Office Of The Americas For The Cause Of Justice And Peace

TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OF OFFICE OF THE AMERICAS
By Blase Bonpane

The creativity of the Office of the Americas is largely the work of Theresa. Just to give you some idea of her organizational skills:
She worked closely with the formation of Medical Aid to El Salvador.
Then she worked closely with Don White in the formation of Cispes In Los Angeles.

She refused to hold on to the turf of OOA but reached out to help structure a series of organizations for specific purposes. These include:
The Bolder-Jalapa Friendship City Project
Technica; Technicians For Nicaragua
The Los Angeles Peace Center Coalition Against the Gulf War in 1990
The Lori Berenson Committee
The Coalition For World Peace in 2001
Doctors For Peace
The living wage campaign
Artists For Peace
and the Seattle based Organization of Solidarity With Central America called CANTO, to name a few

I mention this because it is a model for the movement OOA never wants to become a religion to be protected, on the contrary it wants to continue being a catalyst for peace making. Thanks Theresa.

The fifth grade classroom
Let's go to a fifth grade classroom and talk to the students.
Good morning class.
Good morning teacher.
There are many countries on this globe. Suppose one country attacked another and killed over a million innocent people and then they attacked a neighboring country and killed another endless number of innocent people. What do you think might happen?
Yes, Gianna, and Gianna says:
"I think some of the people in the two countries might be very angry."
Yes, Tommy,
"I think some of them would be angry enough to attack our country back."
Thank you children.

So it seems evident to the class that if we kill millions of people including many children like you, in another land, some of those people will retaliate. so now you understand why our people have been endangered by our attacks on some of the poorest people in the world in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The terrorism experts
And now we move from the fifth grade classroom and speak to some terrorism experts from various universities.
These experts all have their doctorates in terror. Very impressive.
And now we ask the experts what they think might happen if we kill millions of people in other countries just as we asked the fifth grade children.

What do you experts think?
Expert A: I think they are attacking us because of their fanatical religion.
Expert B: I think they are attacking us because they hate our way of life.
Expert C: I think they are attacking us because they are Arabs.
Expert D: I think they are attacking us because they want our Gulf Coast oil.
Thank you very much for giving us your valuable time. I am certain that you will all receive tenure in your university career.

OK friends, it is time to go back to the fifth grade class. The children had the only correct answer.
After you massacre millions of people without cause some of them will retaliate. the answer is self evident. But experts deep in the hypnosis of national hysteria and paranoia simply don't care to get it. They may suffer from pay check diminution. Can we break out of the shell? I think so. Just speak the truth.

The military take-over
The military industrial complex has taken over our nation and is now dictating sensless babble as our official story. Our president is deeply infected with the virus. The simple truth is that our illegal, immoral and barbaric military policy has seriously endangered the people of the United States. This can properly be called reckless endangerment. And now we can expect to be attacked numerous times in retaliation for our murderous behavior.
Who is to blame? Our policy makers are to blame. Actually they have not had a new idea since the invasion of Mexico in 1846.
And what will they do when more attacks occur? They will try to limit all dissent. They will do this not because the dissent is false, they will do it because the such dissent represents the absolute truth.
Why must they limit dissent? Because the story they are telling is a lie. They know it is a lie. They represent iniquity lying to itself. We have lived with hysteria and paranoia in many previous epochs of our history our people have done well when the self evident truths are accepted in place of military propaganda.
The fog of madness was lifted from the witch burners, now we have to lift it from a policy of homicidal mania. Those seeking power and privilege will continue to validate the madness. Those seeking truth and justice will denounce the madness.

The bishop
I remember visiting Louisana in the late 50's. I had an interview with Bishop Schexsnider. My question: Bishop I understand you have a serious race problem here in Louisana. The bishop responded with a classic and angry retort:
"Father, we don't have a race problem in Louisiana!"
And that is the kind of denial we are dealing with at this time. We have not destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan.
Israel does not have nuclear weapons.
Gaza is not a prison.
We did not even have a problem in South Africa.
But we have a problem with Islam? And how does that problem differ from the problem that the third reich manufactured about Judaism?
It does not differ. It is the same mind set, just a new scape goat.
Paranoia and hysteria go together. We are now hearing a phrase, "we are going to kill the bad guys." And who are the bad guys? Anyone the generals suspect. Auspected terrorists, suspected gang members, suspected refugees from Mexico.
And this is why we carry guns. We may see a suspected bad guy. And we neither know or want to know anything about the sociology of guns or arms in general. Honest data tells us that people who carry guns are in far more danger than people who do not carry guns. People with guns kill their children, their wife, their friends, their dogs… Oops, there goes another one. Tthey are also very apt to blow off private parts of their body.
Jjust little accidents here and there. And the same applied to nuclear weapons, just a few little accidents and life on the planet is gone. Read the books about "broken arrows." And now Obama is going to get us some new models of nuclear biocide weapons. We can't be seen with those old 2009 models, we need a new model. We need 2010 models. Seymour Hirsh is correct once again, the president is being led by the military.

