RE-WRITING JAMES BLISH'S BLACK EASTER "GOD IS DEAD" ENDING

James Blish, "Black Easter" wrote:

"I would like to let all the major demons out of Hell for one night, turn them loose in the world with no orders and no restrictions -- except of course that they go back by dawn or some other sensible time -- and see just what it is they would do if they were left on their own hooks like that."

AmbuFortunaZapataGaudi wrote:

I'm not sure that letting all the demons out of hell to do what they want for one night was such a great idea, James! These demons appear to want to save the world, not destroy it. I'm afraid you miscalculated freedom's true value to demons.

Demon 1:

The first demon's name is Major General Smedley Butler.  As soon as he got his freedom, he wrote "War is a Racket," exposing all of his crimes as a gangster for the Government Corporation and detailing the profit and horror of war. He ends his book with a shrieking scream to wake the dead: "TO HELL WITH WAR!"

Sounds like he turned traitor to the Devil just as soon as he got the chance.

"Trading With the Enemy:  An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949," by Charles Higham wrote:

Early in 1934, Irenee du Pont and Knudsen reached their explosion point over President Roosevelt. Along with friends of the Morgan Bank and General Motors, certain Du Pont backers financed a coup d'etat that would overthrow the President with the aid of a $3 million-funded army of terrorists, modeled on the fascist movement in Paris known as the Croix de Feu. Who was to be the figurehead for this ill-advised scheme, which would result in Roosevelt being forced to take orders from businessmen as part of a fascist government or face the alternative of imprisonment and execution? Du Pont men allegedly held an urgent series of meetings with the Morgans. They finally settled on one of the most popular soldiers in America, General Smedley Butler of Pennsylvania. Butler, a brave hero, had been awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor and his brilliant career as commandant of the Marine Corps had made him a legend. He would, the conspiratorial group felt, make an ideal replacement for Roosevelt if the latter proved difficult. These business chiefs found great support for their plan in Hermann Schmitz, Baron von Schroder, and the other German members of The Fraternity.

The backers of the bizarre conspiracy selected a smooth attorney, Gerald MacGuire, to bring word of the plan to General Butler.  MacGuire agreed Butler would be the perfect choice. Butler had attacked the New Deal in public speeches.

MacGuire met with Butler at the latter's house in Newton Square, Pennsylvania, and in a hotel suite nearby. With great intensity the fascist attorney delivered the scheme to the general. Butler was horrified. Although there were many things about Roosevelt he disliked, a coup d'etat amounted to treason, and Butler was nothing if not loyal to the Constitution. However, he disclosed nothing of his feelings. With masterful composure he pretended interest and waited to hear more.

When MacGuire returned, it was with news of more millions and more extravagant plans, which included turning America into a dictatorship with Butler as a kind of Hitler. Once more Butler was infuriated but kept quiet. After MacGuire left on the second occasion, the general got in touch with the White House. He told Roosevelt of the entire plan.

Roosevelt's state of mind can scarcely be imagined. He knew that in view of the backing from high banking sources, this matter could not be dismissed as some crackpot enterprise that had no chance of success. He was well aware of the powerful forces of fascism that could easily make America an ally of Nazism even that early, only one year after Hitler had risen to power.

On the other hand, Roosevelt also knew that if he were to arrest the leaders of the houses of Morgan and Du Pont, it would create an unthinkable national crisis in the midst of a depression and perhaps another Wall Street crash. Not for the first or last time in his career, he was aware that there were powers greater than he in the United States.

Nevertheless, the plan had to be deactivated immediately. The answer was to leak it to the press. The newspapers ran the story of the attempted coup on the front page, but generally ridiculed it as absurd and preposterous. When Thomas Lamont of the Morgan Bank arrived from Europe by steamer, he was asked by a crowd of reporters to comment. "Perfect moonshine! Too utterly ridiculous to comment upon!" was the reply.

Roosevelt couldn't quite let the matter rest. Under pressure from liberal Democrats he set up a special House committee to investigate.  Butler begged the committee to summon the Du Ponts but the committee declined. Nor would it consent to call anyone from the house of Morgan. Then Butler dropped a bombshell. He gave interviews to the press announcing that none other than General Douglas MacArthur was a party to the plot. This again was dismissed by the press, and MacArthur laughed it off.

