A Solemn Anniversary
Five years ago this week, Poets Against War was born as the poets of the United States, almost unanimously, made the decision to stand together to speak publicly against the murderous intentions of our government. But this is, alas, an anniversary for which there is little reason to celebrate. Over the past five years we remained nearly impotent as we witnessed the greatest assault on our civil liberties since the Civil War; we have been nearly impotent in the face of mass murder in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, almost impotent in our opposition to the exploitation of fear as our government’s primary political tool of expediency, impotent in our opposition to torture. As any reasonable student of history must admit, the United States government is, and for more than a century has been, the world’s most accomplished terrorist organization.
The great nineteenth century historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, observed in 1893, “For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion,” predicting those policies, born in the genocidal solution to “the Indian problem,” would force overseas expansionism. The U.S. struggle for world dominance began with the Spanish-American War, where our government betrayed the trust of Cuban patriots struggling for democracy and our soldiers learned, in the Philippines, to pump salt water down the throats of people to make them talk. Whole towns and villages were razed, often with our soldiers killing every man, woman and child over the age of ten.
In 1902, when President José Santos Zelaya of Nicaragua refused to turn his country over to American businessmen wanting to built a canal between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, his government was overthrown by our government. In 1903, when Colombia refused to cater to the whims of Washington, our government invented modern “gun-boat diplomacy,” and carved a new country, Panama, out of Colombian soil. And from those years of carnage, the “American century” was born. And for more than one hundred years we have propped up murderous dictators and sabotaged democracies to make the world safe for U.S. corporate murderers and thieves.
U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Smedley Butler, who twice received the Medal of Honor for his work in Central and South American, compared his work to that of Al Capone. Stephen Kinzer’s remarkable and thoroughly documented history of our corporate-government collaboration in worldwide terrorism throughout the 20th century, Overthrow, is chilling and compelling reading. It should be in every high school and college curriculum in our country.
To understand why the U.S. is so despised by so many Iranians, one needs to go back to 1953, when Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a progressive and democratic leader, decided that Iranians should share in the prosperity of their own natural resources, and nationalized his country’s oil industry that had been run by British corporations. He offered generous recompense, including a reasonable share in future profits. But the U.S. responded by creating chaos in his country, overthrowing his government and re-installing Mohammed Reza Shah on the Peacock Thrown, beginning Iran’s years of dictatorship and suffering that concluded in the eventual coup that brought Ayatollah Khomeini and fundamentalist Muslim fanatics into power. Our government (Reagan and Rumsfeld) followed these disgraceful actions by arming Saddam Hussein for his war against Iran.
The same stories have happened again and again: in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Argentina, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, and on and on. Choosing time after time a leadership that arrogantly and ignorantly proclaims, “We are the greatest country on earth!” and “God is on our side!” we have left in our wake a veritable tsunami of human suffering. It is humiliating and intolerable that time after time U.S. international corporations have stuffed their pockets with despicable wealth as a result of that human suffering. And in recent years we have become increasingly aware that these profits also come at the direct expense of endangering the entire planet.
Democracy depends on tolerance and dialogue. As a nation, we have demonstrated neither. Nor are we democratic: if we had been truly democratic, George W. Bush would never have taken up residence in the White House. We are the most powerful nation on earth. But there is no virtue in absolute power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The corrupt and powerful corporate Americans that have financed the overthrowing of democratic governments and the installation of tyrants around the world also control mass media in the U.S.A.— the very mass media responsible for the successful indoctrination of the people in the peddling of and pandering to the politics of fear and hate and murder. The “liberal” New York Times played a major role in the lead-up to the present disastrous war, as it has in so many others.
It is time to declare an end to “the American century,” time to face our own history of demagoguery and hegemony. We who are poets are among the most literate people of our nation. We owe it to our country and to the world to become better citizens of this world, to stand for truth and compassion in the face of terror and mass murder.
Last week, Reuters news service reported that more than one million Iraqis have died in George Bush’s war. It is virtually impossible for anyone to comprehend what one million bodies looks like, impossible for one mind to comprehend what misery and sorrow and rage follows in the wake of one million dead people. The Iraqi people had nothing to do with the events of September 11, 2001. The Iraqi people never threatened the people of the United States in any way. Now their country lies in ruins and the true death toll will never be known. And their blood is on our hands.
Now we read about the madness of returning veterans, about the lack of hospital and psychological care and treatment for returning veterans, about the homelessness and depression of returning veterans. It is, alas, a very old, sad story.
