Bob Dylan once sang, “Let us not talk falsely, the hour is getting late.”
For years, as one staggering horror upstages the last, as the conscience has been shocked so many times it seems to be numbed for many – these words have sprung to mind again and again. But never have they been more timely than now.
So, let us not speak falsely. The America we once knew is never coming back. And what the future will look like – whether it will be locked down in global war and domestic fascism or whether this will be resisted, defeated and something far better wrenched into being – is fast being determined. It’s not too late for the people to win this – but the clock is ticking.
Just look at the world around us.
Yesterday I got an email from Sureya Sayadi, who some of you know. She is an Iraqi Kurd, a doctor, activist and academic, who lives in the Bay area.
Here’s an excerpt of the article she sent. “Sayadi’s 35-year-old unemployed nephew Mushtaq, with a Kurdish mother and a Shi’ite Arab father, used to drive a taxi between Beji and Baghdad. “A man with a Saudi dialect called his mother, my stepsister Gailas, and ordered her to raise $2,500 to free Mushtaq. They called from his cell phone and had him appeal to his mother to give them the money. She raised the money and brought it to a suburb in Baghdad where they had instructed her to go, only to find her son’s burned taxi and his hacked body wrapped in his prayer rug. The men said they did it because he was Shi’ite.””
Multiply that by hundreds of thousands. Each day intensifies this wild and chaotic suffering, cycles of bloodletting, and destruction of reason and hope along with infrastructure of a whole people. A country that was once secular – now ravaged with the worst kinds of sectarian religious fanatical ethnic and religious cleansing as the U.S. first backed Shias, then Sunnis, and now increasingly people are ground up in between and the violence is staggering. With more than four million having fled their homes and the whole dynamic beginning to spill over the borders, threatening to destabilize and engulf the whole region.
As we speak, the machinery of the United States government has been honed and is being used to torture and break human beings – physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally. All this has been legalized and is taking place on an industrial scale. A survivor from a CIA black-site described how, “The C.I.A. worked people day and night for months” Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.”
An expert told the New Yorker: “”one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever” At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail” There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you”ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.””
This is accompanied by the most massive, high tech, ruthlessly repression police state apparatus of wire-taps, shredding of “due process,” habeas corpus, and the presumption of innocence, and the construction of massive numbers of camps – now specifically for immigrants but with even vaster and graver consequences.
And it is accompanied by a massive clamp down on acceptable speech, protest, and dissent. Students tasered. Peaceful protesters, like Rev. Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus being beaten by police right at the doors of Congress, and arrested. Paid advertisements that tell the truth, like MoveOn’s recently, condemned in Congressional resolutions! McCain even suggested their ad was treasonous. Treason carries the punishment of death.
And this is not all.
While the generations long oppression, systemic discrimination, brutality and racist terror against Black people cannot all be laid at the footsteps of this regime – all this is intensifying and getting a new lease on life under this administration. Just think of Katrina, the racial cleansing of NOLA since (more than 200,000 people have still not returned changing) and now Jena, followed by nooses appearing all over the place.
The Supreme Court has made it drastically more difficult to challenge sexual harassment and discrimination and has begun criminalizing abortion. One of the only abortion providers left who does late-term abortions, Dr. Tiller, is now facing trial, pharmacists are refusing to fill birth control prescriptions and the new litmus test for conservative candidates is opposition to birth control. All of this is intensifying generations of shame, guilt, enforced motherhood, foreclosed dreams, and violence against women cloaked in the self-righteous teachings of the Bible taken literally.
For gay people we have seen annulments of marriages, revoking rights to guardianship of children, enshrining workplace discrimination, and resurrecting open, bald-faced unrestrained self-righteous biblically rooted bigotry.
Arctic melting – science being covered up, suppressed, with great danger to humanity, the planet, and the richness of our lives.
This is our world today – and it is powerfully captured in the Call for The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime.
In the midst of all this — there are many deadly lies and deceptions in America today, but one of the deadliest is that the “Bush Regime is over.”
But the Bush regime isn’t “limping to the finish””it is intensifying. The casting aside of high-level operatives like Rove or Gonzales is not the dissolution of a regime, but preparation for a “sprint to the finish.” Bush himself is reported to be impervious to criticism, “optimistic,” and acting with his “historic legacy” in mind.
That “legacy” is not something for the history books, after we”re all dead. It’s about locking in and pushing further the horrific crimes that have become “the new normalcy.” George Bush aims to use his last 15 months to ensure the continued existence and dominance of this empire, on even more horrific terms and with exponentially greater ability to suffocate any fundamental resistance to it.