The committee hearings were a farce. MacGuire was allowed to get away with saying that Butler had "misunderstood" his intentions.  Other witnesses lamely made excuses, and there the matter rested.

It was four years before the committee dared to publish its report in a white paper that was marked for "restricted circulation." They were forced to admit that "certain persons made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country ... [The] committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler."  This admission that the entire plan was deadly in intent was not accompanied by the imprisonment of anybody. Further investigations disclosed that over a million people had been guaranteed to join the scheme and that the arms and munitions necessary would have been supplied by Remington, a Du Pont subsidiary.

Major General Smedley Butler, "I was a Gangster for Capitalism" wrote:

November 1935

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service in the country's most agile military force, the Marines. I served in all ranks from second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

Thus I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers and Co. in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotion. Looking back on it, I feel that I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents.

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 - June 21, 1940) was at the time of his death the most decorated U.S. Marine in history. He was twice the recipient of the Medal of Honor, one of only nineteen to be so honored.

Demon 2:

The second demon's name is Preston. As soon as he got his freedom, he tore the Tetragrammaton Cleric apart.

Daughter-of-a-gun if the Devil doesn't lose again! Where's your little dutch boy, James?

Kurt Wimmer, "Equilibrium" wrote:

Demon 3:

The third demon's name is Contract Murderer.  As soon as he got his freedom, he saw God, and that changed everything.

Robert Nagler wrote:

GOD

The man who must be shot keeps saying, Please God, Please God, Please God. Hearing this, the contract murderer puts up his pistol. The murderer seeks God. The murderer says to the man, I'll give you half an hour; if God changes the circumstances (he can't think of a better word), you live, otherwise ... He walks out, locks the door of the small windowless room and waits. He hopes God will do something. Not a miracle necessarily, but manifest some token. For if there's a God, there may be Forgiveness and for this the murderer will do anything. He hates his life. He hates what he does. He has no memory because thinking about the past is painful. He waits and waits, looking at the door. When the half hour is up, he unlocks the door and walks in. Nothing has changed except the man is in a corner now. He shoots the man.

When the half hour is up, he unlocks the door and walks in. God is there. God forgives the murderer and everything changes. Now the murderer has an ordinary life and an ordinary job. He can think about his job without pain. He has a memory. He can think about the past without pain because his memories are of ordinary years and years and none of the memories contain blood. Then, the murderer's many victims are resurrected. Their memories contain no terror. They have only memories of very ordinary events. They go on to live ordinary lives. God has changed everything.

Robert Nagler
Oxford, PA

Demons 4:

A group of lesser demons called U.S. Soldiers in Iraq. As soon as they got their freedom, they refused to follow orders, went AWOL, fled to Canada, and marched on the streets of their hometowns carrying signs saying "I killed innocent civilians for our government."

David Goodman, "Mother Jones" wrote:

Breaking Ranks.  More and more U.S. soldiers are speaking out against the war in Iraq -- and some are refusing to fight. Photographs by Jeff Reidel.  October 11, 2004.

After returning home to Pennsylvania, Mike Hoffman founded Iraq Veterans Against the War. "You realize that the people to blame for this are not the ones you are fighting."

MIKE HOFFMAN would not be the guy his buddies would expect to see leading a protest movement. The son of a steelworker and a high school janitor from Allentown, Pennsylvania, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1999 as an artilleryman to “blow things up.” His transformation into an activist came the hard way—on the streets of Baghdad.

When Hoffman arrived in Kuwait in February 2003, his unit’s highest-ranking enlisted man laid out the mission in stark terms. “You’re not going to make Iraq safe for democracy,” the sergeant said. “You are going for one reason alone: oil. But you’re still going to go, because you signed a contract. And you’re going to go to bring your friends home.” Hoffman, who had his own doubts about the war, was relieved—he’d never expected to hear such a candid assessment from a superior. But it was only when he had been in Iraq for several months that the full meaning of the sergeant’s words began to sink in.

“The reasons for war were wrong,” he says. “They were lies. There were no WMDs. Al Qaeda was not there. And it was evident we couldn’t force democracy on people by force of arms.”

