The above quotation exemplifies U.S.]]>

The above quotation exemplifies U.S. American historian William Appleman Williams’ thesis that, from our very origins, any force interfering with the "American" weltanshauung, i.e., prosperity through expansion, must be assimilated, or eliminated. The Indigenous, African Americans, Mexicans, Filipinos, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, labor unions, Vietnamese, among many, come to mind.

Religious historian Karen Armstrong (e.g., A Short History of Myth) describes a myth as an event that happened once but in essence happens all the time (i.e., serves as a metaphor). An occurrence, even as it might be perceived as an historical freak, needs to be liberated from the confines of a specific period/moment and brought into contemporary lives. Otherwise it remains a unique, unrepeatable incident. A myth demands action, ceasing to be an event in the past, becoming a living reality in every moment. It transcends space and time!

The myth of the hero is not about adulation, not intended to provide icons to admire, but designed to tap into archetypal characteristics of courageous empathy and equity that reside deeply within everyone. Myth motivates replication and participation, not passive contemplation.

THE CRIME OF SEPTEMBER 1, 1987: Sending a train at three times the 5 MPH speed limit with people known to be on the tracks in plain view while violating all safety/security requirements.

THE CHARGE: Assault with Deadly Weapon; Attempted Murder

Atmosphere was so unusual and frightening, base fire chief said, I had a bad feeling about this situation.

• Train crew ordered by superiors NOT to stop outside base area (i.e., at our block location) to prevent hijack.
• Marines (twice): We hear there is…to be violence today;…may be some violence out here today.
• Armed Marines stood near our vigil, an unusual scene, then chose not to interfere.
• Supervisor’s response to being told of the block: You’re crazy, I’m going to do my job.
• Security Officer: Let them go ahead, we are going to have a confrontation sooner or later.
• Moving train without braking knowing people or obstacles were on tracks.
• Moving train across public highway while violating safety/security protocols.
• Moving train without sheriff having sufficient notice to be present as required.
• Train crew accelerated over three times speed limit, no braking, smoke pouring from exhaust stack at collision.
• Two Spotters standing on platform above cowcatcher on front of locomotive shook their heads, NO, NO!
• RR crossing clangers first rang after Brian hit, revealing speed far in excess of track’s 5 mph trigger.
• Navy ambulance arrived, then quickly departed, without giving medical treatment.

But listen! This bestial behavior has been conducted by oligarchic power structures for thousands of years, including by the United States itself since its founding!

The Coverup of the Crime

• CNWS said: (1) train going 5 MPH; (2) Brian et al. suddenly jumped; (3) train crew could not see people.
• The CHP refused to preserve radio dispatch tapes regarding the Sept. 1,1987 CNWS assault.
• Navy Investigation denied critical reports of Contra Costa County Sheriff and Federal Railroad Admin.
• Contra Costa County DA: It was "an accident", no crime or intention to hit or run over protesters.
• The fact that train crew was ordered not to stop was NOT part of report submitted to Congress.
• The Congressional Hearings in November 1987 refused any eyewitnesses from the assault.
• The Congressional Hearings censored 43 of Brian’s 47-page prepared written testimony.

Listen up! This kind of lying is not new!

Facts Determined by Official Navy Investigation dated October 2, 1987

• August 21, 1987, Willson letter to CNWS Commander: we will not move for approaching rail traffic; This is significantly different from his June 2, 1987 letter which did not mention "physically being on the tracks to stop munitions movements" as August letter did.
• Aug. 31, 1987, CNWS Commander sent cable to Navy Sea Systems Command: Willson identified as "protest principal". Cable: fasters will NOT move for approaching rail traffic. Local Sheriff and police offices aware of threat. Should potential interruption of rail service occur, they will be requested to remove protestor(s). Interruption of normal Station operations was not anticipated. It concluded: National media attention possible since fasters achieved notoriety during fast on Capitol steps in Washington, D.C. last September.
• CHP talked to vigilers at 11:10 A.M., then told CNWS officials of protestors’ plans to block train.
• Sept. 1, Civilian security officer Banta & Railroad Operations foreman Hubbard noticed absence of sheriff. Banta: You might as well let them go ahead, we are going to have a confrontation sooner or later, and said he "hoped a demonstrator or demonstrators would be on the tracks".
• Two vigilers told Hubbard people were about to block. "Hubbard turned away and refused to listen".
• Demonstrators first observable to two spotters on front of locomotive 650 feet prior to collision.
• Train crew did nothing to brake train prior to collision, even after recognizing people on tracks.
• Speed limit at the location where demonstrators were present was 5 MPH.
• Train crew said they were going 5 MPH; train speed, from FBI analysis, was in fact in range 12-16 MPH.
• Willson was prepared for arrest; he thought trains would not run, or would stop until removal.
• Federal Railroad Administration determined that this was not a railroad accident.

Under Reagan "Terrorism" Became Pretext For Repression (preceding Bush II by 20 years)

From the moment President Reagan took office in 1981, he began signing Executive Orders, National Security Decision Directives, and Intelligence Findings that essentially revived COINTELPRO. It was said that he had authorized a "go anywhere, do anything" policy. The National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI were granted wide authority to conduct domestic surveillance, collect domestic intelligence, and to disrupt and destroy efforts of individuals and groups perceived as "terrorists", especially those opposed to his policies in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Congress funded domestic surveillance. Research indicates at least 200 serious break-ins of private homes and organizational offices, that 1,600 groups were targeted, and that nearly 7,000 U.S. citizens were seriously investigated as "terrorists", the "hook" being their support of foreign governments.

Personal Activities Prior to September 1987: Labeled a "Terrorist"

I had made five trips to Nicaragua and El Salvador where I had made speeches and broadcast radio programs, as well as doing the same in the U.S., condemning our policy of lawless aggression including the c
ommitment of systematic murders and maimings. I had made contacts with guerrillas in El Salvador and officials of the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. I had gathered voluminous evidence of U.S. crimes, as had many other U.S. citizens, from personal "on the ground" investigations. I decided to declare myself a tax refuser to the IRS based on the Nuremberg Obligation that requires me to disobey laws and orders that make me complicit with the government’s commission of crimes.

In September 1986 I participated with three other veterans in a two-phased, open-ended, water-only fast on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, the Veterans Fast For Life, protesting Reagan’s terrorism policies against the restive impoverished in Central America, with complicity of Congress. Nearly six weeks into the fast we were jolted by a declaration of U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee member, Warren Rudman (R-NH), that we were similar to "the terrorists who are holding our hostages in Beirut," inferring, we speculated, that he felt we were holding the U.S. government hostage. About that time both our office, and separate residence, was broken into with records taken.

We ended the fast after the 47th day, as one of our members was seriously ill. Nicaragua’s foreign minister personally joined us on the steps as we declared knowledge of 500 national solidarity activities with our fast, and announced plans to organize more observers in the war zones.

Unknown to us at the time, but only 20 days after Rudman’s statement, the FBI initiated a domestic terrorist investigation of the four fasters. This enabled the FBI to conduct ever more surveillance, mail openings, phone taps, etc. In the first part of 1987, I spent two months in the war zones of Nicaragua with other veterans gathering additional evidence of U.S.-funded and directed barbarism. We sent detailed letters to President Reagan, the Congress, and the U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua. I continued to speak at events with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

I sent additional letters to the IRS stating my intention to continue refusal of payments with reasons given, that I no longer possessed assets, and was prepared to go to prison as a consequence. During one meeting with the IRS, I was ordered out of the office when I refused to sign a payback schedule.

Not long after nearly being murdered on September 1, 1987, an FBI agent in the Midwest was fired for refusing to investigate six people, the four fasters among them, as "domestic terrorist suspects." In December 1987, FBI Director Sessions admitted that the four members of the "Veterans fast For Life", "were developed as suspects," and that the FBI conducted a "preliminary inquiry…under the domestic security/terrorism caption." From the pattern of conduct "it was reasonable to conclude a political motive, by two or more persons engaged in activities in violation of Federal law…an enterprise for the purpose of furthering political or social goals, wholly or in part, through activities that involve force or violence and a violation of the criminal laws of the United States."

What "force or violence" the FBI claimed as a basis for their investigation remains unknown. Did they claim the fasters "held the government hostage," and that was "illegal" force? One of the other men on the tracks was WWII veteran Duncan Murphy, who also had been one of the four fasters. So, there were two "domestic terrorist" suspects on the tracks that day.

Explanation for the Crime

The decision to run the train was irresponsible and dangerous. It was extraordinarily criminal. No similar decision had ever been made at CNWS, though protests dated to the mid-1960s, including trains being blocked. If we were "terrorists," a la "the Middle East," the train could have been blown up.

One can only surmise that government officials’ paranoid fears of a "hijacking" emerged from briefings from unknown sources that Duncan and I were "terrorists" and that under no circumstances was the train to stop to assure our removal from the tracks, as was the historic protocol. In other words, it was attempted murder, since they acknowledged they knew we would not voluntarily move.

The first question asked of me in the hospital by investigator Sheriff Ed Nunn was, "When did you begin planning to hijack the train"? I was shocked. The sheriff’s report was never made public.

The orders to run the train went up at least three levels of the chain of command, but which higher officials were involved has never been determined.

The Trauma of Civilization: A Long, Long View

The human invention of urban "civilization" about 3500 BC, some 300 human generations ago, emerged from the new concept of "surplus" enabled by the agricultural revolution. This coincides with the advent of patterns of systematic violence previously unknown (Mumford), as surplus led to another new idea, greed, manifesting initially in kings, city-states, and early empires. Patriarchy replaced Goddess cultures. Reportedly, 14,500 wars have occurred since. Massive civil obedience has been required to enable vertical authority structures to prevail. Over the eons popular obedience (always with exceptions) has become a habit, generally void of conscious memory of autonomous freedom of pre-civilization tribal groups. All civilizations, including ours, fit this historic pattern.

Class and stratification ripped people from the historical pattern of living in small tribal groups. This separation of people from their intimate connections with the earth produced deep insecurity and fear. Ecopyschology suggests that such fragmentation created a primordial breach, resulting in severe trauma and insecurity in the human psyche (Roszak). Psychologists describe creation of "defense mechanisms" to avoid addressing painful inner "shadows." Arrogance rather than humility, denial rather than awareness, and violence against "others" rather than mutual respect, became major mechanisms to relieve anxiety created by these insecurities (Millburn and Conrad). Authentic freedoms defer to belief in authority structures and their controlling ideologies (De La Boetie, Eisler).

