Category: Politics

The war is not yet a sure thing. Can we actually succeed in stopping it?

City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. wants the City of New York to leave the State of New York.

“We send Albany $3.5 billion more than we receive back,” Vallone said. “The state has treated us like an unwanted orphan for too long. It may be time for us to move out.”
He plans to introduce a bill that would ask city voters whether they want a commission to study secession. If they agree, the commission will hold hearings and draft a proposal. Then voters would get one more shot at the secession question before it can move to state legislators.
If it passed muster before the Legislature, it would go to Congress.

I can think of much better reasons to secede, but not just from the state, from the nation–and now!
We are governed from Washington by a regime alien to everything New York City is about. We support in every way, and all over the world, parts of this country which can’t think straight and which prefer New Yorkers would just go to hell.
Above all, we have been and will remain the primary target of violence from those who resent an American foreign policy established in provincial ignorance and founded in narrow greed. As a city however, we are loved by and have captured the imagination of a world which sees us as smart, open and damn good company, reason enough to establish an independent identity without delay.

There is a very moving paid announcement on the top right corner of page A8 of today’s NYTimes. It consists of the text of a resolution passed by the government of the City of Geneva for submission to the federal Swiss goverment, and nothing else.

RESOLUTION BY THE AUTHORITIES OF THE CITY OF GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
Considering that:
Geneva, as the European headquarters of the United Nations Organization (UN), is a center of negotiation, mediation and the search for peaceful solutions;
as such, our City is a member of the International Association of Peace Messenger Cities, of which it currently holds the Presidency;
the likelihood of a military intervention by the United States and their allies against Iraq is an ever-increasing threat;
sanctions imposed on Iraq are already inflicting the sufferings of war on its population;
in the event of war, the first victims will as usual be innocent civilians;
international law, and the institutions responsible for ensuring its application, provide a more effective guarantee for peace and democracy than do the weapons and culture of war,
the authorities of the City of Geneva invite the Swiss government to use all means within its power to prevent war, in particular by intervening in favor of peace, within the framework of the UN.

What you cannot see on this screen is the Coat of Arms at the top of the text. Below the shield is a pennant bearing the City’s optimistic motto “Post tenebras lux” (after the darkness, the light). The motto had its origin in the middle of the 16th century. It refers to the Reformation. May it be an omen for our own age of darkness.

The members of the administration in Washington are either reading their history these days, or they’re definitely not.
Poland was partitioned and occupied by three autocracies beginning in the eighteenth century and simply disappeared until the end of the First World War. Once again, in 1939, Poland was dissolved, after a heroic struggle, into the territories of the two dictatorships which had succeeded the old trio of Russia, Prussia and Austria. Today the U.S. and Turkey are planning to partition another state, Iraq, in the name of stability, security and peace, the same rationale offered by superpowers in the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, and once again in the twentieth. With the planned initiation of hostilities, Turkey is to occupy the homeland of the Kurds in northern Iraq, according to plans being prepared by American and Turkish diplomats.

The plan, which is being negotiated in closed-door meetings in Ankara, the Turkish capital, is being bitterly resisted by at least some leaders of Iraq’s Kurdish groups, who fear that Turkey’s leaders may be trying to realize a historic desire to dominate the region in a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.

Neither Turkey nor the U.S. can boast of its record at defending the rights of the Kurdish people. No one asked the Poles whether they wanted to be devoured. Has anyone asked the Kurds?
But why would we want to hand over Kurds in Iraq to the tender mercies of a government which has persecuted its own Kurds for centuries? That’s an easy one:

American diplomats and senior military commanders, led by President Bush’s special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, are said to be encouraging the Kurdish leaders to accept the Turkish proposal. While Washington has strongly supported the autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq over the past 12 years, it is eager to secure the permission of Turkey’s leaders to use Turkey’s bases for a possible attack on Iraq.
The proposed deal between the Americans and the Turks moved closer to fruition today when the Turkish Parliament voted to allow American engineers to begin preparing Turkish military bases for possible use by American troops.

No, the occupants of the White House do not read history. They have never read history. They’re Americans and they live only now.

Adlai Stevenson‘s son puts the White House’s “good cop” in his place in an OP-ED column today.
The administration and the media would like to sell Powell’s appearance before the Security Council this week as an “Adlai Stevenson moment.” His son reminds us that Stevenson’s moment was an attempt to contain the Soviet Union and maintain peace, and it worked. The purpose of Powell’s moment is war, and will almost certainly expand the resolve of and sympathy for terrorists. Yes it will work. There will be war and it will be much more than what he is asking for.

President Kennedy and others remembered the lessons learned from the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke and his wife in 1914. Serbian nationalists behind the killings expected a reaction. But they did not expect to bring down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Politically motivated terrorists are fanatics, not fools. Yet the empire delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, bringing on World War I and its own demise.
. . .
A contained Saddam Hussein would remain a pariah in the Middle East. A Saddam Hussein under attack would win sympathy on behalf of his long-suffering people and perhaps the support of terrorists inflamed by the mighty reach of the United States.
. . .
Sept. 11 was not all that different from Sarajevo at the turn of the century. The 19 men armed with box cutters did not expect to bring down all of America. Only America can do that.

