Manuel Valenzuela: Because There is No Cause

01/26.05 - In an immoral war with no cause, in an aggressive invasion without reason, in a dehumanizing occupation with no justification, those pawns fighting the battles implemented by elite warmongers and corporatists in power have no enthusiasm to risk their lives, sacrifice their minds and endanger their bodies to the horrors befalling men fighting their fellow men. Yet today, in the lands of deserts ancient and wise, where once glorious rivers provided fertility allowing civilization to blossom, where ancient cities sprung forth, prospered and were erased from history, where for millennia society had evolved even before the first Europeans had settled the Americas, in a culture thousands of years old, a product of ceaseless wars and human catastrophe and foreign invasions and cascading conflagrations, that is exactly what is happening to American soldiers.

Through the caste draft upon their socially engineered destinies, designed by the assembly lines of indigence, vanquished talent and non-existent opportunity to manufacture the armed forces protecting and defending the interests of those in power, thousands of ordinary men and women have been sent to alien lands to wage war under false pretenses, doing battle with a native population historically accustomed to defending their homes, lands and ways of life from a never-ending stream of invaders and occupiers. This newest assault on Iraq, the Corporate Crusade, is but the latest to seek the lands, riches, strategic position, peoples and resources of a region unforgiving both in its unwelcome environment and in the temerity of its inhabitants in defending themselves.

Into history’s cauldron have American troops been sent to wage war and decimate cities, lands and lives. Provided with the most lethal instruments of war the military- industrial complex has devised, manufactured and designed using the creative genius of human wickedness, whose purpose is the greatest infliction of death, maiming and destruction possible, the soldiers in the army of the corporate Leviathan are enveloped in a torrential downpour of guerilla warfare, surrounded by a 25 million strong populace supportive of the Iraqi freedom fighters and resistance decimating the invading forces. The battlefield is the city, block to block, street to street and house to house, using the weaker opponent’s strengths to the detriment of the stronger force’s weaknesses.

Yet these men and women, courageous as they may be, are destined to return in defeat from a war with no cause, fighting for lies and deceits, because while they wage war for immoral and unjust purposes, with no clear definition beyond government and corporate media propaganda, the resistance fights for freedom and liberation and against illegal foreign invaders and occupiers. Freedom fighters have had their lands stolen, their society destroyed, their cities razed. Families and loved ones have been buried in rubble, burned and charred, lying dead and maimed, made refugees in their own nation. One hundred thousand lie buried in the mass grave of American occupation, making Bush the mirror image of the dictator he so desperately wanted overthrown. And we wonder why freedom fighters fight and the wage guerilla war against occupiers?

Thousands of innocents sit imprisoned in Saddam’s jails, now turned American gulags, tortured, dehumanized, sodomized and raped, robbed of the very freedom the so-called liberators once promised. Thousands more suffer from the loss of life or limb, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers killed or wounded indiscriminately, whether in the countless check points scattered about or in the callous disregard for human life of fighter jets dropping a potpourri of cluster bombs, daisy cutters, napalm, 2,000 pound bombs and a vast assortment of missiles into cities and neighborhoods. And we dare question why Iraqis resist the invaders?

The thoughts of liberty and freedom and democracy once propagated but never delivered by the nation born espousing life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have ceased to exist. To the Iraqis, hypocrisy of altruism in the face of realism, pontificated only after lies and deceits eroded, blurted out more as propaganda to control the American people than to make believers of Iraqis, have served as a reminder that America only serves its capitalistic and corporate interests and that the welfare of the Iraqi people is of little importance next to the usurpation of oil and water resources and geo-strategic control of Middle East territory. The reality of what America has done with Iraq and to Iraqis, nothing less than the methodical destruction of its society, its cities and its foundations, in an onslaught of violence and collective punishment, perfected and taught by Israel, designed to achieve native submission and occupier control, has turned an entire population against the invaders and in full support of the resistance, making expelling illegal occupiers and invaders the duty and indeed the responsibility of most Iraqis.

