Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
May 28, 2023
Memorial Day is a day for remembering the dead. But which dead? Is it only a day for remembering fallen soldiers, as a speaker at the parade in Hastings today proclaimed? Should we also remember the thousands of soldiers whose later suicides were arguably a result of their war experience? Or the tens of thousands of veterans who remain alive, but whose lives were shattered? Or the families of those who did or did not return from the war, whose lives are forever scarred by the trauma of being in a family with "those who served"? And should we also honor the hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded, and traumatized civilians – whether in Vietnam or Cambodia, or Laos, or Afghanistan, or Iraq - "collateral damage" in the wars that supposedly kept us free.
Who and what do we remember on this day, and why?
On Memorial Day we are urged to remember fallen soldiers because they died to protect us, our country, our "freedoms," our "way of life." How did their deaths – or the hundreds of thousands, today mostly civilians, who died in the wars – protect us, our country, or our "way of life"? It is sometimes said that we are "free" because our soldiers fought wars. How did the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq make us "more free"? Just what "freedom" did the fallen soldiers protect?
CFOW objects to the fact that Memorial Day has changed from a day to remember the dead, perhaps all the war dead, into a day to justify and glorify war. As historians tell us, what we celebrate this weekend was originally "Decoration Day." It began in Charleston, South Carolina, where the first guns of the Civil War had fired some four years earlier.
Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters' horse track into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, "Martyrs of the Race Course." Then, black Charlestonians, with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders' race course. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders' republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers' valor and sacrifice.
In a better world, Memorial Day would be a day to celebrate peace, to honor those who prevented war, who rescued those endangered by war, who worked to end war and to create the foundations for genuine peace. In 2023, let's work for peace. No more war!
Events of Interest
On Friday, June 2nd, at 7 pm, Everytown and Moms Demand Action will hold an action against gun violence in Nyack, at Memorial Park (4 Depew Ave.). Called "NY-Wear Orange Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge Lighting and Picnic," this is one of many events being held across the country as part of National Gun Violence Awareness Day and Wear Orange Weekend. To learn more, go here.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held in Yonkers on Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
Needless to say, this week's Rewards for stalwart readers remember Tina Turner, who passed away this week. She sang many of her great songs at her famous 1996 concert in Amsterdam. To help us remember her career Odyssey, please read "We'll Never Live in a World Without Tina Turner" by
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
'I Is Someone Else' [Bob Dylan on his 82nd birthday]
By Lucy Sante, New York Review of Books [March 10, 2005 issue]
[FB – For Dylan's birthday, the NYRB removed its pay wall from this 2005 essay by the very interesting writer Lucy Sante. It is a review of Dylan's Chronicles, Volume One and several compilations of Dylan's writing. IMO, very interesting. Enjoy!]
---- In his memoir, Bob Dylan never precisely articulates the ambition that brought him to New York City from northern Minnesota in 1961, maybe because it felt improbable even to him at the time. Nominally, he was angling for Leading Young Folksinger, which was a plausible goal then, when every college town had three or four coffeehouses and each one had its Hootenanny night, and when performers who wowed the crowds on that circuit went on to make records that sometimes sold in the thousands. But from the beginning Dylan had his sights set much higher: the world, glory, eternity—ambitions laughably incommensurate with the modest confines of American folk music. He got his wish, in spades. … Dylan is a mystery, as he has been since his first record, made when he was twenty, established his eerie prerogative to inhabit songs written long before his birth by people with lifetimes of bitter experience. The mystery has endured ever since, through fallow as well as fecund periods, through miscellaneous errors and embarrassments and other demonstrations of common humanity as well as unbelievable runs of consecutive masterpieces. It has survived through candid and guarded and put-on interviews, various appearances on film, and the roughly two hundred concert appearances he has put in every year for the last couple of decades. [Read More]
Still Teetering On The Brink : Sue Coe And Stephen F. Eisenman's "American Fascism Now"
---- Coe cuts to the heart of the grotesque affront to humanity that is Trump, and more importantly the grotesque affront to society that is Trumpism, with a combination of passionately righteous indignation and meticulously-executed artistic intent, and in so doing lays bare the horror-show of racism, nativism, authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, petty resentment, and just plain cruelty that animates both the man and the movement he accrued to himself, so expect plenty of visceral visual wallop within this well-crafted little 'zine, which is cleverly designed to evoke the look and feel of anti-fascist pamphlets of the WWII era. And while we're on that subject…. [Read More] To see/learn more about the great artist Sue Coe, check out her website.
Henry Kissinger Reaches 100
FB – The US media outdid itself last week in lauding Henry Kissinger, who reached his 100th birthday on Saturday. His prestige among our rulers should be a subject for deep thought, as his murderous and criminal career is brushed under the rug. If the Nazis had won World War II and Joseph Goebbels had made it to 100, the Nazis and their allies might have feted him, as the US/world now does Kissinger. For some correctives, here is some useful reading/viewing.
