Peace Is Noisy

Peace depends upon justice and justice never walks quietly.

If you have no justice, you will have no peace.

Neither peace of mind, nor peace and quiet.

I’ve aways known myself to be a poet. I take an idea and I work it and work it and work it until it’s boiled down to nothing but bones. sometimes it seems like this pot has been boiling away in my head for thirty years or more. Sometimes it has. What remains is the simplest of the simple truths.

Peace Is Noisy.

You can have “peace and quiet” or you can have peace of mind. Do not confuse these similarly named beasts for each other for only one of them will carry you through every conversation faithfully. Only one will actually roll up it’s sleeves and get anything done. Peace and quiet only serve to hold the moment hostage and blame the victim for the violations. Peace and quiet in the face of the madness that is American politics is insane. I’m all for a dignified end but I will not go quietly as I watch the American dream die this death of a thousand cuts.

Here’s another one for you, liars always sound better than someone telling you the truth. Always. Try to keep that in mind as you read this.

America is a nation of immigrants. It’s real strength is in this very diversity. And for every person out there in the world advocating violence against America for its corruption, there are a thousand that say No! Our families are there and it is a place of freedom like no other. Unfortunately I think that perhaps they both have a truth they hold dear and close. Though I do not and never will agree with those that would do violence to further their political aims, I recognize the truth of what they are saying.

America the empire can not last much longer in this state. For most of my life the United States was aligned against the Soviet Union and it seemed to me that the world stood by and angrily watched us wage aggressive war by proxy in the poorest nations on earth. When this war ended and America declared itself the victor, we Americans missed several important facts. As Chalmers Johnson suggested on page 32 of his book “Blowback”, like two scorpions in a bottle, they [the Soviet Union and The American Empire] succeeded in stinging each other to death.”

We can not be the worlds shining hope and an empire at the same time.

With the recent release of even more secret documents through wikileaks we can see the vast beast wince.

The Obama administration now says it is considering taking criminal action against wikileaks. These are not the acts of one of the worlds greatest democracies. Great nations can handle the truth, empires cannot.

Great nations protect its whistle blowers, empires throw them to the lions. Why? Because great nations are built upon the truth and empires are built upon lies.

And now instead of embracing the accountability and transparency that wikileaks represents, we attack our own heroes. We attacked Daniel Ellsberg when he released documents during the Vietnam war as well. We were wrong as a nation then and we are wrong as a nation now. Bradley Manning is a hero, not a villain. Unless we’re an empire and then he’ll be wrongly vilified. But when I say that he’s a hero, that is not a narrative, it is a fact. Daniel Ellsberg saved our country and many other people and Bradley Manning is attempting to do the same. The only difference is this time the stakes are much higher. Losing this fight will mean losing our democracy.

Recently one of the American Empires most articulate critics passed from this earth. We will miss his clarity. Chalmers Johnson has left us with a final plea to “Dismantle The Empire” as the last best hope of a free America.

America has a choice; Worlds Great Democracy? or Empire? We can’t be both.

We must begin as a nation to see the opportunity that wikileaks presents to re-examine our society’s entrenchment with the military industrial complex and begin to dismantle America’s dependency upon war for our economic survival. The world will work with us on this and we can regain the moral high ground we once had. We will be more secure as a nation that values democracy and fairness among nations rather than an empire bent on world domination.

Wikileaks is actually making it easier to dismantle the empire which according to Chalmers Johnson is imperative to America’s remaining a free republic.

Chalmers Johnson suggests three reasons we should dismantle the empire or else watch it liquidate us:

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that “[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet.” a few days later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington D.C., the president again insisted, “Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the world.” And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22, Obama stressed that “[w]e will maintain America’s military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen.”

What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.

According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago’s Robert Pope, author of the important study Dying to Win; The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, typically writes:

America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American Hegemony.

There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:

Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on investment required to sustain them…He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases.

In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.

Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over eight hundred overblown military enclaves.

2. We Are Going To Lose The War In Afghanistan And It Will Help Bankrupt Us

According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story:

If Washington’s bureaucrats don’t remember the history of the region Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MIG’s and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980’s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the worlds sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States.

3. We Need To End The Secret Shame Of Our Empire Of Bases

In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, “Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing.” He continued:

New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults -2,923- and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them.

The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek by jowl next to civilian population and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GI’s has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan’s poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some sixty-four years ago.

Chalmers continues:

It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.

I know that Chalmers must have been en-heartened by whistle blowers who bravely have released secret US military documents through wikileaks. It is only through something like this, a massive truth telling, that we as a nation can go through the next to impossible task of willingly giving up our status as an empire and trading it for just being a great nation of earth. Our great hope is that we can prove that Americans are smart, brave and compassionate people who truly care what our country does to the rest of the world and would rather join it as a peer than as its wrongful master.

Any other course will quite certainly bankrupt America, culturally, morally and financially. There will be no recovery from this. So who knows, maybe wikileaks has just in the nick of time saved our democracy.

Chalmers Johnson
Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope

Daniel Ellsberg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg