The World Must Tell President Obama it is tired of America's Wars. How best to do so? Please sign the NØbel For Obama petition

Last October, after President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he showed ingratitude by refusing to sign the Land Mines Treaty and then committing 30,000 troops to General Stanley McChrystal's unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Fellow peace activist Monique Frugier and myself decided to begin a campaign to force the Danish Parliament, which gives this august honor, to reconsider and cancel its decision. We both feel to wisdom and urgency of this campaign is now greater than ever--and we urge all who feel as we do to engage in peaceful protest by signing the petition we drafted at that time. Afghanistan is now in its ninth year and our victory in Iraq is a Pyrrhic victory that accomplished nothing but the enrichment of arms merchants and the further impoverishment of America's taxpayers.

We feel compelled to renew our call for some form of high-minded, deep-meaning symbolic act of global non-violent protest against President Obama's failure to make significant steps toward peace in our 9-year war of occupation in Afghanistan.

The best symbolism remains to rescind the Nobel Peace Prize given to Barack Obama last October. With one signature, each signer protests the warfare state of America and pleads for it to return to being (in the truest, noblest sense) a welfare state.

It was an understandably hopeful but ultimately naive gesture of good will for Denmark's parliament to award America's commander in chief the world's highest honor in human affairs and international conflict resolution. Obama responded to that invitation to begin laying down arms--and begin entry into the plowshare phase of American life--by lecturing the world on the nature and necessity of Just War. He used his speech to spurn the award and the spirit in which it was given. By so doing, he telegraphed his intention to continue America's hegemonistic foreign policy and betrayed the hopes behind his selection as recipient of the award.

Now confiscation of the Nobel Prize takes on deeper meaning and urgency in light of President Obama's failure to stop the war on nature being waged by global capitalism. The latest theater of that war is the Gulf of Mexico. But if Obama doesn't force BP to suspend planned Arctic drilling, the world will soon have a new theater of operations--and be fighting a two-front war. For his own misguided sake, we need a Caine mutiny in which President Obama is stripped of his standing as the acting Nobel Peace Laureate. To do so is tantamount to stripping him of his Nobel commission (for peace-making) just as Gen. Stanley McChrystal was stripped of his (for war-making).

Please consider signing the NObel for Obama petition. A copy and link are below:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nogoodwarforpeace/index.html

NØbel For Obama

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The Petition

When on October 9, 2009, Barack Obama became the fourth U.S. president to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the world's most prestigious human affairs honor, it was viewed both by giver and recipient as an act of faith that would be justified by future actions. President Obama himself said it was more "a call to action" than a recognition of any specific accomplishment. In explaining its bold faith-based gesture, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said its unanimous decision was based on Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation among peoples." The Committee took special note of the president's restoration of "dialogue and negotiation" as the cornerstones of American foreign policy, lauding his leadership "on the basis of values and attitudes shared by the majority of the world's population" as well as "renewed US commitment to international organizations." We the undersigned believe that in the two months following this stirring announcement, President Obama has undermined the trust on which this award was made and by so doing sacrificed his eligibility for it. We cite two major violations of this trust: 1- the refusal to join the international Landmines Treaty five years after its ratification 2- the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan by sending an additional 30,000 US troops to that embattled nation. In light of President Obama's failure to accept the Nobel Committee's implicit invitation to be a peacemaker, we the undersigned ask this august body to revoke this award and, instead, give it to someone who has shown by actions not just rhetoric repeated commitment to the principles on which this award is based. In asking the Committee to take this unprecedented action, we believe that this body will be acknowledging its premature and mistaken judgment and also defending the integrity of this momentous honor. Last, we believe that such a revocation will send a message to all future recipients that their most inspired words must be followed by significant deeds. Note: The following petition to cancel awarding the Nobel Peace Price to Barack Obama will be sent to Dag Terje Anderson, the current president of the Norwegian Parliament, to forward to Thorbjorn Jagland, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee which is part of the parliament.

