iran are drafting elements of a nuclear deal that commits Tehran to a 40 percent cut in the number of machines it could use to make an atomic bomb, officials told The Associated Press on Thursday. In return, the Iranians would get quick relief from some crippling economic sanctions and a partial lift of a U.N. embargo on conventional arms.  Agreement on Iran's uranium enrichment program could signal a breakthrough for a larger deal aimed at containing the Islamic Republic's nuclear activities.  More

 

Poll: Iran negotiations popular

Direct diplomatic negotiations with Iran are broadly popular, 68% favor them, while 29% oppose them. That support cuts across party lines, with 77% of Democrats, 65% of Republicans and 64% of independents in favor of diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran in an attempt to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.  More

 

One Neocon uncensored. . .

War with Iran is probably our best option

Sanctions may have induced Iran to enter negotiations, but they have not persuaded it to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons… Does this mean that our only option is war? Yes, although an air campaign targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would entail less need for boots on the ground than the war Obama is waging against the Islamic State, which poses far smaller a threat than Iran does.  More

 

Big Bank’s Analyst Worries That Iran Deal Could Depress Weapons Sales

The possibility of an Iran nuclear deal depressing weapons sales was raised by Myles Walton, an analyst from Germany’s Deutsche Bank, during a Lockheed earnings call this past January 27th. Walton asked Marillyn Hewson, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, if an Iran agreement could “impede what you see as progress in foreign military sales.” Financial industry analysts such as Walton use earnings calls as an opportunity to ask publicly-traded corporations like Lockheed about issues that might harm profitability… DefenseOne reports that over the next five years, “Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and Jordan are expected to spend more $165 billion on arms.” And in the U.S., concerns over ISIS and Iran have prompted calls for an increase in the defense budget.   More

 

Palestine events

Mark World Water Day by protesting the Massachusetts-Israel Water Partnership

Friday, March 20, 4 - 5:30 PM

Mass Clean Energy Center: 63 Franklin Street (Close to Downtown Crossing)

The Boston Alliance for Water Justice opposes the Israel-MA 'Innovative Water Partnership'  launched by the Patrick Administration and based at the Mass CEC because Israel uses water as a weapon against the Palestinian people.  We do not believe that Massachusetts should do water business with Israel as long as it maintains its discriminatory water policies.   The UN has declared that water is a human right and  Massachusetts should respect that right without exception.

more info

 

Facing the Ongoing Nakba

March 22, 2015 4:00 pm

Where: First Baptist Church, Jamaica Plain : 633 Centre St. When: March 22nd at 4:00 pm Join the Nakba Education Project for a discussion on the ongoing Nakba (“Catastrophe” in Arabic) affecting Palestinians both in Palestine and in the diaspora. Speakers from Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights will provide a historical 

More info

Jerusalem, on the Moving Edge of Israeli Colonial Rule: A Lecture by Prof. Tom Abowd

March 26, 2015 7:30 pm

March 26, 2015 7:30 pm Fong Auditorium — Boylston Hall room 110, Harvard Yard American Jews for a Just Peace announces their 2015 Hilda Silverman Memorial Lecture, by Tufts Professor Tom Abowd, author of “Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012″. Prof. Abowd will also reflect on more info

 

United for Justice with Peace is a coalition of peace and justice organizations and community peace groups in the Greater Boston region. The UJP Coalition, formed after September 11th, seeks global peace through social and economic justice. Help us continue to do this critical work! Make a donation to UJP today.
info@justicewithpeace.org	617-383-4857	www.justicewithpeace.org

NOTE: our April film is on Saturday, April 4th, We are combining our monthly film with UPandOUT's 10thAnniversary pARtY!!! (& a milestone birthday for pf :-[ Party starts at 5pm; film screens from 7-9; party renews 9-11pm Come celebrate with us!!  Dance, play games, do  your stand-up routines :-) Wanted:  minstrels and stand-up comedians :-) [In May, we get back to our regular schedule - every 3rd Thursday] Please let me know if you are willing to help:  either Friday nite for set up, early Sat afternoon to finish setup, or late Sat nite cleanup. Also let me know if you can bring something to contribute to the food/drink tables. Thank you!

