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New Orphic Review,
Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring, 2006 Editorial
www3.telus.net/neworphicpublishers-hekkanen The
New Orphic Review New
Orphic Publishers 706
Mill Street, Nelson, B.C. V1L 4S5 Canada The Slavery of Our
Times Ernest Hekkanen ON THE WEEKEND of
July 6-9, 2006, the Brilliant Cultural Centre in Castlegar will be hosting
the Our Way Home Reunion. You may have heard about the Our Way Home Reunion.
The brainchild of Isaac Romano, it made its official debut at a press
conference on September 7, 2004, at what seemed to be a fairly innocuous
event at the Vienna Café in Nelson, British Columbia. You must understand
that Nelson is a remote, little town tucked away in the Selkirk Mountains.
The town is as charming as its locale, replete with an array of stately
buildings which hail from the early 20th century. While there is a lot of
creative, political and environmental ferment in Nelson, news of its
activities rarely travel beyond the mountains. We are cloistered, extremely
cloistered; indeed, I would go so far as to say that we are downright
parochial. However, news of Isaac Romano’s proposed reunion quickly changed
that. As soon as the world discovered that he and his fellow war-resisters
intended to raise an anti-war monument to Vietnam War draft-dodgers, news
agencies descended on our community. The proposed event garnered the
attention, and in some cases the animosity, of people from across North
America. Articles appeared in The
New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Vancouver Sun; footage appeared on CBC television, Fox News and ABC news, and the
Veterans of Foreign Wars in the United States urged President George Bush Jr.
to put an end to Isaac’s project – with force, if necessary. Here, in Nelson, the proposed
Our Way Home Reunion caused a rift in the community. Citizens were arrayed
for or against the monument, as well as the reunion event. For a while, Isaac
Romano became either Public Enemy Number One or the Hero of the Moment,
depending on one’s point of view. I found it all very amusing, very
interesting. Our little tempest in a teapot brought to mind Henrik Ibsen’s
play, An Enemy of the
People (1883). The human desire to take out
one’s animosities and intolerance on a scapegoat shone through the whole
affair. Some of the board members of the Our Way Home Reunion committee
quickly discovered they didn’t have enough courage to carry on with the
proposed event and forthwith scuttled back to their holes in the countryside,
never to be heard from again. The episode proved to me how
sensitive our neighbors to the South continue to be about the Vietnam War and
to what extent Canadians continue to live in fear of U.S. reprisals,
particularly when it comes to losing tourist bucks. As I said many times in a
subsequent interview with ABC News, “You don’t kill 1.3 million Vietnamese
without committing some human atrocities and war crimes along the way,” a
remark that wasn’t aired on television – in order to protect the overweening
sensitivities of our neighbors to the south, apparently. In our little
community of Nelson, we discovered there was a fairly large contingent of
people willing to overlook human atrocities committed by Americans, in favor
of collecting tourist dollars. Atrocities committed by America in an attempt
to further its geopolitical aims is something that rests rather uneasily on
the conscience of Americans. A figure that many Americans continue to ignore
is one having to do with how many returning Vietnam War veterans ended up
committing suicide. Approximately 58,000 American soldiers lost their lives
in Vietnam, but a greater number than that committed suicide. By 1988, the
suicide figure had surpassed the number of soldiers killed in that conflict,
which leads me to believe that the veterans who committed suicide must have
possessed some nagging memories they found difficult if not impossible to
live with. I’m sure some of those memories revolved around the atrocities
they were forced to engage in in the name of patriotism. The decision to move the Our Way
Home Reunion event to the Brilliant Cultural Centre was made rather late into
the game plan. The Brilliant Cultural Centre is owned by the Doukhobor
community. As many of you probably know, the Doukhobors refused to be enlisted
into the Czar’s military. They were pacifists. Their refusal was so
contentious they were treated like enemies of the Russian state. Leo Tolstoy,
author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, was instrumental in helping them leave Russia for the shores of Canada. Moving the Our Way Home Reunion
to the Brilliant Cultural Centre held special importance for me. Back in the
late 1960s, when I was educating myself about the Vietnam War, in particular
as to why it was being fought, I, in part, turned to Leo Tolstoy for my
understanding. Although Tolstoy is primarily known for his blockbusting
novels, he wrote treatises on a wide range of topics, among them Patriotism: The Slavery of Our Times. Back in the middle-to-late
1960s, I was a student at the University of Washington and an active member
in the Students for a Democratic Society. I knew about the human atrocities
and war crimes that were being committed on behalf of the Lyndon Baines Johnson
administration and had no desire to participate in them. As most people do in
such circumstances, I started looking around for people whose lives I might
try to emulate. Henry David Thoreau was an individual worthy of identifying
with, but while Thoreau’s arguments in favor of civil disobedience were
intriguing and perhaps even relevant to what was going on in Vietnam, he
didn’t influence my thinking as much as Leo Tolstoy and his little book, Patriotism: The Slavery of Our
Times, which I discovered in the bowels of
the University of Washington library; and Albert Camus’ L’Homme Révolté, translated into English as The
Rebel, a title guaranteed to appeal to
nearly every twenty year old with a rebellious streak. Leo Tolstoy’s sixty page
pamphlet, which has since been reprinted as a rare book by Kessinger
Publishing, under the title The
Slavery of Our Times, appealed to me
because of the author’s righteous indignation and because he seemed to assess
the political and economic landscape a lot more accurately than did Thoreau,
although, upon rereading The
Slavery of Our Times not too long ago, I
discovered it was a little too angry and rhetorical for my taste. But in the
