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Passing the Torch, by William T. Hathaway

The baby-boom generation is ending its lap in the human race, and the Fridays-for-future generation is beginning its run. Generational shifts of power are symbolized by the image of passing the torch, but now what the older has to pass on to the younger seems not a torch but a time bomb, a legacy of crises.

To find a way out of the disaster, we need to look at how we got into it, the historical context. The economic and social system of capitalism shapes our times and shapes us. It is a system based on power, the ability of one group to dominate another – owners dominate workers, rich countries dominate poor countries. To understand the effects of this, let’s review a bit of history.

At the beginning of the 20th century Britain and France were the dominant powers, controlling colonies in Africa and Asia from which they extracted great wealth. Germany was becoming more powerful and also wanted colonies, but Britain and France were determined to keep them out. This conflict led to the First World War in which Germany was crushed.

During that time, people in the colonies and other poor countries were rebelling, trying to throw off domination. This movement was most advanced in Russia, where it was based on the principles of Marx and Lenin. In the chaos of the First World War, the Russian workers succeeded in overthrowing the government and creating the world’s first true socialist nation.

After the war, though, the capitalist powers tried to crush the revolution through invasion, sabotage, and economic warfare. These attacks weakened the revolution and gave Stalin the opportunity to seize dictatorial control of Russia. He distorted the democratic principles of Marx and Lenin into an oppressive, totalitarian regime. Then he and his followers shaped the communist parties of China, Vietnam, and Cuba in this dictatorial form. True socialism no longer existed and still doesn’t.

During and after the war, the revolutionary spirit spread to Germany. To squelch it, the German capitalists helped Hitler, a fanatical anti-communist and anti-Semite, seize control and become a dictator. He led Germany into the Second World War and murdered six million Jews plus other minorities.

The Jewish Holocaust set off a chain of ongoing tragedies. It led to the formation of Israel, which Britain and the USA supported primarily so they could have a base in the Mideast close to the energy reserves. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs were pushed off their land, and they were outraged at being forced to pay for the crimes of the Germans. This generated violent Muslim fundamentalism and an ongoing war to get their homeland back. Due to global Muslim solidarity and their cultural need to avenge dishonor, their resistance has now spread worldwide. The West has responded with massive violence from Libya to the Philippines to stamp it out and maintain their access to the resources. US-NATO attacks on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and much of Africa have killed millions but have succeeded only in generating determined hatred in the survivors.

Ironically, the USA is fighting for oil, but the world’s single largest user of oil is the US military which is doing the fighting. All this contributes to the growing environmental disasters. Our poor planet is reeling under human assault. Our drive for consumption is reaching the point where we are consuming ourselves. The world is trapped in a ghastly dilemma.

That’s the bad news, but here’s the good news: History shows us 1) the cause of these calamities is capitalism 2) that system can be overthrown 3) the way to build a new society is by holding to the democratic principles of Marx and Lenin, avoiding both liberal reformism and Stalinist totalitarianism. The political party that I’ve found to have the best understanding of these principles is the Freedom Socialist Party: https://socialism.com/. It offers a torch of knowledge worth passing on to the next generation.

*
William T. Hathaway is the author of Radical Peace, People Refusing War, which tells the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists from the USA, Iraq, and Afghanistan:
https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Peace-People-Refusing-War-dp-0979988691/dp/0979988691/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1629980469
and of Lila, the Revolutionary, a fable for adults about an eight-year-old girl who sparks a world revolution for social justice:
https://www.amazon.com/Lila-Revolutionary-William-T-Hathaway/dp/1897455844/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1629982195&sr=1-1

 

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The First Mistake

by William T. Hathaway

Establishment journalists and politicians are despairingly asking: Why did we fail in our well-meaning efforts to help the Afghan people? What were our mistakes?

But they ignore their first mistake: creating the Taliban.

The USA’s attempts to dominate Afghanistan and its resources began 40 years ago when Jimmy Carter in one of his last acts as president approved a CIA plan to overthrow the Afghan government. That government was no more dictatorial than others in the region, and it was implementing most of the humanitarian programs the USA later claimed it wanted to do: Women had equal rights and access to education, the country had freedom of religion and a well-functioning healthcare system. The rural infrastructure was being improved, and the standard of living was increasing. But the government was communist, and that meant it had to go, no matter how many people had to die.

The people most willing to die killing communists were the fanatical Muslims, who hated this secular government. The CIA helped them attack it, starting with raids on outposts and assassinations of local officials. The government asked the Soviet Union for help, and they sent in troops. The CIA stepped up its involvement, recruiting thousands of mujahideen fundamentalists, financing them, turning them into an army, and launching a full-scale war that brutalized the country for ten years and left two million dead, many of those children who starved in all the chaos. All the young people growing up knew was war. Atrocities were their norm, and they duplicated that later when they became Taliban fighters.

Osama bin Laden and others who later formed the al-Qaeda and Taliban were all on the CIA payroll then fighting the communists. After they won the war, it was inevitable they’d take over the country. They were the strongest force.

