Listics

Image lifted from YblogZa…  thanks, Mike.

Not Service Oriented Architecture, you ninnies, the "School of the Americas" at Fort Benning, Georgia, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.  It’s time to stop funding this school for military torturers.  Annually, people of conscience go to Fort Benning and engage in civil disobedience to draw attention to the horrors perpetrated by graduates of the School of the Americas.  Thew protests are about to begin again.  Pay attention to them.  Write your legislators.  Consider this statement by a conscientious objector at Fort Benning and juxtapose her values with the values of the government that has us training Latin American soldiers how to wire up a human being to a car battery.

Statement made at Ft. Benning, GA on November 17, 2024 by SPC Katherine
Jashinski, first woman in the military to publicly declare resistance to
participation in the war:

My name is Katherine Jashinski. I am a SPC in
the Texas Army National Guard. I was born in Milwaukee, WI and I am 22 years
old. When I graduated high school I moved to Austin, TX to attend

college. At age 19 I enlisted in the Guard as a cook because I wanted to
experience military life. When I enlisted I believed that killing was
immoral, but also that war was an inevitable part of life and therefore, an
exception to the rule.

After enlisting I began the slow transformation
into adulthood. Like many teenagers who leave their home for the first time,
I went through a period of growth and soul searching. I encountered many

new people and ideas that broadly expanded my narrow experiences.  After
reading essays by Bertrand Russel and traveling to the South Pacific and
talking to people from all over the world, my beliefs about humanity and its
relation to war changed. I began to see a bigger picture of the world and I
started to reevaluate everything that I had been taught about war as a
child. I developed the belief
that taking human life was wrong and war was
no exception. I was then able to clarify who I am and what it is that I
stand for.

The thing that I revere most in this world is life, and I
will never take another person’s life.

Just as others have faith in
God, I have faith in humanity

I have a deeply held belief that people
must solve all conflicts through peaceful diplomacy and without the use of
violence. Violence only begets more violence.

Because I believe so
strongly in non-violence, I cannot perform any role in the military. Any
person doing any job in the Army, contributes in some way to the planning,
preparation or
implementation of war.

For eighteen months, while my
CO status was pending, I have honored my commitment to the Army and done
everything that they asked of me.  However, I was ordered to Ft. Benning last
Sunday to complete weapons training in preparation to deploy for
war.

Now I have come to the point where I am forced to choose between my
legal obligation to the Army and my deepest moral values. I want to make
it clear that I will not compromise my beliefs for any reason.
I have a
moral obligation not only to myself but to the world as a whole, and this is
more important than any contract.

I have come to my beliefs through
personal, intense, reflection and study. They are everything that I am and
all that I stand for. After much thought and contemplation about the effect
my decision will have on my future, my family, the possibility of prison,
and the inevitable scorn and ridicule that I will face, I am completely
resolute. I will exercise my every legal right not pick up a weapon,
and to participate in war effort. I am determined to be discharged as a CO,
and while undergoing the appeals process; I will continue to follow
orders that do not conflict with my conscience until my status has been
resolved. I am prepared to accept the consequences of adhering to my
beliefs.

What characterizes a conscientious objector is their
willingness to face adversity and uphold their values at any cost. We do
this not because it is easy or popular, but because we are unable to do

otherwise. thank you.

http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/11/1784231.html

over bark bark bark…

It’s the 67th anniversary of Kristallnacht and I’ve been crying here tonight.  I’m crying now.  Your hormones change when you get older or something.

I wanted to write something funny about Yevgeny Yevtushenko, to drag his old pre-Glasnost poetic ass forward and rekindle some of the fire we felt when reading Babi Yar forty years ago and more.

But my darkest attempt at humor would fail in this attempt.  There is nothing funny about Babi Yar, nor about Yevtushenko’s brave poetry, unmasking Russian anti-semitism and preserving the memory of those who died outside of Kiev, Jews and Gypsies, homosexuals and POWs, victims of the Nazis.

Tonight I saw a documentary about paper clips.  And I cried.  Some kids in Tennessee collected millions and millions of paper clips.  They were trying to collect six million, but by the time they were done they had twenty-nine million - twenty-nine million paper-clips collected to memorialize the victims of the holocaust, collected as the children learned lessons about hatred, intolerance, and indifference - paper clips from all over, with messages attached from students in Germany, in Poland.  And a boxcar, they received the gift of a boxcar like the ones that hauled those millions of children and women and men to the camps where they were murdered by an inhuman machine, a government machine made out of people empowered and encouraged to ignore their own humanity.  Like the contractors we employ in Iraq, like the government employees working for Cheney and Rumsfeld, offshore, the murderers in Germany, the murderers in Poland, the murderers in Russia (the murderers in Iraq and Serbia and in the CIA gulag) refined their indifference to be able to ignore the stench from the incinerators, the smell of death from bodies decomposing at the bottom of the ravine, and how is Adolph Eichmann any different from Ted Bundy or Rumsfeld?  Cheney? 

