[Mb-civic] David McReynolds: My friend the judge

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

The following thoughtful and worthwhile comments are (via Ed Pearl) from 
David McReynolds, past presidential candidate for Socialist Party USA 
and Green Party candidate for NY governor....

 From: David Mcreynolds 

Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 6:59 PM
Subject: My friend the judge and Saturday's arrest



    This evening I got an agitated call from an old friend, a judge here 
    in New York City, someone who had once been in the Socialist 
    Party. She had gotten a mailing from War Resisters League 
    abouta legal demonstration here in Manhattanthis Saturday, 
    March 19th, at the Times Square Recruiting Station, and the civil 
    disobedience some of us will take part in. She was furious at the 
    idea that we would stop people from exercising their right to get into 
    the military recruiting station in Times Square. In her view this was 
    an outrageous violation of an individual's freedom to enlist or to get 
    information on enlisting. In passing, she deplored what was 
    happening at Harvard with Larry Summers, as another example of 
    the left gone wrong. I'm not sure what Harvard has to do with the 
    recruiting station, but I assured her that while I thought Summers 
    wasan arrogant jerk,he certainly had a right to make his voice 
    heard - in the same way that, in the recent fracas about Ward 
    Churchill, I thought he wasjust as much an arrogant jerkas 
    Summers, but both, one neo-conservative, and one a sham radical 
    ,should have their rights respected.

My friend said she thought we should all be arrested and jailed for life. I 
pointed out to her that, as a judge, she could hardly really believe this, 
since even the dreadful crime of blocking the Recruiting Station was a 
nonviolent offense, the penalties for which were prescribed by law, and 
that she, as a judge, needed to respect the limits of the law. Our 
discussion ended when I said I simply refused to be a good German, and 
thought the US was headed where Germany was in the 1930's - 
provocative comments that Iknow hardly persuaded her.

But the discussion both reminded me not onlyof how raw some emotions 
have become in this troubled time, but how easily otherwise quite sensible 
people can forget just where the country is today.

A week ago I'd gone to see Downfall,the German film about the final 
days of the Third Reich as seen from Hitler's bunker in Berlin. The film 
was well done, it is worth seeing, and I remain haunted by it, and by the 
parallel to our own situation today. One of the most disturbing things about 
Downfall (and the thing which alarmed critics both in Germany and here) 
was that it showed Hitler as a man of charm and charisma as well as 
madness, a complex person, who inspired deep loyalty as well as fear.
We want our villains to be stereotypes. We don't want them - particularly 
in the case of Hitler, who set such vast horrorin motion - to have any 
endearing traits.

This being the third year of the war in Iraq, it is becoming easier and 
easier to forget the basic fact that the United States and Great Britain 
violated international law and the Charter of the United Nations in 
launching a war of aggression - a war which is defined as a crime under 
the decisions of the Nuremburg Tribunal. A crime for which all of the key 
officials in the US and British governments should nowbe on trial. It is 
easy to forget that the toll of death for our own troops has now passed 
1,500, or to ignore the nervous breakdowns the surviving troops are 
having, the increase in the suicide rate, the pain of those who survived but 
are missing parts of their bodies and perhaps of their souls. Easy to 
overlook that over 100,000 civilians in Iraq have been killed. Easy to grow 
accustomed to the charges of torture and murder at the hands of US 
interrogating officials in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and Iraq. Easy to 
forget that all the reasons given for the war proved to be lies. Easy to 
forget the one absolute fact - we are there for the oil, not for free 
elections. Easy to forget that the cost of the war is now running to about 
300 billion dollars - at a time when we face cut backs to health care, 
human services, aid to the poor,proper funding for fire and police, and, of 
course, social security.

These thoughts take me back toDownfall and the question of why the 
Germans went along with Hitler. Of course a great many Germans did not 
-one of the painfully brutal ironies of history is that Berlin, which had never 
been a Nazi stronghold, suffered so badly from the bombing.It is true 
many Germans did not know what was happening to the Jews. We can 
say "they should have", but the fact is they didn't. (How many Americans 
were aware of the number of Muslims arrested and held in secret in this 
country after 9.11?) I suspect most Germans didn't give deep thought to 
the policies of Hitler until the death count on the Eastern front became so 
staggering. 

Hitler, the Holocaust, the Nazis - all of this is, for young people, so very 
long ago. Sixty years ago. It is as if, when I was entering political life in the 
1950's, people were making a great fuss about events in 1890. It is that 
distant from the here and now. 