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you" ~Joseph Heller Catch-22 [see trailer] Showing SATURDAY, April 4, in Cambridge [please download & distribute flyer] Adapted from James Heller's book of the same name, and directed by Mike Nichols, Catch-22 is a parody of a "military mentality" and of a bureaucratic society in general. Yossarian, a bombardier in World War II, tries desperately to escape the insanity of the war. Yossarian learns that even a mental breakdown is no release; Doc Daneeka explains the Army Air Corps "Catch-22":  An airman "would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he'd have to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't, he was sane and had to." Hilarious and tragic, at the heart of Catch-22 is a savage indictment of twentieth century madness, and a desire of the ordinary man to survive it. The cast includes Alan Arkin, Bob Balaban, Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, Italian actress Olimpia Carlisi, French comedian Marcel Dalio, Art Garfunkel (making his acting debut), Jack Gilford, Charles Grodin, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Paula Prentiss, Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, Orson Welles, Buck Henry, Norman Fell, and Austin Pendleton. "An apocolyptic masterpiece."  ~Chicago Times "Blessedly, monstrously, bloatedly, cynically funny and fantastically unique. No one has ever written a book like this." ~ Financial Times review of Joseph Heller's book "Catch-22 is a must-see, particularly in today's world with its warped values of profiteering, corruption, abuse of power, lying, cheating and claims of being guided by 'higher' forces. Get it, see it, see it. I can understand why it wasn't an Oscar candidate, because that would have required large audiences of some sophistication, and where would you get that in the US (especially today)?"  ~Australian reviewer Sample Bon Mots:   :-) There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. "That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.€ Major Sanderson: "You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you're at war and might get your head blown off any second." Yossarian: "I more than resent it, sir. I'm absolutely incensed." Sanderson: "You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs, or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate." Yossarian: "Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously." "Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?" "Every one of them," Yossarian told him. "Every one of whom?" "Every one of whom do you think?" Yossarian replied. "I haven't any idea." "Then how do you know they aren't?" Yossarian said. "Hasn't it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence?" "Yes, sir, it has." "Then why do you do it?" "To assuage my fears of sexual impotence." "From now on I'm thinking only of me." Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way." "Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?" "I'm asking you to save my life." "It's not my business to save lives," Doc Daneeka retorted sullenly. "What is your business?" "I don't know what my business is. All they ever told me was to uphold the ethics of my profession and never give testimony against another physician." "The men were perfectly content to fly as many missions as we asked them as long as they thought they had no alternative. Now you've given them hope, and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours [Yossarian]." When/where doors open 6:40; film starts promptly 7pm 243 Broadway, Cambridge - corner of Broadway and Windsor, entrance on Windsor rule19.org/videos Please join us for a stimulating night out; bring your friends! free film & free door prizes[donations are encouraged]feel free to bring your own snacks and soft drinks - no alcohol allowed "You can't legislate good will - that comes through education." ~ Malcolm X UPandOUT film series - see rule19.org/videos Why should YOU care? It's YOUR money that pays for US/Israeli wars - on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine, Libya. Syria, Iran, So America, etc etc - for billionaire bailouts, for ever more ubiquitous US prisons, for the loss of liberty and civil rights...

