American-Iraqi-Palestinian-Lebanese peace effort

** via Salon.com

Lenny Kravitz has released an anti-war effort titled 'We Want Peace' as a free download, a track he recorded with Iraqi singer Kadim Al Sahir last week in Miami. The song also features Palestinian musician Simon Shaheen on strings and Lebanese artist Jamey Hadded on percussion.

The track is available to download on www.rockthevote.org, an organisation that encourages people to involve themselves with politics.

"I came to Rock the Vote because of its strong stance with young people as defenders of free expression," said Lenny Kravitz. "This song for me is about more than Iraq; It is about our role as people in the world and that we all should cherish freedom and peace."

A growing list of highly-respected stars have now released anti-war tracks, including REM, the Beastie Boys, John Mellencamp and former Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha.

What most Iraq war protesters are missing

** Phillip Jenkins has forecasted a global conflict between two general religious movements, fundamentalism and liberalism (mentioned on this site earlier). Paul Berman is seeing a similar kind of conflict between Islamists who want to return the world to the state it was in in the 7th century, and practically everyone else. This context provides a perspective by which to view the current war in Iraq. Berman believes that while President Bush is doing it all wrong, something needs to be done to dismantle Saddam Hussein's regime. If not successful that country could become the staging area and power base for a reactionary Islamist state. The consequenses could be dire for modernity.

Berman groups Hussein with the thought patterns of Hitler and Stalin, whose intentions to establish a kind of fundamentalist state of their own were eventually thrwarted by armed resistance. Fortunately, Hitler and Stalin were stopped from fulfilling their intentions. This is an important point that he feels anti-war protesters are missing. Suzy Hansen of Salon interviews Berman in this thought-provoking article: Bush is an idiot, but he was right about Saddam

On following our leaders to war

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." ~Theodore Roosevelt

"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." ~Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II

Let us pray for peace, or we soon will have to pray for forgiveness.

In a long Salon piece by Gary Kamiya, executive editor, Salon.com | Sleepwalking toward Baghdad, a poem by WH Auden provides the ominous backdrop for an analysis of the present crisis.

As the United States stands in rigid and increasingly pathological isolation, prepared to take an incredible gamble for no good reason, Auden's poem, with all its incredulity, bitterness, dread and humanity-lacerating guilt, resonates with uncanny power. It is music for the coming shadows.

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

We have become all too familiar with "the lie of Authority," which promulgates patriotic myths to ensure compliance with demands that the individual might reject: It is on Fox News and its imitator MSNBC nightly. But Auden's audacity in this stanza is to link this familiar lie with the "lie in the brain" -- a lie of which all humans, Americans and Iraqis and French alike, are guilty. This is the lie that we exist alone, the lie of egotism, the lie that we do not need to love our fellow man. In a brilliant stroke, Auden reveals that these two apparently separate untruths work in the same way, making us susceptible to demagoguery and fear-mongering, leaving us short of our full humanity. Indeed, they are identical. The resonance with Christianity is unmistakable: "Though I speak with the tongues of man and angels, if I have not love, I am but sounding brass and a clanging cymbal ..."

Complete article (May require subscription)

"September 1st, 1939"
By W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

TISSUE ALERT! Military e-card from spirituality.com

**This card is much appreciated by those in the military and their families. The Military Moms Web site shows over 200 views so far, with most of them issuing "tissue alerts."