Anti-War Anthems: Has the Bombing Begun?

It's been a couple years, but sadly it's time to break out a new entry in the "Anti-War Anthems" feature here at The Cahokian. Today, it's a video I've seen floating around Facebook. "Has the Bombing Begun?" by David Rovics. I don't know anything about this guy, but this song captures something about this moment: the sad resignation that once again, the world has to go through this, because of the willful evil of people who once claimed better.

A Report from Occupy Sunset Park's Unity Day!

That's me in the middle with my OSP comrades making last minute preparations at Unity Day 2. Photo by Lisa Maya Knauer.

This blog entry is crossposted from the "Kasama Threads" blog feature on the new Kasama Project 2.0 website. Kasama has revamped its website to include a less bloggy section of main articles, an open section of contributed blog posts for discussion, and even a "Kasama Social" feature that aims to be something like a Red — as in Communist — Facebook, where you can make friends, engage in conversations, post statuses, and talk about issues facing revolutionaries. I decided to make this my first post in the Kasama threads feature, but wanted to share it here on my home blog too. Be sure to check out some of the other contributions on the Open Threads feature. 

On Monday, January 21, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park hosted its second annual celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday. Attended by over a hundred people in the working class community of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the event was held at St. Jacobi Church, the original home of Occupy Sandy.
This year’s event was smaller than our first Unity Day last year, but we managed to meet two important goals for this year’s event. Last year the overwhelming majority of the 300 participants were from the city-wide Occupy movement. This year we wanted to reach more people in the neighborhood, and by working with a number of co-sponsors, we managed to attract a more sizable percentage of neighborhood folks. We also wanted to present a “Spanish-language first” atmosphere in our event, since so many people we want to reach in the neighborhood are from colonized Puerto Rico or immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and in this we were successful: everything but some of the cultural performances was bilingual. I wound up MCing the event, testing the limits of my own Spanish, but it was really a rewarding experience.

The Welfare Poets perform;
photo by Dennis Flores.

We were a little ambitious in planning the event; and wound up having to jettison a series of small-group discussions and the candle light march we had planned for afterwards due to time, but we got great feedback in general for the program.
It opened with a procession of percussionists from an Afro-Caribbean drumming ensemble. This was followed by a blessing to MLK and the ancestors in Yoruba from the Lucumi Santeria tradition. People were invited to call out the names of people who had passed and soon names like Malcolm X, George Jackson, Pedro Albizu Campos, Lolita Lebron, Chief Bey and Fred Hampton were called out from the audience. The first speech was by Juan Carlos Ruiz of Occupy Sandy who urged us to put MLK in the context of current struggles. He roused the audience by asking the audience to stand up and tell each other “Tu lucha es mi lucha! Your struggle is my struggle!”

This was followed by a performance by the amazing Welfare Poets, a hip-hop/activist ensemble full of rappers, percussionists, drummers, dancers and singers. They were recently targeted by the NYPD, some of their members were arrested and accused of being associated with the Macheteros, underground Puerto Rican independence fighters. One of the Welfare Poets’ songs pointedly criticized President Obama and his drones. By the end of their performance people were dancing in the aisle.

The next speech was by Occupy Sunset Park and Occupy Sandy organizer Diego Ibañez. He talked about the the destruction Hurricane Sandy wreaked on poor communities in Brooklyn and Queens. Then he talked about the “slow hurricane” that effects neighborhoods like Sunset Park all the time: police violence, unemployment, physical neglect, the attacks on immigrants. He ended with a rousing chant of “Community is Unity and Unity is Power!”

