Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Jody Aliesan
The Right of the People
"The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government... For the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent." —Martin Luther King, Jr., Riverside Church, New York, 1967
When I first came to Seattle in May of 1970 it was by train from the east, fresh from work as press representative for the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. At that time our corrupt and duplicitous government was waging an illegal war with massive civilian casualties and severe environmental damage. The only beneficiaries were weapons makers and those obsessed with domestic control and world domination. Sound familiar?
Soon after I arrived in Seattle I helped organize a poetry reading with two other activists. We called it the “Anti-War Fair.”
Flash forward four years to 1974, when the Freedom of Information Act was passed, in acknowledgment of the massive surveillance of ordinary citizens carried out by the Nixon/Hoover FBI. I applied for my file, and after a few months’ wait, it arrived. The pages looked like doilies, there were so many pieces snipped out of them to protect agent identity and, of course, “national security.” Observation went all the way back to 1968, a year of teaching and voter registration in Birmingham, Alabama.
Every page was full of holes except one. That sheet was a very literate review of my part in that poetry reading, including everything I said between poems.
Today the Freedom of Information Act is itself in shreds, thanks to Attorney General John Ashcroft and his Department of “Justice.” Under the USA PATRIOT Act I would be at risk now for speaking out the way I did that night in 1970. So I figure at this point it’s more efficient for everybody involved if I just make a clear statement in print—much easier to clip and file, no travel expense, no overtime:
I charge the ideologically fundamentalist government of our United States with practicing imperialistic capitalism, enforcing it with military and police powers, and taking great bootstrides into fascism. This is not rhetoric, it’s simple description. As Mussolini said, "Fascism should more properly be called 'corporatism,' since it is the merger of state and corporate power." A plan has been in development for more than ten years, awaiting the right events, the right timing. We don’t have to search out alternative street rags to know something's happening here. We can read it in the mainstream media.
It takes psychopathic amorality to manipulate our fears into obedience and subvert natural love for our country into nationalist belligerance while, under cover of these distactions, sliding out from under us the Bill of Rights, social contracts, economic safeguards and environmental protections won during many generations of democratic struggle. It's a criminal cynicism that invents pretexts for the exercise of greed and power on a global scale while dismissing laws and agreements developed with great care among nations. And it's a despicable hypocrisy that makes a show of defending some forms of human life while destroying others at will or whim.
I cannot call the present regime my government. I will continue to oppose it and obstruct its designs. I will seek the truth, inform myself, and pass that information on as widely as I can. I will stand with the majority of us who disagree, disapprove and disown. It's time for us to take back our country.
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." —James Madison, April 20, 1795
"Naturally the common people don't want war... It is the leaders of a country who determine the policy... The people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."—Herman Goering, at Nuremberg
Governments...deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. —Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
