The Death March
by
Al McKinnis
Dissident Voice
March 10, 2003
The following is a letter from Al McKinnis, an ex-Marine and auto worker in Minnesota, to his long-dead Uncle Earl, a Marine who died in the Bataan Death March, reflecting on what has become of his uncle's country in the years since he made the ultimate sacrifice. This letter offers profound, stirring insights into what has happened to the society and what we must do about it. The letter appeared in the UAW Local 879 newsletter and in Al's local newspaper.
Dear
Uncle Earl,
The American ideals
(liberty, justice, freedom, independence) and working peoples' values
(equality, democracy, and solidarity) which you fought and died for as a
20-year-old Marine, at the Death March of Bataan, continue to be attacked. As
it turns out, the Empire you fought was not the Empire attacking your humanity,
but another Empire, the American Empire, continuing its offensive against world
humanity.
I thought of you last week
when some coworkers and a company security guard accosted a friend passing out
notices for an anti-war rally, exercising the very rights you died to defend
and perpetuate for them. Actually the first thing I thought was great, there
are Nazis in the building. I've also thought of you recently as America's
foreign and domestic affairs continue to create what can only be described with
the name history has given your battle, to recognize its horrific event: death
march.
Changing domestic opinion
through lies and provocation was so easy that, shortly after your passing, we
institutionalized secrecy and passed the decision to wage war onto a single
individual, the president. Since then there have been some 200
executive-directed military excursions. We now have a "Pro-active
Pre-emptive Operations Group" reporting to the Secretary of Defense, whose
purpose is to incite terror attacks so the president can order a counter attack
"for national security." As it turns out, Pearl Harbor was a
provocation by refusing access to oil.
Your war is sometimes
referred to as "the good war." As it turns out, the only good war,
righteous war, is the class war. Government by and for wealthy Americans to
control working people has ascended by copying corporate, autocratic power
hierarchies, buying the Constitution, giving them power over individuals, and
building cadres of boot lickers--"privileged citizens." Democracy and
representation are not possible within that infrastructure. Fear and
distraction, through these constant military excursions, corporate America's
theft of individual rights, foreign affairs attacking humanity to take money
from the poorest of human beings and pitting us against each other is our new
world society of top down social control. A society of corporate values (dog
eat dog, "leaders," and kill to accumulate others' money).
You wouldn't believe your
old neighborhood. For every 10 farms, there are now about 1. About 5 large
corporations control what was lost. By influencing elected officials and
intimidating the marketplace, prices for corn and beans are kept so low that family
farms are gone. And after we leave the farms to work at corporate factories, we
subsidize, through taxes, the rat that forced us off the farm! There is a plan
to take the remaining farms. They don't want future generations to know how to
feed themselves. We are systematically starving the Mexican poor and
indigenous, as elsewhere throughout the world, which should be enough pressure
to lower U.S. prices further. My grandson or his kids will be paying as much
for food, relatively, as what we pay today for housing.
Competition is not an
economic phenomenon or a natural human condition but a fiction, not a function
of corporate America's version of free trade. As Adam Smith clearly says,
wealthy individuals owning the means of our livelihoods influence the king to
such an extent that we don't know what a free market is. Logically he thinks
that these influences constrict fair trade as they benefit owners (supply side)
whereas, for the greater good, benefits should accrue to consumers (demand
side). Corporate America has no competition. As it turns out, competition is
the commercialization of human beings programmed to accumulate and spend beyond
their means, while adopting corporate values (the "received" means to
our self- identity) for "privileged citizen" seekers, an offense
against our survival for the rest of us; social control for all.
From my earliest memories
and continuing without exception, every U.S. president at an inaugural address
or State of the Union speech hoists a finger to declare that "we are
Number One" (competition, not equality). Raise your confederate flag,
Brother! Through competition, we are ringers for corporate America's
"game" (in their view) and, as an example, the Bush family retirement
fund: an Afghanistan oil pipeline, and now as co-bidder on an international
fiber optic network. To be purchased for a nickel on the dollar, the 95 cents
compliments of working peoples' 401(k) losses.
Neoliberalism, what
corporate America wants us to believe is its missionary work, is simply taking
money from the earth's poorest people. Its demands are completely divergent
from how it treats itself or how it became so powerful (regulation, not
deregulation and capital protection, not theft through privatization). I always
thought interest rates reflected risk. Corporate America's money center banks
lend money to the poorest countries while being guaranteed by taxpayers. The
money goes to Swiss bank accounts, with the debt left for the poorest of people
who never agreed to the debt. Voila, a new client king is born and hate for
Americans accelerates.