This pattern of accepting one’s class position contributes to deep shame (invalidation), recognition of which is pre-empted by seductive belief systems. Many successive generations of shame-based upbringing (Miller) and shame-ethics has led to systemic patterns of violence (Gilligan). Ancestral memories yearning for a high, or "rush," from experiences of rallying around collective defense to a common enemy (Ehrenreich), and search for meaning in a culture of void, suggests today that "war is a force that gives us meaning" (Hedges).

Tyranny is inherent in concentration of political, social, and economic power, whether achieved through elections, force of arms, or inheritance. The method of rule is essentially the same: achieving massive consent in hierarchies and bureaucracies, either through fear or propaganda/myth. People have deep yearning for meaning and autonomy, remnants of their evolutionary memory, but the void is at least temporarily fulfilled through name-calling and violence with a "cause" (De La Boetie).

United States Civilization, A Long View: The Plundering Metaphor

The U.S. nation does not represent a breakthrough from this pattern of class and violence in the history of civilization, despite the fact that citizens are taught to believe otherwise. Our nation continues to be primarily ruled by white male hierarchies of wealth and power (oligarchs and plutocrats), committed to "prosperity" through expansion (exploitation), with consent of the people under the veil of a "constitutional democr
acy."

What happened on September 1, 1987 was but a snapshot (a metaphor) of our nation’s history of eliminating threats to its entrenched ethos of plundering for prosperity, within the larger context of 5,500 years of vertical power systems controlling resources and stifling threats of people power. Lethal weapons were destined to eliminate autonomous, democratic people movements. The imperial train was rolling on tracks to preserve its hegemony.

Our nation is founded on racist arrogance and violence expressed in at least three holocausts: (1) theft of land by force, resulting in the murder of millions of indigenous peoples; (2) theft of labor by force, resulting in the murder of millions of African Americans (and others); (3) theft of resources by force, resulting in the murder of millions of impoverished people throughout the "Third World," all conducted with virtual total impunity. This has created a cultural attitude of superiority as we laud our prosperity, virtually all a result of violent theft.

The Myth of the Hero: Not Icons to Admire But for Unique Replication by Everyone

September 1, 1987 was not a freak, but a dramatic example of a historical pattern whose existence has been generally insulated from middle-class frames of reference: the evil policy, the good resister. It was a ruthless, visceral experience of Reagan’s "go anywhere, do anything" policy. But this is a normal experience for millions of people around the world who have been victims of U.S. policy when they organize against their own repression. We are not worth more; they are not worth less.

Many of us understand how incredibly delusional is "American exceptionalism." Disobedience to our system is a no-brainer as we participate in re-localizing sustainable communities where we live. Each of us is a hero-in-process. Though the train sought to eliminate us, our yearning to express passionate empathy is so deeply embedded within us it simply awaits access. Dignity trumps longevity. Our spirit seeks to re-claim humanity from patterns of conditioned obedience to anti-human economic and political systems which ironically are destroying life itself, including our own.

Tradition influences humans by circumscribing behavior within certain bounds. But it is equally true that humans make the traditions. Thus, humans make ourselves (Childe). What we have created we can uncreate, then remake in new forms supporting dignified survival in an earth community of biocracy. Each of us is a hero with an evolutionary archetypal track to ground us as we create community justice alternatives to the extraordinarily violent American Way Of Life (AWOL).

U.S.: "Empire of Liberty," Built Upon Three Holocausts

TO: Brian Willson

SENT: Tuesday, March 18, 2003, 11:08 AM

Awaiting the impending U.S. government's concocted "preventive" war against Iraq (indeed, against the world), this is perhaps one of the most frightening moments in human history. In a surreal scenario, the U.S. government is renewing active threats of using nuclear weapons and reviving use of anti-personnel land mines, and is introducing new technological weapons of death we can only imagine, and some we cannot.]]> Introduction

Awaiting the impending U.S. government’s concocted "preventive" war against Iraq (indeed, against the world), this is perhaps one of the most frightening moments in human history. In a surreal scenario, the U.S. government is renewing active threats of using nuclear weapons and reviving use of anti-personnel land mines, and is introducing new technological weapons of death we can only imagine, and some we cannot. As grim as this scene is, I believe it must be the inevitable and logical extension of the continued growth ad nauseum of the American Way Of Life (AWOL) in particular, and the Western Way Of Life in general. Premeditated murder of thousands–perhaps millions–of innocents is the price for AWOL’s insatiable consumption and its bloodthirsty vengeance, totally abdicating responsibility for lethal consequences to the planet and its species, including, ironically, our own. Perhaps Gaia is presenting the current transparent dangers to us as like a cosmic gift so that we might actually be able to see the extraordinary folly of our ways in time to creatively "storm the Bastille."

U.S. Terrorist Roots

U.S. civilization was founded on and has been sustained by terrorism, facilitated by Eurocentric racism, classism, and arrogant ethnocentrism. The grossest irony of all, of course, is that the "War on Terror," to be successful, must focus on our own civilization, the most egregious proponent of terror the world has even known. Terror was systematically utilized since our country’s beginnings in the 1600s. The following instructions, facilitated by a cruel racism, are part of the historic record: "burning and spoiling the [Indian] country," (Captain John Underhill, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1636); "put to death the [Pequot Indian] men of Block Island" (Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop’s order to Captain John Endecott, 1637); "laying waste," and instilling "terror…by any means" among the Indians (General George Washington, 1779); "[with] malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support" (General John Sullivan, 1779).

In a prominent history book published in 1906 (The History of the United States, James Wilford Garner, Ph.D. and Henry Cabot Lodge, Ph.D, L.L.D), the "destruction" of the American Indian is explained as follows: "History teaches that inferior people must yield to a superior civilization….They must take on civilization or pass out. The Negro was able to endure slavery while learning the rudiments of civilization; the Indian could not endure slavery, and…refused to be taught."

Attitudes uttered by white, Puritan, Christian men, civilian and military, thus set the tone for our civilization, sentiments that to this day have not been seriously renounced. We remain primarily a white male supremacy society with overtly expressed as well as suppressed sentiments of racism and classism dominating much of our political life and foreign policy. How can someone drop a bomb knowing that thousands of innocents will be murdered if the bomber is not possessed by cruel racism and/or ugly ethnocentrism?

Conveniently left out of the historical record is the fact that our civilization has been founded on three holocausts, the first being theft of virtually all our land base at gunpoint while murdering millions of the original inhabitants. The second brought us "free" labor from Africa, but resulted in two-thirds of all those originally targeted for apprehension being murdered in the process of trying to escape or from being stowed as human cargo in slave ships known as floating coffins. The third holocaust took place during what the founder and publisher of Time and Life magazines, Thomas Luce, called "The American Century." This century witnessed more than 300 military and perhaps 10,000 covert interventions by the U.S. into more than 100 countries, stealing resources at gunpoint while murdering millions of the increasing numbers of impoverished people struggling for independence. "American exceptionalism" must succeed at any cost. In the process, the three Buddhist "poisons" are employed:

1. greed — for profit at any cost of human suffering;
2. hatred — of any obstacles to profit;
3. ignorance — of the intimate link between Western corporations/governments and "Third World" repressive regimes

U.S. Oligarchy

It does not matter which of the two parties, the republocrats or demoblicans, is in power. They both easily consented to the selection of their chief executive officer in violation of the rights of thousands of illegally disenfranchised Black voters, and of their Constitutional system itself that makes no provision for the Supreme Court to make such selection. Both believe in preserving the "national security" of AWOL, which means continued, unabated acceleration of extraction, consumption and pollution patterns, and obscene profits for the plutocrats and their bribed oligarchs in Washington. For all this to happen, Mr. Bush, indeed, has laid out the necessary plans for a world imperium to assure, in his and his cohorts’ minds, continuation of our Western way of life, business- and profits-as-usual.

These oligarchs are not able to perceive the fact that further continuation of AWOL guarantees our destruction. They are not able to even consider the need for radical contraction and creative alternatives. They act as if blind drunk with their personal and political values of money and power, under the cloak of their disfigured version of Jesus. Unfortunately, the inevitable consequences of their business-as-usual forces are systematic destruction of virtually all sustainable ecosystems and human-created institutions.

Origins of "Civilization"

Some history. As the revolution of urban civilization took root some 5,000 years ago the basic ingredients of "Western civilization" were introduced into our human evolutionary journey. The basic model of "civilization," for all but the most isolated and exceptional Indigenous groups, has seen the advent of powerful male oligarchs surrounded by elite bureaucracies of scribes and priests, overseeing hierarchies that involuntarily enforced large numbers of laborers, often violently captured during wars, to construct large projects for the pleasure of the king. Wars, systematic violence, and harsh class division originated with "civilizations." Secrecy of priestly knowledge about cosmic regularities and calendar-making assured that knowledge was monopolized by the small elite surrounding the oligarch. And the maxim, "the best defense is attack," was often used in early warfare, roots of our preventive strikes of today. According to Asian and Scandinavian scholars there have been nearly 15,000 wars during the last 5,000 years.

Extraordinarily Dangerous Trends

The U.S. economy reveals increasing vulnerabilities to the fiction and hot air behind Wall Street and the continued exploitation and creation of misery upon which it is based. The U.S. regime has chosen to protect its illusion of omnipotence under the veil of fighting "terrorism" and its curtailing of civil liberties is similar to a police state. Increasingly desperate means used by people in power to maintain that power is a historically typical, predictable phenomenon. Never before, however, have oligarchs commanded so much power and possessed so many weapons of mass destruction, with explicit intentions to use such weapons preventively rather than defensively.

I believe that we are at a pivotal point in history. We sit precariously perched on a ledge overlooking imminent extinction as a very real
possibility at this juncture in our long, 7- to 8-million-year human evolutionary journey. Academics often talk about how history is cyclical, but two demonstrable trends, clearly not cyclical, indicate that we are dangerously near the end of our evolutionary branch.

The first fatal trend is the impact of our rapid population growth on space and resources that are finite, facilitated by at least two significant factors — our departure some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago from the natural accounting system tendered when living close to the pulse of the Earth, and our recent nearly religious belief in and uncritical dependence upon dangerous, mind-numbing technology. Closely related, therefore, is the second trend, the "developed" world’s, i.e., Western Civilization’s, virtual total dependence upon dwindling supplies of finite material resources. Black gold, or oil, is only one of these resources, but perhaps the one whose imminent depletion may provoke a necessary evolutionary shift in human consciousness. Supplies of these earth resources have been available to us for only a short time in all of our long human history. We must envision a world of energy and fabric without them. Our cultural transition must quickly move from exponential growth to steady-state.

Two other features of so-called civilization have contributed substantially to this pivotal moment. One feature is the male dominator, hierarchical, bureaucratic model that uses violence, terror and secrecy to induce mass compliance. This model clearly emerged during the late neolithic period, about 3,000 B.C.E. Another feature is our inattention to the independent variable of size as a critical factor in the workability and sustainability of any political, social, or economic unit, and of technology itself.

