Letter: Planned, Accepted and Forced Ignorance

Right on target, June is yet another month of those “it’s lemon and cucumber” June celebrations.

I’m thinking about 40-plus years of teaching and 50-plus years as a journalist. Students today, young and old, are in this amnesia, or in some cases lobotomizing syndrome. Many radical thinkers like myself consider the infantilization and Walmartization/McDonaldsization in the United States as part and parcel the strategy to distract and then erase memory.

Few know about the horrendous crimes of Israel before Oct. 8, 2023. The attack on the USS Liberty, which left 34 Americans dead and 174 others injured — two-thirds of the crew in total, according to a press release organized by the Liberty Veterans Association — has been veiled in controversy. Survivors and former senior intelligence officials have pointed to a deliberate bombardment by Israel and a subsequent U.S. dismissal of the event to pardon its ally.

That was on June 8, 1967.

"For 55 years, we've tried to honor the crew, with little to no support from our government, just like the lack of support we received when we were under attack. Our government has tried to cover the entire attack up as a mere accident. Nothing could be further from the truth," said president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association, Larry L. Bowen.

Now, go back to the Bonus Army soldiers. On July 28, 1932, our government attacked World War I veterans with tanks, bayonets, and tear gas, under the leadership of so-called heroes Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. These WWI vets were part of a Bonus Army who came to Washington, D.C. to make a demand for their promised wartime bonuses.

Disregarding orders, MacArthur decided to finish the job by destroying the Bonus Army. After nightfall, the tanks and cavalry leveled the jumbled camps of tents and packing-crate shacks. It was then put to the torch.

We should continue with the absurdity of ignorance: The Civil War is rarely taught right. Go back 160 years for a little bit of added ignorance: June 19, 1865.

Juneteenth should be a history lesson to illustrate that Abraham Lincoln was not the great emancipator. The Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people only in states like Texas, which were in rebellion against the federal government. They were safely able to continue the institution of slavery until they were forced to end it. Old Abe tied emancipation to colonization, the plan to send Black people out of the country. He actually established one such colony in Haiti.

This event occurred two months after the Civil War. Enslaved Texans were well aware that the war had ended. But they also knew that the absence of federal troops who could enforce the law made any legalities moot.

Ahh, so here we are, 2024, and I have students wondering why the country is “falling apart … our infrastructure frayed … medical care lacking … inflation over 300 percent for many items … and why so much goes to the rich and the war mongers.”

It’s not a red-blue thing, which so many insist now it is, in this carnival-freak show called presidential campaigning.

JP Morgan Chase, Blackrock, Amazon, Palantir or Google and the other Fortune 5000 corporate thieves give little care about which red or blue candidate gets into office. It’s all about the Benjamins. The reality is Biden, Trump, 535 members of Congress and 100 senators are all beholding to their donors, to their political action committees and to the chambers of capitalist power.

Which brave independent tough politicians are calling Biden an enabler of genocide? A dozen? Five? One? Rep. Rashida Tlaib blasted President Biden’s handling of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, deriding him as an "enabler" of genocide.

And the other freak, Donald Trump, what’s his ignorant take on lawful and First Amendment-protected campus rallies for Palestine? Trump told some donors that the student demonstrators are part of a “radical revolution” and promises to defeat them, and even deport individuals en mass.

I have long conversations with older folk, on fixed incomes, who utilize free meals and food. Some are in their 80s, and they have no safety nets to rely on for recovering from a surgery (hmm, $19,000 a month for a rehabilitation center) or no recourse for getting badly needed hearing-aids less than $10,000 a pair.

One woman I know lived in her compact car with her husband for two years before landing some subsidized housing. This woman is grateful for work here on the Oregon coast. Leaving Portland after some dead-end jobs and an apartment with a jacked-up rental hike, the couple found themselves utilizing campgrounds, parking lots, and any other resource they could find.

She knows that those tens of billions of dollars thrown at military offensive weapons companies equate to an inequitable society. She knows the lack of history around how the eight-hour work week was codified hurts current unionization movements. She knows her own plight and her husband’s are repeated millions of times a day in America.

From Black author, radio commentator, activist Margaret Kimberly: “Juneteenth’s only value is if it becomes a day of serious study and political education. That process can start with learning why ‘Jim Crow Joe’ Biden received 90 percent of the Black vote or why the 2020 rebellions after George Floyd’s murder created a need for the state to placate Black people, if only symbolically.”

It is fitting that June is also National Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Awareness Month.

Paul Haeder is a novelist, journalist, educator and author of “Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam,” Cirque Press.