Shortly after your passing,
Brazil was remade in our image (the image as defined by and for corporate
America). After a generation plus 10 years as corporate America's star student
of neoliberalism, 70% of its people are in poverty, and it ranks fourth from
the bottom out of every nation on the planet for income-gap disparity. This is
where capitalism is taking us. America's working class now enjoys a living
standard equal to that of 1960. And it takes a two income household to
accomplish that! I don't know what my grandson's generation will do. Guess
they'll have to sacrifice their first born to become three income households.
As it turns out, neoliberalism was born out of U.S. experiences (payrolls) building
European fascism leading to your war. France rightly sees today's corporate
America as the Fourth Reich marching. It is the French and other European labor
institutions now fighting our "Labor Against War" campaigns as we are
castrated, having given up our right to strike.
American domestic and
foreign affairs are about squashing democracy wherever it rears its ugly head.
U.S. government-like labor institutions and other power hierarchies prefer
one-on-one decision-making models, deciding what's best for their subjects. Our
government makes friends and protects kings in the name of liberty and freedom:
Nicaragua, Chile, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Argentina, Haiti, Mexico, etc. If we
were to promote democracy, our military assistance would go to Zapatistas, the
other side at Columbia, Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya etc. If it was our policy
to promote and support democracy, corporate America would not demand a
"Military Governor" as part of its conquest of Iraq. As it turns out
there is no difference between capitalism and communism in their shared view
that working people are renewable resources.
Back to the war. Peace in
our new society is nothing more than a break in the action. As are all Empires,
we are not just feared, but hated. That hate is derived from corporate values.
Working peoples' values, once labor union values, were stolen as quickly as
they surfaced. Shortly after "the good war," labor unions
institutionalized corporate-copied power hierarchies, giving up,
catastrophically, the right to strike outside of the contract term. So unions
today attend to corporate America's agenda with cadres of "privileged
citizens." As it turns out, our enemies are not Islam fundamentalists,
dictators, communists, competitors, brown eyes, red heads, or people opposed to
war, but the beast we live within.
So what this war protesting
is all about is the recognition that war is just a piece of an even larger
effort to wipe out remnants of human values, once union values (solidarity,
equality and democracy). It's about showing our respect to and acknowledging as
dignified the efforts of corporate America's IMF, World Bank, WTO, NAFTA, FTAA
and GATT afflicted victims. It's a demonstration of solidarity in building a
movement for social justice, bringing together working people, environmental
efforts and peace activism. It is a protest of degradations to social safety
nets to the benefit of corporate welfare. It's a protest against social control
from afar, its arrogance and disrespect for using fear, even death, to minimize
job security, health care and education for unnecessary profits. It's about
self-determination and autonomy for all peoples of the world. It's about
protesting racism, refusing to accept corporate America's assertion that we
have yet another people to hate. And it's about supporting our troops.
How do we support our troops
when they return home? Less than one in ten jobs are living-wage union jobs,
and starting wages, not ending wages, are the height of our career-wage levels
(relative to buying power)! Union jobs have been cut in half twice since the
"good war." This week a former governor died. Shortly after your
passing, he sent National Guard troops to keep scabs off picket lines. Today we
support our troops by having governors send National Guard troops to bust
picket lines! We support our troops by having one, ONE! U.S. legislator, out of
530 some, who has a kid in harm's way. In our last war, one in four were
disabled. All wake up worried about chemical effects corporate America's
government refuses to acknowledge. In my war, more returning troops died from
suicide than were lost in the war. That's how we support troops today.
What these protests can not
become is a focus on replacing the "Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld junta,"
peace, stopping a specific war, or some other too narrow of a focus, so that we
end with folding our tents and returning home to perpetuate the ascendancy of
corporate America. These protests and demonstrations must become not skirmishes
but a war to build new institutions where social, political, and economic
relations are based on human values. We can not allow our energy to be claimed
by a politician or a political party. There is no difference between republican
and democratic party conflicts of interest, which for them today are actually
fiduciary responsibilities to the wealth that "picked" them as party
candidates. The first thing our last democrat president did when endorsed as
party candidate was to throw out its platform and report for service to
corporate America. The only thing that has ever worked for us is strikes, growing
when necessary to general strikes. Your great grandfather's Populist Movement
died when politicians became a focus. The civil rights movement ended, in a
sense, with an end game--a Constitutional amendment.
Our labor
"leaders" tell us that once union values are idealistic. As it turns
out, dreaming is the belief that corporate values have a place in our world.
Semper Fidelis
-- Al McKinnis
*
This letter/article appeared in New
Democracy World. Thanks to Doug Fuda.