William T. Hathaway

Yes We Did: Obama Deploys ‘Change Is’ Slogan

The first step towards that is to free ourselves from the strategies of deception with which the oligarchs try to shape our minds. The second is to join with others in active struggle. Just being angry isn't enough; to succeed we must be organized and militant.

To get a preview of Obama's strategies for winning a second term, we just need to read the liberal press. They are giving lip-service praise to the current protests while trying to steer them in a direction that serves the Democratic Party. Seeking to restore the fading illusion that the Democrats work in the interests of the 99%, they imply that if Obama is given a second term, his true nature will emerge and he'll crack down on the greed and corruption of the 1% and lead the country in a progressive direction. They conveniently ignore that he's done the opposite during his three years in office.

They also try to scare us into voting for him by claiming a Republican president would be much worse. In fact the differences between Republicans and Democrats are mostly a matter of image and style. Their military policies are equally aggressive, and their economic policies differ only in nuances. But the Democrats put a friendly face on their administration of capital. Their rhetoric is sprinkled with populist slogans as they're bailing out banksters and dropping bombs.

The more blatant style of a Republican president might actually be better now because it would generate more opposition at home and abroad. This opposition needs to build into militant resistance before it will produce real change. To prevent this sort of uprising was one of the reasons the corporate elite backed Obama. And until recently he's succeeded in quieting dissent. With masterful PR legerdemain, he put the antiwar movement to sleep while continuing to fight the wars. Under a Republican president we could revive the spirit of revolt and mobilize the people of the world against the empire. It's going to take that kind of international struggle to overthrow this colossus.

Another strategy of deception is to claim that the good old days of middle-class prosperity can be brought back. Both major parties say their policies will restore high employment at good wages. But those times are gone.

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William T. Hathaway

"There could be no greater calamity than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people. Despite the great wrong that has been done us, we must strive for a just and lasting compromise with the Arab people.... Let us recall that in former times no people lived in greater friendship with us than the ancestors of these Arabs." ~ Albert Einstein, 1939

Einstein was opposed from the start to the setting up of a Jewish state and to mass emigration into Palestine. He was also one of the signatories to an Open Letter to the New York Times in 1948 denouncing the terrorist activities of Menachem Begin and the massacre carried out in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. (Source)

Now that the "greater calamity" has occurred, Einstein's prescience takes on a heartbreaking dimension, because it could have been avoided. A "just and lasting compromise" was possible, and it would have benefited both peoples. Jews and Arabs could be living in harmony, mutually benefiting from their different cultural gifts. But the imposition of a Jewish state, mass immigration, and ethnic cleansing destroyed that possibility, and now they are dying from nationalism and mutual atrocities.

Worldwide we are caught in the deadly fallout of the Holocaust. It traumatized the Zionists to the extent that they lost standards of justice and ethics that had been built up over centuries. Their efforts to turn Palestine into Israel have led to 60 years of fighting which is spreading to more and more countries. This battle is a major but unstated reason for US military aggression in the Muslim world, and the trillions of dollars wasted in that is a major but unstated reason for the global economic crisis.

Germany was the site of the previous act of this tragedy. But what unfolded there had its roots in the trauma the Germans went through in the 1920s and '30s. At the outbreak of the Second World War, W.H. Auden looked back on the suffering imposed on the Germans by the Versailles Treaty and wrote in his poem "September 1st, 1939": "Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return." - The former victims become the perpetrators, now in the Mideast. We are trapped in an ongoing chain of linked cataclysms.

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William T. Hathaway

From the Book
RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War
By William T. Hathaway

The following report was contributed by Naomi Golner, one of the founders of Exit Free, a collective in the USA that helps women leave the military by discharge or desertion.

I've become a criminal for peace. How I got there is a complicated story, beginning when the community college where I teach reduced most of its humanities faculty to adjunct status. It saved them a bundle on salaries. We now teach a maximum of three courses per semester, for a really miserable hourly wage with no benefits. They brought in other part-timers to fill the gaps. So the faculty are now mostly freelancers. I ended up with a lot less money but a lot more time.

Several other women I knew were also broke — laid off or dropped out of the McJob economy. We decided to share the misery and formed a collective to make ends meet. One of us had a big empty-nester house from her divorce settlement, so we all moved in. We buy food in bulk, share two cars, planted a big garden, help each other with the things each of us is good at, sometimes quarrel and cry, but mostly we like being together. We feel stronger now than before when it was each of us alone against the neo-con world.

