Tag: Stefan Schindler

TO ENGAGE OR NOT TO ENGAGE – THAT IS THE QUESTION

Posted on by kathiemm
San Francisco protesters of the U.S. immigration ban hold signs reading “Imagine All The People” and “People For Peace”. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Pax Ahimsa Gethen

Part Two: BREAKING THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION

by Stefan Schindler

Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.                                                                                                                                      
Jean-Jacques Rousseau          

How do wars start?  Politicians lie to journalists, then believe what they read.

                                                                                          Karl Kraus

The battles of the Sixties may someday come to seem merely an early skirmish in a conflict whose dimensions we have yet to grasp.

Mike Marqusee

President Donald Trump makes a telling point when he refers to the mainstream news media as “fake news.”  There’s a lot of truth in his accusation, the dimensions of which ought to be honestly explored.  Behold: those dimensions have indeed been explored, with awesome authenticity and shocking revelations, by Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Lewis Lapham, and Noam Chomsky, all of whom ought to have won a Nobel Peace Prize and a Pulitzer Prize for Literature.  They have long been denied such recognition.  Had their insights been widely discussed in the U.S. “marketplace of ideas,” Nixon, Reagan, Cheney-Bush and Trump would never have risen to the heights of power.

The elephantiastical lies of the Republican Party – for example: American-trained death squads in Central America are “freedom fighters;” Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons; global warming is a “liberal hoax;” mega-tax-breaks for the mega-rich will make everybody happy and secure – such lies too often succeed thanks to a criminally complicit Democratic Party, a mainstream news media owned by a handful of Republican oligarchs, an historically illiterate citizen population who (in Noam Chomsky’s astute observation) “don’t know they don’t know,” and an educational system designed primarily to ignorate, manipulate, stupefy and confuse.

When President Trump slings his accusation of “fake news” at American journalists – usually exempting the Fox News Network owned by right-wing Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, and championed by Newt Gingrich – he only does so in order to lie about his lies.

And why not?  It worked for Ronald Reagan, who turned “liberal” into a dirty word, perpetuating the myth of America’s “liberal media.”

That Gingrich and Murdoch succeeded in turning American political discourse into a poisonous swamp is largely the fault of the traditional American mainstream news media, which perpetuates the ignoration that is the primary function of American education.

Thomas Jefferson recognized the problem, noting: “A country cannot long remain ignorant and free.”  American citizens have lost more freedoms than they know, thanks to the most unpatriotic act in American history: the post-9/11 Congressional passing of the unread 340 pages of the Cheney-Bush “USA Patriot Act.”

Democracy cannot survive the shredding of civil rights, nor can it long endure sophistry and deception.  It might be worthwhile, then, to pause a moment to reflect upon the words truth and trust.  In his book On the Meaning of Human Being, Richard Oxenberg notes:

The English word ‘truth’ is related to the Middle English ‘troth,’ whose principal meaning is ‘trust’ (to be-troth someone … is to enter into a relation of trust ….)  A truthful account, then, is one that is maximally trustworthy. …  That Plato had [such an] understanding of truth is evident from his association of the true and the good.  [The true is good – has maximal value – because it is worth our trust.]

To restore truth and trust in American social discourse and electoral politics, it is necessary to oppose the Weapons of Mass Dysfunction – deception, distortion, distraction – employed by the National Security State to bind its citizens with chains of illusion.

Let us give profound thanks that progress toward honesty and enlightenment is now being made.  Although fraught with danger, and subject to abuse, the internet has nevertheless become a major instrument for awakening, as evidenced by websites like Common Dreams, Political Animal Magazine, and Engaging Peace.

This is a timely breakthrough in communication, enhancing solidarity among peacemakers and justice-seekers in the present conflict-ridden crucible of history.

John Le Carre provides context:

In our supposed ideological rectitude, we sacrificed our compassion to the great god of indifference.  We protected the strong against the weak, and we perfected the art of the public lie.  We made enemies of decent reformers and friends of the most disgusting potentates.  And we scarcely paused to ask ourselves how much longer we could defend our society by these means and remain a society worth defending.

