My Country Is Called Earth (6 page)

Now I don’t want anybody to think that I believe I am teaching absolute truth when I say the world is a product of the spiritual dimension—I know there is faith involved in my assertion. But I do object when scientists say or imply that there is no faith involved in their methods and theories.

Someday the public will demand an explanation for experiences that science today says are impossible: spontaneous and spiritual healing, mental telepathy, precognitive dreams, telekinesis, etc. Science will finally be forced to open its eyes to a whole new realm of events. The next great discovery in science will be that the physical universe is only the surface layer of total reality. What is ironic is that scientists will be discovering something that has been known to non-scientists for thousands of years.

I want to end this essay with a short discussion of medicine, the field of science that deals with human health. We are taught by medical science that we are victims of disease, and that without modern medicine we would be helpless against a multitude of illnesses. Science has turned the doctor into a mechanic, and our bodies have become machines with parts that wear out. Little is said about our natural defenses, nor about the cooperation between our cells that makes our lives possible.

I cannot criticize medicine without mentioning that the attitude of the public in the West, and especially in the United States, contributes to this difficulty. We refuse to accept responsibility for our health, and then when something goes wrong, we expect modern medicine to fix us. I believe the best medicine is a belief in your own health, worth, and safety.

I do want to point out that some doctors understand there is a relationship between the soul, the mind, and the body. A doctor who counsels cancer patients wrote: “The fundamental problem patients have is a failure to love themselves.”

Medicine has done a lot to relieve pain and suffering. On the other hand, medicine has done a lot to increase pain and suffering. What am I talking about? Doctors extend the lives of many patients who would otherwise die fairly quickly. In many cases, the result is a prolonged and painful death, with physicians and hospitals raking in huge fees that place a financial burden on vulnerable families, insurance systems, and Medicare.

I see this dilemma as having two main causes. First is that our materialistic culture is basically atheistic. People who believe that this life is all there is will of course try to prolong it. Secondly, many doctors feel that if they let a patient die, they have failed, and so they keep their patients alive as long as possible.

I believe it is time Western civilization wakes up to these truths that are understood by animals and in native societies: Death is a normal stage of existence and is necessary to make room for new life. And without death, we would not appreciate life. As an African tribal leader said, “Death is what makes life precious.”

We need a new definition of human consciousness, because it stretches beyond the years between physical birth and death. In the coming age, death will be known as a door to another reality, as a place to rest and to review one’s past life for weaknesses and errors, and, ultimately, as an opportunity to start over with a new body.

The Arrogance Of Power

Genuine peace comes when justice is served.

For as long as peasants remain landless,

For as long as laborers receive unjust wages,

For as long as we are politically and economically dominated by foreign nations,

For as long as we channel more money to the military than to basic social services,

For as long as the causes of social unrest remain untouched,

There will be no peace.

Seen on a sign in Cagayan de Oro,

Philippines, December 1991

Throughout history, czars, emperors, generals, kings, popes, premiers, presidents, prime ministers, and princes have proclaimed they were doing God’s work as they directed their armies to slaughter defenseless people. The arrogance of power has infected many men, and has led them to believe they could do no wrong, and to believe that what is best for them is right and just.

The arrogance of power has also infected many nations, and has led them to sacrifice the citizens of other lands upon the altars of ancient territorial claims, anti-communist hysteria, capitalism, empire, national interest, secure borders, and self-defense. In the last few hundred years, Spain, Portugal, England, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Germany, Japan, China, Russia, South Africa, Israel, and the United States have all been guilty of the arrogance of power.

I will in this essay discuss the crimes of the people and the government of the United States because I am an American, and therefore, America’s crimes are my responsibility. I also want to demonstrate a point: Not even a nation begun under the most promising of circumstances and based upon the highest of ideals can be trusted with great power.

From the 16th through the 19th centuries we killed Indians and took their land. We rationalized our treatment of Indians by telling ourselves they were heathens and savages. I believe that, in fact, their spiritual perception and wisdom were superior to ours. The Indian nations surviving today, among them the Cherokee, Dineh, Chippewa, Sioux, and Choctaw, should be proud of their heritage, because their ancestors were aware of an important truth our culture has not yet grasped: God lives in nature.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States took control of the Philippine Islands from Spain. Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in
The Oxford History Of The American People
that, since China was being carved up by foreigners at the time, “It began to look like a good idea to many leaders of public opinion for the United States to obtain a base in the Far East.” President McKinley said he wanted to “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” During the first decade of twentieth century, the U.S. Army crushed a rebellion by the Filipino people, who only wanted an end to foreign rule, at a cost of tens of thousands of Filipino lives. An American soldier wrote to his family that it reminded him of hunting rabbits.

In the 1920s U.S. troops smashed a nationalist uprising in Nicaragua in order to protect the American banana interests. The family we placed in power, the Somozas, ruled over Nicaragua for nearly fifty years and made itself wealthy while brutally suppressing the rights of the people. One example: Their security forces would go out to the rural villages and execute all the teenage boys they could find to prevent them from joining the Sandinistas, a guerrilla group named after the leader of the uprising we had put down.

In 1979 the Somoza family was deposed in a popular revolt. During the 1980s the Reagan and Bush administrations fed and equipped former Somozan soldiers so they could fight a terrorist war against the new government in Nicaragua. A Somozan leader, Horacio Arce, described their goal: “We attack a lot of schools, health centers, and that sort of thing. We have tried to make it so that the Nicaraguan government cannot provide social services for the peasants.” The hypocrisy of this military escapade was appalling: President Reagan informed the American people that the Somozan forces were “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.”

