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CONTACT: Congressman Dennis Kucinich Nathan White
(202)225-5871
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Congressman Kucinich’s Response to President Obama’s “Just War” Doctrine
WASHINGTON - December 11 - “Yesterday,
our president mused about the inevitability of war, war’s
instrumentality in the pursuit of peace and just wars. It is important
for us to reflect on his words, because once we believe in the
inevitability of war, war becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once we
are committed to war’s instrumentality in pursuit of peace, we begin
the Orwellian journey to the semantic netherworld where War IS Peace,
where the momentum of war overwhelms hopes for peace. And once we wrap
doctrines perpetuating war in the arms of justice, we can easily
legitimate the wholesale slaughter of innocents. The war against Iraq
was based on lies. Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are based on
flawed doctrines of counter-insurgency. War is often not just;
sometimes it is just war. And our ability to rethink the terms of our
existence, to explore the possibility of peace without war, may well
determine whether we end war, or war ends us.”
39 Comments so far
Show AllAmen !
I was offended by his speech and his justificaion to continue waging wars that were based on blatant lies.....
Too bad the rest of the Council on Foreign Relations, their media, and their government agents have the last word......That is the same group that led us into Viet Nam and all of Obama's advisors are from that same group....
Let's hope that "They" don´t decide to bring down Kucinich's plane.
I have been offended by every President since Reagan and most before that. Obama continues the national legacy.
American Presidents have a long standing tradition. Namely, each one makes his predecessor look good by comparison. By 2012 we'll be waxing nostalgic about the sweet days under Bush/Cheney.
For better or worse Mr. Obama at least framed an international discussion including peace (I believe I saw somewhere a sub-title of a discussion on "War and Peace"). Of course within the first paragraph he makes it a talk on Justice and not Peace.
What Mr. Obama also did was reveal that he functions under the organizing principle that there is a natural "evil" at work on Earth. It's what allows him to do, as he did in his acceptance speech, to easily create enemy imagery that dehumanizes a person or people into an "it" of "evil". To me this, along with the organizing principle of American Exceptionalism; which he also display in this speech, are best to be recognized and confronted at every opportunity.
With his statement here Mr. Kucinich also shows ("war overwhelms hopes for peace...to explore the possibility of peace without war") that Peace reamains a concept and not "the way" as King and Gandhi discovered and actualized.
So for me the task at hand is to break through the dehumanizing religion, myth, story, organizing principle of the likes of Mr. Obama with greater levels and expanse of human recognition; and doing this from a process of peace as only through peace can the path of justice be seen.
And through this dialogue of the last few days I'm coming to bend to accept some aspect of war, with war being conflict, and conflict being able to be carried out in many different ways. With peace, the way of counter insurgency war that Kucinich cites can be seen in the humanly deplorable fashion that it is, and new wars where entire social orders and masses of human beings are not destroyed.
(We are all Prisoners Of War: Work for Freedom - find Peace, work peace, offer peace.)
Ray Berthiaume
I so long for a person like Kucinich to be in a position of national political power!
"And our ability to rethink the terms of our existence, to explore the possibility of peace without war, may well determine whether we end war, or war ends us.” Dennis Kucinich
One of the many reasons I support Dennis Kucinich as Congressman for Cleveland and as President in 2012 is his advocacy of a "Peace" Department.
Dennis,
May you continue to speak out in the face of adversity and injustice.
We support you as you have supported us through these violent and gut-wrenching times.
You have devoted your life to standing up to the powerful who cause so much suffering in this world.
If the "democrat" party does not support you for President in 2012, I am voting Republican in protest.