One year ago, it was my privilege to travel through Vietnam with the good people from The Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts and to observe as they conducted interviews with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generation victims of Agent Orange. I watched people—young and old— dying horrible deaths by cancer and saw children born with horrendous birth defects crying constantly in grief and agony. And I realized that thirty or forty years from now this will all be repeated in Iraq, a consequence of the use of depleted uranium we used in our weapons of mass destruction in our unprovoked attack.
Read article: Agent Orange Deforming a Third Generation in Vietnam By Tom Fawthrop, Comment Is Free
If we do not hear the cries of suffering from this world, what kind of people will we become? What kind of people are we? We have, as a nation, a long deplorable history of turning our backs on the suffering we author, both at home and abroad. We have a long inglorious history of turning a deaf ear to the cries of pain and pleas for mercy that follow in the wake of our violence.
Traveling the world these past five years, I have heard again and again, “Americans simply don’t learn from history.” From Vietnam to Egypt, New Zealand to Lithuania, Italy to Colombia and Venezuela, it has been the same story. And they are right, of course. We seem to have learned nothing from the defeat of French colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria, nothing from the defeat of English colonialism in India and Africa, nothing from our own experience in Vietnam. We repeat the same redundant misery-making, the same arrogant slaughters, while the Haliburtons and the Bechtels pocket billions of dollars.
But only in the United States have I been told that “poetry doesn’t matter any more,” that “poetry is useless.” Only in the United States have I been asked by journalists, “Why can’t you poets just leave the politics out of it?” What a remarkably, stunningly illiterate question. The answer to the latter: “Because we are citizens of this country and of the world, and we are all in this world together.” The answer to the former declaration: “Because poetry has the ability to open people’s eyes and hearts, to change lives one life at a time.”
Poets Against War has friends and allies all over the world. Everywhere I have traveled I have heard heart-felt declarations and seen real tears of profound gratitude for the stand we have taken. When we began five years ago, we were in a minority in our opposition to the war in Iraq. Today, seventy-five percent or more of the American people agree with us. Our world is less safe and our country is less democratic and less respected than ever before. Five years ago, George Bush’s approval ratings stood at eighty-one percent; today it is in the twenties. Our terrible predictions have been painfully realized.
War criminals like Reagan and Rumsfeldt (who armed Saddam Hussein and sponsored Iran-Contra), Henry Kissinger (who is responsible for millions of deaths in Southeast Asia and in Central and South America), Bush, Cheney and Karl Rove never stand trial for their crimes against humanity while lining their pockets and those of their cronies with blood money. We who have pen in hand can allow the Republicrat-Demopublican party to revise history, like Soviet historians, or we can insist on truth. Ronald Reagan didn’t bring down the Soviet regime; bad government did. Bad government is bringing down the American empire as well. Our government tells us that we can afford to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the destruction of other peoples and countries, but we cannot afford a reasonable national system of health care—unlike every other industrialized country in the world. While the world addresses global warming and greenhouse gasses, the United States alone sabotages the Kyoto agreements.
 
The photographs above are of Vietnamese children I met at a school for the deaf. Poverty had kept them from being tested for hearing aids. When I returned home, I contacted a few members of Poets Against War and we each made a modest contribution. These children are now hearing for the first time in their lives, and because they can now hear, they will be mainstreamed in education and lives happy productive lives. There are another dozen students in the school who may well benefit from stronger, more expensive hearing aids. Your contributions to Poets Against War will help us help them—and others like them.
At the end of this quarterly commentary are pictures of Palestinian children and the daily realities they face. Our government contributes $3 billion to Israel every year, and yet the Palestinian people remain under siege while the Israeli government refuses to accept the 1967 boundaries that would permit the establishment of a Palestinian state. We must condemn every act of violence, no matter the source, and insist that Palestinians and Israelis alike give up violence and accept borders as they were established many years ago. These children are the future of the world. We can teach them to hate and to kill, or we can insist that there is another way, a way that can be found only in mutual dialogue and in tolerance. And to those who say I speak of a utopian dream, I ask a simple question: How many murdered, maimed or orphaned children are enough?
In this election year, we will hear a lot about how “we live in the greatest country on earth.” Any politician who says such a thing is living proof to the contrary. There is no “greatest country on earth.” That is, in itself, an arrogant and infantile concept. We will become a great country only when we insist on real democracy, liberty, and the value of human life, only when we elect a government that believes truth and compassion—and a little humility—are the most meaningful ways to combat the politics of fear. It is time for us all—poets, farmers, business leaders, politicians, teachers, clerks—time for us all to become better citizens of the world. —Sam Hamill
The Real Faces of War
 
 
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