Watch Video: [wmv 49.7M]

Speech given by Sunsara Taylor, World Can't Wait advisory board member and writer for Revolution newspaper, at "Voices for Impeachment" at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, January 4, 2007, sponsored by World Can't Wait.

Every generation, each period of history, puts its stamp on the world.  But not every generation lives through pivotal epoch-shaping events.  The generation that rose up and abolished slavery -- the generation that lay down in the face of the Nazis.  These are among the generations that are celebrated or scorned.

The Nobel Prize winning British playwright Harold Pinter said last year, "The Bush Administration is the most dangerous force that has ever existed.  It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany because of the range and depth of its activities and intentions worldwide."

Driving out the Bush Regime before 2008 must be the mission of all of living in this country today, or else everything that Bush has done continues no matter who becomes the next president.

Will we be remembered as the people who sat back and passively accepted the wholesale murder of Iraqi people even though we knew the whole premise of the war was lies?

Will we be the people who accepted a new doctrine of pre-emptive war that spreads this to other countries?

The people who allowed all forms of torture: sleep deprivation, beatings, water-boarding, dogs, sexual violence to become legal?

Who allowed habeas corpus -- a cornerstone of the rule of law that prevents arbitrary, indefinite detention -- to be revoked?

The people who learned to accept government surveillance of emails, of phone calls, of bank accounts and students" records"

The people who accepted signing statements...no-fly lists...and the jailing of journalists?

Will the movement that has made such strides in restricting abortion get what they"re after next: ending birth control, preaching virginity as a girl's worth, and child-bearing and submission to their husbands as a form of worship after that? 

Will the fact of evolution and a scientific understanding of the world be buried, the next generation disarmed of the ability to think critically, to stop global warming, and to simply be awed at the wonders of the natural world?

Will history be re-written -- as it already has been in Christian fundamentalist textbooks and as is being attempted in a different way on college campuses by academic hit-men like David Horowitz -- to erase and excuse the horrors of slavery and lynchings, the genocide of the Native Americans, and conquest of foreign lands?

Catherine Crier, a former Republican judge from Texas, writes of a movement that "would like to see the United States under biblical law.  Comparable to countries like Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran"a nation governed by Old and New Testament scripture.  Born-again Christianity will supplant the Constitution."  She ends this passage with this, "For all of those Americans who believe that our democracy is safe, you are wrong.  Today, the radical Right is winning, and they know it.  Sooner rather than later, we may be living in a very different country, a country that had been ours, a country that will be theirs."

These are the huge changes that we are living through.  And they are a lot further along than most people realize.

THIS is the direction that was not derailed or even challenged in the 2006 elections. 

There were no ads that showed the bodies of Iraqi children in town after town shot down by U.S.  troops, promising to immediately withdraw from Iraq.  No ads that showed the photos of Abu-Ghraib, and implored you to vote out everyone who approved the Military Commissions Act.  No ads that railed against candidates who favor criminalizing abortion, who oppose birth control, or who are promoting discrimination and a culture of intolerance towards gay people.

Through this election and since, there is a yawning chasm between what people want and what they actually got.  Despite millions turning out at the polls largely motivated by their deep opposition to the war on Iraq and the Bush program as a whole, Nancy Pelosi has insisted impeachment is off the table.  Now, it is a sobering indicator of what has initiative in politics that John Conyers, one of the most liberal members of Congress who has done more to expose the impeachable offenses of George Bush than almost anyone and who has even participated in the World Can't Wait, has recently come out and said its time to give impeachment a rest.

What are the reasons that Conyers gives?  The Metro Times on December 20th covered a speech he gave in Detroit where he outlined three reasons. 

For one, Conyers argues that instead of focusing on impeachment we should focus on getting a Democrat in the White House in 2008.

But let us be clear: if George Bush is not impeached and removed from office for his crimes, then everything his regime has done -- the doctrine of preemptive war, the torture, the assault on the separation of church and state, the undermining of the rule of law -- all of this is legitimized and will continue, no matter who becomes the next president.

Conyers also argues that we should not tie up Congress with impeachment proceedings for months, but instead should be putting attention on Iraq.  But, George Bush has made it abundantly and redundantly clear: the troops will not be withdrawn on his watch.  Impeaching the president and driving his regime from power is entirely bound up with ending this illegal war.

Let's remember, as even George Bush is acknowledging in the eulogizing of Gerald Ford, that near impeachment of Nixon flowed out of a period of "turmoil," "one of the most divisive moments in our nation's history."

These were divisions over an unjust war in Vietnam and a whole host of other struggles against the oppression of black people and women and other critical questions.  The political turmoil that led to the removal of Nixon from office was completely bound up with the process of getting out of that unjust war in Vietnam and today, as then, the impeachment of George Bush has everything to do with ending this unjust war.

