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Democracy: Love it or Leave it

By: Lynn Carol - 04/06/03

After steaming all weekend over the “Time for Unity,” here comes “War Won’t Be Won Quickly.” Please! It’s enough already. No-one worth his/her salt in a democracy should be assuming the job of keeping the people passive, let alone justifying war just because it is war. 

I am furious and all of us should be. At a time when the Coalition of the Killing is getting away with murder, and the press is “embed-ed” with the administration, we are told to be quiet and pray, to attend to the “unifying” words of the heretofore demonized Senator Daschle. An old trick, this is, and not a very good one, but Senator Daschle is as wrong in this instance as is our editor. 

Unquestioned compliance is the last thing we need now and is no proof of patriotism. On the contrary. To be actively anti-war is the purest way to “support the troops.” But we are told to shut up and let it happen simply because it IS happening, simply because, “Right or wrong . . . Bush has committed us to a course of action.” This is advice bordering on the obscene. Think about it. We are told to support this war, if not actually cheer for it, simply and utterly because our “president” has fired the first shot. So, if my son comes home and says he’s joined the Ku Klux Klan and is off to burn a cross or worse, it’s my duty to shut up and support him, “to tone down the rhetoric and set aside differences,” simply because the match has been struck, and he IS my son? I don’t think so. And the comparison is fair. Bush & Company have ordained themselves the Neo-Con Grand Wizards of Capitalism. They have all the power and the only podium. So it becomes our “duty” to follow their lead, to burn any cross, “bear any burden,” in the name of “democratic liberation?“ I don’t think so.

Most maddening of all are the platitudes. Prayer may help us to sleep at night, but the Good Lord operates through our hearts and minds and hands and we got ourselves into this mess and we‘re going to have to get ourselves out of it, hopefully by employing “the better angels of our nature.” Our newspapers actually CHEERED the decision to broadcast the Oscars as usual as a means of mass “distraction,” but we deserve no such escapes while others risk life and limb for our comforts and we would do better to rend our garments and wail to the heavens for forgiveness, if nothing else. It is a lie to say “we all want peace.” If it were true, we would have it, and our newspapers wouldn’t have to peddle the platitude. To burn the village to save it is plain crazy and to make the world safe for corporate consumerism by brute force under the false banner of democracy, is NOT democracy no matter how many times it’s repeated. If democracy was what we wanted for Iraq, we’d have “liberated” those wretched people from the monster in their midst long before now, and we NEVER would have allowed such horrific sanctions to strap them so desperately, so long. We could have, at any time in the past dozen years, even before then, even now, marched into that country with our arms full of American generosity, which we know how to do, if the citizens who “all want peace” would have given a damn. But we did not. So long as Iraq suffered in silence, we did not care, and again, the press is complicit in our sins of omission. Bombing hell out of Iraq now, for the sake of “democracy” is an hypocritical lie of the first order and enough to turn the stomach. So please, spare us the pretense. Because in fact, we do not “all want peace” - enough people, powerful people and frightened people, want war - want war very badly, and they’re getting it - and the rest of us, too, in the heart and the pocketbook, with the help of the press. 

The distressed faces of two army pilots are captured on the front pages of  newspapers. Faces of our national shame; yet pride and hope, prominently displayed - for what? More silent prayer? Or to incite us? To what? To kill the enemy with even greater vengeance? To stop the war before more faces are captured? Too many, people would accomplish the latter by applying the former. I cannot agree. And I wonder, also, about the Rumsfeldian sanity, in this era of terrorism, of withholding an active soldier’s identity while flaunting the captured ones. Strikes me as heartless propaganda, and damned dangerous, too. For what and for whom do these men suffer? Truth told, no answer we have at our disposal is good enough, no matter how many flags we wrap it in. And it’s only just begun. 

I protest this war for the sake of my only son who turned nineteen the day this war began, and for his dead father and for all the veterans who have paid and still pay for the insanity of war because we learned the hard way that our government, like all governments, is capable of criminal behavior and must be checked. A soldier is more than a uniform, and in the absence of a national draft, volunteer sacrifice is qualified. Today’s soldiers decided to risk battle for military benefits, albeit too many of them were economically desperate, and all of them will be neglected when they return home - as is evidenced in this administration’s hypocritical call to arms while cutting their benefits. But no worthy soldier will be shaken from duty or self-respect because the nation is not “unified” on the question of war. On the contrary. A soldier will act under duty for the same reason he or she will refuse to act when the cause is shown to be wrong: courage. Because just following orders is not good enough in war - and war should never, NEVER, be business as usual. 

American soldiers, contrary to popular opinion, do not work for the Pentagon and not (not quite yet) for the Commander in Chief, but for the people of this nation whose constitution they are pledged and placed to DEFEND. Our soldiers are DEMOCRATIC tough guys, remember? And if they can’t function FOR a democracy IN a democracy founded on dissent WHILE dissent is happening, then they aren’t tough enough, and we have badly failed in their training. 

