Once again, Mcreynolds humanizes and deepens politics, acknowledges frailties, including his own, and touches, deeply. Thank you, David, and I hope it inspires and motivates your own considerations. I look forward to greeting some of you, tomorrow. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: David Mcreynolds To: b - IPPN Discussion ; a - SocialistsUnmoderated ; UFPJ Cc: Pelz Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 6:59 PM Subject: My friend the judge and Saturday's arrest
This evening I got an agitated call from an old friend, a judge here in New York City, someone who had once been in the Socialist Party. She had gotten a mailing from War Resisters League about a legal demonstration here in Manhattan this Saturday, March 19th, at the Times Square Recruiting Station, and the civil disobedience some of us will take part in. She was furious at the idea that we would stop people from exercising their right to get into the military recruiting station in Times Square. In her view this was an outrageous violation of an individual's freedom to enlist or to get information on enlisting. In passing, she deplored what was happening at Harvard with Larry Summers, as another example of the left gone wrong. I'm not sure what Harvard has to do with the recruiting station, but I assured her that while I thought Summers was an arrogant jerk, he certainly had a right to make his voice heard - in the same way that, in the recent fracas about Ward Churchill, I thought he was just as much an arrogant jerk as Summers, but both, one neo-conservative, and one a sham radical ,should have their rights respected. My friend said she thought we should all be arrested and jailed for life. I pointed out to her that, as a judge, she could hardly really believe this, since even the dreadful crime of blocking the Recruiting Station was a nonviolent offense, the penalties for which were prescribed by law, and that she, as a judge, needed to respect the limits of the law. Our discussion ended when I said I simply refused to be a good German, and thought the US was headed where Germany was in the 1930's - provocative comments that I know hardly persuaded her. But the discussion both reminded me not only of how raw some emotions have become in this troubled time, but how easily otherwise quite sensible people can forget just where the country is today. A week ago I'd gone to see Downfall , the German film about the final days of the Third Reich as seen from Hitler's bunker in Berlin. The film was well done, it is worth seeing, and I remain haunted by it, and by the parallel to our own situation today. One of the most disturbing things about Downfall (and the thing which alarmed critics both in Germany and here) was that it showed Hitler as a man of charm and charisma as well as madness, a complex person, who inspired deep loyalty as well as fear. We want our villains to be stereotypes. We don't want them - particularly in the case of Hitler, who set such vast horror in motion - to have any endearing traits. This being the third year of the war in Iraq, it is becoming easier and easier to forget the basic fact that the United States and Great Britain violated international law and the Charter of the United Nations in launching a war of aggression - a war which is defined as a crime under the decisions of the Nuremburg Tribunal. A crime for which all of the key officials in the US and British governments should now be on trial. It is easy to forget that the toll of death for our own troops has now passed 1,500, or to ignore the nervous breakdowns the surviving troops are having, the increase in the suicide rate, the pain of those who survived but are missing parts of their bodies and perhaps of their souls. Easy to overlook that over 100,000 civilians in Iraq have been killed. Easy to grow accustomed to the charges of torture and murder at the hands of US interrogating officials in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Iraq. Easy to forget that all the reasons given for the war proved to be lies. Easy to forget the one absolute fact - we are there for the oil, not for free elections. Easy to forget that the cost of the war is now running to about 300 billion dollars - at a time when we face cut backs to health care, human services, aid to the poor, proper funding for fire and police, and, of course, social security. These thoughts take me back to Downfall and the question of why the Germans went along with Hitler. Of course a great many Germans did not - one of the painfully brutal ironies of history is that Berlin, which had never been a Nazi stronghold, suffered so badly from the bombing. It is true many Germans did not know what was happening to the Jews. We can say "they should have", but the fact is they didn't. (How many Americans were aware of the number of Muslims arrested and held in secret in this country after 9.11?) I suspect most Germans didn't give deep thought to the policies of Hitler until the death count on the Eastern front became so staggering. Hitler, the Holocaust, the Nazis - all of this is, for young people, so very long ago. Sixty years ago. It is as if, when I was entering political life in the 1950's, people were making a great fuss about events in 1890. It is that distant from the here and now. And what does this have to do with why I'll join those being arrested on Saturday? It is because, as the late Bayard Rustin said, one must put one's body into the machinery of the state so it cannot turn. Only by such nonviolent, peaceful actions - actions undertaken without hatred of the police - that we can hope to get our friends (in my case, my old friend the judge) to ponder why we are so foolish, in our old age, as to get arrested. Most people care as little about politics as I do about sports. I'm not proud of this deficit on my part - it is simply a fact of my nature. I take the sports section out of the New York Times first, look at the weather report which is usually on its back page, and put it aside. I rarely know whether it is the season for football, baseball, or basketball. I am aware that if I can "blank out" the sports news on TV, as if it were a mysteriously vacant space in time, most people are equally able to blank out political news. Most people tend to trust the President. After all, shouldn't he know best? And surely he knows more than we do. During the Vietnam War, which is now a generation in the past, it was only as the body bags began to come home that ordinary working people thought about the war. Those of us who are intellectuals, political people, never grasp this. We assume that under Stalin all the Soviet citizens lived in fear. Nonsense. Most of them got up in the morning to get to work, ate their lunch, chatted with co-workers about sports or sex,, got home at the end of the day to drink, make love, or fall asleep. They did not live in terror. Nor did most Germans think about Hitler and the Nazis until the bombs fell. Falling bombs are, for many, a kind of alarm clock, reminding them it is perhaps time to wake up. Those of us on the left tend to think that under Joe McCarhty all of America lived in fear - nonsense. The only people who even knew we were deep in a period of hysterical anti-Communism were those of us on the left, who were either fearful because we were Communists, or angry that anyone would think that we, good "anti-Communist radicals", were thought to be Communists. I remember the period very well. I thought at the time things would just get worse and we would drift into a police state. But things didn't get worse, the clouds lifted. So I can hope things improve in the here and now - with a little help from some of us. If I had been an African American during the 1940's I might have assumed things would never change. Yet we were on the edge of change. (And let us realize that most of the whites in the Deep South gave no more thought to the daily horrors of Jim Crow than most Germans gave to the plight of the Jews . . . it was not until December, 1955, that the white South began to stir, and then only because the Black South had begun to stir). I put little stock in getting arrested. I've been arrested more than a dozen times and it hasn't seemed to change things much. I think "everyone should be arrested once", if only to realize how little good it does, that it is only one more tactic, no so different from the silent vigils the Quakers organize, or the strikes the trade unions call, or the electoral efforts to which we give ourselves every two years, or the study groups we organize, or the simple fact of trying to be a good parent or a good teacher. Nothing much will change the world, only little by little, drop by drop, is the world changed. But if you are in New York City, join us Saturday the 19th at 10:30 a.m.at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza (47th St. between First and Second Avenues). We will march with coffins in a solemn procession to Times Square to the Recruiting station. At noon some will stand to observe, and some will submit to civil disobedience. We will carry no weapons. We will damage no property. We will use no physical violence nor verbal abuse toward any person. Our attitude will be one of openness and respect toward each person we encounter, including the police. We know that the "enemy" is not the military - it is the institution of war itself, which has trapped good men and women. And in my view, as a socialist, it is also the system of capitalism which helps to breed war. We know that while the war in Iraq is a crime, the men and women in the armed forces are caught up by slogans, directed by leaders, acting on a trust that has been betrayed. We reach out to them. And may my friend of many years, the good judge in Manhattan, consider that the key issue is not the precise way in which resistance is shown, but the fact it is shown. Sooner rather than later. Now, not when the risk becomes too great. David McReynolds (for full info go to: www.warresisters.org or call the WRL at 212 / 228.0450) *** So...to recap: Neocon warlord Paul Wolfowitz will head the World Bank; The White House illegally puts out fake news reports, and the Justice Department does nothing; Another $81 billion of your money and mine is to be poured onto the Iraqi sand; The GOP majority in Congress is preparing to trash 200 years of Senate tradition in order to post a number of certifiably insane people to the bench; Kevin Martin, a conservative Christian activist for the GOP, will now chair the FCC; The Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, one of the most ecologically pristine areas remaining to us, will be paved and drilled for its tiny amount of petroleum. And that was just yesterday. Will Pitt *** MARCH 19 PROTEST IN LA - PEOPLE'S FREE SPEECH VICTORY Join thousands this Sat in LA to protest the war in Iraq and the Bush attack! WHEN: Sat, March 19, 12 noon WHERE: Hollywood & Vine (march to Hollywood & Highland) Momentum for the March 19 Global Day of Action protest in LA is growing every day! Today, in a free speech victory for the people's anti-war movement, the Los Angeles Police Commission was forced to grant a permit for the March 19 protest in LA. Last week, the ANSWER Coalition received a permit to for the protest. Succumbing to pressure from big business interests in Hollywood, the Los Angeles Police Commission unlawfully rescinded ANSWER's permit yesterday. This was a blatant violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It was an attack on our right to free speech. The LA Police Commission today reversed its unlawful denial and granted the permit to march. This was after the National Lawyers Guild promised to file a lawsuit against the Police Commission and the ANSWER Coalition called a press conference in front of LAPD headquarters. Jim Lafferty, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild, Los Angeles, said, "The Police Commission's reasons for yesterday's permit denial amounted to nothing more than pandering to commercial interests at the expense of the First Amendment right to free expression. Every year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Disney and other private commercial entities are given free and full permission to close and use the same area sought to be used by the ANSWER Coalition. The streets are closed for a much longer period of time than requested for this Saturday's anti-war march and rally." Big business interests want to take away the right of the anti-war movement and the people to demonstrate in Hollywood. The people won't stand for this. We fought for and won the right to protest on March 19 and we'll continue fighting for our rights against right-wing attacks and corporate greed. The more people who come out into the streets of LA this Saturday, the stronger our message will be to the warmakers and all those attempting to erode our hard-won rights. All out for March 19! No to war and occupation! Defend the right to free speech! ANSWER Coalition-Los Angeles Act Now to Stop War & End Racism 323-464-1636 http://www.answerla.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Help save the life of a child. 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