Washington, DC

George W. Bush today once again defended the costs of the war, in lives and money, declaring that his decision to order more troops to Iraq last year had averted potential defeat there and that withdrawing would be catastrophic to American interests. Speaking at the White House to a small audience that included Vice President Dick Cheney, the secretaries of State and Defense, and representatives of veterans’ organizations, he signaled that an American force nearly as large as at any other point in the last five years would remain in Iraq through his presidency. He left any significant changes in policy to the next president. “Fifteen months ago, Americans were worried about the prospect of failure in Iraq,” he said, sounding a triumphant note about his decision last year to send 30,000 additional troops. “Today, thanks to the surge, we’ve renewed and revived the prospect of success.”

Please, please, get a grip on reality Mr. Bush… the world—along with the hapless and the hopeful in your own nation—deserve so much better! Listen to what recently-returned veterans have to say (from Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupation), for example here.

Story Source: The New York Times

Atlanta, Georgia

Forty years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee at the age of 39. Baptist minister, world-renowned civil rights leader, and powerful advocate of non-violence, King’s influence fundamentally changed civil rights for African Americans in the United States. In 1964, he became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means.

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Washington, D.C.

Well, today marks five horrific years since the “pre-emptive strike” on Iraq by the U.S., based on conclusive “intelligence” it had collected regarding the threat that Baghdad posed to the world’s fear-ridden superpower… we all know where things are actually at—though this is what George W. Bush had to say today (please listen to the dear man’s voice for full effect).

Because sometimes the best thing you can do is laugh, here’s a link to a more humorous take on things (language warning)—thanks to Shirley Hicks in Toronto for that, from an exchange on the GDC Listserv today. I also heard Phil Donohue on CBC Radio while driving to work (I don’t normally listen to American talk-show hosts, I’ll have you know…) here’s what Phil had to say.

Sad, very sad, a very sad day indeed… thankfully spring arrives within a few hours from now, as Tom Waits quips here….

Winnipeg, Canada

Forty years ago today, U.S. Army forces massacred hundreds of women and children in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai (the My Lai Massacre). The incident prompted widespread outrage around the world and led to reduced U.S. support at home for the Vietnam War… one wonders why, four decades later, the latest U.S.-led war in Iraq still has the support it does (especially given the information available at our fingertips, e.g. the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib).

Has our age become inured to suffering, brutality, and injustice? I was an impressionable 13 years old when the incident at My Lai took place, and I certainly remember….

Wherever…

Not to get weird about it, but the Ides of March have freaked me out ever since I first learned of them in elementary school. In the year 44 BC this day marked the treacherous demise of Julius Caesar (I’m not making a value judgment here, it’s just a historical thing); in 1917 it was the day that the last tzar of Russia, Nicholas ll, was forced to abdicate the throne (three years before my dad was born into the turmoil of Molotchna, and part of the remarkable unrest following WWI); in 1933 it was the day that Adolf Hitler first expressed his nascent dream of The Third Reich (and six years later to the day that Nazi troops invaded Bohemia and Moravia [then Czechoslovakia]).

More recently, it was the single day in history that more people on the face of the earth than ever before gathered together in a unified action for peace (400,000 marched in Milan, 300,000 in Barcelona, 120,000 in Madrid, you get the picture… )—to no avail, George W. Bush simultaneously prepared to lead the (bullied, cowed, coerced) “coalition of the willing” nations into the U.S. empire’s most recent war against Iraq.

It remains a poignant day for me… five years ago today I was in Mumbai, India on a network-building sortie with Icograda—six days later while in Ahmedabad (Mahatma Gandhi’s home town), we watched in surreal disbelief as the U.S. reigned down an unprovoked firestorm on the ancient city of Baghdad (one of the the world’s “cradles of civilization,” and onto its hundreds of thousands of terrified citizens).

Indeed, beware the Ides of March… (don’t say I didn’t warn you).

