Robert C. Koehler

Presidential Politics and the American Soul

By Robert C. Koehler

When I want to believe that America is a democracy — indeed, to feel so deeply this is so that my soul trembles — I turn to Martin Luther King, who gave his life for it.

He cried out for something so much more than a process: a game of winners and losers. He reached for humanity’s deepest yearning, for the connectedness of all people, for transcendence past hatred and the demonization of “the other.” He spoke — half a century ago — the words that those in power couldn’t bear to hear because his truths cut too deep and disrupted too much business as usual.

But what else is a democracy than that?

“Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war . . .”

Uh oh. This ain’t politics as usual. This is King standing in the oval office, staring directly into the eyes of LBJ, declaring that civil rights legislation isn’t a political favor but merely the beginning of a nation’s moral atonement.

“If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”

These words were part of the stunning address King delivered — on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before his assassination — at Riverside Church in New York City. To read these words today, in the context of the 2016 presidential race and the mainstream media’s inevitable focus on stats and trivia rather than big issues is to realize how utterly relevant this man and the movement he helped awaken remain today. To read King’s words in 2016 is to rip this man out of a sentimentalized sainthood and to bring him back to living relevance.

What he had to say to the political leaders of the time must not be reduced to a few phrases carved in granite; they must be heard anew, in all their disturbing fullness. I say this not because his “day” recently passed and I’m somewhat tardily “remembering” him, but because the 2016 presidential race needs King’s presence — his uncompromised wisdom — standing tough against the media and political status quo that is now trying desperately to mute the unapproved voices spurting forth in this campaign and pulling the electorate’s attention away from the approved, mainstream candidates they’re supposed to choose between.

Paul Krugman, for instance, representing the liberal wing of the status quo, came out for compromise and Hillary the other day, dismissing Bernie Sanders not out of a specific disagreement with any of his positions but because of a contempt for the “contingent of idealistic voters eager to believe that a sufficiently high-minded leader can conjure up the better angels of America’s nature and persuade the broad public to support a radical overhaul of our institutions.”

This is how to make sure that a self-proclaimed democracy is really a faux-democracy, flawed, perhaps, but plodding along in the right direction and basically healthy, with its biggest threat not unrestrained militarism or unregulated corporate capitalism but . . . oh, universal health care. See, that’s radical.

I have yet to hear the status-quo media call the poisoning of the Flint, Mich., water supply, or the daily police shootings of young men or women of color — or the multi-trillion-dollar failure known as the war on terror — “radical,” but a candidate who wants to give a serious push for policies of social betterment (and calls himself a democratic socialist) is radical. He’s purveying false hope, disrespecting the sacred act of political compromise and dangerously trying to establish, or re-establish, the precedent that the public should get what it needs, even if those needs override the quietly laid plans of the nation’s military-industrial consensus.

Indeed, that consensus is never asked to compromise or, good God, subjected to public scrutiny — except, of course, by radicals.

This brings me back to King’s Riverside Church speech, which had the audacity to be visionary, to challenge the United States at its deepest levels of being — which is something that ought to happen during a presidential race. King looked directly at the hell we were inflicting on Vietnam and called not simply for an end to that war but an examination of the national soul.

“This,” he said, “I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.”

The war King was crying out against ended eight years after that 1967 speech, but the poison did not disappear from the country’s soul. There was no atonement, no real change, only, ultimately, a retrenching and regrouping of the military-industrial consensus. Thus, King’s words remain as urgent and prescient today as when he first uttered them.

“The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. . .

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”

Would that Bernie Sanders spoke with such radicalism — or drew such a clear connection between social deprivation and militarism.

Beyond that, however, I must ask, in light of the words of Martin Luther King, what kind of democracy is too terrified, and too cowardly, to examine its own soul and reach toward values that are bigger than its short-term interests? And why do we not have a media rooted in these values and committed to holding politicians accountable to them?

–end–

Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is an award-winning Chicago journalist and editor.

