Chimpie Goin Down, Part Deux

Cindy Sheehan and other military families are descending on Washington D.C. in preparation for the September 24 demonstration. What power can a woman like Ms. Sheehan really have?

Let me take you back to another invasion, another protracted war gone bad, another empire that no longer exists: 1979, Afghanistan, the Soviet Union. As repressive as the Bushit regime tries to be, and they are to be commended for the effort by any totalitarians out there, the Soviets knew a thing or two about putting down demonstrations and stifling dissent. The leadership did its best to avoid showing coffins returning, discussing war dead, or enabling a discussion of war policy in general. Once committed, they had to stay the course. But there was one group that had nothing left to lose, nothing left to fear from a regime that could and would resort to the most extreme violence to maintain its illusion of control.

The mothers. The mothers of slain soldiers began appearing in the streets of Moscow, of Leningrad, of Minsk, of Krasnodar and Khabarovsk and Rostov. They stood silently, holding up large photographs of their dead sons, or they cried, or they screamed. And as the death toll mounted, they became more numerous, more persistent, more emboldened.

A friend of mine was in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again) where he was spending a year while working on his graduate degree in the mid-1980s. His Russian was near fluent, and he happened to fall in drinking with a Soviet colonel newly returned from the front in Afghanistan. The drunker they got, the more the colonel ranted about the horrible and pointless carnage in Afghanistan, the unwinnable nature of the war, the way it was tearing the country apart, in spite of all attempts to glorify it, or at least justify it.

Zbigniew Brzezinski called it the Soviet Union's Vietnam. After ten years of war, 15,000 dead Soviet soldiers, and 37,000 wounded, the USSR pulled out in April, 1989, severely weakend economically, politically, and morally. Within three years, the USSR ceased to exist.

But it started with some mothers, some grieving, angry mothers who, when they lost their sons, had lost everything of value that could be taken from them. And when you face people who have nothing left to lose to your stupidity, you're fucked.