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A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 12, 2001
Robert Jensen
Goodbye to
All That...
Patriotism
Nancy
Oden
My
Day at the Airport
CounterPunch Wire
East Timor
10 Years
After the Massacre
C.G. Estabrook
Instead
of Terror
Alexander Cockburn
Wide World
of Torture
November 11, 2001
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland
Insecurity: The Politics of Terror in America
November 10, 2001
Grover Furr
Seeking an Opposition
to the Afghan War
Bruce
Kyle
Anatomy
of a Green Smear:
Backstabbing Nancy Oden
November 9, 2001
Karen Snell
Torture By
Proxy
John Troyer
A
New Kind of Activism
Tariq Ali
Q &
A About the War
Michael
Colby
Schoolgirl
Gets Booted
for Anti-war Views
November 8, 2001
Mokhiber/Weissman
The
Cipro Rip-Off
Mitchel Cohen
The Smear Campaign
Against Nancy Oden
Steve
Perry
American
Roulette
November 7, 2001
Bahour/Dahan
Placebo Peace
Plan
Tom Turnipseed
Bush
Gives Billions
to His Oil Buddies
Cockburn/St. Clair
Greens, Airports
and
National ID Cards
Dr. Susan
Block
Ayatollah
Asscroft
Brian J. Foley
Bombing Campaign
Not "Self-Defense" Under International Law
November 6, 2001
Mark Scaramella
Where's
That Red Cross Money Going
C.G. Estabrook
Our Torturers
Sheperd
Bliss
Scott
Nearing on War
Rep. Ron Paul
Underwriting
the Taliban
Tariq
Ali
The
General Who
Came to Dinner
Evan Ravitz
Stop the War
Through
Direct Democracy
Steve
Perry
Hunger
in Afghanistan
November 5, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
Living
in the Minefields
David Price
Terror
and Indigenous People
November 3, 2001
Declan McCullagh
Nancy Oden Interview
Daniel
Wolff
The
Memphis Blues Again
Mark Weisbrot
War on Civilians
Dave Marsh
How
the RIAA (and the FBI) Cheat Musicians
Robert Jensen
Speaking
Out Against
War on Campus
November 2, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Green
Party Leader Detained at Maine Airport; Prevented from Boarding
Any Plane
Alexander Cockburn
FBI Eyes
Torture
November 1, 2001
Dean Baker
Dying
for Patents
Sami Amarah
US Attempts
to Recruit
Russian Vets of Afghan War
Molly Secours
Where
Are the Voices of Reason? Let the Women
Be Heard
William Blum
Unleashing the
CIA
October 31, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
Terrorize
the Poor,
Subsidize the Rich
Chris Clarke
Thank God
for Berkeley
Steve
Perry
The
Silent Genocide
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
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The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
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November
12, 2001
Veterans Day, 2001
By Peter P. Mahoney
November 11. Most people would probably think
of this date as the two-month anniversary of "the day that
changed everything". It is also Veterans Day. It used
to be called Armistice Day, celebrating the end of World War
I, the "war to end all wars". Funny how these pronouncements
can seem so foolish over time.
I have always had somewhat conflicted
feelings about Veterans Day. I am a veteran, a veteran of Vietnam.
I had volunteered to fight in that war, full of youthful exuberance
and patriotic machismo. My grandfathers had fought in World
War I, my father fought in World War II. Vietnam was my war.
It was a no-brainer.
I came home from Vietnam, physically
whole, thank God, but spiritually changed forever. In war, all
wounds do not pierce the skin. My patriotism had been spent
like chump change in a penny arcade, wasted on a futile effort
in a dirty war where survival was the only measure of success.
My first Veterans Day back from Vietnam, I was arrested for
the first time in my life. I was arrested for trying to march
in the Veterans Day parade under a banner that said Vietnam Veterans
Against the War. Perhaps you can see where my ambivalence towards
the day derives.
Veterans Day is a day that few notice
and fewer celebrate. It is usually left to the pigeon-breasted
politicians looking to score a few patriotic brownie points,
and to the veterans themselves, who typically use the occasion
to play the traditional role that society assigns to them--that
of cheerleaders for the next war. I, for one, have never deigned
to pick up the pom-poms.
A friend of mine recently asked me what
I thought about this "new war". It reminds me rather
much of the old, cold one. It is not a war against a state,
it's a war against an "ism". These are much more preferable
for the politicians, allowing for sweeping rhetorical flourishes
about "fighting against evil" and "defending our
way of life." Everything, however, remains conveniently
amorphous, undefined. Nobody knows what "victory"
means, or when it will be achieved, if ever. I hate to sound
cynical, but I rather suspect that the "war on terrorism"
will extend at least through the next presidential election.
Don't think George W. didn't learn a thing or two from his father.
Don't want these wars to end too soon, and lose the popularity
spike before it can do you any political good.