Nationalistic fundamentalism
Our policy is one of nationalistic fundamentalism. Because iniquity is lying to itself we assasinate them, we torture them, we destroy their culture they are the bad guys.
Do you think this kind of hysteria has any future? I don't.
It is the language of a defeated polity.
It is the language of a dying culture.
Why then is there so much silence? The silence is a result of accommodation. Accommodation to the permanent war economy.
Accommodation to racism.
Let us all become well adjusted to perpetual war on the poor. But wait, some of us don't want to be well adjusted? It was the maladjustment to racism that gave us civil rights legislation. It is the maladjustment to war that will give us a peace movement. The maladjusted Howard Zinn in one of his final and possibly most important lectures told us about three holy wars.
holy wars? that's right. our revolutionary war, our civil war, and the great and holy World War II. None of these conflagrations were necessary. But those fifth graders we were talking about will not be told the truth because of the institutional lying that goes on in our educational system.
one word answers will not help us to understand that these wars were unnecessary. read Howard Zinn's lecture on the three holy wars and read his text books.

Why has the peace movement declined in Europe? Because of accommodation.
And in the U.S. It is a matter of accommodation and fear. Why do I use the song " fear..fearing fear" on my radio program? Because fear is the motor force of all corrupt politics.
They are saving us from the terrorists as they create terrorists.
They are saving us from violence as they give us the biggest arms business in the world.
In the days of Lena Horn, the one word was communist. None of the accusers could define it but my how often they used it because it meant bad and it also meant ok to kill.
Then they evolved into the one word terrorist. Those are people we define as bad guys and they are also ok to kill. And everyone knows that there can't be a war on terrorism because war is terrorism. Even the mass murderer general Curtis Lemay stated clearly, war is immoral.

Is all of this reason to despair? I don't think so. And it's not a reason to be depressed either.
We can be part of an evolutionary process out of barbarism.
We are actually in a process of overcoming our accommodation to racism.
We are in a process of overcoming our addiction to war.
We are in process to no longer allowing the ideas of every age simply be the ideas of the ruling class.
That's right friends we live in a highly stratified class society.
When was the last time you saw a phrase about class in a high school text?
And don't tell our Supreme Court that we have a very specific system of class justice. They might be upset. Their 12th century love of the death penalty and their denial of class justice which has given us the largest prison population on the planet.
We are a very long way from liberty and justice for all.
Poor people make up the world's largest prison population. That's right, these are our people.

We can come to life…we can leave the cult…we can be free
But we can't do it by accepting the official story.
I find that in this time of dysfunctional government people are beginning to see the dysfunction but the hazard here is scape goating. They see the dysfunction but they fail to see the cause of that dysfunction. The tea baggers are worried about too much government when they should be concerned about too much war.
We can help them to understand that the war system is an absolute failure. The permanent war economy is a failure. Pentagon capitalism is a failure.
The war on drugs has been one of the most counterproductive efforts in our history. Afghanistan is a monument to the drug business which competes quite well with the oil business… business is business. We can remove all of the problems if we refuse to accommodate to them.
Do not allow the paralysis of fear which is the motor force of the political system to triumph. Perfect love casts out fear.
Do not accept government by hysteria which is created by corporate capitalist shills on the media.
Just remember that every word stated by commercial media fanatics is paid for by corporate capital. Just remember that all the barking dogs of commercial TV are absolutely obedient to their masters.
It is time for them to calm down.
It is time to see the truths that our fifth grade children can see clearly.
Unless you become as little children, you will not enter the kingdom.
War is evil.
War is terrorism.
Torture is evil.
Government lies are blasphemous.
Racism is evil.
The official story would be a joke if it were not so hughly destructive.
By rejection of the official propaganda we can end the war system.
We can build a peace system.
Where each political decision will be made to answer the question:
Will this be good for the children?
For the present we must look to the leadership of the ALBA nations of the americas. They are the vanguard for progressive change. Cuba, a poor country in the Caribbean, is number one in the care of children.
Tthe U.S. is 28th.
The leadership of this new alba movement has set aside rigid ideology and is striving to make decisions from expressed needs of the population. This is a movement toward substantive, participatory and economic democracy. The dinosaurs will continue to fight for their existence… But their time has come.
Love can be systematized, justice can be systematized.
This is the work of the Office of the Americas.
You can help to make this happen.
La lucha continuara …the struggle continues.
Blase Bonpane
TWENTY-SEVENTH Anniversary Celebration of
THE OFFICE OF THE AMERICAS
May 15, 2010

Gaza Freedom March - My Report from Cairo, December 2009-January, 2010
By Shae Popovich

Click here to read the article

The Catholic Church's Dirty Little Secret Is Out: Now What
By Blase Bonpane

Click here to read the article

OOA On YouTube:

Interview with Blase Bonpane:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aypbqMdNL-Y

Interview with OOA Board Member Ed Asner:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aypbqMdNL-Y

Interview with Mike Farrell:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aypbqMdNL-Y

Programs of the Office of the Americas include:

WORLD FOCUS, weekly radio interviews with key scholars, analysts and movement leaders who are generally excluded from commercial media (Pacifica Radio, KPFK, Los Angeles). Listen to previous broadcasts of WORLD FOCUS on our website orvisit www.kpfk.org, click on Archives and then click on WORLD FOCUS.

The Office of the Americas is an organization of four thousand people concerned about issues of international justice and peace. The work of the organization is carried out by a small staff, supplemented by seventy volunteers.

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