And the band played Waltzing Mathilda

This is my favorite anti-war song. "And the band played Waltzing Mathilda" was originally written in 1971 Eric Bogle. This is the version performed by The Pogues, which I find to be the most powerful cover. While the song was originally written about the Battle of Gallipoli in World War 1, there are many universal themes about war in it that make the song especially relevant today.


Although the events recollected occurred almost 100 years ago, it is just as relevant today as when it was originally based. With a much more advanced medical presence in combat areas today, the number of fatalities has been reduced significantly. As a result, the number of survivors with permanent disabilities has drastically increased as well. In the song the protagonist has had his legs blown off, and as he arrives home and is being carried off his ship, the welcoming band plays the traditional Australian folk song "Waltzing Matilda". This soldier is not unaware to the irony of this, as he can no longer waltz as a result of the war. I've always loved this metaphor, and how the lyrics are subtle in articulating it. As the song closes with the haunting question, "Who'll go-a-waltzing Matilda with me?" I'm always struck by the despair in that line. It is impossible for me to relate to the level of alienation a solider must feel upon returning from combat, especially if they've had a significant injury. Most of us will thankfully never experience the horrors of that situation, but we should never be passive to those who try to romanticize it as being something glorious and necessary.

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech: Where are we now?

It takes a powerful speaker to simultaneously claim two opposing standpoints, and convincingly present them as if there is no contradiction. And that is precisely what President Obama accomplished in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, where he subjected the prize committee to his rendition of the Orwellian mantra “War is Peace”.
In expressing the unease he felt about accepting the prize under his current circumstances, President Obama contemplated the words Martin Luther King Jr. delivered at the same award ceremony years ago.

“'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.' As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.”

Yet it is increasingly becoming unclear who or what that threat is, if it was ever clear in the first place.
On May 31, 2009, abortion doctor George Tiller was shot and killed during a church service by Scott Roeder, an anti-abortion activist.
On June 10th, 2009, white supremacist and Holocaust denier James Wennekervon Brunn shot and killed security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns during an attempted shooting spree at the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC.
On November 5, 2009, U.S. Army major Nidal Malik Hasan went on a shooting spree, killing 13 people and wounding 30 others at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. While his motivation remains unclear, there has been some speculation that he had ties to Anwar al-Awlaki, a known al-Qaeda recruiter.
On Christmas day, a wealthy young man from Niger, attempted to blow up the airliner he was on with explosives planted in his underwear.
On February 18th, Joseph Stack, a disgruntled software engineer, flew his private plan into the IRS building in Austin Texas. In the attack he injured 13 employees and claimed the life of Vernon Hunter, an IRS manager and war veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam.
Even as I type this, the news is reporting that an IRS office in Ogden, Utah is being evacuated after the discovery of a mysterious white substance found in an envelope.
None of these terrorist attacks were planned or commenced from the mountainous regions of the Afghan-Pakistan border or in Baghdad, Iraq. How can Obama claim to be facing the “world as it is” when this “world as it is” is not isolated to the middle-east? The words of Dr. King and Mohandas Gandhi should not be trivialized as a luxury that pragmatic heads of states cannot afford, when those very claims to realism buckle under closer investigation. It may be that the words of King and Gandhi resonated the most with the war-weary and the underprivileged, but their activism was not mere preaching to the choir. Their words apply just as much to the President of the United States as the solider fighting in Afghanistan, or the Iranian protesting in the streets of Tehran.

In keeping with his notions of moral justice and national values, the President went on to deliver this observation:

“we lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend”

I wonder now what ideals President Obama was defending when he signed a one-year extension of the Patriot Act on Saturday, with no provisions made to protect privacy. I had assumed those ideals he was referring to in Norway were the right to privacy, or as Obama himself said during his 2004 keynote speech at the DNC, the freedom to “say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door”. It now appears that what he was defending was the right of executive privilege, and of systematic invasion into peoples personal lives under the guise of national security.
When tackling the issue of climate change, this line stuck out to me the most:

“It's also why the world must come together to confront climate change. There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, more famine, more mass displacement -- all of which will fuel more conflict for decades.”

This sobering statement seemed to show that our commander in chief was taking initiative in anticipating not only the natural disasters that climate change threatens us with, but also the very real possibility of eco-terrorism. It also hinted at a reversal of the Bush Doctrine, which justified the US in preemptively declaring war on a nation that is perceived to be threatening, to what could have been a bold new Obama Doctrine, where we preemptively confront conflict with diplomacy and negotiation before they boil over into acts of terrorism and violence.
Yet only one week later, when President Obama arrived at Copenhagen for the international summit to confront climate change, this attitude of collective cooperation and bold action seemed to dissipate as well. What we got was a much different scene, a scene that journalist Naomi Klein described as:

“...a particular model of dealing with climate change is dying. It is revealing itself before the world as nothing more than a final scramble for the remaining resources of a planet in peril. That’s what’s going on at the Bella Center. And when you’re in there, you can feel it. It feels really ugly.”

The lack of a legally-binding agreement amongst nations to drastically cut emissions was seen by many as a squandered opportunity on part of President Obama. For all his talk of the US becoming a world leader in the production of green-technologies and standing up to the challenges that climate change presents us with, it seemed like President Obama's participation in the summit was at best no more than a photo op, and at worst a cop-out to corporate interests.
I say all this with Cornell West's reaction upon hearing about the Nobel Prize in mind, saying that we need to “keep [Obama] accountable and loving, and self-critical not self-righteous.” In fact, I'll end this post with a video of what Cornell West had to say, as I think he promptly sums up my motivation for writing what I've tried to express here: