-----Original Message-----
From: Will Thomas
To: Will Thomas
Date: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 8:51 PM
Subject: WALKING AWAY FROM WAR


WALKING AWAY FROM WAR

by

William Thomas




Commentary
Lifeboatnews.com
March 19, 2003



As the glaciers balancing this planet on its axis melt like sherbet on an endless summer day, and Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix compliments Iraq's "proactive" compliance in a quickening process of disarmament that "will not take years, nor weeks, but months" – a sociopath who used to stuff firecrackers into the mouths of frogs before tossing them into the air to watch them explode is about to send thousands of radioactive high explosives into a city the size of Toronto, where this story was reported.

When things are this perverted, warned the Hopi, you are entering the End Time.

How did we get here? How can this be? Even as we tell ourselves, "This can't be happening. I must be going insane"… another abused madman is preparing to defend his country by detonating the planet's second biggest oilfields in a "titanic" sensor-blinding, climate-changing carbon burp.

But not to worry. The immediate prospect of unquenchable oil fires even worse than the globe-girdling smoke signals from the last Desert Storm has been censored by American networks intent on ignoring the consequences of the warmongering and weaponry they sell on behalf of corporate owners who make the killing machines they display. This list of media taboos includes the radioactive residues that will decimate the invaders, their spouses and offspring as drastically as they already have the mothers and children of Iraq.

An hostage people will be glad to see sanctions and Saddam gone. But the spectre of a rogue Superpower just hours away from firing thousands of uranium-tipped cruise missiles and bombs into defenseless cities mostly inhabited by sick and starving children in order to "liberate" the bleeding, irradiated and traumatized survivors from a tyrant it imposed on them for decades is so twisted, so arrogant, so repugnant – helpless spectators around the globe risk the same despairing paralysis we felt the last time around.


WHAT CNN WON'T SHOW
When will news managers admit that killing kids is wrong? Unlike its mind-bending replays of the facilitated attacks of 911, CNN will not be showing close-ups of Iraqi infants torn to pieces by the most savage "live fire exercise" ever directed at urban centers. Even as the Office of Cyber Security vows to shut down worldwide websites opposing this illegal assault or supporting the Iraqi people, the Pentagon has warned it will instantly blow up Al Jazeera and any other satellite news uplinks attempting to beam independent images from a burning Baghdad.

Good luck to them. Until video footage is hand-carried out of Iraq, we may be left to our worst fears in imaging the fate of a predominantly five to 18 year-old population that has never attacked or threatened the countries moving against them. Boasted by its planners to eclipse the destruction of Hiroshima, this imminent deluge of radioactive "dirty bombs", megatons of high-explosives, flesh-flaying cluster-bombs, "mini-nuke" blast effects from 19-ton fuel-air explosives, and microwave pulses powerful enough to fry all electronic circuits from emergency services switchboards to heart pacemakers – is intended as a warning for any nation caught in the cross-hairs of Imperial America's stated march toward unrivaled domination of our spaceship's last resources.

As if in accompaniment to the detonations already shaking Basra, Shaaban Abdel-Rahim's hit song, "The Attack on Iraq" blares incessantly on Egypt's equivalent of MTV:

"After Afghanistan, here comes the turn of Iraq, and no one knows who is next."



WELCOME TO THE END TIMES
The Hopi saw this coming. In 1948, Thomas Banyacya was charged by the elders to go to the newly opened United Nations and ask anyone who would listen to help keep the land and lives in balance. "We have no business going around disturbing other people's land and life," Banyacya told UN representatives. Alas, "Eventually inside the white house the people will become so corrupt, greedy, selfish and dishonest" they will try to destroy many lives and lands.

As Banyacya pointed out to UN Secretary General Boutros Ghali, in a world increasingly out of balance, "The animals are also homeless, birds have no places left to build nests. Whales commit suicide. Every American wants a big gun, people are acting crazy in big cities. Americans are so steeped in materialistic lifestyles they cannot connect with their own inner spirit. Millions take drugs either to feel high or feel nothing."

Later, a rapt General Assembly was told how the Hopi prophecies foretold the coming of railroads and highways across the land and skies, the moon landing – and wars that "will come about like powerful winds" to bring a Great Purification that will cleanse a corrupt world, and usher in a thousand years of peace.

The Hopi say that while we cannot stop the cleansing that has begun, the heaviest lessons we have arranged for our own awakening can be avoided if we wake up and get those lessons now. As the Sun Clan's Dan Katchongva said before his death, the World of the 5th Hoop is a world of hope, "as all of our sacred powers are reconnected" in a time of great healing.

That time and that world are now.


WELCOME TO A NEW BEGINNING
Two nights ago, after robotically reciting a dizzyingly dissonant pastiche of gross distortions and outright lies coupled to a crude cowboy deadline, Bush II raised his middle finger to international law and the world community with a trademark little-boy smirk – partly fearful, partly defiant – that asked, "Will you let me get away with this?"