The remainder of the program was short presentations by groups and individuals from the community, interspersed with poetry from the Peace Poets and Eric Aviles. First up was an organizer from the Workers Justice Project, a group which helps organize and protect immigrant day laborers. After she spoke one of the laborers spoke up, talking about how workers like himself were the unsung heroes of Hurricane Sandy, being among the first called in to do dangerous reconstruction work. He was moved to tears by the response of the audience. Next up were two of the rent-strikers of the 46th Street Tenants Association that Occupy Sunset Park has been helping. Sara, a forty-year resident of the buildings, originally from Honduras, told the story of living in a building neglected by a slumlord. She told how Occupy Sunset Park had helped them gain media access and the strength to force city agencies to step in. The other tenant, an elderly woman from Mexico, told the audience she didn’t care what people said about her being undocumented, she had the same rights as anyone else to a decent place to live. Next were two speakers from #YoSoy132NY. The first explained the rise of a new Mexican democracy movement organized in response to fraudulent elections, she said their struggle was the same as MLK’s struggle. The second told the story of being an indigenous native Mexican: how dare US immigration rules challenged her right to go anywhere on the continent she and her ancestors had always lived. The presentations were topped off by a rousing speech by a veteran of the Puerto Rican independence struggle, Alfredo Lopez, who echoed MLK’s last speech saying that he might not live to see the victory of our struggles but he was sure that that victory was on its way. Maritza Arrastia, an organizer with Occupy Sunset Park and a veteran of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party closed the speeches with a call for building real unity by building ongoing organizations that could challenge the difficult times that are coming.

We went downstairs for an delicious home-cooked Mexican meal. Surrounded by photos of struggles in the neighborhood and in Mexico, people ate their fill of rice and beans, tortillas and pork with spicy sauce, washed down with agua de lulo and agua de guanabana. I got a chance to talk to a number of attendees. Memorable was a guy and his girlfriend who were visiting from Argentina. When they got to the U.S., he said, he couldn’t believe how awful the political situation was. He was inspired to find something like the Asambleas Populares back home.

After dinner we were joined by the Cetiliztli Nahucampa Ensemble, a dance troupe that not only performs the dances of the indigenous Mexica (the so-called Aztecs), but performs them in the context of sacred ceremony. They lead a blessing to the four directions and to the earth in Spanish and Nahuatl before performing dances and then leading all the participants in a linked-hand serpent dance around the church basement as copal fumes drifted from the base of a carved log drum.

From my perspective the event was a great success. We hoped for a formal discussion in the event on what “unity” means and how to build it, and that didn’t happen, but we’re planning a follow-up event with a less ambitious agenda of dialogue and conversation. I thought it was really significant that none of our speakers talked about pressuring politicians or about reforming police departments or voting in more “responsible” figures into government. This was all about what the community could do for itself. In that regard I felt like it reflected what I feel is the continuing subversive message of the Occupy movement. This is about challenging capitalism in a creative way. The Occupy folks who came seemed a little less fresh-faced and more grizzled: many of them have spent months doing hurricane relief mutual @id.

In truth Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park has been struggling to maintain momentum; and for now anyway weekly General Assemblies have ceased. But it’s clear that something real is being built here. We now face the challenges of keeping the struggle sustainable and finding ways to keep people involved. It’s going to call for more creativity to keep building an anti-capitalist community-based movement that is both revolutionary in spirit and connected to peoples’ lives. But the roots we’ve been laying down and the connections we’ve made were really evident at this event. I remain a proud participant.

Occupy Sunset Park: Unity Day 2!

 

For the second year, my neighborhood Occupy group "Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park" will be holding a celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday.

Organized in coalition with Occupy Sandy and a number of community organizations mostly from neighborhood's large Latino-immigrant population, the event is meant to frame a discussion of Unity in the context of continuing struggle and resistance. In the aftermath of Hurricane Dandy, we're hoping to address the everyday "slow hurricane" that is life in working class communities like this one under an austerity capitalism that is less and less able to provide for its citizens.

The event will have speeches and small group conversations, framed by an Afro-Caribbean opening ceremony and an indigenous Mexicayotl closing ceremony, and a performance by the Puerto Rican independista hip-hop group Welfare Poets. It's gonna be a busy day!

Click on the posters to embiggen them and see all the details. I was lucky enough to design them...even though it's definitely way text heavy I'm proud of the design.

Liberate the Neighborhood!

