By David Swanson
George W. Bush is an ordinary human being, in fact a quite stupid one. So are all of his handlers. They are ordinary people, and we have the power, should we choose to use it, to throw them out of our public housing.
This simple fact is hidden from us not just by the media constantly instructing us that we can make no difference, not just by lies connecting the crimes of 9-11 to Iraq, or Iraq or Iran to weapons they do not have, and not just by the deference to power of the devoted neoconservative minority.
On September 11th we must recognize that one of the ways in which we make ourselves comfortable with our failure to act against this criminal government is by fantasizing about this government possessing superhuman powers, such as the power to fabricate the story of a nonexistent airplane hitting the Pentagon, bribe hundreds of people to claim they saw it hit, generate phone calls from the nonexistent people on the plane, make the plane and those people vanish, shoot a missile out of thin air that no one saw, and hide all the evidence for five years. A government that could perform this and the other feats of the 9-11 fantasists would not just bear no relation to the bungling idiots running the White House. It would be superhuman.
We would bear absolutely no responsibility for our failure to rebel against such a government.
The evidence is public knowledge and virtually undisputed that the criminal thugs in the White House have lied us into illegal wars, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocents, created secret prisons, detained without charge or communication, tortured, murdered, wiretapped without warrants, overturned 800 acts of Congress with signing statements, stolen elections, and slashed every vital public initiative in this country. These criminals have blood up to their shoulders. Proving that they committed yet one more crime would not make them any more criminal. They cannot be made any more criminal. And proving one more crime would not lead anyone in power to remove their leaders from office.
Only we, the people of the United States, getting off our couches and acting will put an end to this growing nightmare. The crimes of September 11th had nothing to do with Iraq, and have no more to do with a protest of the war on Iraq. Those of us living on the National Mall in front of the U.S. Capitol at Camp Democracy http://www.campdemocracy.org are remembering and honoring those victims of five years ago, but we are focused on something else today: the fact that today marks 100 years since Mohandas Gandhi began his campaign of nonviolence.
This morning, Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, spoke to us at Camp Democracy.
http://campdemocracy.org/sites/v2.campdemocracy.org/files/images/gandhi_…
Arun Gandhi told us that by failing to prevent the impoverishment and humiliation of people around the world, we are engaging in passive violence, the result of which is physical violence. He said that we need to work for peace actively, not be satisfied with peace in our own hearts or private lives, but insist on taking peace out into the world everywhere we go.
This is an important message.
Private fantasies about a peaceful world are no more useful than private fantasies about how buildings collapse. Only public efforts will save us. The journalist hunting for the latest smoking gun, the next Downing Street Memo, the newest Pentagon Papers, is of no use to us now. The evidence is before us, and it is our unavoidable responsibility to take it up and act on it.
It is not our responsibility to act as soon as the next elections are stolen. It is our responsibility to act now.
Should our Congress have a Democratic majority, we will have a hard struggle to compel that Congress to act for justice. We have that same hard struggle now with a Republican majority. We cannot step away from our moral duty to take up that struggle and sacrifice for it.
The schedule of upcoming events at Camp Democracy is here:
http://www.campdemocracy.org/schedule
Now is the time to join us. There are people arriving here by bicycle and on foot from distant states. The least you can do is use a car or plane. Join us.