Don't cut off your nose to spite your face, sue1403. Wait to see what the choices are. Also read nobodyknown's comment.
what a stupid and psychotic country and world that would
accept the blather lies and falsehoods that emanated from
obamas mouth at his acceptance speech. we on the left have
to find a candidate in the next 2 years that we can elect
in 2012 and right this country and help the world do the
same. we are now near the tipping point that will determine
whether or not we are going to make it as a species!
between global warming looming and more importantly how
how we let world leaders continue their assault on human
rights starting with us and the rising poverty that allows
a very few take more then the lions share of capital and
more importantly its resources natural and otherwise
that must be halted. dennis is correct in almost everything that he says but he will continue to have a news blackout on him
because the last thing that the elite in this world would
stomach is him as president! they would kill him first before
that could happen. he would join john bobby martin paul
wellstone and anybody else that tried to make our world
a fairer place for the have nots!
"we are now near the tipping point that will determine
whether or not we are going to make it as a species!"
The species will get along fine, with or without us. The tipping point is coming for this empire. Like all empire's, it will collapse under the weight of its imperial wars.
This Canadian is heartened that there are yet islands of honesty and voices of sanity in the United States. Dennis Kucinich is one such island and voice.
Yes. Yet as an American, I find it strange that after the hundreds of comments the other day against liberal collusion with power, people are not outraged here at their acceptance of Obama espousing war. His glibness in transmogrifying fascism into policy needs more Glen Greenwalds exposing it and more Kucinichs rejecting it. We must all reject not only Obama's words but him as anyone we tolerate as a leader.
You're right, but when it comes 2012, the American public will AGAIN think that they must only elect either a republican or a democrat. As Ralph Nader has spoken many times, when one chooses "the lesser of two evils", one is still choosing evil. Kuchinich is a good, honest man and would have made a viable candidate, but alas, the corporate controlled party will never allow such a thing to happen.
Dear Dennis Kucinich
If your district has no jobs for the unemployed, you might want to check in with the Clinton Circus who gave us Nafta and
outsourced our industrial base to China and Mexico. Not satisfied with that loss, Hillary was outsourcing our computer
jobs to India. Time for you and yours to get a wakeup call.
He is giving you one. Or are you saying, since the Clintons got rid of industry here, war is an industry Kucinich should get behind?
9/11 as justification for war is no justification at all.
I am a New Yorker. As such I knew people who died on 9/11. For months afterward I smelled the horrific smell of burnt flesh, saw the terrible absence of what had been a city within my city. Once to my horror I came home to find a piece of human bone embedded in the sole of my shoe. Yet as a New Yorker I am appalled that the powers that be use our horror and pain as they do. They keep waving the bloody shirt to the point that family and friends from out of state called to make sure I was all right when we had a steam pipe burst in NYC.
But using that horror to justify sacrificing our young and killing Afghan men women and children is every bit as cynical as the disastrous Iraq adventure.
The claim is that the 9/11 plot was hatched in Afghanistan so we must wipe out the plotters there. Yet the majority of the plotters were Saudi nationals. Much of the material support came from other Saudi nationals and institutions. Yet when a group of survivors sued these people the US government intervened on behalf of the Saudis, on the grounds of our national interest.
Obama the candidate knew that killing parents and children of those who perceive they have grievances against the US will make us less safe.
Obama the President seems determined to continue the march of folly.
Mr. President when you send our young to die and kill know that you do not do it in our name. Know that you dishonor the innocents who died by killing more innocents.
Shame on you.
The towers were brought down by nano-thermite produced in the US by our Military.
Goggle the "Niels Harrit" movie and watch it. He is a Danish scientist, who after watching the video of Bldg #7 collapse, set forth to prove it was a controlled demolition inside job. And he found positive proof! Check it out.
Kucinich goes from strength to strength , the world is listening to him .He speaks truth to power.
uk reader
sierra7
When will we understand that our "elected" presidents (of corrupt reps) will bring "change we can believe in" but the common folk taking to the streets?
Sierra7, Did you mean to say there will be "change we can believe in" when the common folk take to the streets?
I think most readers would agree with that. I believe it will take a lot (more) for that to happen but it will happen, and I fear that once it does there will be no turning back.
The religion is business. The god is profit.