Finally, Conyers argues that impeachment has little chance of success.  As the article puts it, "not because there's an obvious absence of any culpability on the part of the president, but rather...bipartisan support would be needed...and that support simply isn't there." 

But here we must be very clear again: All this is saying is that the only ones who can set terms politically are George Bush's neo-cons and religious fascists and that everyone else has to march along constricted by the terms they set.  No.  What this makes very plain is that it is on the people to mobilize themselves in political protest demanding the ousting of the Bush regime that creates such a political uproar in society that those in power feel compelled to change their positions.

Again, let's look back at how Nixon won the presidency in a landslide election but just two years later he resigned in shame.  The U.S. war in Vietnam was going terribly.  The military was disintegrating.  The whole of society was in political upheaval -- campuses were being shut down and taken over, soldiers were in political rebellion, hundreds of thousands were out in the streets, the music of the time pulsed with disaffection and dreams of a better world, revolution was on the lips of many among the most oppressed -- and millions more were on the verge of losing their faith in the whole political system.  It was in the face of all this that some Republicans changed their position and voted for impeachment, that John Dean, a member of Nixon's own cabinet, refused to lie for him, where his subordinates refused to carry out Nixon's request to fire the special prosecutor investigating Watergate and where the whole dynamic in society was radically reversed.

Today all this is being rewritten as if this was an unfortunate and painful period and the pardon of Nixon by Gerald Ford is being upheld as a model for national unity and healing.

But this is a moment when the real lessons of that period are more relevant than ever.  When Nixon said he"d end the war by escalating it to Cambodia, campuses across the nation were shut down in the largest student strike in the history of this country.  This is something the purveyors of war for empire fear - but this is something that people who have no interest in today's war should be working urgently with every resource they can command to achieve.

World Can't Wait is calling on all of you to help organize teach-ins at 100 campuses this spring to bring the full truth about the crimes being commit in our names.  And once people know, they have a responsibility to act.  The students need to be challenged to shake off all the, "What about my grades, what about my career, will it really make any difference, what about me?"  And start thinking and acting about the world we live in.  Who gave young people today the idea that we can't change the world?  Driving out this criminal regime must become the mission of this generation.

Also, get the DVDs of the Bush Crimes Commission where ex-government officials, first-hand witnesses, and recognized experts indict, document and convict the Bush administration for war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

In the Call for the World Can't Wait - Drive Out the Bush Regime, we say, "This whole idea of putting our hopes and energies into "leaders" who tell us to seek common ground with fascists and religious fanatics is proving every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to demobilize people."

We have to challenge and change -- not accept the limits of -- the political terms that exist in the halls of power.  We need to completely break with the deadly logic that has kept so many people paralyzed and passive in the face of one horror after another for the last five years.

Over and over again, the Bush regime proposes - or gets caught doing something - outrageous.  At first the Democrats make some noises of opposition, then they get reasonable, and eventually capitulate, and yesterday's outrage becomes today's institutionalized horror.  Again, as the World Can't Wait Call says, "That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop you will learn - or be forced - to accept."

Look what we have learned to accept.

There's been Roberts, Alito, the Patriot Act I, the Patriot Act II, the Terri Schiavo theocratic lunacy, the NSA spying, the Military Commissions Act, it just goes on and on and on.  And now, we're seeing the same thing happen - again - with the war on Iraq.  The Democrats promised a "new direction," but already they are accommodating, and now Bush is about to announced sending 20,000 MORE troops.

This must stop!  There will be no savior from the Democratic Party!

There is another force in society.

There are people.  Millions and millions of people.  People who are sick of this war. 

Troops who don't believe in their mission stuck on their second and third tour of duty. 

Thousands still scattered across the country by Hurricane Katrina and millions more whose smoldering anger at how Black people were treated there has been inflamed again by the NYPD's 50 shots that killed Sean Bell. 

Women and gay people whose fundamental rights are being systematically shredded. 

Rivers of immigrants who not long ago clogged the streets of every city in this country in protest. 

Intellectuals and artists who are not ready to bow down to a king. 

All the people who tried to give expression to their sentiments through this election. 

These people, totaling in their millions, are the political force with the potential to bring all this to a halt.  They have been missing from the equation - channeled into supporting candidates and a process that offered no alternative.  This has demoralized people not just here but all over the world who look to what is happening here and say where are they?  People who are watching bodies be chewed by dogs in the streets of Baghdad every day can not see your bumper-stickers -- they don't hear your gripes and complaints over dinner with friends --they need to see millions of people in the streets driving the regime responsible for this from power!

In this culture of instant gratification, a lot of people say, "We protested the war but it didn't do any good."

