“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Martin Luther King

Throughout history, warmongers of all persuasions have taken refuge in false patriotism. If you do not agree with us, the argument goes, you are being disloyal, you are unpatriotic. It’s a boring old tactic, designed to stifle debate. Of course, it remains popular – because it works.

In today’s world, dominated as it is by a single nation, the twist on the old story is the accusation of being anti-American. This has been a big part of the debate on the looming suppression of Iraq. If you disagree with us, say the warmongers, you are anti-American. This is somehow meant to devalue the worth of your viewpoint. Your bias renders you incapable of balanced judgement.

The obvious opposite, naturally, does not hold true. Being pro-American does not compromise your judgement in any way.

It’s all so much nonsense that it’s almost not worth debating. But we hear it every day. You are just another anti-American. It’s used by politicians and journalists alike, and it is parroted time and again on internet forums in often hysterical tones by pro-war contributors. And it’s because its still being trundled out, and because people are still buying the line, that it needs to be confronted.

The recent Webdiary offering from Hal Wilson (George Bush, Australia’s war leader) is a prime example of the great lie. Mr Wilson’s belligerent little message is typical in its absence of insight, its refusal to question and its passive acceptance of the trite and tired nonsense peddled by his government and ours. In Mr Wilson’s case, one has to suspect that the myopia is irreversible. You’re with us or against us. If you don’t agree with us, you are anti-American. Sorry, Mr Wilson you’re just plain wrong. Your crassly simplified world just doesn’t exist. You cannot comprehend the danger you personify: You cannot and will not grasp that your own entrenched ignorance flew co-pilot on the September 11 jets.

A quick aside on Karen Jackson’s response (Oh Superman): Karen, you’re understandably cheesed off with our friend Mr Wilson, but ‘Ten Reasons to be anti-American’ doesn’t really help, as I’m sure you’ll agree in a moment of quieter reflection. Mr Wilson will take it as evidence that he is correct. Which, I repeat for emphasis, he most certainly is not.

My starting point here is to state categorically: I am pro-American. As an Australian, I am a committed supporter of the special relationship we have with the United States. Should that country come under attack, I would be among the first to say that Australia should lend its aid, however small and symbolic. Symbols are important.

Supporting unprovoked wars of aggression is another thing altogether. No way, Jose.

I remain implacably opposed to the Bush Administration’s drive to subjugate Iraq. No case has been made. This does not make me anti-American. I also remain implacably opposed to Australia’s involvement in this attack. Here too, no case whatsoever has been made. This does not make me un-Australian. My pride in my country and all it could be is not (yet) diminished by the acts of politicians.

Just as in Australia, growing majorities in America are opposed to the Bush Administration’s drive to war. A profound scepticism and distrust is emerging and American voices of dissent are getting louder every day.

In Oh Superman Harry Heidelberg put forward a number of possible reasons for the upcoming war, but Harry missed what is probably the biggest driver to war: Bush’s domestic political agenda. This presidency is not going well. He needs a win to cover the losses.

More and more Americans are tuning in to this. Most Americans (yes, most) are no longer sucked in by the Bush lies about defending freedom and the American Way. What they are seeing is a smoke screen, and they know it. This, remember, from a nation still reeling in understandable pain and shock from September 11. Dissenting voices reject their governments cynical exploitation of those horrors, and bring the lies into the bright light of day. It is these voices that are the embodiment of the liberty and democracy that George W. Bush so prostitutes. And it is because of these voices that I am pro-American.

From independence to civil war, from Vietnam to Iraq, America has been shaped like few other nations by dissent. Often, America goes wrong. Very wrong. Today, an unrepresentative administration – the true enemies of freedom – have hijacked the American agenda. Given the shape of the world today, this means they have hijacked our agenda too.

John F. Kennedy once famously claimed to be a Berliner. He was expressing a commonality of spirit and humanity. In a similar vein, I believe Australians can also claim to be American. At the very least, we are kindred spirits.

I want to highlight some Americans of independent mind. People who uncompromisingly exercise their right of question and challenge. My focus is on the activists, the public speakers, the writers, musicians and poets. I have often thought that America is blessed with an eloquence that eludes other nations. An ability to encapsulate grand ideas in words of elegance and power. And I am a great believer in the magic of words.

American Voices

It is in the words of dissident Americans that we find all the reasons we need to be pro-American. People like Frederick Douglass, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, and the hordes who just will not be brainwashed are the real voices of America. These people are Americas redemption and therefore ours.

In her essay/speech ‘Come September’, the writer Arundhati Roy reflects this viewpoint:

“The most scholarly, scathing, incisive, hilarious critiques of the hypocrisy and the contradictions in U.S. Government policy come from American citizens. When the rest of the world wants to know what the U.S. Government is up to, we turn to Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert, Chalmers Johnson, William Blum and Anthony Arnove to tell us what’s really going on.”

