The Canton, Ohio Anti-War Speech — by Eugene V. Debs (June 16, 1918)

The Canton, Ohio Anti-War Speech
by Eugene V. Debs
June 16, 1918

Debs was later imprisoned for giving this speech, having been found guilty of "uttering words intended to cause insubordination and disloyalty within the armed forces of the United States, to incite resistance to the war, and to promote the cause of Germany."

He was sentenced to ten years in prison and was disenfranchised (i.e., lost his U.S. citizenship) for life. His sentence was commuted on December 25, 1921 by President Warren G. Harding; however, his citizenship was not reinstated until 1976 (posthumously). He died in 1926, having never recovered his health which deteriorated during his time in prison.

[...] it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world. [...]

These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition to Junker rule in the United Sates. No wonder Sam Johnson declared that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people. [...]

Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These autocrats, these tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims-they are the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight. [...]

Click here for the full speech via the Pomona College History Department website. This webpage also includes Mr. Debs' statement to the court upon his conviction of violating the Sedition Act.

I would like to thank Tom at Information Clearing House for the above (and below) excerpts, and for inspiring me to research and read the whole of these two speeches as well as additional biographical information on Mr. Debs.
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"For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are."

~ Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527): Italian statesman and political philosopher.

Bush Admin Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity — by International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration

International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration

305 West Broadway, #199, New York, NY 10013

PRESS CONTACT: Larry Everest 510-472-8484
COMMISSION OFFICE: 212-941-8086
commission@nion.us
www.bushcommission.org

PRESS ADVISORY

February 2, 2006


BUSH ADMINISTRATION GUILTY OF CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY SAYS COMMISSION OF INQUIRY; ACTIVIST CONFRONTS RUMSFELD WITH VERDICT, SAYS "STEP DOWN!"

Today the Bush Administration was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for invading Iraq, instituting torture and indefinite detention, attacking efforts to control global warming and for deliberately failing to prevent devastation and loss of life during Hurricane Katrina.

These findings were released at the National Press Club by the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration. The full text of can be found at www.bushcommission.org.

Shortly after the findings were released, activist Heather Hurwitz confronted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with the Commission's verdict during his press luncheon. Hurwitz, of World Can't Wait--Drive Out the Bush Regime, declared Rumsfeld and The Bush Administration were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and that thousands were gathering Saturday, February 4th in Washington to demand that they step down. (www.worldcantwait.net)

Ms. Hurwitz was quickly removed by security personnel. After she was led away, Rumsfeld joked, "We'll count her as undecided." When informed of Rumsfeld's comment, Hurwitz said, "war crimes and crimes against humanity are not joking matters. Rumsfeld's attitude typifies this administration's brazen immorality and lawlessness, and this is why it must step down."

Earlier, at the Commission's press conference, Ajamu Sankofa, Executive Director of Physicians for Social Responsibility-NY and one of the panel of jurists, stated "The historical significance of this tribunal is that American citizens, civil society, is demonstrating courage to stand up and speak its definition of the truth against a wholly orchestrated system of deliberate deceptions."

"This commission is attempting to change the level of discourse," said Abdeen Jabara, another panelist and former President of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "We want people to understand Iraq is not simply a war of choice but an actual war of aggression from which flow certain legal consequences. Torture is often reported as 'abuse' rather than torture. So we need to change the way these items are talked about for people to face the fact of what this government is doing."

"The Commission is incredibly important for the future of the United States and really the world, because it's the people of America that are speaking to these very serious indictments," said panel member Ann Wright, a former US diplomat and retired US Army Reserve Colonel. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern added, "Our German fore-bearers in the 1930s sat around, blamed their rulers, said 'maybe everything's going to be alright.' That is something we cannot do. I do not want my grandchildren asking me years from now, 'why didn't you do something to stop all this?'"

Brig. General Janis Karpinski, former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, were among the 44 witnesses presenting testimony at the Commission's two sessions. The Commission will later issue detailed findings, accompanied by full documentation.

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A 9/11 Conspirator in King Bush's Court? — by Jeremy Scahill

Sheehan Wasn't Welcome But a Saudi Accused of Support for al Qaeda Was

by Jeremy Scahill
CommonDreams.org
February 2, 2006

While Cindy Sheehan was being dragged from the House gallery moments before President Bush delivered his State of the Union address for wearing a t-shirt honoring her son and the other 2,244 US soldiers killed in Iraq, Turki al-Faisal was settling into his seat inside the gallery. Faisal, a Saudi, is a man who has met Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants on at least five occasions, describing the al Qaeda leader as "quite a pleasant man." He met multiple times with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Yet, unlike Sheehan, al-Faisal was a welcomed guest of President Bush on Tuesday night. He is also a man that the families of more than 600 victims of the 9/11 attacks believe was connected to their loved ones' deaths. [...]

Click here for the full Common Dreams article.

Progress Hits Home — by Melissa Holbrook Pierson

by Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Orion Magazine
January | February 2006

[...] Our neural pathways were formed by millions of years of existence in communities of our fellows where daily congregation and rituals and exercises made us what we became, and thus whole. Then a few years ago, give or take, they thought up the fetishization of personal property and the automobile and the installation of industry at the tippytop of the rights chain, and bingo: no more meeting places and no more walking and no more breathing of air and viewing of sky and mythmaking to explain the experience. Now you drive to a slushy parking lot and gingerly step into Walgreens for a newspaper and some Rolaids and quickly back the car out after assuring the concerned clerk (he asked, after all) that you're fine today and equally concerned about his psychic well-being (you asked, after all). You then leave the site of what was formerly a heavily used sidewalk in front of a bank, a café, and a shoe store that your grandparents, lacking a car but living nearby, used to walk to. Invisible hands reached down and changed it all around like chess pieces, and you don't know whom to bite. No one else seems to have noticed.

