Flyer from AWARE October 2010 demo

THE ANTI-WAR ANTI-RACISM EFFORT (AWARE) OF CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, ILLINOIS, SAYS,

“LET’S TALK ABOUT THE WAR”

A member of AWARE, David Green, sent the following letter to the newspaper at the University of Illinois:

The vast majority of 9/11 observances in this country cannot be seen as politically neutral events. Implicit in their nature are the notions that lives lost at the World Trade Center are more valuable than lives lost in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and elsewhere; that the motives of the 9/11 attackers had nothing to do with genuine grievances in the Islamic world regarding American imperialism; and that the U.S. has been justified in the subsequent killing of hundreds of thousands in so-called retaliation.

The observance at Saturday’s football game was no different. A moment of silence was followed by a military airplane flyover; in between, Block-I students chanted “USA, USA.” This was neither patriotism nor remembrance in any justifiable sense, but politicization, militarism, propaganda and bellicosity. The University of Illinois is a public institution that encompasses the political views of all, not just the most (falsely) “patriotic.” Athletic planners should cease such exploitation for political purposes. They might at least consider how most Muslim students, American or otherwise, would respond to this nativist display; or better, Muslims and others that live their lives under the threat of our planes, drones and soldiers.

The overwhelmingly white, privileged, Block-I students should be ashamed of their obnoxious, fake-macho, chicken-hawk chant, while poverty-drafted members of their cohort fight and die in illegal and immoral wars for the control of oil. University administrators need to eliminate from all events such “patriotic” observances, which in this country cannot be separated from implicit justifications for state-sponsored killing.

–David Green, University Academic Professional

Flyer from AWARE Sepember demo

[The following leaflet was distributed on 4 September 2010 at the regular monthly demonstration by the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana IL.]

~ THE WAR IS NOT OVER ~ IT’S EXPANDING INSTEAD ~
OUR GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO KILL PEOPLE IN THE MIDEAST; PRESIDENT OBAMA CONTINUES TO MISLEAD US ABOUT WHY

Last Tuesday night President Obama gave a speech about the war that his administration is conducting in the Middle East.  Unfortunately, his account was so misleading as to amount to a substantial lie:

God and Creation

[This is a section – which I take to be within the limits of fair use – from a book by the late Oxford theologian Herbert McCabe, OP – “God Matters” (London, 1987 – the title is at least a triple pun).  It’s part of a larger argument in which McCabe, a Wittgensteinian Marxist, was an active participant.]

In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to
carry on an activity, to be engaged in research, and I think this throws
light on what we are doing if we try to prove the existence of God. To
prove the existence of God is to prove that some questions still need
asking, that the world poses these questions for us.

U.S. WAR POLICY VS. OBAMA’S RHETORIC ON REDUCING NUCLEAR WEAPONS

On August 6, 1945, the U.S. detonated an atomic weapon in a defeated Japan, killing 150,000 people. Three days later, a different sort of atomic bomb was dropped on another defenseless city, killing another 75,000.

If there is an argument for the attack on Hiroshima, there can be none for that on Nagasaki – a weapons test with live subjects. And we in America have no memory at all of the “finale” described in the official Air Force history, a 1000-plane raid on civilian targets organized by General “Hap” Arnold to celebrate the war’s end, five days after Nagasaki. According to survivors, leaflets were dropped among the bombs announcing the surrender.

Sixty-five years later the U.S. – the only country ever to use such weapons in war – spends more each year on war than the entire rest of the world. And our country has maimed, killed and made homeless more noncombatants than all the rest of the countries in the world combined since World War II.

If Americans knew what was being done in their name around the world, they would be appalled.

“Taxed Enough Already”: A Case for the Tea Partiers

[Those in the Tea Party movement, who are frustrated and fed up with American government] shouldn’t be laughed at. It’s not a joke. Ridiculing the Tea Party shenanigans is a terrible mistake. Why are those voices of discontent being mobilized by the extreme Right?”  –Noam Chomsky, 8 April 2010


A correspondent sends an apposite description of the Tea Party protests:

“An astroturf campaign that has become a mass movement”

that is, a fake grass-roots movement begun by business interests, some associated with the Republican party, to prevent tax rises for social spending – but which unexpectedly came to attract many Americans in the wake of the financial collapse and bank bailouts of 2008.

By 2010 the business publication The Economist was describing Tea Partiers as “America’s most vibrant political force.” The name “Tea Party” is a reference to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when British colonists in New England (disguised as Indians) destroyed tea taxed by the British government when the colonists had no representation in the British Parliament. Contemporary Tea Partiers say the first word is an acronym for “taxed enough already.”

Particularly after their protest of the administration’s so-called health-reform bill, the Tea Partiers have attracted hysterical condemnation from supporters of the administration Television news channel and website MSNBC (Microsoft and NBC) has been particularly scornful; The Nation magazine has called for prosecutions for “sedition” [sic]; and leading New York Times columnist Frank Rich has written several columns (“vibrant with class hatred,” says media critic Alexander Cockburn) dismissing the Tea Partiers at length as simply “racists.”

Although the Media and the President Seem to Ignore it, Americans Continue to Kill and Die in the Middle East. Why?

(Text of the flyer for the regular monthly demonstration by the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign IL, 6 Feb 2010)

It’s not “because of 9/11” or to “stop terrorism,” as President Obama now says. The war is neither just nor legal: the real reason for it seems to be the long-standing U.S. policy of control over the largest oil-producing region of the world. And not because we need the oil ourselves; the US imports very little oil from the Middle East for use here at home. Most of the energy resources that we consume in the US come from the Americas and West Africa. But control of Mideast oil and gas gives the US government a powerful bargaining chip in its relations with its real economic competitors in the world – the European Union and East Asia (China and Japan). That has been American policy for a long time. The National Security Advisor in President Jimmy Carter’s administration (1977-81), Zbigniew Brzezinski (he was also a foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign), observed that control of Mideast energy provides the US with “critical leverage” over its industrial rivals in Europe and Asia, an idea of American government planners that goes back to the end of World War II, in 1945.