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This piece is by author Robert C. Koehler about the mismanagement of the American taxpayers' funds. Poor Congressional spending decisions lead to Americans not having what they need to survive. The American military gets the most, pollutes the most, and is making the most enemies. Koehler asserts that we can do better."
~Tom Hastings

"Meanwhile, we waste more than half our annual national budget developing weapons, preparing for and waging useless wars and, in the process, creating not just future enemies but environmental hell for millions of people."

-- More fresh hell from Afghanistan, where US war planes just bombed another hospital, ensuring more hatred for America from more people for more years. Add to that this idiocy written about in this piece (below and attached) by Robert Koehler about children are being raped by so-called American allies--while our military tells our soldiers to ignore it. Koehler asks if our allies behave worse than our enemies, why are they our allies?

For PeaceVoice, thank you, 

The Moral Rabbit Hole

By Robert C. Koehler

The New York Times reported last week that U.S. soldiers still fighting the war in Afghanistan — 14 years on — are under orders to be “culturally sensitive” regarding different attitudes among our Afghan allies about, uh … the sexual abuse of children.

One officer was relieved of his command several years ago, the Times informed us, because he punched out an Afghan militia commander “for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave.” And in 2012, three Marines were shot and killed at a U.S. base in Helmand Province by a 17-year-old Afghan “tea boy” who may also have been the sex slave of a warlord ally stationed there — possibly in retaliation for the Marines’ failure to intervene in the situation. The father of one of the murdered Marines said that officers had told his son “to look the other way” regarding child rape “because it’s their culture.”

Oh, the sensitivity!

Shane Harris, writing a few days later in The Daily Beast, expanded on the moral helplessness of the American invaders in such matters: “A 45-minute scripted presentation given to Marines as part of their pre-deployment process … explains that laws and norms about sexual relations vary from country to country, and that in Afghanistan in particular, sexual assault is a ‘cultural’ issue, and not a purely legal one,” he wrote.

“… The training guide supports allegations by Marines and Army soldiers in recent days that they’ve been told not to intervene to prevent sexual assault in Afghanistan, including the rape and sexual enslavement of children on U.S. bases.”

Where does one start deconstructing the moral weirdness of all this? The stories don’t address the American invasion itself, which has shattered Afghanistan and created infinitely more harm than it has eradicated. Instead, we’re left seething at the scapegoat du jour: anonymous higher-ups, who are imposing strategically mandated directives on our boys on the ground: pedophile warlords are our partners in fighting the Taliban. Don’t look too closely at their leisure activities.

In the Times story, in particular, a sense of American innocence permeates the situation. Our soldiers know better and want to do the right thing — impose decent values on a sleazy, immoral culture — but despite being armed to the teeth, they can’t force our allies to behave like good Americans. The real villain here, if we look no deeper than the Times chooses to, is political correctness.

All of this suggests to me that the fact that certain U.S. allies in Afghanistan, in the war against our former allies (the Taliban), were wont to abuse local children sexually was not overlooked out of some screwball sensitivity to Afghan culture, but was cynically disregarded as irrelevant to the goal of defeating the enemy. What’s that you say? The “enemy” isn’t as bad as our friends? You’re missing the point. The point is victory.

Here on the home front, where we continue to fund this and all our other insane wars, military “victory” remains a feel-good mirage, some sort of triumph of good over evil. In the ravaged countries where we actually wage our wars, there is only moral breakdown everywhere you turn.

Indeed, it’s worth noting that sexual predation is very much built into American, and probably every other, military culture. Tens of thousands of women and men are raped in the U.S. armed forces every year; most of these incidents go unreported, because reporting a rape usually makes matters worse. That is, it’s not just in Afghanistan where “victims . . . risk blame and punishment for the crime that was committed against them,” as the Marine Corps training manual points out. It happens in every autocratic culture, including the U.S. military. The hammer of moral authority seldom falls on the ones who are in charge, no matter what they do.

Onward to victory, men (and gals)! Just be sensitive to the moral relativism of military culture. Don’t look too closely at what we don’t want you to see.

–end–

Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.

