Let me just respond to a couple of issues that are particularly important. First, the sort of question about people's different responses to the massacre of a week ago yesterday. A psychologist that I know sent me an email recently suggesting that after watching repeated film footage of the trade towers being crashed into by planes and people jumping out of high buildings – high stories on those trade towers - in order to avoid being burned to death, that many of us in the United States are suffering from a degree of post-traumatic stress disorder. An ailment we normally think of as besetting combat veterans, and rape victims. Is in fact the sort of the thing that much of us in the nation are now suffering from in one degree or another; difficulty sleeping, regular depression, disorientation, unable to concentrate. If that describes something you've been experiencing in the last week, I take its in part a consequence of us all having gone throw a nightmare experience – second-hand only through watching it in television.
So the observations that we should be patient with one another and that we should try and understand anxiety and angers at this point, is I think they're terribly important, since they don't necessarily represent permanent political commitments, but in many cases they represent confusion, and anger, and fear and at the same time a great deal of concern about what's going to happen next. So I think, in that sense, we need to be patient with one another and as understanding as we can, across the differences that clearly exist.
To the GIs in the room, the military veterans, as a veteran myself, I'd like to suggest that high-levels of military spending aren't likely to benefit GIs. Right now for married and enlisted members below the rank of E-4 and E-5, most of them qualify for food stamps. Because military pay is so low they can't in fact afford to feed their family with what we pay them. The massive increase in the military budget that's likely to occur won't go to GIs. It will go to large high-tech weapons manufacturers, as a kind of permanent subsidy out of the U.S. Treasury to their guaranteed profitability at the expense of social services and the GIs themselves.
I think that a lot of our comrades in Vietnam and earlier - I was myself in the Army Security Agency with a top secret code word clearance spying on the Soviets across what was then called the Iron Curtain, in West Germany in the 1950s. We flew penetration flights into Eastern Europe, in order to cause them to scramble their electronics in their fighters, and then we would intercept the signals. Occasionally U.S. pilots would got shot down and killed. That was reported as a training mission that strayed off course. Families never knew what was going. And the GIs, by in large, had no idea what the politics of the situation they were put in was . I certainly didn't get to learn what I was involved in, until long after I left the military and had a chance to find out what was in part of my truth information and education program.
So in a sense by attempting to prevent the war, I think we are in a sense serving the interest of our GIs, of our military personnel, whatever service branch they are in, because they're being protected from being put in harms way, only to discover, as many of my veteran friends from Vietnam discovered, that they were over there fighting a war on behalf of U.S. corporate interests and that they had almost no support amongst the Vietnamese themselves at all. They weren't there protecting anyone's freedom. They were there protecting the ‘unfreedom' that the corporate world would impose on all of us. As indeed the third-worldization of the U.S. labor force over the last twenty or thirty years has begun to show.
Their vision of the future is a world in which we're all cheap labor and we all have no say over what happens. And that GIs as well civilians have a stake in protecting members of the service from being put in harms way, in a cause that will later lead them, as some of my Vietnam vet friends have, with post-traumatic stress disorder that wakes them up in the middle of the night thirty years later, soaked with sweat and screaming from the nightmares they're having. That's a legacy we don't need to hand to another generation, especially people sitting in this room who will have to face the draft if the decision is made for a massive military mobilization. So I would argue the best way we can protect our friends and neighbors in the military, is to keep them from being put in harms way by the Empire, under the pretext of freedom and democracy elsewhere, when that historically has not been the case.
On the difficult issue on what to do about terrorism, I would suggest that the history of the Israeli State is an illustration of what little you can do about terrorism. In fact, there is no military solution to terrorism. There is no means of stopping people who are willing to wrap themselves in dynamite and walk into a crowded square in Tel Aviv and blow themselves up. You certainly can't threaten them by threatening to kill them by military action. They've already made it clear that that's not a disincentive for them. That in fact they see their willingness to sacrifice themself as a condition for their notion of commitment, however barbaric the consequences may be for innocent civilians that they blow up.
I guess that I would argue that while some Arab states supported Hitler, not all did, and certainly not all members of the Arab World supported Hitler. It's always seemed to me that the Holocaust is a very compelling argument for making a Jewish state out of half of Germany. It seems to me that it has no basis for an argument to argue a two thousand-year-old land claim in the Middle East. If we're going to start recognizing two thousand year old land claims, there's some Native Americans who would like some more recent land claims [clapping] to be recognized.
What we ultimately need to do is to look for a way we can all live together now, without ancient land claims, without divisive nationalism. National boundaries are simply the place were the ruling class stop their war. There is no difference between us and the people fifty miles north of us who live in Quebec, except some linguistic and cultural differences, that are essentially resident from the colonization of this hemisphere by Europeans. There is no reason why we should feel more concerned for people who live in Saint Albans [of Northern Vermont] then for people who life in Phillipsburg, across the [Canadian] border. That these borders are themselves, divisions that have been exploited historically by setting us against one another those of us ordinary working people who have a lot more in common then we do with the leaders of our nation.
And one of the distinctive features of earlier twenty-first century globalization is that the ruling class has given up on nationalism. They've now gone global. They now move our jobs like that old game musical chairs from one place to another to see who will work for the least. They have no loyalty to this nation. Most of the Fortune 500 now make more than half their profits overseas. They're global. We're still stuck being told that we should see ourselves as nationalists, within a given nation and having nation-state loyalties. When they've long since stripped themselves of such limitations.
I would argue now, that we need to begin to build the global organizations that can confront them, cause after all they're just a tiny number of people. And if we stop policing ourselves, they don't have the means to police us all. So that we need to look at nationalism as impediment to the human community. We are, after all, citizens of this planet. What we have in common is the earth, and we need to find a way to live with one another. As Rodney King suggested we all need to learn how to get along.
Compiled by Aaron Hawley and posted on the SPARC web space.