Plans have already been drawn up for over 2,000 strike targets in Iran and two U.S. naval battle groups are in position. The Sunday Telegraph reported on September 16th that “Pentagon and C.I.A. officers say they believe the White House has begun a carefully calibrated program of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran.” Whether this is what develops, or whether the U.S.’s funding of covert operations and anti-regime groups inside Iran force the Islamic Republic of Iran to capitulate to U.S. demands or to trigger an internal collapse short of war, or whether something else develops is not yet determined. But all the momentum is building towards confrontation.
Another big illusion is that somehow the 2008 elections will offer some relief. Not true. If this program is not repudiated, if these crimes are not reversed, they will be codified, legitimated, and locked into place regardless of who becomes the next president.
The Democrats just granted Bush the ability to attack Iran without consultation. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have all refused to take the use of nuclear weapons against Iran off the table. And last week all of them refused to pledge that U.S. troops would be out of Iraq by 2013!
In a recent speech Daniel Ellsberg said:
“This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.
“Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.
“Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in – and there’s no move to do this at this point – unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.”
So, 1. Bush is not over. 2. The Democrats and the 2008 election won’t stop this direction.
This regime must be stopped by the people. It must be driven out by the people. Its program must be repudiated by the people.
It’s easy to see the strength of the regime and how far behind we are in bringing forward the scope and scale and determination of resistance to stop this. But it is the scope and scale of the crimes of this regime that are dragging people into political life. And the huge contradiction between the program being slammed into place and the sentiments and desires and aspirations and interests of literally tens and hundreds of millions are extremely sharply opposed. This is a very volatile social contradiction that we have to get in the middle of and transform. And there are new shoots of resistance and new stirrings right now that we must not fail to identify and spur forward.
Tens of thousands who poured into Jena just two weeks ago – they seemed to come out of nowhere, actually they came from every corner of this country, casting off cynicism and paralysis and daring to fight for a different world for the youth. People felt good being there together, being seen by the world, and people don’t want this to end.
It was just a year and a half ago we saw millions of immigrants clog the streets of every major city and dozens of small towns in this country – tired of working like slaves in the shadows, terrorized by gestapo-style immigration raids that have only intensified.
In the recent anti-war protests many, especially students, are stepping out for the first time. After protesting Bush at the UN the other day an NYU freshman wrote, “It was a great first protest experience and turned my apathetic mindset which I previously though would be impossible.” And the anti-war sentiment in society has only deepened and spread – including right within the U.S. military – with the potential to politically erupt.
At concerts that WCW went out to over the summer with our orange campaign it was clear there is a new radicalness brewing in this country. There’s a section of the new generation that is looking out on the world and sees nothing they want to have any part of. A section of this generation questioning everything, senses the need to be as radical as the times, and is gravitating to the need for struggle and even great sacrifice.
It is a sobering reality that our movement doesn’t have the size, organization, or influence yet that is so urgently necessary. But in a situation like this we can build on what we have accomplished over two years, start again, and spread this movement like wildfire.
A small group of highly motivated people stepping out boldly and with the truth, into a situation that is this politically charged and intensifying can change everything. If we go boldly and unsparingly both at the regime’s program and at the passivity and complicity of those staying on the sidelines, and if we give others a vehicle to act on their sentiments – we can galvanize tens of thousands and then millions and change history.
One of the most important vehicles for this – that I think we have failed to fully appreciate and push on – is the “Orange Uprising” that WCW has called for.
The basic concept is very simple – if we all show how we really feel, things will start to change. If you don’t show it, it doesn’t count. And if you don’t act decisively when it counts, it doesn’t matter.
Orange – the color of the torture victims and detainees at Guantanamo – needs to become the mark of a new defiance. Orange needs to become like the afro was to Black people during the 60’s or the long hair to hippies – a signal that we want no part of this whole murderous racket, that we”re about a whole different and much better future.
This can spread fast. Imagine how the conversations will change if youth are tagging orange on walls and wearing it to school, if orange flags are waving outside shops and off porches, if celebrities are being spotted with orange ribbons and if orange starts appearing in insurance offices and law firms, sparking debates and becoming a magnet for others who have for too long swallowed their morals, their principles, and their tongues. Imagine if all those who hate what is happening could find each other and be seen by the world as a political force – how that would change their feeling that the best they can do is hope for a savior from the Democrats, or to put their heads down and go along.
