In this time of war and rumors of war, perhaps we should give thought to oldest and longest war of all.
For many, this seems a time for passionate urgency unprecedented in human history. We remain mired in a slow motion global economic crisis that could pick up speed at any moment. Economic inequality has reached astronomic levels both at home and abroad. The political and economic institutions that govern our lives, corrupt and empowered as never before by technology, seem poised to establish themselves as permanent leviathans. Ecological catastrophe looms. The prospect of military action and potentially, another war are on the horizon.
It's a daunting prospect but not unprecedented.
From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution onward, we have been engaged in a race between survival and obliteration. This is a lesson that my grandparent's generation and my parent's generation learned from the horrors of the Great Depression and two World Wars. It's a lesson I learned at age six with the realization that the world could be incinerated at any moment by the blunders of a powerful few. That whole populations of supposedly normal people could turn a blind eye to exploitation, brutality and murder, as long as the victims were of a different, religion, ethnicity or color.
All these realities called for passionate and urgent responses, because they were all battles in a larger conflict that continues to the present day. It is the fight for the future. It is the long war between those who struggle for human dignity and decency in a world that exalts the few at the expense of the many and those who would defend the status quo, even at the cost of human extinction.
We stand where countless others have stood before us.
So now, having been lied into two wars in a decade by politicians drunk with imperial ambitions, we fear being lied into another. Rightly so, as those of us who experienced the era of the Viet Nam War can attest.
I've never gotten over that one. I knew people who were sacrificed there in the name of anti-Communism but on the altar of empire. I might have shared their fate if the war had gone on longer. Fortunately, the draft was on the way out by the time I came of age. I also knew people, like one of my sister's boyfriends who was a draft resister, much to our father's disgust.
I was born into a society that had legal apartheid as its keystone and the violence of the white supremacist backlash against the Civil Rights Movement was the backdrop of my childhood.
I know what it's like to be arbitrarily singled out by the cops. I've experienced being searched, threatened and beaten unconscious with a billy club. At age 16 during Nixon's reign I was questioned by the FBI due to my political activism.
I witnessed the fall of Nixon after Watergate, the success of the Anti-Nuke movement and the reactionary wave that brought Reagan to power. I participated in the struggle against his brutal contra war against the revolutionary Sandinista Government of Nicaragua and his support of the genocidal regime of Rios Mont in Guatemala. I spent close to a decade fighting the resurgent KKK and the rise of the Nazi skinheads.
In 2000 I was the Press Secretary for the Green Party in my state. I was arrested by the military for trespass as part of the effort to close the School of the Americas. I was a founding member of my local Indymedia collective and participated in the anti-globalization movement. I was in the street with thousands of others attempting to stop the wars in Afghan and Iraq before they started. When the Occupy movement emerged I attended local General Assemblies and supported their actions.
I find reciting all this more than a little tiresome, not to mention self indulgent. I only do so because I want it to be clearly understood where I'm coming from.
For those of you who feel compelled to join this struggle, who feel called to take up the fight, I applaud your commitment and your efforts. I understand your frustration and impatience. Your sense of urgency is well founded.
Now I have to say some things you may not like. The most important lesson you can learn from previous generations of radical activists is to not repeat their errors and blunders. That means applying the same critical scrutiny and skepticism to them as you apply to the government, the right wing, etc.
I don't say this to draw a false equivalence. I say it because radical activists are human beings with all the flaws and failings that implies. One of these failings is a tendency, as they grow older, to attempt to relive their youth through others. Another is that a certain percentage have forgotten nothing and learned nothing. The most destructive failing though, is the natural tendency to withdraw from engagement with those of differing views into a consoling cocoon of mutual reinforcement. If that were an effective approach we wouldn't have experienced the past 30 plus years of reaction.
The hard reality is that we will not halt the march toward global corporate oligarchy with all its evils if we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to those who do not yet understand the stakes.
One last thing, it's extremely important when assessing the ideas that have come from previous generations to comprehend the context in which they arose. When it comes to Professor Chomsky, for example, you should keep in mind that his entire political outlook was shaped by the environment of the Cold War, the "Old Left" and the sectarian conflicts and modes of thought that it typified. This doesn't invalidate his very real contributions and insights but it does mandate an informed and critical reading of his work. The same scrutiny should apply to all inherited opinions.
I'll leave you with some words from a song that was written in the Vietnam era by an American anti-war GI.
"They took away Sacco, Vanzetti, Connolly and
Pearse in their time.
They came for Newton and Seale, the Panthers and some
of their friends.
In Boston, Chicago, New York, Santiago, Cape Town and
Belfast.
And places that never make headlines, the list never ends.
No time for love if they come in the morning.
No time to show fear or for tears in the morning.
No time for goodbyes, no time to ask why.
And the wail of the siren is a cry all the morning."