Monday Missive – April 15th, 2013

Hi Fighter,

You’ll have to forgive me if today’s missive reads more like a campaign letter but I want to devote my energies today to a membership drive for the Wikileaks Party!

Become a Foundation Member of the Wikileaks Party! 

I assume that everyone knows who Julian Assange is and what Wikileaks is about.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the news (or my missives) you might not know that Julian is running for a seat in the Australian Senate in the Federal election this October.

Further, it’s not just a solo campaign on Julian’s part. The Wikileaks Party intends have candidates running in a number of Australian electorates, and if you’ve been keeping up with my missives you know I’ve been meeting regularly with Julian’s dad in order to further the campaign in my own area.

You might be wondering why I am such a passionate supporter of Assange, especially when he is wanted in Sweden for questioning in relation to a sexual assault investigation.

In truth, I suspect that charges against him are concocted but, either way, it’s not the man I am inspired by so much as by what he (and the Wikileaks Party) stand for – the democratic requirement of truthfulness in government.

I read a striking quote recently:

“Why of course, the people don’t want war. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Who said it?

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring – Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man!

I wasn’t alive during World War II but I’ve lived long enough to see Göring’s methodology employed multiple times to start wars that have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people!

I grew up fearing the Viet Cong and the ‘Red Terror’ of Communism. After the fall of Soviet Communism I watch my government manufacture a new enemy – the Muslim terrorist who had been plotting to murder my family and destroy my way of life for all of history though I had been blithely unaware of it! 

I watched my government lie about Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ so as  to wage war upon the people of Iraq, resulting in the deaths of more than a hundred thousand civilians! Now I am watching my government tell the same lies about the chemical weapons of Bashar Al-Assad in an attempt to escalate the death-toll there!

So far as I can see, Wikileaks has been one of the very few voices in this world that has been exposing these lies and shining the harsh light of truth on the murderous power-play of our democratically-elected leaders!

Bradley Manning’s revelations are a case in point. Manning now admits that he leaked internal army video of airstrikes in Baghdad in 2007, where civilians are clearly targeted and killed.  Wikileaks published the footage under the name “Collateral Murder“.

Manning was later arrested for leaking the video, has been in prison ever since, and is currently standing trial, facing a possible life-sentence. Assange, for his part, was called a “terrorist” by Newt Gingrich, while Sarah Palin suggested that he should be hunted down “with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders”.

The official rationale behind the rhetoric was that Manning and Assange were putting human lives at risk through releasing this sort of classified information. When you watch the Collateral Murder video though and read through the other leaked material, you realise that the only persons put at risk by Wikileaks’ revelations are the politicians who need to keep their official narrative in place in order to maintain their campaigns of global violence!

Enough said! If I haven’t convinced you by now to join the Wikileaks Party, I guess it ain’t gonna happen.

If you are interested in joining, let me encourage you to do it NOW, and I’ll give you a few good reasons why you should:

• The Wikileaks Party has not yet registered with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).
• The AEC requires that the party has 500 financial members before it can register.
• I’m told that more than 500 have applied but that a significant number of those memberships have been deemed invalid (due to typos in data entry, I believe).
• We thus currently need another 72 persons to join before the party can officially register for inclusion in the next election!

So here’s your chance to become a foundation member of the the Wikileaks Party and to try to put the democratic requirement for truthfulness in government on the political agenda! Of course:

1. You must be an Australian citizen and
2. You must not be a member of any other Australian political party.

If that’s you though and you can afford the $20 membership fee, you can apply for membership online at the the Wikileaks Party website and there is now a provision to pay online via credit card. 

Please be careful though when filling out your application. Apparently your name and address etc. must appear exactly as it does on the AEC’s enrollment records. If you get it even slightly wrong, the AEC will apparently deem your membership invalid. 

 The Road to Damascus!

As you may remember, Denning and I will be heading off to Syria in the next few weeks, and I can’t pretend that this didn’t influence my choice of text for last Sunday’s sermon.

While I normally preach on the Gospel reading, the first reading scheduled for last Sunday was the story of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus – the man we know as the Apostle Paul! It took place in Syria – on the road to Damascus.

It’s an amazing story of one of history’s most amazing men, and I couldn’t resist preaching on it. I’ll tell you bluntly that I was very pleased with this sermon. I felt I really did communicate something of the character and eccentricities of St Paul.

I appreciate that my depiction of the early Saul as a religious fundamentalist and terrorist is not a common one, yet I believe it is accurate! Click below if you’re ready to hear my take on St Paul and please leave your comments (positive and negative) in the comments section at the end of this post.

[imaioVideo v=1]

• If you can’t see this video, click here.
• If you’d rather read the written version, click here.
• If you’d prefer to hear the audio version, click here.

Reasons to be Cheerful

It’s another reason for me to be cheerful, at any rate – the eleventh birthday of my dear son, Soren Lee Mordechai Smith.

In case you didn’t know, Soren was named after my three great heroes:

• Soren Kierkegaard (the father of existentialism)
• Robert E. Lee (the great Confederate General)
• Mordechai Vanunu (who told the world about Israel’s hidden nuclear arsenal)

On reflection, perhaps I should have also included the other man I most admired – my father, Bruce – but at the time three middle-names seemed like more than enough.

Anyway, Soren Lee is now eleven and he’s showing himself to be a talented boxer as well as a kick-butt Yu-gi-oh player!

That’s enough from me today, fighter.

Until next week I remain …

Your brother in the Good Fight,

Dave
www.fatherdave.org
www.fighting-fathers.com
www.zerocostwebsite.net
www.israelandpalestine.org
www.how2changetheworld.com

P.S. And as I’m apt to remind you, if you’d like to support our work, the best way is to become a financial member at fighting-fathers.com. It only costs you $10/month but it makes all the difference at this end!