Monday, December 09, 2002

Endless War, Endless Fear, Endless Repression We held a community forum on Iraq last night in Lexington, with a good turnout of 70 to 80 people in the midst of the Christmas holiday craziness.  Our idea was to open the podium, and give everyone who wished 3 minutes to speak on Iraq.  It was a very safe event, and I am glad that some people who supported the war, or at least thought it was the only alternative also found the atmosphere conducive to their speaking.    Several things struck me about the evening.  First, was our lack of information about Iraq.  The first speaker, a frequent visitor to Iraq, said that somewhere near 500,000 Iraqi children have died from simple treatable and preventable diseases since the Gulf war, because of the sanctions and the inability of Iraq to get chemicals needed to purify its water system.  Most water purification is done with chlorine, which is a banned substance for Iraq.   The number of dead Iraqi children is more than the total number of people who have died in all uses of weapons of mass destruction since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.   Most Americans know nothing about Iraq, and there was a palpable hunger to know more.   The second thing was that visiting Iraq is illegal—and that under the new terrorism laws, independent trips by Americans are prohibited, and anyone who goes there is subject to prosecution for aiding terrorists.  Recently the Treasury department has moved to enforce fines against Voices in the Wilderness for bringing medicine into Iraq.  So, the prospect of many people actually finding out independent information about the lives of Iraqi’s, as opposed to through the pentagon’s managed news feeds, is actually very slim.   Finally, it was obvious that the real issue underlying the forum we had last night is fear—palpable fear.  Some people are fearful of Iraq sneaking a nuclear weapon into Boston onboard a container ship—something that is a fanciful construct by Rumsfeld, but that has terrorized a number of Americans.    But a bigger fear was of endless war.  Several people mentioned George Orwell, and a repressive government’s need to always have a war, an enemy, an external threat to make people fearful and in need of “Big Brother”.    Are we going to be another Israel, descending into a no-win situation of suicide bombings and endless retaliations?  That was one fear expressed.  Will we lose all of our constitutional rights?  People who are fearful and terrified don’t take time to demand free speech or due process, or safety against arbitrary searches and seizures.   One U.S. citizen stood up and said he thought everything he admired in the U.S., the freedom of speech and action, the tolerance, was at risk because now he was viewed as a terrorist for being a young Muslim, originally born in Iran.   Another fear was the political fear. Being in Massachusetts, the audience was overwhelmingly democratic—but the fear expressed was of endless war for empire sucking up all available resources, so that education, health, environmental protection, our very quality of life, would be sacrificed on the alter of endless war.   What stood against this fear was moral courage.  When we first founded our group after Sept. 11th, people were literally afraid to speak against the war on terror.  Last night, many spoke out, including a number of local high school students.  The act of moral dissent has emboldened more people to oppose the war, to oppose the illegal questioning and detention of Muslims, to stand against the drive to war.   But, my own feeling was that the stakes are getting higher.  I had never thought the machinery of repression that is being put in place could apply to me until last night when I wanted to donate money for relief of Iraqi civilians.  Our government has built a repressive apparatus that could jail people who want to morally support the Iraqi population—the same population that our government says is not an enemy.   If that is truly the case, then Congress must amend the draconian laws that give dangerous fascist thinking people like Ashcroft the police power to repress dissent—not through denial of freedom of speech, but through raising the consequences and penalties for the slightest moral actions that opposes the war on terrorism.  7:18:56 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 1/2/2003; 11:22:22 PM.