[This talk was given by Craig Barnes, my uncle, and I have permission to
share it around. -- Grins, Dan Chay]
History on Our Side
A Meeting sponsored by the Veterans for Peace
Lensic Theater
May 6, 2003
By Craig Barnes
My friends, in searching through the clouds on our dark horizon this May,
let us remember that the people ended the Vietnam War. The explosion of
teach-ins, revelations of presidential untruths, the release of the
Pentagon Papers, the impact of the draft upon young people, the death of
over 50,000 young men and women, all combined to create a body of opinion
sufficiently strong to overcome the religion of capitalism versus
communism, to overcome the driver of the military industrial complex and
the arrogance of presidential imperialism. Those were powerful forces,
all combined, and yet the people's dissent overcame them all.
The Vietnam war was the best we ever had because the people ended it and
that extraordinary event happened in our life time. It happened because
of people like Ken Mayers and Charlie Clements both of whom are here this
evening; both of them were whistle blowers and got out of the military
because of presidential lies during that war. I say that to honor them of
course, but even more to honor you because if two people of great courage
sit with us, and look like us, they could as well be sitting out there and
look like you. We are the people who end wars of imperialism and we have
done it before.
Let us also note in passing that for hundreds of years war between France
and England was a given. Henry V of England fought at Agincourt, and
Elizabeth I at Calais and Wellington at Waterloo. Today war between
England and France is unrealistic, unprofitable, and unthinkable.
Three times in the last 150 years war between France and Germany erupted
to claim millions of lives. Today war between these two is unrealistic,
unprofitable, and unthinkable.
For seventy years war between Russian communists and western capitalism
seemed probable; Marx said it was inevitable. It was avoided
non-violently, diplomatically, without the use of nuclear weapons.
Eisenhower resisted the use of these weapons when urged, as did Kennedy.
Not only the people can avoid war, so can presidents. Or, we might say,
even presidents can sometimes rise to the challenge of making peace.
There is a gradually increasing area of the planet where war has become
obsolete.
We notice these things to counter or to draw a contrast to the story that
war is a given or that it is everywhere and for all times our destiny.
That is just propaganda. Propaganda is the life blood of war. It is
necessary to support the planning, the preparations, the investment. War
does not come from anger or aggression run rampant but from ideology run
rampant It comes from the propaganda on behalf of that ideology. It has
been coming at us since Homer's Iliad and today for the first time in
human history the story of war as glorious, the propaganda, is in trouble.
Today, on a global scale, from the internet, from our experience, from our
computers each of which has become a little private printing press the
propagandists of war have met their match. As a result, in the last 40
years, since Vietnam, the culture of war has been desperately holding on,
rallying from that first defeat, crying out for help by rushing off to
easy victories in Grenada and Panama, Nicaragua and Somalia. The
propaganda of war was damaged in El Salvador and seriously damaged by what
happened in Mogodishu; it was damaged again in Afghanistan for the
Russians in the 1970s and now again for us in modern times.
The 30 million people who were on the streets on February 15, 2003, were
out there because the culture of war has been having a hard time
controlling the masses. We came close, for the first time in history, to
a global uprising. Thirty million people have never been in the streets at
any time in the human experience, and they were there because of what they
know, because in our life time the propaganda is wearing very thin.
In the great tide of the information age, in the rising waves of democracy
that have swept the planet in the last 200 years those powers which seek
to rule us and make us into minions and draftees and blind subjects of
corporate advertising have made a fatal error. Those forces which seek
today to recreate oligarchies of imperial power, to mimic the Hapsburgs of
Austria or the Medicis of Florence or the Caesars of Rome are the last
gasp of an age that is no longer running with the tide. Those media moguls
and oil empires and weapons manufacturers who think that they are dealing
with the cannon fodder who fed the plains of Gallipoli, or marched with
Napoleon to Russia or with El Cid through Spain, those empires of the mind
which began with ancient Homer to propagandize the value of human killing
and the depravity of the human spirit did not imagine that 30 million
would understand, and understanding, say no.
Forty years ago before Vietnam this meeting would not have happened, but
we learned from Vietnam. Ninety years ago, before the First World War
there would not have been 20 people in this room. Two hundred years ago,
before the Great Napoleonic Wars there would have been no one in this
room. We say that there is progress in human history because we are not
burning witches any more. Because Genghis Khan would not have had to take
his case to the United Nations. Because we no longer glory with the Roman
Centurion in the slaughter of barbarians or because we no longer believe
that to die for Athens will take us to the Elysian Fields to live forever.
Because we no longer can be told that Iraqis are "the enemy" or that it is
"liberation" to burn libraries and museums. One day in the past that
message might have sold. Today, that message will not sell. No matter
how many times Mr. Rumsfeld says to us that in a war "stuff gets burned,"
that was not stuff. We the people, in the last 200 years have become the
fertile soil on this planet from which all government takes its authority
and we are not pleased that you burned our history, Mr. Rumsfeld, we are
not pleased that you put the tanks around the oil ministry and not around
the Codes of Hammurabi. The first law code and first arithmetic were
important to us. We noticed what you did and you were not on the side of
civilization. That is what we will say. We are alive and we noticed.
Not just one of us, but millions of us noticed.
We believe in something else more decent than destroying libraries to save
them and this something else is life's survival. We believe in something
other than violence to solve problems and this something else is the
capacity of the human for self knowledge, the advance of modern
psychology, the rise of personality studies, the spread of common
education through the masses of us who used to be coal miners and
carpenters, the flow into this country of non-violent Buddhism and Sufism
and independent Catholicism and liberation theology and a thousand
non-profit organizations that protect the earth, and millions of women who
for the first time in Western history are allowed to lead and write and
cry out with a pain that matters. All these have changed us below the
surface of the hardened crust of militant America, all these have affected
the soil of our politics, and the heat just below the surface is rising.