When he returned home and got his honorable discharge in August 2003, Hoffman says, he knew what he had to do next. “After being in Iraq and seeing what this war is, I realized that the only way to support our troops is to demand the withdrawal of all occupying forces in Iraq.” He cofounded a group called Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and soon found himself emerging as one of the most visible members of a small but growing movement of soldiers who openly oppose the war in Iraq.

Dissent on Iraq within the military is not entirely new. Even before the invasion, senior officers were questioning the optimistic projections of the Pentagon’s civilian leaders, and several retired generals have strongly criticized the war. But now, nearly two years after the first troops rolled across the desert, rank-and-file soldiers and their families are increasingly speaking up. Hoffman’s group was founded in July with 8 members and had grown to 40 by September. Another organization, Military Families Speak Out, began with 2 families two years ago and now represents more than 1,700 families. And soldier-advocacy groups are reporting a rising number of calls from military personnel who are upset about the war and are thinking about refusing to fight; a few soldiers have even fled to Canada rather than go to Iraq.

In a 2003 Gallup Poll, nearly one-fifth of the soldiers surveyed said they felt the situation in Iraq had not been worth going to war over. In another poll, in Pennsylvania last August, 54 percent of households with a member in the military said the war was the “wrong thing to do”; in the population as a whole, only 48 percent felt that way. Doubts about the war have contributed to the decline of troop morale over the past year—and may, some experts say, be a factor in the 40 percent increase in Army suicide rates in Iraq in the past year. “That’s the most basic tool a soldier needs on the battlefield—a reason to be there,” says Paul Rieckhoff, a platoon leader in the New York National Guard and former JPMorgan banker who served in Iraq. Rieckhoff has founded a group called Operation Truth, which provides a freewheeling forum for soldiers’ views on the war. “When you can’t articulate that in one sentence, it starts to affect morale. You had an initial rationale for war that was a moving target. [But] it was a shell game from the beginning, and you can only bullshit people for so long.”

With his baggy pants, red goatee, and moussed hair, Mike Hoffman looks more like a guy taking some time off after college than a 25-year-old combat veteran. But the urgency in his voice belies his relaxed appearance; he speaks rapidly, consumed with the desire to get his point across. As we talk at a coffee shop in Vermont after one of his many speaking engagements, he concedes, “A lot of what I’m doing is basically survivor’s guilt. It’s hard: I’m home. I’m fine. I came back in one piece. But there are a lot of people who haven’t.”

More than a year after his return from Iraq, Hoffman is still battling depression, panic attacks, and nightmares. “I don’t know what I did,” he says, noting that errors and faulty targeting were common in the artillery. “I came home and read that six children were killed in an artillery strike near where I was. I don’t really know if that was my unit or a British unit. But I feel responsible for everything that happened when I was there.”

When he first came home, Hoffman says, he tried to talk to friends and family about his experience. It was not a story most wanted to hear. “One of the hardest things when I came back was people who were slapping me on the back saying ‘Great job,’” he recalls. “Everyone wants this to be a good war so they can sleep at night. But guys like me know it’s not a good war. There’s no such thing as a good war.”

Hoffman finally found some kindred spirits last fall when he discovered Veterans For Peace, the 19-year-old antiwar group. Older veterans encouraged him to speak at rallies, and steadily, he began to connect with other disillusioned Iraq vets. In July, at the Veterans For Peace annual meeting in Boston, Hoffman announced the creation of Iraq Veterans Against the War. The audience of silver-haired vets from wars in Vietnam, Korea, and World War II exploded into applause. Hoffman smiles wryly. “They tell us we’re the rock stars of the antiwar movement.”

Several of Hoffman’s Marine Corps buddies have now joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, and the stream of phone calls and emails from other soldiers is constant. Not long ago, he says, a soldier home on leave from Iraq told him, “Just keep doing what you’re doing, because you’ve got more support than you can imagine over there.”

Members of IVAW led the protest march that greeted the Republican convention in New York, and their ranks swelled that week. But the protest’s most poignant moment came after the march, as veterans from wars past and present retreated to Summit Rock in Central Park. Joe Bangert, a founding member of Vietnam Veterans of America, addressed the group. “One of the most painful things when we returned from Vietnam was that the veterans from past wars weren’t there for us,” he said. “They didn’t support us in our questioning and our opposition to war. And I just want to say,” he added, peering intently at the younger veterans, “we are here for you. We have your back.”