A Family Business of Perpetual War

Exclusive: Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan have a great mom-and-pop business going. From the State Department, she generates wars and – from op-ed pages – he demands Congress buy more weapons. There’s a pay-off, too, as grateful military contractors kick in money to think tanks where other Kagans work, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia – and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats.
This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks.
Not only does the broader community of neoconservatives stand to benefit but so do other members of the Kagan clan, including Robert’s brother Frederick at the American Enterprise Institute and his wife Kimberly, who runs her own shop called the Institute for the Study of War.
Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (which doesn’t disclose details on its funders), used his prized perch on the Washington Post’s op-ed page on Friday to bait Republicans into abandoning the sequester caps limiting the Pentagon’s budget, which he calculated at about $523 billion (apparently not counting extra war spending). Kagan called on the GOP legislators to add at least $38 billion and preferably more like $54 billion to $117 billion:
“The fact that [advocates for more spending] face a steep uphill battle to get even that lower number passed by a Republican-controlled Congress says a lot — about Republican hypocrisy. Republicans may be full-throated in denouncing [President Barack] Obama for weakening the nation’s security, yet when it comes to paying for the foreign policy that all their tough rhetoric implies, too many of them are nowhere to be found. …
“The editorial writers and columnists who have been beating up Obama and cheering the Republicans need to tell those Republicans, and their own readers, that national security costs money and that letters and speeches are worse than meaningless without it. …
“It will annoy the part of the Republican base that wants to see the government shrink, loves the sequester and doesn’t care what it does to defense. But leadership occasionally means telling people what they don’t want to hear. Those who propose to lead the United States in the coming years, Republicans and Democrats, need to show what kind of political courage they have, right now, when the crucial budget decisions are being made.”
So, the way to show “courage” – in Kagan’s view – is to ladle ever more billions into the Military-Industrial Complex, thus putting money where the Republican mouths are regarding the need to “defend Ukraine” and resist “a bad nuclear deal with Iran.”
Yet, if it weren’t for Nuland’s efforts as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, the Ukraine crisis might not exist. A neocon holdover who advised Vice President Dick Cheney, Nuland gained promotions under former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and received backing, too, from current Secretary of State John Kerry.
Confirmed to her present job in September 2013, Nuland soon undertook an extraordinary effort to promote “regime change” in Ukraine. She personally urged on business leaders and political activists to challenge elected President Viktor Yanukovych. She reminded corporate executives that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” and she literally passed out cookies to anti-government protesters in Kiev’s Maidan square.
Working with other key neocons, including National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman and Sen. John McCain, Nuland made clear that the United States would back a “regime change” against Yanukovych, which grew more likely as neo-Nazi and other right-wing militias poured into Kiev from western Ukraine.
In early February 2014, Nuland discussed U.S.-desired changes with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (himself a veteran of a “regime change” operation at the International Atomic Energy Agency, helping to install U.S. yes man Yukiya Amano as the director-general in 2009).
Nuland treated her proposed new line-up of Ukrainian officials as if she were trading baseball cards, casting aside some while valuing others. “Yats is the guy,” she said of her favorite Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Disparaging the less aggressive European Union, she uttered “Fuck the EU” – and brainstormed how she would “glue this thing” as Pyatt pondered how to “mid-wife this thing.” Their unsecure phone call was intercepted and leaked.
Ukraine’s ‘Regime Change’
The coup against Yanukovych played out on Feb. 22, 2014, as the neo-Nazi militias and other violent extremists overran government buildings forcing the president and other officials to flee for their lives. Nuland’s State Department quickly declared the new regime “legitimate” and Yatsenyuk took over as prime minister.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had been presiding over the Winter Olympics at Sochi, was caught off-guard by the coup next door and held a crisis session to determine how to protect ethnic Russians and a Russian naval base in Crimea, leading to Crimea’s secession from Ukraine and annexation by Russia a year ago.
Though there was no evidence that Putin had instigated the Ukraine crisis – and indeed all the evidence indicated the opposite – the State Department peddled a propaganda theme to the credulous mainstream U.S. news media about Putin having somehow orchestrated the situation in Ukraine so he could begin invading Europe. Former Secretary of State Clinton compared Putin to Adolf Hitler.
As the new Kiev government launched a brutal “anti-terrorism operation” to subdue an uprising among the large ethnic Russian populations of eastern and southern Ukraine, Nuland and other American neocons pushed for economic sanctions against Russia and demanded arms for the coup regime. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]
Amid the barrage of “information warfare” aimed at both the U.S. and world publics, a new Cold War took shape. Prominent neocons, including Nuland’s husband Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century which masterminded the Iraq War, hammered home the domestic theme that Obama had shown himself to be “weak,” thus inviting Putin’s “aggression.”
In May 2014, Kagan published a lengthy essay in The New Republic entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” in which Kagan castigated Obama for failing to sustain American dominance in the world and demanding a more muscular U.S. posture toward adversaries.