Images: Caesar’s demise as painted by Vincenzo Camuccini; Tsar Nicholas ll of Russia; Adolf Hitler of Germany; George W. Bush of the U.S. of America.

London, United Kingdom

The universally recognized (and easy-to-reproduce) peace symbol, called the “most famous postwar logo without commercial purpose,” turns 50 years old tomorrow. The symbol, created in the United Kingdom by the irascible pacifist Twickenham textile designer Gerald Holtom a half a century ago (for the fledgling British disarmament movement), still radiates emotion as it approaches its momentous anniversary.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma, Gandhiji, Bhapu to some) was assassinated 60 years ago today in New Delhi. His frugal, exemplary life of non-violence (“My life is my message.”) continues to be an inspiration to millions around the world—on 15 June last year the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution declaring 2 October (Gandhi’s birthday) to be the International Day of Non-Violence.

On a trip to India a few years ago I had the chance to visit Ahmedabad (where Mahatma Ghandhi established two ashrams in 1915) as well as the house in Mumbai where he spent years in house-arrest. While there, I picked up a copy of his remarkably forthright autobiography, The Story of my Experiments with Truth… 

Source: The Economist

“A good graphic can tell a story, bring a lump to the throat, even change policies…” read the opening lines of a feature piece in the December 19th edition of The Economist. Cited by author Edward Tufte as “the best statistical graphic ever drawn,” the chart above also tells the story of a war: Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812. “It was drawn half a century afterwards by Charles Joseph Minard, a French civil engineer who worked on dams, canals and bridges. He was 80 years old and long retired when, in 1861, he called on the innovative techniques he had invented for the purpose of displaying flows of people, in order to tell the tragic tale in a single image.”

“Minard’s chart shows six types of information: geography, time, temperature, the course and direction of the army’s movement, and the number of troops remaining. The widths of the gold (outward) and black (returning) paths represent the size of the force, one millimetre to 10,000 men. Geographical features and major battles are marked and named, and plummeting temperatures on the return journey are shown along the bottom.”

“The chart tells the dreadful story with painful clarity: in 1812, the Grand Army set out from Poland with a force of 422,000; only 100,000 reached Moscow; and only 10,000 returned. The detail and understatement with which such horrifying loss is represented combine to bring a lump to the throat. As men tried, and mostly failed, to cross the Bérézina river under heavy attack, the width of the black line halves: another 20,000 or so gone. The French now use the expression “C’est la Bérézina” to describe a total disaster.”

“In 1871, the year after Minard died, his obituarist cited particularly his graphical innovations: ‘For the dry and complicated columns of statistical data, of which the analysis and the discussion always require a great sustained mental effort, he had substituted images mathematically proportioned, that the first glance takes in and knows without fatigue, and which manifest immediately the natural consequences or the comparisons unforeseen.’ The chart shown here is singled out for special mention: it “inspires bitter reflections on the cost to humanity of the madnesses of conquerors and the merciless thirst of military glory.”

Read the full The Economist piece online here. Download a high resolution JPG of the Minard Map (568 KB) here.

Washington, USA

In 1972 (while I was still living in Germany) I saw a powerful anti-war documentary that had screened at Cannes that summer—Winter Soldier. This powerful testimonial to the atrocities of the Vietnam War (shot largely at a motel in Detroit where The Vietnam Veterans Against the War had come together in a solidarity of witness) made a lasting impression on me, and was influential in (finally) shifting public opinion against the decades-long U.S. aggression in Vietnam. You can watch a trailer for the original movie Winter Soldier here.

I’ve been informed by a cousin of mine (Boyd Reimer, a tireless activist for peace and social justice who lives in Toronto) about an upcoming action that sounds to be of merit. Boyd is engaged with The War Resisters Support Campaign which has called for a pan-Canadian mobilization on Saturday, January 26th, 2008 to: 1) ensure that deportation proceedings against U.S. war resisters currently in Canada cease immediately; and, 2) ensure that a provision be enacted by Parliament ensuring that U.S. war resisters refusing to fight in Iraq have a means to gain status in Canada. Read more about that Canadian campaign here.