The Occupy group in my Brooklyn neighborhood is holding a community speak-out to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday this upcoming January 16. It's exciting to be doing organizing again (although it's also time-consuming, responsible for the shortness of recent posts here). The event, called Unity Day, should be pretty interesting: one of our speakers is going to be Felipe Luciano, a founder of the mythic Young Lords Party and a member of the seminal pre-rap political poetry ensemble The Last Poets. There's going to be live music, an open mic, some video, a speaker from OWS, and others. It's being held at the Trinity Lutheran Church, a neighborhood church that has been graciously donating space and resources to the Occupy movement. OSP hasn't actually occupied anything yet, but who knows what the future has in store!

One of the cool things for me is that I'm getting to exercise my graphic design skills for something I actually like rather than for work. I'm proud of the poster I designed, above. There's also a version in Spanish I'll put up here later. Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park!

The End of Qaddafi

Propaganda image of Moammar al-Qaddafi dressed as an admiral among sailors of the Libyan navy, ca. 1980

It's not often one gets to watch the end of an era come to a bloody end on a tiny Youtube screen, but today I watched two videos of the death of the fugitive Libyan dictator Moammar al-Qaddafi at the hands of the NATO-backed former rebel forces. The first shows a bloodied but still alive Qaddafi being dragged off the hood of a car. He looks dazed and semi-conscious as he's manhandled into a crowd. He had apparently just been discovered in a metal culvert, and shot while trying to escape his fate. This was at the end of the merciless siege of the last Qaddafi stronghold of Sirte, a town that apparently proved the old Vietnam-war era military adage about "destroying the village in order to save it." The second video shows Qaddafi's considerably bloodier and less alive body being kicked around in the dust. A gory still photo that followed showed more of Qaddafi's bloodied head and lifeless eye sockets than I cared to ever see.

And so an oppressive dictator died, reportedly about the same time as his two sons Muatassim (definitely dead, more gory pictures) and Saif al-Islam (reportedly so or at least wounded), who had stayed with their father and refused to go into exile with other members of the family as Tripoli fell to the rebels in late summer. It was time for his dictatorship to go, and at least a whole lot of Libyan people seem pretty happy about that. But honestly, watching these gruesome videos I felt a little sad.

All the Libyan civilians and international photojournalists who lost their lives in Libya's short but brutal civil war deserve the real tears that perhaps Qaddafi does not, but it's hard not to reflect on the humanity ending so abruptly before the cameras. Oh I understand the merciless are rarely afforded mercy, but still it doesn't feel exactly like justice when those living by the sword die by it, despite what the Christian Bible says about such inevitabilities. I'm against the death penalty, even for men who have proved their moral bankruptcy many times over. I don't celebrate the brutality I witnessed today.


Stamp design showing the American assassination attempt on Qaddafi in 1986 in which his adopted daughter was killed

It's so easy to accept the media cliche that Qaddafi was a "madman." He was certainly a man of his own tastes and eccentricities, but isn't it funny how America's "enemies" are always demonized as "madmen" as though it's the requisite dehumanization required to objectify them and lust for their deaths: Iraq's Saddam, Iran's Khomeini and Ahmedinejad, Venezuela's Chavez, even Cuba's Castro. Never mind that all these leaders, rogues or heroes depending on one's perspective, all have or had plenty of solid reason to choose the side they were on. I have never believed I was better than anyone else solely because of the accidental location of my birth (which, come to think of it, wasn't the United States anyway, but I digress). That kind of us-against-the-forces-of-darkness patriotism is a sickness. Americans might want to hold our own leaders to higher account before looking to cast stones about the neighborhood. And pity the poor actual madmen among us: I saw several today on the subway. They weren't capable of running countries and I didn't want to kill them even slightly.

And I don't know about you, but somebody sending jets to try and kill me but instead killing one of my children and a few dozen neighboring civilians, well, that would sure make me mad.

Many cite the PanAm airplane explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland and grit one's teeth coldly and say Qaddafi deserved what he got. Well, if you believe that's what actually happened. I'm no scholar of that terrible destruction of innocent life, but the accounts that claim Libya had nothing to do with Lockerbie and place the blame on other rogue terrorists seem as feasible to me as the ones that claim Qaddafi somehow masterminded it. Not being a student of those facts I wouldn't get involved in a heated argument on the subject. But I know the record of spies and lies in the 1970s and 1980s and let's just say if I had lost a loved one over Lockerbie I would resent my loss being used for anyone's political justifications, and certainly wouldn't wish to spread the suffering around.


