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July 4, 2002
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
June 27, 2002
Ralph Nader
Reclaiming
Our Commons
Neve Gordon
Jerusalem
Under Attack
Robert Jensen
Alternative
Futures
David Vest
Darryl Kile's
Great Day
Gary Leupp
The Loya
Jirga Joke
Rahul Mahajan
Arafat
Says US Needs New Leadership; Calls for Fair Elections
June 26, 2002
Robert Fisk
Sharon as
Bush Speechwriter
Mokhiber / Weissman
Brokerman
June 25, 2002
Dave Marsh
The RIAA,
Library of Congress and the Web Pirates
Uri Avnery
Reform
Now!
Bahour / Dahan
Bush:
Off with Arafat's Head
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F-Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
Resources:
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by Alexander
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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Independence
Day
July 4, 2002
What the Flag
Means to Me
by S. Brian Willson
I was probably seven years old before it really
sunk in that everybody in my town was not celebrating my birthday
on July 4. It was an exciting day with parades, picnics, fireworks
and, in my case, special birthday parties and gifts. I lived
much of my young life with the extra boost of having been born
on the day that our earliest political framers signed the Declaration
of Independence, an historical act of defiance against monarchial
colonial rule from distant England. I remember proudly carrying
the U.S. American flag in one of the July 4th parades in my small,
agricultural town in upstate New York. And for years I felt goosebumps
looking at Old Glory waving in the breeze during the playing
of the national anthem or as it passed by in a parade. How lucky
I was to have been born in the greatest country in the history
of the world, and blessed by God to boot. Such a blessing, such
a deal!
It wasn't until many years later, while
reading an issue of the armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes
in Vietnam, that I began thinking and feeling differently about
the flag and what it represents. There was a story about an arrest
for flag burning somewhere in the United States. I had recently
experienced the horror of seeing numerous bodies of young women
and children that were burned alive in a small Delta village
devastated by napalm. I imagined that since the pilots had "successfully"
hit their targets, they were feeling good and probably had received
glowing reports that would bode well in their military record
for promotions. I wondered why it was okay to burn innocent human
beings 10,000 miles from my home town, but not okay to burn a
piece of cloth that was symbolic of the country that had horribly
napalmed those villagers. Something was terribly wrong with the
Cold War rhetoric of fighting communism that made me question
what our nation stood for. There was a grand lie, an American
myth, that was being fraudulently preserved under the cloak of
our flag.
It took me years to process this clear
cognitive dissonance between the rhetoric of my cultural teachings
and the reality of my own personal experiences. I had to accept
that, either there was serious distortion in how I was interpreting
my personal realities, or the cultural rhetoric was terribly
distorted. Hmm. A dilemma! If I accepted the former, I could
relax and feel good about being an "American." If I
accepted the latter, I would experience a serious identity crisis,
perhaps a nervous breakdown. But no matter how hard I tried,
I could not ignore what my own conscience was continually telling
me.
I began a serious reflection that included
careful study of U.S. and world history. When I was a teenager
living near Seneca Indian reservations in western New York State
I occasionally heard Seneca acquaintances utter "jokes"
about how the "White man speaks with forked tongue."
We thought it funny at the time. But then I discovered how my
country really was founded. There were hundreds of nations comprised
of millions of human beings--yes, human beings--living throughout
the land before our European ancestors arrived here in the 1600s.
The U.S. government signed over 400 treaties with various Indigenous
nations and violated every one of them. And over time these original
peoples were systematically eliminated in what amounted to the
first genuine American holocaust.
When I reread the Declaration of Independence
I noted words I hadn't been aware of before: "He [the King
of Great Britain] has excited domestic insurrections amongst
us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers,
the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is
an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."
Honest history reveals that the very land upon which our founding
fathers began this new experiment in freedom had been taken by
violence and deceit, ironically using the same diabolical methods
the framers accused of those already living here. It became obvious
after extensive reading that my European ancestors did not believe
that Indigenous Americans were human beings worthy of respect,
but despicable, non-human creatures, worthy only of extermination.
The pre-Columbus population of Indigenous in the Western Hemisphere
is estimated to have been at least 100 million (8-12 million
north of the Rio Grande). By 1900 this population had been reduced
to about 5 percent of its former size. An Indigenous friend of
mine, a Seneca man who had served the U.S. military in World
War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and then after retiring, discovered
his ancestral roots as a native American, once remarked to me:
"I call the American flag 'Old Gory,' the red representing
the blood, and the white, the bones, of my murdered ancestors."