	Veterans' Banner Tags Abandoned Detroit Building: "How's The War Economy Working For You?" Submitted by Chip on Sat, 2010-06-26 14:33 Activism Economy Military Industrial Complex Nonviolent Resistance DETROIT -- On June 26, at 2pm, a group of U.S. military veterans will hang a large banner on the abandoned Eddystone Hotel, on Sproat St., between Cass and Park, to protest and reveal the effect of war spending on American cities. Members of Veterans For Peace (VFP), attending the U.S. Social Forum, a gathering of over 8,000 activists from across the U.S., created and erected the 10 x 15-foot sign that reads, "HOW IS THE WAR ECONOMY WORKING FOR YOU?" Detroit has an unemployment rate of 15 percent and 10,000 abandoned homes on the mayor's demolition list. Taxpayers in Detroit have sent a total of nearly two billion dollars to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The city's 2011 general fund budget of 1.3 billion dollars contains an estimated deficit of 300 million dollars, even after years of cutbacks in services once assumed to be part of urban life. The budget for Detroit schools has a deficit in the same range. "Detroit, like so many of our cities, is in crisis," said Mike Ferner, National President of VFP. "This crisis is no different than a five-alarm fire and we should respond the same way. Instead, we watch America's cities literally crumble while we pour thousands of lives and trillions of dollars into wars abroad." John Amidon, President of VFP Chapter 10, added, "It's absolutely criminal that the people who built the U.S. auto industry have to watch their city collapse around them while they send $2,000,000,000 to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is indeed the purest form of madness and it's coming to a city near you." ### VFP, with over 100 chapters, is beginning a campaign to work with local government officials to place “war counters” on city halls stating the amount of money each community has sent to the wars. Veterans For Peace members fought in World War II, the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan wars and have served in all eras in between conflicts. VFP is an official Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) represented at the UN. Login or register to post comments Email this page Printer-friendly version

My Night With Beethoven: Building an Arc/Ark of Triumph

Notes after a night spent listening to Dame Myra Hess play Beethoven's 30th and 31st Piano Sonatas, Opus 109 and 110, EMI CDH7 63787 2, released as part of the "Great Recordings of the Century" series in 1990:

The last three piano sonatas (Op. 109/10/11) of Ludwig Von Beethoven are perhaps the most private and intimate works of beauty in his life and require extraordinary interpretative skill to play. Only musicians with the same meditative depths as the composer--ones, in his case, forced upon him by circumstance of his deafness--can free this music from the page where the notes are otherwise indecipherable diary entries in what might be the most profound privacy in all musical history. To me, each note is gnostic--an incandescence emerging out of a silence so great it is the primal emptiness from which all comes and to which all returns. Ex nihilo is no longer a point of embarkation for creation but something even more extraordinary: the mouth of God. Beethoven shared a space beyond and before those inhabited by angels and spirits: the very place and possibility of immanence itself. In this music, the beauty that is the deepest reason for creation is experienced. God has no deeper or more selfless reason for Manifestation/Many-fest-ation than the beauty of doing so. Many-fest-ation is, as the word suggests at its most connotative, the festival of the many God's breath will inhabit. Beethoven finds within himself and the instinctive great chain (efflorescence?) of being that extends to his performers and listeners alike (if they accept the open invitation) the beauty that is itself the reason for their existence.

I'm inviting you this morning to listen to what I think is the greatest performance of the Fuga from Sonata No 31, Op. 110, that has ever been committed to record: Dame Myra Hess's peerless performance, recorded on October 1-2, 1953. If I could master the intricacies of uploading, there would be a link to this and the preceding Adagio which serves as prelude to the miracle that takes place in the Fuga (thankfully, its main theme is reprised in the middle of this fourth and final movement as recapitulation and re-enactment of the Genesis taking place).

Before I leave you to find Madame Hess's recording (try Amazon), let me tell you how I came to have my pre-dawn encounter with Beethoven. I have been spending the last week packing for a move from my much-too-expensive Narberth apartment to a far more affordable house in Ardmore. Because my CD collection numbers in the thousands, I find fugitive discs in corners, under papers and all sorts of other recesses. Yesterday afternoon, I found a CD with Myra's Beethoven recordings. Thanks to the fact that I have an iPod docking station next to my bed, I knew that if, as has been happening with regularity these past few expectant weeks, I couldn't sleep I would have the solace of music. Beethoven became my instant choice for solace should it be needed. It was. At 3 AM, I got into my diving bell and plunged into the deep seas of Beethoven's Op. 109 and 110 (Hess never recorded the Op. 111). The music instantly took me into depths that I rarely reach, except when listening to Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier, lots of Renaissance choral music and madrigals and some ragas. These are zazen depths gifted by the concentration this music requires as price of admission into its heartlands. I felt born to hear what I was hearing. I felt this was my particular key to an understanding that can only come through experience of complete absorption in it. I was at the place where the very prompting to be born, to be created, was found. This place is suffused in and circumscribed by what the mystics call "divinity." I felt afterwards that I had watched and even pitched in to help the building of what my inner punster much, much later called, after France's Arch of Triumph, "the arc of triumph, the ark of triumph." I invite you to share the wide opened spaces into which Beethoven was ushered by his divinity-drenched genius in late 1821. To complete and continue the astonishment, I discovered this morning that the completion date marked on the autograph score by the composer is Christmas Day of that year. What a gift of joy Beethoven brought to the world, the Christ(os) singing its way into being. Enjoy! And Merry Christmas!