Cartoonish propaganda stamps showing Qaddafi in civilian and military guise ca. 1982

Certainly Qaddafi had a high opinion of himself, and created a classically visual personality cult around himself. He had his own ideology, contained in the incredibly boring and disingenuous Green Book (I guess my copy is now a collector's item). He had an army of women with guns around him for a while, which you would think would have made him more popular with elements of the American population who like B-movies with that plot, but oh well. He really, really wanted to be loved. He claimed the love of the Libyan people, the African people who he claimed to want to unite, and, at his last speeches to the United Nations in which he pleaded for more powerful representation for the third world, he claimed the love of the peoples of the entire planet. I'm not saying that love was actually redeemed.

There's a lesson there for all of those with money and (regional) power: those who tell you they love you might not really mean it when the money and power go away. And if you want your people to love you for giving them the pleasure of living in a socialist egalitarian paradise like the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya claimed to be (yes, that was the official name of the country), you might want to remember that a reasonable standard of living is not enough if your faux socialist paradise is also secretly a repressive police dictatorship where you can end up in jail or a mass grave for speaking your mind.

In the end Qaddafi and his sons refused an extended Saudi Arabian retirement, unlike certain other falling dictators. They were not apparently thanked for this last display of patriotism. I guess they proved they were committed to their own image. Whatever that's worth. Not much in the end, I guess.


Just a couple of world leaders shaking hands.

In the aftermath of the American toppling of Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi decided to come in from the cold. While occasionally reverting to bouts of his former rhetoric, he made nice with imperialism. He made nice with President Bush and with British Prime Minister Blair and for a while with Bush's successor Obama. He took the virtual bullet for Lockerbie more or less on the same basis as Mark Zuckerberg settled lawsuits over his social network, something you can afford to do when money is being pumped out of the ground. Where once he reviled Italy for its brutal decades of occupation before World War II — the world's first civilian concentration camps were established by Italy to punish rebellious Libyans in the early 20th century — Qaddafi made especially nice with corrupt Italian leader Berlusconi, promising to help him keep unwanted African immigrants from crossing the Mediterranean into Italy.


Hillary Clinton making nice with Qaddafi's son Muatassim, also reported killed today.

Qaddafi's grown children tried to rehabilitate their reputations and that of their father, posing as international businessmen or diplomats. Heck they were international businessmen selling lots of oil to a greedy European market. But all those smiles went south when the season turned to Arab spring.

Memo to self: beware of shaking hands with members of a government that has already tried to kill you even if the last time you met them they seemed happy to see you.


One of the last stamps issued by the Qaddafi regime (in 2010) honored the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and claimed racism was outlawed in Libya.

Qaddafi was the last of his kind: that generation of late 1960s/early 1970s nationalist leaders who spoke a language that sounded like it was leftist and anti-imperialist but on closer examination proved to be something quite different. It seems like today's authoritarians have mostly dispensed with the language of socialism or social justice. The dictators of Qaddafi's day needed to legitimize themselves by claiming a higher cause. Sadly, in the end they just poisoned the well, ruining the reputation of socialism which became equated with mere statism and repression; reserving the equality of poverty for the masses while a privileged class at the top enjoyed villas and luxury yachts.

And so this last Qaddafi-era stamp is sort of poignant. I mean, even the United States hasn't put MLK on a stamp since the 1980s. Yet it seems extraordinarily unlikely given the rumors of racist atrocities against West African immigrants by the now-victorious Libyan rebels that there was some kind of widespread anti-racist consciousness under Qaddafi's rule.

I hope the Libyan people find justice and freedom from new kinds of oppression. I hope they haven't poisoned that well with the brutality of this civil war and the extra-legal execution of their former ruler. I hope they understand — or learn quickly and not too painfully — what kind of deal with the devil they have made by inviting in NATO and empowering a new spirit of American interventionism. A new spirit of interventionism that is, by the way, already evident in President Obama's dispatch of a small unit of American soldiers and military advisers to Uganda to fight the so-called Lord's Resistance Army. Yes, our so-called "peace" president involves the country in another war.

