{"id":6479,"date":"2008-12-24T17:30:27","date_gmt":"2008-12-24T22:30:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=6479"},"modified":"2013-04-29T10:20:36","modified_gmt":"2013-04-29T14:20:36","slug":"behind-ivaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=6479","title":{"rendered":"Behind IVAW"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Andre Shepard<\/a>, the soldier stationed in Germany who decided he couldn’t dare leave his German girlfriend unattended while he did a tour of Iraq, so he decided to ask for asylum in Germany. Bouncing around the internet, I found this picture of him with some of his pals on Workers World (yes, it’s a socialist website);<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That’s Andre on your left, in the middle is Darnell Stephen Summers and on the right is Chris Capps, the regional director of IVAW in Germany. So who is this Darnell Stephen Summers. I tracked him down to this web page<\/a> which had a short biography of him;<\/p>\n

He volunteered for the US Army and served from 1966 to 1970. While home on leave before going to Vietnam in 1968 he became involved in the struggle to found the \u00bbMalcolm X Cultural Center\u00ab (MXCC) in Inkster Michigan, a suburb of Detroit and was one of the spokespersons for the \u00bbMXCC\u00ab. His political affiliations included membership in the Black Workers Congress, Viet Nam Veterans Against The War \/ Viet Nam Veterans Against The War (Anti-Imperialist), chartermember of the Malcolm X Cultural Center(Inkster Michigan).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well we know about the VVAW, but I’d never had contact with the Black Workers Congress so I went to Wikipedia;<\/p>\n

The Black Worker\u2019s Congress (BWC) was created in 1971 in response to a manifesto written by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (League). The BWC would be a separate organization that would be used to expand the League across the United States. The BWC was also used to coordinate Revolutionary Union Movement and Black Workers caucuses.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was a short-lived organization and WIkipedia didn’t have much, so I checked on it’s parent organization the League of Revolutionary Black Workers;<\/p>\n

The formation of the League was an attempt to form a more cohesive political organ guided by the principles of Black liberation and Marxism-Leninism in order to gain political power and articulate the specific concerns of Black workers through political action. While the League was only active for a short period of time, it was a significant development in a time of increasing militancy and political action by Black workers and in the context of both the Black liberation and Marxist-Leninist movements in the United States.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So this guy standing with his arms around an IVAW regional coordinator and a recent deserter is pictured on a web page of Workers World is a genuine 1960s Marxist-Leninist. Ain’t that sweet?<\/p>\n

In fact, when the Black Labor Congress died out the League of Revolutionary Black Workers merged with an organization called the Communist League which began dying out in 1974 and merged with the Communist Labor Party. But Darnell Summers went to Germany;<\/p>\n

He was instrumental in organizing the STOP THE WAR BRIGADE in Germany during the Gulf war to build support for anti-war GIs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Short-lived gig that.<\/p>\n

So here’s a real live commie helping soldiers commit crimes. And Matthis Chiroux is hanging out with World Can’t Wait<\/a> and Not In Our Name (which was founded by C Clark Kissinger famous member of the Revolutionary Communist Party which advocates the violent overthrow of the US government) pretending to be an honorably discharged Afghanistan veteran. It’s beginning to look like it’s going to be real difficult for active members of the military to continue their relationship with IVAW with these kind of ties to their organization. Hint. Hint.<\/p>\n

Oh, the article about Shepard continues to chronicle his empty blather;<\/p>\n

\u201cI could not in good conscience continue to serve,\u201d Shepherd said at a news conference. (Reuters, Nov. 27) \u201cWe have destroyed nations, killed leaders, raided homes, tortured, kidnapped, lied, and manipulated not just citizens and leaders of our enemies, but of our allies as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a sickening feeling to realize that I took part in what was basically a daily slaughter of a proud people.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added that after he \u201cheard about people being ripped to shreds from the machine guns or being blown to bits by the Hellfire missiles\u201d and \u201cbuildings and infrastructures being destroyed, I began to feel ashamed about what I was doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am remorseful for my contribution to these heinous acts, and I swear that I will never make these mistakes again.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He wasn’t even a flightline mechanic – he was in a support brigade. And it sounds like he regrets that Saddam Hussein was hung after a trial. What else could the phrase “We have destroyed nations, killed leaders….” mean? The only other leaders we killed were al Qaeda leaders…he couldn’t mean them could he?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Andre Shepard, the soldier stationed in Germany who decided … Behind IVAW<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}