Wrong. It did a LOT of good. The government didn't listen -- but the world did and the people in this country did.

Before the war even began the whole world could see a very large section of people acting against the injustice of this war.  This got debated throughout society -- it opened up a whole lot more room for people to think, and planted doubts even among those who still lined up behind the President.

And then, as events unfold, as lies were exposed and as Iraq descended into a gruesome civil war these doubts grew.  The president's popularity plummeted from 80% approval to below 30%.

This makes it harder for Bush to project an intimidating strength in the Middle East and forces those in the military to really weigh the morality and legality of the orders they are being commanded to carry out.

People don't always get to see their results immediately.  Imagine if, after their first march, the Civil Rights workers had looked into the hardened faces of the Southern police and authorities and decided they had accomplished nothing and gave up.  Imagine if, after the big moratorium in 1967 against the Vietnam War, the students and others had summed up that because they didn't stop the war nothing had been accomplished and all gone home.  History would have turned out very differently.

And now, with the stakes even higher than they were in Vietnam, is NOT the time say protest makes no difference.  We should take George Bush and Cheney at their word when they say this "War on Terror" -- which is really, in essence, a war for permanent empire -- will last generations.  We should take seriously Bush's decision to increase the size of the military in order to fight this war for a very long time. 

This war was waged pre-emptively.  It is a war of aggression.  Now Iraq's morgues are overflowing, villages have been reduced to rubble, economy and infrastructure is decaying, and returned U.S. troops talk openly about how they were given a free-pass to massacre civilians.

Under the rubric of the "War on Terror" Bush demanded and Congress passed the Military Commissions Act.  Now George Bush and any future president have the legal right to disappear anyone, never press charges, never tell the family, and to have them tortured or killed -- everything we saw at Abu-Ghraib and more -- indefinitely with absolutely no legal recourse. 

These things I am talking about -- preemptive war and torture -- are war crimes.  So is collective punishment and targeting civilians, hospitals and ambulances.  And yet, again, there was bipartisan support for, to take one example, the decimation of Fallujah, once a city of 350,000.  70% of the city was bombed to the ground.  The whole city was cut off from electricity or water for weeks, was pounded with more than one ton of bombs per person, was declared a "free fire" zone, and yes, there were U.S.  snipers targeting hospitals, children, and ambulances.

These are war crimes.  These are crimes against humanity.

So, look.  As other speakers have emphasized, there is no question that there are grounds for impeachment.  The questino is will the people of this country politically rise up and create a political situation where impeachment is put back on the table, where indictments and even resignation become realistic?  Or will we be complicit in these war crimes and these crimes against humanity? 

The biggest problem is not that people support the President, but that too many people are inactive, tuned out, they don't know how bad it is and they don't know how they can affect things.  The only way this will change is if challenge people around what is being done in our names.

Seriously, imagine how much further along we'd be if visible resistance fueled a national conversation where the whole country had to take a side: Are you for torture or are you against it?  For the slaughter of the Iraqi people or against it?  For spying on the public or against it?  For preaching abstinence, ignorance and patriarchy or against it?  For denying fundamental rights to gay people or against it?  For abandoning Black people and others in toxic floodwaters and then abandoning them against as relief and housing funds get cut off and New Orleans remains unrebuilt.  For replacing science with religion in the public schools or against it? For papering over global warming or against it?

It is good to stand against these crimes.  It is RIGHT to stand against these crimes.

Imagine if, before the elections, hundreds of thousands of people had protested demanding that the Bush regime be driven from power because the world can't wait.  It would be tremendously more difficult for Pelosi to keep impeachment off the table.  And, if she still insisted on doing so, it would be much more likely that people would be reacting with political protest and outcry, not passive acceptance.

The White House and Congress needs to look out and see that the country is overwhelmingly polarized against them and they need to seriously fear that if they don't put a stop to this whole direction that the political resistance is going to escalate and that they are going to lose the allegiance of millions of people.

This is what it is going to take to get Nancy Pelosi to put impeachment back on the table.

Key in getting this dynamic going is the distribution of more than a million copies of the World Can't Wait Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime.  This Call boldly speaks the truth about where society is h eaded and what kind of struggle we are called upon to wage to stop it.  Email this to your friends, handing it out at bus stops, school, and religious services, donating to get this published as ads in newspapers, read on the radio, posted on websites, plastered on walls as posters and all throughout society.

So, I want to say again: every generation, every period in history, puts its stamp on the world.  What will ours be?

The final words of the World Can't Wait Call are this, "History is full of examples where people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and were victorious. And it is also full of examples of people passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined. The future is unwritten. WHICH ONE WE GET IS UP TO US."

The World Can't Wait - Drive Out the Bush Regime!

 Quote this article on your site

Share Link: