Guest Post: What It Means to Be Anti-War

This guest post was written by Eric Cummings over at On Violence. Check it out, its a thought provoking blog I frequent quite a bit.


The point of this blog is to cut through the crap, and try to come up with something new, to advance the dialogue. With this lofty goal in mind, I want to write about something that’s been frustrating me, the anti-war movement. Searching for fellow anti-war/peace bloggers, I've discovered two simultaneous, seemingly incongruous facts: The internet anti-war movement is dead, and it is crazy radical.

Let me back up. I write for the blog  On Violence with my brother. As our tag-line says, it is "written by two brothers--one a soldier and the other a pacifist." See, I’m the pacifist, and I’m not sure I’ve lived up to the billing. To represent my side better, I decided to find/interact/become a part of the anti-war blogosphere, as an alternative to the thriving, right-leaning milblogosphere.

And I found out there (virtually) wasn't one.

There is a gigantic milblogosphere, and a non-existent anti-war one. This sucks. The few blogs that do represent the anti-war/peace position are fragmented, disparate and unfocused, while milblogs have their own website just to catalog them all.

I understand why the anti-war blogosphere is smaller than the milbogosphere. Being anti-war isn’t really a lifestyle like being in the military; it's more a political stance. As a political stance, it tends to merge with other political opinions. And that’s were the problems begin.

Based on the anti-war blogs I've read, to be anti-war you have to hate your political enemies, including but not limited to Neo-cons, President Bush, conservatives, Republicans and right wingers of all stripes. You also have to hate moderates, blue-dog democrats, Barack Obama, Paul Krugman and anyone who doesn't agree with you. You have to distrust the government and corporations. You must believe 9/11 was an inside job. You support Palestine. Sometimes you support Chavez. You need to be anti-American, and not in the standard right-wing talking point, but actually think America is an ugly, imperialist nation.

Basically, you have to be crazy. 

Of course, that’s not a fair thing to say. Someone who believes the above opinions isn't crazy, just well outside the mainstream. The anti-war movement isn't extreme, it's fringe.

This sucks, especially when I think of how being pro-war is definitely a mainstream, if not majority, opinion. To me, being anti-war, pro-peace, or non-violent is not a fringe mindset, but the only people willing to promote this viewpoint are people the so-called "free media" will not listen to.

We need a new non-violent anti-war movement. The new movement doesn’t need a new message, but a new way of saying it, one that relates to the average person. I wish I knew how.
Eric Cummings writes about art and philosophy for On Violence, a blog on military and foreign affairs written by two brothers–one a soldier and the other a pacifist. Find him on Twitter,@onviolence.

The Second Pillar, or the Middle Pillar I flaunt to the Supreme Court

Campaign Finance reform is a dry subject whose nuts and bolts are primarily of interest to lawyers, accountants, and people of questionable intent at the FEC nowadays. Recently in a mind boggling decisions its recently been tied to the concept of free speech. One of the basic precepts to a functional democracy is free speech. Free speech is not discriminatory, a secretary has the same rights to speak as his or her boss, and his or her vote counts just as much as that of his or her boss. The secretary´s boss´s wallet can talk a lot louder than that of the secretary.

A quid pro quo arrangement between aspiring politicians, elected representatives, lobbyists, and special interest groups representing entire industries has turned modern politics into a puppet show, and has had a profound impact on public policy that quite easily fits the classical definition of corruption.


                                                                                                         

There has been an article about an 11th amendment to the bill of rights by Jefferson and Madison that has been going around for a couple of weeks on this issue that shows that this is an issue that dates back to the founding of our country. The question of whether the electorate or people with money, influence, and power will choose who makes and enforces policies and laws goes back even further than that however, atleast to ancient Greece itself. It probably goes back even earlier as it is a fundamental trait in human societies worldwide. Kust as everywhere else, money and politics have been America´s secret torrid affair, even if it is an open secret. Living in New Jersey growing up with Senator Torcelli´s "indesrections", better said outright corruption, I´ve seen what kind of impact a corrupt body politic can have on a state when politicians don´t represent the people that elect them but rather the business interests that make their political career possible and give them the "perks" more proportional to their power than their $174,000 a year salary. "Surprisingly" enough former Senator Torcelli is even getting into lobbying for the real estate industry nowadays. In the "Gilded Age" industries stranglehold on Congress and the body politic was so tight that workers constitutional rights were routinely violated, child labor took decades to reform, and people were often subjected to unnecessarily hazardous conditions for little pay, and tax payer money was funneled into already massive companies overloaded bank accounts.