Absolutely. And we have to realise that the only people who are going to change America are the Americans themselves. The full text of the speech (compulsory reading, I think) is at comeseptember.

I am of a mind with Alex Pollard (Waiting for George):

“Criticisms of Americans often unconsciously confuse the USA (the nation) with Americans (who I shall call ‘United Staticians’)”, says Alex, hitting the nail on the centre of the head.

There is an American legend that an angel, speaking of the future of America, told George Washington that the whole world united shall not prevail against her. But all prophecies are double edged and tricky, aren’t they? Will America (the notion, not the nation) end up destroying itself? The incumbents in Washington are lined up as destroyers, even if one or two of them have good intentions. The dissidents may in the end be the only hope we have.

America its own worst enemy? As far back as the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln, as quoted in Jack London’s The Iron Heel, sensed the growing internal threat of vested interest:

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country…Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

And if the ideal of America does fall irrevocably into corruption, vested interest and deceit, what then? What hope the world if the new Roman Empire falls? A new Dark Age?

Musical Voices

There’s something happening here,

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

Theres a man with a gun over there,

Tellin me I gotta beware.

I heard the old Buffalo Springfield classic on the radio the other day, and it got me to thinking about the importance of the protest song as a catalyst for change. I am hopelessly out of touch with the music scene today, and I will be very happy to be proved wrong, but there seems to me to be a void of conscience in today’s music scene.

At some point in the late 1970s, I discovered Jackson Browne. His music and particularly his lyrics continue to speak to my soul and mind today. In the mid-1980s, Browne released an album called Lives in the Balance. His focus at the time was his government’s criminal actions in Nicaragua. In a song called ‘For America’, Browne wrote:

I have prayed for America

I was made for America

It’s in my blood and in my bones

By the dawn’s early light

By all I know is right

We’re going to reap what we have sown

I am not given to flights of fancy, but with hindsight, this almost feels prescient (though I think Browne would not appreciate the idea). Remember, this is an American voice. And it’s clearly not anti-American. In the same song, he highlights the dishonesty of some people’s patriotism:

As if freedom was a question of might

As if loyalty was black and white

You hear people say it all the time-

“My country wrong or right”

I want to know what that’s got to do

With what it takes to find out what’s true

With everyone from the President on down

Trying to keep it from you

The song ends at the heart of the problem:

I have prayed for America

I was made for America

I can’t let go till she comes around

Until the land of the free

Is awake and can see

And until her conscience has been found

In summary, a stark criticism of policy but an unequivocal commitment to his country. (Try transposing Australia for America, and see how it tastes).

On the title track of the album, Browne railed against the dishonest motives of those, the men in the shadows, who promote wars. It defies summarisation, so here’s the full lyric:

I’ve been waiting for something to happen

For a week or a month or a year

With the blood in the ink of the headlines

And the sound of the crowd in my ear

*

You might ask what it takes to remember

When you know that you’ve seen it before

Where a government lies to a people

And a country is drifting to war

*

And there’s a shadow on the faces

Of the men who send the guns

To the wars that are fought in places

Where their business interest runs

*

On the radio talk shows and the T.V.

You hear one thing again and again

How the U.S.A. stands for freedom

And we come to the aid of a friend

*

But who are the ones that we call our friends–

These governments killing their own?

Or the people who finally can’t take any more

And they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone

There are lives in the balance

There are people under fire

There are children at the cannons

And there is blood on the wire

*

There’s a shadow on the faces

Of the men who fan the flames

Of the wars that are fought in places

Where we can’t even say the names

*

They sell us the President the same way

They sell us our clothes and our cars

They sell us every thing from youth to religion

The same time they sell us our wars

*

I want to know who the men in the shadows are

I want to hear somebody asking them why

They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are

But they’re never the ones to fight or to die

*

And there are lives in the balance

There are people under fire

There are children at the cannons

And there is blood on the wire

These words have incredible resonance today. And Browne, though perhaps mellower with age, has maintained his rage. His opposition to the Iraq war is a matter of record. In his latest album, The Naked Ride Home, he castigates his Casino Nation as a weapons-producing nation under Jesus. He hits on a fascinating irony here, this whole murky mixing of apparently devout but deeply warped religion and an addiction to violence. It’s very American, a subject for another time.