Oh yes, there is global warming and it is from movements like these, and
evenings like these where all over the globe we are saying that if war is
healthy for Haliburton and Harkness and Bechtel it is not healthy for
human beings. If war is healthy under the corporate charter it is not
healthy under the constitutional charter which gets its moral authority
because it protects human beings. We are not draft eligible numbers, or
ten-digit-call-back numbers, or 16-digit-credit-card numbers or weekly
un-employed numbers; we are not ledger numbers or ciphers, or percents of
GDP, or construction starts; we are people!
These movements and this consciousness has changed the global culture and
because of all these changes we are able at last to say we are not that,
we are this; we will not stay with you in the land of nationalism and
aggression, we have seen the promised land and it is not that, it is
something else than that and unlike the children of the past whom you
marched off to the Crusades or to the Ardennes or to Que San, we the
children of the future intend to not go with you there, but to lead you
somewhere new.
There is talk of a second American revolution and that means that this
time around we will honor women because they, more than property, produce
life, and we will honor the sun because it, more than oil, produces life
and we will honor water because it more than the stock market produces
life, and the seasons, and decency and human dignity because they
illuminate life, and while property is so terribly important, it is not
more important to us than life. That is the second American revolution.
That we will secure our future through the quality of our being, through
the nature of our community, through our relationships rather than working
longer hours for less wages, rather than mortgaging not only our homes but
also our children's education, rather than pledging our credit, we will
pledge our trust in each other as human beings and if it is to "be all
that we can be" it will not be by going off to watch the museums of
Baghdad burn.
Let us remember that it is veterans who called us together this evening.
Let us remember that it is veterans who have seen war, seen what it does
to life, seen what it does to truth, seen what it does to decency and
veterans do not write the poetry of war. Tonight we are all veterans.
Veterans scarred by the scourge of a military budget. Veterans of schools
that are under funded and hospitals that are understaffed. No American is
not a veteran and all of us are heroes. And tonight we enlist again.
Tonight we re-enlist in an old cause. Tonight we re-enlist on the side of
civilization.
The president was fond of saying this last year that 12 years of Saddam's
regime was enough. Well, the glorification of war began in 800 BC with
Homer and we are here to say that 2,800 years of glorifying war is enough!
When a people accord with the natural law that protects life, when people
act in accord with the principles of survival, they are with God, with
what ever we, or they, or anyone, might mean by that term. We are right
with the natural order of the universe and we are more likely to survive
because the universe has bent toward life. The universe has made you and
me into success stories. Everyone of us is a success. Every one of our
ancestors successfully made it to the point where he or she could survive
and carry on the species. The universe bends to life and you and I are
proof. The core principle of how life has succeeded is that it is
interdependent. Ants know that. Bees know that. Birds know that.
People know that. The hours of the day that we spend in cooperation with
other people far exceed the number of hours that we spend killing people.
Think about it. We stop at stoplights. We pay taxes. We call people back
on the phone. We do our share making dinner or picking up the house. We
are all earning money and sweeping the floor. That is cooperation and not
once this week did I kill anyone. For thousands of hours in my life I have
been in cooperation and not once did I kill anyone. It is nonsense to say
that we kill naturally. It is practical good sense, every day sense, that
we humans cooperate more than we are violent. Don't let the great war
propaganda fool you. Killing easy is their story not ours; that is the
advertising, but that is not the truth of who we are. When we are
cooperating we are acting in accord with the natural laws which have kept
the species unfolding and growing and learning for this last 2 million
years. Two thousand, eight hundred yeas ago Homer and the patriarchs
glorified and propagandized war to secure property and corral women but
they were against the long tide. Today neither our property nor any women
are theirs for the taking!
We as a species are not naturally out there hanging outlaws before lunch.
If we got here by killing we would all be dead. It is nonsense to spread
the ideology that we have to be tough and punish the French to survive, or
punish the Syrians to survive. That is just Homer urging the Greeks to
Troy, that is Caesar urging the Romans across the Rubicon. That is Nero
burning his own city. I got here tonight, and you got here tonight,
because someone helped with dinner and the dishes. That is the program.
That is the human DNA. That is what works. And we are here today because
everyone of our ancestors made it work well enough to bring you and me
here.
The true story of humanity is that being friends and having neighbors is
what works; it is what makes us more secure. We know that. I grew up in
rural Colorado where we all helped each other clean irrigation ditches in
the spring, helped put up hay in the summer, helped chase the horses that
were out in my neighbors' fields. America was built on neighbors helping
neighbors. Communities were built on that. That is the story of America
and it is the story of humanity.
So we say to them: Hang on, you warlords, the tide is against you. The
proclaimed success of the rugged individual is propaganda. Individualism
is, unhappily, a myth. Alexander the Great never made his own sword.
Caesar never made his own toga. They needed friends. The policy of going
against the world without friends will not work. Ask Napoleon. Ask
Antony. Ask Thucydides. Ask Herodotus. War is not a policy for success.
War is an aberration, a failure. Thirty million of us already know that.
More will be learning with each museum you burn, with each civilian who is
shot down.
As the flower bends slowly toward the sun, in the long term history bends
toward life. Friends, friends of life, friends of cooperation and decency
and caring, we are the ones^×as the Hopi say^× who we have been waiting
for, we are the ones who have gotten us this far and history is with us!
--Heidi and Dan Chay <chay@alaska.com>
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