Once the Taliban were in power, the USA wasn’t concerned they were persecuting women, gays, and non-Muslims. They were just one of the many dictatorships the USA does business with and doesn’t object to.

That changed, however, when the Taliban became anti-capitalist, as they shifted away from a corporate-dominated economy and towards Islamic socialism. That made them a danger to Western interests. The final straw was when they refused to allow a US company to build an oil pipeline through the country.

Suddenly the Western press was full of atrocity stories – some true, some lies – about how terrible the Taliban were. They became monsters who must be destroyed before they take over the world.

The USA invaded with a massive land and air assault, conquered Kabul, and installed a figurehead president who had previously worked for the US company that wanted to build the pipeline. He was their guy, and the pipeline was at the top of his agenda.

The Taliban merged back into the rural population, where they have deep roots. To find and kill them, the USA and its NATO partners unleashed a campaign of terror – house raids, brutal interrogations, drone strikes, infantry sweeps – that divided the rural population into two groups – the dead and the determined. The survivors were filled with the will to resist, and that proved stronger than American bombs and bullets. With the support of the people, 60,000 Taliban fighters triumphed over 300,000 soldiers in the government army and thousands of NATO troops financed by trillions of US dollars.

The minority who didn’t support the Taliban retreated to Kabul, and now the stories of their trying to flee the country are being used as propaganda to build the myth that the USA, although it unfortunately failed, was trying to do good and defeat evil. But now in the countryside most people are celebrating their victory over mighty America.

This was truly a people’s war, as in Vietnam. The Afghans and Vietnamese proved that the USA can’t win a war against a country in which the majority of the people oppose them. Their victories are a tribute to the strength of the human spirit and a damning judgment of the USA’s attempts to destroy it.

Defeated on earth, the USA is now planning to wage war in space.

In the meantime, the surviving earthlings have learned a valuable lesson: If you unite, organize, and fight long and hard enough, you will win and free yourself from oppressors, whether it’s the USA or the forces it helped create: the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

*

William T. Hathaway is a Special Forces veteran of the US war on Vietnam. He is the author of Radical Peace, People Refusing War, which tells the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists from the USA, Iraq, and Afghanistan:
https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Peace-People-Refusing-War-dp-0979988691/dp/0979988691/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1629980469
and of Lila, the Revolutionary, a fable for adults about an eight-year-old girl who sparks a world revolution for social justice:
https://www.amazon.com/Lila-Revolutionary-William-T-Hathaway/dp/1897455844/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1629982195&sr=1-1

 

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Black Moon Culture

an excerpt from the travel memoir, The Last Tourist, by Nowick Gray

Children of the Machine: From the Be-Bob Reggae Bar to the Black Moon Rave.

08 March 2008

A hundred devotees sat motionless on the sand watching, as if on reality-TV, the spectacle of young Thai men playing skiprope with fire, a 15-foot length of flaming sisal. Thump-thump-a-thump-thump went the pounding “music” in the dark; the dayglo constructions overhead offering the only variety from the relentless beat of the machine. Most of the crowd were men, young travelers from Western lands who shared buckets of Red Bull and local whiskey with their shadow-eyed Thai escorts of the night, or with me in exchange for a few eager taps on my djembe.

It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, with the group of us who started out in the Be-Bob bar. Be-Bob was not the usual kind of casual misspelling; it was an intentionally clever description of its proprietor, a Thai in his mid-twenties who in his own gentle and gracious way, offered to this corner of the world a kind of personal altar to Bob Marley. Day and night the old standards played, “Redemption Song” and “No Woman No Cry,” sometimes accompanied by Mang and friends on guitar or drum, but never out of the looping playlist for long. It was a haven artfully constructed from local rocks and tree limbs, festooned with vines and strings of coral and featuring the burbling sounds of a recreated forest spring. A few feet out the door lay the swath of new road construction, daily heaving with its trucks and bulldozers and graders as the access is prepared for the 200-million-baht, 50-bungalow resort going up on the nearby end of the beach.

A couple of days earlier I had wondered about attending the Black Moon dance party at Ban Tai, just to get a taste of the phenomenon—at least its new moon variant—that attracted so many partygoers to that opposite end of the island. But it seemed a bit far to go, with a pricey taxi ride and no certain return in the late night; and techno music was not really my thing. Meanwhile after a casual jam at the Be-Bob, Mang had the inspiration to throw a party on this same night, which seemed a good, rootsy alternative to the Ban Tai beach scene. He printed up some flyers with the additionally clever come-on, “Be There—Be Bob.” His friends would show up with a piece of metal roofing to fold into a makeshift barbecue, and the usual fare of drinks and smokeables would be on hand to ease guests into cozy conviviality.

