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photo credited to Kenley Neufeld, by the way.

What does 3,000 mean?

It means George W. Bush and his cronies have now killed more Americans than did Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001.

According to a recent John Hopkins study published a few months ago in Britain's Lancet, George W. Bush and his cronies have killed more than 600,000 Iraqis with their illegal war. I heard of no vigil for that grim milestone. That 600,000 represents not dead soldiers but true innocents. So by that measure, if September 11 was tragic because innocents were targeted, George W. Bush and his sick cronies have murdered 200 innocent Iraqis for each innocent American killed by Osama.

And we are supposed to be afraid of Osama?

George W. Bush celebrates the 3,000 milestone by turning Saddam over to a lynch mob, before his trials have even finished. Saddam was hung in the most grisly manner, on the eve of one of Islam's holiest days, while a mob shouted slogans. George W. Bush called that "justice." Hundreds of millions of Muslims - no friends of Saddam - protested this grotesquery all over the world.

Under George W. Bush and his goose steppers, our soldiers have raided the homes of innocents in the wee hours of dawn, murdering entire families (Hadatha); torched cities (Falluja, Ramallah); broken into a family's home to repeatedly rape a thirteen year old girl and murder her parents; tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib; kidnaped innocent villagers and caged them across the world in Cuba; on and on and on. Iraq is a wreck, its institutions shattered, its people decimated, desperate, in the streets, unified in only one goal - to oust the occupation forces.

What exactly does this vigil honor?

3,000 soldiers dead is a tragic waste. We all suffer and we will be bearing the fallout for a long time. But 3,000 U.S. soldiers killed while illegally occupying a sovereign nation cannot be the most significant milestone for honor and vigil.

How about instead honoring those brave soldiers who have refused to fight this criminal war? Can we keep a count of them? List their names as the true heroes of our military?

History surely will.

Great comment anonymous but It is not a war, it is an invasion. Osama is a paper scape goat. The United States has been Exxon's lap dog for too long. It is just a matter of time before our name reflects this economic fact. USE - United States of Exxon

I love the idea of honoring those who have refused to go where their consciences tell them it is wrong to go. I also love the idea of honoring all the people along the way who have tried to prevent the fighting and who have served those affected.

When Evan first suggested this vigil, I asked him what the Iraqi death toll was and he quoted a figure like yours. Unfortunately, I don't think a vigil honoring those innocents would have the same effect on Americans as this vigil might. Americans riding the fence about this attrocity, as with conflicts in the past, can be swayed by imagery of "their own" being maimed or killed in a way they are not affected by images of "outsiders."

I am so glad Evan is here in our community, constantly reminding us of our ability to speak out.

"They never knew their strength in numbers
So power seems so mystical"

-Boots Riley of The Coup
www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic

Anonymous, your perspective is very intriguing and your points well taken. i completely agree with you that our 3,000 deaths cannot compare to the 655,000 in Iraq, and if there's one thing i would have added more prominently to the vigil, it would have been that second, larger number.

i am thrilled by your idea to create an event to honor war resisters...in the grand scheme, they truly are my heroes as well. my sense, however, is that that would be quite a different event, and given more to a rally than a vigil. i think it would also generate a pretty healthy and energetic opposition, which is merely a point of thought and not necessarily an argument against. but i say go for it: find their names, find a number, and if you build it, i'll come.

Here is a link to a page that lists some of those who have publicly resisted from within the military:

http://www.tomjoad.org/WarHeroes.htm

Bush and the Crony Capitalists and War Profiteers he represents are not only responsible for the 3000 American dead soldiers, but also the 3000 9/11 deaths. When are we going stop denying the evidence that our own government pulled off 9/11?

Why not combine all deaths, soldiers, mercenaries, contractors and civilians, and start a countdown to 1,000,000?

Let's not just bash Bush. We're all guilty to some degree if we pay taxes, have stocks or a bank account. It's all one corrupt money system. We can't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but we can change the oily water.

I was there last night, and couldn't help noticing all the big vehicles driving by. When are we going to connect the dots between the life of the rich and the death of the poor?

Here's a link to British tax protesters who refuse to contribute the fruit of their labors to fund the Iraq crime:

http://www.peacetaxseven.com/history.html

It is so basic that this war really is about our federal tax dollars - its principal purpose is as a vehicle for Bush, Cheney and their cronies to make a grab for that federal tax pie.

Want to bring home the troops? Pass a law that prohibits Iraq-related federal contracts from being awarded to any company that has any connection to a member of the administration or a crony of the administration.

The troops will be home the very next day.