Emergence of Nonviolent Anarchism

Following my tour of military duty in Vietnam, I was shocked at how easily I had followed orders, without asking any questions, to do things that in hindsight seemed so criminal and insane. I began pursuing new ways of thinking. I stumbled on a variety of thinkers who might today be called nonviolent anarchists. Anarchism is the natural and spontaneous tendency of humans to associate together for their mutual benefit. The idea is that social groups of modest size are better off organizing themselves without government, i.e., organizing without authority. Tolstoy, Kropotkin, Thoreau and Gandhi were all anarchist thinkers.

Peter Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) renounced his privileged position with the Russian Czar’s Military Corp to study biology, geography, and anthropology in the vast unknown regions of Siberia. His work ultimately prepared a scientific foundation for an essential feature of anarchism by demonstrating that mutual aid — voluntary cooperation — is an even stronger tendency in human evolution than aggression and domination. One of the world’s greatest books, in my opinion, and one of the first to present an authoritative long-view of ecology before that word was even used, is Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Kropotkin begins by stating that "it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own." He concludes his book by declaring that "in the ethical progress of man, mutual support — not mutual struggle — has had the leading part."

It was when reading these very words of Kropotkin’s sometime during the 1970s that I experienced my first "aha!" regarding the origins of my startling response to a question posed to me by a Vietnamese lieutenant as he and I witnessed the immediate aftermath of the bombing of a small village in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta in April 1969. As I looked at mangled and bloodied corpses of mostly women and children, I gagged, then wept. The lieutenant was grinning as he asked me, "What’s wrong?" Without thinking, I responded, while pointing to a particular woman who was lying near my feet with three small children next to her, something to the effect that these people were part of my family. He clearly did not understand my response since he apparently perceived the horrible scene as a victory over "communism." My response had been a mystery to me until I read the above passages. Yes, of course, we are all intimately related by spirit, even by molecular and DNA structure, imbedded deeply in our ancient mind-body mechanisms. To realize that and act upon it will enable us to find the strength and wisdom to liberate ourselves from complicity with the depths of our nation’s insanity. It was these experiences that began my life-time journey as a recovering white male.

Etienne de La Boetie

Much earlier than the thinkers mentioned above, 18-year old French law student Etienne de La Boetie (1530-63) wrote a short essay in 1548, "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude," which became and remains a classic in the literature of nonviolence. It is brilliant in its explanation of the origins of tyranny and the ease in which enslavement occurs. His ability to grasp, more than 450 years ago, the psychology and inherent corruption that regularly occurs with social and political power is staggering. He argued that men create their own tyrants by giving obedience to them. He stressed that tyranny would easily collapse if the people chose to withdraw their support and complicity.

"The more tyrants pillage, the more they crave, the more they ruin and destroy; the more one yields to them, and obeys them, by that much do they become mightier and more formidable, the readier to annihilate and destroy. But if not one thing is yielded to them, if, without any violence they are simply not obeyed, they become naked and undone and as nothing, just as, when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies."

Note: "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" was republished as a paperback in 1997 under title The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (Harry Kurz, translator).

William Godwin

The 18th Century political philosopher William Godwin (1756-1836), the first person in modern times after the French Revolution to develop a systematic theory of nonviolent anarchism, concluded in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) that men are subject to tyranny because the great mass of people agree to be tyrannically ruled. Godwin declared that reliance on basic truth necessitates sacrifices. Regarding war, he concluded: "We can have no adequate idea of this evil, unless we visit, at least in imagination, a field of battle. Here men deliberately destroy each other by thousands without any resentment against or even knowledge of each other."

Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau

Russian Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) espoused a religious anarchist view of nonviolence in which he advocated peasant nonviolent resistance to the State and war (The Kingdom of God Is Within You: Christianity Not As A Mystic Religion But As A New Theory of Life, 1893). Massachusetts native Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) protested against the institutions of slavery and the so-called Mexican-American War, hoping for sufficient numbers of persons to offer nonviolent non-cooperation. In Civil Disobedience (1849), Thoreau was concerned that people were too attached to the State, too little conce
rned with what is right. He declared that until people are willing to go to jail in considerable numbers, the State would continue to have its willing instruments for wars and institutions like slavery. He concluded: "All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable."

Mohandas K. Gandhi

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948) rejected the merits of affluent industrial society. It can succeed, he said, only by organized greed or by systematic terrorism and oppression. His first principle of valid political action is non-cooperation with the disorder, injustices, and commitment to untruths characteristic of affluent societies. The core of Satyagraha, nonviolent resistance, or truth-force through love, is to lay down one’s life for what one considers to be right. The Satyagrahi has a religious and human duty to confront untruth in society with personal witness in order to reveal to everyone the falsities, even if it means suffering to the point of death. (See Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1948).

The first duty of every person is to recover his or her "right mind" in order that society might once again become sane. Gandhi understood that to be "civilized" by force was in reality to be reduced to barbarism, as the civilizer was barbarized. His pursuit of the awakening of a mature political consciousness was not simply ascetic or devotional routines to suit the fancy of pacifists or poets, but precepts fundamentally necessary if humans are to recover their "right mind." There can be no peace without profound inner change that brings humans back to this healthy inner space.

Martin Luther King

Though Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) was not an anarchist, his April 4, 1967 speech, A Time To Break Silence (sometimes referred to as Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam), given at the Riverside Church in New York City exactly one year to the day prior to his assassination, is one of the most revolutionary and prophetic essays of the 20th Century. His 1967 speech clearly indicated he was in the midst of a radical critique of the corruption of U.S. economic and political power as he called for a people’s nonviolent revolution of values and structures within the United States. Condemning the U.S. war against the Vietnamese and "deadly Western arrogance," King called for the lives of U.S. American people to "be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly."

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

King continues:

"The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before…We must support these revolutions….our brothers [sic] wait eagerly for our response." Then he asks: "Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men [sic], and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history."

I hope that after 9/11 we have internally registered that their yearnings and ours are the same. We are not worth more. They are not worth less.

Recognizing Our Complicity: A Key to Liberation and Empowerment

Indeed, I believe we the people have enabled Western civilization with our willing consumption patterns, taxes, silence, and various other levels of complicity. We have given legitimacy to our oligarchic rulers, willingly or begrudgingly. However, this likely happened over centuries of common people abdicating their individual and collective power in community affairs, either for fear of tyrannical rulers or from being mesmerized into dehumanization by cultural technics preempting spiritual meaning. Lack of use causes enfeeblement of physical, intellectual, and spiritual capacities.

Etienne de La Boetie, in his "Discourse of Voluntary Servitude" (see above), possessed a prophetic perception still relevant today:

"It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement."

Our nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776), signed some 226 years ago, forewarned against passivity, asserting active vigilance over government:

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Our originating document indicates a right of revolution when our existing government no longer conforms to the consent of the governed and the laws that government has sworn to uphold, such as our Bill of Rights.

We can now choose to actively and consciously withdraw our support in the best interests of humanity, and Earth herself. Knowing better in our hearts, many of us have nonetheless chosen to quietly "skate" because we could get away with it for just another day, another week, or year. We know differently now.

A Quantum Leap in Human Consciousness: Our Choice

The fact is that you and I just happen to be living at a moment when a huge, quantum leap in human consciousness and a radical cultural adaptation are begging us. Our days of living in relative comfort without paying attention to consequences are over. Done! It took 9/11 to bring us to this point, even though the origins and advancement of the gathering storm have been visible for centuries. As frightening as it is, this moment represents an extraordinary evolutionary opportunity for intentional participation in a huge shift. This is as big as the Neolithic revolution, when Old Stone Age food-gatherers became New Stone Age agriculturalists some 8,000 years ago, and the subsequent urban revolution that saw agriculturalists develop into city dwellers in the ancient Near East some 5,000 years ago. Fortunately, humans are totally capable of rapidly adjusting to imminent danger, if it can be recognized, and of making sudden, radical shifts in behavior and choices.

Is a dignified future worth risking position, reputation, life or limb? Do we want to build a new world, with a new man and a new woman, committed in partnership to emotional as well as intellectual honesty? Do we want to learn to live in decentralized communities based on local self-reliance that wisely honors each bioregion’s limits? Local availability of water, energy, food, fiber, and fabric is intimate information to be integrated into our mind-beings, so that o
ur choices become synonymous with Earth wisdom. This wisdom now dictates walking a mindful path of local responsibility within a global context. The Seneca Indians around whom I grew up, prophetically suggested making choices based on how they would affect the seventh generation of offspring. We have wise teachers if only we would listen.

Famous Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe (1892-1957) named his classic book Man Makes Himself (1936). What human beings have created, we can uncreate, and recreate anew, based on history’s lessons. There can be no more war, hate or violence! There can be no more systemic ethnocentrisms! There can be no more systemic greed! There can be no more oligarchies! There can be no more male (or female) domination! Out of necessity we must now support one another in healing from these disabling addictions so that our evolutionary process can continue.

Conclusion

Let us commit to a cooperative process of liberation from our quid pro quo, subservient relationship to violent nation-states, renouncing our allegiance to their insanity. We shall strive to recover our spiritual roots and the meaning of life as it connects us to the heavens and the earth–the sky, the cosmos and the carrying capacity of our seasonal Mother Earth in each of the bioregions where we live. We can choose to feel the Mother’s rhythms if we walk slowly on the earth, learning from the changing seasons, awe-inspired by a mere glance at the 350 billion-plus stars in our galaxy alone. We can find our way merely by being quiet and listening to the breeze of wisdom that totally envelops us at all moments, including right here at this very second.

[1] Vision For 2020, February 1997, by United States Space Command, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.

• "Dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment"
• Joint Vision 2010: "Dominant maneuver, precision engagement, full-dimensional protection, and focused logistics are enabled by information superiority and technological innovation.]]> Documented by S. Brian Willson

  [1] Vision For 2020, February 1997, by United States Space Command, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.

  • "Dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment"
  • Joint Vision 2010: "Dominant maneuver, precision engagement, full-dimensional protection, and focused logistics are enabled by information superiority and technological innovation. The end result of these enablers and concepts is FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE."

   

  ---

   

  [2] Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, September 2000, eds. Robert Kagan and William Kristol. New American Century, 1150 17th Street NW, Suite 510, Washington, DC 20037.

  Established in the spring of 1997, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is a nonprofit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. The PNAC is an initiative of the New Citizenship Project (501c3); the New Citizenship Project’s chairman is William Kristol and its president is Gary Schmitt.

  Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources For A New Century, September 2000, by PNAC.

