Common Sense for the Twenty-First Century

Introduction

xiii Introduction The George W. Bush Years have been the greatest threat to international justice and peace in world history. He has endangered the people of the United States and the world with a vision of endless wars. He has enraged the international community with his banal arrogance and threats. A sycophant media and a constantly clapping Congress revel as cheering sections for his nationalistic fundamentalism and fanatical jingoism. He presides over the dead of Afghanistan, the dead of Iraq, the dead of our loyal troops and wounded without number. Indeed the wounds of his militarism have damaged the people of the planet and called into question the future of the United States of America. George W. Bush came to power under the cloud of non-election. Action taken by the Supreme Court to select him as President has been questioned by leading legal scholars. The Bush presidency recalls the years of the selected President Rutherford Hayes who, as Bush, failed to win the popular vote and who did as much as possible to destroy the period of reconstruction after the Civil War. For four years, Hayes was known as “Your Fraudulency.” These commentaries are presented as a judgment on the Bush presidency. Our hope is that the resilient people of the United States will be able to overcome a regime that has done nothing for the common good of the people of the United States and which has endangered the planet on behalf of its military, industrial, gun and prison cronies. The manipulation of fear by war-mongering profiteers is the lowest form of corrupt politics. Over ninety years ago, January 16, 1914, a college freshman gave a speech The Call of Our Age at the Dr. Albert Edwin Smith’s Annual Oratorical Contest at Ohio Northern University. He won the $50.00 prize for the best oration. That freshman, an immigrant from Italy who worked his way through school as a printer, was my father, Blase A. Bonpane, a Judge of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County. In his entire career, not one of his decisions was ever reversed by a xiv higher court. Written prior to the League of Nations and the United Nations , his oration foretold the necessity of such agencies of international law. As a twenty-year old student at the outset of World War I, my father saw clearly what needed to be done; we had to abolish the war system and to build a peace system. He gave The Call of Our Age. The Office of the Americas is responding to his call. Thanks Dad. Here is his oration: Through the silent, solemn, march of the centuries, fraught with strife and struggle, the world has ever gone forward and upward. Entombed in the ages gone by are the shattered remains of tyranny, of iniquity, of human oppression. Lawlessness and brute force are no more the ruling powers. Despotism and unfounded persecution have submitted to law and government. Today we look back from our pinnacle of civilization with surprise and horror to behold “man’s inhumanity to man.” In all of the civilized world of this era our institutions are for justice and equality. Education smiles with vigor. Christianity sings her song of hope. More than ever before, the world throbs with humanity; more than ever before human suffering is sought to be reduced; more than ever before, the cry of peace and good will resounds throughout the earth. But alas! In our age of civilization, the vitals of human progress are being forever stunned and sapped of their lifeblood by a dreadful relic of primeval years—that pestilent scourge of war. The fruit of man’s handiwork representing years of tireless toil is squandered in a single encounter. The richest in health and vigor, the most promising industrial productiveness, are being drawn from the ranks of youth to quench the bloody thirst of war. Yet this war has in great part been caused by the unsound reasoning of modern statesmanship. For years the mind of man was misled by that fallacious doctrine that preparation for war secures peace. “Burden the people with taxes, build artificial volcanoes, parade them up and down the high seas and defy the world to attack us!” Then, they said, “We shall have peace.” Have we eyes and yet see not that while this policy was being upheld, each nation regarded with jealous eyes any increase in armament by the other? One day England built mammoth war machines...