Reviews - From Complicity to Contempt
Tim Gatto is a rising voice in the Liberal Left and is destined to become a major thorn in the side of the Republican Fascist Right Wing. In his first of three proposed books, From Complicity To Contempt, Gatto calls a spade a spade—and then he shows you how to use it to dig the truth out of NeoCon Lies.
In this collection of articles, written from August 2005, to January 2007, we see the evolution of a man, a man who served his country for nearly 21 years in the United States Army—including the last few years as an Army recruiter. We learn how that recruitment came to trouble him as young people signed up for what would become a seemingly endless series of wars. And where were the money, and the motivation, for these wars coming from?
It is here we see the loss of political innocence as Tim Gatto comes to the realization that a—his word—"Corporacracy" runs the country, profits from these wars, and has bought and sold both of the two major Political Parties—robbing the American people of their voice and leading into slaughter a generation of warriors dying for the Corporate bottom line. And speaking of Generations, Gatto wonders, where is ours? Where the Flower Children, where the Hippies and the war protestors of the Vietnam era that defied Nixon and helped bring down the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson? Where are those who valued social justice above all else?
We have met the enemy, and they are US. The generation that Tim and I share, the generation that took to heart the warnings of the late President Dwight D Eisenhower about the dangers of the "Military Industrial Complex," has sold out to the same Capitalist greed we fought so righteously in the Vietnam era.
We need to find ourselves. We need to reignite a social revolution in our country, ban corporate contributions to election campaigns and once again teach a lost generation and the NeoCon Right Wing that the real wealth of a country is NOT its corporations but its people. They call us the "Grey Panthers." So be it. It's time we started to prowl again. And to the Fascist Right, beware. We hunger. We are coming for you.
From Complicity To Contempt runs the course from darkly humorous to deeply disturbing. It is the start of a clarion call to action, and Tim Gatto is leading the charge.
Steven White — Cultural Conscience
.......................................................................................................................................................
The essays of Tim Gatto represent the efforts of one determined man to affect America's course in the world. The enduring testimony offered in this compilation of his work is proof that we are not powerless. Even though it might seem that the words of one man or woman are insignificant by themselves, in reality, words reverberate after they are first uttered, playing out their natural lives as determined by the power that propels them. Tim's questions and observations remain alive, waiting in the void to be taken-up, or to be answered by others.
Tim has a way of getting people to talk about the unreported issues that will mean so much to us all in our immediate future. His articles are expressed in simple words and structure, making them readable to people who might otherwise be turned off by too many multi-syllabic words and composition that's too complex. His brave attempt to break out of the news filters of the national media and to reach beyond the gatekeepers makes this book one that's far out of the ordinary. More of us on the left should be so bold and follow Tim Gatto's lead.
Tim's writing and his activism mirror my own latest determined effort to right the many great wrongs that intensified with the election of 2004. For me, and I suspect it is the same with Tim, Bush's second inaugural address sounded too much like an American declaration of war upon the world. Bush and Cheney represented an evil that had to be stopped.
The United States has no divine right or manifest destiny to reshape the world by force, especially not into the immoral imperial design that Bush and Cheney had in mind. A real American patriot could not stand idly by while US forces were trying to bomb the world into submission. The Bush Administration had made the entire world hate us, and the new Obama Administration is making sure that the hatred will go on.
With his website, his radio program, and now this book , Tim Gatto is doing his best to lead America away from the current path of desolation. Will you be able to claim such a commitment to freedom yourself when the time of accounting arrives?
As a former "lifer" and recruiter in the Army, Tim has experienced something of a belief reversal, thanks to the abusive misuse of American military forces by the Bush Administration. Witnessing the death and disabling of tens of thousands of veterans in illegal wars of aggression is a powerful incentive to work for change in American foreign policy.
Tim is like so many other Americans, both veterans and civilians, in that his activism is an act of self-defense for himself, his family and his country. Perhaps this book is the message that will reach from the left, past the gatekeepers, into the minds of the right, with the message that silence in the face of such evil is not a virtue. Healing the divisions created by Washington's warlords is the true path towards peace that Tim and so many others like him have sought to follow, the most vital task right now for our entire Nation.
This war, like the Vietnam war, will be brought to an end by the people. The tide is slowly turning as more veterans and returning soldiers find their own voices and join the call for world peace in our time. Tim, like thousands of other veterans, is mobilizing popular support for this resistance, working to get the people off their butts and into the streets in order to bring this latest war of national aggression to an end. This book is but the latest salvo-and one of the most unflagging and courageous-in a deadly war for the hearts and minds of the American people.
Peter Chamberlin—Editor, There Are No Sunglasses