Strike while the iron and irony is hot to rethink Afghanistan

Good morning, Afghanistan!

The Rolling Stone article about Gen. Stanley McChrystal, "The Runaway General," is a great and rare blessing for the anti-war movement. It allows Americans to learn first-hand what the men charged with planning this war really think about their chances of victory. They have little or no hope of doing so--yet with sociopathic devotion and drudgery continue to wage it. This is what happens when the military usurps diplomacy and is allowed to think of itself as peace makers.

I am linking you to a spectacularly effective short video of highlights from it called "Rethink Afghanistan" which I urge you to watch and pass on chain-mail style to everyone you know--urging them to do the same. The only victory is to withdraw--and do so now.

http://www.facebook.com/rethinkafghanistan?akid=1150.1101779.9rBK7O&rd=1&t=3&v=app_10531514314

By the way, you should know that Michael Hastings, the author of the Rolling Stone article, is drawing heavy fire from other so-called war correspondents for not having "protected" his sources--and endangering the cosy candor the press corps has long enjoyed. This is what happens when the media is "embedded" in the army it covers and no longer free, or even cares, to report the truth of what it sees.

The truth--namely, that America can't do what the British and the Russians failed to do--has been known for nine years and rarely told because journalists were too afraid to lose their privileged eavesdropper positions. McChrystal clearly expected Hastings to censor himself--just as all the other reporters did--and that's why he felt so free to be on his worst behavior. Evidently Hastings wasn't the first to see the general so contemptuously at ease. Evidently he wasn't the first to be admitted to the general's inner sanctum of cynicism--and be expected to bring, and later use, his own gag and blind fold. He was just the first to refuse self-censorship and to report the general and his aides behaving badly--in all its shocking detail.

The real story that Rolling Stone told was about the implicit conspiracy of silence by the media. Hastings told that story by betraying the conspiracy. While that silence is still shattered, we can and must act to share the truth that was revealed with our fellow citizens. Please watch "Rethink Afghanistan" then act by helping this video go viral.

That link, again:

http://www.facebook.com/rethinkafghanistan?akid=1150.1101779.9rBK7O&rd=1&t=3&v=app_10531514314

The War Correspondent as Hero: How Rolling Stone's Expose of General Stanley McChrystal Redeems the Disgraced Profession of Journalism

"The Runaway General" by Michael Hastings reads like a chapter in Denis Johnson's novel "Tree of Smoke" (the best Vietnam war fiction ever penned) and conveys by sheer grit and gist the absolute corruption and cynicism of America's latest Asian adventure in Afghanistan. Besides serving as Gen. Stanley McChrystal's suicide note in terms of future assignments, it is, perhaps, the best expose of the whole sordid Bush-Obama period of American hegemony in the Arab world. As it has done more bravely and clearly than any other English-speaking publication with the Wall Street crisis, Rolling Stone has revealed Afghanistan to be a monstrous fraud and ripoff of the American taxpayer who contributes life, limb and liquidity to its perpetuation (now in its ninth year). The Pentagon is shown to be as criminal and derelict as Wall Street. The war is a scam and we are told this unflinchingly at the very opening of the article when McChrystal is complaining about having to attend a Paris dinner to placate the increasingly restive French by telling the same failed lies he has told the deserting Germans, Dutch and, soon, British.

Who did McChrystal think was sitting there with that notebook for nearly a month, embedded in his naive, trusting midst the way Trotsky's assassin was embedded in his? Did he think Hastings was a Stephen Colbert clowning around? If so, it shows you in what contempt our generals hold the media and how McChrystal and his team must have assumed that the Rolling Stone reporter, like every other reporter, was a belled cat or, worse, a gelded mare. By secretly belonging to an older order of courage and candor, Hastings redeemed the profession of journalism. He also ensured swift retaliation against it via Supreme Court decision and Executive Order.