Here's where some of those taxes have been and are going: For whom the bell tolls Does this make American taxpayers complicit to murder? You can always say you were asleep/did not know. Maybe it's best to keep your head in the sand.

This is from an Army Chaplain in Iraq:

An Army Chaplain does a very good job in explaining the actuality from the fantasy.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006-:

Not a war, but reconstruction

One of the things I've noticed about the coverage of the war in Iraq, back in the US, is the absolutely negative way in which everything connected to it is being portrayed. This includes the media, and members of both political parties. And it comes from people who lack a very basic knowledge of the region or its people. Read this article on CNN for an example. Now, I understand that not every American knows that Al Qaeda is a Sunni organization, but shouldn't the guy who will be heading up the House Intelligence Committee know this?? Seriously... and these politicians are the ones telling us we're "losing."

What bothers me is the way that members of both parties have, a) Turned the war political, and b) Begun to talk about winning or losing in ways that we cannot. Coming back to the States for a bit, and seeing the TV coverage blows me away. What's getting lost in the mix are the Iraqis.

Let me offer a different way of thinking about this: We won the war in Iraq. Yes, past tense: we won. You see, militarily, we invaded Iraq, defeated their Army, and captured their leadership. On this point, we had a crushing and overwhelming victory. No questions about it. We did what we said we were going to do: invaded the country and deposed Saddam (remember, right before the war started, we gave Saddam 48 hours to leave office), and we inforced the weapons inspections. That was the "war." We won that.

What is happening now is the reconstruction and reconstitution of Iraq. In other words: putting it back together. We helped the Iraqis democratically elect a government. Check. We have trained and Army and Police Force. Check. The problem is that the government and military of Iraq are not doing a good job. That is the point on which things are failing. We have to stop thinking about this phase as winning or losing a war.

Over the past two years, we had one political party (the Democrats) pretending that nothing was going right over there, and we had the other political party (the Republicans) pretending that everything was going right over there. (In other words, BOTH are to blame) In the meantime, the Iraqis get hurt by our own self-obsession.

Things are failing because we have been so self-focused that we have failed to stop and ask "what do we need to do to improve the situation?" We have sat and argued about pre-war intelligence, about whether we should call it a civil war or not, about whether the Iraq war is part of the greater war on terror or a separate war, etc. In the meantime, we seem to have forgotten about.... the Iraqis.

What I find interesting about the Iraq Study Group report- which works under the assumption that we're "losing"- is that the people who seem to object to the report the most are the Iraqis. The reason: I think they see that America is getting bored, and is getting ready to leave them in a precarious position. It's kind of like a mother having a baby, and wondering why the baby isn't full grown after three years, and deciding that the best option would be to send the baby off on his own.

I wonder if we have the virtuous resolve to complete our committments, even when they turn out to be more difficult than we first believed?

Brian - that's an interesting article, and there are points I agree with. But the author asks "what do we need to do to improve the situation?" and then can only reply with us having "virtuous resolve to complete our commitments."

That's absurd - "resolve" is not a plan, any more than "stay the course" is. It seems to me that there is an awful lot of gray between what you describe as reality and fantasy.

Brian please pass this cool video by A Perfect Circle to your insightful priest, thanks. Imagine

This is pure genius: Go Back To Sleep

They buchered one of my favorite songs. Just because you can work adobe premeire ( or what ever program they were using) doesn't make you an artist. And it also doesn't mean you know what you're talking about. All this terible wealth created the internet you are playing with everyday. Why don't we throw Bill Gates in jail and burn all the computers. Maybe we should reduce the American population to 200 thousand hunter gatherers so we can stop being so evil to the rest of the world.

It is not the 'wealth' that is causing suffering - it is the lack of imagination - that you demonstrate so thoughtlessly. Thanks for the rubbish, if you knew any better you'd be embarrassed for turning your self into a fox news puppet.

Go back to sleep: "Counting bodies like sheep to the rhythm of a war drum".

"All this terrible wealth created the internet you are playing with everyday."

Hmmm... funny, but the history of the development of the internet looks much more like the history of what a successful cooperative, government-funded effort by non-profit-oriented academics can achieve. The wealth grab we saw in the unseemly internet bubble looks more and more like a simple blip in the development of this new communications standard.

Here are some links to the some histories of the development of the net:

http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

(No mention of Al Gore.)

Thanks for the videos, Michael. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these are worth a million. Why is it I laugh and cry at the same time? These new art forms are a sort of revelation to me. They nail truth, at least the dark side. Shakespeare would love them. Richard III has returned, only on a larger scale. Like his plays, they hold up a mirror to nature, especially human nature. There's a bright side, but it doesn't help to "go to sleep" when faced with our dark reality.

