Tag: 9/11/2001

Forget Me Not

 

Saturday, November 11, is Veterans Day, a day that an older generation remembered as Armistice Day from its origins in World War I. Not really a celebratory holiday like Thanksgiving Day later in the month, and a little more than a historical marker like Columbus Day several weeks before, in October, Veterans Day has become a day for honoring the service of veterans, living and dead, in war and peace, in the front lines and in the rear echelon. For all that, the day means different things to different people.

 

Public Reactions, The March on the Pentagon - NARA - 192602
Veterans for Peace contingent in anti-war March on the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., 21 October 1967. Photo by White House photographer Frank Wolfe.

In the last twenty-five years or so, and especially after 9/11 and the endless wars it spawned, Veterans Day seems to have become a way for civilians who never served to either express gratitude honestly to veterans or to salve their own guilt by obsequiously expressing gratitude. None of that is necessary. More and more stores and restaurants offer discounts on merchandise or free meals to veterans or active duty military on Veterans Day, as well as other times of the year. Those are nice, well-meaning gestures, and are no doubt helpful to down on their luck veterans, but overall they are yet another sign of the American citizenry kowtowing to military culture, an inclination dangerous to liberty.

Fifty years ago at about this time of year, in Washington, D.C., tens of thousands of demonstrators marched on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. It was the beginning of the flower power non-violent movement against the war and the glorification of military power and its culture. Among the marchers were Veterans for Peace and members of the Lincoln Brigade who volunteered to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Forty years later, in Seattle in October 2007, there was another march against another war, again including a contingent from Veterans for Peace. The scale of that march was far smaller than the one in Washington, D.C., in 1967. Ten years further on, in November 2017, there is hardly anything to be heard in the land but “Thank you for your service.”

 

27 Oct 2007 Seattle Demo - Vets for Peace 02
Veterans for Peace contingent in anti-war march, Seattle, Washington, 27 October 2007. Photo by Joe Mabel.

The wars haven’t stopped; peace hasn’t broken out. Meanwhile, citizens choose to get upset over some football players and others kneeling during the National Anthem in protest against police brutality toward minorities, though what a lot of those citizens are really upset about is their misconstruing of the protests as being against the Anthem, the Flag, and members of the Armed Services, something that was strongly suggested to them by Supreme Leader. NFL owners and administrators are upset that customers are turning against their product on account of the protests, the top administrator of the league saying that fans don’t pay to see protests.

True, but can the NFL have it both ways? The NFL has for years wrapped itself in the Flag, put the Anthem front and center as part of each game’s introductory ceremony, and had a nearly symbiotic relationship with the Armed Services, including military color guards and fighter jet fly overs as part of its pageantry. All the patriotic trappings were good for marketing to its clientele, some of whom enjoy a good jolt of jingoism with their spectator sports. The NFL owners and administrators neglected to clamp down on players’ personal, political displays in contract negotiations with the players’ union, however, and now they are caught in a bind between some of their more principled players and the sunshine patriot fans angry that plantation politics is intruding on their football fun.

 

It’s a certainty the military/NFL partnership will be on full display at the games this Veterans Day weekend. Some of those same fans who howl with hatred at the players kneeling to express concern about the abuse of human rights in this country will quite likely take time to say “Thank you for your service” to someone in uniform or to a veteran. It probably won’t occur to the fans to examine any of that. It’s why the football stadiums are often filled to capacity, now more than ever, but not many folks are interested in marching in the streets against war, injustice, and the brutality of establishment enforcers. Hardly anyone understands placing flowers in rifle barrels anymore, but most everyone can say “Thank you for your service”, and without needing to understand it very well at all.
― Vita

Coccinella on Myosotis
Ladybird beetle perched on Forget-Me-Nots. Photo by Yvette Thiesen.

 

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Busybodies

 

Almost lost amid the furor over the current president’s mishandling of a condolence call to the widow of a serviceman killed in action in Niger was the news that the United States has a military presence in that country. Even some Congress members charged with oversight of the military were surprised at the news that there are as many as 1,000 soldiers in Niger. American soldiers have been in Niger for over a decade, and that really shouldn’t be surprising considering how in the chaotic rush after 9/11 Congress gave the president and the military carte blanche to conduct operations around the world.

Congress ceded its authority to declare war to the executive branch, but who gave Congress the authority to do that? The Constitution clearly vests Congress with the power to declare war, and there is no exception to the rule, such as states of emergency. But Congress has given up its authority, and it is the citizenry that has let them get away with it. The only reason the executive branch still defers to Congress in some degree over military matters is because Congress retains the power of the purse. That power amounts to a formality, however, since Congress would never seriously consider withholding funding from the Pentagon.
Ongoing conflicts around the world
Ongoing conflicts around the world as of 2012. In one way or another, the United States has involved itself in most of these places. Map by Futuretrillionaire.

Burgundy: Major wars, 10,000+ deaths in current or past calendar year.
Red: Wars, 1,000–9,999 deaths in current or past calendar year.
Orange: Minor conflicts, 100-999 deaths in current or past calendar year.
Yellow: Skirmishes, fewer than 100 deaths in current or past calendar year.