According to a New York Times article about how the essay took shape and its aftermath, writer Jason Horowitz reported that Kagan and Nuland shared a common world view as well as professional ambitions, with Nuland editing Kagan’s articles, including the one tearing down her ostensible boss.
Though Nuland wouldn’t comment specifically on her husband’s attack on Obama, she indicated that she held similar views. “But suffice to say,” Nuland said, “that nothing goes out of the house that I don’t think is worthy of his talents. Let’s put it that way.”
Horowitz reported that Obama was so concerned about Kagan’s assault that the President revised his commencement speech at West Point to deflect some of the criticism and invited Kagan to lunch at the White House, where one source told me that it was like “a meeting of equals.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s True Foreign Policy ‘Weakness.’”]
Sinking a Peace Deal
And, whenever peace threatens to break out in Ukraine, Nuland jumps in to make sure that the interests of war are protected. Last month, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande hammered out a plan for a cease-fire and a political settlement, known as Minsk-2, prompting Nuland to engage in more behind-the-scenes maneuvering to sabotage the deal.
In another overheard conversation — in Munich, Germany — Nuland mocked the peace agreement as “Merkel’s Moscow thing,” according to the German newspaper Bild, citing unnamed sources, likely from the German government which may have bugged the conference room in the luxurious Bayerischer Hof hotel and then leaked the details.
Picking up on Nuland’s contempt for Merkel, another U.S. official called the Minsk-2 deal the Europeans’ “Moscow bullshit.”
Nuland suggested that Merkel and Hollande cared only about the practical impact of the Ukraine war on Europe: “They’re afraid of damage to their economy, counter-sanctions from Russia.” According to the Bild story, Nuland also laid out a strategy for countering Merkel’s diplomacy by using strident language to frame the Ukraine crisis.
“We can fight against the Europeans, we can fight with rhetoric against them,” Nuland reportedly said.
NATO Commander Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove was quoted as saying that sending more weapons to the Ukrainian government would “raise the battlefield cost for Putin.” Nuland interjected to the U.S. politicians present that “I’d strongly urge you to use the phrase ‘defensive systems’ that we would deliver to oppose Putin’s ‘offensive systems.’”
Nuland sounded determined to sink the Merkel-Hollande peace initiative even though it was arranged by two major U.S. allies and was blessed by President Obama. And, this week, the deal seems indeed to have been blown apart by Nuland’s hand-picked Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, who inserted a poison pill into the legislation to implement the Minsk-2 political settlement.
The Ukrainian parliament in Kiev added a clause that, in effect, requires the rebels to first surrender and let the Ukrainian government organize elections before a federalized structure is determined. Minsk-2 had called for dialogue with the representatives of these rebellious eastern territories en route to elections and establishment of broad autonomy for the region.
Instead, reflecting Nuland’s hard-line position, Kiev refused to talks with rebel leaders and insisted on establishing control over these territories before the process can move forward. If the legislation stands, the result will almost surely be a resumption of war between military forces backed by nuclear-armed Russia and the United States, a very dangerous development for the world. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s Poison Pill for Peace Talks.”]
Not only will the Ukrainian civil war resume but so will the Cold War between Washington and Moscow with lots of money to be made by the Military-Industrial Complex. On Friday, Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan, drove home that latter point in the neocon Washington Post.
The Payoff
But don’t think that this unlocking of the U.S. taxpayers’ wallets is just about this one couple. There will be plenty of money to be made by other neocon think-tankers all around Washington, including Frederick Kagan, who works for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and his wife, Kimberly, who runs her own think tank, the Institute for the Study of War [ISW].
According to ISW’s annual reports, its original supporters were mostly right-wing foundations, such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, but it was later backed by a host of national security contractors, including major ones like General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and CACI, as well as lesser-known firms such as DynCorp International, which provided training for Afghan police, and Palantir, a technology company founded with the backing of the CIA’s venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir supplied software to U.S. military intelligence in Afghanistan.
Since its founding in 2007, ISW has focused mostly on wars in the Middle East, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, including closely cooperating with Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded U.S. forces in those countries. However, more recently, ISW has begun reporting extensively on the civil war in Ukraine. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons Guided Petraeus on Afghan War.”]
In other words, the Family Kagan has almost a self-perpetuating, circular business model – working the inside-corridors of government power to stimulate wars while simultaneously influencing the public debate through think-tank reports and op-ed columns in favor of more military spending – and then collecting grants and other funding from thankful military contractors.
To be fair, the Nuland-Kagan mom-and-pop shop is really only a microcosm of how the Military-Industrial Complex has worked for decades: think-tank analysts generate the reasons for military spending, the government bureaucrats implement the necessary war policies, and the military contractors make lots of money before kicking back some to the think tanks — so the bloody but profitable cycle can spin again.
The only thing that makes the Nuland-Kagan operation special perhaps is that the whole process is all in the family.
~ Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