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William T. Hathaway

From the book
RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War
by William T. Hathaway

I first met the man we'll call Trucker in 1970 at a rally against the Vietnam War. Our demo was going to start on the Berkeley campus and continue with a march down Telegraph Avenue. This was shortly after the National Guard and police had murdered six demonstrators at Kent State and Jackson State, so the mood was extremely tense. The Berkeley city government had denied us a permit to march and called in police reinforcements from Oakland. The Oakland cops had a reputation for brutality (based on their treatment of the black population), and we were expecting an ugly and possibly violent confrontation. Out of fear, many people decided not to march, but others of us argued that marching was now more important than ever. We needed to defy the government's attempts to scare us into silence.

After speeches and music in front of Sproul Hall, we marched off the campus and were met by a wall of police sealing off Telegraph Avenue. Some of our hard-cores in front tried to break through the barrier but were clubbed down. Cops began firing what looked liked shotguns, and people started screaming and running in panic, but it turned out to be tear gas.

A demonstrator wearing a biker helmet, swim goggles, and a cloth around his face picked up a gas canister with gloved hands and hurled it back at the police -- a classic scene of a brave individual defying tyranny. Inspired, I pulled off my old green beret that I'd been wearing and used it to protect my hands as I scooped up a hot canister and threw it back where it came from. I thought about all the grenades I'd thrown in Vietnam and felt much better about this one.

The first line of cops, those who were firing, wore gas masks, but those behind didn't, and I felt a surge of triumph seeing them run from their own gas. But the ones in masks kept advancing and firing, looking like robots.

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William T. Hathaway

The Israeli government has launched an aggressive adver-
tising campaign in the U.S. to discourage its expats from
marrying American Jews, who some see as not really Jews
at all. (The Daily Beast)

From the book
RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War
by William T. Hathaway

Stan and Hannah Cooper are friends of mine from college days. Both are Jewish, but they have diametrically opposed views about Israel, and their differences have become so bitter that they've decided to divorce. As the three of us talked about this, it became clear that their dispute is a microcosm of the conflict that is tearing the Jewish community apart and also destroying lives in an increasingly large part of the world.

William: Your differences must have become quite serious if you've decided to end your marriage after all these years.

Stan: Well, these are very serious issues. If you take the Holocaust seriously, you have to support Israel. And Hannah doesn't. If she has her way, if the people she supports come to power in Israel and the USA, they'll stop resisting the terrorists and become holier than thou pacifists while the Arabs push the Jews into the sea and blow up half the USA. Then the pacifists will cry about what a tragedy it all is.

Well, I'm not going through another tragedy. I'm not going to see America and Israel destroyed because we didn't have the courage to stand up to fanatics. I'm not going to have our generation go through something like our grandparent's went through. Once is enough, once was way too many, and now we finally have to defend ourselves.

Hannah: No way am I in favor of pushing the Jews into the sea. Whenever we talk about this, you exaggerate my position. You get very thin skinned and go into your attack mode.

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William T. Hathaway

From the book RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War by William T. Hathaway. Published by Trine Day 2010. This is a collection of reports from peace activists in the USA, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. An American exchange student in one of my courses here in Germany contributed the following essay.

Jason was my boy-friend for a while in high school. It wasn't a match made in heaven. Looking back, I think the main thing we had in common was that I wanted a boy-friend and he wanted a girl-friend. Other than that there wasn't much between us, as we discovered whenever we tried to talk about anything. I broke up with him when he asked me to go rabbit hunting with him. We stayed friends, though, probably because since it was obvious we could never be a real couple, neither of us had hard feelings.

We both left town after graduation; I went to college, Jason went to the marines. Two years later we were both back home; I was on summer vacation, Jason was on medical leave after having half his leg blown off in Iraq. He'd been riding in a truck that hit a mine.

Everybody in town felt terrible about what had happened to him. The American Legion post gave him a parade. The high school marching band played, the vets marched, and Jason walked in front next to the mayor, who was carrying the American flag. Jason could walk pretty well, considering.

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An Interview with William T. Hathaway

Rather than sheepishly obeying in hopes of avoiding more punishment, we need to actively resist and take back the power that's been usurped from us. This struggle won't be comfortable, but it will be meaningful.

"I used to be a war criminal, now I'm an anti-war criminal. The government awarded me medals for the first crime, now they're trying to imprison me for the second," says ex-Green Beret William T. Hathaway. "I'm a war criminal not because I committed atrocities. I didn't, and most soldiers don't. But the US government's invasions of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were war crimes. The United Nations Charter clearly forbids aggressive attacks on other countries. That's exactly what those invasions were. Every GI who participates in that has to share some of the blame.

"I'm an anti-war criminal because I'm part of a group of domestic insurgents who are helping soldiers to desert, destroying computer systems, trashing recruiting offices, burning military equipment, and sabotaging defense contractors. We've become criminals for peace out of despair. Obama's morphing into a war president has convinced the only way to bring peace now is to bring the system down. We're defying the Patriot Act and working underground in secret cells to undermine the US military empire. So it's not surprising that the government's trying to lock us up."