In a land where tyranny has replaced tyranny, where radiation poison fills the air, land and water, forever burrowing into the bodies of millions and the soils of time, where missiles and napalm rain down from above and bullets and artillery whiz by from below, where controlled order and safety has given way to human hell and unmitigated chaos, where virtuous men and women have mutated into savage cold-blooded murderers and sadists thanks to the evil they have both witnessed and perpetrated in the name of freedom, and where the triumph of the human spirit can be seen both in the Iraqi unwillingness to succumb to humiliating occupation and in its courageous fight against the world’s greatest military machine, the reasons and will to fight by Iraqis can be seen.

Throughout the world their cause gains acceptance and support. More and more it is seen that their resistance has cause, their purpose merit. They have reason to fight, sacrificing themselves for freedom from occupation and love of nation. Over two centuries ago Americans were doing the same, bravely fighting tyranny and oppression, expelling from their lands a foreign entity, knowing that they fought with just cause leading the way, lighting in their hearts purpose and confidence that what they were doing was right. It is when the cause is just and the resistance valid that victory is assured, for those seeking freedom fight with the knowledge that the moral high ground is theirs. When invaded and occupied the fire inside is lit, for the human spirit is strongest when confronted by wrong. Outgunned and outspent, the resistance nonetheless triumphs over time, possessing what the invading armies lack, namely the security of purpose and the conviction of right. Without these, morale plummets and the fighting spirit dies, for when there is no cause, in an aggressive war of choice, offensive and without purpose, immoral and corrupt, based on lies and for profit, entire armies crumble and are defeated.

Make no mistake, many American soldiers know they have been deceived, told lie after lie, manipulated into making enemies of innocents, fighting for corporate profit and not principle, defending not America but corrupt capitalism, freeing not Iraqis but the devil’s excrement, exploited and abused, treated like expendable refuse, drafted and redrafted like slaves and serfs of old, unable to escape the War Department’s tentacles of conscription, callously left exposed to death and injury due to greed, left to die in a hornet’s nest of anger and vengeance, surviving day to day in spite of their leadership’s incompetence and indifference, fighting for survival and not just cause. Because there is no cause they are being defeated by a weaker army that possesses both the will to fight and the patience to endure, willing to die for freedom from American occupation and forever confident that while they grow strong, the invader grows weak, unsure of why they fight, not wanting to die for a lie, not wanting to be sacrificed for the bottom line. The American army fights to survive and protect each other, to escape the hell the warmongers, chickenhawks and armchair generals have sent them into and to one day soon be able to return home to be hugged by family and embraced by the normalcy that once enveloped them.

In a year and a half, this army of death, unknowingly enslaved to its corporatist masters, has done the bidding of those not bothered by the death of 100,000 people, the maiming of countless more or the complete destruction of entire cities, unleashing massive suffering and dehumanization on Iraqis. Yet into history’s cauldron is this army immersed, slowly hemorrhaging to death, their appendages severed, their bodies burned and their minds condemned to eternal hell. For their masters have sent them to die, to be used as pawns in the chess game of power and control, treated like cannon fodder and as unthinking robots trained to push the buttons, triggers and levers of the War Department’s instruments of malice that unleash human violence upon the world, American style. These men and women, which the horrors of war succeed in mutating into barbaric monsters possessed by the demons of human malice, have laid waste to an entire society, importing into a once stable nation torture, rape, murder, mass graves, cruelty, xenophobia, destruction, untold levels of suffering and collective punishment onto a culture that never threatened, never attacked and never deserved the savagery being perpetrated onto it.

Sent to secure the oil and the people and the lands and the society needed by American capitalism to exploit, profit and subjugate, the army of enslaved grunts finds itself living in a hell of its own making, in a land alien and unknown, fighting a people too long accustomed to the wickedness of humanity and the suffering of tyranny. They have been sent by their masters into history’s cauldron, and slowly but surely, in the day to day battles and the hourly demons of clandestine guerilla warfare, they are being defeated, both in body and mind, their strengths becoming their greatest weaknesses, their leaders living in a fantasy world and their corporate masters indifferent to the numbers dying and injured because in the end, the profit motive commands and the corporatist corruption of humanity continues.