Around the word, the resounding response is, "HECK NO!"

We have had enough of Americans' willful denial and spoiled brat behavior that renames "French fries" so they can be gobbled without dwelling on the prickly questions of law and morality raised by that long-time American ally while watching Baghdad get blown up like a televised sports event sandwiched between commercials urging more mindless consumption that drives these massacres for oil.

As oil author Thom Hartmann observes, a transportation infrastructure based on 6,000-pound SUVs carrying single individuals, cheap forced-labor Chinese goods sold at Wal-Mart's unpaid overtime gulags, and cut-rate Mexican produce plastered with pesticides – are propelling a conquest "that is really about the survival of the American lifestyle, which, in their world-view, is both non-negotiable and based almost entirely on access to cheap oil."

But even if Bush's forces seize Iraq's 20 oilfields intact, an oilgarchy's last grab for Iraq's cheap crude will not stop a steepening planetary slide into prohibitively expensive go-juice. Observing that world petroleum production peaked three years ago, the author of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight declares that the American lifestyle – "our ability to maintain our auto-based transportation systems, our demand for big, warm houses, and our appetite for a wide variety of cheap foods and consumer goods" – while risking catastrophic climate change and the ire of a ripped off "Two-Thirds" world beyond U.S. borders – is about to receive a non-negotiable reality check.

Some Americans just don't know it yet. But the remaining 95% of the world's populace recognizes that America's orgy of violence and resource consumption is dangerously out of place in this "Last Chance Century" to grow up and get it right. Lucky for us – if not for the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea and 55 other targeted nations – G. W. Bush has seized this moment to unite the world against him and an obsolete power paradigm as no leader has since his granddad financed Hitler.

This time around, in a spontaneous uprising unprecedented in its size and principles, a countervailing "Super Power" of world opinion refuses to meet force with force, violence with yet more self-perpetuating violence. Instead, this growing global response to unrestrained military aggression is an outcry for peace that cannot be denied.

Even as Europe moves toward energy conservation and "renewables", an even bigger shift is swiftly gathering momentum as an outmoded petroleum-powered patriarchal Power-Over Paradigm collides with an unstoppable Peace Paradigm that urges dialogue and dignity, respect, restraint and cooperation with all life – including the forests, finned, feathered and four-leggeds so intricately bound with our own.

At this late hour, our continuing survival offers no other choice.


POWER PLAYS
Enthralled by the prospect of using unmatched military force to dominate the world, the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Perle-Wolfowitz-Bush cabal is about to get a lesson in real power. As Japan's first great Shogun, Tokugawa, remarked, "If you have to resort to force, you have already lost."

Far from a sign of invincible strength, America's overwhelming attack on Iraq is an admission of fatal weakness. In declaring war against the world, an illegitimate president and a handful of Apocalyptic ideologues have sealed the fate of their own morally and financially bankrupt nation as surely as they've sealed the fate on another American creation called Saddam.

Increasingly irrelevant in the global village it scorns, in declaring itself an outlaw nation answerable to no laws, agencies or appeal, the mightiest military power on this planet is itself within hours of becoming a shunned pariah state. As tens of millions of people register their revulsion in the only way they can, worldwide boycotts of "Made In The USA" products, and a cascade of dollars cashed in for increasingly valuable "Euros" could humble the United States to third-rate status within a few short years.


THE WORLD COMES OF AGE
Right now, even as we deal with our grief and outrage over so many more needless deaths, we would do well to take a deep steadying breath. It is time to take heed and take heart.

The world is coming of age. United in the liberating realization that we are no longer dependent on Washington's largesse or permission to determine destinies in harmony with the myriad lives around us, we are awakening to the power within us to just say No! to war – and Right on! to manifesting a vision a time where violence is never used to settle disputes between nations.

In two short years since Sept. 11, a global network of dedicated Lilliputians is learning how to throw an Internet over a gluttonous Gulliver brandishing fearsome weapons of mass destruction.

Since last September, electronically-linked grass roots movements have succeeded in passing anti-war resolutions in over 120 state legislatures and city councils around the United States – including Los Angeles, Chicago, Santa Fe, Portland and Milwaukee. On March 12, the New York City Council overwhelmingly approved a similar resolution opposing war with Iraq. "We of all cities must uphold the preciousness and sanctity of human life," said Councilman Alan Gerson, whose district includes the World Trade Center site.

Meanwhile, dozens of U.S. cities and towns have instructed public employees to defy federal authorities in implementing a Patriot Act that has no authority over Constitutionally-protected state jurisdictions. Similar resolutions are pending in at least 40 municipalities in 24 states.

