Re: Respecting the summer of love AND the vets

Ron Jacobs (rjacobs@THYME.UVM.EDU)
Wed, 3 Sep 1997 11:29:25 EDT

> Miles wrote:
> <I am innocent of blame and I dare say so are you!>
>
> Wrong! Miles you are not off the hook. The complicity was and is
> corporate, in the national sense. Complicity touches you in ways
> you can't even imagine, our economy and political system are that
> complex. It is very similar to your complicity (if you are white) in
> the still-bleeding wounds of the Blacks because of their getting
> fucked out of forty acres and a mule during reconstruction. Whites
> continue to this day to materially benefit from that. The machine
> confuses your vision, makes it hard for you to see it. But we
> benefit none-the-less. Same with the war.

NO ONE IS INNOCENT OF BLAME!! But then again, blame/guilt is a wasted
exercise. Self righteousness of any kind only perpetuates the battle
amongst ourselves while the masters of war go on making guns and ammo
and new reasons to use them. Peacemaking with guns is what Orwell
was talking about fifty years ago. Our rage against the war in Nam
(and for those of us who continued--in Central America and the Middle
East) should not be a thing of the past, but transferred to opposing
today's
machinations of that same system of imperial desire which put us in
Nam.
By the time I started actively opposing the war (1969), the
counterculture and the movement against the war in Nam and American
racism were so intertwined I jumped headfirst into them both. That's
because the analysis was an anti-imperialist one which, if applied to
day STILL WORKS.

-

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