Wealth and power can only be concentrated and maintained by force of arms.
CORP IS BORG.
The Obama doctrine of just (in case) war is more like the Bush Hog's Dicktrain, starting with Cheney's. STILL on the WRONG TRACK!
What a shame that Dennis will never make it past that whorehouse they call Congress. He's the man we need in the White House!
I have great respect for Congressman Kucinich and have been a longtime supporter that is likely to continue However, I must say that the knee-jerk left wing liberal fundamentalist answers are not working on this one. We need fresh thinking, which Thank God, President Obama is bringing.
I have listened to the old promises about saving steel in Ohio, for example, when what we should have been told was to get what we can out of these industries, save pensions, and get money for retraining because we cannot stop these jobs from passing away. Our local liberal leaders had neither the vision or courage to say these things and now our region is desperate as many are without retraining, pensions, or jobs and its people among the poorest and least educated in the nation.
Peace is not merely saying no to war, it is the presence of a change making force that makes a tangible difference in the world until war obsolete. Mr Obama has such a plan -- whether it works or not. Because of it, the people in Afghanistan at the end of this may get better jobs training than the people of northeast Ohio because here is a re-building strategy that realistically looks at the problem and tries to solve it. If the Democrats are going to govern, they must imagine new solution to the day-to-day problems of real people, walk together and lead the way through difficult solutions to solve them. They must also learn to stand with their president and at least give the strategy a chance before ripping it apart.
The WWII soldiers who died and their widows, the men who lay awake at night still with horrific memories from that war, and the victims whose lives were saved know there is such a thing as a "just war." Mr. Kucinich, I am usually anti-war, but in this case, I urge you to not do the knee jerk anti-war thing but to . . . think. Real people need real solutions to life's problems. Imagination and courage may re-build Afghanistan and northeast Ohio which is still desperate for results, imagination, and courage sir.
"Because of it, the people in Afghanistan at the end of this may get better jobs training than the people of northeast Ohio because here is a re-building strategy that realistically looks at the problem and tries to solve it." rlbuford
You are making Dennis' point.
The money spent on war should be spent on creating jobs in the U.S. through public works programs and re-building our country in addition to providing health care to every one.
"We need fresh thinking, which Thank God, President Obama is bringing."
St. 0-gustine is just regurgitating the same old God-on-our-side crap.
Just war is just that.
Funny you should mention that phrase: "God-On-Our-Side."
From the 1930's through 1945, every German soldier's belt buckle bore the phrase: "Got Mit Uns" (God is with US).
I think George Carlin was right when he said "the Germans lost the war, but the fascists won."
911 was the starting gun for our wars in the middle east. But the towers were brought down by nano-thermite produced in the US by our Military. Google nanothermite and read about it.
Another, typical, false flag operation happened here.
Goggle the "Niels Harrit" movie and watch it. He is a Danish scientist, who after watching the video of Bldg #7 collapse, set forth to prove it was a controlled demolition inside job. And he found positive proof! Dust samples from 4 different spots in NYC showed the same material. Nano-thermite.
The governments conspiracy theories are lies accepted by the sheeple as the gospel truth, while the sagacious facts are wrong if they counter the whore media and the corrupt official line. Tigers infidelity is 24/7 important, but the facts surrounding 911 and Wellstone are not important because they are a threat to the wealthy,elite. Geobbels would be proud!
Homo sapiens (what arrogance) has been making war on it's own kind - and others not of its own kind - for at least all of recorded history; and it's a fair bet that war has been going on since before we humans became, well, sapient.
I am a liberal. But I am also a realist. War will never stop. It isn't in our nature. It is a pipe dream to think we, or anyone else, will stop warring.
thanks for that vote of confidence in our nature.
(I imagine a fetus dreaming of war.)
it was a pipe(line) dream that got Afghanistan invaded.