There was no Iraq veterans’ group for Brandon Hughey to turn to in December 2003. Alone and terrified, sitting in his barracks at Fort Hood, Texas, the 18-year-old private considered his options. He could remain with his Army unit, which was about to ship out to Iraq to fight a war that Hughey was convinced was pointless and immoral. Or he could end his dilemma—by taking his own life.

Army private Brandon Hughey is one of six U.S. soldiers seeking refugee status in Canada.

Desperate, Hughey trolled the Internet. He emailed a peace activist and Vietnam veteran in Indianapolis, Carl Rising-Moore, who made him an offer: If he was serious about his opposition to the war, Rising-Moore said, he would help him flee to Canada.

The next day, there was a knock on Hughey’s door: His deployment date had been moved up, and his unit was leaving within 24 hours. Hughey packed his belongings in a military duffel, jumped in his car, and drove north. As he and Rising-Moore approached the Rainbow Bridge border post at Niagara Falls, Hughey was nervous and somber. “I had the sense that once I crossed that border, I might never be able to go back,” he recalls. “It made me sad.”

Months after fleeing Fort Hood, the baby-faced 19-year-old still sports a military-style buzz cut. Sitting at the kitchen table of the Quaker family that is sheltering him in St. Catharines, Ontario, Hughey tells me about growing up in San Angelo, Texas, where he was raised by his father. In high school he played trumpet and loved to soup up cars. But when his father lost his job as a computer programmer, he was forced to use up his son’s college fund. So at 17, Hughey enlisted in the Army, with a $5,000 signing bonus to sweeten the deal.

Quiet and unassuming, Hughey grows intense when the conversation turns to Iraq. “I would fight in an act of defense, if my home and family were in danger,” he says. “But Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. They barely had an army left, and Kofi Annan actually said [attacking Iraq was] a violation of the U.N. charter. It’s nothing more than an act of aggression.” As for his duty to his fellow soldiers, he insists, “You can’t go along with a criminal activity just because others are doing it.”

So far, only six U.S. soldiers are known to have fled to Canada rather than fight in Iraq. But in 2003, the Army listed more than 2,774 soldiers as deserters (military personnel are classified as having deserted after not reporting for duty for more than a month), and many observers believe the actual number may be even higher; the Army has acknowledged that it is not aggressively hunting down soldiers who don’t show up. The GI Rights Hotline, a counseling operation run by a national network of antiwar groups, reports that it now receives between 3,000 and 4,000 calls per month from soldiers seeking a way out of the military. Some of the callers simply never thought they would see combat, says J.E. McNeil, director of the Center on Conscience and War. But others are turning against the war because of what they saw while serving in Iraq, and they don’t want to be sent back there. “It’s people learning what war really is,” she says. “A lot of people are naive—and for a while, the military was portraying itself as being a peace mission.”

Unlike Vietnam, when young men facing the draft could convincingly claim that they opposed all war, enlistees in a volunteer military have a tough time qualifying as conscientious objectors. In the Army, 61 soldiers applied for conscientious objector status last year, and 31 of those applications were granted. “The Army does understand people can have a change of heart,” notes spokeswoman Martha Rudd. “But you can’t ask for a conscientious objector discharge based on moral or religious opposition to a particular war.”

Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey may be the most unlikely of the soldiers who have come out against the war. A Marine since 1992, he has been a recruiter, infantry instructor, and combat platoon leader. He went to Iraq primed to fight. “9/11 pissed me off,” he says. “I was ready to go kill a raghead.”

Jimmy Massey went to Iraq a gung-ho Marine, but returned shaken after killing civilians.

Shortly after Massey arrived in Iraq, his unit was ordered to man roadblocks. To stop cars, the Marines would raise their hands. If the drivers kept going, Massey says, “we would just light ’em up. I didn’t find out until later on, after talking to an Iraqi, that when you put your hand up in the air, it means ‘Hello.’” He estimates that his men killed 30 civilians in one 48-hour period.

