[In the closing time of his life, the famed whistleblower
continues to speak out with urgency, in particular about the need for
genuine diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia, as well as the U.S. and
China, to avert nuclear war.]
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CELEBRATING DANIEL ELLSBERG AND A COURAGE UNCONFINED TO THE PAST  
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Norman Solomon
April 11, 2023
Common Dreams
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_ In the closing time of his life, the famed whistleblower continues
to speak out with urgency, in particular about the need for genuine
diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia, as well as the U.S. and China,
to avert nuclear war. _

Daniel Ellsberg, former military analyst who released the "Pentagon
Papers" in 1971, gives the peace sign during a protest December 16,
2010 in front of the White House in Washington, DC. Ellsberg and
several others were arrested for civil disobedience as, Karen
Bleier/AFP via Getty Images

 

In just a few words—"those who control the present, control the past
and those who control the past control the future"—George Orwell
summed up why narratives about history can be crucial. And so, ever
since the final helicopter liftoff from the U.S. Embassy's roof in
Saigon on April 30, 1975, the retrospective meaning of the Vietnam War
has been a matter of intense dispute.

The dominant spin has been dismal and bipartisan. "We went to Vietnam
without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on
other people," Jimmy Carter
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White House in early 1977. "We went there to defend the freedom of the
South Vietnamese." During the next decade, presidents ordered direct
American military interventions on a much smaller scale, while the
rationales were equally mendacious. Ronald Reagan ordered the 1983
invasion of Grenada, and George H.W. Bush ordered the 1989 invasion of
Panama.

In early 1991, President Bush triumphantly proclaimed that reluctance
to use U.S. military might after the Vietnam War had at last been
vanquished. His exultation came after a five-week air war that enabled
the Pentagon to kill upwards of 100,000 Iraqi civilians
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"It's a proud day for America," Bush said
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"And, by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."

Two decades later—delivering what the White House titled "Remarks by
the President at the Commemoration Ceremony of the 50th Anniversary of
the Vietnam War"—Barack Obama did not even hint that the U.S. war in
Vietnam was based on deception. Speaking in May 2012, after he had
more than tripled
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the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Obama said: "Let us resolve
to never forget the costs of war, including the terrible loss of
innocent civilians—not just in Vietnam, but in all wars."

Moments later, Obama flatly claimed
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"When we fight, we do so to protect ourselves because it's necessary."

No matter how much the defenders of the militaristic status quo have
tried to relegate Daniel Ellsberg
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insisted on being present

Such lies are the opposite of what Daniel Ellsberg has been
illuminating for more than five decades. He says
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about the Vietnam War: "It wasn't that we were_ on _the wrong side; we
_were_ the wrong side."

Outlooks like that are rarely heard or read in U.S. mass media. And
overall, news outlets have much preferred to make only sanitized
references to Ellsberg as a historic figure. Much less acceptable is
the Daniel Ellsberg who, since the end of the Vietnam War, was
arrested nearly a hundred times for engaging in nonviolent civil
disobedience against nuclear weapons and other aspects of the warfare
industry.

After working inside the U.S. war machinery, Ellsberg became its
highest-ranking operative to opt out—bravely throwing sand in its
gears by revealing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, at the risk of
spending the rest of his life in prison. The 7,000-page study exposed
lies about U.S. policies in Vietnam told by four successive
presidents. During the 52 years since then, Ellsberg has continually
provided key information and cogent analysis of pretexts for U.S.
wars. And he has focused on what they've actually meant in human
terms.

Ellsberg has explained, most comprehensively in his 2017 landmark book
_The Doomsday Machine_, what is worst of all: The nation's
military-industrial-media establishment refuses to acknowledge, let
alone mitigate, the insanity of the militarism that is logically
headed toward nuclear war.

Helping to prevent nuclear war has been an overriding preoccupation of
Ellsberg's adult life. In _The Doomsday Machine_—subtitled
"Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner"—he shares exceptional
insights from working for the doomsday system as an insider and then
working to defuse the doomsday system as an outsider.

An upsurge of media attention to Ellsberg resulted from the emergence
of other heroic whistleblowers. In 2010, U.S. Army private Chelsea
Manning was arrested for leaking a vast quantity of documents that
exposed countless lies and war crimes. Three years later, a former
employee of a National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden,
went public with proof of mass surveillance by a digital Big Brother
with mind-boggling reach.

By then, Ellsberg's stature as the Pentagon Papers whistleblower had
risen to near-veneration among many liberals in media and others happy
to consign the virtues of such whistleblowing to the Vietnam War era.
But Ellsberg emphatically rejected the "Ellsberg good, Snowden bad"
paradigm, which appealed to some eminent apologists for the status quo
(such as Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote a specious New Yorker piece
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contrasting the two). Ellsberg has always vigorously supported
Snowden, Manning and other "national security" whistleblowers at every
turn.

Ellsberg disclosed in a public letter
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in early March that he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, with a
prognosis of three to six months to live. Now, in the closing time of
his life, he continues to speak out with urgency, in particular about
the need for genuine diplomacy between the U.S. and Russia, as well as
the U.S. and China, to avert nuclear war.

Many recent interviews are posted on the Ellsberg website
[[link removed]]. Ellsberg remains busy talking with
journalists as well as activist groups. Last Sunday, vibrant and
eloquent as ever, he spoke on a livestream video
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Democrats of America.

Grassroots activists are organizing for the national Daniel Ellsberg
Week [[link removed]], April 24-30, "a week of
education and action," which the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and
Democracy, based at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, is
co-sponsoring with the RootsAction Education Fund (where I'm national
director). A central theme is "to celebrate the life's work of Daniel
Ellsberg, to take action in support of whistleblowers and peacemakers,
and to call on state and local governments around the country to honor
the spirit of difficult truth-telling with a commemorative week."

No matter how much the defenders of the militaristic status quo have
tried to relegate Daniel Ellsberg to the past, he has insisted on
being present—with a vast reservoir of knowledge, an awesome
intellect, deep compassion and commitment to nonviolent
resistance—challenging systems of mass murder that go by other
names.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel
free to republish and share widely.

===

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and
executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His next
book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its
Military Machine, will be published in June 2023 by The New Press.
 

* Daniel Ellsberg
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