  • "Global Pax Americana"
  • "…blueprint for maintaining global U.S. pre-eminence…"
  • "…demanding political leadership rather than that of the United Nations…"
  • "New methods of attack–electronic, ‘non-lethal’ biological–will be more widely available…combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and…the world of microbes.

   

  ---

   

  [3] Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For the 21st Century, April 2000, by (James) Baker Institute For Public Policy, submitted to U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney.

   

  
  

  A front view of Baker Hall, the home of the Baker Institute at Rice University. Baker Hall was completed in the Spring of 1997. More detailed information on the building is available from Rice University.

  The Baker Institute is strictly non-partisan and dedicated to the highest standards of intellectual excellence and integrity with the goal of helping bridge the gap between the theory and practice of public policy by drawing together experts from academia, government, the media, business, and non-governmental organizations. By so doing, the institute will broaden the professional perspective and personal understanding of all those involved in the study, formulation, execution, and criticism of public policy.

  Located in Houston, Texas, the nation’s fourth-largest city and a dynamic business and cultural center in the American heartland, the institute brings a unique perspective to the public policy questions of the day. The Baker Institute is an integral part of Rice University, one of the nation’s most distinguished institutions of higher education. Rice’s faculty and student body play an important role in its research programs and public events. The Institute is located on the Rice campus in James A. Baker III Hall, home not only to the Baker Institute, but also the School of Social Science that includes the departments of Economics and Political Science.

  The Honorable James A. Baker, III, the 61st Secretary of State and 67th Secretary of Treasury serves as the Institute’s Honorary Chair.

  • "Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to…flow of oil…"
  • Recommendations: "military intervention" and "de-fanging" Saddam
  • "…the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma"
  • "…central dilemma" is "American people continue to demand plentiful and cheap energy without sacrifice or inconvenience." [emphasis SBW's]
  • "Chances are greater than at any point in the last two decades of an oil supply disruption."

   

  ---

   

  [4] The National Security Strategy for the United States, delivered to Congress, Friday, September 20, 2002 by U.S. President George W. Bush.

  • U.S. strength "beyond challenge" so as to "dissuade future military competition"
  • "distinctly American internationalism"
  • act "pre-emptively"
  • "non-negotiable demands…[of] respect for private property"
  ]]> http://www.brianwillson.com/u-s-reach-product-of-u-s-fundamentalism-not-security/feed/ 0 http://www.brianwillson.com/september-11-2001-wake-up-call-we-are-not-worth-more-they-are-not-worth-less/ http://www.brianwillson.com/september-11-2001-wake-up-call-we-are-not-worth-more-they-are-not-worth-less/#comments Tue, 11 Sep 2001 18:26:45 +0000 brian http://www.brianwillson.com/wordpress/?page_id=28 The shocking September 11 attacks on U.S. symbols of capitalism (the World Trade Center) and its indispensable military protector (the Pentagon) caused tragic loss of life, provoking deep feelings of grief and anger here and abroad. Equally intense feelings of grief and rage have been experienced by hundreds of millions of people in numerous countries for decades due to a historic pattern of U.S. interventionist policies generally unknown to our public. Will we be able to also feel their pain?
  ]]> The shocking September 11 attacks on U.S. symbols of capitalism (the World Trade Center) and its indispensable military protector (the Pentagon) caused tragic loss of life, provoking deep feelings of grief and anger here and abroad. Equally intense feelings of grief and rage have been experienced by hundreds of millions of people in numerous countries for decades due to a historic pattern of U.S. interventionist policies generally unknown to our public. Will we be able to also feel their pain?

  The United States comprises only 4.5 percent of the globe’s population, yet consumes 25 percent to nearly half the world’s resources, depending on the particular resource examined. Meanwhile, the "Third World," which comprises 75 percent of the earth’s population, is squeezed with only 15 percent of the world’s resources. This imbalance is neither ecologically sustainable nor morally justifiable. Despite the representations of political and economic leaders, the globalization of capitalist economics is exacerbating this imbalance.

  To perpetuate our grotesque consumption pattern, which lays waste to the native environment in addition to causing much human suffering, requires a world imperial apparatus–a plutocracy supported by a complacent public with a well-financed, globally positioned military. It requires a bully mentality, a willingness to use brute force to get what we think we need. It has historically been enabled by an arrogant, Eurocentric ethnocentrism and a deep, stubborn racism. The U.S. public’s awareness of the consequences of its addictions is obstructed by a national rhetoric that paints us as an enlightened defender of freedom, a self-serving mythology perpetuated generation after generation. This ideology amounts to our own brand of fundamentalism.

  Our disproportionate consumption of resources has driven U.S. policy to consider desires for local autonomy and self-determination in the world as threats to the American Way Of Life (AWOL). Free access to every corner of the globe to feed our insatiable consumer appetites basically requires a pattern of robbery and pillage. People who threaten that access are characterized for the U.S. public as "communists," "narco-guerrillas," "Hitlers," "terrorists," or some other demonization, justifying any actions taken against them.

  Policies carried out to eliminate these threats have often been so brutal they have been conducted in secret. "Plausible deniability" originated during the Cold War when U.S. policymakers sought to shield covert operations, ostensibly from our enemies. In reality, however, these policies were kept secret from the U.S. public who, once knowing, would vigorously oppose them as intrinsically unconscionable. Secret or not, U.S. policies regularly violate with impunity international and domestic laws.

  U.S. policies have been applied with enraging double standards. For example, with U.S. support, Israel defies numerous United Nations resolutions and international laws relating to the protection of besieged Palestinians in their occupied lands. We turned our head when Israel invaded Lebanon and killed thousands, and bombed Iraq in the early 1980s. Yet when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and killed hundreds, we bombed them into the Stone Age. We are still bombing Iraq. Who even cares? We have imposed cruel sanctions against the Iraqi people that have killed a million civilians, many of them children.

  Unfortunately, our leaders have been too arrogant to consider likely side effects of their secret policies ("blowback"). For example, by creating numerous "terrorist" training camps to prepare thousands of radical Islamic men to oust Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the U.S. in effect created the "Mujahideen" who are now equally enraged with continued U.S. interference in the historic Arab world.

  During my lifetime alone, the U.S. has conducted at least 200 military and thousands of covert interventions into more than 100 sovereign nations, amounting to a pattern of "wholesale" terrorism. The details of these attacks, once known, are so gruesome as to be beyond comprehension of most U.S. citizens. My own experiences in nearly two dozen countries in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America have revealed direct connections between U.S. economic and military policies, and the preservation of impoverishment and repression of the majority. This results in the tragic premature snuffing out of countless lives. What I have witnessed has wrenched my heart, radically changing my life.

  As might be expected, the violent pattern of U.S. imperial behavior breeds anger, then rage, which sooner or later boils to the point of motivating aggrieved people to plot desperate acts of revenge. This might be called "retail" terrorism." The proverbial chickens have come home to roost, and many more are waiting in the wings. No amount of military might or vigilance can provide us the security we seek amidst this vast sea of rage. Only a radical change toward humility and mutual respect in our attitudes and policies can do that.

  Perhaps the recent acts of "retail" terrorism against the U.S. will serve as a wake-up call, provoking us, amidst the horror, to carefully reexamine our history of "wholesale" terrorism, and the assumptions of AWOL upon which that behavior is based. Perhaps our own pain will lead us to greater empathy for others. Perhaps our arrogance will give way to humility. Perhaps our materialist obsessions will give way to simpler lifestyles in harmony with the planet and her billions of inhabitants. Perhaps a commitment to justice and mutual respect will replace our bullying, imperial Pax Americana.

  Planning foreign policy on vindictiveness rather than stopping to ask why such violence happens is, quite frankly, downright foolish, and extraordinarily dangerous. Retaliation is likely to inspire further acts of rage against the U.S. population, and increases probability of a world catastrophe. Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan, has offered a clear prescription. In addition to unequivocal condemnation of the horrific acts, he reminds us of what seems obvious: "The security of the United States lies in its re-engaging with the people of the world, especially with those that it has grievously harmed." The truth is that we are not worth more, and they are not worth less. The most radical action needed is a change in our hearts and minds!

  ]]> http://www.brianwillson.com/september-11-2001-wake-up-call-we-are-not-worth-more-they-are-not-worth-less/feed/ 0 http://www.brianwillson.com/letter-to-sam-farr/ http://www.brianwillson.com/letter-to-sam-farr/#comments Sat, 01 Sep 2001 21:06:57 +0000 brian http://www.brianwillson.com/wordpress/?page_id=33 "If one starts to play the role of God one cannot avoid playing the role of the devil as well."

  --K.M. Abenheimer,
  "Shakespeare's 'Tempest': A Psychological Analysis,"
  Psychoanalytic Review, 33]]> "If one starts to play the role of God one cannot avoid playing the role of the devil as well."

  –K.M. Abenheimer,
  "Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’: A Psychological Analysis,"
  Psychoanalytic Review, 33
  (October 1946), p. 405

  "…orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body…This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in newspeak as doublethink…The party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards for comparison…The past is whatever the Party chooses to make it…It will be seen that the control of the past depends above all on the training of memory."

  –George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949

  FROM: S. Brian Willson

  TO: The Honorable Sam Farr
  United States House of Representatives

  Dear Congressman Farr:

  This letter is directed to you, my Congressperson, to convey my alarm at the rapidly convened bi-partisan support for President Bush’s war of "good versus evil" in waging a world battle against "terrorism." But more than that, this letter requests advice from your office as to how I, and others who vigorously but nonviolently oppose the nature and spirit of this war of "good versus evil," might preserve our safety and civil liberties amidst the growing fear and consequent expansion of legal and administrative mechanisms intending to detect and eliminate "terrorists."

  This is no academic question. Though I share in the grief and anger at the horrific acts directed against the United States, and the tragic loss of innocent life, President Bush’s edict that nations, organizations, and individuals are either with him, or against his plan for eliminating "terrorism," is a scary proposition. In the 1980s, I, along with a number of other law-abiding U.S. citizens active in nonviolently opposing president Reagan’s lawless and brutal policies against popular movements and/or governments in Central America, were identified by the President’s anti-terrorism task force (headed by Buck Revell of the FBI and Vice President George Bush) as domestic "terrorist" suspects. In my case it led to my nearly being killed, losing my legs and suffering a serious skull fracture and brain injury during a peaceful protest of shipment of lethal weapons from California to El Salvador. My mail was often intercepted and my phones tapped without a court order due to the "terrorist" label. An FBI agent of 22 years service was fired for refusing to investigate as "terrorists" six nonviolent activists including myself. This enabled us to learn much more about the government’s siege state of mind and the policies associated with that mentality. In my case, they had imagined that I was a potential hijacker of arms shipments, a shockingly paranoid state of mind for U.S. government servants. [SEE "FBI Probe of Willson Reported," San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 12, 1987; "The Cost of a Fired FBI Agent's Journey to Catholic Nonviolence," National Catholic Reporter, Nov. 27, 1987.] Your fellow Democratic peers George Miller and Nancy Pelosi know my case well, as does U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer.