We have our "grand coalition"
going, fragile as it may be. Of course, as in the Cold War,
the coalition contains a number of unsavory governments and characters
(the enemy of my enemy...). Given the fact that during the war
on communism, the US managed to count among its allies some of
the most totalitarian regimes and brutish louts of the latter
half of the 20th century -- among them, of course, old Osama
himself -- one wonders which of our current "grand coalition"
partners will become the next international boogieman. Our former
allies are now are enemies, and our former enemies are now are
allies, in an Orwellian merry-go-round where the only constant
is the shedding of blood.
Of course, the lies have started. Why
would anyone think otherwise? In war, truth is the first casualty.
What is truly astonishing is how easily people seem willing
to believe them. How could anyone my age--who lived through
Johnson's Vietnam, Nixon's Watergate, Reagan's Iran-Contra, Clinton's
sex life--take any assertion by the government at face value?
And these are only examples of the lies we caught them in.
What are the lies of the "war on terrorism"? We have
found out the first little one--that there was no "credible
evidence" that Air Force One was a target of the terrorists.
That was just a little public relations spin, so that Bush's
erratic flight around the US in the first hours after the terrorist
attacks wouldn't look so unpresidential. One wonders, of course,
what the big lies are.
The national media, as usual, have suspended
their skepticism in favor of playing the role of propaganda ministry
for the government. One wishes they would apply their mantra
"This report could not be independently verified" to
the Pentagon spokesman as well as the Taliban spokesman. "The
war is going well, the war is going according to plan."
This report could not be independently verified.
The bombing of Afghanistan is not a just
war; it is just another war. It is yet another act of terror
against the people of the world. Each innocent person that is
killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll
of civilians who died in New York and Washington. It is a classic
confirmation of the essential lesson I learned in Vietnam: that
soldiers are required to do their jobs because politicians fail
to do theirs. Make no mistake, the war on terrorism is the desperate
act of politicians who failed miserably in the leadership responsibilities
to those who elected them, and who, by the very act of starting
the war, have failed us even again.
Conveniently lost in the post-catastrophe
patriotic orgy orchestrated by the government is the fact that
this happened because of the government's utter failure to protect
its citizens. Consider this: one of the terrorists was apparently
on the FBI's "watch list". This man was flying in
and out of the country, sometimes with an expired visa, having
meetings with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague, visiting
jailed terrorists in Spain, and all the while taking pilot lessons
in Florida. And nobody noticed? It was a "failure of bureaucracy"
they tell us. And their response? Create more bureaucracy to
watch over the other bureaucracies.
It takes no deep thinker to recognize
that the ham-handed retaliation our government is engaged in
is precisely the reaction the terrorists were trying to provoke.
They want a holy war between Islam and the West, and by God,
we will help them recruit their forces. The war on terrorism
will do nothing except create more terrorists, and the tragedy
we have just experienced will pale in comparison to the tragedy
before us.
All this will be branded by some as "unpatriotic".
I beg to differ. This is my patriotism. With all due respect
to some of my well-meaning neighbors, my patriotism is more meaningful,
more appropriate than the mindless flapping of ragged American
flags from the antennae of SUVs and pick-up trucks. In a democracy,
dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
This Veterans Day, I will think of my
friend Sasha. I first met Sasha when I went to the then Soviet
Union in 1988 as part of a delegation of Vietnam veterans to
meet with Soviet Afghanistan veterans--Afghantsi, they called
themselves. I remember the first few moments when we met at
the airport in Moscow. Everything was a bit awkward and formal,
neither side knowing quite what to do. Then one Afghantsi--his
eyes blazing with the look I knew all too well--suddenly pulled
up his shirt to show several bullet wounds. "You see these,"
he said fiercely, "These bullets were fired from an America-made
M-16." One of the Vietnam veterans who accompanied me quickly
pulled up his shirt. "You see these," he said, "These
bullets were fired by a Soviet-made AK-47." The two men
stared at one another briefly, then fell in each other's arms
and wept.
I remember standing in a frigid wind-swept
Moscow park , my arm around Sasha, in front of a peculiarly irregular
boulder, standing on end with a plaque on it. This was the Afghantsi
Memorial, put up by the Afghantsi themselves when the Soviet
government failed to honor their request for a government sponsored
memorial. There was a large group there -- Afghantsi and Vietnamsi--and
the former soldiers each took turns speaking from the heart.
The message from all was the same: We must honor those who
died, we must take care of those who survived. We must promise
to each other that our sons will never go through what we did.
Empty words, it seems. The sons of the
Afghantsi are now dying in Chechnya, and the children of the
Vietnamsi are soon to be Afghantsi. Yet it is the one idea I
still find worth fighting for.
The most relevant way to celebrate Veterans
Day is to fight to make it irrelevant.
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