Watchfires for Freedom

On a very cold night, a week before Christmas, a small group --- 17 hardy souls --- got together here in Bangor, Maine, to protest the escalation of the War in Afghanistan by burning the president’s words.
We had been deeply dismayed when President Obama announced this escalation --- particularly so because many of the reasons he gave & the points he made in the speech were not true. And the major TV, radio and print media in this country did nothing to correct the errors. How can we expect the people to fulfill their duty as democratic citizens if the media fail to do their job? Below is the op-ed I wrote to explain the action.

Watchfires of Freedom

Ninety years ago a small group of women led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns set an urn in front of the White House and in it burned the words of President Woodrow Wilson. They called their action Watchfires of Freedom. Wilson had been extolling the great benefits of democracy brought to the world by the bloodbath of World War I. If this were true, the women asked, where are our rights? What respect do anyone’s words --- especially a president’s --- deserve when they are based in hypocrisy? When there is no accountability in either the media or the courts for the distortions and lies of elected officials, how are citizens supposed to express their disdain?

On December 17th at 5 pm in front of the Federal Building in Bangor a group of citizens will burn the words of President Barack Obama from his speech justifying the escalation of the War in Afghanistan. We will not act to advance the agenda of any political party. Our agenda is democracy and truth. It’s an old truism that the first casualty of war is truth. It might equally be said that the first casualty of untruth is democracy. Democracy is a sacred trust. That trust must burn with pure, transparent clarity. If a democracy is really to be of, by and for the people, the people can only take on its responsibility if they know everything their elected officials know. How else, then, can they make decisions to devote their precious lives and resources to solving their common problems? Elected officials who employ fear, patriotism, propaganda and false history to mislead their own people have betrayed democracy. We act knowing that we have the freedom of speech to burn these words. More importantly, we act to demand the freedom to be told the truth.
President Barack Obama in his speech of December 1, 2009 calling for the escalation of the War in Afghanistan, used multiply duplicities about the present and the past to make his case for expending more blood and money.

We will enumerate and denounce those lies and distortions, burning them as a metaphoric act of clarification, purification and transformation. Our acts are ritualistic --- demonstrating immense respect for life and an equal abhorrence of deceit. While the style of our president is articulate and persuasive, his content is hypocritical and purposely misleading. Our intent is to burn the lies and shed light on the truth. George Orwell said, “When deceit becomes universal, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” If truth is war’s first casualty, then telling the truth must the harbinger of peace and justice.

President Obama said, “The wrenching debate over the Iraq War is well-known and need not be repeated here.” It does not bear repeating because the fundamental, though unacknowledged, “debate” was not about going to war, but about whether to commit a war crime or not --- whether to knowingly, by lying to the American people and the world’s people, precipitate a crime against humanity, a crime designated as such by our own Constitution and our binding treaties. And our president has used his persuasive power to insist that this real debate should never take place. And that those guilty of plotting the crime not be held accountable.

President Obama justifies the war on Afghanistan by the actions of 9/11. He says the US attacked Afghanistan only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden. This is not true. The Guardian reported in October of 2001 that three times the Taliban offered to surrender bin Laden and, each time, was rejected by the Bush administration. The Bush administration was more intent on war than justice.

Whereas Obama asserts we have no interest in occupying Afghanistan that’s difficult to square with the invasion of troops, contractors, CIA agents, and advisors and the construction of an enormous embassy in Kabul and over 80 very permanent-looking military installations.

The president says, “We did not ask for this fight,” a statement that is disingenuous at best. The great Czech writer Milan Kundera once said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” None of the 9/11 terrorists were from Afghanistan. And we are being asked to forget that during the 1990s many prominent figures of our military industrial complex spoke of the urgent necessity for finding a reason to attack Iraq and Afghanistan --- long before 9/11. The reasons for wanting war involved control of oil and gas supplies and the enlarging of the US’s sphere of imperial power. Perhaps we did not ask for this war, but we surely wanted it. Nothing about that situation has changed except that what was once a hypothetical desire is now a reality.

Obama said the U.S. has underwritten global security for six decades. We would ask, “Where does the history of Vietnam and the 2-3 million lost lives fit in that vision? How secure might the people of East Timor, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, El salvador, Guatemala, Ghana, the Congo feel after our meddling in those countries? And has Obama forgotten what he admitted in his speech earlier this year in Cairo --- that our CIA overthrew the democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 and brought back the repressive Shah in order to preserve western oil interests?

Most astounding, Obama says, “Unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination.” The facts are otherwise: a military budget equal to if not larger than the rest of the world’s combined, over 1000 foreign military installations (while all other countries may have 200 total), and a substantial U.S. military presence in over 100 countries, including Japan, South Korea, Germany, Columbia, Italy, & Iraq. The Pentagon calls this military control of the world Full Spectrum Dominance.

A country that compulsively spins the truth and obscures its history, that demands patriotic fervor for deception and ethical approval for murder, that tells its idealistic soldiers that they are fighting to save democracy when they are fighting to save capitalism is a country that promotes political and cultural insanity. Truth telling is the only path to political and cultural sanity. Without truth telling there will be no democracy, no peace, and no justice. Our goal is not to tell truth to power, but to insist, as we all must, that power tell the truth. May we burn the lies to feel the warmth of truth.

The Nigerian writer Ben Okri says, “Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.”