Eichmann and Bundy stood trial.  Should we deny Cheney and Rumsfeld this opportunity?  I think not.  And if there is in the world a country with the stones to drag their sorry asses to justice, then I hope it is done, but it will not be done in America because the callous indifference of the German people on the morning following Kristallnacht, the willingness to let friends and neighbors suffer rather than stand strong against injustice, against inhumanity - that willingness to turn away, to resent the victims for upsetting the balance of cool detachment  that permits people to go about their business while brownshirts burn books and the Patriot Act turns the clock back one thousand years - that sickness that consumed so many good people of Germany and Poland and Russia, that sickness is here in America today.  And for every spark of hope kindled by an eighth grade class project there are a million skinheads set to burn books, bomb synagogues and mosques and turn away from the torture that has become government policy under this cruel and inhuman Republican government.

BABI YAR

By Yevgeni Yevtushenko (1961)
Translated by Benjamin Okopnik, 10/96

No monument stands over Babi Yar.
A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
I am afraid.
Today, I am as old
As the entire Jewish race itself.

I see myself an ancient Israelite.
I wander o’er the roads of ancient Egypt
And here, upon the cross, I perish, tortured
And even now, I bear the marks of nails.

It seems to me that Dreyfus is myself.
The Philistines betrayed me - and now judge.
I’m in a cage. Surrounded and trapped,
I’m persecuted, spat on, slandered, and
The dainty dollies in their Brussels frills
Squeal, as they stab umbrellas at my face.

I see myself a boy in Belostok
Blood spills, and runs upon the floors,
The chiefs of bar and pub rage unimpeded
And reek of vodka and of onion, half and half.

I’m thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of "Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!"
My mother’s being beaten by a clerk.

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The "Union of the Russian People!"

It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I’m in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other’s eyes.
How little one can see, or even sense!
Leaves are forbidden, so is sky,
But much is still allowed - very gently
In darkened rooms each other to embrace.

-"They come!"

-"No, fear not - those are sounds
Of spring itself. She’s coming soon.
Quickly, your lips!"

-"They break the door!"

-"No, river ice is breaking…"

Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.

And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I’m every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.

No fiber of my body will forget this.
May "Internationale" thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.

There is no Jewish blood that’s blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that’s corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!

For the following, my thanks to Kerr Mudgeon (another US citizen exercising his right to freedom of expression anonymously since that so-called right is not very well guaranteed under the oppressive Bush regime)…

If our media were as liberal-biased as the right-wing says, they wouldn’t simply
report the President’s words in situations like this but would start articles
with leads like this: “President Bush contradicted himself today by saying . . .
.” Or “In an egregious attempt to confuse the American people about
Administration policies,. . . “ Or “Today the President supported America’s
right to torture our enemies in defiance of the Geneva Conventions.” And so
on.

Here he is all done up as Margaret Dumont.

Antonin Scalia… I always think Thomas and Scalia, and then I spit.   I don’t much think of Antonin Scalia by himself because  to me he’s a caricature, an example of what the Supremes ought not to be, a book-end, half of the comedy twosome of Thomas and Scalia. 

Now it looks like we may be in for a long run of the Three Stooges, unless the Democrats find enough political Viagra in their luggage to stonewall this thing. 

Samuel Alito, the treasonous felon’s choice.   With ANY Bush pick, the prospects for free elections in 2024 are hugely diminished.  Fitzgerald needs to come forward with the rest of the indictments soon so this thing can’t get off the ground.

After 27 months one is tempted simply to say "BFD."  The Libby indictment is a little late to stop the war.  There are still enough witches around the White House cauldron to keep things stirred up, even with old Scoot-fruit gone.  Twenty or thirty indictments for crimes against humanity, war crimes, high treason involved in the violation of international treaties to which the US is signatory…  impeachment for election fraud and a round of Bronx cheers would begin to address some of the superficial issues that the Bush gang of felons and miscreants have visited upon the country.  One dude named "Scooter" seems too small an offering to the gods of felonious misprision.

That Billy Frist… what a card!

AP photo.