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The Collateral Damage of Austerity

By Robert C. Koehler

“Officials in France and in Brussels said on Monday that they were unhappy and dumbfounded with the no vote, but let it be known that they would hold the door open to the possibility of a compromise between Greece and its creditors.”

Dumbfounded? Why? Because the godlike power of the creditors was insulted?

Mainstream coverage of economic matters — the above quote is from the New York Times — seldom cuts very deep into the world of money, seldom questions who’s in charge, and seldom dares to suggest that an economic system ought to serve humankind rather than vice versa.

The austerity packages Greece has endured as its condition of economic bailout over the past half-decade — dictated by those who wielded financial power and were determined to profit enormously off of the suffering of Europe’s economic losers — have not only further gutted the country’s broken economy and prevented any sort of recovery toward self-sufficiency, but have shattered the socioeconomic structure of life for a huge segment of the Greek population. All of which is … you know, too damn bad. Money is as money does. The creditors have no choice but to impose severe restrictions on Greek social spending.

As Robert Kuttner wrote recently at Huffington Post, Greece’s economic comeback, including needed governmental reforms such as more effective tax collection, “would be so much easier and more effective in the context of a recovery program as opposed to a debtors’ prison.”

Much of what I read about the situation reminds me of the way too many media cover war: as both necessary and, in human terms, utterly abstract, with its consequences the stuff of separate, lesser stories, which have no bearing on the war’s national value and ongoing necessity.

The collateral damage of Greece’s austerity includes:

·         An unemployment rate of more than 25 percent, and nearly double that for young people. “Meanwhile, our future flees. A quarter million university graduates have abandoned our nation. They have no choice: unemployment for those under 25 has hit 48.6 percent,” Michael Nevradakis and Greg Palast write at OpEd News.

·         Pensions slashed multiple times, “two-thirds of pensioners live below the poverty line,” according to Nevradakis and Palast.

·         Devastating cuts in health care, leaving nearly a million people without any, the U.K. Independent reported last year. The article quoted Dr. David Stuckler of Oxford University, lead author of a report on the crisis in the medical journal The Lancet: “The cost of austerity is being borne mainly by ordinary Greek citizens, who have been affected by the largest cutbacks to the health sector seen across Europe in modern times.” The consequences of this have been particularly devastating to the most vulnerable, with infant mortality rising by 43 percent between 2008 and 2010, and stillbirths up 21 percent.

·         “And, for the first time since World War II, widespread starvation had returned,” Nevradakis and Palast write. “500,000 children in Greece are said to be malnourished. Students fainting from hunger in frigid schools which cannot afford heating oil is now a common phenomenon.”

Debtors’ prison, indeed. “Imagine,” Kuttner writes, “if the Europeans came bearing genuine technical assistance, investment capital and debt restructuring as opposed to more austerity demands.”

Imagine an economic system focused on serving human and planetary needs. Yet in predatory fiscal practice, human needs are reduced to frivolous luxuries. Where’s the profit in good schools and healthy children? As the profiteers impose austerity on the vulnerable, indebtedness becomes a condition to be mocked. Yet we are all indebted. Our lives depend on the good will of others.

In the wake of World War II, for instance, Germany was forgiven most of its Nazi-era debt. “In the 1950s, Europe was founded on the forgiveness of past debts,” Thomas Piketty and other economists point out in an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, published in The Nation. This forgiveness allowed it to make “a massive contribution to post-war economic growth and peace. Today we need to restructure and reduce Greek debt, give the economy breathing room to recover …”

And Kuttner asks us to “consider the many hundreds of billions of dollars of official aid that went to the big banks that caused the financial collapse of 2007- 2008. Their sins, and the resulting damage to the global economy, were far worse than those of Greece. Yet they were showered with official aid. That double standard is also staggering.”

A bogus moral authority seems to accompany the accumulation of wealth — a sense that one deserves it while those without wealth deserve servitude and hopelessness. Bolstering this moral authority lies the desperate need to ignore the common humanity of those who are struggling to survive.

– end –

Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.

