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18 April, 2005 -- The death of Marla Ruzicka, who the mainstream press reports was in Iraq using Amerikan money to find homes for war orphans, is another bloody testament to the need to halt the march of the u.$. war machine. MIM mourns the death of this California womyn who chose to risk her life mitigating the suffering her government extracts from the Iraqi people, and we make this plea to the people in Amerika who are appalled by this "senseless" loss:
If the death of a white Amerikan womyn means more to you than those of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi victims, think for a minute about why. Then do something about it. Whatever your motives, do something to stop this war.
According to the New York Times and The Guardian, as Ruzicka's car happened to be near a convoy of foreign contractors when a car bomber struck that convoy on April 16. MIM does not have independent confirmation of these facts, but we take them at face value for the purposes of this article. This death "by chance" is no different from the hundreds of thousands of deaths that have bloodied the hands of Amerikan people in this war, except for two things. First, because she was an aid worker with a poignant story as a one-womyn orphan rescue agency. And second, because Ruzicka was an attractive white womyn who sought popularity with reporters to get her work done more effectively. Many more people will hear about her than they do about individual Iraqi victims.
The poignancy of Ruzicka's story will harden some Amerikans in their opinions against "terrorism" and for "pre-emptive war." These are the people who will not wrap their heads around the fact that when Iraq has been under 14+years of daily bombardment by the united snakes, the Iraqi people are left no choice but to fight back with the means they have available. MIM is willing to face the hard possibility that for many of these hardened Amerikans, there is not to be any awakening to the grotesque reality of imperialism.
The people who look at Marla Ruzicka's story and become hardened in their views against the Iraqi people are the same people who would have backed the Confederacy in the Amerikan Civil War, or stood with Marie Antoinette against the French peasantry. They cannot understand this simple fact: no country can export military invasion, occupation and genocide for hundreds of years without having some of that violence eventually come home.
Altruistic death to perfume an imperialist war machine is a waste of altruism. People like Marla Ruzicka should be in charge of society as a whole through participation in leadership in a vanguard party. Instead she played second-fiddle to war-mongers with no long-term plan for species-survival. The waste of altruistic efforts by the u.$. government makes this story all the more tragic but typical.
Marla Ruzicka chose with open eyes and generosity to risk her life trying to alleviate some sufferings caused by her own government. None of the uncounted number of Iraqis killed since this war began (excepting those compradors and wannabes who are busy trying to ride the u.$. train and were targetted like the occupiers) has had the liberty to make that choice.
Ward Churchill correctly pointed out in his now-famous "Some people push back" that all of us who enjoy the privileges of u.$. citizenship live in danger of the consequences of our government's actions. Even those who reject this militarist government and devote their lives to anti-imperialist struggle live at risk, and must accept some guilt, for having failed so far to stop the biggest terrorist on the planet running amok.
Marla Ruzicka's death is a costly lesson for someone like the persyn who stopped at our Los Angeles demonstration yesterday to talk about who is culpable for u.$.-imperialist crimes. Confronted with MIM's account of the witch-hunt against Ward Churchill, this individual, who showed considerable sympathy with the international proletariat in some parts of his thinking, said: Well, maybe Ward Churchill shouldn't be fired for what he said, but maybe just for being somewhat insensitive.
As MIM has said to countless Amerikans over the years: people are dying; the government you tolerate is killing them; the time for sensitivity was several hundred years ago! It's time to wake up, Amerika. The calendar says this is your day to get angry, and get busy smashing imperialism. You are already late.