And The War Goes On #2
August 13, 2007
by William P. Meyers

Last fall the voters sent the Establishment a message: get our troops out of Iraq. So much for Democracy. For my earlier take you can see my first And the War Goes On blog.

 

Democratic Party apologists, of course, blame our continuing presence on the Republicans and in particular George W. Bush. The Democratic Party majority in the House of Representatives could have ended the war by cutting off funds for Iraq, but most of these party hacks only used the public's turning against the war as a means to get votes.

 

Norman Solomon, critic of the U.S. media and of U.S. militarism, spoke in my town, Point Arena, California, last week. His solution: elect different, anti-war, democrats to Congress. He claimed it was a mistake in the 1960's to not vote for the Democratic Party. He was relying on the mainly-progressive-Democrats in the audience mistaking their myth for what actually happened back then.

 

In, say, 1963 the Democratic Party was run by a racist majority. It was anti-women's rights. It was anti-gay. It was intimately interwoven with the military and arms industry; it invaded Vietnam.

 

Who then changed the direction of the country? Not Democrats, and certainly not Democratic Party politicians. The people who fought for change were socialists, communists, anarchists, radical feminists and black nationalists. I am pretty darned sure that Malcolm X was not a Democrat; neither were the members of the Black Panther Party.

 

But hey, why not take credit for things once they have happened and the opinions of voters have changed? That is all the Democratic Party did. It turned against the war - once Richard Nixon was President. It came out for civil rights for blacks and women - once it was clear that the votes of blacks and women could only be gotten that way. And no one noticed the Democratic Party in the forefront of pushing for gay rights.

 

And the Vietnam War went on, and on. The Democrats had the votes in Congress to end it all along, but they did not. Not under Lyndon Johnson, not under Richard Nixon.

 

Founded on the principle of slavery and a genocidal policy against Native Americans, the Democratic Party has had no redeeming moments in its history. It's two Patron Saints, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, could not be bothered to give African Americans the right to vote in the South. It created the Atomic Bomb program and is the only party to ever use nuclear weapons in war, and at that it chose civilian targets to "test" its new weapons of mass destruction.

 

Make no mistake: the Democratic Party loves war. Al Gore wanted to invade Iraq but felt restrained by public opinion. Barack Obama talks about peace but actually plans to keep U.S. troops in Iraq if he is elected President and has promised to widen the war to Pakistan, just as Richard Nixon promised to end the War in Vietnam but instead extended it to Laos and Cambodia.

 

American citizens, wake up and get off your asses. We need new parties to represent us. The war crimes organizations, the Democratic Party and Republican Party, need to be defeated. Then they need to be categorized as what they really are: criminal organizations.

 

I would like to make the Green Party into an organization that the voters can trust and empower. If other parties emerge that are against war and meet my standards for social justice, I think that would be great.

 

People say this is a two party system, so your only choice is to work for change within the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. But if you look at the U.S. Constitution, it names neither party, nor does it restrict us to two parties.

 

And if you look at U.S. history, really looking rather than just accepting generalizations that are meant to discourage truth seeking, you will see that two parties are not really the norm. Most significantly, the Republican Party was started in the 1850's in response to the Democratic Party's continuing promotion of slavery. There have been many third parties that have elected some officials. There have been regional third parties, meaning that they were the leading party in their region, and one of the two "major" parties was typically runner-up. And in the South, after the Civil War until about 1968, there was really only one party, the Democratic Party.

 

Here's a plan: help make northern California and other "liberal" areas into a two party system where the two parties are the Greens and the Democrats. This has already taken place in San Francisco. But it did not happen because people sat around and waited for it to happen. It happened because thousands of people who care about social justice and the environment went out and worked in elections. They lost a lot of elections before they elected the first Green to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors; they missed electing Matt Gonzalez to be mayor by a hair. But there have been Green mayors elected to a number of smaller cities in northern California.

 

I think that once the voters are able to choose freely between Green Party candidates and Democratic Party candidates, without worrying about the Republican Party spoiling the elections, Green candidates are going to win a lot of offices. This will undercut the gravy train of corruption that both the Democrats and Republicans depend on to control this nation. It will be the beginning of the end for the Republicans, and hopefully the death of the Party of Slavery, the Democrats, will be long in following.

 

And the war goes on. You can stop it, but only by supporting genuine anti-war candidates. And if someone has joined the Democratic Party, they have shown their weakness and willingness to be corrupted.