“The community of free nations can show that it is strong and confident and determined to keep the peace.” This is Bush speaking in Washington thursday, just after Colin Powell returned from New York and his mission to pressure the U.N. Security Council to approve offensive war.
But not to worry. Even if their strong-arm tactics fail, the junta says it’s prepared to go to war with a coalition of “like-minded nations” [Reuter’s phrase] without U.N. backing.

The Bush administration, facing a wary public at home about the prospect of war and uneasiness abroad, has support for war from Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic and most eastern European nations as well as Australia. [All are nations currently governed by right-wing parties, but this is something the media neglects to mention, perhaps because to do so would help puncture our balloon and show that this war is politics after all.]

Thanks to Thomas Scott Tucker for introducing me to A.J. Muste.

“There is no way to peace—peace is the way”

and, in an ominous warning,

“The problem with war is the winner.”

Ok, this is the one, this is the one! This is where we want to start to stop the war–and Bush! Meet on the steps of the New york Public Library Main Branch at 11:30, saturday the 15th.
From the site:

Calling all misfits, revelers, puppetistas and drummers, musicians, singers and loud hummers; samba bands, hungry marchers, jugglers, baton twirlers, fire eaters and artists of all stripes; ravers, beehives and vikings, billionaires for bush, gore or perma-war; radical cheerleaders, reclaimers of streets and critical massers; church ladies for choice, drag queens and kings, radical rockettes, perms for perma-war, church of stop bombers, missile chicks, babes for bombs, students for an undemocratic society, new kids on the blac bloc, those united for peace and justice and anybody and everybody who thinks that this war is absurd. [sorry, no mimes]

A festive and theatrical CARNIVAL BLOC FEEDER MARCH to the massive anti-war rally on February 15th. Organized by Mobilize New York and Reclaim the Streets.
On February 15th, hundreds of cities around the world will be hosting huge protests against the rush to war. This will be the largest global day of protest in history. In New York City alone, more than one hundred thousand people are expected. And we will be there, making it all look (and feel) fabulous.

From the steps of the NYPL we’ll parade/party en masse to the United for the Peace and Justice rally, likely to be at the UN. For details on the massive rally we are meeting up with, see www.unitedforpeace.org.

Bring Mardi Gras Beads, costumes, instruments, drums, beats, boom boxes, dancing shoes, noisemakers of all kinds, bring posters and banners and puppets. Bring yourselves and friends. Be prepared to mock the Axis of Oil without mercy.

MoveOn.org reports today that the New York City Police Department still has not approved organizers’ request for a permit. Yeah, I know.

The event in New York is scheduled for noon on the 15th, but the New York Police Department is making it difficult for the organizers to get a permit for a march to accompany the rally. We’re certain it’ll be worked out — a legal complaint was filed this morning in the Federal District Court in Manhattan and we expect that a mutually acceptable agreement will be reached soon. We’ll let you know as soon as we have a final word on the location to go to.

Once one sixth of Monty Python, but still a sage today, Terry Jones had a piece in London’s Observer two sundays back. It’s very good, but really no laughing matter.

And let’s face it, Mr Bush’s carefully thought-out policy towards Iraq is the only way to bring about international peace and security. The one certain way to stop Muslim fundamentalist suicide bombers targeting the US or the UK is to bomb a few Muslim countries that have never threatened us.
That’s why I want to blow up Mr Johnson’s garage and kill his wife and children. Strike first! That’ll teach him a lesson. Then he’ll leave us in peace and stop peering at me in that totally unacceptable way.

[thanks to George Carter]

Now we are even being told by the police state how we can remember the dead. It’s bad enough that our putative secular authority can only speak in religious imagery, and only Christian imagery, when he can get away with it.

In heavily religious language, Mr. Bush sought to comfort the family members of the astronauts seated in the front row.
“Some explorers do not return, and the loss settles unfairly on a few,” he said, as the wife and sons of Cmdr. William C. McCool, the shuttle’s pilot, wept.
The sorrow, the president said, is lonely, but he added: “You are not alone. In time, you will find comfort and the grace to see you through. And in God’s own time, we can pray that the day of your reunion will come.”

Elsewhere in Texas, three days ago a pair of artists, Robert Ladislas Derr and Lynn Foglesong-Derr, who live in Nacogdoches, began a beautiful and totally secular performance intended to memorialize the seven astronauts lost in the Columbia disaster above their home.

Dressed in black to show mourning, Ms. Foglesong-Derr somberly outlined Mr. Derrs body with chalk within the site of one of the debris from the shuttle in the town center. Once the silhouette was drawn, the artists walked into the crowd and recited from Jean-Paul Sartres book Essays in Existentialism, speaking the words, When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men.
The artists chose this quote from the French philosophers book because it speaks to the effect of an individuals action upon the many. This tragedy involving seven astronauts emotionally touches humanity throughout the world.

Minutes into the performance, Texas state troopers stopped them and told them that flowers and flags were a more appropriate way to remember the deceased. The world is being made poorer by the ascendancy of small minds.
[Thanks to Douglas Kelly for the Nacogdoches story.]