Revolutionary thought of the day: I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I aint a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of
Continue readingTag: war resisters
wmtc: rtod: nope, i ain’t gonna kill nobody
Revolutionary thought of the day: I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I ain’t gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich
Continue readingwmtc: frank showler: called to be faithful
Frank Showler, born in 1919, died last week at the age of 102. Frank was a foundational figure in the social-justice activist community, seemingly participating in every demonstration, rally, vigil, and campaign. It was a universal saying: It’s not a demo until Frank shows up. And show up he
Continue readingwmtc: the only lesson to be learned from afghanistan: war is a waste
Veterans for Peace protest, 2016 As the US finally ends its occupation of Afghanistan, watching the media obsess on the specifics of the pullout has brought me no end of head-shaking. The violent chaos of the exit makes for sensational images and startling headlines, always good for the business of media.
Continue readingwmtc: police resisters: not the solution to systemic racism, but an extremely positive development
I was shocked when Detective Dmaine Freeland, an active duty officer on the NYPD force, publicly condemned the Minneapolis officer who killed George Floyd and the other cops who witnessed the murder and did nothing to stop it. To say this is unusual is a massive understatement. It’s absolutely unheard
Continue readingwmtc: what i’m reading: political graphic nonfiction: emma goldman, muhammad ali, eugene v. debs
I have been collecting graphic nonfiction with leftist political themes. I just love these books and am indulging myself in buying them. I was planning to review them, but I’ve decided to simply post images of the covers, the names of the books and the creators, and a quote from
Continue readingwmtc: what i’m reading: ali: a life by jonathan eig
Ali: A Life is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary person. It’s an epic page-turner at more than 500 pages. This is simply a fascinating book about an utterly fascinating person. If Muhammad Ali hadn’t existed, you couldn’t make him up. No fiction character on this scale would be believable. It
Continue readingwmtc: what i’m reading: ali: a life by jonathan eig
Ali: A Life is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary person. It’s an epic page-turner at more than 500 pages. This is simply a fascinating book about an utterly fascinating person. If Muhammad Ali hadn’t existed, you couldn’t make him up. No fiction character on this scale would be believable.
Continue readingwmtc: 11.11: there is no glory in war
Eleven people, on war. * * * * Imprisoned for opposing U.S. involvement in thewar in Europe, Debs ran for President from jail. He garnered 1,000,000 votes, at a time whenthe US population was 103,208,000, andonly men could vote. These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the
Continue readingwmtc: rotd: frederick douglass, prophet of freedom
Revolutionary thought of the day: Douglass’s great gift, and the reason we know him of today, is that he found ways to convert the scars Covey left on his body into words that might change the world. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom This is what every abuse
Continue readingwmtc: 11.11
11 anti-war books, parts 1 and 2. 11 anti-war songs. Robert Fisk: “…Heaven be thanked that the soldiers cannot return to discover how their sacrifice has been turned into fashion appendage.” Why no red poppy, why no white poppy: It’s that time of year again, the week when no one dares
Continue readingwmtc: something you can do with your shock and outrage: support military resistance to u.s. concentration camps
As the outrages pour out of the US daily, or seemingly hourly, good people’s shock and horror are often accompanied by feelings of frustration and helplessness. Far too many well-intentioned organizations are lining up around the midterm elections, as if the answer lies only at the ballot box. Many people
Continue readingwmtc: welcome to the allan and laura new york city history reading club
The theme of this year’s TD Summer Reading Club — a national program (developed by Toronto Public Library) that more than 2,000 Canadian libraries participate in — is Feed Your Passions, or as some are calling it, geeking out. Allan and I are going to join the fun with our
Continue readingwmtc: chelsea manning will be free!!!!
This is the best news I’ve seen in a long, long time. Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who became one of the most prominent whistleblowers of modern times when she exposed the nature of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who then went on to pay the price with
Continue readingwmtc: war resister ryan johnson needs our help
Our friend Ryan Johnson, a war resister, is now in military prison. Ryan and his partner Jenna Johnson lived in Canada for more than 11 years. After running out of court challenges, and exhausted from living in limbo for more than a decade, the Johnsons returned to California, and Ryan
Continue readingwmtc: what i’m reading: the evil hours, a biography of post-traumatic stress disorder
The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is an outstanding book — meticulously researched, but written in a compelling, accessible style, and with great humanity and compassion.
Author David J. Morris unearths the social and cultural history of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the fourth most common psychiatric disorder in the US. He surveys the potential treatments. He explores the role of social justice in our understanding of PTSD.