  In my case this "terrorist" label was apparently first applied to the four members of the Veterans Fast For Life, of which I was one. We were participating in a water-only fast on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. in September-October 1986 with no pre-determined date for its termination, in protest of U.S. policies supporting the Contra "terrorists" in Nicaragua who had been created, funded, armed, and trained by the CIA. This was no secret! [SEE "Rudman Likens Fasting Veterans To Terrorists," The Boston Globe, Oct. 11, 1986.] You may recall that this was also a bi-partisan policy of overthrowing a sovereign government, in violation of international law and a decision of the World Court. The Democrats were more in favor of a policy of inflicting fear through terror from a tight embargo and consequent food shortages and slow starvation, confirmed in a meeting with the political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Managua in January 1986. The Republicans were more in favor of an explicit policy of inflicting terror through arson, murder and pillaging of civilian targets in Nicaragua. But both parties openly supported the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government by instilling fear of daily loss of life through bullets and/or starvation. William Casey, CIA director at the time, was reported to have said about Nicaraguans, "Make the bastards sweat." [SEE Bob Woodward, The Veil, p. 281.]

  Use of terror is no stranger to the United States. George Washington demanded of his generals that "terror" be used against the "beasts of prey," referring to thousands of Indigenous civilians in the colonies. Terror was an explicit policy against the popular movement in the Philippines during the "Spanish-American" War. "Low Intensity Warfare" is a euphemism for terror, the mainstay of U.S. policies following the Vietnam war. That we may now be the victims of our own toxic policies abroad should cause us to reflect deeply about who we are and what are sustaining values in a world of 210 nations and 6.2 billion people.

  I, like you, was born on July 4 (1941). I remember carrying the U.S. American flag during holiday parades in my small, New York State agricultural town. I was a National Honor Society student and a star athlete. As you served the United States as a Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia, I served as an Air Force officer for four years. In 1969, I was a first lieutenant in charge of a combat security unit of forty men at a Vietnamese airbase 100 miles south of Saigon in the Mekong Delta. It was there that my trust and faith in the U.S. American system of government was first placed in question. I witnessed the after effects of continued bombings of numerous Vietnamese villages where only civilians were mercilessly murdered. I began to protest the nature of the war. Of course, my views were not welcomed and it was a very troubled time for me personally. Nonetheless, in 1970 I honorably left the military in the rank of captain. Subsequently I became a lawyer and was admitted to the Bar in Washington, D.C.

  During the 1980s I served first as a legislative aide to the Massachusetts legislature, then became director of a Vietnam veterans outreach center in rural Massachusetts where I received a special commendation for my efforts from then Governor Michael Dukakis. I also served on Dukakis’ homeless veterans and Agent Orange task forces. In 1984 I volunteered in support of John Kerry’s first Senatorial campaign in 1984, and served on his veterans advisory board when he was a junior Senator.

  But mostly what I have done since I separated from the U.S. military has been to study the nature and effects of U.S. policies on "Third World" people and their cultures. I have been to nearly two dozen countries, including Colombia, and have written extensively about the devastating pattern of U.S. foreign policy. Naturally, my experiences have guided development of a more comprehensive view of the world then I held as a younger man. I think it imperative for U.S. Americans to know a much more authentic history of how our policies have destroyed the aspirations and lives of multiple millions of impoverished people in the continents in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Many times I have wondered when and where this long history of inflicting demonic policies on other people in order to maintain the disproportionately privileged American Way Of Life (AWOL) was going to haunt us. Unfortunately, the inevitable "blowback"
  has begun.

  It would behoove our nation to seriously ask why so many people in the world are so enraged at the U.S. that they would carry out these desperate acts. My belief is that these acts of what I call "retail" terrorism are carried out in response to our long pattern of "wholesale" terrorism. The fact is that for international peace to become a reality, world resources must be equitably distributed. Currently the U.S. comprises 4.5 percent of the world’s population, but consumes anywhere from 25 percent to nearly half the world’s resources, involuntarily squeezing the 75 percent of the people in the "Third World" with but 15 percent of the resources. This cannot be maintained either ecologically or morally.

  This latest crime against U.S. humanity is best treated by submitting the cases to while cooperating with Interpol (to which at one time I was a member) and the United Nations, legitimate international institutions intended to collectively solve serious problems such as this. However, a much more substantial U.S. diplomatic approach is needed in order to genuinely understand the bases for numerous, historical grievances against the United States in particular, and the West in general, as experienced by a majority of the world’s impoverished population. No amount of military and security vigilance can offer U.S. people a long-term feeling of security amidst this vast sea of rage which will continue to seek relief, even if in acts of desperation, from the repression and double standards to which they have been involuntarily inflicted. Security will come from reparations and a serious attempt to establish relationships with the rest of the world based on justice. This will require a humility replacing our dangerous arrogance.

  From all my experiences studying the effects of U.S. policies around the world, I believe the bi-partisan war on terrorism is destined to completely miss addressing the causes of rage, and will, ironically, intensify that very rage which will endanger evermore the lives of U.S. Americans.

  I do not know the course of nonviolent action that I and others will take at this critical juncture in U.S. and world history. But I need to know from you how personal security and civil liberties are to be protected as many of us, myself included, plan to oppose the current course of action as outlined by president Bush and supported by virtually the entire Congress. Dissent is a fundamental right under our so-called Constitutional democracy. President Bush on September 20 declared that those nations that are not with him will be considered with the "terrorists" and will consequently feel the full wrath of the U.S. Government. The Joint Resolution of Congress on September 14 authorized the President to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines are involved in "terrorist" acts. This is unlimited war with no time limit, no clearly identified enemy except a few named individuals, and with unlimited military force. This is madness on top of madness. Is this the United States that I served?

  The seriousness of your answer (or failure to answer) will contribute to my discernment as to how to exercise my free speech rights and obligations. I pray that by writing this letter I will not bring inadvertent state response. I worry that a number of conscientious U.S. citizens are going to face a period of severe repression, especially if the U.S. government continues its bully, arrogant approach to the world, viewing dissenters from within as accessories to "terrorists." As I have stated earlier in this letter, I know from personal experience how easy these terms can be abused by the government which does not want to ask more profound questions.

  Thanking you in advance, I am

  Sincerely,

  S. Brian Willson

   

  ]]> http://www.brianwillson.com/letter-to-sam-farr/feed/ 0 http://www.brianwillson.com/u-s-government-impunity-at-home-the-politicization-of-terrorism/ http://www.brianwillson.com/u-s-government-impunity-at-home-the-politicization-of-terrorism/#comments Sat, 01 Jan 2000 18:49:52 +0000 brian http://www.brianwillson.com/wordpress/?page_id=31 The history of the United States is loaded with cases of government commission of international crimes against other nations, and against the individual citizens of other nations, in which the U.S. government has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, absolute impunity from any accountability, sanctions or punishment. This historic record of U.S. criminality is a very good reason why the Clinton Administration and people like Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) are absolutely opposed to creation of a U.N. International Criminal Court (ICC) unless the U.S.]]> The history of the United States is loaded with cases of government commission of international crimes against other nations, and against the individual citizens of other nations, in which the U.S. government has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, absolute impunity from any accountability, sanctions or punishment. This historic record of U.S. criminality is a very good reason why the Clinton Administration and people like Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) are absolutely opposed to creation of a U.N. International Criminal Court (ICC) unless the U.S. retains effective veto power over prosecution of any U.S. personnel. Otherwise, the court might be in perennial session just dealing with the crimes committed by thousands of employees of the U.S. government, including virtually all of our Presidents, most Congresspeople, and voluminous numbers of CIA, U.S. military, and other security and military personnel.

  Furthermore, people of "minority" background in the United States have experienced two centuries worth of grotesque violations of their human rights–murders by the hand of the state or sanctioned by the state, unfair imprisonment, police and jail beatings, and a myriad of other indignities, again with U.S. or various states’ governments enjoying absolute impunity from any accountability. People of European ancestry who have harshly criticized the state or the unfairness of capitalism have also suffered repression at the hands of the government with no redress, such as many labor movement participants and those branded as "communists" before the hostile House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC (1938-1975).

  However, I didn’t seem to fit into any of those categories and I had never really experienced such persecution. I was a clean-cut WASP who had always been loyal to my God and country. When I clearly stated my opposition to the Vietnam War, especially the daily village bombings, while serving as an officer there, I was threatened with punishment, but after all, by 1969 millions of U.S. Americans were questioning the war. Not until 1990 did I learn that the FBI had interviewed my uncle Bob, my father’s youngest brother,on two occasions in 1969 when I was first beginning to express my opposition to the Vietnam war. I was very surprised to have first learned this more than twenty years after the fact. I believe my uncle’s silence had something to do with my family feeling ashamed that their small-town boy they hoped would become "successful" was being investigated for possible "treasonous" activities.

  I did not become vigorously active in the "peace with justice" movement in the United States until after my first trip to Nicaragua in January and February l986. Prior to that time, I enjoyed my Constitutionally protected free speech rights as an "American" citizen. Nominally active for several years, I spoke at anti-U.S.-intervention rallies, lobbied Congress to stop funding Contra terrorists in Nicaragua and death squad governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, wrote letters and op-ed essays for publication in local newspapers, and spoke to high school students about war and peace issues as a member of the Massachusetts-based Veterans Education Project.

  Certainly if my elected representatives knew the truth about what was really happening with their policies outside Washington, I reasoned, they would immediately reverse policies that were violating international laws by terrorizing and murdering innocent people. I had been taught that we were a nation of laws, not of men, committed to justice under the law. And in grade school civics class we had learned how a bill becomes a law, and how laws and policies in general are formulated by those elected to represent the people guided by their oath to uphold the Consititution of the United States of America.

  For a number of years in the 1970s and early 1980s I worked on domestic justice issues, mostly relating to the needless and destructive proliferation of prisons which, by their inherent nature, brutalize prisoners and guards alike. I wrote a number of articles and drafted numerous pieces of legislation attacking both the classist and racist nature of imprisonment in the U.S., which has historically been used as a political substitute for choosing to address serious social, economic, and racial injustices. I found this work relatively thankless with few constituents who were willing to take up the cause.

  But my awareness and feelings about the crimes and lies of U.S. foreign policy–a natural outgrowth of my Vietnam experiences–remained locked in my soul until a flashback unexpectedly erupted in 1981. During the early 1980s I knew of no evidence that the U.S. government–the government that acts and speaks in our names as U.S. citizens–was in any way responsive to expressions of moral and political outrage opposing our lawless U.S. foreign policy. However, I was soon to discover that they did respond, not by changing their foreign policy, but by lawlessly attacking constitutionally protected domestic dissent by using "terrorism" as a fraudulent pretext for their suppression activities.