(Video) Henry Kissinger Is 100 and Still Free, Somehow
From MSNBC, with Mehdi Hasan [May 26, 2023] [See the Program]
Henry Kissinger, History's Bloodiest Social Climber
By Jon Schwarz, The Intercept [May 27, 2023] [Link].
Kissinger's Bloody Paper Trail in Chile
By Peter Kornbluh, The Nation [May 15, 2023] [Link].
Henry Kissinger, War Criminal—Still at Large at 100
By Greg Grandin, The Nation [May 15, 2023] [Link].
The War in Ukraine
Why Are We in Ukraine?
By Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, Harper's [June 2023 issue]
[FB – This article is of interest in part because it is another in a growing number of policy dissents from within the upper levels of US strategy-makers re: the Ukraine war.]
---- While Russians of every political stripe have judged Washington's enfolding of Russia's former Warsaw Pact allies and its former Baltic Soviet republics into NATO as a threat, they have viewed the prospect of the alliance's expansion into Ukraine as basically apocalyptic. Indeed, because from the beginning Washington defined NATO expansion as an open-ended and limitless process, Russia's general apprehension about NATO's push eastward was inextricably bound up with its specific fear that Ukraine would ultimately be drawn into the alliance. … Washington, then, will not entertain an end to the conflict until Russia is handed a decisive defeat. … The policies that Washington has pursued toward Moscow and Kyiv, often under the banner of righteousness and duty, have created conditions that make the risk of nuclear war between the United States and Russia greater than it has ever been. Far from making the world safer by setting it in order, we have made it all the more dangerous. [To read more, paste this link - https://archive.is/vp5BL – into your browser.]
A Very Simple Request - A plea to my Western progressive friends
By Boris Kagarlitsky, Russian Dissent [May 23, 2023]
---- To my Western colleagues, who, after more than a year since the beginning of the war, continue to call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. Do you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? In a country where museum buildings and collections formed over decades are handed over to churches, heedless of the threat of losing unique artifacts? In a country where schools drift away from the study of science and plan to abolish the teaching of foreign languages, but conduct "lessons about the important," during which children are taught to write denunciations and are taught to hate all other peoples? In a country which every day broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike? I don't think I really want to. So, we in Russia also do not want to live like this. [Read More]
Also about the war – Two useful articles add to our knowledge about what US/NATO military equipment is being sent to Ukraine, and how it is being (mis)used. Read "Top US General: Ukraine Should Not Use US Equipment to Attack Russia," b[Link]; and "British warmongering is driving Europe towards catastrophe in Ukraine," by Jonathan Cook, Declassified UK, [May 24, 2023] [Link].
The Climate Crisis
[FB – The Biden administration recently brokered a deal with the states of Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada to share (and conserve) the dwindling water volume in the Colorado River. The deal was lubricated by $1.2 billion in federal funds. For many bodies of water, a water shortage is linked to climate change. But in the course of the Colorado deal's negotiations, we learned some additional facts about the reasons for our water crisis. Check out the startling graphic in the following article.]
The Colorado River Is Shrinking. See What's Using All the Water.
May 22, 2023]
---- Hint: It's less about long showers and more about what's for dinner. The water supply that 40 million Americans rely on has been pushed to its limit. Reservoirs and wells are running low. This week, the states that rely on water from the Colorado River reached a temporary deal with the Biden administration on sharing what's left. What's using all that water - 1.9 trillion gallons of water Amount consumed within the Colorado River basin in a typical year? [Read More]
Civil Liberties
Blindman's Buff: America's Continuing Quest to Hide Torture
By
---- For 20 years now, the hunt for its perpetrators, the places where they brutalized detainees, and the techniques they used has been underway. And for 20 years, attempts to keep that blindfold in place in the name of "national security" have helped sustain darkness over light. From the beginning, the torture program was enveloped in a language of darkness, with its secret "black sites" where savage interrogations took place and the endless blacked-out pages of documents that might have revealed more about the horrors being committed in our name. In addition, the destruction of evidence and the squelching of internal reports only expanded that seemingly bottomless abyss that still, in part, confronts us. Meanwhile, the courts and the justice system consistently supported those who insisted on keeping that blindfold in place, claiming, for example, that were defense attorneys to be given details about the interrogations of their clients, national security would somehow be compromised. Finally, however, more than two decades after it all began, the tide may truly be turning. [Read More]
(Video) Stella Assange in Australia: Bring Julian Assange Home
FB - Julian Assange's wife Stella Assange and Julian's father John Shipton are campaigning in Australia for the freedom of Julian, now in Belmarsh prison in London and facing extradition to the USA, where he could end up spending the remainder of his life in prison for reporting the news – most especially, for reporting US war crimes in the Iraq war. A terrible crime is being committed by our government against Julian Assange, and against press freedom and the right to speak the truth about a government's evil deeds. [See the rally]. For more background on the Julian Assange case, recommended is this program from The Real News Network, with Chris Hedges introducing and explaining a recent documentary film about the efforts to free Assange, "Ithaka."