In addition to his activism, Hathaway has authored four books and a series of articles about waging peace. His first book, A World of Hurt, won a Rinehart Foundation Award for its portrayal of the psychological roots of war: the emotional blockage and need for patriarchal approval that draw men to the military. His second book, CD-Ring, is a young-adult novel about a boy learning the need for peaceful communication. The third, Summer Snow, tells of an American warrior in Central Asia who falls in love with a Sufi Muslim and learns from her an alternative to the military mentality.

His latest book, Radical Peace: People Refusing War, presents the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and activists in the USA, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It's a journey along diverse paths of nonviolence, the true stories of people working for peace in unconventional ways. The book has aroused controversy. Conservative critic Joanne Eddington described it as, "Loathsome ... further evidence that the hatred of America is reaching hysterical dimensions." On the other side of the political spectrum, Noam Chomsky described it as, "A book that captures such complexities and depths of human existence, even apart from the immediate message."

Hathaway is currently an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. ld Is Possible interviewed him from there via e-mail.

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William T. Hathaway

A short review of Gilad Atzmon's new book, The Wandering Who?

Gilad Atzmon, Another World Is Possible contributing writer, has just published a study of Jewish identity politics. The Wandering Who? chronicles his journey away from his Jewish identity, and by extension away from all exclusive identities, into an inclusive humanness. It's a painful journey, a brutally honest self exploration of these internalized tribal impulses. He emerges from the struggle deracinated but emancipated, freed of a destructive load of cultural baggage.

As the poet Allen Ginsberg said, "If you want to be a prophet, you have to tell your secrets." By being brave enough to expose himself in writing, Atzmon has become a prophet, and his prophecy, as I see it, is a completion of the Mosaic journey, but this time as a mass exodus from Jewishness and all other ethnic bondings that split humanity. After 40 centuries of wandering in the desert of chosenness and separation, Jews and Gentiles alike can finally enter the full humanness of one world family, a secular promised land free of divisive group identities.

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William T. Hathaway

From the Book Radical Peace: People Refusing War by William T. Hathaway. Published by Trine Day 2010.

A Granny for Peace told of finding young allies in the struggle against military recruiting. Due to the Patriot Act, she wishes to remain nameless.

It's never easy being a parent or a child. The generations always have friction between them, a conflict between the elders' need to give guidance and youths' need to find their own way. I grew up in the 1950s, when the USA was very conservative and bound by traditions. My parents' generation had grown up in the Depression amid poverty and then struggled through World War Two with its threat of death and destruction. By the time they were ready to start families, they were fixated on stability and security. They measured their progress by their possessions: buying their first car, first television, first house. Their morality centered on controlling sexuality and protecting private property. Their religion was a death cult of stern patriarchs, obedient virgins, innocent babies, and threats of eternal torture. Their deepest philosophy was, "There is no free lunch." The peak of their scientific achievement was the hydrogen bomb. Fear was their strongest emotion.

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William T. Hathaway

From the Book RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War by William T. Hathaway. Published by Trine Day 2010.

I was sitting in full lotus, body wrapped in a blanket, mind rapt in deep stillness, breathing lightly, wisps of air curling into the infinite space behind my closed eyes. My mantra had gone beyond sound to become a pulse of light in an emptiness that contained everything.

An electric shock flashed down my spine and through my body. My head snapped back, limbs jerked, a cry burst from my throat. Every muscle in my body contracted ― neck rigid, jaws clenched, forehead tight. Bolts of pain shot through me in all directions, then drew together in my chest. Heart attack! I thought. I managed to lie down, then noticed I wasn't breathing ― maybe I was already dead. I groaned and gulped a huge breath, which stirred a whirl of thoughts and images.

Vietnam again: Rotor wind from a hovering helicopter flails the water of a rice paddy while farmers run frantically for cover. Points of fire spark out from a bamboo grove to become dopplered whines past my ears. A plane dives on the grove to release a bomb which tumbles end over end and bursts into an orange globe of napalm. A man in my arms shakes in spasms as his chest gushes blood.

I held my head and tried to force the images out, but the montage of scenes flowed on, needing release. I could only lie there under a torrent of grief, regret, terror, and guilt. My chest felt like it was caving in under the pressure. I clung to my mantra like a lifeline to sanity. I was breathing in short, shallow gasps, but gradually my breath slowed and deepened, the feelings became less gripping, and I reoriented back into the here and now: my small room in Spain on a Transcendental Meditation teacher training course.

I lay on my narrow bed stunned by this flashback from four years ago when I'd been a Green Beret in Vietnam. I had thought I'd left all that behind, but here it was again.

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