Dennis, thanks for the wisdom, strong stance and fearless examples of speaking one's truth. I've often wondered why so many, who secretly share our viewpoints remain quiet. Yesterday, I found the following, on a comments thread, which offers some insight:

1. Start with a cage containing five apes. In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb for the banana.
2. As soon as the ape touches the stairs, spray all of the apes with cold water. After a while, another ape makes an attempt with the same result – all the apes are sprayed with cold water.
3. Turn off the cold water. If, later, another ape tries to climb the stairs, the other apes will prevent it even though no water sprays them.
4. Now, remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all of the apes attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.
5. Next, remove another of the original five apes and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The other newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.
6. Again, replace a third original ape with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four apes that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest ape.
7. After replacing the fourth and fifth original apes, all the apes which have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced.
Nevertheless, no ape ever again approaches the stairs. Why not?
BECAUSE that’s the way it’s always been done around here.
A disassociative splintering of the collective society, the "Memory Wars" of the 21st century.
Posttraumatic amnesia extends beyond the experience of sexual and combat trauma and is a protean symptom, which reflects responses to the gamut of traumatic events.
Posted by: Uncle $cam

And as Milan Kundera said:
"the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting"

What most distinguishes human character from apes is truthful speaking. It comes at a price, though. As Dylan said, "To be honest, you've got to be outside the law," or something like that.

With all due respect, DL, I beg to differ:

It is obvious, once one considers the subject at all, that our eyes cannot see the whole universe. They can't even see the whole room in which we happen to be sitting (they only see what is front of us, and not all of that...) Similarly, our stomachs cannot swallow the whole universe, and our brain cannot "know" the whole universe (they only know the signals they have received up to this second, and do not remember all of them consciously...)

Nonetheless, language programs us to try to speak, or to accidentally give the impression that we are trying to speak, as if we possessed the kind of infallibility claimed by the Pope or the Central Committee of a Marxist party. That is, language allows us to say things like "The rose is red," and in the mild hypnosis of this Virtual Reality we then promptly forget that the rose is more and other than red- that it is fragrant, for example, and that it is temporary and will wither soon, and that it is made of electrons, which are made of quarks, and that it "is" only red to creatures with eyes like ours, etc.

Every over-simplification becomes a lie quickly (if we are not very cynical about language); ergo, language always lies, just because it over-simplifies. From "The rose is red" to "The National Debt forces us to raise taxes again" to "ARKANSAS MOM RAPED BY MIDGETS FROM MARS" to "Pornography is murder" (A. Dworkin) we proceed from one fiction to another, every time we open our mouths to speak.

(See my Quantum Psychology, New Falcon Publications, 1990, for further examples of how language creates a Virtual Reality experienced as just as real as a bottle of beer and a ham sandwich.)

Is it is possible to use language to undo the hallucinations [emphasis added] created by language? The task seems impossible, but Zen riddles, Sufi jokes, the works of Aleister Crowley, and a few heroic efforts by philosophers such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein seem able to jolt readers awake-shake them out of the hypnosis of words. The following book by Dr. Hyatt [The Tree of Lies] also makes that gallant effort to use words to transcend words. Success in this field does not depend on the author alone, however. It requires not only the right words, but the right reader at the right time, before the shock and awakening can occur.

Will it work for you? I don't know, but the odds of a favorable outcome increase if you do not "browse" or "skim" but read and re-read carefully, meditating all the while on the following two propositions:

1. Words can never say what words can never say.

2. With the right reader at the right time, words can, in fact, say what they can never say.

One of those propositions is the most dangerous lie in this book. Can you see which one it is?

Robert Anton Wilson
Los Angeles, CA

Next: 'dogpile' or 'google' "language and apes".

Michael,

i'm confused enough to be intrigued, but also enough to be perplexed. i would like to explore whether we can apply what you're saying to some of the original topics: analysis of the purpose and effectiveness of a vigil, the nature of humans at war, suggestions for more direct action, etc.

if you are already doing that, i missed it. i hesistate to ask you to "dumb it down" for me, but i do suspect that you've shot way over the heads of many.

God help us if a vigil for 3,000 dead soldiers would have more "impact" than a vigil for 655,000 dead Iraqis.

655,000 dead Iraqi civilians is an atrocity.

We are truly lost as a nation if 3,000 of our soldiers sacrificed even bears a mention against such a horror.

Before beginning, I want to be clear on the source of the essay - and its context - that appears above your questions. Robert Anton Wilson wrote it as an introduction for a book written by Dr. Christopher Hyatt titled: “The Tree of Lies”. This book has since been renamed: “To Lie is Human, Not Getting Caught Divine”.