Having been betrayed by a corrupt political system, we are now in the early stages of America’s third Civil War.  The second Civil War was embodied in The Spirit of The Sixties, when the civil rights and anti-war movements – quietly but greatly aided by Harry Belafonte and Marlon Brando – coalesced into an anti-establishment revolution, emphasizing peace, justice, gender rights, Earth Day, holistic health, nuclear disarmament, egalitarian economics, and authentically edifying education.

The Reagan counter-revolution succeeded in crushing that national outburst of activism, hope, and pragmatic idealism.  It was aided in doing so by the pseudo-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, embodied in the Trilateral Commission, which in 1975 published The Crisis of Democracy.  The crisis?  Citizen activism in the body politic, hoping to influence a government supposedly “of, by, and for the people.”  Citizen participation in the functioning of democracy was, and still is, considered outrageous by what C. Wright Mills called “the power elite.”

Yet citizen activism was the origin and impetus for the American Revolution; for the anti-slavery “abolitionist” movement; for the women’s-right-to-vote “suffragette” movement; and for the 1960s and 1970s anti-war and civil rights movements.  Today, with an echo of Thomas Paine’s “these are the times that try men’s souls,” citizen insistence on a just society remains our only hope for democracy, peace, and ecological sanity.

To engage or not to engage in self-education, global citizenship, and active resistance to the forces of mega-wealth and tyranny – that is the question which every citizen now faces, and upon which the future of our children and grandchildren depends.

Stefan Schindler is the co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey; and author of America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.  His forthcoming book is entitled Buddha’s Political Philosophy.

TO ENGAGE OR NOT TO ENGAGE – THAT IS THE QUESTION

Posted on by kathiemm
San Francisco protesters of the U.S. immigration ban hold signs reading “Imagine All The People” and “People For Peace”. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Pax Ahimsa Gethen

by Stefan Schindler

Part One: YESTERDAY’S STORM AND TOMORROW’S RAINBOW

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music. – John Keats

Fifty years after President Eisenhower launched a multi-trillion dollar arms race with the Soviet Union, the Cheney-Bush Administration (in a version of “the boy who cried wolf”) saw fit to shout the greatest and most dangerous lie in American history, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and repeating – day after day, week after week, in the post-9/11 rush to vengeance and preemptive war – “Mushroom cloud!  Mushroom cloud!  Mushroom cloud!”

Thus did Cheney-Bush – and their cabal of Gingrichian sycophants, aided by a cheering mainstream news media – bring to fruition the nightmare envisioned in Bob Dylan’s 1963 tour de force, “Masters of War.”  Dylan sings, and the lyrics still resonate:

You’ve thrown the worst fear / that can ever be hurled: 

fear to bring children / into the world.

In the dawning of the year 2019, it remains to be seen whether President Donald Trump will also escape punishment for his narcissistic and multitudinous lies, for his continuation of American militaristic violence, and for his Reagan-Cheney-Bush-like crimes – economic and ecological – against the American people and the planet.

In what Gore Vidal called “The United States of Amnesia,” the Orwellian ignoration of the citizen population continues unabated.  For example:

I go to the store and buy some stamps.  The clerk hands me a packet.  Each stamp has an American flag on it.  In the lower left hand corner of each stamp is written “USA Forever” – a truly insidious slogan.  Nothing lasts forever.  Not a season; not a life; not an empire.  George Carlin said: “That’s why they call it the American dream.  You have to be asleep to believe it.”

          In 1821, John Quincy Adams warned that America should not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” for in doing so, “she might become the dictatress of the world, [but] she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

In the late 1890s, Mark Twain witnessed America’s imperial acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the Spanish-American war.  Twain responded with an observation not taught in school: “America’s flag should be a skull-and-crossbones.”  Then he added: “America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.”  Adams and Twain understood that empire and democracy are mutually exclusive.

Lyndon Johnson said in 1964 that he did not want “a wider war” in Vietnam, even as he was lying about events in the Gulf of Tonkin and planning the invasion that President Kennedy refused to launch.  Richard Nixon said he would bring The Vietnam War to an early end with “peace and honor,” yet disgraced himself with a heartless disregard for peace and an utter lack of honor, becoming the first American president to resign from office.