I hope Arab spring fulfills its promise. As spring turns now toward winter, there are reasons both for hope and for concern. Libya shows how hard the "West" will try to keep control of the situation. Despite the decidedly mixed bag of events in Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Palestine, we also have the worldwide Occupy Together movement birthed by #OWS but spawned by a new popular awakening. As much as NATO bombings and executions in the streets seem like depressing precedents, I remain hopeful. Spring always comes round again.

Stamp images mostly from Libyan-Stamps.com

MLK Day 2011: The Fight Against Racism Remains

When I was a member of the organized left many years ago, it was not unusual to hear The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. derided as being a sell-out reformist compared to his militant competitors in the African-American community like Malcolm X. It is true that these two men had differing analyses of American society, and differing responses suggesting counterposed strategies for fighting the racism so prevalent--some would argue so foundational--in American life. Both these great men have been gone for so long, and the world has turned so far, it strikes me as less productive to focus on their differences.

Indeed looking deeper at Dr. King's speeches and actions in the 1960s shows him to be far more radical than the co-opting establishment myths about him would like people to believe. As I noted a few days ago, his position on war and the American military puts him far, far to the left of any mainstream American political figure today. Certainly far, far to the left of our first African-American president. While it might not be possible (or necessary) to resolve Malcolm X's derisive dismissal of the American baby and its bathwater of racism with Dr. King's lofty appeals to some innately American promise of justice, so many years later these things seem like splitting hairs.

What's clear to me is that despite that first African American president, despite undeniable civil rights victories with many legal, social and cultural ramifications, racism remains far from dormant as an animating force for the American right wing.

It's sort of a miracle that Martin Luther King Day is actually a Federal Holiday. I remember when it became one back in the 1980s, it was a joyous moment. No one should forget that chief among the opponents of making Dr. King's birthday a holiday was the right-wing saint Ronald Reagan. For this post I wanted to research who else opposed the holiday -- of course the racist Senator Jesse Helms led the opposition -- and so this morning I googled "who opposed King holiday." I found an innocent sounding website that deeply disturbed me. It's called martinlutherking.org. Click that link at your own risk. Because masquerading as an information resource about Dr. King, this site is actually a nest of racist vipers operated by Neo-Nazi and KKK sympathizers. It links to works by notorious racist David Duke, and links to an alleged "MLK Discussion Forum" hosted by Stormfront, a fascist hate group. It focuses on Dr. King's ties to "communists and Jews," and has articles on why the King holiday should be repealed: it even has downloadable "informational" flyers for your kids to pass out at school "exposing" the truth about Dr. King. These are the snakes lurking deep in the American underbrush. Perhaps not so deep.



Talk of civility in American politics is lovely. People should treat other people with respect. That is an undeniable aspiration, with almost spiritual resonance.

But here's the problem. Pronounced in racist epithets, bad cracker humor like the tea party sign above, or in pretentious pseudo-intelligent polite speech a la Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or any Republican congressperson, the underlying message coming from the right wing is in and of itself abhorrent. When Ronald Reagan and his ilk opposed the King holiday, they weren't rudely tossing around the "n" word. When today's teabagger movement implies that black and brown people are to blame for the economic crisis, they're not openly calling for lynchmobs.

I think challenging the right-wing's message is absolutely crucial. Exposing the ugliness underneath some newfound professed civility will now become more important than ever. The website I found today is perfectly civil, for example. I didn't see the "n" word anywhere at all. But the racism seeping out of every ugly word is undeniable. Are we to pretend that it's all okay because it's "civil"? I don't think so. While the disinformation website I stumbled on might be a step or two to the right of the average teabagger or Republican congressman, it's clearly calibrated to be in their same ballpark. And this is the danger: do we on the left start pulling punches in response to the right wing's implicit racism because of how it might look? I don't think so.