The area was known as Montrose. In 1973, I-77 chanced to be connected to Route 21, and the minds of men were turning, turning. "There was nothing there, it was empty," explained one of these forward thinkers to the newspaper with pride. Empty—just space, grass, nothing that people could buy. Three hundred and sixty acres of uselessness. Then, in something like six days, the world was created. Between 1970 and 1990 the number of business square feet—planned, approved, built—in Montrose rose from one hundred thousand to about five and a half million. The forecast for the end of the first decade of this century is another three and a half million. ("Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be concerned, they therefore do as they like": Edward Thurlow, Lord Chancellor, 1731-1806.) From clay, fully formed, there sprang into being West Market Plaza, Rosemont Commons—appropriate home for that perfect manifestation of the commons ideal, the community Wal-Mart—Shops of Fairlawn, Builders Square, and Market Square, shopping centers built behind shopping centers, Sam's Club, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Super Kmart, Cost Plus World Market (indeed), Cellular One, Pier 1, Borders, T.J. Maxx, MC Sports, Old Navy, Pet Fair, Comp USA, Sears, The Home Depot, Taco Bell, Chipotles, Red Lobster, Romano's Macaroni Grill, Cracker Barrel, Boston Market, Bob Evans, Ruby Tuesday, Friendly's, Baja Fresh, more and more and more until you fall, sated, heart bleeping faintly, unconscious of the sky above or the ground below or whatever could matter except crawling back to the Camry and waiting for the bank of lights at Cleveland-Massillon Road to give you a left arrow so you can creep home, finally to transport the contents of two dozen plastic bags into the house which will, somehow, absorb it all. [...]

The big numbers only fit through the brain edgewise and so cannot in fact be processed. We are made for smaller stuff: what we see in the several yards around us, what it makes us feel. The emotional space to catch one's breath, the vacant apartment that might be lent to someone who will do something artistically big in it, the quietly forgotten corners of town that are not overnight sold and flipped half a dozen times in the weeks before transformation into the next hot neighborhood for the rich—there is only a sense that these things are gone never to return, but our sadness does not look for the reason. What is it but a stare at the galaxies above, unable in any real way to comprehend their distance, to know that the planet is about to add 3 billion more people? Not much easier to try to think of what this country alone will be like with 120 million more people, even if you imagine all of them competing for your parking space at the post office. We won't speak of the fact that you will never again be able to visit the lovely beach of your childhood, because you can't get near it. (And no, no simpler to think of the 2 million more scurrying humans soon to be paving over their own little piece of Great Britain, either; or the 3 to 8 million added to Australia; nor, certainly, the 300 million destined for India.) Perhaps the only thing that can be grasped by any one of us is the sight of bulldozers just down the lane, grading the former hay meadow and giving rise to a dream vision of thirty-seven new taupe vinyl-sided "homes" with white trim and yawning bays for several cars. Then we might begin to see the future. It is composed of permanent mourning and unhappy accommodation.

Once upon a time, only the king could place his fortifications on the highest ridge; now any king who owns an SUV can do the same. It seems to go against nature, but then so much does, lately. I don't think I will have the satisfaction of collaring one of the egos-on-a-stick who is planning to build his supersized mansion on the hill that was my solace, but if I did I would pummel him with a piece of Alan Devoe's 1937 Phudd Hill:

So green are these hills, and so round and so many, that they suggest the massive tumuli of some gigantic and immemorially ancient race of man. I have walked upon them and extracted from their timeless earthiness the profoundest peace which it is possible to know. [...]

Click here for the full Orion Magazine article.

Climate Change: "Welcome to Mars (or North Korea)!" — by Media Lens

Media Lens
January 31, 2006

The Great Media Silence on Causes and Solutions

"One fundamental goal of any well-crafted indoctrination program is to direct attention elsewhere, away from effective power, its roots, and the disguises it assumes." (Noam Chomsky, 'Deterring Democracy', Vintage, 1992, p.303)


Of Realists And Stalinists

The Independent is feeling the heat from public criticism of its adverts pushing foreign travel, cars and endless consumerism. A recent editorial noted:

"Just ponder this as you flick through those holiday brochures and even the travel pages of this newspaper to brighten up the grey January days... Fuelled by cheap flights, the British wanderlust seems far from sated. Fuelled is the operative word here. For the cost of cheap flights may be low in pounds sterling but the cost to the environment is high." ('All these flights abroad could end up costing us the earth', leader, The Independent, January 28, 2006)

It is rare indeed for a paper to even hint at the negative impacts of the advertising it carries.

Over at the Independent on Sunday (IoS), deputy editor Michael Williams dismissed readers protesting the paper's climate-killing adverts as "a curmudgeonly lot of puritans, miseries, killjoys, Stalinists and glooms." (Williams, 'A bottle of bubbly for the best way to fly', Independent on Sunday, January 22, 2006)

It would seem the "Stalinists" who aspire to radical media reform are beyond the pale: "Welcome to Mars (or North Korea)!". Williams refuses to recognise that his paper's heavy reliance on advertising revenue is only one of a series of filters protecting the public from unpalatable truths about power in society.

Click here for the full Media Lens Alert.