Due to the lies and depredations of Johnson and Nixon, the American people grew increasingly suspicious of their political leaders.  That distrust deepened into cynicism when President George W. Bush’s claim – that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” which he then used as a pretext for war – proved to be an outrageous lie.  And now, alas, Donald Trump inhabits the White House, proving once again that a Nixonian neurotic and Bush-whacking ideologue can become the most powerful and most dangerous man in the world.

Yet all is not lost, not hopeless, not without redemptive possibilities.  Despite the forces of obstruction, the American landscape is filled with a multitude of brave, inquisitive, vocal, active, dedicated justice-seekers and peacemakers.  They recognize that they are not alone, that solidarity is our only hope, and that their collective voice indicates something like A Renaissance of The Renaissance.  They – We! – know who Tom Paine was, and why he wrote “Common Sense” and “The Rights of Man.”

We know that John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed for their courage of conscience; and because we refuse to let their lives and deaths be in vain, we carry the torch they lit for a sane and better world.  We dare, with John Lennon, to Imagine.  We know that there are millions around the world who feel the same, and who are also doing their part to bequeath to a new generation the world of peace and beauty they deserve.  Accordingly, we shall not despair; we shall not relinquish hope; and we shall indeed do whatever is necessary to restore America’s tarnished ideals to their once and future glory, for the sake of all humanity, and for Mother Earth and all her blessings.

Stefan Schindler

…………………….

Stefan Schindler is the co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey; and author of America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.  His forthcoming book is entitled Buddha’s Political Philosophy.

Growing into The Spirit of The Sixties

Posted on by kathiemm

Stefan Schindler with John Lennon collage

by Stefan Schindler

In my early childhood – born just north of San Francisco, and fresh from two years in England – I spent four years in Texas, then one in Alabama, unconsciously absorbing from both states a culture of racism and American superiority.

Then the family moved to Japan, where I spent three years absorbing a new culture, and, subconsciously, an alternative worldview. It changed my life, and I shall be forever grateful. When the family moved from Japan to Pennsylvania, I was shocked to discover fellow students who had never been out of their home state. I was like a visitor from the moon.

My formal education continued to be mostly ignoration, but the year was 1960, just in time for me to grow into The Spirit of The Sixties. As I  watched The Beatles evolve into Peacemakers, coinciding with my college years, I began to realize just how brainwashed I had been.

My father, a bomber pilot in World War Two, was a career officer in the U.S. Air Force, rising through the ranks to become a Lieutenant Colonel. Hence our family’s many moves around the country and the world. Hence also my military upbringing.

When I entered Dickinson College in 1966, I joined ROTC (and its elite “Pershing Rifles” group). I quit after six weeks, having been ordered to do this and that my entire life, and now, in college, finally free from my father’s commanding influence, and joyfully participating more and more in the anti-establishment counter-culture revolution.

By my senior year at Dickinson, 1970, while President Nixon continued The Vietnam War, I was a member of S.D.S – Students for a Democratic Society – and with fellow peacemakers disrupting ROTC drill performances on the football field, and, more importantly, marching in peace demonstrations outside the gates of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, just a few blocks from Dickinson.

After graduate school, post-1975,  I embarked upon a self-education program, leading to my further political awakening, a new appreciation for Mark Twain and William James as members of The Anti-Imperialism League, and the writing of my book, America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War.

Now, just about a year from 2020, I see The United States of Amnesia failing to learn the lessons of history, and increasingly becoming a high-tech version of Plato’s cave, governed by plutocracy, divided more and more by economic apartheid, and careening toward ecological apocalypse, nuclear war, and another Great Depression. John Lennon was right – “We are led by lunatics.”

Fortunately, the spirit of Emerson, James, and Twain lives on in the activism, writings and wisdom of people like H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, I. F. Stone, Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, John Pilger, John Prados, Dan Ellsberg, the Berrigan brothers, Molly Ivins, Howard Zinn, Bertrand Russell, Amy Goodman, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Victor Wallis, Naomi Klein, Lewis Lapham, Thich Nhat Hann, Sulak Sivaraksa, the Dalai Lama, Vandana Shiva, and so many others.

