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General News    H3'ed 5/26/22

Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, Not in Our Name

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Just in case you missed it, former President George W. Bush ("Mission Accomplished") had a howler the other day. He was talking about Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the Russian autocratic system when, in a speech at his presidential center in Dallas, he denounced "the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq I mean, of Ukraine" Iraq, too. I'm 75."

How apt, I thought! Admittedly, as president, he didn't launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of a neighboring country, but of one thousands of miles away based on an utter lie (that Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction). Mind you, at almost 78 myself, I do understand how the brain can play tricks on you. Still, our George wasn't wrong in that slip/description of Putin and himself, was he? In fact, he helped remind us, when it comes to invasions and criminal wars, how much the U.S. has in common with Putin's Russia.

Looking back, however, I felt a deep sadness as I watched Congress rush to appropriate another $40 billion in aid, military and otherwise $53 billion in total so far for Ukraine even as it couldn't agree to pony up a red cent for a pandemic-support package or much of anything else domestically. I couldn't help remembering that, except for a brief moment before the invasion of Iraq when hundreds of thousands of protestors, including me, took to the streets of this country, that horrific war and occupation went remarkably unprotested here, even if TomDispatch did its damnedest to oppose it.

Today, TomDispatch regular Beverly Gologorsky, author of a remarkable new novel, Can You See the Wind?, about the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era, reminds us just how important such ongoing protests truly are. In the process, she brought me back to my own time in the streets protesting the Vietnam War (as well as working as a young journalist at Pacific News Service, part of the alternative media of that moment). She reminded me of just how focused so many of us were then on stopping our country from killing yet more Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.

Faced with America's brutal conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, if only we had truly risen to the challenge as so many are now ready to do when Russia acts similarly, we might be in a different American world. Sadly, we aren't. But let Gologorsky offer you a little bit of hope for our future. Tom

The Need to Organize
What's the Message and Who's the Messenger?

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To begin, an anecdote. This past summer, a pigeon walked through my open balcony door while my attention was elsewhere. I shooed it out, but when I turned around two more pigeons walked out of my bedroom. In the 20 years I've lived in my apartment, this had never happened to me, though my balcony door was often open. All I could imagine was that those poor birds had gotten as disoriented as the rest of us in these pandemic years when nothing feels faintly normal.

But what is normal, anyway? Decades filled with war, inequity, poverty, and injustice? Really? Is this what we want a society clearly failing its people?

There are, of course, many groups working in wonderful ways to improve our lives, each of them a harbinger of what's possible. These would certainly include Black Lives Matter, reproductive-rights organizations, and climate-change groups, as well as newly empowered union organizing, and that's just to mention a few obvious examples.

But here's the truly worrisome thing. These days such social-justice groups, inspirational as they may be, can barely be heard above the clamor of right-wing organizing and conspiratorial thinking, which seems to be gathering strength, leading toward an accretion of power across this land of ours. They're doing so locally by getting onto school boards and city councils; by using social media to spread ever wilder racist, misogynist ideas; by encouraging racial hatred that results in nightmarish murders, most recently in Buffalo, New York, where a young white man slaughtered African-Americans in a supermarket. And by doing all this and more, the right wing has grown into a set of movements that continue to flourish nationwide with far too little forceful opposition.

Right-wing politicians, extremist groups, and their social-media outlets are anything but new. For years, however, they lingered in the shadows. Donald Trump's presidency gave them permission to emerge all too vocally and capture the fealty of so many Republican lawmakers and voters. The threats to legal abortion, voting rights, marriage equality, and education (via book banning and curriculum reshaping) are just a few obvious aspects of American life now being menaced by a set of authoritarian, nationalist, racist political movements that are unfolding daily. The question, of course, is: What should the rest of us do to counter all of this?

We live on an ever more climate-endangered planet and in a society threatened by growing amounts of disinformation, misinformation, and a tendency toward extreme individualism. Consider just the growing number of anti-vax, anti-masking Republicans who equate their choices with the personification of freedom, which is really a fear of loss of control white control, rich control, male control.

Sadly enough, progressive ideas aren't permeating our society anywhere near as quickly or defiantly as right-wing ones. In the increasingly dangerous world we inhabit, it's not enough to fire up anger by sending people into the streets for a single day of protest, even to shout No!, Stop!, Not in our name! It's a shame since they should matter but such flare-ups don't engender real change. Only consistent, visible grassroots organizing, local and national, might lead to the kinds of change that could affect political consciousness and alter a country that may be going the way of Trump far too quickly.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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