The State of the Union
Asylum in Limbo
By Andrea R. Flores, New York Review of Books [May 28, 2023]
---- On May 11 Title 42 finally expired. The public health order, issued by the Trump administration in March 2020, almost completely shut down asylum processing at our southern border; in the last three years the US has conducted approximately 2.8 million expulsions of migrants, regardless of their reasons for trying to enter the country. … Under this new policy, which bears a striking resemblance to a similar asylum ban issued by President Trump in 2019, nearly all migrants who fail to seek asylum in another country first or secure an appointment to enter at a land port of entry will be presumed ineligible for asylum when they reach US territory. This blocks most would-be asylum seekers at the southern border from making asylum claims, with the justification that they should have availed themselves of another immigration pathway before traversing Mexico—an option currently only available to immigrants from a handful of countries. The rule effectively normalizes the dangerous theory that, because certain migrants are at once less deserving of humanitarian protection than others and more threatening to the social cohesion of our democracy, the US can dispense with its legal obligations under the Refugee Act of 1980 to individually review every asylum case. [To read more, paste this link - https://archive.ph/AtQFF- into your browser.]
The Fight for Fair Wages
By Willa Glickman, New York Review of Books [May 25, 2023]
---- For our economy to function in its current form, hourly workers must toil at unpleasant jobs for very little money. Nearly a third of the US workforce makes less than fifteen dollars an hour—40 percent of female workers, 47 percent of Black workers, and 57 percent of working single parents. A number of recent books about low-wage work show the human misery behind that status quo. Together they describe a system that may well be nearing a breaking point. From this instability has grown some of the most high-profile grassroots labor organizing in decades. While the success of the movement is far from certain, it may offer the only way out. The story of this crisis is a long one. … In Essential, an account of the labor market during the pandemic, the sociologist Jamie K. McCallum highlights the effects of the Great Recession of 2007–2009: midwage jobs made up 60 percent of those lost and only 22 percent of those that came back during the recovery. "We put people back to work, mostly as fast-food workers and in care services—almost seven million jobs that paid under $25,000 per year," McCallum writes. It was also around this time that the gig economy was born. [To read more, paste this link - https://archive.ph/Tv5xk – into your browser.]
Israel/Palestine
Only Two Options Remain for Israel: Another Nakba or One State for Two Peoples
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz [Israel] [May 28, 2023]
---- One of the greater achievements Benjamin Netanyahu can chalk up to his credit is the final removal of a two-state solution from the table. Moreover, in his years as prime minister he has managed to remove the entire Palestinian issue from the public agenda. In Israel and abroad, no one is interested in it anymore, other than paying lip service, at least for now. In the eyes of the right, this is a tremendous achievement. In the eyes of anyone else, this should be considered a disastrous development, with only the indifference toward it being even more disastrous. Netanyahu is leaving us with only two long-term solutions, and no more: a second Nakba, or a democratic state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Any other solution is unsustainable – no more than a delusion, like all its other predecessors, one intended to gain more time for the entrenchment of the occupation. [To read more, paste this link -https://archive.ph/SUzeZ – into your browser.]
Our History
The Mexican Revolution Was an Internationalist Revolution
By Jonah Walters, Jacobin Magazine [May 2025]
[FB – This is a review of two interesting books about the revolutionary upheaval in Mexico and the US southwest before WWI, centered on the amazing Flores Magón brothers.]
---- For about six months in 1911, on that long finger of land pointing southward from Mexico's Pacific Coast, an international band of fellow travelers attempted revolution. The rebels seized Baja California border villages like Mexicali, Los Algodones, and Tijuana, conducting a number of their raids from the backs of hijacked trains. Over the roar of the rails, unfamiliar voices suddenly boomed across town plazas newly bedecked in red banners. Some of the revolutionists spoke in Welsh and Australian brogues, others in the rugged dialects of the US mountain states, others in the studious Spanish of urban Mexican literatis freshly returned from their American exiles. … The carnivalesque insurrection the PLM orchestrated in Baja tends to be remembered nowadays as a cautionary tale, a warning to voluntarists and idealists. Staged at the cusp of the storied Mexican Revolution, but not exactly of that revolution (at least in memory), the Baja rebellion has gone down in history as a kind of doomed utopian rehearsal, a well-intentioned experiment that unfortunately turned freakish under the glare of the unblinking California sun. Tellingly, Flores Magón is celebrated in Mexico today not as a participant in the country's revolution, but as a "precursor" to it — a strange fate to befall a man who in fact lived through the upheavals his ideas are now thought to have prefigured. [Read More]
