Sea lions and cormorants holding on during the King Tides at Heceta Head on the Oregon Coast. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

We can’t go on; we must go on.

This isn’t an original thought. I’ve cribbed it from Samuel Beckett and twisted it for our purposes. The line comes from Beckett’s inscrutable novella The Unnamable. It’s spoken by someone curled in a fetal position, confined to a giant jar. He’s immobile. He can’t move. But he knows he must if he’s going to survive.

Beckett’s story was unspeakably strange to me when I first read it in 1979. It seems very familiar to me now. Nothing seems to happen. Or perhaps everything that’s happening has already happened before. He’s stuck in a history that keeps repeating itself like a needle stuck in a lethal groove. If history won’t move, he must. This is our challenge, too, isn’t it? But not only must we move, but we need to move others along with us.

CounterPunch went online in 1998, just in time for Clinton’s war on Serbia. Now we’re at war in Europe again. No one asked us if we wanted another war. It was imposed on us by powers that don’t ask for consent, as if we are voiceless figures stuck in a jar.

You could say CounterPunch was born in wartime and we’ve spent the last 25 years covering bloody conflicts, even when we desperately want to write about something else.

I don’t consider myself a war correspondent by any measure. That harrowing calling was taken up by writers like Robert Fisk, John Ross, Kathy Kelly, Franklin Lamb, Uri Avnery, Saul Landau, Mark Levy, Matthew Hoh, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn. Journalists who have been under literal fire. Writers you’ve all read here on CounterPunch.

Still, I have been writing about wars for nearly three decades now, even when I’d rather be writing about cerulean warblers or the geology of the Snake River canyon. New wars keep coming, regardless of who controls Congress or the White House, and the old ones don’t end. Not really: Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Serbia, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, Niger, Ecuador, and now the entire Caribbean basin. 

History keeps getting recycled, only more gruesomely.

We can’t move on; we must move on.

Tombstone of Alexander Cockburn, Petrolia Cemetery. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Obama bombed more people than any Nobel Laureate this side of Henry Kissinger. Who was there to call him out? Not the New York Times or Washington Post. The wars of the last 30 years have been enabled by the very journalistic institutions that were meant to challenge them. Journalism failed when it was needed most. Worse than failed. In many ways, it was complicit. We refused to be complicit. Our critiques of........

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