I went ahead and made the mistake of reading the latest issue of the Mount Diablo Peace and Justice Center's Peace Gazette. Oh man, where to begin?
I suppose at the begining. the first thing i see is the "action of the month" section. i would think that a section urging folks to take action would have something to do with making it a tad bit harder for the US government to wage wars and occupations. wrong! the peace and justice folks instead urge their readers to send care packages to the troops.
how in the world are you going to be against a war while at the same time supporting the troops who are fighting the war? it makes no sense at all.
look, i have friends in the military, some of whom are taking part in occupying iraq. i know them on a personal level, and support them in the sense that i want them to come home alive. i most certainly do not support them killing anyone or doing anything else that they and the rest of the military does. pretty much everyone i talked to who has been there has said they killed someone. it doesnt matter how close we were in high school, i dont support that in anyway.
if im not down with my friends killing people in iraq or Afghanistan, how the hell does anyone expect me to support all the troops i dont know? i dont know them, i dont know anything about them, other than they were stupid enough to sign up for the military. my guess is, most of them are assholes who id want nothing to do with. im most certainly not going to consider them heroes because they went off and killed a bunch of people for no good reason.
i'm not surprised that the peace and justice center support the troops. they are an upper class liberal pacifist organization. and none of those adjectives are a good thing.
they're the kind of people that drool over religious fundamentalist gandhi. maybe they do not believe all the accusations of racism that have been thrown at gandhi.
maybe they do not know that gandhi loved to sleep next to nude teenage girls.
Gandi was a crazy religious fundamentalist; there are much better role models for social change.
as George Orwell said in an essay on Gandhi
Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realize that Gandhi's teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from....
...Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly.
pacifism is ineffective and only works if you are in a privileged and comfortable position in society. if you are a member of the upper class, as the peace and justice center is, making social change isnt really that important. you are a part of the small minority of people in the world who benefit from imperialism, racism, capitalism, and war.
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