Dr. King and Malcolm X both had the courage to tell the truth about what they believed. And as the beliefs of both men evolved, they had the courage to explain what was happening to their thinking: Dr. King's position on the Vietnam War and Malcolm X's position on separatism both changed dramatically as a result of them broadening their experiences and drawing connections and conclusions. The words of these two brilliant men remain with us revealing condemnations of racism and injustice that remain extraordinarily relevant and inspiring. The anger bubbling under the surface of their words is white-hot, clear now decades later. And justified.

So while what's called the incivility of the right wing may be grotesque, it seems to me what is more grotesque is the message underlying that incivility. It's that message that needs to be called out and exposed. Allowing the teaparty to claim it is interested only in "constitutional and economic issues" might seem civil. But it's also a lie. The ugly racism at the core of the right wing's message is plain to see. And despite the martyrdom of Dr. King, despite his canonization in a Federal Holiday (and I'm glad for the day off!), there's so much work to be done to fulfill his vision.

No, Actually King Would Not Have Supported Today's American Wars

Today is the birthday of the heroic Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This week Jeh C. Johnson, the defense counsel for the Department of Defense, stated: "I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack." He then went on to compare Dr. King's compassion and support for striking sanitation workers shortly before his death to today's military: “I draw the parallel to our own servicemen and women deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their home."

These are obscene statements. Let's remember what Dr. King really stood for:

"Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the NLF, but rather to my fellow Americans who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents....Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and non-violence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know of his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition....

At this point, I should make it clear that while I have tried here to give a voice to the voiceless of Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for our troops must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create a hell for the poor....

Somehow this madness must cease. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam and the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop must be ours....

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death....

If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight."

--From his speech at Riverside Church, April 1967. Read the whole speech and try to resolve the obscenity of the wars started by Bush and continued by Obama with his words. Not. Possible.

Happy birthday, Dr. King.

An Unlikely Renaissance of Socialist Realism

Shown above is the new bronze "African Renaissance" statue in Dakar, Senegal, built by a North Korean company at the commission of the Senegalese government (pic snagged from the NYT). It shows the perfect heterosexual couple posed dramatically with their child pointing the way forward to the future. It's taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York. I understand all the criticism that has been made of this sculpture: the expense, the culturally tone-deaf depiction for a mostly Muslim country, the indulgence of North Korea's outdated socialist-realist aesthetic, and more importantly to me its somewhat sexist and heterosexist implication (as if); but I have to say this statue really works for me. Works of art like this are meant to be a sort of inspirational cartoon, and I find the sweeping heroic tableau visually exciting and dramatic. Check out the Renaissance Africaine website for a flash montage of close-ups and a beautifully-filmed propaganda video in French.

This is a model of the centerpiece statue for the Martin Luther King National Memorial being built in Washington DC. It was designed by Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin, and has predictably attracted its share of criticism. Like the African Renaissance statue, its socialist realist pedigree is clear, and, like the African Renaissance statue, I love it.

Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial was revolutionary; it's beautiful and impactful. But I think it has engendered a whole new generation of cliches as memorials embrace abstraction and endless lists of sacred names. Frankly what I love about socialist realist statuary is its almost religious manipulation of symbol and motion. The metaphors slap you in the face, sure, but they generate the requisite awe, reverence and uplift.

It's surprising to see such a widely reviled aesthetic being resurrected in two such unlikely locations, but it sure makes me want to add both of the statues to my must-see list.

(see my previous post on the huge Ernst Thaelmann statue in Berlin)

MLK's Birthday: Never Forget

That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.

Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.
--the Reverent Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, April 3, 1968, Memphis

War Is Over If You Want It

"...I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

"I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. 'And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.' I still believe that We Shall overcome!"
--The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964

"We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations - acting individually or in concert - will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

"I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago - 'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.' As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life's work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing naïve - in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

"But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

"I raise this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower."