I dont know if linking Jackson Browne and Bob Dylan is completely legitimate in a musical sense, but you can’t think about words of American dissent without thinking about Dylan, and certainly the two men address the same themes, though Dylan’s lyrics often contain a harsher edge. ‘Masters of War’ is one of his best known earlier works, and today it is being quoted liberally on many dissident websites:

Come you masters of war

You that build all the guns

You that build the death planes

You that build the big bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know

I can see through your masks

*

You that never done nothin’

But build to destroy

You play with my world

Like it’s your little toy

You put a gun in my hand

And you hide from my eyes

And you turn and run farther

When the fast bullets fly

*

You fasten the triggers

For the others to fire

Then you set back and watch

When the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion

As young people’s blood

Flows out of their bodies

And is buried in the mud

Historical Voices

The American dissident voice is not a new phenomenon. The nation was, after all, founded in rebellion. The uncharitable will say that the American Revolution was little more than tax avoidance with guns, but this is churlish. And the founding ideals of the nation that emerged from their Revolution remain authentically inspirational.

Born a slave in Maryland in the early 19th century, Frederick Douglass rose to become one of the most remarkable Americans – perhaps one of the most remarkable human beings – in history. Douglass escaped from slavery, then worked tirelessly to eradicate it. He was instrumental in persuading Abraham Lincoln to make emancipation a central cause of the American civil war. Douglass was no pacifist, and campaigned actively for the acceptance of African Americans into the armed forces to fight for the Union.

To him, the civil war, once it was a war on slavery, was the most just of wars, and he committed himself to it unequivocally. It would be fascinating to hear him today. What would he make of the question of war on Iraq? Would he see this as a just war?

In his long and extraordinary life he did and said uncounted extraordinary things. I’ll quote one passage from a speech given on 5 July 1852. The precise date is important, as the title he gave to the speech was ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July’. It says much of the courage and character of the man, and equally of the country that (a hundred and fifty years ago) let him say it:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

The full text of this astonishing speech is at douglassarchives. I have read it several times now, and still, to borrow an Americanism, I’m like – wow!

This is the voice of America. And it is in the end the only voice that America will ever listen to. And although it may well take decades or longer, in the end America hears.

Fast forward: Just over a century later, and whilst Douglass’s great battle is long won, the struggle continues. Martin Luther King now has the dream. Much of King’s oratory is well known, but again I’ll include a passage. Here King, an advocate of non-violent activism, is trying to reconcile his world view with that of a government entangled in the Vietnam war:

My third reason [for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision] moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years – especially the last three summers.

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.

But they asked – and rightly so – what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

America listened in the end. The Vietnam war is done and condemned. King, the dissident, is a national hero. An international hero. And even death has not silenced his voice.

Voices Today

I want to end my piece with some references to the voices of today’s Americans dissidents. Not wishing to sound too melodramatic, but these people are the hope of the world, and they need our support.

I was going to start this section with a passage by Noam Chomsky, but then I found this, from an American gentleman called Frank Drazan. It was originally published on 25 January 2003 in the Chicago Tribune:

I am 82 years old. My generation has been identified as the “greatest” generation by many, primarily because we have survived through many turbulent years. I do not agree. We are not the greatest generation; we are the worst. We are the me-me-me generation.

Seniors have the most powerful lobbyists in the world that suck the blood out of our kids’ hands while we sit around doing absolutely nothing about political disasters that surround us. Why are the senior citizens standing mute while George W. Bush is promoting wars? Don’t we know the consequence of war, the killing, the destruction of cities and infrastructures, and the creation of hate for Americans? If we win the wars, will we be safer?

What I am proposing is that the seniors of America use our almost unlimited power to end this drive to make war on any country that displeases us. America was a peace-loving country before Bush was elected. Why should we be the biggest threat to peace on the planet? Have we forgotten the Vietnam War or the Korean War or the Bay of Pigs?

Why do we allow Rambo Bush to plunder our environment, ignore treaty obligations and ignore the problems of the inner cities when one bomber less would fund many programs for the poor?

Professor Chomsky, for all his unquestioned skills, could not have put it better. I do not think he would object to being supplanted by Mr Drazan. Speaking of professors, here’s the thoughts of Prof. Jack Balkin of Yale:

Bush is right about one thing, however. The world faces a single man armed with weapons of mass destruction, manifesting an aggressive, bullying attitude, who may well plunge the world into chaos and bloodshed if he miscalculates. This person, belligerent, arrogant and sure of himself, truly is the most dangerous person on Earth.

The problem is that his name is George Bush, and he is the President of the United States.

Ouch.

What about the commentators, the purveyors of opinion, the makers of manners? Robert Scheer in the LA Times recently:

It’s truly frightening when facts don’t matter as a nation prepares for war. Once the bombing begins, any search for truth will end. Now is the time to question a pattern of egregious distortion of the facts on the part of a White House that apparently feels it needs a war to retain its fading popularity.

You don’t always find this material on the front pages of the major papers, but it is there if you go looking. A personal favourite of mine is an article by Mark Morford in the San Francisco Gate. For those whose tastes lean towards the scathing, the full article is at sfgate. Here’s an appetiser:

This is not a war. Iraq will not be a war. Do we understand this? We do not seem to understand this. This is heavily corporatized power brokers killing each other for oil and capital. Oh yes it is.

