Foreword
by Larry Pinkney
Though often hidden or distorted, human history is replete
with examples of courage and sacrifice by a relatively few political dissenters
sounding the alarm and speaking truth to power. These dissenters are scorned
and ridiculed by those who control the corporate mass media and its concomitant
systemic machine of perpetual war, death, and destruction. Yet, US society in
particular, and Mother Earth as a whole, are in dire need of these principled
dissenters whose stories represent the very best of struggling humanity. This
is the essence of Cindy Sheehan and why her actions and writings over many
years are of such invaluable and enduring significance. She has repeatedly actualized
the words of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when he said, “Our lives begin
to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
After suffering the terrible loss of her son Casey, in the US
war on Iraq, in 2004, Cindy Sheehan demonstrated an unshakable commitment to
raise awareness nationally and internationally about 1) the underlying and
unacceptable causes of war; 2) who the real purveyors of war actually
are; and 3) the inextricable connection of—militarism and war—to poverty,
corporate hegemony, the obliteration of human rights, ‘racism,’ and the de
facto state sponsored ‘terrorism’ against humanity carried out as an integral
part of the national and global surveillance police-state.
In the stalwart tradition of Rosa Luxemburg, Lucy Parsons,
Fannie Lou Hamer, and so many other courageous women and men of all colors,
Cindy Sheehan has taken her message directly to everyday ordinary people. In
plain language she urges people to critically think, and to link the issues together
in order to bring about an end to the insane militarism, corporate greed, and
environmental ravaging of our Mother Earth.
Well before the conclusion of the eight years of G.W. Bush’s
disastrous rule of perpetual war and unspeakable horrors abroad and at home,
the tiny US corporate/military power elite was preparing and grooming a
successor who would continue and substantively exacerbate the same Bush
policies, while insidiously and effectively masquerading as someone who would
bring about genuine change on behalf of the suffering masses in the US and
globally. This successor and articulate political conjurer was Barack Obama—Mr.
‘hope and change,’ whose second largest 2008 Obama campaign contributor was
none other than Wall Street’s notorious corporate blood-sucking Goldman Sachs.
Thus, in 2008, the handwriting was in fact already on the wall, but with the
complicity of the US corporate-stream mass media and numerous so-called
‘progressives,’ etc., the majority of everyday struggling people were
thoroughly and cynically bamboozled to their own detriment. Indeed, on the third
day of his first term as US President, Barack Obama mercilessly droned the
sovereign nation of Pakistan, murdering children, women, and men
non-combatants. Subsequently, Obama has gone on to massively increase
the use of deadly US drone attacks upon many other sovereign nations in
Africa, Asia, and the so-called ‘Middle East.’ It is estimated that at least 90
percent of the victims murdered and/or maimed by US killer drone attacks are
non-combatant children, women, and men. Thus, Obama spawns more rage and hatred
as a result of these ongoing killer drone attacks, and with it, the concomitant
spiral of terror and perpetual war.
Prior to 2009, when Barack Obama was officially installed as
the nominally ‘black’ designated standard bearer for the US system of global
Empire at home and abroad, there were precious few who had the principled
courage to sound the alarm. Fortunately for us all, Cindy Sheehan and a
relative handful of other dissenters, refused to be complicit with, or silenced
by, the nauseating and deafening chorus in those days by the supporters of
corporate brand Obama’s euphoria of madness on the US
Democrat/Republican plantation of the damned.
Not satisfied with his war crimes abroad, the wily
corporate-controlled Drone Man Barack Obama, in service to the
corporate/military elite, has bestowed upon himself his very own ‘kill
list’—empowering him to target and have killed at will, individuals of any
nationality (including US citizens) in the US, or anywhere else in the world,
whom he, as judge, jury, and executioner, decides must die. This is Barack
Obama’s so-called ‘hope and change.’ Whatever happened to international law and
the US Constitution?
Barack Obama’s repeated annual signing of the so-called
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which includes an outrageous
unconstitutional provision authorizing the indefinite detention of any
person or persons in the US without the due process of a legal defense attorney, a jury of one’s
peers, or even an open trial is—onerous and utterly unacceptable—and is yet
another indication of Obama’s hypocritical and arrogant disdain for the US
Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International
Covenant On Civil and Political Rights.
Cindy Sheehan has long made the connection between US
militarism abroad and political repression, including the militarization of the
police, at home. Thanks to her courage and diligence, an increasing number of
people are becoming aware of just how relevant and extremely important making
these connections are to our very survival as human beings on this precious
planet of Mother Earth.
It is with a sense of urgency that this book containing the
writings of Cindy Sheehan—particularly as they pertain to Barack Obama and the
current US political system—need to be read and re-read with a view
towards making a critical analysis of the recent past, in order to bring about
a seismic political change in the US and avert an even larger pending
political, economic, and social future disaster in the year 2015 and beyond.
May you be inspired to creative action by the clarity and
cutting-edge honesty of Cindy Sheehan’s writings in this book!
Larry Pinkney is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of
Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the
only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights
case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities,
Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour,
formerly known as The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, and more recently on the nationally
syndicated Alex Jones Show, and RT (formerly known as Russia Today). He is
currently founder and curator of the Black Activist Writers Guild (BAWG)
BlackActivistwg.org (Click here: Black Activist Writers Guild). Pinkney is a
former university instructor of political science and international relations,
and his writings have been published in various places, including The Boston
Globe, San Francisco BayView newspaper, Black Commentator, Intrepid Report,
Global Research (Canada), LINKE ZEITUNG (Germany), 107 Cowgate (Ireland and
Scotland), and Mayihlome News (Azania/South Africa). He is in the archives of Dr. Huey P. Newton
(Stanford University, CA), cofounder of the Black Panther Party. For more about
Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th
Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard
Zinn]. (Click struggle-and-win.net Bill Mandel on Larry Pinkney to read excerpts from the book.)
Sarah L. Blum, ARNP is a decorated nurse Vietnam veteran who earned the
Army Commendation Medal serving as an operating room nurse at the 12th
Evacuation Hospital Cu Chi, Vietnam during the height of the fighting in
1967. Because Cu Chi sat on the edge of the Hobo Woods, where all the
fighting took place in 1967, her hospital handled mass casualties
regularly and their operating room became the largest user of fresh
blood in all of Vietnam
Back in the United States, Sarah received her brother soldiers of
Vietnam with their wounds and amputations, cared for them directly and
saw how their physical wounds did not heal when their heads and hearts
were deeply affected. She was awarded the Certificate of Achievement for
exemplary service as head nurse of the orthopedic ward at Madigan Army
Hospital in 1968, where she was also the assistant director of nursing
on evening and night shift in 1970.