Profit over people, the Almighty Dollar over Human Flesh, the corporatist way is guided by apathy, immorality and unconcern for humanity, where the death of 100,000 Iraqis and 5,000 Americans, not to mention the wounding of thousands more, kneels down to the bottom line of billions of dollars in profits. Its interests must be served, its power augmented, and only by using the lower castes of American society can this be achieved, regardless of the number dead, maimed, burned, traumatized, stressed and diseased. It matters not that thousands are being sacrificed in mind and spirit, forever to be tormented by an immoral and unjust war concocted for the benefit of a few. This is a Corporate Crusade, after all, where American soldiers are but easily replaceable drones by that magic assembly line called human procreation and social engineering.

Only when the certain inevitability of defeat arrives will reality emerge in the eyes of the Establishment, and only then, when the mixed blood of both American and Iraqis fills the rivers and the deserts, only when the wails of suffering become deafening, only when the world and those residing inside the belly of the beast stand up and say “enough,” will this human hell cease to live. Defeat is a certainty that has befallen this latest and most wicked foray of crony capitalism and market colonialism into lands of dark-skinned humans living in “third world” nations. Its reality is upon us, only waiting for warmongers and ego-driven greed addicts to awaken from their bubble of arrogance, self-denial and malfeasance. Reality waits for the People to demand an end to human malice and a return to human compassion. Only then will the cauldron of history, that manifestation laying waste to American forces, release from its grip the thousands sent into a hornet’s nest of unforgiving karma.

The cauldron of history is unmerciful and savage in its resistance to occupation and exploitation, for the lands and people of Iraq have weathered the storm of human wickedness over and over again, fighting, struggling and resisting for millennia. Iraq’s scars and past are testament to this truth. So, now, it seems, is America’s present, festering with the scabs of a war that cannot be won, haunted by the death of thousands snuck in under cover of darkness and media blackouts, sickened by the maiming of body and mind of thousands more and still unwilling to accept the reality of thousands now buried that have yet to be officially counted in a macabre cooking of the books by the propagandists and liars in government intent on keeping from us the real sacrifices and tragedies of a war with no cause.

Across this Mesopotamian landscape can be seen the ruins of cities destroyed, armies slain and empires fallen. The battlefields of times long forgotten and those of times not ever recorded have been eroded and covered up by the sand dunes of time, yet their ghosts remain visible, not in the dust or the rock, but in the minds of modern man and behaviors ingrained in the human condition. For as long as man exists war and death and destruction will soon follow, demonizing our species as they have since time immemorial, refusing to release us from the bondage they have enveloped humankind with since we lived in trees and hung on branches.

Iraq stands inside the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of agriculture and domesticated livestock and the human ecosystem, the city. In its ancient lands stands the Cradle of Civilization, that monumental leap forward where humanity arose from the wake of nomadic wonderings to give rise to the communal brain. It was here that the rivers Tigris and Euphrates provided fertile land for farming and succulent water for habitation, making ancient humans prosper and thrive. Along with prosperity, however, there soon mutated in the human animal the need for property, resources, power and dominion over all things wanted and sought. Greed, jealousy, addiction to power and desires to quash competition brought forth war, pitting small city against small city, rising empire versus falling kingdom. Humans had been moved to the city, taking the human out of the animal world but failing to take the animal out of the human world.

Yet if civilization was birthed from the flows of fresh water so to was the thirst for war. For where civilization is said to have begun so to have city-states, nomadic armies and empires been defeated and condemned by failure to learn from history, repeating the mistakes of those that have come before. It is here where the warmongering delusions of feeble leadership and unwise guidance of corrupt advisors find their unsuspecting yet inevitable grave. In this part of the world, history has not been kind to those greater in wealth yet arrogant in mind and ignorant in intelligence, those thinking themselves superior in blood and culture, more advanced in technology, yet deficient in wisdom. From the writing of humanity past can the lessons for the present be understood, yet when not consulted, the books of wisdom prepare to add still more mistakes to its chapters of human folly, for those who fail to heed the past are inevitably condemned to repeat it.

