A-Infos (en) In praise of hecklers

["Lyn Gerry" <linjin@tao.ca>]

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     A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
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Date:          Thu, 19 Feb 1998 11:34:24 -0800
From:          San Francisco Liberation Radio <sflr@slip.net>
To:            radio@tao.ca
Cc:            fnb-l@tao.ca, dove@slip.net, tburghardt@igc.apc.org, kiilu@sirius.com
Subject:       In praise of hecklers
Reply-to:      radio@tao.ca

Bill Clinton wants a war.  The students at Ohio State don't.  Thank God
for the students.  1-2-3-4- we don't want your racist war! 
Unfortunately, in all of yesterday's reporting on the heckling incident,
that's about all we got to hear from the students.  Instead of being
identified as human beings with legitamate concerns, they were pretty
much dismissed by the major media as cranky, kooky hecklers.  1-2-3-4 we
don't want your racist war!  Reuters, rather than offering any
meaningful insights into what was really on the minds of these young
people, instead served up 3 paragraphs of  pontifications from a
Republican congressman from Ohio.  Which is all the more reason why we
need community radio in this country.   In the corporate-owned media's
analysis of what happened yesterday, the Clinton administration tried to
hold a pro war pep rally in the heartland and it backed fired on them. 
This is true, but again we don't hear much from the Ohio State students
other than 1-2-3-4.  We know they can count now, but other than that
they remain pretty much faceless.

Bombing a people and making them suffer  because our leaders don't
happen to like their leader is not only morally repugnant.  It gets
worse than that.   Not that I generally quote Clinton administration
officials as great thinkers, but consider the words of Madeline
Albright.  Albright told the crowd in the Ohio State gymnasium
yesterday,  "Iraq is a long way from Ohio, but what happens there,
matters here."  On that much, at least, Albright and I agree.  What
happens in Iraq DOES effect what happens here.  I don't want to be in a
federal building or aboard an airplane when some Iraqi, who's perhaps
lost his whole family to our bombs, decides to get even with America. 
To be sure, America has many crimes and many School of the
Americas-trained death squads to atone for, but what we have done to the
Iraqi people for the past 7 years, and what we are about to do now, 
stands out dramatically.   This is one of the cruelest and most barbaric
acts ever committed by the leaders of this country.  One way or another
there's gonna come a pay back time.  In the words of Tupac Shakur,
"America, you reap what you sew."  

In recent years we've heard U.S. government officials publically
fretting, seemingly to no end, about "terrorism."  Bill Clinton even
gave us a so-called "Anti-Terrorism Bill."  Most of us, while concerned
about an erosion of freedoms and civil liberties,  dismissed this sort
of talk as being little or nothing more than a bunch of media hype,
intended as justification for a further cranking up of the police
state.  In my own view, this expressed "fear-of-terrorism" coming from
U.S. leaders is probably genuine.  If I had killed as many people as the
U.S. government, I, too, would be pretty concerned about watching my
damn back.  Paranoia walks among those with guilty consciences.  

 So where does that leave us--the "average citizens" of this country,
who never wanted this war?  To a large degree it leaves us caught in the
middle.  All over the world right now people are protesting the U.S.  
Many of these people do not, to any significant degree, distinguish
between the "American Government" and the "American People."  Many of
them hold us responsible for the actions of our government, and in a way
they are correct in doing so.  The only way for us to shed, or at least
to mitigate, this bloodthirsty image that stains all of us is to get out
on the streets in sufficiently large numbers and say "no!"--to draw a
clear division between ourselves and the U.S. government.  Hopefully our
efforts will be noticed--most especially by those to whom we have done
the greatest wrong, the Iraqi people.  The students at Ohio State have
made an admirable first step in this direction.  But more needs to be
done.  Much more. 

I encourage microbroadcasters to blow the anti-war trumpets as loudly as
possible--and to upload as much stuff to A-Infos as we can and as the
system can possibly hold. We will be uploading some new material in the
next couple of days, including speeches made at a preiere showing of the
film "Genocide By Sanctions" last Sunday.  We may not be able to stop
the Clinton administration from carrying out this bombing attack, but at
least we can speak forcefully against it--and with the combined power of
the radio project and a few hundred micro stations now, we are at least
a lot louder than we were 7 years ago. 



Richard Edmondson


P.S. Coming up in San Francisco:

Protest the war on Saturday, Feb. 21 at the federal building, 450 Golden
Gate, starting at 1 P.M.

Protest again on Saturday, Feb. 28, starting at noon at Delores Park.

Emergency protest will be held at Powell and Market Streets on any day
the war starts.  If that day should fall upon a week day, the starting
time for the demo will be 5 P.M.  If the bombing starts on a weekend,
gather at noon.

P.P.S. Inscription on a sign at a protest in Bethlehem on the West Bank
the other day:  "Clinton you coward, run to Monica."

  
- -- 
San Francisco Liberation Radio
http://www.slip.net/~dove


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