Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Mark Twain and the Sins of Empire War Foretold
by Ramzy Baroud When I resorted to Mark Twain's writings I attempted to escape, at least temporarily from my often distressing readings on war, politics and terror. But his "The Mysterious Stranger", although published 1916, still left me with an eerie feel.
The imaginative story calls into question beliefs that we hold as a "matter of course" a favorite phrase of his. It summons the awful tendencies of "our race": our irrational drive for violence, be it burning 'witches' at the stake or engaging in wars that only serve the "little monarchs and the nobilities."
As the Iraq war rages on, Twain's words ring truer by the day. "The
loud little handful will shout for war. Then the handful will shout
louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against
the war with speech and pen, and at first will have hearing and be
applauded; but it will not last long; those others will out shout them
and presently the anti-war audiences will thin and lose popularity.
Before long you will see the most curious thing: the speakers stoned
from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men.
And now the whole nation will take up the war-cry, and shout itself
hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and
presently such mouths will cease to open.
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the
nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those
conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them and
refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by
convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the
better sleep he enjoys after the process of grotesque self-deception."
Twain, whose genius undoubtedly
surpasses time and space, wrote the above passages nine decades before
the world's leading statesmen, President George Bush and Prime Minister
Tony Blair forged their case for war, based on falsities and refused to
examine any refutations; they rallied millions, investing on their
ignorance and blind patriotism to carry out a war whose outcome is akin
to genocide. The text was also written long before the thousands who
stood for human rights, rallied and organized against the war, defended
the constitution and civil liberties were "shouted out" and "stoned
from the platform"; thousands of those "fair men" and women have
endured such a fate, the latest being Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved
American mother who lost her son, Casey, in Bush's war for oil,
strategic repositioning of the empire and the neoconservatives'
ceaseless hunt for Israel's illusive 'security'. She too was shouted
out, and in a heart-wrenching letter, she reached the conclusion, most
difficult for any mother to reach, that her son, Casey died for nothing.
But
Bush is adamant to carry on with his costly endeavor that has espoused
so many new chasms within his country, and in the world at large:
religious contentions and political turmoil, damage that neither Mr.
Bush, nor his most luminous advisors have the will nor the brains to
remedy.
"But what does it amount to?" says Twain, using one of
his story's characters, an angel to convey the idea: "nothing at all.
You gain nothing. You always come out where you went in. For a million
years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and
monotonously re-performing this dull nonsense to what end? No wisdom
can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping
little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if
you touches them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to
call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not shamed of it,
but proud."
Sheehan couldn't get an answer for why Casey was
killed; many more might want to live with the illusion that their loss
didn't go in vain; but dead American bodies continue to arrive back to
US soil only at night; the wounded are maltreated and hidden from the
public eye, only occasional courageous reports manage to break the
silence and the perfected propaganda. In Iraq, the sheer number of dead
and dying defies belief; the entire country is now gripped in an
endless strife that shall define the cultural and social disposition of
future generations; it's often easy to comprehend and come to terms
with a total number of deaths when they are presented in a neatly
packaged chart or a website, no matter how harrowing; but once you
learn of the individual stories, you wonder whether the days of burning
witches at the stake were better times: a young girl raped before her
own family and later killed with her own baby; entire families
massacred in broad daylight; militants chopping off limbs and ears and
noses under the watchful eye of the Iraqi police, for their victims
belonged to the wrong sect and stood on the wrong side of the war.
"The
Mysterious Stranger" ended up being a figment of a little boy's
imagination or was it? - its meaning is overreaching and very much
real. The war is real and frightening and hurtful; it's not an
intellectual argument; it cannot be reduced to a few images and
captions and editorials; nothing can ever capture a moment where a
mother receives the corpse of a son or the scene of a father kneeling
before the shattered body of a daughter. It's all real, and it's all
our own doing, whether by supporting, financing and fighting the war,
or by staying silent as it rages on.
Writings 
When I resorted to Mark Twain's writings I attempted to escape, at least temporarily from my often distressing readings on war, politics and terror. But his "
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