Peoples that invented civilization have had to fight for their survival for the last 10,000 years, mutating, evolving, fusing, regressing and progressing in time, overcoming divisions, droughts, tyrants, ever-changing tribal and religious affiliations, European colonialism and modern economic genocide. They remain a society to this day, hardened by generations of tumultuous existence, made strong and resilient by the tunes of destiny, unlike thousands of other cultures from around the globe which history and the wickedness of the primate called man have made extinct. Conquered, re-conquered, colonized, mass murdered, oppressed, exploited, invaded, divided, occupied and repressed, all under the auspices of war, death, destruction and the worst in human wickedness, whether through ancient bow and arrows, spears and primitive battle or through missiles, machine guns or tanks, the Iraqi people are survivors of time and environment, overcoming once and again the mandates of human nature and the fate of living in lands at the crossroads of humankind.

Ten-thousand years of history and still Iraqi civilization remains, from the rubble of Ur to the flattened city of Fallujah, from Babylon to Baghdad, brought down only to rise again, occupied only to brutally resist and expel a long list of invaders. Into this has the American Establishment sent its lower castes to fight a war without just cause, without moral high ground and without purpose, transforming innocence into wickedness and souls at peace into minds at war. Based on lies, deceptions, manipulations and the all-powerful profit motive, where addiction to the Almighty Dollar and his sister greed control and blind, America’s rural and urban children turned warriors are being sacrificed and slaughtered, gunned down and blown to pieces, all for a Corporatist Crusade intent on usurping and extracting Iraqi oil, conquering strategic lands and pilfering America’s treasure.

Never Truth, Never Democracy

This week, America will be bombarded by a massive propaganda campaign by both government and the corporate media trying to validate the debacle unfolding in Iraq. The sham that is Iraqi elections will be unfolded for the public to see just how noble George W. Bush’s war truly is. The lackeys in the media will fly to Iraq to extol the virtues of American imposed democracy, trying to impregnate into our minds distorted history and altered realities, trying to change a national mood that every day turns more against the war. The corporate media is being sent to do damage control, finally allowed to open its camera lenses to an Iraq that has for two years been hidden from us. Never mind that these lenses will be distorted and censored, controlled and manipulated, made into a kaleidoscope of propaganda created so the war and occupation may continue distorting American eyes and filling the coffers of the Establishment.

Democracy, they will say, is, thanks to us, coming to Iraqis. The war, and the countless deaths of American soldiers, will thus be justified because another tyranny has been defeated, replaced with American style democracy and liberty. Freedom has been exported to Iraq, just like Afghanistan. The war on terror works, evil is being defeated, it must be continued, and it must be financed. The sacrifices of the working and middle class, in the life, mind and bodies of loved ones and the pocketbooks and taxes stolen from us will be validated, even as the rich sacrifice neither and corporate profits only continue to skyrocket. Nowhere will the eroded fictions of WMDs or the lies of Iraq’s connection to 9/11 and al-Qaeda be found. One hundred billion more dollars is needed for the war effort, they will say, to secure the happiness and freedom of peace-loving Iraqis, to fight off those dreaded terrorist evildoers.

History is being revised right in front of our eyes, becoming the reality government and the corporate media wish it to be. For the majority of the American public that has the attention span of a gnat and the memory of a fish the great fantasy-laden altruism of bringing freedom and democracy to Iraqis will be swallowed whole. Only America can bring an end to evil, they will be told, and only we have been blessed by the Almighty itself to end tyranny worldwide. To the easily manipulated, this bull fecal matter is manna from heaven, a justification to continue noble intentions and the fight against evil. Good must be victorious, even at the cost of 100,000 dead innocents, many women and children. After the election the naïve and gullible among us will justify their false beliefs with facts laced in propaganda, telling us that freedom is on the march and democracy has worked thanks to our occupation. They will fill the airwaves with patriotic-filled diatribe easily swallowed by those refusing to believe in the wickedness their leaders propagate, those living in denial, those not privy to reality and those refusing to wake from fantasyland.