George Bush may have “Hit the Trifecta” he bragged about even as the towers were crumbling, but Majority Rule is still subject to constraint in this country, and it is the duty of the people to keep government in check, and a soldier is just as responsible for good citizenship as anyone else. To brow-beat the public into compliance on the premise that dissent destroys morale is righteous rhetoric and an insult to our troops and only sets Americans to fighting with each other. 

A damned good case can be made that dissent is the only thing which has forestalled another terrorist attack in this country, but we’ll have to catch the “right” criminal in order to know. No soldier, at home and abroad, can escape public opinion - nor should they. To assure that they risk their lives, and take lives, only when all other recourse has been exhausted, and to stop war in its tracks when the cause is wrong, is the best means by which the people evidence support for the troops. Our news media surely knows that when the question is war, and when war is aggression, there is no “common ground” between the factions. In reality, no matter how clever the spin, this unnecessary “war” is but the opening gambit in an oily grab for power and world domination, waged in the name of our September dead. The anti-war movement was organized, in part, by families of those dead.

So let us not forget that the press - all major media - had to be dragged kicking and screaming even to cover the anti-war movement and still prefers to waste it‘s time and our patience bickering over the numbers, thereby avoiding the substance of opposition. It‘s been said that the first duty of the press is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, but in this time of trouble, what does it have to say? Not much, when it could have made all the difference, and no relentless calls for anything but war, now Victory. Even now, no major press publishes the Pax Americana (PNAC) blueprint which is the “fundamental” basis for this administration’s militant global domination and the REAL reason we are in Iraq; no headlines rage over the fraudulent evidence put forth for this war or the devious measures to insure it, nor the death merchants in all quarters who stand to profit from it; no bold banners call daily for an immediate, fair and honest investigation into the tragedies of September 11, 2001; no persistent editors demand the immediate end to executive secrecy, let alone war - and even in its penchant for paper-patriotism, the press has had hardly an opinionated word to say about the historical (and hysterical) tendencies of Americans to succumb to mob rule which is precisely why so many have fallen in line for this war, why so many law loving citizens yet believe that Iraq, with no evidence to support the case, was complicit in the 9-ll massacres. This alone, proves the point: our media is become a lazy conduit for political and corporate - and Pentagon propaganda, aka lies.  

All over the world, people are angry. Ignoring their anger while justifying our own, only increases the danger. Our news media says that those who oppose war “will point to the atrocities” as reason why we shouldn’t be fighting, and then he goes on to say this is exactly why we have to fight and win. And fight and win we will - what else? Victory was never in question or we wouldn’t have picked this fight. But they make no effort to explain that what WE call war, THEY call an invasive, aggressive, atrocity. In like manner, one nation’s prisoner of war, by our own precedent, is another nation’s enemy combatant and so - anything goes. How very shocking! 

Resistance by any means possible! The savages! What next? Will their babies start throwing rocks at our tanks! In such madness, who could have guessed the enemy would fight so hard for their homeland, would strike back? The peacemakers, that’s who. And we neither need nor deserve to be lectured or consoled on the realities of war. And shame on our media for using our opposition to war as excuse to cheer it on. As terrible as the war itself, here in the homeland, is the continuing and pompous justification for it. It would be better by far if those who want war so badly were required, at least, to preach from the front lines instead of crowing at home, exploiting the concerns of the peace makers as means to their atrocious, “victorious” ends. 

It is irresponsible to support a cause simply because it’s become a military cause - in fact, a “Cause Celebre.” The job is to stop it, to employ democratic means, even unto impeachment, to remove this unqualified usurper and his neo-con manipulators before they are born again - and to implement methods to improve conditions on this ravaged planet without death and destruction. We‘re bright people, made in God‘s image and granted free will, and it’s high time we employed our God-given brains beyond our might to resolve the injustices which are at the core of all earthly disputes. The angriest person, let alone nation, is only stilled, if ever he is, by the recognition that his anger, his cause, is worthy of hearing if not respect and change. We don’t like to hear this. We like to believe the world so loves corporate capitalism that it will bow down and thank us for forcing our way of life unto them, but even as the angry one is standing in his new Nikes, sipping his Coke, watching the girls go by in the mall, don’t kid yourself. He is hating our guts for tricking him, for beating him out of his own. And the danger will incubate even as we proclaim victory. For the wretched of the world have two resources the complacent will never have, long memories and bitter patience, and nothing but justice will ever turn those things to good. And prosecuting the wrong victim for the wrong crime is a greater crime - and a sin against God and the innocents, not to mention the enemy, real and imagined.

No, this is not the “Time for Unity” as our media defines it. This is the time for courageous voices and lots of them. This is the time for every editor of every peoples press to spare us the pabulum and paper-patriotism and give us the truth, uncensored and difficult though it be - and this yet includes a thorough exposure of the dangerous workings of this false administration. Democracy demands a formidable free press, a vigilant, vocal, and visible citizenry. If we don’t exercise our most basic rights and responsibilities now, all we’ll have left is violence and mass distraction. Then we might just as well praise the spurning Bush, pass the ammunition and teach our babies to shoot straight from the hip in the high chair because all they’ll inherit from us is perpetual war and freedom fries.

Lynn Carol, a contributing writer  for Liberal Slant, lives in Owatonna, Minn

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