Once More Into the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More… (archive)

(archived from May 31, 2009)

by Scott Creighton

As the forest burns and flames leap from tree to brush, the wildlife stampedes to safety ignoring the clarion call of those they left behind.  Cowardice is their only recognizable feature after their mask of courage melts away.

We who were once the few who stood against the tide of imperialist America’s baseless wars of aggression will stand alone again soon enough. The writing is clear. Our support, our colleagues, our brothers in peace have left us on the battle fields so that they may still scratch out their own secure place in the ghetto that awaits us all.

A once proud and fearless voice for revolution, now panders for “votes” and donations so to secure a seat at the corrupt table of congress… for himself.  Change the system from the “inside”?  Hardly.  “Votes” will not save this land, but may yet still save him a place as an anointed servant to the oligarchy.

It is a sad day for revolutionaries everywhere.

 

The winds have shifted and the worst is now upon us.  What was once a noble and united front has been cloven in two from an unexpected attack; within. The Fifth Column was us.  The “moderate” or “pragmatic” among us has weighed the options and taken the safer path. Our “progressive” activists have turned.

Our numbers are now, despite years of our hard work and the treason and the wars and torture and lies now of TWO administrations, despite all that, our numbers are back where they were at the beginning.  Our voices and our dissent, our outrage over the indignities and atrocities being committed in OUR names, are once again relegated to the fringes.

Unspeakable is our name.

After years of enduring the attacks and insults from the pro-war zealots from the left and the right, the “support the president or shut-up” brigade, we now face slanders and insults from our own ranks as well.  We are as we began; a courageous minority committed to our cause.

The “300″.

The moderates have chosen “respectability” over justice. They flee from the stigma of “extremism” though they avow the rightness of our cause in secret communications or with ambiguous insinuations that they can’t later be held accountable for.

These are the worms who might not have sold out their neighbors who  helped run the underground railroad, but they certainly never took the risk themselves.  And when times changed and the dawn of the emancipation was born, they were the first to adapt the pretense of resistance, claiming they were resisters “all along”.

When it is over, if we are victorious, they will be the first to raise their hands in victory though they never had the stomach to raise them in defiance.  This is how they will sleep with themselves. This is the delusion they will need just to get through the day.

Not everyone has the stomach for a fight.

The winds have shifted and the forest burns faster now than ever before.  Like Lear before us, we curse the winds and rage against the inevitable, but we stand our ground and we fight.

And now we know who we can count on.  The flames have burned off the dead flesh.

“Once more into the breach, dear friends… once more.”

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”