In reality, however, the sham of democracy in Iraq is being implemented at the barrel of a gun, under an omnipotent and omnipresent fear and insecurity. No true election could possibly take place under these circumstances. Iraq is a nation in chaos, riddled with death and destruction. Its citizenry live in fear and insecurity, unable to live free of death or violence or suffering. How can democracy be made to function when the entire nation is under foreign occupation? How can elections be successful when the locations of polling places remain secret and hidden from the electorate for fear of attacks and when most of those running remain unknown to the population, their names and faces blacked out for fear of assassination? How can elections be implemented when UN observers refuse to go into Iraq thanks to the incessant insecurity and when election boards have resigned in mass numbers thanks to threats? How can elections be called democracy when the American puppet Allawi and his party are given unlimited funds for advertisements, expanded television time and ceaseless propaganda while other candidates wallow in anonymity?

How can an election be honest when water, electricity, food rations and other social services are being used – denied, turned off and toyed with by the occupiers – to manipulate the population into voting for the American sponsored candidates and party? How can democracy function when fear is all-encompassing, when security is non-existent and when those brave enough to vote do so under the watchful eye of an invading force? How can elections be validated when forty percent of Iraqis, living in four provinces, will not be able to vote because the American military cannot provide security? How can we call Iraq democratic when Sunnis are boycotting the elections and Shiites are voting according to the dictates of their religious leaders?

How can the American public believe freedom and democracy will soon embrace Iraq, and that America will soon leave the beleaguered nation, when countless military bases have been and continue to be constructed throughout Iraq, protecting borders, pipelines, oil facilities and those who are clandestinely pilfering both oil and water from Iraq? Do we really expect the American military to leave Iraq when hundreds of billions of dollars continue to be marked for the occupation, when critical military infrastructure continues to be built throughout the country and when the American embassy is the largest in the world, not to mention the largest CIA station in the world? With war drums beating of possible preemptive attacks on Iran and Syria, with dwindling supplies of oil becoming a reality, with control of world economies guaranteed to those possessing oil, with unlimited profit and wealth waiting to be extracted from beneath the soils of Iraq and with an entire nation waiting to be pilfered through neo-liberal policies, corporate rape and American imposed capitalism, can even the most brainwashed among us believe the American military will leave in the next ten years?

No, America will not leave voluntarily. It will remain as long as it can, sacrificing its soldiers for the profits to be made, the wealth to be pillaged, the power to be garnered. It will leave when the resistance defeats its military, when those residing inside the belly of the beast rumble mightily for an end to war and occupation. Willingly the elite do not care to leave. After all, it is not their sons and daughters dying nor their pocketbooks thinning out. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain, for as the war takes its toll, as more money is diverted away from healthcare and education and infrastructure and the necessities at home, instead given to the military-industrial complex and the oil oligopoly, the privatization, and hence the profitization of government will begin. This is called corporatism, more commonly named fascism. When this happens, it is the Establishment that triumphs, raping the people for the benefit of the elite, gutting social services, our civil liberties, our rights and our way of life, introducing the psychopathic tendencies of the corporation into government. It has already begun, and this war has made it all possible.

The Awakening

The Iraq war is this generation’s anti-war and peace movements’ Vietnam. To this reality we must awaken, for in tragedy can an enormous opportunity be seen. The awakening is already taking shape, yet for it to triumph it must continue growing, waking from the doldrums of decades of complacency, dusting off the cobwebs of resistance and evolving to new times and means. It is up to us, millions strong, some more vocal than others, some more courageous than most, each with different talents and abilities, each with one common purpose. We must become the patriots of old, those espoused by the Declaration of Independence, helping to end a war with no cause or purpose, helping to bring the troops home, away from death and maiming, back to normalcy and security. The anti-war, peace movement must begin where it left off, fierce and unrelenting, eager to triumph over corruption and malfeasance, knowing that dissent and protest is as American as apple pie, secure that the America of Bush and the elite is not the America of the majority.

Our government has been taken from us, given instead to the corporate world, transforming a land of beauty into a land of garbage, full of refuse, poison, toxins and pollution. The foods we digest kill tens of thousands each year, the air we breathe kills thousands more, the regulations of governance no longer serve the people, only the corporations that today control politicians and hence the most powerful government in the world. Our loved ones die for money and profit and the bottom line; we are being used, abused and exploited. Our jobs are taken abroad, our wages are suppressed, our minds are being brainwashed and our children are being dumbed down. The America our ancestors immigrated to and believed in , the America of dreams and happiness and vast potential, the place where no talent was left behind and opportunity never ceased is being gutted, transformed into the nightmares of times long gone by.