The line between private industry and enterprise and public representation and political office has never in American history been as blurry and confusing as it is now. The normal US politician has more conflicts of interest than interest in the public good. The US government is responsible for subsidizing, contracting, regulating, and protecting the public´s interest by politicians who have stock in the companies, who have campaign´s bought by these companies, and may be employed as a lobbyist or consultant, or any of a number of positions by any number of these companies afterwards.

The kind of open corruption displayed in American politics isn´t tolerated in many other countries, or its normally at least kept a much tighter secret. What is considered such standard practice in the United States that it would not even ended up in the news has recently turned into a scandal here in Germany, and some political careers have been seriously damaged at a time right before election season in Saxony. This isn´t to say politics is completely clean in Germany, not by a long shot, but its become apparent that most politicians here are as dominated by business interests as they are in the United States. Of course there are exceptions, Roland Koch is to Fraport what Dick Cheney is to Haliburton, and of course people at the top of industry know people at the top of politics, but the corrupting influence of campaign contributions and other forms of bribery are greatly reduced. 

A day in the life of......

I apologize to everybody for the delay in posting, I´ve been telling people I would try to post atleast twice a week, but this week it looks like I´ll only be able to put one out here. This week has been a frequently recurring mess.

I´ve mentioned having to deal with veterans with PTSD in a guest post on a different blog, and this week has been one such week. No names are mentioned, and parts of it are left fairly vague to protect the anonymity of the people and parties involved.

The story starts a couple of months back, a guy I know and I´ve met a couple of times in IVAW mentions that a friend of his is on his way to Germany. The guy coming over is a vet, he has been rated 100% disabled by the Department of Veterans Affairs for PTSD with the help of an excellent veterans service organization called Swords to Plowshares. With 100% disability you have financial freedom, you get a paycheck thats almost as much as a lot of people make with a full time job, but with all the time and freedom in the world on your hands. He was essentially retired although he is very young. Sounds great right? Unfortunately I don´t know anybody who has a 100% disability from the VA who wouldn´t trade it for being a normal Joe Schmuck with ordinary problems and being without the disability that entitles them to a liveable paycheck every month. This guy decided he wanted to travel and see Europe with this new freedom, and had the dream of living in Europe and becoming an EU citizen someday.

So he comes to Europe and eventually ends up in Germany, with a little bit of help and some contacts he finds a place in Berlin. We meet a few times, we do a couple of events together, we become good friends, he meets and falls in love with a girl in my area, enrolls in a German class, and settles down with her. Should be a happily ever after story right? If only life was that simple, that easy. No instead the situation spirals out of control very fast.

First off, believe it or not in foreign countries people speak other languages, in the case of Germany, well German. When you´re paranoid (not an uncommon trait with PTSD) and you don´t understand the language you automatically assume everybody is talking about you, whether it is true or not, and if you have no way of interpreting what is being said you´re left to your own imagination to fill in the gaps as to what is being said. You can´t learn a foreign language overnight either, and its a frustrating process to learn. This is one huge problem to having PTSD and living in a foreign country.

Second, PTSD devastates relationships like nobody´s business. I have to give credit where credit is due, and my friend´s girlfriend handled the situation admirably for as long as she could, but its simply difficult to be in an intimate relationship with people who have a fuse shorter than a midget, its attached to a hydrogen bomb, and have less patience than a child waiting to open their Christmas presents. Eventually at points she lost her patience as well, she would become sour or angry after her boyfriend got into a bad mood, and found herself in love with somebody who took up so much of her time, nearly required as much care as a child (not in the conventional sense, but in having to find doctors, spend time with him so he doesn´t feel alone etc.) and was angry very often. Her losing her patience and getting into fights with him of course had the effect of turning his mood even sourer.

Eventually she reached her breaking point as they were at a therapist nearby, and broke up with my friend. For my friend this relationship had turned into his reason to live and given new meaning to his life, and it crumbled beneath his feet due to his own problems. As his world crumbled around him he called me, his only good friend in the area. We talked about suicide, his family, about going back to the states, and we had some beers at a couple of bars. He was desperate and I wanted to stay with him, if simply just to make sure he didn´t kill himself.  There was even a couple of comical points such as going to an Afghani travel agency with beers in our hand and asking what it would take for us to go to Afghanistan as civilians and a pointless bar fight which ended friendly enough (although my friend got his knee hurt).