One day, he recalls, “there was this red Kia Spectra. We told it to stop, and it didn’t. There were four occupants. We fatally wounded three of them. We started pulling out the bodies, but they were dying pretty fast. The guy that was driving was just frickin’ bawling, sitting on the highway. He looked at me and asked, ‘Why did you kill my brother? He wasn’t a terrorist. He didn’t do anything to you.’”

Massey searched the car. “It was completely clean. Nothing there. Meanwhile the driver just ran around saying, ‘Why? Why?’ That’s when I started to question.”

The doubts led to nightmares, depression, and a talk with his commanding officer. “I feel what we are doing here is wrong. We are committing genocide,” Massey told him. He was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and given a medical discharge.

Back in his hometown of Waynesville, North Carolina, Massey got a job as a furniture salesman, then lost it after speaking at an antiwar rally. Two or three times a week, he puts on his Marine uniform and takes a long walk around the nearby town of Asheville carrying a sign that reads: “I killed innocent civilians for our government.” The local police now keep an eye out for him, he says, because people have tried to run him over.

When asked what he would say to someone who thinks the way he did before the war, Massey falls uncharacteristically silent. “How do you wake them up?” he finally responds. “It’s a slow process. All you can do is tell people the horrible things you’ve seen, and let them make up their own minds. It’s kind of the pebble in the water: You throw in a pebble, and it makes ripples through the whole pond.”

Jeffry House is reliving his past. An American draft dodger who fled to Canada in 1970 (he was number 16 in that year’s draft lottery), he is now fighting to persuade the Canadian government to grant refugee status to American deserters.

“In some ways, this is coming full circle for me,” says the slightly disheveled, 57-year-old lawyer. “The themes that I thought about when I was 21 years old now are reborn, particularly your obligation to the state when the state has participated in a fraud, when they’ve deceived you.” A dormant network has been revived, with Vietnam-era draft dodgers and deserters quietly contributing money to support the legal defense of the newest American fugitives.

House’s strategy is bold: He is challenging the very legality of the Iraq war, based on the Nuremberg principles. Those principles, adopted by a U.N. commission after World War II in response to the Nazis’ crimes, hold that military personnel have a responsibility to resist unlawful orders. They also declare wars of aggression a violation of international law. House hopes that in Canada, which did not support the war in Iraq, courts might sympathize with the deserters’ claims and grant them legal refugee status; the first of his cases was to be heard by the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board this fall.

On an August afternoon, I follow House as he darts through Toronto traffic on his way to see a new client—a young American who had been living in a homeless shelter for 10 months before revealing that he was on the run from the U.S. Navy. He disappears into a run-down brown brick building; moments later, a thin, nervous young man in shorts and a T-shirt emerges onto the sidewalk and introduces himself as Dave Sanders. Over dinner at a nearby Pizza Hut, he tells me his story.

Sanders dropped out of 11th grade in Bullhead City, Arizona, in 2001. He got his GED and was hoping to study computers, but couldn’t get financial aid. “The only reason I joined the military was to go to college,” he says. That was late 2002, and I ask Sanders whether he then considered he might end up in combat. “I was told,” he says, “that everything would be ended by the time I got out of boot camp.”

Dave Sanders, age 20, left his Navy unit because he felt that Iraq was "a very unjust war."

Sanders completed boot camp in March 2003, two days before the United States began bombing Iraq. He started training as a cryptologist; in his spare time he surfed the web, reading news from the BBC and Al Jazeera. He was growing skeptical of the administration’s motives in Iraq. “Stuff wasn’t adding up,” he recalls. “Bush was trying to connect the terrorists with Iraq, and there was no proof for that. I was starting to think that we kind of put the blame on Iraq so we could go over there and make money for companies.” He considered what his job might be if he were deployed; as a cryptologist, he could have been handling information leading to raids and arrests. “I didn’t want to be a part of putting innocent people in prison,” he says. “I felt that what we were doing there was wrong.”

In October 2003, Sanders learned that his unit was headed to Iraq. For several weeks he agonized over what to do; then he bought a one-way Greyhound ticket and headed to Toronto. He picked up odd jobs and kept quiet about his predicament, fearing that authorities might send him back to the United States. Finally, he read an article about Jeremy Hinzman, another deserter who had fled to Canada and was being represented by Jeffry House. When I spoke to Sanders, House was helping him file for refugee status.