In the mean time, Hastings showed the war in the full glare of its folly, ineptitude and criminality. He took us into the boardrooms (headquarters) where it is planned and botched and, ultimately, lost. Everyone who believes that the mainstream media must show pluck and principle in reporting on American Empire Games owes it to themselves to buy a copy of the magazine and read Hasting's article. Here's the opening for your enlightenment and--because it is superbly written--entertainment. If Hastings doesn't get a Pulitzer Prize for this piece, something is as rotten in America as it was in Denmark last October when they gave my country's war-thirsty Commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, a Nobel Peace Price. (By the way, you can still sign my Prize rescission petition by linking to: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nogoodwarforpeace/index.html)

For those who want an immediate link to the full article, go here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236#

The Runaway General

Stanley McChrystal, Obama's top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House

• The Runaway General

  Stanley McChrystal, Obama's top commander in Afghanistan, has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House

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Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, works on board a Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft between Battlefield Circulation missions.

U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Mark O’Donald/NATO

By Michael Hastings

Jun 22, 2010 10:00 AM EDT

This article appears in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.

'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.

McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.

"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?"

McChrystal gives him the middle finger.

More on General McChrystal

1 ⁄ 3

• 

  Hastings on Replacing McChrystal: Can Petraeus Win the War?

• 

  Photos: On the Ground with the Runaway General

• 

  Revolt of the Troops: Hastings Reports In From Afghanistan

The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine." The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.

"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.

"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.

McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.

"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.

He pauses a beat.

"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."

With that, he's out the door.

"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides.

"Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."

The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile

Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.

"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"

"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."

The Persisting Residue of Grace

I was walking down the street today and thinking of my hero Rene Descartes, famous for "I think therefore I am." Suddenly the 'I am' seemed a constant electric hum rising to a ringing in the ears. It seemed to grow uncontrollably louder and louder. How do I turn down the volume of my bifurcation? I asked Rene the way Mrs. Regan used to query Christ. "Try a variation on the theme," he suggested, "try: I think therefore I love." The following poem is the result of that moment. I added Peggy Lee's incredible version of "Cloudy Morning" from her 1963 masterpiece, "Mink Jazz."

THE PERSISTING RESIDUE OF GRACE

1

I have done plenty of perfectly awful things in dreams

but I never threw

a plate at you

or laid a hand on anyone

or trashed an apartment

Nor was there any reciprocity

of vandalism

on "your" part

since, in dreams, you are me

and I am you

and

we are all together

for the umpteenth

last time

2

What was I thinking?

Shouting your name at you

walking far ahead of me

on a hazy California beach

where you seemed intent on dis

appearance

Even in dreams

people go missing

or are abducted unwillingly

from a promiscuous vastness

mobbed by shimmering shapes

too vague to be promised to anything

but freedom or escape

from the dreamer

3

I promised not to see you in my dreams

except by chance and not as chalice

I could drink from

for deep forever

I promised you safe passage

across a beach so public

you could trespass

without capture or even fear of it

"You can be Greta Garbo, if you like,

recognizable only from a distance

and mis-

taken for someone else

if I get too close."

Such are the rules of dis

engagement

letting hearts embark

in the chastity of friendship

Such are the rules of re

membrance

in a world that is haven

for souls lifted and loose

but never lost

4

The earth was then a second skin

of surf seizing our feet

or sand breading

our bodies

We sank to swim

in deeper meanings

of oceanic contentment

that had nothing to do with wombs

or any embrace less permanent

than heaven's

5

Your breath on cold evenings

was smoke from fires

gently contained and stoked

within us

The moon taught us to rub

two gazes together

to make one light

of love

6

We must practice walking on an earth

whose shine is never faint

and beyond the reduction of its glare

to embers

We must practice remaining on an earth

so hot and inviting to the touch

we become carriers of lower light

as bright and warming as winter coals

We must practice revealing an earth

that is first and foremost a birthplace

where we are still so welcome

when the final trumpet sounds

there is no where else to go

7

Everything

even the most jagged shards

and coarsened shreds

of bad dreams

are harbingers of the life

I never had

before you.

--David Federman, Narberth, June 24, 2010