Let’s be perfectly clear. You cannot have a war when the so-called enemy has done nothing to provoke you and is absolutely no threat to your national safety and has no significant military force and has negligible chance of even setting off a firecracker near your own overwhelming death machines, and whose only weapons of minimal destruction are the rusty short-range warheads and biochemical agents we sold him 20 years ago, and kept selling to him, even after we knew he was gassing his own people.

You cannot have a war when there is nothing to fight against, when it’s essentially going to be a huge U.S. military stomping/bombing exercise, when, just like Afghanistan, we stand to suffer zero U.S. casualties (except for those we seem to kill ourselves), and we just bomb and bomb and kill and kill and shrug. This is a Mack truck versus a Pinto. This is an F-16 versus a paper airplane, a Tomahawk missile versus a spit wad. There is no contest. “War” is exactly the wrong term. The U.S. attack on Iraq will be, of course, a massacre. Go team.

In a piece which celebrates the growth of grass roots war opposition in her city, Ruth Rosen in the San Francisco Chronicle observes that:

Never before in human history has an anti-war movement grown so fast and spread so quickly. It is even more remarkable because the war has yet to begin.

Ms Rosen attributes this unprecedented growth rate at least partly to the internet. I’m sure she must be right. I suppose that’s why I’m sitting here typing away at 3.14 in the ******* morning. (Yeah, yeah get a life). I would not be so presumptuous as to claim any personal impact in trying to turn the tide, but the sheer weight of accumulated protest must be having some sort of effect. The speed and reach of the internet leaves the liars and warmongers with no place to hide. They do read this stuff, you know. (A thought that is simultaneously encouraging and frightening).

Getting away from the big cities of the US, I found this from The Roanoke Times, by one Alwyn Moss:

There is something very strange and troubling when the world’s foremost military power; the only nation to possess thousands of nuclear bombs, nuclear weaponry, missiles; the only nation to have actually used atomic bombs on a civilian population, demands the total disarmament of a small, devastated nation under threat of pulverizing that nation into total submission and regime change.

Incredibly, this threat includes the possible use of nuclear weapons to deal with the possibility that the other nation might have some nuclear capability.

We would like to believe that the United States could be the force of change that might deliver humanity from its present misery, often as not due to poverty aggravated by endless wars. Yet it is well known that the United States leads the world in sales of weapons of every variety. The character and quality of a nation – even a superpower – can be judged by its priorities.

I have deliberately stayed away from the more public dissidents in these quotes. I wanted to see what lesser known people are thinking. Of the people I’ve quoted, I think only Robert Scheer is relatively well known, though I could be mistaken. I found a lot of the references above at a site called Common Dreams at commondreams.

Those who want Chomsky, Said, Zinn, Jensen and others (and I for one frequently do) know where to look. (zmag is always a good starting point, particularly for Chomsky). You’ll also find the British connection here, people like Fisk and Pilger (I confess I am not particularly a fan of Pilger, but he does warrant a mention) as well as our own Scott Burchill. Its a great resource.

One more reference, then I’ll close. Ed Garvey, in the Madison Capital Times:

But when I see poll after poll showing us to be the most unpopular country in the world, “The Ugly American” sadly comes back into focus. Why are we hated? Why were there demonstrations last Saturday in New Zealand, Great Britain, Australia, Islamabad? The answer is simple: Arrogance of power. We have told the world we don’t care about their attitudes. Hot news. No one loves the bully.

Why did hundreds of thousands of Americans – young, old, veterans, pacifists, Muslims, Christians, Jews, students, professors, iron workers, farmers – hit the streets to raise hell about “no blood for oil”? I’ll give you a hint. We remember the burials during Korea, we remember the body bags in Vietnam. Ask a neighbor with a 19- to 25-year-old son if she would sleep well with a flag in the house that had draped the coffin of her boy following a war to enrich Halliburton, Exxon and Mobil.

That is what this is all about. Would we, middle-class America, send our sons or daughters into combat to satisfy the dream of W’s advisers and to make billions for the oil companies? If not, is an American war OK if only the poor whites, blacks and Hispanics give their lives and health?

These are all American voices. They are the reason we cannot be anti-American.

So this is my case for supporting America. The real America. George W. Bush is not America. He is small and mean-spirited. He is an embarrassing but temporary pimple on the face of a much loved friend. Be anti-George by all means (I know I am, and always will be) but anti-American? No. The Americans I admire may not stop this war, but they will keep trying even once it starts.

All we can do is raise Australian voices too. We may not always have American eloquence. We certainly do not have their volume. But Australian support, whilst small in the scheme of things, is symbolic. And symbols are important. John Howard knows this. George W. Bush knows this.

But so do we, boys. And were going to keep shouting until you hear.

Ah boy, boy

This world is not your toy…

(Jackson Browne)