late 1960s, when the U.S. was gripped by so much violence and patriotic
fervor, it made a direct appeal to my visceral annoyance with the state. As a young man who was fast
approaching the age of majority, the age of reason, if you will, I didn’t
want to be a warrior in the tradition described by Tolstoy in his book on
patriotism. In olden times the warriors, with their
chiefs, fell upon the defenseless inhabitants, subdued them and robbed them,
and all divided the spoils in proportion to their participation, courage and
cruelty; and each warrior saw clearly that the violence he perpetrated was
profitable to him. Now, armed men (taken from the working classes) attack
defenseless people: men on strikes, rioters, or the inhabitants of other
countries, and subdue them and rob them – that is, make them yield the fruits
of their labor – not for themselves, but for people who do not even take a
share in the subjugation. Because America had taken over
from France in Vietnam, in an attempt to protect the interests of wealthy
individuals and corporations that had investments in rubber plantations, and
because it was speculating that oil might reside offshore of Southeast Asia,
Tolstoy’s argument seemed to be pretty damn pertinent, as his argument would
seem pertinent decades later in the Middle East, when George Bush Jr. decided
to invade Iraq in order to secure oil resources and to strategically locate
the U.S. Military in case he and his cronies ever decided to invade any of
the surrounding countries. But Tolstoy went even further: If doubts suggest themselves to some people
as to whether all this is necessary, each one thinks only about himself, and
fears to suffer if he refuses to accept these conditions; each one hopes to
take advantage of them for his own profit, and everyone agrees, thinking that
by paying a small part of his means to the government, and by consenting to
military service, he cannot do himself very much harm. But, in reality,
submission to the demands of government deprives him of all that is valuable
in human life. That
was pretty heady stuff for a young rebel like me who thought he was capable
of choosing for himself what he wished to believe in. I eagerly read on: [Military] discipline consists in this, that
by complex and artful methods, which have been perfected in the course of
ages, people who are subjected to this training and remain under it for some
time are completely deprived of man’s chief attribute, rational freedom, and
become submissive, machinelike instruments of murder in the hands of their
organized hierarchical stratocracy. And it is in this disciplined army that
the essence of the fraud dwells which give to modern governments dominion
over the peoples. . . When governments have in their power this instrument of
violence and murder, that possesses no will of its own, the whole people are
in their hands, and they do not let them go again, and not only prey upon
them, but also abuse them, instilling into the people, by means of a
pseudo-religious and patriotic education, loyalty to the very men who keep
the whole people in slavery and torment them. I
think we only have to recall the atrocities which occurred at the Abu Ghraib
prison camp to verify what Tolstoy was talking about in his treatise. Albert Camus’ book, L’Homme Révolté, which I brought with me to Canada in 1969 and which I still have in my
possession, seemed to begin where Tolstoy’s treatise ended: What
is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a
renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his
first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all his life
suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. What does he mean by
saying ‘no’? He
means, for example, that ‘this has been going on too long,’ ‘up to this point
yes, beyond it no,’ ‘you are going too far,’ or, again, ‘there is a limit
beyond which you shall not go.’ In other words, his no affirms the existence
of a borderline. . . Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that,
somewhere and somehow, one is right. . . [The rebel] demonstrates, with
obstinacy, that there is something in him which ‘is worthwhile . . .’ and
which must be taken into consideration. In a certain way, he confronts an
order to things which oppresses him with the insistence on a kind of right
not to be oppressed beyond the limit that he can tolerate. As
Robert McNamara so tearfully admitted in the documentary film, Fog of War, the Vietnam War was little more than a hoax. The government did
everything it could to persuade Americans that the war was not a fabrication
concocted by the military-industrial complex, in order to move unused
military hardware off the nation’s shelves so as to make room for military
hardware that was then coming on line. A market for planes, bombs, incendiary
devices, land mines and chemicals such as Agent Orange had to be developed to
keep the wheels of commerce turning in the United States; for, by then, the
economy was based on the creation and proliferation of such weapons – which
should serve as a warning to Canadians not to pursue that course of action. America put a lot of time, money
and effort into fabricating a piece of fiction known as the ‘domino effect.’
According to that little fiction, Americans would end up fighting communism
on the beaches of California if they lost their toehold in Southeast Asia, a
scenario that history has subsequently proved to be quite wrong-headed, if
not intentionally meant to deceive an unsuspecting public. To further their
aims, U.S. authorities proceeded to fabricate the Gulf of Tonkin Incident,
the same way, decades later, they fabricated the case that Saddam Hussein
possessed weapons of mass destruction. It is interesting how often
religion and patriotism go hand and hand off to war. It seems to credit what
Tolstoy had to say about pseudo-religious and patriotic education keeping
people in slavery. However, too often, ours seems to be a willing slavery; we
ache to participate in a story of some kind, and if that story leads us like
sacrificial sheep off to war, well, we prefer not to think about it. Our
desire to participate in a story, any story, even at the risk of sacrificing
our own lives, is something I find endlessly fascinating. At
the Our Way Home Reunion, we will be offering alternative stories to the
dominant one that has to do with enslaving populations for economic gain.
Check out our website:
www.ourwayhomereunion.com |