Author: Gene Marx

The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. ~ Caitlin Johnstone

On April 14, Veterans For Peace Advisory Board Member and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern along with long-time VFP member and Global Network coordinator Bruce Gagnon joined former Pentagon analyst F. Michael Maloof on Peter Lavelle’s Cross Talk for a much-needed, nuanced conversation of the Ukraine conflict timeline. Both Ray and Bruce had spent considerable time in Donbass, as well as other parts of Ukraine, which made their contributions to this Cross Talkepisode, Heading Toward War, all the more absorbing, and Facebook shareable.

Oddly enough, though not totally unexpected, the VFP Discussion Group moderators determined that the content of this panel discussion, posted on April 22 by a lifetime VFP member on this private Facebook group site, did not make the cut for generating a nuanced discussion. Labeled “A sober analysis of the Ukrainian debacle, including the escalating potential for a nuclear exchange,” the post apparently did not comply with group protocols. So it was arbitrarily removed. Disappeared. Gone.

The moderators’ wobbly attempt at feedback: “RT has been identified as a not credible source in recent years, but rather a state run Russian mis- and dis-information operation.” The implication being that a long list of RT contributors like Ray McGovern, Bruce Gagnon, VFP Advisory Board member Chris Hedges, Lee Camp, Joe Lauria and others had been collaborative, even ceding to Kremlin misinformation. Or could it be more accurately called a fear-based or ideological acquiescence to the pro-war narrative managers?

In a recent interview piece with VFP Advisory Member Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi describes the Hedges/RT affiliation: 

“By the 2010s, one of the last places where media figures pushed off the traditional career track could pick up a paycheck was Russia Today. In an arrangement Hedges plainly describes as a cynical marriage of convenience, the Russian state was happy to give voice to figures covering structural problems in American society, and those quasi-banned voices were glad for the opportunity to broadcast what they felt is the truth, even understanding the editorial motivation.”

Needless to say, with the advent of the Ukraine debacle, the entire six-year archive of Chris Hedges’ RT America interview show On Contact was removed by YouTube, as he suggests, ”in the name of censoring Russian propaganda.”

“They know it is not Russian propaganda,” says Hedges. “We rarely mentioned Russia or Putin, and the few times we did it was not in flattering terms. It’s much more pernicious than that. RT gave a platform to a critic such as myself…It was a show that gave a voice to critics of the United States ruling class and the US empire. They knew I was not disseminating Russian propaganda, unless critiquing the ills of American society serves Russia’s interest. To an extent it does. That’s of course why RT gave me a show. But in a functioning democracy with a free press, that is the precise role of the press.”

So when – if ever – was a Pentagon imprimatur a prerequisite for any Veterans For Peace discourse in cyberspace? Yet, regrettably, this is how far down the thought policing rabbit hole liberals, even self-censoring antiwar progressives, are apparently willing to descend.

As luck would have it, this post will be shared even more widely. Maybe. You never know. McGovern and Gagnon will continue to inspire and inform as tireless antiwar contributors at any venue giving them a voice, upholding the first provision of the VFP Statement of Purpose: “To increase public awareness of the causes and costs of war.”

And truth, always the first casualty of war, is still indisputably the truth, no matter its origin or social media platform.

Gene Marx is a former Naval Flight Officer and Past National Board of Directors Secretary of Veterans for Peace. He is currently the Communications Coordinator for Bellingham’s VFP Chapter 111. He can be reached at ejmarx2@gmail.com.

I don’t do Memorial Day. I suppose Memorial Day does me, days and weeks before the annual barrage of flag-waving platitudes. Recollections of ageless high school friends flood my senses during the flag-waving buildup, some alive as if they actually came home from Vietnam in one piece.

My best friend actually showed up at my front door in the dead of night, smiling as if he punked me…like old times. Imagine, for decades I thought those bone fragments, ceremoniously interred in real life, were his. We exchanged words, but ended up laughing, just before precious REM homeostasis splintered, again, in the dark. 

Daytime reveries and distractions are also heightened, triggered easily by misplaced guilt and moral injury or even a Stones track, but always entangled with a surge of aggressive commercialism, building to a crescendo with the laying of the last wreath on the last Monday in May. More affront than tribute, our country’s hypocritical remembrance is now on global display, and unavoidably an open wound to survivors and victims everywhere.

Continue reading “Memorial Day’s Pretense of Remembrance”

I have thought a lot about George lately, one of my ghosts from a past that has been lucky enough to span decades. Luckily, George has never been a triggered recollection, just a benign spectral from my misdirected youth. And at least for now, for this letter to the Wall, just call him George, although his full name and rank are etched in black granite on Panel 26E, Line 48.