This peaceful revolt is not confined to the United States. In Scotland, two engineers have refused to pull a train from Glasgow to a NATO military. Veteran journalist John Pilger also reports that in Italy, "people have been blocking dozens of trains carrying American weapons and personnel, and dockers have refused to load arms shipments. U.S. military bases have been blockaded in Germany, and thousands have demonstrated at Shannon which, despite Ireland's neutrality, is being used by the U.S. military to refuel its planes en route to Iraq."

On the labor front, last month more than 200 unions on all five continents, representing over 130 million members, agreed on an unprecedented joint statement rejecting war on Iraq. The British Trade Union Congress has called for a general strike in the event of war. In Italy, where unions organized a peace rally of over three million people in Rome, the General Confederation of Italian Workers has also called for a general strike in the event of hostilities.

As spokesman Enzo Bernardo explained, "We know terrorism in our country, and this war has nothing to do with resolving it." Just as in Spain, Britain and Australia, Bernardo insisted, "Our government does not speak for the Italian people."

Already familiar with the suffering and destruction inflicted by the U.S. military on a quickly abandoned Afghanistan, the Pakistani trade union federation representing over five million workers has joined the call for a general strike to protest what its leader calls a war "only for oil".


READ THIS
Other acts of resistance are coming from intelligence communities fed up with the lies and dirty dealings perpetrated in their name. While the FBI investigates the origin of the false documents used by the White House to "prove" Iraq's nonexistent nuclear capability, CIA officers are publicly exposing falsified and nonexistent reports cited by Bush as "evidence" of phantom chemical-biological weapons facilities dismantled a decade ago.

The spirit of the leaked "Pentagon Papers", which exposed another destructive deception in a place called Vietnam, is alive and flourishing. In Britain's top-secret Government Communications Headquarters, a courageous young female employee ended the Bushwhackers' bid for a coerced UN resolution by distributing a U.S. government memo to American operatives calling for stepped up spying on key voting members of the Security Council.

Other stress cracks heralding a tectonic realignment away from American dominance are spreading at the speed of a crumbling dam. NATO will never again be a rubber-stamp for Washington's aggression. Blair, Bush and Australia's Prime Minister Howard are also toast as mounting resignations among top diplomats and government officials over an illegal war continue to crumble their credibility.

As Canada and Europe move out from the shadow of U.S. domination, the whole world is realizing that we no longer have to accede to American demands, or ask Washington's permission to join a consensus Canadians are calling a "Coalition of the Living".


WHAT CAN WE DO NOW?
From pin-wheeling galaxies to a child's laughter and the songs of whales, the only powerr that matters is aligned with and informed by the Spirit animating all things. According to a "Peaceful People" called the Hopi, "the truest and greatest power is the strength of Peace." This power, their prophecies promise, "is a force which will bring about world change."

It already is. As tens of millions of people join in the personal and planet-shifting vibrations of massed peaceful intent, networked participants in an instantaneous, interactive global information exchange are stepping up consciousness-expanding credibility campaigns. No lie remains unexposed for more than minutes on the web.

In the Hopi Way, we are discovering how to counter aggression without killing or hurting by "using truth and positive force". Many of us are learning how to take to the streets and the Internet "to educate by clear thoughts, good pictures, and by carefully chosen words."

As American and British terror bombings commence in Iraq, the Hopi advise us to embrace end times as necessary as a peaking fever, with compassion and an open heart. Counsels a Hopi elder: "There is a lot in store for all of us, and the intensity of this will be a lot less if we can all settle down and behave and not be in the way. We have to keep ourselves from being corrupted by anything from the outside."

Translation: It might be an opportune time – right now! – to turn off all brainwashing boxes before sophisticated media mesmerizers drag us by the scruff of our emotions into a bottomless pit of confusion, helplessness and fear.

Instead, we would do well to remind ourselves and each other that this onrushing onslaught is a sign not of America's strength, but of its own undoing. Even as the Bushwhackers trumpet their triumph over yet another monster of their own creation, the moral and financial bankruptcy they exemplify and exacerbate is speeding the downfall of this seemingly invincible police state in a collapse that will come as suddenly and completely as the former Soviet Union.

And for many of the same reasons.

Across America and around the globe, we had best get busy creating something new! The good news is that in this time of bleakness, bombs and bluster, many millions of brave hearts are coming to beat as one. Undaunted yet aware, focused yet out of state control, the time for peaceful people everywhere to come together and pour it on with joined prayer and protests, general strikes, tax reform, selective boycotts, civil disobedience, shouts of truth and defiance from the streets and rooftops, and massive noncompliance with a doomed death culture is now.


It’s time to bring in the angels and focus on peace.



This time, we will get the lesson of carnage.



This time, we will walk away from war.



This time, the sacrifice of the Iraqi people will not be in vain.




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