"I'm sorry whenever any human being dies." -Michael Berg (Nick's father)

They wanted a fist in the air and a triumphant, "Ye-e-e-e-es!" to death and revenge. They wanted someone to say that Nick Berg's soul can now "rest in peace" and that the family can now "feel closure" at the 500 lbs. dropped on Baghdad yesterday, blowing human beings to smithereens. They wanted satisfaction and smug glee at the carnage. They wanted an endorsement of pre-emptive capital punishment. That was the script. But what they got was a man who said a very surprising thing...

Soledad O'BRIEN (CNN): "...But at some point, one would think, is there a moment when you say, 'I'm glad he's dead, the man who killed my son'?"

Michael BERG: "No. How can a human being be glad that another human being is dead?"

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/06/08/berg.interview/index.html

Discussion at:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2668563

I've been thinking about this for hours now, and repeating it to other people, who look at me in awed disbelief. The CNN reporter tries every way he can to get the war profiteering corporate news monopoly narrative to come out right. But Michael Berg won't play.

"I feel doubly bad...because Zarqawi is also a political figure, and his death will re-ignite yet another wave of revenge, and revenge is something that I do not follow, that I do want ask for, that I do not wish for against anybody. And it can't end the cycle. As long as people use violence to combat violence, we will always have violence." --Michael Berg

Read the interview. Berg explains, simply, so that all can understand, how the Iraqis have been ridden of one dictator, Saddam Hussein, only to be replaced by another, George Bush. I think it's the most amazing interview I've ever read. Think Ann Coulter interviewing Jesus Christ come back from the dead. Or Bill O'Reilly interviewing Mother Theresa. There is just no way that Soledad O'Brien could make Michael Berg feel the things he wanted him to feel, and say the things he wanted him to say--despite his repeated efforts to do so. Berg also mentions the abuse he's taken from warmongers because of his outspoken views on peace, which became known soon after his son's death. There, too, I think, the reason Freepers went after him was that he foiled the script (the true why and wherefore of Nick Berg's death, and what Americans were supposed to feel, and especially how "the family" was supposed to react to this horror, and how that would fire up the desire for killing and torturing more Arabs, and cover up the then recently revealed atrocities at Abu Ghraib). (Am I saying the Bush junta did it? Yes, that is what I very strongly suspect.)

Despite heaps of abuse, and even being shot at (I hadn't heard that before), Michael Berg seeks no vengeance, and seems to deeply understand what revenge does to the human soul, and to the soul of a nation. It twists us, like pretzels, into the opposite of what we say we are. We see it in the few supporters that the Bush junta still has left--hate-filled people, who hate US, the rest of America, and never did like our "melting pot" or our majority progressive beliefs; hate-filled corporate news monopolies trying to stoke up hate in theirs and Bush's victims--us; hate-filled churches (some of them); hate-filled fatcats who see us as their servants and robbery victims, and would as soon kick us in the teeth as pay another penny in tax for our schools and our hospitals; hate-filled Bush and his handlers, the icy-souled thieves of democracy.

It is very, very difficult not to hate them back. And, in our darkest hour, we need models of transcendent peacefulness to pull us through. Michael Berg is such a model. And when we finally rise up and "storm the bastille" of the election theft machinery that Bush's buds at Diebold and ES&S have installed in our country, while most of us weren't looking, keep him in mind. What we need, and will need--if we want restoration of peace and democracy and a good country--is not vengeance, but rather a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

I have been especially disturbed at the near-constant presence of that picture of his dead body they have been running on CNN all day--there is no civilized reason for that.

Yeah, he was a very bad man, and yeah, you could say he's now paid for what he did--but there is no excuse for celebrating death.

work heard what Berg said on AAR. He gets it. Which means millions more do as well.

should be with the hypocritical human mind.

but I thought Mr. Berg is Jewish. Regardless, he's a special human being who just might be my next Congressman from Delaware.

issue.

walking down the street wearing anti-war paraphernalia. And all the "reporter" could repeat was how he's "a man with strong convictions". No mention of what his attitudes were about the war or the circumstances surrounding his son's death. He was simply a man of strong convictions.

Michael Berg is truly enlightened.

article.

Thank God, I've never had to really truely put my money where my mouth is on the issue. No one has ever truely given me something to hate them for. Nobody's truly done something so incredibly horrible to me.

Michael Berg is my hero.

Peace to him.