When adding to our first holocaust the
damage done to African cultures through forcefully seizing human
beings to be slaves in order to build our early agricultural
and industrial base, and the carnage from nearly 300 U.S. overt
military and thousands of covert interventions in the Twentieth
Century to acquire access to markets and resources on our selfish
terms, we see there are actually three holocausts that have enabled
the "glorious American civilization" to be what it
is today. It is now estimated that Africa lost 50 million of
its population to the slave trade, at least two-thirds of whom
were killed resisting capture or died during the horrors of transit;
an estimated 20 to 30 million people in the Third World have
been killed as a result of U.S. interventions. Note that when
other peoples all over the globe have attempted to emulate the
spirit of our Declaration of Independence (a proclamation of
self-determination), such as Vietnam explicitly did in 1945,
our government not only has turned a deaf ear, but has done everything
in its power short of dropping Atomic bombs to destroy their
efforts to obtain independence. This is the foundation upon which
we have built "America." Quite the karma!
The founding of our Republic was conducted
in secrecy by an upper class who insisted on a strong national
government that could assure a successful but forceful clearing
of western lands, enabling the safe settlement and economic development
of previously inhabited Indigenous territory. Our Founding Fathers
did not represent the common people. Some historians believe
that if the Constitution itself had been subjected to a genuine
vote of all the people it would have been resoundly defeated.
Subsequently, what evolved is a political system run by plutocrats
who perpetuate an economic system that protects the interests
of those who finance their campaigns (a form of bribery). The
U.S. government is a democracy in name only. Never have we had
a government that seriously addresses the plight of the people,
whether it be workers, minorities, women, the poor, etc. Whatever
has been achieved in terms of rights and benefits for these constituencies,
i.e., the people, has been struggled for against substantial
repression, and the constant threat the gains will be subsequently
lost. Intense pressures are applied by the selfish oligarchy
which seeks ever increased profits, rarely, if ever, considering
the expense to the health of the majority of people, their local
cultures, and the ecology.
What the West calls capitalism is nothing
like what Adam Smith had in mind with his views of decentralized
networks of small entrepreneurs working in harmony with the needs
and forces of others in their own communities. What we have is
a savage system of centrally institutionalized greed that is
unable to generalize an equitable way of life for the majority
of people here in the U.S., or in the rest of the world. It requires
incredible exploitation of human and other natural resources
all over the globe with the forcible protection of military and
paramilitary forces financed or sanctioned by governments. It
thrives on its own sinister version of welfare where the public
financially guarantees--through tax loopholes, subsidies, contracts,
and outright bailouts--the profitable success of the major corporations
and financial institutions, especially, but not exclusively,
in the military-industrial complex. Additionally, our monopoly
capitalism defines efficiency by totally ignoring the true costs
of its production and distribution. It conveniently forgets the
huge ecological and human exhaustion costs (both being our true
wealth). If these costs were included, the system would be finished
in a second. The reality, upon honest examination, is that the
economic system we call capitalism, now neoliberal, global capitalism,
is cruelly based on a very fraudulent set of assumptions that
justify massive exploitation. The reality, upon honest examination,
is that our political system was founded, and has been maintained
to this very day by substantive plutocracy, not democracy.
So when I see the flag and think of the
Declaration of Independence, instead of the United States of
America, I see the United Corporations of America; I see the
blood and bones of people all over the globe who have been dehumanized,
then exterminated by its imperialism; and I see a symbol that
represents a monstrous lie maintained by excessive, deadly force.
It makes me feel sick, and ashamed. And I know that my opinions
being expressed here will not be popular, even among some of
my closest friends. But I cannot ignore the reality as I now
understand it. I believe we are living one of the most incredible
lies in history, covered over by one of the most successful campaigns
of public rhetoric, ignoring empirical reality. It is truly amazing!
I hope that one day we will end our willful ignorance and be
able to see our transgressions, and beg, on our knees, for forgiveness,
and then wail as we begin to feel the incredible pain and anguish
we have caused the world as well as our own bodies, minds, souls,
and culture.
S. Brian Willson
is a Vietnam veteran who in 1987 had his legs cut off at Concord,
California, while protesting a Naval train carrying weapons headed
for Central America. Visit his website at: http://www.brianwillson.com
Today's
Features
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
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