 

 

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Chomsky Speaks: Resistance to the Vietnam War - The history the Pentagon does not want you to know or remember When: Saturday, March 28, 2015, 10:00 am to 4:30 pm Where: MIT, Stata Center • 32 Vassar Street • 32-141 (AM) and 32-123 (PM) • Cambridge People's History of the Vietnam War Teach-In: Resistance to the Vietnam War The history the Pentagon does not want you to know or remember on the 50th anniversary of the 1965 teach-ins on the Vietnam War featuring Noam Chomsky, Louise Bruyn, Carl Davidson and other resisters Registration fee: $5 in advance, $10 at the door.  Register here: http://vietnam-teachin.bpt.me/ Voices from the Movement to End the Vietnam War - Speaking out Then and Now A People's History - covering Draft Resistance, Resistance within the Military, a Vietnamese Perspective, SDS, Agent Orange, Vietnam today, building a movement, persevering and working for peace, justice and social change 10 AM Panels/Discussions in 32-141 History of the Vietnam War - Four Perspectives Paul Shannon is a staff member of the American Friends Service Committee and helps coordinate the Budget for All project. During the war he participated in numerous anti-war mobilizations including the Daily Death Toll project, the Committee to Free Saigon’s political prisoners, the Indochina Peace Campaign, and the peoples Blockade Committee. For 20 years he was the Editor of the Indochina Newsletter. Carl Davidson was twice elected to SDS national leadership--as Vice-President in 1966-67 and as National Inter-Organizational Secretary in 1967-68. After that, he worked at the Guardian as a staff writer, news editors, and the paper's representative to several national antiwar coalitions. More recently, he was a steering committee member on United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and local peace groups in Chicago and Pittsburgh. He is a national co-chair of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and a member of USW Local 3657. Louise Bruyn, author, She Walked For All Of Us.  "Someone ought to walk to Washington to tell the government to stop to stop this war!"  Louise Bruyn did just that in 1971.  She walked from Newton, Massachusetts to the Capitol in Washington, where then-Senator Edward Kennedy and then-Rep. Father Robert Drinan met her on the steps.  Forty years later, she published a book based on her diary. Nguyen Ba Cheung, Association of Vietnamese Patriots Wayne Smith, Vietnam Veteranwho since 1976 has played a leading role in efforts for normalization of relations with Vietnam, justice for veterans, and peace. Pat Hynes, Traprock Center for Peace and Justice in Western Mass, is a retired environmental engineer and Professor of Environmental Health who worked on multi-racial and low-income issues of the urban environment (including lead poisoning, asthma and the indoor environment, safe housing, community gardens and urban agriculture); environmental justice; and feminism at Boston University School of Public Health.  She recently conducted an investigation of the ongoing legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam and has created the Vietnam Peace Village Project to support scholarships for 3rd and 4th generation Agent Orange victims. Poems with Doug Rawlings from Veterans For Peace (VFP poet of the year!) Lunch Break - 12:30 - 1:30 - Lunch places are nearby or you can bring your own, food is not provided by the organizers! 2:30 PM  Panel on Resistance to the Vietnam War in 32-123 Professor Noam Chomsky, MIT.  Noam Chomsky is one of the foremost public dissidents in the U.S. and has been for more than 50 years.  His books and articles criticizing U.S. policies are read around the world. John Bach - draft resistance.  In 1967 John Bach dropped out of college to lose his student deferment which he considered racist and classist.  He spent three years in federal prison which he views as three of the freest years of his life.  