In the U.S., plans are afoot for a Winter Soldier redux of sorts: from March 13-16, 2008 (40 years to the day following the horrific events of the My Lai massacre), Iraq Veterans Against the War will gather in Washington “to break the silence and hold our leaders accountable…” Link to more information from the Iraq Veterans Against The War here.

I’m sometimes asked what I believe… (perhaps because I tend to get preachy at times, and I wear mostly black?)… and I have no easy answers. This is quite likely because (as I’ve aged) I’m less interested in knowing the right answers than in continuing to ponder relevant questions. Although I have never officially signed on to any particular belief system or denominational roster, I do consider myself to be a believer of sorts and a somewhat spiritual being.

I was raised within fundamental, unadorned, conservative Christianity as practiced by my devout Mennonite parents and forebears. This Anabaptist belief system (named after its radical 16th-century Protestant reformer-founder Menno Simons) puts much stock in Biblical primacy, salvation through conversion (sometimes proselityzed with missionary zeal), simple living, and a commitment to non-violence and pacifism—very similar to traits shared by our “cousins” the Amish (remember The Witness?), as Miriam Toews (award-winning author of the bestselling book A Complicated Kindness [set in the town of Steinbach where she was born a decade later than I] puts it)—Mennonites are “basically Amish… but with cars instead of buggies.”

For most of my elementary schooling my family lived in Reinach, Switzerland, on the outskirts of Basel where I attended private school. The stunning Goetheanum in Dornach (designed by esotericist Rudolf Steiner, and the world seat for Anthroposophy) was only 2 kilometers away and frequently a destination for Saturday bike rides—ironically, some forty-plus years later I find myself increasingly drawn to the transformative holism and social activism exemplified by Steiner and other Theosphists. I remember for a brief period as a teenager being enamored with Zoroastrianism—the concept of one universal and transcendental God and the call to actively live out one’s goodness (the walk as opposed to the talk) on a daily basis in order to stave off chaos, were of particular appeal. Much later in life I had the chance to visit India, where I encountered Gandhi’s very forthright book My Experiments with Truth—reinforcing the over-riding importance of active, actualized faith. Considerable time spent in Asia in the past few years has also been helpful in introducing me to the tenets of Buddhism.

After graduating from high school at Black Forest Academy (a private Christian school in southern Germany), I attended a year of religious study at Capernwray Hall, a Bible-based school housed in a 19th-century mansion and set in 175 acres of parkland just south of England’s famous Lake District in Carnforth, Lancashire. In spite of having already been steeped in organized religion by that point, I did learn a lot about the value of fellowship, as well as understanding for those from other cultures (the student body of 170 comprised individuals from some 22 different countries).

In 1973, a desire to put faith into action led me to Operation Palmbranch, an African relief mission based in Bavaria, Germany. This was an incredible learning opportunity, as we were a small team of volunteers re-building scrapped Mercedes Unimogs (amazing all-wheel-drive vehicles trashed by the military in NATO war games) that we would then drive down through the Sahara for use as mobile hospitals and surgical units in northern Zaire (now the Congo). I’d have to say I learned some of my greatest lessons in life during that time…

Today, I find myself believing more rather than less (inclusive vs. exclusive), while retaining many of the aspirational spiritual tenets I was raised with—faith as a core of destiny, the cardinal importance of love, a commitment to non-violence, a call to simple living, etc. I believe that the divine is alive in each of us (nascent transcendence), that faith takes us much further than fear, and that “love conquers all.”

A climbing analogy perhaps best describes my thinking regarding religions… The first recorded successful ascent of a mountain summit is often the most famous, and becomes the “classic route,” while latter ascents by other parties chart new routes and deviations (often more daring, frequently less obvious). Of course there are also summit attempts that fail catastrophically—so it behooves the summit-seeking climber to be well trained, well conditioned, well outfitted, and well focused.

Climb on…