We are hated the world over, now considered a pariah state. The President is the most hated man in the world, seen as the number one terrorist. American citizens are, more and more, seen with disdain and scorn, unwelcome and unwanted. To the world we are a nation of warmongers, racists, colonizers and selfish greed addicts ruining the planet for our own voracious materialism. We allow a war to continue, even when it is based on nothing more than propaganda and lies. We fail to question authority or seek accountability, refusing to stand against the inherently evil actions and policies of our government. We allow ourselves to be manipulated and exploited as unconcerned we remain to what our government does in our name. To the world, we are all sadists, torturers, mass murderers and hypocrites, believing the bull manure our government spits out of bringing freedom, democracy and liberty to the world even as we are the greatest threat to each principle through our blatant support of coups and state terrorists, financing of tyrants and dehumanizing occupations and meddling into nations’ internal matters and elections.

Thousands of our loved ones are dying and suffering horrific mental and physical damage for a war based on lies and deceits, where the only justification is profit and control. Just like Vietnam, the elite have condemned over 100,000 innocent Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers to premature death. Their weapons of human wickedness have and continue to destroy the environment, poisoning air, land and water, razing cities, importing carnage and savagery. Their depleted uranium has already killed tens of thousands since 1991, including 11,000 American veterans of the first Gulf War. Millions are now living in radiation filled toxic lands, exposed to cancers, disease and fetal deformities. Tens of thousands of American soldiers will undoubtedly bring back pulverized uranium back home, dying in clandestine misery, covered up by the government, giving birth to cancers and disease and child deformities, radiation living inside their bodies until they cease to exist, dying prematurely and without reason.

Like Vietnam, moral and honorable young men, and now women, have been transformed into conduits for murder and hatred and human evil, forever to be condemned by the demons of a war of choice, not necessity, based on lies, not truth, protecting profit, not the population. History is once again repeating itself, as it always does in times of feeble and unwise leadership, helping send America down the black hole of barbarity, mass psychosis and regressive division, condemning those residing inside the belly of the beast.

History is indeed repeating itself, with one notable exception, however: the anti-war, peace movement. It is true that small manifestations can be seen around the nation. A hundred here, a thousand there, the brave among us have indeed taken to the street in sporadic manifestations of passive aggressiveness. Yet something is amiss in this great nation that once thundered through the plains and the mountains and the valleys, bringing to their knees presidents and elites, echoing in unison the dissatisfaction of governance and the wrongness of a war based on lies. The voice of the people shook foundations and crumbled power, helping to end a terrible and heinous war that had killed mercilessly and seemingly without purpose. The power of the people stood like a giant monolith, moving to the tunes of peace and love, helping restore sanity to a senseless nation. The beauty of protest and dissent and debate awoke a nation back to reality.

Since the end of Vietnam, however, the voice of the people has been turned silent, clandestinely controlled by the system through years of conditioning. For decades we have witnessed on the margins at the evil committed in our name, unable to stand together, unable to demand change. A new challenge is upon us, however. A new war, a new quagmire, a new warmongering few infected with the virus of greed and apathy for their fellow human beings have been birthed. This group threatens our way of life, they threaten to turn this nation into a true corporatist state bereft of civil rights, infiltrated by mass psychosis and a police state. They threaten to make America a warmongering empire whose purpose is perpetual war. They threaten to enslave us to the dictates of the corporate world, dumbing us down further, using us as human energy producing and consuming. Without feeling they send our flesh and blood to war, sent to kill innocent human beings. Without care they attack defenseless nations through the instruments of war and American capitalism. They are destroying the fraternity of nations and the livability of the planet. They respect nothing but the Almighty Dollar and his sister greed, and today have embroiled us in a debacle spawning a hornet’s nest of hatred and vengeance.