If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how? --Joan Baez
Killing requires training because there is a built-in aversion to killing one's own kind. When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear, we slam head-on into that midbrain resistance that generally prevents us from killing. Only sociopaths--who by definition don't have that resistance--lack this innate violence immune system. How the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive, because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modelling. -- Lt. Col. David Grossman
The story of the human race is characterized by efforts to get along much more than by violent disputes, although it's the latter that make the history books. Violence is actually exceptional. The human race has survived because of cooperation, not aggression. -- Gerard Vanderhaar
In 1989, thirteen nations comprising 1.7 million people experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations . . . If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions in our century (the Philippines, South Africa . . . the independence movement in India . . .) the figure reaches 3.4 billion, a staggering 65% of humanity! All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence doesn't work in the 'real' world. -- Walter Wink
We have a higher nature that our purpose in life is to aspire to. This higher nature is peace itself. The nature that you refer to is our ego, which is always at war, and it abhors peace. Therefore, if we want to be at peace, we must act from our higher nature to restrain our ego.
Congressman Kucinich is the voice in the wilderness of corporate bought and paid for congresspersons. The few in congress who delineate the moral high ground (and transcend the bullshit of being a realist) are quickly pilloried by the corporate media or just marginalized. Such political courage rarely achieves political advantage in a system that thrives on hypocrisy rooted in following the money. When it comes to war the question "Who pays and who profits?" should immediately be at the core of all deliberations. Why isn't it? To do so would mean exposing those who will benefit from war. So in that regard we have no accountability. I like the bumper sticker which says: NO ACCOUNTABILITY EQUALS NO DEMOCRACY! As for President Obama's Oslo speech there's a Yiddish word - it's chutzpah.
there's also an English word - it's bullshit.
Obama's speech was crazy.
Read it and see how the words he uses to describe what he is warring against apply as well to him as to the 'enemy'.
Absurdity is not sane and the President of the USA is an absurdity.
Dennis Kucinich was, far and away, the best choice for president. He wanted to create a Peace Cabinet. But let's be honest about how successful his administration would have been. He would have had not only the Republicans out to get him, but nearly all of the Democrats too. They would have fought him tooth and nail, and he would, very likely, have not been able to get much done. The corporate media turned him into a joke during the campaign, what do you think they would do if he were president? That said, I think that his presidency, and his insistence on putting the people first, might have become a catalyst for real change, IF the people backed him.
we now have bases in saudia arabia. iraq and afganistan..... in those places we have a huge chunk of the global oil output..... by controlling these areas we can force them to sell the oil in US dollar denominations...... as long as that occurs the dollar will still be the main global currency.....
by forcing the global economy to use dollars we can finance our trade and governmental deficits.....
that may well be the reasons for invading - besides of course the oil....
although they just sold off some of the oil fields in iraq and the main bidders were france w/ china and the dutch w/ the malaysians.....
no american companies to be found.....
hence i think the currency issue is a big part of controlling these countries....
when the dollar falls as the global currency we're in for a world of hurt.....
1993 World trade Center Bombing .... Terrorist Attack.
1995 Murrah Building bomb ..... Domestic Terrorism.
2001 World Trade Center ..... Terrorist Attack.
9 years three attacks, all highly suspect for being Red Flag operations. The targets were chosen, no coincidences.
The new world order has mades its move.
But hey, the Neocon controlled Banks play for keeps, they have thier global terrorist threat, thier wars, thier invesments guaranteed by thier controlled puppets in washington, and the pentagon, military industrial complex , and major media to protect them.
The Constituion has served its purpose , attract and build a nation.
200 years later and the constitution is getting in the way of controling Americans. So the Patriot Act and Immunity has pushed it aside.
Put a forlk in us, the stazi are growing in numbers and closing in, our elected officials are not invoking the constitution as rule of law, the executive and the judiciary and stollen the power from the Legislative.
The Judiciary has made a huge error in not choosing sides with the Legislative.
Congressman Kucinich is correct and brilliant, but he does not have the power to effect real change.
The people have the power, but we are not smart enough to use it.