  In 1986 I was one of four fasters taking part in the water-only Veterans Fast For Life (VFFL) while sitting on the U.S. Capitol steps in Washington, D.C. in protest of Contra aid, a fast that ultimately lasted forty-seven days. On October 10, 1986, forty days into the fast, U.S. Senator Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) released a letter about the Veterans Fast, stating in part, "In my opinion, their actions are hardly different than those of the terrorists who are holding our hostages in Beirut." This letter was reported as a news story in the Oct. 11 Boston Globe, "Rudman Likens Fasting Veterans To Terrorists." We thought it a strange connection at the time, and wondered whether the idea had come up in one of the private Congressional conversations or secret intelligence briefings. During the fast, our staffed office was broken into, the computer tinkered with, and our residence was broken into with written information about supporters names and addresses taken. At the time we never dreamed that our action would be perceived as a threat to national security justifying a "terrorist" label and the associated illegal surveillance that accompanies such an identification.

  Since then, each of us veterans has continued to publicly, often boldly, exercise our rights as political "activists." While still recovering in the hospital from the multiple injuries I suffered as a result of the gruesome train assault during an action on September 1, 1987 at the Concord, CA Naval Weapons Station, I was interviewed by the first of many allegedly impartial investigators of what was continually referred to as the "accident." I was struck by the first question: "When did you begin to discuss plans for hijacking the train?" I was stunned that the investigator even considered it a valid question. "Where on earth did that idea come from?" I wondered. It was the first clue that I had that the government had conjured up a wild scenario of their own imagination, of their own making.

  After an ABC-TV crew interviewed me in November 1987, in Washington, D.C., I began to believe, just a little bit, that the government had a particular interest in us fasters. It seemed incredible. I was increasingly aware of and disgusted by FBI surveillance of domestic groups and individuals opposed to Reagan’s Central American policies, so I could easily believe it about others. But me? The ABC-TV reporter showed me a thick FBI file and asked me to read the first few pages while on camera. Though it was not a Brian Willson file as far as I could determine, the file was discussing the Veterans Fast For Life of which I had been a part a year earlier. It said something to the effect that the members of the fast, under "terrorism" guidelines, were suspected of being part of "an organized conspiracy to use force/violence to
  coerce the United States government into modifying its policies." It talked about the importance of our government’s Central American policies to the security of the United States, and the increasing efforts by citizens to stimulate civilian resistance throughout the United States threatening disruption of those policies. Gee, the government considered four veterans fasting on water-only while sitting on the east steps of the U.S. Capitol building "terrorists?" What did that say about the mind-set of our government and its political leaders and bureaucrats?

  On November 18, 1987, I testified at the Congressional hearings about the September 1st train assault at the Concord, California Naval Weapons Station where I had almost been killed. Or murdered? Yes, the Republican members of the Congressional committee had treated me rudely and censored the vast majority of my prepared testimony. That was not surprising. A few days earlier, US Navy Captain Stanley Pryzby had testified at those same House Armed Services Subcommittee on Investigations hearings, at which he admitted that the Navy had indeed known quite a bit about me prior to September 1. He acknowledged that the Navy knew I was a serious protestor, and thus had taken my notification of planned blockades of munitions trains very seriously. Therefore, they must have believed me when I said that we would remain on the tracks intending to obstruct movement of the munitions train, that we were not "playing chicken." Thus, they knew I was a dead duck if a decision was made to not stop the train. Of course, in the past they had always stopped for protestors awaiting physical removal and arrests. They would not consider running the train, knowing we would not move. Or would they?

  Apparently, at some level, I was perceived as a threat to the government and its policies, along with the other members of the VFFL. Though nonviolent, our action had publicly and boldly–and perhaps effectively as perceived by the Reagan administration–opposed U.S. foreign policy. Duncan Murphy, a World War II veteran who was one of the four participants in the Veterans Fast, was also part of the planned train blockade. They were dealing with two "terrorists," not just one. Again, I could easily believe that other people, especially those who advocated violence, were the objects of serious investigations and intense surveillance. Why spend so much time and effort on us nonviolent activists?

  Perhaps the government has another definition of "violence." Perhaps it considers any action that threatens to upset or disrupt the capability of the government and business to continue to function as usual, "terrorism," and by some distorted logic, "violent." This I think we can clearly see in the December 1999 demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle and the April 2000 demonstrations against the World Bank in Washington, D.C. These large-scale nonviolent demonstrations were so effective that they either literally stopped government functioning or seriously threatened to do so. This effectiveness justified, in the police and politicians’ minds, a brutal and violent reaction to perfectly nonviolent and constitutionally protected citizen dissent. The demonstrators were considered bad, even "violent" in some cases, merely because they were sufficiently tenacious in their devotion to collective nonviolence to be able to disrupt business as usual. The truth is, civil disobedience is a very powerful form of action. If the government can convince themselves–and the public–that effective nonviolent activists are dangerous–portray them at least potentially violent–that gives them permission to use violence in suppressing them. The police have now normalized violent reactions in such cases. The police have erased the distinction between direct nonviolent civil disobedience, and violence. The system seems to believe in protected free speech only if it is ineffective.

  I am not a paranoid person. But the FBI terrorism investigation of the VFFL that was begun in the Fall of 1986 automatically authorized the FBI to conduct telephone, mail and other surveillance of the subjects. For months after the 1987 train assault, the vast majority of the voluminous mail I received had been obviously opened, then often resealed in plastic. How does one, once identified as a threat to the government, no matter how loosely the threat is defined, become genuinely freed of various forms of surveillance by the government and its network of private and public spies? Even if the government claimed the investigation was completed, how would one know if it was telling the truth? Our government, by its own admission for "national security" reasons, operates in secrecy and with "plausible deniability." Any conscientious observer knows how lawless our government is: Note, for example, its defiance of the 1986 World Court order to cease funding the Contras terrorizing Nicaragua, its numerous illegal interventions into the sovereign affairs of dozens of other nations using various kinds of terrorism, and its abuse of our own Constitution in undermining the right to free speech and dissent.

  Because no jurisdiction–City of Concord, County of Contra Costa, State of California, or U.S. Government–was willing to bring criminal charges against any of the persons involved in the commission of the September 1, 1987 crime at the Concord Naval Weapons Station, we were forced to attempt redress through federal court in a civil proceeding. Thus, the government had committed this crime with absolute impunity from any criminal prosecution.

  During deposition proceedings in federal court in San Francisco in the late 1980s, U.S. prosecutors and train crew lawyers grilled me for over forty hours. They focused much of their attention on my trips to Nicaragua and El Salvador. They were quite concerned about my personal relationship with the FSLN (Sandinistas) in Nicaragua, and especially with their President Daniel Ortega and their Foreign Minister, Miguel Brockman D’Escoto. Ortega, they believed, was part of an international communist plot, working closely with Castro and Russia to threaten the values of the Christian capitalists of North America. They hinted that I was a paid representative of the Nicaraguan government and, therefore, should have registered with our State Department as an agent of a foreign government (Foreign Agents Registration Act). They also hinted that I served as a spy for the Sandinista-led Nicaraguan government when I (with two other gringos) spent a number of hours conversing with Eugene Hasenfus who had been shot down over Nicaragua as he was "kicking" supplies out of a CIA supply plane to Contras in the Nicaraguan countryside. Hasenfus had been captured after parachuting to safety and was awaiting trial in a Nicaraguan prison. The U.S. government had abandoned Hasenfus, denying that it had any official connection to him. Hasenfus, who had served in Vietnam, first as a soldier and then with the CIA, claimed that he was working directly for Vice President George Bush through long time CIA operative Max Gomez. He was bitter about being abandoned, not even being acknowledged, by his own government. During the course of our conversations he outlined the twelve missions he had participated in "kicking" supplies to the Contras, all originating from the Il Opango air base near San Salvador, El Salvador, half flown in over Honduras, the remainder coming in from Costa Rica after flying down the Pacific coast. There was nothing earth shaking about this information. It filled in some details on Contra supply operations and we had made this information public on several occasions. However, the lawyers grilling me at the deposition spent much time attempting to paint an intricate pattern of my relationship with Nicaragua in which their conclusion seemed to be that I was helping "communist" Nicaragua while trying to harm the noble, god-fearing "free" United States of A
  merica. Of course all these activities had occurred prior to the train assault, and information about them was readily available to the FBI and other federal agencies providing them with more profiling data.

  In my case, some might say I have tenaciously continued my political activities since almost being killed on September 1, 1987. However, the bulk of my activities have been nothing more than speaking to various groups of people or writing essays about the lawless nature of our government’s policies, and the destructive nature of many the values dominating our culture. I have traveled to well over half our states since the 1986 Fast, and to nearly two dozen other countries, invited to many others as well. My message is simple: Our government is lawless, it lies regularly about its own activities, and it commits numerous crimes in both domestic and international arenas. We as people of conscience, with mindfulness, can choose to empower ourselves to take personal and social responsibility for our society. We can choose to work to make the changes necessary for a nonviolent revolution of consciousness based on justice and ecological principles, rather than continue a paradigm based on greed and violent consumption. We the people, with sufficient political will, are perfectly capable of committing to a process of extricating ourselves from further ignorant complicity in perpetuating this old paradigm that is killing us all. We are, or can choose to be, part of a new consciousness.

  When I have traveled to other countries I have discovered, as do other U.S. citizens, surprising access to revolutionary and popular movements. There is great merit in this kind of international solidarity as it builds up cumulative fields of empowerment. In my case, since I survived an assault that nearly took my life as a price for expressing my opposition to U.S. arms shipments, I represent, especially to people in "Third World" countries, a solidarity with struggle, suffering and empowerment. This phenomenon of human solidarity and trust is often beyond my cognitive understanding, yet it is always experienced as very powerful and spiritual. It is that power, perhaps, that poses a serious threat to the prevailing paradigm and the government and related institutions that promote and protect it.