I almost never know what prompts my high school version of George to show up. I was listening to some Stones and Creedence last week from a favorite Vietnam era playlist…perfect self-isolation rock. Also Memorial Day is coming up, so who knows? Our lifelines barely crossed, only once as a matter of fact, in the summer of 1965. We were both non-essential workers, stuck in a fast food restaurant, slogging out our last summer at minimum wage before we had to take LBJ’s draft seriously. Neither of us were Fortunate Sons, obviously, both just navigating the grinds of adolescence, topped off by the daily preoccupations and upheavals of a foreshadowed war in Vietnam.

Aside from the shared angst of uncertain futures we had virtually nothing in common. Hometown parents and teachers must have loved George, a reserved, hardworking math-club type, straight A student, from a no-frills, Catholic family. Two years older, my life was his parallel universe in miniature. I was an unbridled college freshman, committed to nothing more than a draft-deferred C+ average, the next weekend, and a military aviation career like my father. Nonetheless, a year at Tech and the suspect worldliness that went with it were street credentials enough for George to look up to me.

Continue reading “Memorial Day Reminiscence in Isolation: For George”

Between the fading bugles of Veterans Day weekend and Black Friday, my day-long musings invariably return to Vietnam, but this year there was a new wrinkle to my abstractions. You see, my granddaughter, Kaya, turns 14 next week and she has never lived in a time when her country wasn’t waging an unrelenting interventionist war somewhere. Not for one moment, and I couldn’t let it go.

So, what does that have to do with Vietnam? Well, as I grew up and unavoidably served in combat, I never thought "my war" was ever going to end. Never. It was always the mainspring of my very existence, and that of my contemporaries. It was also a monster with an insatiable appetite that devoured friends, relationships, plans and dreams, and no one could – or would – kill it, not a diplomat, not an elected Congress or President, no one.

Continue reading “Vietnam vs. Afghanistan – Matched Mayhem, Ceaseless War”

Several US invasions ago, beginning with Afghanistan in 2001, transport aircraft chartered by the US military have shuttled almost 3 million troops through Shannon Airport. My youngest son and his gun truck company made the stopover trips through County Clare to the carnage in the Middle East twice, in 2003 and 2004; even disembarking for the terminal lounge in full battle dress while their aircraft was being refueled. There was never an attempt by the soldiers to hide this unwitting disregard for Irish neutrality. To my son’s knowledge there was never a search of the planes and his troops were armed to the teeth, in violation not only of the Irish constitution but also the Hague Convention restricting the movement of troops or munitions by neutral countries.

While not exactly hidden in plain sight to the anti-war movement this US-Hibernian troop movement received very little global attention until peace and human rights activists with Western Ireland’s Shannonwatch pushed back, monitoring, posting and publishing all US military movement and, yes, rendition flights and overflights into and over Shannon. While unchecked power tends to remain absolutely unchecked, opposition to this ongoing illegal military alliance is heating up. Dublin’s MEP Clare Daly has always been among its more vocal opponents. Responding to a regional poll denoting a growing resistance, she remarked, "A country with a policy of positive neutrality would not facilitate the massive, devastating displacement of tens of millions of people through wars whose only purpose is to keep the gears of the military-industrial complex oiled."

On June 6, former mayor of Galway and TD Catherine Connolly, after standing in solidarity with Shannon Airport activists, voiced her frustration in an interview, "We’re facilitating the murder and slaughter of innocent people…and Shannon, unfortunately, is an absolute integral part of that. On any given night there are more military aircraft or more civilian aircraft carrying military than there are ordinary flights. We’ve set up Shannon now to depend on our collusion with wars abroad."

Continue reading “Garrison Shannon, Hidden in Plane Sight”

Fifty years ago next month Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us in his first public antiwar speech Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence that any nation that continues year after year "to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." Arguably that led to his assassination exactly one year later. Since the height of the American War in Vietnam, conditions have worsened exponentially, with military spending escalating unchecked. Each new bloated Pentagon appropriation has become the new normal.

Barely a week after his inauguration, President Trump’s executive order, as promised, obliterated the limits on Pentagon spending, setting in motion a military buildup to end all military buildups. As if on cue the House of Representatives voted this month to boost funding for more bullets and bombs, as well as some of the most deadly airborne killing machines in the US arsenal. Some weren’t even on the Pentagon’s wish list, 11 and 12 more F-35 and F/A-18 fighters, respectively. The new $578 billion stopgap bill keeps the U.S. military operating through September and sets the stage for even more increases to the Pentagon black hole of expenditures, as if budget caps were merely inconvenient workarounds.

Continue reading “A Time To Break the Silence on Military Spending”