So it went… me arriving with djembe in hand fresh from kirtan, already uplifted into seventh-chakra bliss by the vibrations of the beehive-kiva sound temple at the yoga center up the hill. I joined a party of somewhat familiar fellow travelers, seven of us from seven countries. Scattered tales of Jamaica and Amsterdam, Laos and India… but soon the idea arose: who’s up for a trip to Ban Tai? Some waffled. Sandrine flipped a coin: heads, she’ll go. Tempted by the opportunity and a group taxi fare, I yet demurred. The complimentary barbecue food, tasty fish and plates heaped with salad, was just starting to arrive at our table, and the intended jam session was yet to begin. Mang sat pensive and alone—perhaps a trifle discombobulated—behind the bar, watching his only party guests consider an early exit. “Don’t worry,” we half-sang to one another; “Everything’s gonna be all right…” At that moment disembodied Bob joined us for the chorus.

I felt in a sense obligated to honor the personal invitation that had been extended to me, along with the promise of semi-public performance; but on the other hand the party was, so far at least, nearly empty but for the group of tourists about to walk out the door. At the last instant I changed my mind, grabbed my drum, and joined them, promising Mang to come back and jam again another night. As I walked through the door Bob, always on cue, sang a serenade: “You’re running, you’re running, you’re running away…”

Sandrine confided that she always had trouble making decisions. Sometimes she would call a friend for advice; usually she would resort to the coin-flip method. That often entailed more than one result: two out of three, or even up to ten tries, to “increase the probabilities.” I shared that during my recent Vipassana retreat (at a monastery just up the hill from the town of Ban Tai) I had put this very question of nagging doubt and indecision to the teacher. He had a couple of ready answers. “When in doubt, don’t do. Then the task is to ask a friend. If still in doubt, flip a coin.” Evidently Sandrine was already tapped into this timeless spiritual wisdom. I recalled the past year’s deep dark film based on the Cormac McCarthy novel, No Country for Old Men, with the coin flip a device used by the psychopathic killer to doom his victims by their own choice. This resonance was further enriched by the fact that our Irish friend for the night’s road trip was named Cormac.

By the time we reached the taxi stand there were four of us still committed to the journey. But now the taxi driver, taking his ease with friends between the shops in the calm night air, changed his mind, shaking his head as he looked at us as if in dour judgment of our collective cultural (or was it anti-cultural?) folly. No matter; we found another taxi stand, and waited there sipping what was advertised in red block letters on the wall as “Sexy Beer.”

Once deposited under the broad banner of “Black Moon Culture,” we were confronted with a 300-baht entrance fee, unanticipated but unavoidable now that we’d arrived. The scene past the gate was uninspiring: vendors with rainbow wands beside large boards filled with dayglo figures they would paint on body parts. Long booths selling incongruous drinks such as red plastic beach buckets brimming with Jack Daniels. Herds of aimless, faceless people visible only as a pattern of black and white, punctuated by flashing wands of rainbow light. The ever-insistent, never-uplifting deadbeat pulse of the beat, beat, beat.

Where and when had I felt something like this malaise before? Ah, yes… the Hinsdale, Illinois Youth Center, when I was seventeen and looking for something to do on a Friday night.

Eventually people danced. Cormac wandered for two hours looking for his girlfriend who had disappeared in the company of another friend. Sandrine sipped whiskey and coke and talked wistfully of her bungalow and book, Krishnamurti. Even so she was content enough with her decision to go for “the adventure,” and so was I. You never know unless you try. “Better to act,” my teacher had said, “than sit on the fence.” I drank a second beer, sat in the sand astride my drum and tried to play along with the bassy airwaves, refusing an offer of Ecstasy. But the beer didn’t quite do it. The drumming couldn’t really be heard. We joined the dancers. With a little effort and time you could kind of get sucked into the tsunami of sound. After a while that too was boring; we decided it was enough and we should look for a taxi ride home. Cormac gave up on trying to find his girlfriend.

The taxis were doing a brisk business at 3:30 a.m., and we quickly found a ride back to Haad Salad, packed in the back of a pickup with five or six others headed to assorted destinations. The tipsy Swedish blonde sitting across from me could hardly keep her flying fingers off my djembe; but whenever she paused for a moment, the French woman next to me immediately urged me to keep playing. Perhaps, after all, the spirit of Bob was still with us: “jammin till the break of day…”

It was four thirty by the time I reached my bungalow. The decision to turn off the six o’clock meditation bell-alarm was a no-brainer. Sleep when it came was not steady or deep, as the leftover pulse of the beat machine refused to go away… having entered the very structure of my cells, reprogramming my DNA. Joining the others, in the inexorable drift toward Black Moon culture, now I, too, had become a child of the machine.

Fast-forward: 9:30 a.m.

“I woke up this morning, and wrote down this song…”

Order The Last Tourist now from Amazon.

Table of Contents

Part I – Paradise Lost and Found
* Hawai’i: Gateway to the Tropics
* Walking Light: Asia-Pacific Travels

Part II – The Long Way Home: Europe and Latin America

Part III – Healing Journeys
* Amazonia
* Abadiania
* Arunachala
* Ayurveda