The next day my friend´s girlfriend came over, they made up to a degree, and we started searching earnestly for some better help for my friend. Its a travesty and a scandal that for the thousands of veterans living here in Germany out of the Army there is no real help for many of them. Fluent English speaking therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists are a rarity here, particularly ones with experience in dealing with PTSD. There are no VA facilities here at all besides a VA office on Landstuhl that is primarily there for soldiers who are outprocessing, not to take care of vets who have remained in Germany. The therapist my friend was seeing earlier in my opinion had her shortcomings, but with some help we were able to find a psychiatrist and make an appointment with him the next morning, as well as schedule an impatient therapy with a good reputation for him in March.  I was asked to go back with them to their place to play the role of a mediator between the two for awhile, and watched a movie and relaxed as both were to exhausted to be get into fights with each other that night.

The next morning my friend wakes up in a sour mood, possibly just because its early in the morning, possibly because he was having nightmares the night before. We drive to the psychiatrist, he talks to the psychiatrist alone, and then his girlfriend is called into the office after awhile. After the appointment I asked him what he thought of the Dr. and he said he was okay. He came out with a prescription for an anti-depressant and some tranquilizers as the anti-depressants have the effect of keeping people from sleeping in the first couple of weeks of use. Fortunately the appointment was pro-bono, but unfortunately my friend does not yet have German health insurance meaning he would have to pay for the anti-depressants out of his own pocket (as well as the upcoming potentially expensive impatient treatment if we don´t find someway of taking care of that). He didn´t want to take the medications, and I can´t blame him. Most people I have seen put on medication for PTSD get put on a whole entire cocktail of drugs that either turn them into a zombie or create problems nearly as severe as the PTSD itself. On top of that he wouldn´t be able to drink with the medication, and here in Germany thats asking a lot of somebody to give up, and he was a social drinker. He agreed to give up drinking and take the medication so long as he could have a dog. His girlfriend didn´t feel they were stable enough to be responsible for a dog, and it erupted into another fight with his girlfriend screeching the car to a halt and my friend getting out of the car and storming off. I played the mediator and told both sides about each of their concerns, and agreed to go home with both of them to come to a resolution. From my eyes it was apparent to me that both of them living together isn´t working out, and neither of them had their own space to go to for privacy when they couldn´t tolerate one another to cool down and decompress.

It was decided that my friend would visit some other extended family he had in Europe, he took off today and hopefully arrived a couple of hours ago. His girlfriend has to make up for time lost taking care of him at work, but will hopefully have sometime to decompress and reflect as well. Both me and his girlfriend hope he stays there long enough to decompress, travel, see his family, and have some fun, but comes back soon enough to start his impatient treatment. My fear is that he comes back and that, everything is okay for awhile but there is time enough for both of them to start the cycle of them mutually pissing each other off before he starts impatient treatment. Both of them love each other very much, but having a relationship with somebody with PTSD is incredibly difficult, and requires glacial patience, time, assertiveness when necessary, conflict resolution skills, and an unbelievable amount of love.  I´m crossing my fingers for them and hope they find some ways to adjust and make their relationship work.

Thats my excuse for "missing my homework" this week on my blog, similar incidents may happen at some point in the future, they sure as hell have happened in the past, and I would like to apologize for this and for future situations in advance. No opinions today, just the reality of having friends who are truly fucked up from war.

Congratulations to Cynthia McKinney

To make this clear, I am neither a member of, nor do I endorse the Green party in the US. I do not belong to any political party, because I don´t believe any party out there encompasses all my views. With that being said, I believe Cynthia McKinney deserves this prize.

Greens congratulate Cynthia McKinney, recipient of the 'Peace through Conscience' award from the Munich American Peace Committee

McKinney will accept the award at a peace conference in the same city as NATO's Munich Security Conference, which will address the war on Afghanistan; Greens contrast McKinney's 'deserved' award with Obama's Nobel Peace Prize

I was the first recipient of this prize in 2008, and I accepted it on Andre´s behalf in 2009 (he could not make it at the time because of problems with his case). The prize was given outside in the security conference in the demonstration in order to contrast it to the "peace through dialogue" prize given out by NATO inside the security conference. The year I received the prize it was given to a Canadian soldier who had performed valiantly in combat in Afghanistan, a gesture towards Canada in a time when Canada was seriously considering pulling out of Afghanistan. I have always felt, and I still do feel that that soldier deserves all the recognition in the world, just not a peace prize for valor in combat. The year Andre received it was a little bit crasser, Henry Kissinger (a man who values power over law and whom I believe should be investigated) was given the NATO award inside. This year I believe Cynthia´s prize is designed to be a counterpoint to Obama´s Nobel Peace Prize more than prize that will be given away in the conference. 


