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Memorial Day: Remember The Dead And Salve The Wounds Of The Living

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When friends and strangers wish me a “happy” Memorial Day I want to shout back “there is nothing ‘happy’ about Memorial Day” in remembering those who have given the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of our nation.

It is a day to lay flowers on the graves of dead soldiers.  There is nothing happy in this act of remembrance.

During this weekend and on this day especially, families and friends visit cemetaries to remember their dead, clean their graves and leave tokens of love and affection.  The 9-11 generation has now joined our ancestors who have gone before them–we have been remembering them in quintessential American fashion–with round the clock television broadcasts that focus on surviving veterans and policy discussions on how to address their needs.

The broadcasts will end tonight, although the killing and dying will not.

America, weary by more than a decade of continuous warfare and exorbitant spending, forges ahead in the Afghanistan conflict, which looks more and more like the Vietnam War in every way:  a futile effort, led by a corrupt head of state, in a country where no one expects to win Afghani “hearts and minds” and ultimately we have quietly admitted to ourselves that even America will be unable to repel the Taliban from its retrogressive advance against modernity.

To his credit, President Obama has carried out a successful lethal campaign against Al-Qaeda leadership, killing them one by one and accelerated America’s withdrawal from active combat missions by one year now planned to end in 2013.

Yet the legacy of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are affecting thousands who survived–the walking and wheelchair bound wounded–the obvious and not so apparent casualties that require ongoing and extensive medical care delivered by a bureaucratic matrix in the Veteran’s Administration (VA)–the nation’s largest hospital system.  This is our social compact to care for those who fought and sustained injury on our behalf, now rests on tenuous ground.  Today, less than one-half of one percent of the total population serves in the armed forces.  Very few of us have relatives or friends in uniform, making the war and its casualties more and more disconnected from our everyday lives.

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Shockingly, according to the VA, 18 veterans commit suicide everyday, registering 20 percent of total suicides in America, despite the small fraction of the population that serve.

Indeed, suicides committed by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans total about 6,500 per year, now exceeding the number of the total dead–1,857 in Afghanistan and 4, 485 in Iraq (through its official conclusion on Dec. 15, 2011).

Women veterans commit suicide three times the average of US population according to Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN).  More than 283,000 women have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and 139 have died.  But women soldiers are more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted during these wars by colleagues.  Indeed, the rates of reported  sexual assaults are mind boggling (men are sexually assaulted too and more than likely under reported to authorities).

According to SWAN, more than 19,000 sexual assaults occur annually in the ranks, which equates to 52 sexual assaults each day. Like in civilian life, sexual assault crimes are under reported at 13.5 percent of total assaults.  The unacceptable outcome that results from these crimes, is that women develop PTSD not from serving in war fighting a foreign enemy, but having survived a rape or sexual assault by a fellow soldier while at war.  Adding insult to injury, only 32 percent of PTSD claims submitted to the VA by women survivors are granted.  So many sexual assault survivors feel doubly victimized for good reasons.

So as we visit our dead today, let’s also remember the living, the walking wounded in body and soul.  The psychic wounds of war plague everyday living for thousands of veterans for the horror they may have witnessed or for the sexual crimes that may have trespassed their minds and bodies.  Many are alone and edge toward an embrace of death and self-destruction. This is what faces America in our moment of remembrance– the high cost of war is the collateral damage done to the souls of the living.

Press your cheek against my medals, listen through them to

 my heart

Doctor, can you see me if I’m naked?

Spent longer in this place than in the war

No one comes but rarely and I don’t know what for

Went to that desert as man did before

Farewell and believing and hope not to die

Hope not to die and what was the life

Did we think was awaiting after

Lay down your stethoscope back off on your skills

Doctor can you see me when I’m naked?

                                         —Quarto, by Adrienne Rich

Image of  the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers at Arlington National Cemetary courtesy of Wikipedia

Tanya L. Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University who teaches about human rights in East Central Europe and the former Yugoslavia.  She is a Harriman Institute affiliated faculty member. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi was a nationally recognized LGBT civil rights activist who worked for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force during the campaign to lift the military ban in the early 1990s. Domi also worked internationally in a dozen countries for more than a decade on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights, gender issues, sex trafficking, and media freedom.  She is currently writing a book about the emerging LGBT human rights movement in the Western Balkans.

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Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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