And what does this have to do with why I'll join those being arrested on 
Saturday? It is because, as the late Bayard Rustin said, one must put 
one's body into the machinery of the state so it cannot turn. Only by such 
nonviolent, peaceful actions - actions undertaken without hatred of the 
police - that we can hope to get our friends (in my case, my old friend the 
judge) to ponder why we are so foolish, in our old age, as to get arrested.

Most people care as little about politics as I do about sports. I'm not proud 
of this deficit on my part - it is simply a fact of my nature. I take the sports 
section out of the New York Times first, look at the weather report which is 
usually on its back page, and put it aside. I rarely know whether it is the 
season for football, baseball, or basketball. I am aware that if I can "blank 
out" the sports news on TV, as if it were a mysteriously vacantspace in 
time, most people are equally able to blank out political news. Most people 
tend to trust the President. After all, shouldn't he know best? And surely 
he knows more than we do. During the Vietnam War, which is now a 
generation in the past, it was only as the body bags began to come home 
that ordinary working people thought about the war.

Those of us who are intellectuals, political people, never grasp this. We 
assume that under Stalin all the Soviet citizens lived in fear. Nonsense. 
Most of them got up in the morning to get to work, ate their lunch, chatted 
with co-workers about sports or sex,, got home at the end of the day to 
drink, make love, or fall asleep. They did not live in terror. Nor did most 
Germans think about Hitler and the Nazis until the bombs fell. Falling 
bombs are, for many, a kind of alarm clock, reminding them it is perhaps 
time to wake up.

Those of us on the left tend to think that under Joe McCarhty all of 
America lived in fear - nonsense. The only people who even knew we 
were deep in a period of hysterical anti-Communism were those of us on 
the left, who were either fearful because we were Communists, or angry 
that anyone would think that we, good "anti-Communist radicals", were 
thought to be Communists. I remember the period very well. I thought at 
the time things would just get worse and we would drift into a police state. 
But things didn't get worse, the clouds lifted. So I can hope things improve 
in the here and now - with a little help from some of us. 

If I had been an African American during the 1940's I might have assumed 
things would never change. Yet we were on the edge of change. (And let 
us realize that most of the whites in the Deep South gave no more thought 
to the daily horrors of Jim Crow than most Germans gave to the plight of 
the Jews . . . it was not until December, 1955, that the white South began 
to stir, and thenonly because the Black South had begun to stir).

I put little stock in getting arrested. I've been arrested more than a dozen 
times and it hasn't seemed to change things much. I think "everyone 
should be arrested once", if only to realize how little good it does, that it is 
only one more tactic, no so different from the silent vigils the Quakers 
organize, or the strikes the trade unions call, or the electoral efforts to 
which we give ourselves every two years, or the study groups we 
organize,or the simple fact of trying to be a good parent or a good 
teacher. Nothing much will change the world, only little by little, drop by 
drop, is the world changed.

But if you are in New York City, join us Saturday the 19th at 10:30 a.m.at 
Dag Hammarskjold Plaza (47th St. between First and Second Avenues). 
We will march with coffins in a solemn procession to Times Square to the 
Recruiting station. At noon some will stand to observe, and some will 
submit to civil disobedience. We will carry no weapons. We will damage 
no property. We will use no physical violence nor verbal abuse toward any 
person. Our attitude will be one of openness and respect toward each 
person we encounter, including the police.

We know that the "enemy" is not the military - it is the institution of war 
itself, which has trapped good men and women. And in my view, as a 
socialist, it is also the system of capitalism which helps to breed war. We 
know that while the war in Iraq is a crime, the men and women in the 
armed forces are caught up by slogans, directed by leaders, acting on a 
trust that has been betrayed. We reach out to them. And may my friend of 
many years, the good judge in Manhattan, consider that the key issue is 
not the precise way in which resistance is shown, but the fact it is shown. 
Sooner rather than later. Now, not when the risk becomes too great.

David McReynolds
(for full info go to: www.warresisters.org or call the WRL at 212 / 
228.0450)

***

So...to recap:
Neocon warlord Paul Wolfowitz will head the World Bank;
The White House illegally puts out fake news reports, and the Justice 
Department does nothing;
Another $81 billion of your money and mine is to be poured onto the Iraqi 
sand;
The GOP majority in Congress is preparing to trash 200 years of Senate 
tradition in order to post a number of certifiably insane people to the 
bench;
Kevin Martin, a conservative Christian activist for the GOP, will now chair 
the FCC;
The Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, one of the most ecologically 
pristine areas remaining to us, will be paved and drilled for its tiny amount 
of petroleum.
And that was just yesterday. 

Will Pitt

***

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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


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