--President Barack Obama in his acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize today

"War, huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

"War, it ain't nothin' but a heartbreaker
War, friend only to the undertaker, oh

"Peace, love and understanding, tell me
Is there no place for them today?
They say we must fight to keep our own freedom
But Lord knows there's gotta be a better way"

--Edwin Starr/Norman Whitfield/Barrett Strong song lyrics, 1970

I give credit to President Obama for an attempt to reconcile his respect for the civil rights tradition while trying to justify his role as commander in chief of the largest military machine the world has ever known: he presented a thoughtful argument for the idea of a just war, for well-behaved war, for nice war with rules and fairness. His speech today has provoked me to read some other speeches, and to assess what I believe. I'd certainly rather hear Obama's reasoned argument than those base and empty appeals to "freedom" a la Reagan or Bush. If I wanted to hear that war is peace or freedom is slavery I know which bookshelf to find Orwell on. Obama is a good speaker if not, here, a fiery one, and I'm glad to be pushed to affirm my own views.

I am proud that my father and his paternal line were peaceful people who ran from war, who would uplift their lives and families and give up their homes rather than serve in the military. They did this over and over again when they fled Germany in the 1700s and when they fled Russia in the early years of the last century and when my father did it before I was born in the 1950s. But I'm also proud of my father's maternal line; that my great great grandfather donned that blue uniform to defeat the racist Confederacy.

I am deeply persuaded by Dr. King's profound notion that the long and difficult path of non-violence was the way to respond to the violence of racism in such a way as to transform and transcend a social relationship not just suppress or repress it. But I am also deeply persuaded by the righteousness of generations of anti-colonial revolutionaries who were drawn to armed struggle in their path of liberation.

These are contradictions, and I think it was courageous of Obama to acknowledge that fundamental contest of justice and violence. But here's another contradiction: I think that U.S. military intervention anywhere in the world--with the debatable exception of the Second World War--is always and fundamentally wrong. And I think it was deeply disingenous of Obama to weave so slender a thread around the real story of the misery inflicted by the U.S. on so many nations and peoples around the world in pursuit of its own self-righteous agenda.

As someone living in New York City during the events of September 11, 2001, I could easily have been one of the people the Al-Qaeda hijackers were trying to kill. I think that the religious fundamentalists behind those criminal attacks needed to be brought to justice; not because they dared threaten the American way of life but because they chose to blame and kill a bunch of innocent people. In that sense I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the American destruction of the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11 if it's viewed as a mission to arrest criminals.

But it is the history of the crucible of those religious fundamentalists--Afghanistan--that shows the deadly chain reaction that belief in "a just war" causes. The "Just War" of the Soviets aiding the secular Afghan revolution; the "Just War" of the Mujahedeen expelling the foreign invaders; the "Just War" of the Taliban fighting the corrupt tribal Mujahedeen militias; the "Just War" of the US against the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda guests, and now, from someone else's perspective, the "Just War" of the Taliban again to expell new foreign invaders: where do these "Just Wars" end? How many regular people is it okay to kill to steer the wheels of history in a different direction?

Here's the thing. As long as people like Obama rationalize their seduction by war, all those good intentions mean nothing because in the end it comes down to parents on the wrong side of some arbitrary line on a map made to scream and weep inconsolably over the bloodied bodies of their children.

It took me many years to understand it, but John Lennon and Yoko Ono's famous Christmas Greeting is so deeply profound:

"WAR IS OVER! if you want it."

As long as the leaders of this world--both the ones in whom we've placed our aspirations for good, like Obama, and the ones we feared as pure corrupt evil, like Bush--look for the "moral justifications" in their use of bombs and tanks and drones and missiles and guns and mines and cluster bombs, then we, the regular people, will suffer. This world of violence is our choice...unless we stop wanting it; unless we're brave enough to listen to the likes of Dr. King without adding that terrible soul-corrupting word "but."

I'd like to choose peace.

The Moment passed

Forty Years

Forty years ago today, one day after giving his prophetic "mountain top" speech, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a white supremacist in Memphis.

I remember as a boy of nine hearing the news on the radio. The high-school student who looked after me til my mom got home from work told me she was worried what would happen at her school the next day. That evening we walked to the corner and looked down the broad avenue we lived near in super-segregated Chicago. The black neighborhood down the way was on fire.

The world lost a great great man that day. May his spirit shine forever.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday

Courtesy of my friend Andrew, here's greeting for the late Dr. King, whose birthday would have been today. Still hard to believe his birthday became one of our monday holidays... thank you Stevie Wonder.