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A sermon by Dave Weissbard delivered at The Unitarian Universalist Church Rockford, Illinois 09/21/03
READING from Hope: the Dynamics of Self-Fulfillment by Arnold A. Hutschnecker, MD Progress is like a fever that goes up and down, hope versus hopelessness. We can only deplore, but must not despair, painful events of regression, as for instance the recent (1978) action of a government that claims to be civilized but in a fit of raging fever reverted to ancient barbaric methods of kidnaping and stoning people to death – with a judge throwing the first stone., In the chapter on cults we tried to show that psychopaths don’t know that they are mentally sick and people don’t know why they follow them. The people, for the most part, are passive and helpless. Therefore they believe the promises of their Pied Pipers. In the case of the people stoned to death their crimes were sexual transgressions, normal in one society at one time, a mortal sin in another place at another time. Does an event of deep regression mean that there is no real hope for human development? On the contrary. These acts of “temporary insanity” have come under the sharp searchlight of psychiatry on individual and not psychopolitical levels. They have not diminished but rather strengthened our need and our hope to find answers to human problems such as violence. History is full of periods of stormy progression. We need only think of the time during which one of the noblest of human documents was written: the American Constitution. But history also has produced the deepest regression of humanity: methods of slow torture, the use of science in the negative to sadistically design has chambers aimed at the destruction of millions of people. Executed not in a heat of passion but laid down in a document written in more primitive than legal language, these Nuremberg Laws were conceived and signed by Rudolph Hess, a psychopath, Hitler’s deputy and the only one next to the Fuhrer himself who was allowed to sign a document into law. What he did makes him one of the greatest mass murderers who ever escaped the gallows, by his plea of amnesia. And yet, in spite of setbacks by people who are motivated by hate and have dedicated their lives to death and destruction because of the inner self-hate, human progress has marched on. Even at its darkest moments and at times of utter despair the light of hope has never been fully extinguished. It has kept on flickering in the minds of men and women who psychologically have been structured to endure catastrophes, resist torment, or be lost in the trivial – even if resistance means personal pain and deprivation. These people have carried the torch of civilization forward because of their strong beliefs and their visions of a happier destiny for mankind. As science is slowly winning its battle against superstition and man’s ancient lust for blood, the ghosts and evil spirits begin to vanish. With more education grows the hope that the never-ending search for greater knowledge, better methods, and newer discoveries will make [hu]mankind more free, teach us to be more just, and to become more civilized. . . . So we must go on with confidence and hope. But are all people who say they want better lives really our helpers? Let us turn to our lawmakers, brilliant men and women who defend the rights of all people. But do they? To what degree can we trust our political leaders to progress humanity in general and our great nation in particular? How was a Joe McCarthy possible? Have not others also failed us and our trust? Have they lived up to their great mission to give “advice and consent” to a president who, because of his own disturbed mental state, exercised disastrous judgement, unhampered by our protectors, the members of the Congress? The latter failure this author is referring to is the Tonkin Resolution. That a president (Johnson), in a flash of anger, ordered air raids against Communist North Vietnamese PT boats that attacked American ships may have been justified or may have been a human error, but that Congress, with the exception of three senators, within a record time of a little over twenty minutes, gave the president full powers of action, without investigating the facts, strikes this author as being a sign of mass hysteria and irresponsibility. It helped to cause this nation the longest, bloodiest, and most controversial war that succeeded only in America losing prestige throughout the world.
THE SERMON [International Peace Day]
The sixth of the seven principles and purposes of the Unitarian Universalist Association declare our commitment to “The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.” This is not just a “pie in the sky” kind of statement for us – it is a declaration of a core religious commitment. How that goal of a world community with peace, liberty and justice, is to be achieved is, however, complex. We do not all agree. The means are debatable. That does not, however mean that they are not discussible. I believe that principle compels us to discuss the issue, even though it creates dis-ease among us. I do not hold a moderate view on this issue. I believe that looking at the facts makes moderation impossible. But that’s my view; you need not agree. It is my responsibility as a Unitarian Universalist minister to stand in this pulpit and present to you sermons which are relevant, honest, and clearly thought out. It is your responsibility to consider what is said, to come to your own conclusions on the basis of what you know, and then to respond accordingly. Following the service we will have a discussion in which the only unwelcome views are those which suggest that I do not have a right as minister to speak my beliefs, or that others do not have a right to disagree with what I’ve said. [America’s fall from grace] For two hundred years, the United States of America has stood as a beacon of freedom. In spite of a history which has a seamier side, with our consistent support of dictators friendly to us rather than democratic governments that might challenge our economic interests, our ideals have historically dominated the perceptions of us by people in foreign lands. That has now changed - dramatically. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has updated the survey I cited back on Dr. King’s birthday which showed that “discontent with the United States has grown around the world . . . Images of the U.S. have been tarnished in all types of nations: among longtime NATO allies, in developing countries, in Eastern Europe, and most dramatically, in Muslim societies.” A new survey released in June, based on 16,000 interviews in 20 countries, revealed that:
The report goes on to observe that:
Our government has a way of dealing with such views – it attributes it all to jealousy. That, of course, makes no sense at all. America has not suddenly become wealthy or powerful. We were admired for those attributes, until we became profligate in their exercise. In the eyes of the world, the United States of America is now seen by vast numbers of people as the nation which provides the greatest threat to world peace, no longer as the symbol of liberty. Time Magazine’s poll of 750,000 Europeans showed that 86% believe that our president is the single most viable threat to world peace. Our media, for the most part, hew to the party line because Americans really do not care and certainly do not want to know what others are thinking about us. We read the count of US soldiers killed in Iraq, but they do not tell us the number who are maimed, and they never mention the number of Iraqi civilians we have killed, or whose deaths we have caused, or who have been maimed by us. You have to dig for that information. It doesn’t come up on NPR or PBS, much less the major networks. We are “protected” from the truth. Let’s review briefly the background of our current involvements which have so impaired our standing in the world: the seeds we have sown for the crop we will yet reap.
[Afghanistan] As the Soviet Union neared its end, it was mired in an uprising in its putative colony Afghanistan. That uprising was the product of an American investment of $500 million to build a terrorist organization that would give the Soviet government its own Vietnam. In Operation Cyclone we provided missiles and other arms and training to more than 100,000 Islamic extremists, the rebels known as the Mujahadin – to Osama bin Laden and his followers, among others. The Soviets called them terrorists and we called them “freedom fighters,” and we ultimately gave them more than $4 billion to fight the Soviets. Our government commissioned a whole curriculum that was used in underground schools in Afghanistan which taught the children that it was holy work to kill all foreigners who were oppressing them. When the Soviets withdrew, there was no central government and there was chaos as local warlords, bandits, took over. The chaos was finally brought under control by the religiously fundamentalistic Taliban, who oppressed the people, but at least there was order. And the Taliban were praised and supported generously by our government, particularly since they co-operated in the extermination of opium, which was the crop which supported the warlords. A problem developed in the spring of 2001 when the Taliban were less than enthusiastic about an oil pipeline that US oil interests wanted to build through Afghanistan. The oil interests were represented by Dick Cheney, who was paid by nine oil companies, and Condoleezza Rice, now national security adviser, then a director of Chevron-Texaco with special responsibility for Pakistan and Central Asia. The Taliban were reportedly warned by a US representative, “either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.” According to the BBC, Niaz Niak, a former Pakistani foreign secretary was told in July of 2001, two months before 9/11, that the United States would be taking military action against Afghanistan before October. Then came 9/11. The hijackers were not Afghani, but the purported organizer of the terrorist acts and a couple of hundred of his followers were living in Afghanistan. The refusal by the Taliban to turn them over to us without proof of their complicity, which would have been a violation of Islamic law, provided what our government saw as a sufficient excuse for the war which the pipeline people wanted, and we overthrew the Tailban and decimated the country. We installed a government sympathetic to US interests and promised to rebuild the country. We also commissioned a new curriculum for the schools to replace the one that we put in that encouraged the killing of foreigners. While the Afghani government of American sympathizers remains in power within the bounds of the capital, by no stretch of the imagination does it control the country. In his State of the Union Speech last year, George Bush remarked, "The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today, women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new government.” And he had a woman in the Afghan government stand for applause. Within weeks she was out of the government, labeled a heretic, and she lives in fear for her life. Afghan women are no freer today than they were under the Taliban – they are more subject to rape from the bandits serving the warlords than they were under the puritanical Taliban. They are not free to leave their homes. The warlords, to whom we gave tens of thousands of dollars in cash and truckloads of weapons to bribe them to stop fighting each other and fight the Taliban as “the Northern Alliance,” are now in charge again with their opium and extortion, and chaos again rules the countryside. And now the Taliban are again gaining power and sympathy among the people because they represent stability. What wonderful progress we achieved at the cost of driving another nation further back to the stone age and the death of thousands of civilians. In May 2002, the British newspaper, the Guardian published the result of an investigation by Jonathan Steele who concluded that, in addition to up to 8,000 Afghans killed by American bombs, as many as 20,000 more may have died as an indirect consequence of Bush's invasion, including those who fled their homes and were denied emergency relief in the middle of a drought. Well, at least today, with Afghanistan "liberated", the pipeline is finally going ahead, watched over by the US ambassador to Afghanistan, John J. Maresca, formerly of the Unocal oil company. Many of the people whom we now label as terrorists are the very people who were trained by our CIA and Special Forces in the very techniques that are being used against us. Many of the weapons they are using are weapons with which our government provided them. None of this is speculation. It is all well documented.
Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator who seized power in Iraq in 1979. We were, at the time, very worried about the Muslim extremists who had overthrown the Shah we had put in power in Iran. Saddam Hussein was a Muslim secularist - no friend of the fundamentalists. We encouraged and supported Iraq’s invasion of Iran, and provided training and materials for the use of chemical weapons, as well as convention arms . We even licensed the purchase by Iraq of equipment for the production of nuclear weapons. When Hussein used chemical weapons on the Kurds, who had supported Iran, an attempt in the UN to criticize Iraq was blocked by our government. Our liaison with Saddam was one Donald Rumsfeld, whose name may ring a bell. We keep trying to forget that Iraq’s incursion into Kuwait a decade ago was approved in advance when Saddam sought the clearance of the American ambassador to Iraq. When we and our allies slaughtered the Iraqi troops, the UN demanded the destruction of the chemical weapons and the end of the nuclear program. Inspections were set up to verify the destruction, but Saddam Hussein objected to the spying that was going on by the supposedly neutral inspectors. It ultimately was revealed in testimony before the US Congress that the inspectors were indeed reporting political intelligence to the CIA - Saddam was right. The inspectors left because of restrictions placed on them – they were not expelled. Hans Blix, the most recent chief of UN inspectors, told the Australian Broadcast Company this week that he has come to the conclusion that Iraq did, in fact, fully comply with the destruction in 1991. When asked why some people were so sure they still had weapons of mass destruction, Blix responded, “Iraq might have tried to fool them surreptitiously that there was something . . . I mean, you can put up a sign on your door, ‘Beware of the Dog,’ without having a dog.” It is no longer clear, if it ever was, why we went to war in Iraq. First we were told it was because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to use at a moments notice on the US, and then we were led to believe that Iraq was really linked with al-Qaeda, in spite of the fact that the Muslim fundamentalists hated Saddam Hussein’s secularism. Finally, we are told it wasn’t weapons of mass destruction and it wasn’t 9/11, it was that we wanted to bring liberty to Iraq. 69% of the American public still believes that the invasion of Iraq is a response to 9/11, but this week, finally, Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush have both confessed that there was no such link. Where did people get that idea? It was planted in the press by the administration. Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were constantly linked in the same sentences in ways in which only grammatical experts could separate them. And there are no weapons of mass destruction. So why the war? In a new article in Newsweek online, Christopher Dickey suggests that:
Dickey observes:
Our American naivete impedes the ability of our people to understand what is happening in Iraq today. We were so effectively fed the propaganda line that we were going to liberate Iraq from tyranny that the daily news that we receive about opposition to us does not make sense – and we are receiving only a part of it. It is a challenge to make the reign of Saddam Hussein look good, but we are succeeding. Months after we declared victory, there are no reliable electricity, water or sewer systems in Iraq. There is little employment, except as translators for the occupying army, which marks you as a traitor to your people. There is rampant crime. There are continual murders of innocent civilians by frightened American troops, who have good reason to be frightened. There are regular “disappearances” and torture of civilians by our forces. We have recruited new terrorists who hate America – not because of our freedom, but because of our destruction of their homes and families. We have managed to make the terrible worse. Only those on our payroll are able to see improvement. And American corporations with ties to the Bush administration are making out like bandits. [why we did it] I believe that Dickey is right that the American people supported the war to save face after the 9/11 humiliation, but that does not explain the administration’s actions. One of my daughters gave me a book for my birthday of the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. One of the gems is this: There are things that we know, And then there are known unknowns, That is to say There are things that we know that we don’t know. But there are also unknown, unknowns. There are things that we do no know we don’t know. That is, the absence of evidence Is not evidence of absence Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists Does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist.