As we talk, Sanders keeps tapping his feet and twisting his long fingers. “Sorry if I seem nervous,” he finally blurts. “I never really talked to the media before. I’m a shy person.” I ask if he surprised himself by defying his orders. He nods. “I never really thought I could stand up to a whole institution.”

Though Sanders has kept away from the spotlight, other deserters have attracted headlines around the world—and drawn criticism from the war’s supporters. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly called their actions “insulting to America, and especially to those American soldiers who have lost their lives fighting terrorists.”

But Sanders says he doesn’t actually consider himself a deserter. “I don’t think I did anything wrong by turning down an illegal order,” he says. “I don’t know what it’s called—I think it’s Nuremberg?—that’s what I followed by leaving.” When I ask if he would call himself a pacifist, he says he is not sure what the term means and asks me to explain. Then he shakes his head. “I believe if you’re being attacked you have a right to defend yourself. But right now, we are not the ones being attacked. That’s a reason I think this is a very unjust war.”

Sanders is an only child; his father served in the Marines for 13 years. “My family is pro-war, pro-Bush, pro-everything that’s happening,” he says. “They would really not support what I’m doing.” He has emailed them to tell them that he’s alive, but they have not replied. “I miss them,” he says, his eyes welling. “I love them. And I hope they can find it in their hearts to forgive me.”

Sergeant John Bruhns is sharply critical of soldiers who go AWOL. “I feel that if you are against the war, you should be man enough to stay put and fight for what you believe in,” he says. But he also doesn’t believe in making a secret of his opinions about the war. “I’m very proud of my military service,” he tells me from his post with the Army’s 1st Armored Division in Fort Riley, Kansas. “But I am disheartened and personally hurt, after seeing two people lose their limbs and a 19-year-old girl die and three guys lose their vision, to learn that the reason I went to Iraq never existed. And I believe that by being over there for a year, I have earned the right to have an opinion.”

Bruhns returned in February from a one-year deployment in Iraq. He is due to complete his Army service next March, but his unit may be “stop-lossed”—their terms extended beyond their discharge dates to meet the Pentagon’s desperate need for troops. Critics have called this a backdoor draft, a way to force a volunteer military into involuntarily serving long stints in an unpopular war. A California National Guard member has filed a lawsuit challenging the policy, and Bruhns has considered joining the case.

“I’m really a patriotic soldier,” the 27-year-old infantryman tells me; he addresses me as “sir” and stops periodically to answer the squawk of his walkie-talkie. He signed up as a full-time soldier in early 2002, after serving five years in the Marine Corps Reserve. “I was really upset about what happened on 9/11,” he recalls, “and I really wanted to serve. I lost a buddy of mine in the World Trade Center. I believe what we did in Afghanistan was right.”

But what he saw in Iraq, Bruhns says, left him disappointed. “We were fighting all the time. The only peace is what we kept with guns. A lot of stuff that we heard on the news—that we were fighting leftover loyalists, Ba’ath Party holdovers—wasn’t true. When I arrested people on raids, many of them were poor people. They weren’t in with the Ba’ath Party. The people of Iraq were attacking us as a reaction to what the majority of them felt—that they were being occupied.”

Among his fellow soldiers, Bruhns adds, a majority still support the war. But, he notes, “This is a new generation. We have the Internet, discussion forums, cable news. Soldiers don’t just march off into battle blindly anymore. They have a lot more information.”

Vietnam figures prominently in soldiers’ conversations about Iraq. Nearly every one of the Iraq veterans I spoke with has relatives who served in the military, and nearly every one told me the same story: When they grew cynical about the Iraq war, the Vietnam veterans in their family immediately recognized what was happening—that another generation of soldiers was grappling with the realization that they were being sent to carry out a policy determined by people who cared little for the grunts on the ground.

Resistance in the military “is in its infancy right now,” says Hoffman, whose cousins, uncle, and grandfather all did their time in uniform. “It’s growing, but it’s going to take a little while.