During the Cold War (1945-1989), American politicians told us our safety was threatened by governments in the Third World that were friendly with the Soviet Union or China. State Department documents and other important writings, however, clearly demonstrate that our leaders, with the exception of President Johnson, were not frightened by little nations. The stories of Communist monsters in the Third World were meant for public consumption—the danger perceived by our leaders was to capitalism itself. In
Deterring Democracy
, Noam Chomsky discussed National Security Council document No. 5432, entitled “U.S. Policy in Latin America,” dated August 18, 1954:

The major threat to U.S. interests is posed by “nationalistic regimes” that are responsive to popular pressures for “immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses” and diversification of the economies. This tendency conflicts not only with the need to “protect our resources,” but also with concern to encourage “a climate conducive to private investment” and “in the case of foreign capital to repatriate a reasonable return.”

Chomsky wrote that when President Kennedy tried to convince Latin American nations to work together against Cuba, a Mexican diplomat said, “If we publicly declare that Cuba is a threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.” Unfortunately for the Cuban people, this contrived danger was taken seriously by the American public, allowing the U.S. government to maintain an economic embargo on that small island until the present day. It can be argued that Castro was pushed into the Communist camp by our support of the dictator Batista and our hostility to his confiscation of foreign-owned property.

Our involvement in Vietnam began when the French were fighting the Vietnamese patriots. The Eisenhower administration gave the French financial support and offered to drop an atom bomb on the Vietnamese forces besieging Dien Bien Phu. It was the intent of our leaders to suppress nationalist governments in Southeast Asia in order to prevent them from interfering with our designs for the region. The State Department Policy Planning Staff wrote in 1949 that the area was to function “as a source for raw materials and a market for Japan and Western Europe.”

After the Vietnamese patriots had succeeded in expelling the French from their homeland, the Eisenhower administration decided the United States would back the Diem government in the south against the Ho Chi Minh government in the north, even though the Geneva Agreement of 1954 stipulated that an election should be held to unite the nation in two years. Believing that Ho Chi Minh would win free elections, the Diem regime refused to allow them to take place.

After a bloody and long war, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese succeeded in defeating the American puppet government. More than two million Vietnamese, six hundred thousand Cambodians and Laotians, and fifty thousand Americans died in this effort by the United States to impose its will on the Vietnamese people.

The reason the United States sent an army of half a million soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s was that President Johnson was hysterically obsessed with stopping Communism. Johnson told a member of the Senate: “If we do not stop the Reds in South Vietnam, tomorrow they will be in Hawaii, and next week they will be in San Francisco.”

An American official remarked about a South Vietnamese town the U.S. had leveled during the 1968 Tet offensive: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” In the twisted thinking of American political and military leaders in the 1960s and 1970s, we were going to save Southeast Asia from Communism even if we had to ravage the land and decimate the populations of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to do it.

The American people were not only informed the war was being fought to save Southeast Asia from Communism, but that we were also fighting for freedom and democracy. For the United States to fight a war for freedom and democracy in which three million people are killed is reason gone mad. No one has ever explained to me how the dead could enjoy freedom of speech, religion, or the right to vote.

Ninety percent of the casualties of the Vietnam War were civilians. We dropped more bombs on Southeast Asia during the war than we dropped in all of World War II. In 1970 it was discovered that U.S. forces had butchered between 175 and 500 children, women, and old men two years earlier in the hamlet of My Lai. During the Congressional inquiry that followed, one soldier involved in the massacre talked about “killing everything that moved.” The commander of the man who led the attack on My Lai declared, “Every unit of brigade size had its My Lai hidden someplace.”

There are some who say the opponents of the Vietnam War were traitors. I don’t understand how anyone can defend a war in which ninety percent of the casualties were civilians. I think killing civilians is immoral, no matter what your President, your commander, or your platoon leader says. Killing innocent people in the service of your country is placing your nation above God.

I consider many of those who opposed the Vietnam War to be the real American patriots, for they were standing up for the principle upon which this nation was founded:
All men are created equal
. The antiwar protesters of the 1960s and 70s were saying to the American people: “The Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians we are slaughtering are human beings who also have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I consider all Presidents involved in the horrors I describe in this essay to be guilty of un-American activities and international crimes, including Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. I also believe the paranoia, lies, and illegal activities of Johnson and Nixon associated with the Vietnam War, and the hypocrisy, lies, and illegal activities of Reagan and Bush related to their Central American interventions and Middle Eastern escapades were impeachable offenses.

I am not trying to justify the terrible violations of human rights by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. But there are two kinds of sins: sins we commit and sins others commit. Or as my father taught me: Two wrongs do not make a right.

The Vietnamese revolution was fought for the same reason our American Revolution was fought—to put an end to foreign rule. The lesson of the Vietnam War is not that we should only fight wars when we are prepared to use overwhelming force, but that all life is sacred, and all people have the right to choose their own government and to live without fear that a foreign nation will drop napalm on their children.

As I have already mentioned, we were told the purpose of our interventions in the Third World during the Cold War was to stem the tide of Communism. This excuse was a cover for the real intent of our leaders: to prevent foreign governments from interfering with the activities of American businessmen. Our politicians saw popular movements as a threat to America’s markets and sources of raw materials. They feared American corporations would have their investments nationalized if the common people were allowed to govern themselves. Military regimes which could be bought off with money and weapons were, therefore, preferable. No concern was shown for the people who would suffer under these dictatorships.