David Swanson is an outstanding anti-war progressive who I met in 2008 at the CODE PINK House in Washington, DC. He has been an essential voice of morality and clear-thinking in the post-9/11 era, and I highly recommend his blog: http://davidswanson.org/
This recent Facebook post of his simply took my breath away. It’s been nightmarishly sickening watching the left self-destruct in this way, betraying our principles over neocon propaganda and hysterical pee-pee ravings.
How very critical it is that we get this moment right. But Swanson says it best:
“If the new fascist misogynist racist president comes in and ends Obama’s cold war and slows the nuclear weapons expansion of the liberal Nobel-Peace laureate, and the peace movement doesn’t have the walk-while-chewing-gum sophistication to support that move without feeling like racist sexist Republican Exxon Mobil backers, it ought to go back to preschool and try to start over. This is not that complicated. It just requires acting on principle rather than party. Our principles ought to include peace. They ought not to include professions of undying faith in claims of the CIA. This ought not to need saying.”
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For what it’s worth, here’s my ebullient response, lauding Swanson’s sound advice:
Emphatically, yes! WTF is wrong with the unhinged left today, championing the CIA, neo-McCarthyism, and genocidal neocons??? Good progressives now stand with lying warmongers in Washington and the Deep State. In a horrifying display of contorted/inverted values, good progressives are buying into the corporate media’s Democrat-absolving, outrageously hypocritical demonization campaign, marked by rage, rage, rage… and not an iota of common sense or rationality. The leadership of the left — including some people I love and deeply respect — seem to have lost their minds… and their principles. We’re witnessing a wholly self-inflicted disaster for the real left — not the establishment liberals and closet hawks, but the actual, once-principled LEFT.
Your post today, David, feels lifted from my stream of consciousness. “Fuckin’ A, right!” I said to myself, reading it, and immediately shared it with my wife. Over the last year, we feel like we’ve been living a nightmare, watching our best liberal friends and bona fide progressives move smoothly and without question to the DARK SIDE of U.S. politics, supporting the extreme-right and a new Cold War because… identity politics? The MSM said so? Pee pee?
There will be much to protest — on principle — over the next four years (this is in no way a defense of Trump or what he represents), but these protests are not cathartic; they’re FUCKING SUICIDAL for the left, and not even CODE PINK seems aware of this simple fact. This is a complete and total nightmare we’re living, so thank you, Mr. Swanson, for providing a voice of sanity… though it must be damn lonely.