Like Maya Angelou, I know “Why The Caged Bird Sings.” I know that the meaning of life is learning and service. And I give thanks for friends like Toni Snow and Lewis Randa, who help me keep the faith and keep on truckin’, as a Compassionate Peacemaker and global citizen, committed to Universal Brother-Sisterhood.

Note from Kathie MM: Please share with people on your email lists Stefan’s inspiring story of his journey to peace activism-and send us your own story for publication on engaging peace. Many families, many communities, include peace activists who go about the business of making the world a safer more just and human place. Share the stories. 

 

When the Absurd Speaks Truth, Part 2

Posted on by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

American belief in American superiority was, and remains, such an elephantiastical delusion – “a cross-fertilization of ignorance” – that most of what politicians, the military and the mainstream media say to the American people about the purpose and process of American war-making was, and remains, “psychotic vaudeville.”

Michael Herr did not have to be in Vietnam from 1967 through 1968, but he chose to go; and his memoir, Dispatches, is a scorching dispatch from death. “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding.”

Bleary soldiers and sweat-stained reporters “were all studying the same thing, and if you got killed you couldn’t graduate.”

Combat soldiers in Vietnam, mostly drafted, uniformly thought that correspondents were crazy for choosing to be there. And yet, for the most part, there was enormous respect on both sides. Living and dying together, in the worst of all possible worlds, made for some mighty fine tenderness in between the horrors of combat, and often in the midst of it.

…………………………………………………………………………

“Oh man, you got to be kidding me. You guys asked to come here?”

“Sure”

“How long do you have to stay?”

“As long as we want.”

“Wish I could stay as long as I want,” the Marine called Love Child said. “I’d been home las’ March.”

“When did you get here?” I asked.

“Las’ March.”

…………………………………………………………………………

Robert “Blowtorch” Komer was chief of the rural pacification program. “If William Blake had ‘reported’ to him that he’d seen angels in the trees, Komer would have tried to talk him out of it. Failing there, he’d have ordered defoliation.”

“There was such a dense concentration of American energy there, American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.”

“Stay cool,” “good luck,” “right on,” “keep your shit together, motherfucker” – there were a thousand ways to say goodbye when parting, and it happened every time. Most muttered the words. Some just gave you the look. But it was always the same. “It was like telling someone going out in a storm not to get any on him, it was the same as saying, ‘Gee, I hope you don’t get killed or wounded or see anything that drives you insane.’”

1968.“The death of Martin Luther King intruded on the war in a way that no other outside event had ever done.” I’ll leave it to you to figure that one out. Just think race relations, then and now.

By the end of 1968, the lies and lunacy of the war fused so completely with heroin addiction and racial tension that one could not speak truthfully of an effective American fighting force. Despite President Nixon’s continuation of the war for another five years, the American army in Vietnam was disintegrating.

Nixon took credit for ending the war, but soldiers in revolt had already made that decision, no longer willing to fight and die for a parasitic nightmare conjured into being by men who thought themselves independent, invulnerable, god-like, better than the rest of us, and for whom now, even today, we must not cease to pray, in the hope that they will come down off of their throne, bring the troops home, leave others alone, and join the community of the sane and decent.

Note from KMM: What similarities do you see between circumstances in the US during the Vietnam/Indochina war and the US today? Do you get any inspiration from the glimpse Stefan has provided into America’s “Vietnam War” as seen through the eyes of Michael Herr? Do you think, as Stefan and others do, that America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan constitute a Second Vietnam War (this time in the Middle East) — equally lie-launched, unjust, morally reprehensible, and self-defeating? For further edification, see Stefan’s short, illustrated, reader-friendly, paperback book: America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War and  Nick Turse’s book: Kill Anything that Moves. Also think about what drones and nuclear weapons can do today in the wrong hands–and think very, very carefully about who the wrong hands are if what we want is a world of peace, a world of social justice, a world. Finally, ask yourself this question: “What can I do in November to help end today’s and tomorrow’s Vietnam wars?”