“There was a progression of thought that happened among soldiers in Vietnam. It started with a mission: Contain communism. That mission fell apart, just like it fell apart now—there are no weapons of mass destruction. Then you are left with just a survival instinct. That, unfortunately, turned to racism. That’s happening now, too. Guys are writing me saying, ‘I don’t know why I’m here, but I hate the Iraqis.’

“Now, you realize that the people to blame for this aren’t the ones you are fighting,” Hoffman continues. “It’s the people who put you in this situation in the first place. You realize you wouldn’t be in this situation if you hadn’t been lied to. Soldiers are slowly coming to that conclusion. Once that becomes widespread, the resentment of the war is going to grow even more.”

Demon 5:

The fifth demon's name is Lee Atwater. He ran the most racist presidential campaign in modern history for George Bush, promoted policies that resulted in 50 million deaths per year, played his electric guitar lasciviously at Bush's inauguration, then got a brain tumor, and before he died he expressed deep remorse for having contributed to the creation of the Bush regime.

Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin in "George Bush:  The Unauthorized Biography" wrote:

Among those Republicans who had succeeded in winning the White House in two-way races (excluding years like 1948 or 1968, when the totals were impacted by Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats, or by George Wallace), Bush's result was the weakest since fellow Skull and Bones alumnus William Howard Taft in 1908. [fn 51] These patterns might also indicate that the dominant role of the electoral votes of the former Confederate States of America within the Electoral College under the post-1968 Southern Strategy of the national Republican Party may be subjected to erosion in 1992, especially under the impact of the Bush economic depression.

It is also to be hoped that 1988 will prove in retrospect to have represented the high-water mark of hired gun media and campaign consultants in presidential elections. Atwater at one time boasted that his staff contained at least 28 media experts and political operatives who had worked in at least three previous presidential elections, many of which were also winning efforts for the GOP. These men were drawn from New York's Madison Avenue and from Washington's Connecticut Avenue "Power Alley," where many of the best-connected political consulting firms have their offices. It is clear that men like Atwater, Ailes, Spencer, Deaver and others have performed a function in the consolidation of a modern American leviathan state that is exactly analogous to the vital services rendered to the Third Reich by Propaganda Minister Dr. Josef Goebbels between 1933 and 1945. There is a crime of menticide which consists in the deliberate destruction of the cognitive powers of another human being, and the campaigns organized by these consultants have represented menticide on a mass scale. Further: if the international economic policies inflicted on the world by the Reagan-Bush and Bush regimes have exacted a yearly global death toll of upwards of 50 million needless deaths, primarily in the developing sector, it has been the image mongers and public relations men who have organized the US domestic electoral consensus that has permitted those genocidal policies to go forward. For all of these reasons, the media and campaign consultants are fascists. They are virulent fascists typical of the American totalitarian state of the late twentieth century, and this is true even if these consultants lack the bombastic trappings of the central European fascists of more than a half century ago.

Lee Atwater celebrated the Bush inauguration by playing his electric guitar at a rhythm and blues concert in which his gyrations bordered on the outright obscene. Although Lee Atwater had masterminded the most racist presidential campaign in modern history, he still had the gall during the spring of 1989 to be a candidate for a post on the Board of Trustees of Howard University, the historically black institution of higher learning in Washington, DC. Atwater was forced to abandon this outrageous candidacy by a mass mobilization of the Howard students.

Some months later, Atwater was found to be suffering from a malignant brain cancer. It is rumored around Washington that Atwater in his final days became a convert to Roman Catholicism and expressed repentance for many of the deeds he performed during his political career. It appears certain that he personally apologized to some of the candidates whom he had vilified during the course of various political campaigns. When Atwater died in April, 1991 at the age of 40, it was widely rumored in Washington that he had expressed the deepest remorse for having contributed to the creation of the Bush administration.