It is time we say enough is enough, that the American people refuse to sit idly while a few miscreants destroy our nation and our world. It is time to show the world what we once were, and are capable of once again becoming. It is time we make our government accountable. It is time to end the madness of this illegal and immoral war. It is time to bring the troops home and leave Iraq to Iraqis. It is time to resurrect the anti-war, peace movement. It is time to stand together, marching shoulder to shoulder, rising in one united voice, bringing leaders to account and the system that shackles us to justice. Only we can help bring our loved ones back, for the government will surely let them die before admitting defeat. Only we can save countless more innocent Iraqis, for the government has made it policy to collectively punish and unilaterally destroy. Only we can stop the madness that is war. Only we can put the stop to the human wickedness done in our name.

Because there is no cause we need to rise up. Because we are continuously lied to we need to speak out. Because our loved ones are dying in vain we need to take to the streets. Because our instruments of death are mass murdering we need to raise our fists. Because we are moral, honorable human beings we must put a stop to an unjust and immoral war. Because there is no cause the anti-war, peace movement must rise once more, from coast to coast, inundating cities and streets. College campuses and students must awaken from their doldrums, becoming active in the Vietnam of their generation, participating to save the lives of countless souls. Twenty and thirty-somethings must escape the complacency and comfort of their existence, becoming strong voices of protest and dissent. Veterans of the 60’s need to impart wisdom and experience; academics need to inform. From high school kids to veterans of the 1960’s movements, the anti-war movement must be all-encompassing and omnipotent. It is our duty as patriots and freedom loving people to stop this war and the spread of human malice. It is our right to protest and dissent and debate, doing all we can, peacefully helping to put a stop to the death and the carnage and the human destruction.

It worked once before, helping to end the war in Vietnam. It will surely work again, yet it must begin to grow far and wide. The true extend of American dead and wounded is not being told to us, as with everything else in this war, and everyday more and more continue to fall. In us lies the salvation of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lives. In us lies the ability to stop the war in Iraq. This is our Vietnam, a new generation taking the torch from those previous, assigned to secure the wellbeing of the state and the welfare of the people. Bring the troops home, leave Iraq alone, bring warmongers to justice and let the truth prevail. Let the anti-war, peace movement restore balance to this great land. Let the world see that half of America still stands for truth, justice, honor, morality and love of humanity. This is our time to shine, for the sun of goodness refuses to surface. If not us, who? If not now, when?

Because there is no cause we fight. Because there is no cause we will rise. Because there is no cause we are in the right, and slowly, but patiently, in the warm embrace of hundreds of thousands, the goodness of the many will triumph over the malice of the few, and hopefully, in time, humanity will forgive us for the evil we allowed warmongers to do in our name. This is our Vietnam, this is our chance to fight the system, this is our opportunity to do good and help lead humanity away from the road of self-destruction.

What is being done in our name is not America. The president and his cabal of corruption do not speak for us. Aggressive war is anti-American. Mass murder and collective punishment is anti-American. Invasion and occupation are anti-American. George W. Bush, the neocons and the elite are anti-American. A corporatist government, a police state and corporate control over our lives is not America. Death, suffering, xenophobia, homophobia, war, maiming, apathy are not American values.

In a world usurped by corruption, in a land rotting in immorality, in a populace led by a plague of malfeasant parasites stand principles of humanity, justice, honor and togetherness. Those are American values; those are America. As such, it is our duty, our right and perhaps even our salvation to uphold these principles and return this most troubled nation back to what we once thought it to be. Our future and that of our children depend on it.

Manuel Valenzuela is social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now on sale by Authorhouse.com. A collection of essays, Beyond the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on America and Humanity, will be published in early 2005. His articles appear in alternative news websites and you can find him regularly on http://www.informationclearinghouse.info. His unique style and powerful writing is read internationally and seeks to expose truths and realities confronting humanity today. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. A diverse collection of many of his essays and articles can be found below:

Articles by Manuel Valenzuela, 2004 and at at my archives

Echoes in the Wind Sales Page

Mr. Valenzuela´s new novel is now on sale. Almost 600 pages in trade paperback form on sale internationally through secure web page transaction. In one month this title will be available on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. Also, if preferred, the novel can now be ordered at any local bookstore worldwide through its ISBN number (found on the sales webpage).

© Scoop Media