What Congress is left with is oversight of military operations by way of the budget. After the recent operation in Niger left four American soldiers dead, it appears Congress, or at least some of its members, have lost sight of even that last shred of responsibility for the worldwide entanglements of the American empire. Since Congress, the branch of government most directly accountable to the people, can’t or won’t control the executive branch’s will to meddle in numerous countries, it is up to the people to take a greater interest in national affairs.
World Income Gini Map (2013)
World map of the Gini coefficient of income inequality in 2013. Dark green countries have the least inequality, and dark red countries have the greatest inequality. Map by Araz16.

The idea of representative government was to free up the people to go about their business, while their elected representatives more or less did their bidding in the councils of government. It no longer happens that way since corporate money has completely bought off elected officials. Now the people sign off on electing officials and then neglect their oversight duties. Meanwhile, between elections, the officials do the bidding of their corporate sponsors with little regard for the wishes of their constituents. Amazingly, the constituents as often as not re-elect the officials who are no longer responsive to them.

Why doesn’t Congress do more to rein in America’s overseas adventurism? That’s a question better asked of ourselves. By getting involved in local politics and by instituting some form of mandatory national service for all citizens, people can bring back the democracy part of this democratic republic. Until then, elected representatives have no reason to act on behalf of the people who elected them, because those people show up only for elections, and other than that they don’t want to be bothered and they pay little attention to what’s going on in government. It shouldn’t be surprising then that Congress members neglect the activities of the executive branch as it pursues the duties of empire, because they learned abdication of responsibility from the citizens who elected them.
― Ed.

 

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The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost

 

It’s hard not to notice the impact of the national security state in daily life, particularly for people who travel regularly or pay attention to news stories. Pat downs and x-rays at the airport, police road blocks with DNA swabs that are voluntary but are implied by the police to be mandatory, stop and frisk in minority neighborhoods, the shoot first and ask questions later garrison mentality of the police, SWAT team no-knock raids, and the nearly complete disregard by governmental authorities for citizens’ rights under Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable or warrantless search and seizure operations.

It may be hard to believe it is the citizens of the republic who allowed their agents in government to accumulate all that oppressive authority. People like to think government has a natural tendency to creep into citizens’ lives and to aggrandize itself at their expense, and that is true. What people often fail to acknowledge, especially in a nominally democratic republic such as the United States, is their own complicity in allowing the government to get away with it.

Fear can cause people to do some foolish things, and one of  them is relinquishing unchecked authority to government following a catastrophe, such as what happened after the events of 9/11/2001 in the United States. Save us! Kill them! The tendency of people to allow themselves to be stampeded toward war has long been noted by manipulators in government, industry, and the press, who have used it to their advantage. There is a long history in America of cynical manipulations toward war, but perhaps the most blatantly obvious occurred at the start of the Spanish-American War shortly before the turn of the twentieth century.


The citizenry are usually stirred to support these wars by patriotic fervor and by some wildly exaggerated stories in the popular press of atrocities supposedly committed by the new enemy. Most people tend not to take time away from their busy lives to examine things more closely and rationally. Remember the Alamo! Until thirty or forty years ago, except for the large scale conflicts of the Civil War and the two World Wars, Americans could largely go about their daily lives without reference to the far away battlefronts their leaders had stirred them up to support initially.


In the 1941 film Citizen Kane, Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher at the time of the Spanish-American War, throws a party to celebrate his hiring of the staff from a rival newspaper. His colleagues, played by Joseph Cotten as Jedediah Leland and Everett Sloane as Mr. Bernstein, provide commentary on the proceedings.

Superficially, that still seems to be the situation at home, where Americans can go shopping, while far away the world burns. Look more closely, however, and it becomes obvious that the so-called “War on Terror” is different than any other past war in that to a hitherto unprecedented degree it has allowed government to infiltrate lives at home as well as abroad in the name of security. The reasoning is that there is no “front”, as in a conventional war; the front is everywhere, and government must therefore defend everywhere, from flying drones over the huts of Afghani opium farmers to using the NSA to monitor the communications of American citizens.

 

Backscatter x-ray image woman
A 2007 image of Susan Hallowell, Director of the Transportation Security Administration’s research lab, taken with the backscatter x-ray system, in use for airport security passenger screening. This is not the image that screeners see at the airports. The machine that took this image does not have the privacy algorithm.

People line up for security checks at the airport, the majority of them probably unconcerned with the larger issues of government oppression and infringements on their liberty as long as they can get through with minimal hassle to themselves. But the hassles will only grow. Highway road blocks and intrusive police demands will only increase. The courts will continue upholding these practices and implicitly grant the authorities ever more leeway in pushing people around in the name of security. The way the American military occupiers treated the Filipinos in the early years of the twentieth century continues reverberating in unexpected ways, such as in how it informed our use of torture in the early twenty-first century; our treatment of various Latin American countries throughout the twentieth century haunts our relations there and here to this day; and at last the methods, materiel, and mindset of occupation we are deploying throughout the world today, and particularly in the Middle East, have come home to us, the fearful perpetrators of so much unnecessary violence. That’s Homeland Security.
― Vita

 

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