The World
Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime July 2008
A country “at peace with being at
war” is a country of “Good Germans.”
Seven
years of the Bush Regime have radically altered the shape of U.S. society
and locked in a global trajectory of wars for empire with no regard for human
cost or conscience.
The world
is shocked by the crimes and destruction the American people have allowed to be
carried out in our names.
Despite
the longest presidential campaign ever, George Bush remains unrelenting and
self-assured that he can drive the savageness of his agenda into the next
administration. Still commander in chief, Bush is recklessly threatening
military action against Iran
that could break out even before the next president is sworn in.
Who is to
stop him when both presidential candidates have also threatened Iran, each
insisting that all options, including nuclear weapons,
remain on the table?
Who is to
stop him when the Democrat-controlled Congress secretly approved funding for
covert special operations already underway inside Iran?
Who will
stop any of this when both major parties are championing the so-called
war on terror, under which the U.S.
launched two wars in a region that is strategically located, rich in oil, and
long a central concern of imperial powers?
Both major political parties have authorized these wars. And at every step, both
political parties have voted to extend billions more dollars to continue them.
Only you – not your government –
can bring any of this to a halt. The only
realistic course is for the people of the U.S. to taking meaningful and
independent political action to resist the machinery of war and the fascist
direction that has emerged since September 11, 2001.
We
believe that people of conscience must take responsibility for what their own
governments do. People of conscience do not allow themselves to be demobilized
by the political and moral terms of an election that calls for national unity
while carrying out unjust war for empire.
We should take this government?? at their word when they promise a war
to last generations.
People of
conscience act when torture has been legalized and when war crimes are being
carried out in our names.
People of
conscience do not give up our right to dissent or hand over our consciences in
return for a hollow promise of safety.
While
Barack Obama and John McCain, each in their own way, distance themselves from
the debacle of the Bush years, neither of them, and no significant force within
the halls of power, is acting decisively to reverse the re-making of American
legal norms and political culture that can rightly be described as fascistic.
Neither
of them is demanding that the U.S.’s
policy of torture – sanctioned and codified in the Military Commissions Act
which passed with bi-partisan support – be repealed and those
responsible prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Neither
candidate is calling for ending the mass round-ups of immigrants or the
Halliburton contracts for new prisons to hold targeted immigrant populations
and political dissidents.
Neither
of them gave voice to the public outrage against Bush’s illegal wiretapping;
instead, Obama voted with the majority to grant retroactive immunity to those
who joined Bush in breaking the law and violating basic rights to privacy and
freedom of press. Further, Barack Obama
has pledged to extend Bush’s faith-based initiatives. and promotes a nefarious
message of finding common ground with Christian Fundamentalists who rail
against evolution, celebrate intolerance and openly advocate the submission of
women.
This is
not the pendulum “swinging back.” This
is a continuation of the politics of empire. Never before has a sole super-power
held so much of the world in such peril and never before have the crimes of one
empire threatened the future of so much of the planet.
The words
from the original World Can’t Wait Call to Drive out the Bush Regime ring even
truer today: “That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will
learn – or be forced – to accept.”
What is
needed is not a minor course correction. What is needed is not meaningless
“change” we are allowed to believe in, but a radical change in direction
brought about by people acting outside the political confines of these
official politics.
Real change
can come only from people in their millions taking responsibility to change the
course of history. It will not be as easy as writing your congressman or
putting your energies and resources into a supposed savior from the Democratic
Party. But that. Let’s face it, is an
illusion.
What will
things look like the day after the election?
Will people – through their passivity and through having restricted
themselves to mobilizing behind one or the other major candidate – have
legitimized the results of an election that is taking place on terms
inhospitable to the future of the planet?
Will the millions who want so badly a different future have forfeited
this righteous demand on the altar of “national unity” and an empty promise of
“hope”?
Or will
there be a pole of opposition that inspires with its moral clarity and fearless
truth-telling? An increasingly visible
independent political force of resistance, protest, and acts of conscience that
people can join with and persevere with until this whole direction is brought
to a halt?
Let it be
said: It was wrong to go into Iraq. It has been wrong to stay in Iraq. It is wrong not to get out now. It is wrong to escalate the war in Afghanistan
and to threaten war with Iran.
LET IT BE
SAID in DENVER so that, on August 24, the eve of the Democratic Convention,
there is the largest anti war demonstration that city has seen. Come to Denver for a week of
protest that includes marching to stand with immigrants under assault and
counter-protests to the week of
anti-abortion actions of the Christian Right.
For this
to happen, WE must act and mobilize now.
We
believe that people of conscience must take responsibility for what their own
governments do. Thus we call on all people living in the United States to RESIST the
trajectory of wars and repression that has been loosed on the world by the Bush
administration and a complicit Congress.
We choose
to make common cause with the people of the world by extending a hand to those
suffering from these policies and by showing our solidarity in word and deed.
The World
Can’t Wait! July 2008
I understand the discomfort the term “good germans” must give the poster. The fact that it has beocome a term for people who remained silent when they should have and could have spoken out against murderous leadership cannot be revresed. What happened, happened. It is true that succeeding generations of Germans are unfairly soiled by the sins of the fathers. Still it is a reminder that has power. I cannot be blamed by the slave holding sins of my grandfather or his part in the American Civil war to protect his way of life. But I can accept the lesson that the term “redneck” teaches me and the discomfort I feel motivated me to stand against slavery and explotiation of fellow humans. M pain and embarrassment is secondary to the value of the reminder it affords. Good German or “redneck” is worth repeating.
“With malice toward none, with charity to all, let us strive on to finsish the work…..etc.” Abe Lincoln.
I agree with everything said here, but I must object to the title. The term “good Germans” is extremely derogatory. It would not be acceptable to use another ethnic group in this regard, yet historically, the truth is that the Germans are hardly exceptional when it comes to atrocities.
True, the Iraq occupation is nearing the same lifespan as the Holocaust; the Afghanistan invasion is almost as long, and together they add up to some 3 million deaths – well on the way to 12 million.
HOWEVER: Germans today are much more politically informed, and much more active in preventing their nation from sending troops to Iraq, than Americans have been for decades. They protested the Iraq invasion by the millions, and continue to voice their dissent when Bush visits there. There are in fact very good Germans, all around the globe.
It is wrong to malign Germans in order to make a point about Americans. The point is that Americans need to learn that we are not exceptional in any way when it comes to moral conduct.
Someday the term “good American” may take on an even more sinister meaning than “good German”, especially since the breadth and scope of American power globally, and thus the amount of damage this former “beacon of democracy” is wreaking on all fronts, far exceeds Germany’s reach in the 40s, as bad as it was then. Furthermore, there is no chance of an Allied response!