This sea of orange must be coupled with, and reinforce, increasingly militant and growing outbreaks of real political resistance – actions of individuals or groupings that keep pace with and are on a scale commensurate with the horrors piling up. Some of that’s starting. But it’s not yet enough. We”ve got to stop waiting for a resistance to emerge, and go out and lead it. If we want to see a resistance movement, we in this room have to start being one. Resistance needs to much more spring up like mushrooms after the rain, in all kinds of different forms and unexpected places, and everybody wearing orange can help spur that and spread it.
Crucial Nodal Points and Key Links
There are critical political battles shaping up that if seized upon, and if coupled with the growing social wave of orange, can be openings to begin to reverse the political momentum in society.
1. We have to take responsibility for mobilizing people to get into the streets to raise awareness about and act to prevent an attack on Iran. On Friday, the 12th, lets hold an Orange Friday about Iran – lets get out to all the folks on our e-lists and phone trees, but also very systematically reach out to students to manifest across the country all week to be out on Friday with LOTS OF ORANGE and the very powerful “Iran Quiz.” This can go a long way towards changing the fact that most people still don’t understand this danger and providing a vehicle for many to act who are yearning for a way.
2. From October 22 – 26, David Horowitz and his right wing student thugs are holding what they call an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” Posing as anti-fascists, they are preparing a fascist assault on the universities. Posing as upholders of women in Islam, they are planning sit-ins at women’s studies centers and targeting Muslim student groups. This is coming on the heels of having driven Ward Churchill out of a tenured professorship, denying the tenure of Norman Finkelstein, the pulling of an invitation of Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu from the University of St. Thomas, and an overall closing down of the ability to criticize the U.S. or Israel on campuses. Universities are places where critical thinking still goes on more than in the rest of society and students are always on the forefront of any successful political movement – this is why these institutions are being targeted, because chilling them out is a key link in bolting down fascism throughout society.
The recent graffiti up at Columbia University that read, “Attention you pinko Commie motherfuckers and Arab Towelheads: America will wake up one day and nuke Mecca, Medina, Tehran, Baghdad, Jakarta, and all the savages in Africa. You will all be fucked! America is for White Europeans!” gives a picture of where this goes.
A very important point is that you cannot defeat fascism by ignoring it. We must counter this week with an “American Fascist Awareness Week” where we wage a campaign of truth and exposure to unmask these fascists for what they are, to make it so that every student has to pick sides and is enabled to see each side for what they really are, and through doing this we not only politically defeat this assault on the campuses but bring forward a new generation to make it their mission to drive out the Bush regime and reverse the whole fascistic program for global empire that this Horowitz assault is part of.
3. There are important anti-war protests we should build for and fully saturate with orange on the 27th of October.
4. And we should discuss here ideas for another powerful orange manifestation on November 6th – election day – as proposed by Garret Keizer in this month’s Harper’s.
Through all this there is the need to distribute and publicize the Call in even more massive numbers.
Think of those being ravaged by the wars, the torture, the attacks on women’s rights, everything symbolized by Katrina, the gay-bashing, the repression and demonization of the immigrants, the outrages to people’s legal rights, the attack on critical thinking” Most of them don’t know we are meeting this weekend. But they are counting on us.
What we do here this weekend, the collective will that we forge and the plans we come out with carry their hopes and dreams and even lives.
We have to shed any remnants of denial of about what we are confronting and our responsibility. We have to fully throw ourselves body, mind and spirit into taking up this challenge and boldly put this challenge to others. We have to lead millions, by example and through powerful and truthful political arguments, take history into our own hands.
In conclusion I want to share from a powerful, stirring and poetic call to conscience and action from Garrett Keizer in this month’s Harper’s Magazine.
Keizer writes:
“How much better if we could say to our next administration: Don’t talk about Bush. We dealt with Bush. We dealt with Bush and in so doing we demonstrated our ability to deal with you. You have a mandate more rigorous than looking good [compared to] Bush. You need a program more ambitious than “uniting the country.” We are united-at least we were, if only for a while, if only in our disgust”
He goes on:
“For the past six and a half years I have heard the people I love best-family members, friends, former students and parishioners-saying, “I’m sick over what’s happening to our country, but I just don’t know what to do.” Might I be pardoned if, fearing civil disorder less than I fear civil despair, I said, “Well, we could do this.””If anyone has a better idea, I’m keen to hear it. Only don’t tell me what some presidential hopeful ought to do someday. Tell me what the people who have nearly lost their hope can do right now.”