I can´t make it down to Munich today to say congratulation to Cynthia personally, I will be going to an MCN meeting tomorrow to help soldiers, but if she happens to come across this, congratulations Cynthia. 

The First of 3 Pillars needed to improve dialogue in the US

A shot I took of Pompeii shortly before sunset

I am going to present to you three pillars of democracy, dialogue, and rational debate that are rapidly decaying in the United States, and that I believe need to be attended to, renovated, repaired, reinforced, and regularly maintained even if it means amending the constitution to enshrine them as a duty to uphold. The first and possibly most essential pillar I am going to talk about is education. I apologize for the long entry, but it is a broad subject that can´t really be fully addressed in one blog post.

"The only thing more expensive than education is ignorance." 

Benjamin Franklin 

Education is one of the characteristics of a civilized society. It pertains to democracy, dialogue, and rational debate in the fact that it informs and creates a more rational electorate that is more capable of thinking analytically and independently as well as creating people who are more capable of engaging in a constructive debate. What I am not talking about here is political indoctrination in school,  although I believe a more complete and comprehensive version of history needs to start being studied in schools.

As I speak today the education system in the United States has some of the most prestigious schools of higher education in the world, such as MIT, Caltech, Harvard, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Yale, and Cornell and yet students are migrating more and more to community colleges. Simultaneously public schools are debating teaching intelligent design in classrooms,  STILL making an issue out of school prayer, taking dictionaries out of schools because they contain the definition of oral sex, suspending kindergarteners for having long hair, and are embarrassingly low in international rankings.

When we talk about education in the United States people generally separate it into two issues, the first being public education, generally meaning kindergarten through highschool, and then higher education, the education you typically need to get a well paying career and productive job, meaning college, a university, a trade school, job training, and ever rarer nowadays apprenticeships.

Before I delve into these two subjects separately let me address the run on sentence above. Nowadays school does not have one but rather two goals. The first has been and should remain to be to inform and educate the students so that they may develop into brighter, more creative, better informed, and rational human beings. The secondary purpose of education that has developed has been to create people qualified and capable of performing competitively in both the national and increasingly international job market. 

When we consider the secondary purpose of education in the modern world, why do taxpayers in the US foot the bill for primary education, meaning kindergarten through highschool, but not the complete education, to the point where students really are qualified and capable of entering the job market? A highschool diploma is useless to start a meaningful career in the civilian market. Leaving the job halfway done sounds like the waste of an investment that has already been put into these students. 

Higher Education

College students in the US nowadays are lucky if they have a scholarship or their parents saved up for them. If not they have to pay for their college either through student loans which will leave them in debt for years to come, go through an ROTC program which will obligate them to being a military officer afterwards, or joining the military to pay off student loans, struggle to use tuition assistance while in the military, and get the GI Bill afterwards. Decisions are tough, especially with the skyrocketing costs of higher education in the US, this is the reason for the spike in enrollment in community college and why many people who may very well be academically capable do not end up starting or completing a degree. On top of that the degree most stop with, a Bachelor´s degree, is decreasing in worth as many nation´s higher education systems improve and their own Bachelor´s and equivalent programs to meet or surpass our standards.

Let me contrast that to what I´ve seen here in Germany. Higher education generally has no or very low tuition here, and the state provides students whose parents are incapable of supporting them an interest free loan known as BAföG. BAföG only has to be paid back when they have finished their degree and they have found a well paying job that enables them to pay it back over a long time in small increments. Parents are legally obligated to support their children through higher education if they are financially capable of doing so. Academic standards in universities and colleges here are incredibly tough, with some majors having as high as an 80 or 90% attrition rate. In short going through college and getting a degree here is not dependent on financial resources but purely academic capability. Of course this has a cost, but when we´re talking about education this should not be seen as a cost, but rather an investment.