Demon 6:

The sixth demon's name is William Powell.  In 1968, he wrote "The Anarchist Cookbook," which Erowid.com describes as: "a veritable grab-bag of techniques for psychedelic urban guerrilla warfare, the AC contains recipe-style, how-to sections on the home manufacture of drugs and explosives, demolitions, weapons, and electronic eavesdropping, making the AC the first mass market publication created with the express purpose of subverting modern technology in order to overthrow the government." After Powell became a confirmed Anglican Christian in 1976, he wrote Lyle Stuart, Inc., the publisher of his book, and requested it be taken out of print.  When they refused to do so, based on their theft of his copyright, he wrote an Author's review and posted it at Amazon.com which said:

"A Repentant Anarchist," by William Powell wrote:

I want to state categorically that I am not in agreement with the contents of "The Anarchist Cookbook" and I would be very pleased (and relieved) to see its publication discontinued. I consider it to be a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print.

Demon 7:

The seventh demon's name is Ralph Rimar, second in command at the so-called Intelligence Department of the Kingdom of Henry Ford, a fascist state within the United States found guilty by the National Labor Relations Board in more than half a dozen states of maintaining "a regime of terror and violence directed against its employees."  When he got the chance, Ralph wrote "Heil Henry! -- The Confessions of a Ford Spy," to "undo some of the many wrongs I have helped to accomplish." 

George Seldes in "Facts and Fascism," wrote:

A man named Ralph Rimar, who was in Harry Bennett's department for many years, and during the great strike which preceded the C.I.O. unionization, and who was second in command to Norval Marlette, chief of the so-called Intelligence Department of the Ford Empire, and therefore fourth man in the hierarchy from Ford himself, wrote a book which he called Heil Henry! -- The Confessions of a Ford Spy. No publisher would take it. I have read the entire manuscript and have obtained permission from Rimar's agents to quote from it.

The Ford Empire, Rimar shows, is ruled by a triumvirate for its owners, the Ford family. The triumvirs are: Harry Bennett, who bosses 130,000 men in peacetime, more in wartime; Charles Sorensen, an admirer of Hitler's, who bosses production; and W.I. Cameron, who directs public relations and who until recently spoke over the Ford Radio Hour. It was Cameron who published the notorious forgeries called "The Protocols of Zion" in Ford's anti-Semitic publication called the Dearborn Independent, and when Ford in 1927 recanted his anti-Semitism (at least officially) it was Cameron who continued his anti-Semitic activities through the Anglo-Saxon Federation of Detroit and Boston. 

Here, then, are extracts from the amazing unpublished manuscript:

EXTRACTS FROM RIMAR'S CONFESSIONS

"Perhaps in telling my story [Rimar begins] I can undo some of the many wrongs I have helped to accomplish. ... 

"It is not a pleasant story. ... It is a tale filled with violence and brutality, with human baseness and deceit, with greed, depravity and ruthlessness. It is a tale of the underworld, a tale describing the inner and furtive workings of the greatest individual industrial empire in the world, the Ford Motor Company.

"International fascist tieups, gangsterism within the plant as well as support of the Fifth Column without; connections between Ford Company officials and vice rings; relationships between Ford henchmen and city, state and government authorities; the use of criminals by the company, the protection of Nazis, the bribery of government witnesses; the torture, mutilation and murder of union men; the efforts to instigate race riots; the constant relentless plotting against tens of thousands of Ford workers."

[This is Rimar's introduction. The manuscript bears out these promises. All the fascist actions and horrors are described in the  book.]

"For years I have been one of the key men in the Ford Gestapo. ... Within Ford's domain I soon found there was no liberty, no free speech, no human dignity ... the vast power of Ford extended into courts, schools, prisons, clubs, banks, even in to the national capital, enveloping us all in a black cloud of suppression and fear.

"To those who have never lived under dictatorship it is difficult to convey the sense of fear which is part of the Ford system."

Demon 8:

The eighth demon's name is Chuck Barris who held down two jobs, one as the creator of The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show, and the second as a CIA assassin who dispatched thirty three victims. In his book, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," he wrote: "It was 1981, and I had holed myself up in this New York hotel -- the Phoenix Hotel -- terrified of everything, ashamed of my life. Until, finally, I realized my salvation might be in recording my wasted life unflinchingly. Maybe it would serve as a cautionary tale, and maybe it would help me understand why." 

New York, 2002:  "I came up with a new game show idea recently. It's called 'The Old Game.' You got three old guys with loaded guns on stage, they look back at their lives, see who they were, what they accomplished, how close they came to realizing their dreams. The winner is the one who doesn't blow his brains out. He gets a refrigerator.

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