A Warning From the Past

I have modified this passage for the common day, though
it is still timely and continues to be timely.

Certain people in the AFL-CIO are wise to this as well.

"A Warning for the Past"

Exclusive Submission to Portside

By Stewart Acuff, National AFL-CIO Organizing Director

"Driven by these provocations and frustrations, there
is the danger that America may be tempted to exert all
the terrible power she possesses to compel history to
conform to her own illusions.  The extreme, but by no
means the only expression, would be the so-called
preventive war."

"Such historians must have learned that virtue has
never been defined by national or regional boundaries,
and that morality and rectitude are not the monopolies
of factions or parties.  They must reveal the fallacy
of a diplomacy based on moral bigotry, as well as the
fallacy of one that relies on economic coercion through
the fancied indispensability of favored products. Their
studies would show the futility of erecting
intellectual barricades against unpopular ideas of
employing censorship and repression against social
criticism, and of imposing the ideas of the conqueror
upon defeated peoples by force of arms."

Sound like Michael Moore or Howard Dean in 2004?  It
may sound like them, but neither of them wrote it and
it wasn't written in 2004.  No, these wise words were
written in 1952 by C. Vann Woodward, one of America's
most esteemed historians as a warning during the Cold
War, in his book "The Burden of Southern History." They
could not, however, be any more timely than they are
today.  The lies, falsehoods, and fallacious
braggadocio of this President are unequalled by any
other in our nation's history.

Woodward wants America not to use its power to compel
history to conform to its illusions.  That is precisely
why the neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration
wanted to make war in Iraq, to force the Middle East to
conform to this illusion.

While a wise man 50 years ago cautioned the nation to
avoid preventive war, George Bush has based our
country's latest foreign policy doctrine on preventive
war.  Woodward's warning serves as an indictment of
Bush. Bush has prosecuted a preventive war that is
unnecessary, unjust and evil.  He has used moral
bigotry against all who don't subscribe to his narrow,
provincial and biased morality.  With Rumsfeld's
dismissal of old Europe and the U.N., Bush and his
people think virtue rests with us.

Bush and his followers have scoffed at and scorned all
who disagree with them, causing huge police
overreaction, ever creating temporary police states
during demonstrations at the FTAA summit in November 2003
in Miami and at the Republican Convention in New York
City.

And in Iraq, they are right now trying to impose their
will and ideas in a country by force of arms, even
going so far as to try to use CIA covert operations to
"help" favored candidates.

Iraq is going terribly, horribly wrong.  Over 3,000
Americans have died and as many as 100,000 Iraqis have
died.  Bush lied about the reasons to go to war.  He
has and continues to lie repeatedly about how it is
going.  He has obscenely gloated while people are
dying.  And with his cocksure, "Bring 'em on," he has
invited more attacks and encouraged the insurgents.