As part of the Bologna Process Germany has just started to integrate the normal Bachelor´s / Master´s programs into its higher education process. Since in order to get into a college or university here you need an abitur (an earlier degree basically equivalent internationally to an associates degree) until recently the degree you would finish from a college or university with (called a diplom) was academically equivalent to a master´s degree. Yes there are many people here who completed gymnasium with an abitur at 18 years old, went through college for three years (called a Fachhochschule) and had the equivalent of a master´s degree at the age of 21. With the Bologna Process taking place, Germany has been required to adopt bachelors and masters programs to become more compatible with the rest of the EU. Instead of trying to lower the bar needed to get into college, and reducing the academic difficulty required to get a degree, German school´s have tried to create the "super bachelor´s" in which they pack nearly as much curriculum needed to get a diplom into a shorter bachelor´s program. On top of that many German employers are reluctant to accept graduates with bachelors degrees as they feel they are less qualified then the people they had previously received with a diplom. Because of this and recent attempts to try and introduce small tuitions to colleges ( a few hundred euros per semester) there have been and still are nationwide student strikes (sorry link is in German).

The German system has its faults as well. While education is free here and creates one of the most qualified workforces in the world, the downside of it is that even some of the most basic jobs in society like being a house painter requires some education and job training as well. This of course leads to an inflexible job market, a brain drain and underemployment as well. With the job market being so competitive nationally, a German education is worth a lot more on the international market. But overall I think the problem of to much education and a brutal meritocracy is better than the problem of a large portion of society not having access to education and not having a shot at a meaningful career domestically or abroad.

Public Education

I´m going to talk about two themes here, first the way the funding for the public education system itself is structured and the no child left behind act, followed of course with another (short) comparison to the German education system. 

A 2005 study found that the US is tied for first with Switzerland in the amount of money it pays for per student (an average of $11,000 a year). A 2006 study found that the US ranked 35th out of 57 in math, 29th out of 57 in science, and reading scores couldn´t be reported due to a technical error in the exam instructions. These scores were far behind that of every other developed nation surveyed. The fact that better curriculum needs to be taught is evident, perhaps moving away from the highschool diploma and going to the international baccalaureate, but one reason people might see this catastrophic failure is the fact that what was taken is a sample from a wide cross section of American schools including both suburban, rural, and inner city school districts. 

While income is not the sole indicator of a school´s performance income and performance are to a degree correlated. The average breakdown for income to school districts is 8.5% from federal sources, 48.7% from state sources, and 42.8% from local sources (normally property taxes). 

Often times state sources are tied to attendance in school and in poor inner city schools where attendance may suffer and property values are low they do receive less funding, and of course social problems in poor inner city areas aren´t left at the door when students enter a classroom. 

Suburban areas in contrast have been getting a lion´s share of school funding, and have noticeably better (even if they´re still not up to international standards) environment, with lower crime, better curriculum, and more students who go on to get a college degree. Since parents often want their children to be in the best public school possible they will do their research and move to one of these districts, driving up demand for property in that area, and in turn increasing funding to the school itself. This creates a magnet effect and funding in suburban schools is not normally to much of an issue.

No child left behind has had a small effect for three reasons. The first is that it failed to implement national education standards, and education standards may vary wildly not only from state to state but from school district to school district as well. Some states like Arkansas have a highschool diploma that don´t really show any kind of academic performance at all. The second reason is that the concept behind no child left behind has been to withhold federal funding from schools that under preform. Federal funding for school districts only accounts for an average of 8.5% of school funding. The third reason is that to get the funding they have not created a federal standardized test with a broad series of questions of varying difficulty, but rather they have left testing up to the states, giving states a perverse incentive to create standardized tests easy enough for the worst kid in the class to pass in order to keep receiving federal funding. 

In my predigested opinion there needs to be a national education standard that every state is required to meet or surpass, funding needs to be controlled from the federal government to insure that every school district gets income proportional to the amount of students it has, of course taking into account the cost of living in the area. As far as curriculum, I have suggested earlier in this post that US schools move towards implementing an International Baccalaureate program in all schools, that is a significant increase in the quality of education and hopefully an increase in the knowledge students take from their schools. I would also suggest foreign languages start being taught earlier, in middle school if elementary school is not an option. 

In Germany, English as a second language starts within the first few years of elementary school (depending on which state), followed by a third language usually starting in 6th or 7th grade. I´m not going to go through how German kids are segregated by academic and behavioral standards in middle and highschool because I think it is a pretty screwed up system myself and would hate to see the US go in the same direction, but thankfully Gesamtschulen are making a comeback here.

Disagree with me? Agree with me? I would like to hear what you think.