{"id":233450,"date":"2023-04-17T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2023-04-17T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=233450"},"modified":"2023-04-13T04:09:14","modified_gmt":"2023-04-13T03:09:14","slug":"daniel-ellsberg-has-foiled-those-who-want-him-confined-to-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/04\/daniel-ellsberg-has-foiled-those-who-want-him-confined-to-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Daniel Ellsberg Has Foiled Those Who Want Him Confined to the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Daniel Ellsberg in 2020 by Christopher Michel<\/p><\/div>\n

11 Apr 2023 – <\/em>In just a few words \u2014 \u201cthose who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future\u201d \u2014 George Orwell summed up why narratives about history can be crucial. And so, ever since the final helicopter liftoff from the U.S. Embassy\u2019s roof in Saigon on April 30, 1975, the retrospective meaning of the Vietnam War has been a matter of intense dispute.<\/p>\n

The dominant spin has been dismal and bipartisan. \u201cWe went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people,\u201d Jimmy Carter\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0soon after entering the White House in early 1977.\u00a0\u201cWe went there to defend the freedom of the South Vietnamese.\u201d During the next decade, presidents ordered direct American military interventions on a much smaller scale, while the rationales were equally mendacious. Ronald Reagan ordered the 1983 invasion of Grenada, and George H.W. Bush ordered the 1989 invasion of Panama.<\/p>\n

In early 1991, President Bush triumphantly proclaimed that reluctance to use U.S. military might after the Vietnam War had at last been vanquished. His exultation came after a five-week air war that enabled the Pentagon to kill upwards of\u00a0100,000 Iraqi civilians<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s a proud day for America,\u201d Bush\u00a0said<\/a>. \u201cAnd, by God, we\u2019ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two decades later \u2014 delivering what the White House titled \u201cRemarks by the President at the Commemoration Ceremony of the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War\u201d \u2014 Barack Obama did not even hint that the U.S. war in Vietnam was based on deception. Speaking in May 2012, after he had\u00a0more than tripled<\/a>\u00a0the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Obama said: \u201cLet us resolve to never forget the costs of war, including the terrible loss of innocent civilians \u2014 not just in Vietnam, but in all wars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moments later, Obama flatly\u00a0claimed<\/a>: \u201cWhen we fight, we do so to protect ourselves because it\u2019s necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such lies are the opposite of what Daniel Ellsberg has been illuminating for more than five decades. He\u00a0says<\/a>\u00a0about the Vietnam War: \u201cIt wasn\u2019t that we were\u00a0on\u00a0<\/em>the wrong side; we\u00a0were<\/em>\u00a0the wrong side.\u201d<\/p>\n

Outlooks like that are rarely heard or read in U.S. mass media. And overall, news outlets have much preferred to make only sanitized references to Ellsberg as a historic figure. Much less acceptable is the Daniel Ellsberg who, since the end of the Vietnam War, was arrested nearly a hundred times for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience against nuclear weapons and other aspects of the warfare industry.<\/p>\n

After working inside the U.S. war machinery, Ellsberg became its highest-ranking operative to opt out \u2014 bravely throwing sand in its gears by revealing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, at the risk of spending the rest of his life in prison. The 7,000-page study exposed lies about U.S. policies in Vietnam told by four successive presidents. During the 52 years since then, Ellsberg has continually provided key information and cogent analysis of pretexts for U.S. wars. And he has focused on what they\u2019ve actually meant in human terms.<\/p>\n

Ellsberg has explained, most comprehensively in his 2017 landmark book\u00a0The Doomsday Machine<\/em>, what is worst of all: The nation\u2019s military-industrial-media establishment refuses to acknowledge, let alone mitigate, the insanity of the militarism that is logically headed toward nuclear war.<\/p>\n

Helping to prevent nuclear war has been an overriding preoccupation of Ellsberg\u2019s adult life. In\u00a0The Doomsday Machine<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 subtitled \u201cConfessions of a Nuclear War Planner\u201d \u2014 he shares exceptional insights from working for the doomsday system as an insider and then working to defuse the doomsday system as an outsider.<\/p>\n

An upsurge of media attention to Ellsberg resulted from the emergence of other heroic whistleblowers. In 2010, U.S. Army private Chelsea Manning was arrested for leaking a vast quantity of documents that exposed countless lies and war crimes. Three years later, a former employee of a National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, went public with proof of mass surveillance by a digital Big Brother with mind-boggling reach.<\/p>\n

By then, Ellsberg\u2019s stature as the Pentagon Papers whistleblower had risen to near-veneration among many liberals in media and others happy to consign the virtues of such whistleblowing to the Vietnam War era. But Ellsberg emphatically rejected the \u201cEllsberg good, Snowden bad\u201d paradigm, which appealed to some eminent apologists for the status quo (such as Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote a\u00a0specious New Yorker piece<\/a>\u00a0contrasting the two). Ellsberg has always vigorously supported Snowden, Manning and other \u201cnational security\u201d whistleblowers at every turn.<\/p>\n

Ellsberg disclosed in a\u00a0public letter<\/a>\u00a0in early March that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, with a prognosis of three to six months to live. Now, in the closing time of his life, he continues to speak out with urgency, in particular about the need for genuine diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia, as well as the U.S. and China, to avert nuclear war.<\/p>\n

Many recent interviews are posted on\u00a0the Ellsberg website<\/a>. Ellsberg remains busy talking with journalists as well as activist groups. Last Sunday, vibrant and eloquent as ever, he spoke on a livestream\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0sponsored by Progressive Democrats of America.<\/p>\n

Grassroots activists are organizing for the national\u00a0Daniel Ellsberg Week<\/a>, April 24-30, \u201ca week of education and action,\u201d which the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy, based at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, is co-sponsoring with the RootsAction Education Fund (where I\u2019m national director). A central theme is \u201cto celebrate the life\u2019s work of Daniel Ellsberg, to take action in support of whistleblowers and peacemakers, and to call on state and local governments around the country to honor the spirit of difficult truth-telling with a commemorative week.\u201d<\/p>\n

No matter how much the defenders of the militaristic status quo have tried to relegate Daniel Ellsberg to the past, he has insisted on being present \u2014 with a vast reservoir of knowledge, an awesome intellect, deep compassion and commitment to nonviolent resistance \u2014 challenging systems of mass murder that go by other names.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org<\/a> and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His next book,\u00a0<\/em>War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,\u00a0will be published in June 2023 by The New Press.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original – counterpunch.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

11 Apr 2023 – In just a few words \u2014 \u201cthose who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future\u201d \u2014 George Orwell summed up why narratives about history can be crucial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":233451,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,2299,2670,1126,1050,2571,2200,70,2940,1594,481],"class_list":["post-233450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-daniel-ellsberg","tag-exceptionalism","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-us-empire","tag-usa","tag-vietnam-syndrome","tag-war-economy","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233452,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233450\/revisions\/233452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}