Journal Entry for March 2003

March 24, 2003

At War with Bush

Our government needs to listen to the American people, now that the United States is at war. The Bush administration won the election by having the power to twist the arms and to contaminate the members of the United States Supreme Court. The members of the Supreme Court took it on themselves to make Bush the first appointed president of the United States. Half of the people did not vote for him. This administration is lying not only to the American people but also to the United Nations Security Council. In a recent issue (March/April, 2003, p. 20) of The Humanist, a magazine concerned with critical inquiry and social concerns, Professor Michael I. Niman writes the following:

In a way, the Bush folks were telling the truth. The UN report as distributed was missing key pieces of information about Iraq's weapons programs. But that's because the United States removed over 8,000 pages of information from the 11,800 page document before passing it on. The missing pages implicated twenty- four U. S. based corporations and the successive Ronald Regan and George Bush administrations in connection with the illegal supplying of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government with myriad weapons of mass destruction and the training to use them.

According to the report, Eastman Kodak (which, among others, seems not to have fundamentally changed since collaborating with the Nazis in World War II), Dupont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Sperry, Hewlett-Packard, and Bechtel were among the American companies aiding the Iraqi weapons program leading up to Iraq's1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The fascist implication that Americans are wrong if we question Mr. Bush's or Mr. Cheney's reasons for entering the Iraqi war sounds like the early 20th century when the Espionage Act was passed by Congress and signed by Woodrow Wilson in June 1917 to stop protest during World War I. (Zinn, 1998). Presidents both Democrat and Republican have used the Espionage Act as a way to silence war protesters. Howard Zinn, the great historian of the unwritten American history, in his book, The Twentieth Century: A People's History, writes:

The Espionage Act, thus approved by the Supreme Court, has remained on the books all these years since World War I, and although it is supposed to apply only in wartime, it has been constantly in force since 1950, because the United States has legally been in a “state of emergency” since the Korean war. In 1963, the Kennedy administration pushed a bill [unsuccessfully] to apply the Espionage Act to statements uttered by Americans abroad; it was
concerned, in the words of a cable from Secretary of State Rusk to Ambassador Lodge in Vietnam, about journalists in Vietnam writing “critical articles…on Diem and his government” that were “likely to impede the war effort.” (1998, p. 86)

The Espionage Act was used to suppress free speech during times when the United States military was being used to win wars where natural resources would benefit our corporate structures’ production of consumer goods. The Power Elite (C.W. Mills 1956) of military, politicians, and corporations are still colluding and causing unnecessary wars. The Power Elite perceives a threat to our national interest if other countries challenge us or our self-assigned rights to their natural resources. Currently the Power Elite sees our oil needs as being threatened by Iraq.

The megalomania of Arafat, Hussein, Bush, Sharon, Bin Laden, and all other terrorists active in our time is threatening the whole world. We cannot let these violent men define the century. Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., have given us directions for nonviolence. We need to lift these lovers of the world into our conscious awareness and let them conquer images of hate that infiltrate our minds by the haters of life.

God, let your love and peace prevail on earth.

References
Mills, C. W. (1956). The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

Niman, M. I. (2003, March/April). What Bush Didn't Want You To Know About Iraq. The Humanist, 63(2), 20-22.

Zinn, H. (1998). The Twentieth Century: A People's History. New York: Harper Collins.