What these people made clear, and still believe, is that America must have bases all around the world to enforce our wishes if we are to stay on top, to sustain what they boldly refer to as the “Pax Americana.” It is even more frightening to read the new official National Defense Strategy of the United States of America. It is, not surprisingly, the offspring of the Project for the New American Century’s report, since many of the people now defining our strategy are the people from that project. It lays out in alarming clarity the principle that because of the power we have, we have the right to do whatever we want, wherever we choose, whenever we choose, to further our national interests. “Might makes right.” The administration invokes the long ago discredited immoral principle of “pre-emptive war.” Paul Wolfowitz was fired by the elder Bush in 1991 when tried to get this adopted as policy – it was too radical for the father, but not for the son. Our nation’s official policy states:
Where we used to value multi-lateralism, recognizing that others might not always go along with us, as so few did in the Iraq war, the policy declares:
In what seems to be an acknowledgment of the violation of international law upon which we have embarked, the policy states explicitly that:
We are saying up front that the concept of being held responsible for war crimes is ok for Nazi’s or a Milosovec, but we will not permit any Americans to be judged by world standards. We will decide what is and is not ok. And you know, when you have more military force than all of the other nations of the world combined, you can make such outrageous statements and get away with it -- for a while. This week I borrowed a copy of Mein Kampf from the Rockford College Library. The anti-Semitism with which it is laced notwithstanding, the grandiosity, the hypernationalism in it rings a bell to one who has just reread our national security policy. “Pax Americana uber alles.” [ real patriotism] In the pre-Bush days, there was cognitive dissonance between what America stood for, and some of what it did. We have long acted against democracy around the world while espousing democracy as our goal. Perhaps the present administration is to be congratulated for reducing the gap between our actions and words, but they have done it by lowering the standards – by openly declaring an immoral principle of America first. The administration defends itself from criticism by attacking its critics as unAmerican. The new rage is Ann Coulter’s book “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.” She plays the familiar theme that those who criticize anything an American government does must hate America – I believe that does exempt the right wing’s attacks on quasi-liberal administrations. As any parent knows, there is a difference between loving your children and loving everything they do. When they do wrong, they need to be called to account. That is our responsibility. That is also the responsibility of citizens in a democracy. Those whose moral compasses show we are moving in the wrong direction are obligated to say so. I do not hate America, but I do hate, despise, abhor what America is doing today in the world community. Friends, I love this country, which is to say I love what it has stood for, but I fear for its future if we are destined to reap what we have sown. I cling to the hope stimulated by the knowledge that Caligula was not the last emperor or Rome – it survived him. I believe that regime change is essential. I believe that we are being led today by psychopaths who have no moral compass – or if they do, it is skewed by the magnetic attraction of lining the pockets of those who put them into power. In the best of all possible worlds, regime change would be followed by handing over Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their cronies to the International Court of Justice for trial for the war crimes they have committed. That’s only in my dreams. I do believe, however, they must be driven from power for the lies they have told and the harm they have done to the security of our nation and of the community of nations. [not moderate] I warned you this was not going to be a moderate sermon. Thomas Paine said, “Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice.” You may strongly disagree with what I’ve said, but don’t disagree only because what I’ve said makes you uncomfortable. You do not have to agree, but tell me where I am wrong, where what I said was not true. There is nothing I would like more than to find a glimmer of honor in the dishonor in which I believe we have bathed ourselves. In our reading, Dr. Hutschnecker, speaking of the Vietnam fiasco, said:
I am not sure about Dr. Hutschnecker’s confidence, but I do cling to the hope that the American people will accept the challenge of looking squarely in the mirror and seeing what so much of the rest of the world sees, and accept also the challenge of doing something about it, for the sake of world peace, and for the sake of our children and our children’s children. |