But above all, Morris confronts the meaning of trauma, in society and in his own life. Morris was a U.S. Marine stationed in Iraq. After narrowly escaping death, he returned home questioning everything he thought he knew — and eventually having to face the reality of his own trauma. Morris’ dual role as both researcher and subject give this book a unique power as history, social science, and personal essay.
People have known for centuries, for millennia, that traumatic events produce after-effects, but different cultures in different eras have explained those effects in different ways. The modern history of trauma is linked to the carnage of 20th Century war. And our current understanding of PTSD owes everything to the Vietnam War, and the experience of returning veterans who publicly opposed the war.
In this way, the history of PTSD encompasses a history of 1960s and 1970s peace activism, especially of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a group that began a sea-change in the culture of the United States. As a student of peace, I found this part fascinating.
Taking this even further, Morris links PTSD and social justice. Powerless and marginalized people are more likely to be traumatized by one or more of the four principal causes of PTSD: war, genocide, torture, rape. Taking a social and cultural perspective forces us to confront a world that causes these traumas. In this view, PTSD is not so much an illness as a moral condition brought on by the worst of human society.
The United States Veterans Administration (VA) sees it quite differently. To the VA, PTSD is strictly a medical condition. And this matters greatly, because research about PTSD is almost entirely funded and controlled by the VA. Explaining trauma as purely medical or biological doesn’t address the causes at all. In fact, it does the opposite — it normalizes PTSD as a natural consequence of unavoidable circumstances.
As for treatment, Morris surveys what’s out there and finds most of it useless. VA hospitals and insurance companies prefer therapies that can be “manualized” — made uniform, with a certain number of treatments and little or no emotional engagement from the therapist. Statistically, these types of therapies appear to be useful — until one learns that the numbers don’t include all the patients who drop out! Talk about cooking the books: everyone for whom the treatment isn’t working or, in many cases, is actually worsening their symptoms, is simply ignored.
Morris himself feels that therapeutic talks with an empathetic person with some training goes further than neuroscience can. “What they [the VA] seem to want instead,” Morris writes, “is mass-produced, scalable, scripted therapies that make for compelling PowerPoint slides.”
Readers of this blog may know that I have PTSD. Much of The Evil Hours brought a shock of recognition — the feeling that someone else is expressing your own thoughts, saying exactly what you’ve been thinking all along. Morris perfectly articulates how trauma plays out in one’s life, the depths of change it brings about.
Morris writes: “We are born in debt, owing the world a death. This is the shadow that darkens every cradle. Trauma is what happens when you catch a surprise glimpse of that darkness.”
In the immediate aftermath of my own trauma, while trying to write about my experience, this is exactly the image I fixated on. We are, all of us, dancing on the edge of a great precipice, usually unaware of how terrifyingly close we are to that edge. Then something happens, and we understand it, not in some theoretical way, but immediately and profoundly, perhaps in a way humans are not equipped to understand. We talk about “the fragility of life” but we don’t know what that is — until we do. Then we spend a lifetime trying to live with the knowledge.
“One of the paradoxes of trauma,” writes Morris, “is that it happens in a moment, but it can consume a lifetime. The choice of how much time it is permitted to consume is usually in the hands of the survivor.”
The Evil Hours may be very useful for people who are figuring out how to stop PTSD from consuming any more of their lives. It is certainly a must-read for anyone interested in the effects of trauma on the human mind.
Continue readingwmtc: the greatest, forever. rest in power muhammad ali.
Revolutionary thought of the day, from a revolutionary American.Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated …
Continue readingwmtc: rest in power, daniel berrigan and michael ratner
The world lost two great fighters for peace and justice this past week.Daniel Berrigan was a lifelong peace activist, a man who was ready and willing to put his body and soul on the line. He was a writer, a thinker, a pacifist, an idealist, a pragmatis…
Continue readingwmtc: what i’m reading: the deserters, a hidden history of world war 2
No one knows exactly how many US soldiers deserted from the Vietnam War, nor how many young men resisted conscription by going either to jail or to another country. The most conservative account puts the number at about 50,000, the highest at about dou…
Continue readingwmtc: u.s. iraq war resisters: the struggle continues
Still war resisters. Still in Canada. Still fighting to stay.So far, the change in government hasn’t helped the Iraq War resisters who remain here, nor the ones who were forced out of Canada who would like to return. The Trudeau government could do thi…
Continue reading