I chose this excerpt as a primer for Dennis and doubt that many folks want to delve any further down this particular rabbit hole but I shall try to answer your questions anyway. I hope you all do not mind.

First off, it is my belief that we are all in this together. In particular, I am hoping that most of us are reading each other’s comments because we’re revolving around a single point of attraction: “Stop Wars” - sums it up nicely. In order to do this effectively, I believe that we need to understand where our language loses integrity because this wastes energy and the original objective can easily become lost. There are several threads on the Ojai Post, which demonstrate this point nicely. So then, specifically how might the English language be inaccurate and how can this influence our perception of reality? Towards Understanding E-Prime might help to shed some light.

Now, taking this a step further and applying it to your three questions may not be so easy, but once again, I will step to the plate and take a couple swings. What is the purpose of a vigil and effectiveness of a vigil? Well, according to Wikipedia, Vigils is a term for night prayer in ancient Christianity. A Vigil is a night spent in prayer, and a Vigil Mass is a Roman Catholic Mass that is liturgically for a Sunday or Holy Day but which takes place the previous evening. As far as the effectiveness of your vigil, it seems to me, the number 3000 is misleading and plays into the hands of the war machine’s transnational benefactors. This article is a bit dated but will give you the gist of what I am talking about. And this does not even approach the amount of the actual number of beautiful human beings that have been murdered by ‘our country’. Personally, I have a distinct aversion to religious services, in particular, Roman Catholic ones. I have a B.S. from a Jesuit University paradoxically.

I am glad you brought up the ‘nature of humans at war’. For some reason or other, there does not appear to be much information on this subject or at least not in the way that I think about it. Humans are not the only species that wages war. Other primates wage battles but not war. The equivalent that I am aware of are ants. Ants use tools, agriculture and even have slaves. As many of us know, they wage war as well. Not to digress too much, our cities tend to remind me of termites and our suburbs are like bee hives. The stratification and specialization of insects within their societies also can resemble human social behavior as well. The point of all this is to demonstrate that a lot of the ‘evidence’ out there points to war being ‘natural’. What purpose does it serve then? Well, I remember reading an article in Details magazine (in its early stages 20 years ago maybe),that produced statistics claiming that war has almost always occurred in human societies when males between the ages of 18-30 represent 30% of the population. This supports the notion that war is a function of biology.

Another relevant article, which I am again going to have to cite from memory (sorry), demonstrates that the size of the primate brain is a predictor of the size of that primate’s tribe. The idea here is that the human brain’s size determines that we can only have around 200 or so members in our tribe. Anyone outside the tribe, by default, is not ‘human’. This may explain why some (maybe more than some) of us are capable of murder (war is mass murder). I suspect that the leaders in our country are unable to transcend their biology. And may be the reason why Ojai’s vigil had no mention of the 655,000 innocent humans that have been mercilessly slaughtered and ‘butchered’. One of the things that the 1960’s demonstrated to me, was that leaders who could transcend their ‘brain size’, developing charisma as a natural consequence, would be assassinated.

And so that brings us to: ‘direct action’. I’d look to countries like South Africa as a model. Nelson Mandela sat in prison for 27 years, unjustly, and he came out with no bitterness. South Africa went from Apartheid to having democratic elections within 4 years of his release - nonviolently.

In our country, for many reasons, we seem to have a mostly apathetic populace (function of brain size?). This seems to be a consequence of being in ‘survival mode’ according to Noam Chomsky, who suspects it’s one of the many ways that we have been divided and conquered.

George Carlin, in my opinion, is a brilliant example of some one who is and has been taking ‘direct action’ thru his ‘comedy routines’.

At this point, for me, ‘direct action’ is a personal decision. I have found that transcending my own bio/neural/behavioral tendencies to be almost overwhelming at times. I can only pray that my struggles will bear the fruit of reducing my own suffering simultaneously with others. I express my gratitude for your careful consideration: Thank You.

I have been playing catch up on this computer for what seems like hours, so my brain is sort of operating on default but I want to timely comment on this thread because it is so interesting and potentially instructive to myself. My immediate concern is political specific to the council meeting tomorrow, and the citizens run up meeting tonight; but my long term interest is in this recent discussion.

Words have severe limitations as to the truth of what transcends them, their principal function being a screening capacity; however they're one of our most important tools.

At this point, I must really take a break. The mind can only comprehend what the seat can endure. Thanking the gods in the meantime for this godlike invention, the Ojai Post, that we are not all braindead or heartstarved, I state my intention to return later.