  I believe that the decision to continue moving, then accelerating the munitions train to more than three times the posted legal speed limit, at the Concord Naval Weapons Station on September 1, l987, cannot be understood outside the context of this demonstrated interest of the U.S. government, and all of its nefarious networks, in my (and Duncan’s) activities prior to Sept. 1. The nature of the relationship between this prior interest and the decision to recklessly move the train has yet to be unraveled. At a minimum it created a milieu of lack of concern, wanton disregard and contempt for the rights and well-being of conscientious U.S. citizens objecting to U.S. government policy. At worst it was attempted murder. It certainly was reckless and dangerous behavior. If we were "terrorists," as the government claimed they believed, then we might have had explosives taped to our bodies capable of creating a huge crater and widespread area damage once ignited by impact with a speeding munitions train. These trains regularly carry lethal munitions. The legal speed limit of 5 MPH with two human spotters posted on the very front platform of every locomotive are features designed to promote the maximum safety for a train carrying explosive cargo. We do know that the train crew members on the morning of the assault were briefed by their superiors not to stop the train, not to allow any of us to board the train. This would be consistent with a perception, a paranoia, that we were planning to climb aboard and hijack the moving train. Nonetheless, it is a strange concern since the Navy munitions base was protected by three hundred armed Marines, some of whom were standing only a few yards from our nonviolent blockade. And the maximum penalty for interfering with movement of federal trains and their cargoes was posted on a large sign just a few feet from our vigil and blockade: one year in jail and/or a $10,000 fine. Nothing was said about summary execution or maiming.

  My theory is that sometime during the last part of September or early October 1986, a decision was made by the government, perhaps by the Operations Sub-Group (OSG) to Combat Terrorism, working under the aegis of Col. Oliver North, FBI Assistant Director Buck Revell, and Vice President George Bush, to begin covert surveillance of the Veterans Fast For Life. After all, this OSG had chosen to investigate a number of other so-called "terrorist" suspects. This would help explain Senate Intelligence Committee member Warren Rudman’s (R-N.H.) remarks made in early October comparing the fasters to "terrorists," as well as the break-in at the VFFL office and the subsequent break-in at the home of the Fasters where lists of names were taken.

  The FBI inquiry, launched under "terrorism" guidelines, did not originate until October 31, 1986, several weeks later. The evidence the FBI used to legitimize their investigation of the VFFL was their claim that they found two VFFL leaflets at the scene of a vandalism at a Chicago recruiting office, and a "communiqué" that the fasters had motivated the vandals. The FBI attributed the vandalism to the "Plowshares Group." VFFL had produced several flyers describing the motives and basis for our fast, and had distributed them to a number of church and Central American solidarity groups, asking that they escalate and publicize their nonviolent resistance to the lawless policies.

  Former FBI agent Jack Ryan, fired after 21 years as a Special Agent because he refused to investigate the Plowshares Group or the Veterans Fast For Life under "terrorism" guidelines, said that the FBI memorandum of October 31, l986, originating the investigation, was unusual, even suspicious, for two major reasons. First, the act investigated was minor vandalism of recruiting offices, an insignificant crime in FBI experience. But it led the local Chicago FBI office to initiate a national "priority" communication to every field office and the Director in Washington, D.C. Ryan said minor vandalism of this sort would rarely, if ever, be the basis of a priority national communication from a local office. It is so unusual and extraordinary as to lead one to believe the FBI had another motive in this case.

  The second thing that raised suspicion in Ryan’s mind about the FBI investigation is the fact that the October 31 communication authored by the local Chicago office had already identified a national code name, "Lockout," for this minor case. This is extraordinarily unusual, and again suggests another motive and plan behind the FBI communication. What was their real motive and what did they really believe about us? Were we perceived as having become "dangerously" effective?

  Let us hope for more "terrorists" willing to nonviolently disrupt the continuation of the U.S. Government’s policies of lies and violence as usual. We act with the faith that one day the people making and carrying out our government’s cruel policies will hear our cries and those of les miserables around the world.

  ]]> http://www.brianwillson.com/u-s-government-impunity-at-home-the-politicization-of-terrorism/feed/ 0 http://www.brianwillson.com/domestic-counterterrorist-trainings-a-dangerous-trend/ http://www.brianwillson.com/domestic-counterterrorist-trainings-a-dangerous-trend/#comments Fri, 01 Jan 1999 18:52:06 +0000 brian http://www.brianwillson.com/wordpress/?page_id=32  
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  Conditioning the Public to Accept the Threat
  of Domestic Terrorism While Masking
  a Genuine Understanding of the Structural Injustices
  that Lead to Global Impoverishment and Anger

  "Terrorism is escalating to the point that Americans soon may have to choose between civil liberties and more intrusive means of protection." –U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, 1998

  Residential and downtown areas in communities throughout the United States are now being used as active training locations for Armed Forces’ counterterrorist exercises. Often conducted in secret and at night, sometimes with live ammunition, always with little or no public participation or knowledge in advance, these military activities signal that a systematic domestic terrorist training policy has been quietly developed at the top with virtually no democratic input. Secret Army Delta forces, an elite counterterrorist unit, flown in black helicopters by the equally secret Night Stalkers (160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment Airborne), repel at night into their designated community target areas. Both are headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They have conducted at least 25 "invasions" of U.S. communities, perhaps more, in the last two years, from Kingsville, Texas to Chester, Pennsylvania. They are coordinated by the Army Special Operations Command located at MacDill AFB in Florida. The crack Navy counterterrorist force, SEAL Team 6, has conducted trainings from the Monterey Bay in California, to the Merrimack River in Lowell, Massachusetts. The SEALs operate out of Little Creek, Virginia and Coronado, California, respectively. More recently the Marine Corps has conducted "Urban Warrior" counterterrorist trainings in cities such as New York and Charleston, South Carolina in the east, and Monterey and Oakland, California in the west. These Marine exercises are part of Operation Sea Dragon, planned by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. All of these military units are experimenting with the latest in high-tech weaponry and tactics, one of their articulated rationales for these exercises.

  In January 1999, the Pentagon requested from President Clinton appointment of a military leader to direct a new U.S. Continental Command to combat threats of terrorism–from chemical and biological agents, and cyberwar, to suitcase nuclear weapons. President Clinton appointed Richard A. Clarke as the nation’s counterterrorism czar to oversee the expenditure of $11 billion in federal funds intended to combat terrorism at home and abroad. Under Clinton the FBI’s counterterrorism budget has escalated to $286 million, including creation of a new FBI Counterterrorism Center that directs more than 2600 special agents in the U.S. and overseas. The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center now works closely with the FBI center.

  How did we get to the point where domestic counterterrorist trainings are taking place so routinely in our communities with virtually no public participation or knowledge? Let us look into a bit of history. Ever since the creation of the first domestic police Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) teams more than 25 years ago, there has been a blurring of the line between military and civilian police missions and tactics. Use of both military and civilian police to contend with "terrorist" or "insurgent" threats has evolved worldwide from the concept of "unconventional" operations utilizing "special" forces in guerrilla warfare. U.S. Army unconventional warfare began with small units operating behind the lines during World War II. Army Special (counter-insurgency) Forces officially became part of its Psychological Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in 1952. Shortly after President Kennedy took office, prompted by the ill-fated April 1961 CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba, he substantially expanded the Special Forces (now wearing green berets) counterinsurgency capacities at their beefed-up Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. Special Forces were the first American troops dispatched to Vietnam under President Kennedy to conduct operational roles, often working under the command of the CIA and well insulated from Army regulars.

  The Marine Corps, historically proud of its record and capacity for engaging in hostile local operations around the world going back to the late 1700s, was nonetheless bolstered in 1961 with the appointment of Major General Victor Krulak to fill a new post as Joint Chiefs’ Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities. The Air Force, too, established its First Air Commando Group in April 1961 and created its own Special Air Warfare Center at Eglin AFB, Florida in 1962. Not to be ignored, the Navy created the SEALs (Sea, Air, Land forces) in 1962, combat paratrooper frogmen who could do everything the Army’s Special Forces could do and more. The Seals first saw operational action in Vietnam as well. By the 1980s, SEAL Team 6, with nearly 200 men, a far larger number than the normal 16-man units, was created specifically as a highly trained counterterrorist force. And the other military branches continued to refine their "special" and "unconventional" components as well.

  In the 1960s the words "terror" and "counterterror" increasingly began to appear in Army field and training manuals, as their cooperative role with the CIA developed for shaping U.S. foreign policy, not just in Vietnam, but in places such as Guatemala and the Congo, among others. And when COINTELPRO first surfaced in 1971, and Congressional hearings had begun to disclose the 1960s infiltration by the Army–in association with the CIA, FBI and local police agencies–of domestic political movements, we discovered that our views and activities at home were also being "shaped." The lines were blurring even more between the military, the CIA, and law enforcement functions.

  Army Ranger units, wearing black berets, were re-established in 1974 in response to fears of international terrorism. Rangers were relatively small forces trained for special missions such as rescue of hostages. In sorting out confusion and competition among the various military units claiming special prowess for dealing with "terrorists," President Carter rebuilt the Special Forces and Rangers as units to accomplish very narrowly defined tasks. The Army’s First Special Forces Operational Detachment, Delta, a secret unit for antiterrorist missions became operational at Fort Bragg in November 1977, competing with the counterterrorist Navy SEAL units as the best trained of the elite forces. The Delta force drew upon specially trained personnel from the other services, not just from Special Forces and Rangers. Their first mission, Operation Eagle Claw, launched in April 1980 to rescue the American hostages in revolutionary Iran, ended in tragic failure.

  There is no better domestic example of the meld of military with civilian police operations and mentalities than the April 19, 1993 siege of the David Koresh Davidian religious compound in Waco, Texas. Fatigue-clad FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agents, accompanied by advisors from the Army’s secret Delta forces, fortified with helicopters, armed vehicles, tanks, and assault weapons, conducted a military, in lieu of a civilian law enforcement, operation. Over 80 human beings needlessly perished in the operation. The local sheriff possessed a regularly accessible and friendly relationship with members of the religious commune who often traveled to nearby towns. The sheriff was virtually totally ignored in the attempts to talk and negotiate with Koresh. The federal assault operation became the alternative. The military mind-set easily becomes a siege mentality where respect is ignored and nearly an
  y response is rationalized.

  The Reagan Presidency revived with gusto the Cold War ideology following the futile attempt of the Carter Administration to place human rights in the forefront of foreign policy. The nation was still feeling stunned from our defeat in Vietnam. Angry about the success of revolutionary Iran and perceived threats to our security interests in the Middle East, the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (only six months after President Carter angered the Soviets by pouring aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul), and the "Communist" presence in Angola and Central America, the Reagan administration set out to reverse "Communist" and revolutionary advances, and re-establish the U.S. as the prevailing, God-fearing nation in the world as claimed by our delusional belief in "Manifest Destiny."