A very committed Quaker, he has tried to be faithful to that trajectory ever since. Susan Schnall - resistance within the military.  Susan Schnall was an active duty Navy nurse during the American conflict in Vietnam.  In 1969 she was tried and found guilty by general court martial for:  conduct unbecoming an officer for dropping anti war flyers over military bases in the San Francisco Bay area and wearing her uniform in the GI and Veterans March for Peace demonstration in San Francisco.  She has been active in the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Medical Aid for Indochina and the GI coffeehouses of the 1960s.  Susan Schnall is a member of the core of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign, Veterans for Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Judy Norsigian - linking in the Women's Movement of the era.  Judy Norsigian is a co-founder of Our Bodies Ourselves - the book that revolutionized women's health care. She is an internationally renowned speaker and author on a range of women's health concerns, her areas of focus include women and health care reform, abortion and contraception, childbirth (especially the role of midwifery), genetics and reproductive technologies, and drug and device safety. Anti war music of the time with Chris Nauman, a long time peace activist who lately has been leading standing room only Pete Seeger singalongs! Link to Resistance Documents of/about  the time:www.dropbox.com/s/d3jfoodnj9ztqmb/Resistance-Documents%20%281%29.pdf   Registration fee: $5 in advance, $10 at the door.  Register here: http://vietnam-teachin.bpt.me/ Sponsored by United for Justice with Peace Hosted by MIT Technology and Culture Forum Supported by Survival Education Fund  United for Justice with Peace is a coalition of peace and justice organizations and community peace groups in the Greater Boston region. The UJP Coalition, formed after September 11th, seeks global peace through social and economic justice. Help us continue to do this critical work! Make a donation to UJP today. info@justicewithpeace.org 617-383-4857 www.justicewithpeace.org Upcoming Events:  Facing the Ongoing Nakba Sun Mar 22 4:00pm First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain Jamaica Plain Fed Up with MBTA Budget & Service Cuts? There Is an Alternative! Tue Mar 24 7:30am North Station Boston People's History Teach In on the Vietnam War: the history the Pentagon does not want you to know or remember Sat Mar 28 10:00am MIT, Stata Center Cambridge The Wounds Within - Mark Nickerson (Author) and Kevin Lucey Sat Apr 4 3:00pm West Barnstable High School Hyannis Rebuild our Urban Economy! Peace & Planet Tue Apr 7 7:00pm First Church in Cambridge Cambridge Tax Day: A Time to Speak up for our Values Sat Apr 11 12:30pm Old South Church Boston Vocal Chamber Music in Times of War and Peace Sat Apr 11 7:30pm Harvard-Epworth Methodist Church Cambridge Peace & Planet International Conference Fri Apr 24 6:00pm Cooper Union New York City More Peace and Justice Events.    How to Submit Events

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A Good Day at BIW (Bath Iron Works)                                                   

Hee Eun Park (Silver) with message from Jeju Island at BIW today. (Photo by the Pizza King)

• Just over 50 folks turned out today for the weekly Lenten season vigil at Bath Iron Works (BIW).  Thanks to Lisa Savage and CodePink Maine for bringing a big bus load of people from Portland and Brunswick to the event.  Lisa created and led a great skit that is being put onto YouTube as I write this.  It was cold and wet on this new spring day.  Maureen Kehoe-Ostensen with the Smilin' Trees Disarmament Farm in Hope, Maine reminded us that this is now spring, even if it doesn't yet feel like it, and that under the ground were bulbs and other plants just waiting to emerge.  She said we should remember our vigils are also the seed.  Maureen invited the assembled to join the two remaining Lenten vigils at BIW on the next two Saturday's starting at 11:30 am.

