On Power - Open letter to the US Congress
Filed under: General, Imperialism, Military, Energy War, The Chickenshit Press, Repression & Resistance, Class
By Stan at 5:49 pm, 12/1/05
ON POWER
AN OPEN LETTER TO CONGRESS FROM A VETERAN AND MILITARY DAD
By Stan Goff
(Disclaiming in advance for the rare exceptions in Congress)
If there is one thing we can always count on, it’s politicians who walk over human corpses to show fear only in the face of something as formless and abstract as an opinion poll. The veterans and military families antiwar movement are well-versed on so-called realism – and that deference we are supposed to exercise when we approach elected officials, hat in hand, for a few crumbs of your attention and support.
We understand power very well. You are fighting each other for your careers, and you are retaining your power over us through distance and guile, and trying to promote that power by pretending you are hearing our “concerns.” But we have more than “concerns” at stake here. It is because we understand power that we haven’t the slightest intention of allowing ourselves to be used to promote your careers past the 2006 elections. If you fail to demand US withdrawal now, you are supporting the war; and if you support the war, as far as we are concerned, you can go straight to hell in 2006.
It is because we understand power that we are not going to forgive and forget that when the war fever was up, fed by the lies of Republicans, the war was facilitated by the eager xenophobic complicity of most Democrats, and by the slavish obedience of the corporate press. Most of you not only co-signed what you knew to be an illegal invasion – you have continued to sign the checks to perpetuate the war. You wanted to be lied to about the war, because the polls supported the war, and you were sniffing the political air. It is because we understand power that we know that most of you did this out of craven opportunism and a concern for your political ambitions – knowing full well that no one you loved was likely to be sent home without a limb, without an eye, without a life.
It is because we understand power that we know how cynically cavalier you are with the lives of others, and how narcissistically self-promoting. It is because we understand power that we understand why many of you are backpedaling in your support for the war. You are maneuvering to be “critical” of the war. You “demand” the administration provide “an effective exit strategy.” And you haven’t said a goddamned substantive thing, as the cameras shutter away for you. And you want us to play along – so you can beat Republicans without taking a single real position. You don’t want to stop this war. You want to win an election. By the time you win that election, another thousand troops and another 20,000 Iraqis could be dead. We do not calculate time the way you do. It is because we understand power that we know most of you will stand by while those of us with less privilege see our loved ones sent to kill and die. The real corpses produced by the exercise of power are no more to you than a political calculation. We understand power, because we know what really stands behind it. Power is embodied in the mounted cops you use to police our protests. Power is expressed by the armed guards for your gated communities. Power is the ability to kill and maim and get away with it, even if you dress it up in $5,000 suits and trot it out on the talk-show circuit, on C-Span, in your interviews with CNN.
(snip)
To the tiny handful of you in Congress who have said what we say, “Out Now!,” we commend you and thank you for your principled voices.
(snip)
November 2006 is not an election to us; it is a body count. If you think you can take us for granted over an election, think again.
http://stangoff.com/?p=222
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