  In the heightened atmosphere of fear of global threats from "terrorists," revolutionaries, and the new menace of "drug traffickers," as well as "Communists," to preservation of the consumptive American Way of Life (AWOL), i.e., to our "national security," President Reagan formulated a number of secret policies granting expanded powers to the CIA, FBI, and the U.S. Armed Forces for countering threats both at home and from abroad. In December 1981, he signed Executive Order 12333, establishing operating procedures for the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies, intending to restore to them the domestic surveillance and other powers enjoyed prior to Watergate-initiated reforms, while still prohibiting assassinations. This Executive Order authorized the infiltration, manipulation, and disruption of domestic organizations even in the absence of evidence of wrongdoing. It must be remembered that in the language of the National Security Act of 1947 that created the CIA, a huge loophole has enabled each and every President since to commit and direct heinous criminal activity in the name of "national security": The CIA could "perform such other functions and duties…as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." And please note again that as early as Vietnam various "special" military units worked closely with, often under the command of, the CIA in "eliminating" civilian leadership and organizations.

  On April 3, 1984, President Reagan signed classified National Security Decision Directive 138 (NSDD 138), approving both preemptive and retaliatory raids against "terrorists." It authorized creation of FBI and CIA paramilitary squads for counterterrorist operations, and enabled the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to have its own contract intelligence agents for the first time. A Joint Special Operations Agency was created in 1984 under the Joint Chiefs of Staff to coordinate military counterterrorist activities in each service branch. Reagan’s Vice-President, George Bush, chaired the executive Task Force on Combatting Terrorism, which in turn created the Operations Subgroup (OSG) under the Terrorist Incident Working Group (TIWG) chaired at the time by Oliver North. NSDD 207 (Jan. 20, 1986) created a National Security Council (NSC) coordinator of counterterrorism, again chaired by Oliver North. Terrorism was indeed weighing heavy in the minds of the Reagan folks. Reagan’s Secretary of State, George P. Schultz, emphasized the need for the U.S. to use military force to combat terrorists, the "depraved opponents of civilization," even though he acknowledged it could mean "the loss of life of innocent people" ("Schultz Says Risks To Innocent People Part of Combatting Terrorism," The Boston Globe, Oct. 26, 1984).

  Numerous individuals and organizations in the U.S. fiercely opposed President Reagan’s aggression and internationally adjudged illegal policies in Central America. It is no surprise that Reagan quickly applied his secret "terrorist" guidelines leading to gross violations of civil liberties of a number of U.S. citizens by various federal agencies, civilian and military, in efforts to quell domestic dissent. During the Iran-Contra scandal it was revealed that there were plans to round up "dissidents" and immigrants in the event of a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua and detain them in emergency prisons, some located at U.S. military bases. This was all justified as being "legal" under the secret Executive Orders and National Security Decision Directives authorizing such draconian measures to protect "national security."

  The momentum was rolling. "Terrorists," and the emerging "drug traffickers," were in the process of replacing "Communists" as major pretexts rationalizing intervention as the Cold War was nearing its end. The use of government instruments for repressing dissent and other perceived threats to "national security," whether here in the U.S. or by or from other countries, was of course not new. But a powerful new pretext was in the process of being ingrained, being conditioned, in the minds of the U.S. population. It is believed that both military and CIA and FBI counterterrorist units were present alongside civilian law enforcement agencies at both the July 1984 Olympic games in Los Angeles and the Democratic convention in San Francisco to protect participants from "terrorists." Soldiers from the Army’s elite Delta force, discussed above, were apparently deployed in New York City to assist New York’s finest during the 1986 July 4 celebrations ("Army Antiterrorist Squad To Be In City, Officials Say," The New York Times, June 28, 1986). As these encroachments by the military on domestic law enforcement functions have leaked to the public, citizens and civil libertarians have severely criticized these operations as a dangerous violation of the long-held principle of the separation of armed forces from domestic law enforcement operations. Such military powers can very easily expand to seriously threaten the privacy, liberty and lives of the people.

  Are these Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine forces preparing for domestic interventions in combatting "terrorist" threats or potential disaster scenarios within the United States? It is conceivable that the "suspects" they will be interrogating and the "adversaries" they will be apprehending will be people like you and me–residents who could easily be defined as unpopular or undesirable based on a convenient political demonizing because of their beliefs. This possibility has now become a probability since U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen declared that "Terrorism is escalating to the point that Americans soon may have to choose between civil liberties and more intrusive means of protection" (U.S. Army Times, Oct. 27, 1998).

  Because the Marine "Urban Warrior" exercises that had been intended for Monterey on March 15 and Oakland, California on March 15-18, 1999, faced public opposition once the plans became known, Marine officers presented public briefings and "promotional" information justifying these operations. Their words and those of other military officers give us some clues about the nature of the Pentagon’s thinking relating to preparation for counterterrorist operations. Consistent with the Marines’ historical function of establishing beachheads from Navy transport vessels at various locations around the globe, they argue a need to practice counterterrorist operations in coastal cities as help is requested from friendly governments facing internal crises. They predict that the "battlescapes of the 21st Century" will arise from swelling problems in increasingly congested areas where "eliminating" an "asymmetrical enemy using the city as a shield" will require new tactics and techniques. Practice with a Chemical-Biological Incident Response Force is a critical part of these exercises. Col. James A. Lasswell, head of experimental
  operations for the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory which directs the "Urban Warriors," declared that "there will be widespread economic problems and cultural, ethnic, and tribal tensions, many caused by wave after wave of immigration."

  Major General Scales is clear in his view of the military’s role for resolving future class conflicts in urban warfare:

  "The future urban center will contain a mixed population, ranging from the rich elite to the poor and disenfranchised….Day-to-day existence for most of the urban poor will be balanced tenuously on the edge of collapse. With social conditions ripe for exploitation, the smallest tilt of unfavorable circumstances might be enough to instigate starvation, disease, social foment, cultural unrest, or other forms of urban violence.

  "The enormous problems of infrastructure and the demand for social services threaten to swamp governing authorities in the urban centers of emerging states will most likely worsen….Moreover, the proximity of the disenfranchised to the ruling elite provides the spark for further unrest and sporadic violence." (Armed Forces Journal International, referenced in Gar Smith, "One Nation Under Guard," San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 10, 1999.)

  This clarity of the nature of the harsh socio-economic realities was earlier uttered in 1990 by General A.M. Gray when he served as Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps under President Bush. He identified our threats as originating from the "underdeveloped world’s growing dissatisfaction over the gap between the rich and poor nations" creating a "fertile breeding ground for insurgencies which have the potential to jeopardize regional stability and our access to vital economic and military resources."

  These military leaders demonstrate their understanding of the structural problems but seem unable or unwilling to envision just structural solutions. Over 3 billion people on the Earth have incomes of less than $2 a day, living and dying squeezed with but 6% of the world’s wealth. As of 1996 the world’s 358 billionaires owned more assets than the combined incomes of nearly 3 billion human beings. The 20% plus who live in the high-income countries enjoy 86% of the world’s private consumption. The 20% who live in the lowest income countries scrape out a living with but 1.3% of the world’s private consumption. And in the U.S. itself, over one-fifth of our children live in poverty while the top 20% control 80% of the wealth, the top 1% possessing more wealth than the bottom 90%. This widening of the income and wealth disparity between the Haves and the Have-Nots, both here and globally, will, of course, inevitably lead to instability. How can it not? Impoverishment and misery are grotesque violations of fundamental human rights. They continue because of structural conditions that can only be maintained by the use of various forms of terror and military force.

  Since the beginning of our republic, our presidents have ordered more than 400 overt military interventions (only 5 declared as war as required by our Constitution), the majority initiated by Marines and Sailors, many in foreign coastal cities. The Marines first landed in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, in 1798 and have since landed dozens of times in over 100 countries. They have been practicing for more than 200 years. Virtually all these interventions have been and continue to be in "Third World" countries, the "enemy" being the poor, and for much of the 20th Century labeled as "Communist."

  Thus, U.S. Marines and Sailors have been refining destabilizing intervention techniques throughout the world, "eliminating" "enemies" for two centuries with virtual total impunity. The primary uniqueness of the current training exercises is their dangerous expansion of training areas from designated military installations into domestic civilian communities, threatening civil liberties in the process, just as they have done to the poor and dissidents abroad as commanded by their superiors. They, of course, practice with the latest in high-tech weapons and tactics against "terrorists," the new pretext replacing the out-of-date "Communists," and against an "asymmetrical enemy," apparently a new euphemism for the struggling poor, generally called "insurgents."

  There is an obvious common historical thread to the targets of U.S. intervention: people’s desire for self-determination, independent of imposed U.S. objectives. U.S. intervention and armament policy is driven by intense materialist appetites and an ethos of arrogance demanding that our collective 4.5% of the world’s population and its consumptive AWOL be forcefully maintained by denying justice to, and self-determination efforts of, the majority of the world’s 6 billion people, while eroding the Earth’s finite ecosystem in the process. Denial of our history of lawless and hurtful aggression is a necessary condition enabling its continuance, precluding the necessary radical changes if lasting peace is to be achieved through genuine commitments to justice.

  General Smedley D. Butler (the most highly decorated Marine in U.S. history) concluded correctly after his retirement in 1931 that during his 33 years as a Marine operating on three continents, he served as "a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers…a gangster for capitalism." Butler understood the more honest function of the Marines (and U.S. foreign policy in general) to forcefully maintain structures protecting the Haves from the Have-Nots.

   

  Conclusion

  The current U.S. military "invasions" into our communities serve to uncritically condition citizens to expect, and accept, escalated policies of militarization, rationalizing the ballooning of already inflated post-Cold War U.S. military budgets. They represent more of the same bully military approach to fundamental structural injustices. Wise diplomacy would indeed require a new commitment on the part of our government to uphold standards of international law and respect for sovereignty and human rights. Preparation for "terrorist" attacks–the chances of which are ironically increased due to our continued illegal, bellicose foreign policies carried out with enraging double standards–foolishly, and dangerously, substitutes for addressing historical injustices.

  United States foreign and military policies continue to be waged with dangerous arrogance. They are formulated with narrow, self-serving interests in mind. They seriously endanger U.S. American lives as the policies create ever-increasing numbers of angry and desperate people throughout the world for generations who find themselves on the bombable and discriminated-against side of the double standard. Our blindness to this overbearing "diplomacy" precludes our nation from recognizing the importance of humility, pursuing genuine justice in the world of more than 200 nations with ever diminishing resources. Forcefully maintaining systems of injustice through exploitation that selfishly benefit a small number of people at the expense of the majority and ecological health of the Planet is simply not sustainable nor fair. It is morally indefensible. In response to U.S. policies of committing "wholesale" acts of terrorism, the desperate are for the most part left with the choice of vengeance through attention-getting acts of "retail" terrorism. Everyone is a loser in this cruel imperialism. When Washington commits to being a law-abiding member of the international community, practicing golden rule principles of "do unto others as it would have them do unto you," the root causes of "terrorism" will be dramatically reduced.

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