• Hee Eun Park (nicknamed Silver) spoke to many shipyard workers at 11:55 am as the noon shift change was in motion.  Hundreds were lined up in the cold to be released from inside the gates at the yard when the horn blasted.  A few were yelling at us - things like "I love war!" with a few hoots and howlers joining that chorus.  But the majority were respectful and listened to Silver's words blaring from our fragile sound system that luckily in this moment did transmit the message.  Silver told the workers that the people on Jeju Island loved them.  She cried when she said the people just don't want war - they had already long suffered during the 4-3 (April 3) massacres that led to the killing of more than 30,000 on Jeju under the full direction of the US military. 
• The US took over Korea after the Japanese Imperial Army was defeated at the end of WWII.  Sadly, the US replaced the Japanese fascists with Japan's former Korean collaborators - thus nothing really changed for the people.  The peasants on Jeju Island resisted and were brutally brought into submission.  For many years the 4-3 massacre was a forbidden topic in South Korea under the series of US puppets who ran the country.  (If you watch closely you see the same thing happening in Ukraine today.  Same arrogant bullying to grab money, resources and lands for military bases).  These conflicts inside Korea ultimately helped create the Korean War that was all about the US and Europe imposing their control of the region for continued economic exploitation.

• The inclusion of the voices from Jeju Island at the BIW today's event changed everyone in some way.  The important question of 'Where do these warships go?' was made real after hearing from Paco Michelson and Silver who are now on a national tour to tell the Jeju story.  I felt a shift in the people at the protest vigil.  I also felt that many of the workers are beginning to see that they must think about our foreign policy; they must think about the cost to the nation of having a militarized economy; their kids face a severe future with climate change and they should be actively doing something like speaking out to say "We want to build rail, wind turbines, tidal power, and solar - we must do it now if they will have any chance to survive on our Mother Earth!"  Where else except the nearly $1 trillion Pentagon-NSA-CIA budget will the $$$$ come from to make the kind of conversion of our war economy that is needed for survival?

• We are trying to get the community to recognize that we need to move toward 'Plan B' now while there is still a chance.  Sadly, those with power and authority have their ears closed and their hearts darkened.  They huddle over their "New World Order" once forecasted, I heard, by Adolph Hitler. 

• We can't just think of ourselves all the time - this every man for himself individualism is a huge part of the disease.  Silver reminded us about the need and value of community - such a love, respect and deep spiritual connection to your village, your land, the sea, all life engulfing - which Gangjeong villagers have manifested for more than 500 years.  We are fighting they say - every single day (and many nights) for the past eight years.  The people in Gangjeong village are crying out to the world to understand their struggle.  It is the same struggle everywhere.  
• Jeju and Bath are connected - sadly by US Navy destroyers.  So let's have a real 'sister city' relationship.  Maybe we should approach Bath City Hall with a letter from Gangjeong village requesting sister city status.  The Jeju folks could explain about the soft coral forests just offshore that are being killed by dredging for the coming US warships.  Maybe the local newspaper (which ignored our attempts to put an announcement in the paper about the vigil) should print the Gangjeong letter?  We could try to hand the letter out at future vigils at BIW.
• Folks in Bath understand the sea - the Navy dredges the Kennebeck River so they can get their destroyers out to the ocean.  Jeju and Bath have much in common - let's make it for something real! Anyone interested in that effort please let me know.  Maybe we could get letters from other cities around the world to Bath requesting they acknowledge the people on Jeju Island who are suffering because they must give up their lives and their culture so the US Navy can stick one more damn expensive and provocative warship down China's throat.