RALLYING AROUND THE FLAG?

"We  are way past due in doing away with the myths that will kill us all."

By Bernie Berg

For the past two years I have, in something of a new hobby for me, attended Memorial Day parades and ceremonies, complete with parade music, syrupy songs and the usual cant, shibboleths and lies about this or that war having been waged for freedom: our freedom, Vietnamese freedom, Iraqi freedom, you-name-it freedom. There are flags flying (and have been since 2001) from one end of the Lehigh Valley to the other, so many that it is hard to make out the Lanta buses with their giant flags painted on the sides. I am sure that as Flag Day, and then Independence Day come and go, and especially during this, a Presidential election year, there will be no shortage of photo ops for the candidates, posed in front of 6 million flags, each flag the size of the State of Texas. The winner, given the intelligence of those who gave us 8 years of Bush, the Vietnam hero, will be the one whose picture is surrounded by the most and the biggest flags.

In Walter Karp’s book, "The Politics of War," he tells us of the freedom that President Wilson’s war to end all wars brought us.: "A free people made servile and a free republic made safe for oligarchy and privilege, for the few who ruled and the few who grew rich…" Wilson is still presented in our public school history books as one of our "great" presidents, rather than the paranoid basket case megalomaniac that he was. Under his Espionage Act of June, 1917, "it became a felony punishable by twenty years’ imprisonment to say anything that might postpone for a single moment…an American victory "in the struggle for democracy…" A woman who wrote a letter to the editor of her local paper, critical of the government, was tried, convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. Under this act which predated the Patriot Act by 84 years, no one but espionage agents was safe, for under this act not a single enemy spy was ever convicted.

Wouldn’t it be nice, for a change of pace, if one day during this season of flags, when we commemorate the slaughtering of all evil by dawn’s early light (as Jacques Brel put it), instead of the octogenarians of WWII reliving their glory days, we had, as guest speakers at our local ceremonies, a Vietnam Veteran Against The War , an Iraqi Veteran Against The War, a Veteran For Peace, or some other disinterested party willing to call a spade a spade? I have in mind Father Emmanuel Charles McCarthy who, on April 11 of this year, at the eulogy for Tom Lewis (one of the Catonsville Nine) said of the group that poured homemade napalm on draft files, "they taught anyone who had eyes to see and ears to listen that THERE IS NO MORAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THROWING A THOUSAND CHILDREN INTO A FIRE AND THROWING FIRE FROM AN AIRPLNE ON A THOUSAND CHILDREN."

John McCain and his "Iraqi Freedom" counterparts are presented to us today as war heroes. But according to McCarthy, "there is no such thing as heroism in the execution of evil. A mafia hit-man, taking great risk in order to kill the children of an opposing godfather is not a hero…Murder decorated with a ribbon is still murder…"

We are way past due in doing away with the myths that will kill us all. A reading of real history (Walter Karp, Howard Zinn) will bring us the truth that might actually set us free. When governments become like ours, the Declaration of Independence tells us our duty is to alter or abolish it. This bloody government has never been anything but "a huckster’s pitch. As cold and unfeeling as the change in one’s pocket." (Phil Berrigan).

Bernard J. Berg