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Absolute Power

By Robert C. Koehler

826 words

“The existence of the approximately 14,000 photographs will probably cause yet another delay in the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as attorneys for the defendants demand that all the images are turned over and the government wades through the material to decide what it thinks is relevant to the proceedings.”

This was the Washington Post a few days ago, informing us wearily that the torture thing isn’t dead yet. The bureaucracy convulses, the wheels of justice grind. So much moral relativism to evaluate.

“They did what they were asked to do in the service of our nation,” CIA director John Brennan said at a news conference in December, defending CIA interrogators after a portion of the 6,700-page Senate Intelligence Committee report was made public.

Serving the nation means no more than doing what you’re told. Really?

God bless America. Flags wave, fireworks burst on the horizon. Aren’t we terrific? But this idea we celebrate — this nation, this principled union of humanity — is now just a military bureaucracy, full of dark secrets. The darkest, most highly classified secret of all is that we’re always at war and we always will be. And war is an end in itself. It has no purpose beyond its own perpetuation.

This is the context of torture.

At least this is what occurred to me as I reflected on the most recent non-news, that the existence of many thousands of photographs of U.S. black site operations are out there somewhere, classified but known and pulsing. What more can we learn that we don’t already know?

“On Nov. 20, 2002, (Gul) Rahman was found dead in his unheated cell. He was naked from the waist down and had been chained to a concrete floor. An autopsy concluded that he probably froze to death.”

So the Los Angeles Times informed us in December, in an article about two psychologists, Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, who were serving their country in the early days of the War on Terror by developing the CIA’s torture methodology.

“When he was left alone,” the article reported, describing another detainee’s experience, “(Abu) Zubaydah was placed in a stress position, left on a waterboard with a cloth over his face, or locked in one of two confinement boxes."

“In all, he spent 266 hours — 11 days and two hours — locked in the pitch-dark coffin, and 29 hours in a much smaller box. In response, he ‘cried,’ ‘begged,’ ‘whimpered’ and grew so distressed that ‘he was unable to effectively communicate,’” the interrogation team reported.

“The escalating torment, especially the waterboarding, affected some on the CIA team. ‘It is visually and psychologically very uncomfortable,’ one wrote. Several days later, another added, ‘Several on the team profoundly affected … some to the point of tears and choking up.’”

And a few weeks ago, The (U.K.) Telegraph, quoting from the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, described the experience of Majid Khan, who “was raped while in CIA custody (‘rectal feeding’). He was sexually assaulted in other ways as well, including by having his ‘private parts’ touched while he was hung naked from the ceiling …

“‘Majid had an uncovered bucket for a toilet, no toilet paper, a sleeping mat and no light … For much of 2003 he lived in total darkness.’”

And the awkward part of all this, for defenders of the military bureaucracy, is that these torture procedures produced no information of any value. We sold our soul to the devil and got nothing at all in return. Bad deal.

Whatever details about the torture program remain classified and buried, these stories, along with plenty of shocking photographs, are fully public. There’s enough data here to open a deep conversation about what it means to be a nation and what the limits of power ought to be. What I see instead is a sort of official resignation — on the part of media and government — to the inevitability of out-of-control power in the pursuit of self-defense.

Stanford researcher Philip Zimbardo—whose studies are literally textbook--called this phenomenon the Lucifer Effect: the utterly corrupting nature of total power over others. Reports of CIA torture are rife with observations that the interrogators were out of control. The information they sought from the utterly powerless detainees in their keep was a treasure to be extracted, like oil or diamonds from the bowels of the earth, and no technique was too inhumane, too morally odious, to achieve that end. Call it human fracking. It’s for the good of America.

The awareness that must emerge from a decade-and-counting of torture revelations is that absolute power over others does not keep us safe and should not be pursued. And torture is only a minute fraction of the wrong we promulgate through unchecked militarism, the aim of which is domination of the planet.

Step one in the unhealthy pursuit of power is the dehumanization of “the enemy.” The consequences of what we do after that will always haunt us.

–end–

Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.

 

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