From Johann Christoph Arnold, a “provocative argument that a military draft might not be a bad idea”:www.nonviolence.org/articles/1003-arnold.php. “Deciding which side to stand on is one of life’s most vital skills. It forces you to test your own convictions, to assess your personal integrity and your character as an individual.”
It’s a pretty drastic wish. I don’t really wish it on today’s youngins’ (I’m not sure Arnold is quite convinced either). But I will give a snippet of my own personal story, since it’s kind of appropriate to the issue: when I was a senior in high school my father desperately wanted me to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. I went on interviews and even took the first physical. The pressure to join was sort of akin to the pressure young people of earlier generations have faced with a military draft (except more personal, as I was essentially living with the chair of the draft Martin Kelley board). I was forced to really think hard about what I believed. I had to reconcile my romaticism about the navy with my gut instincts that fighting was never a real solution. My father’s pressure made me realize I was a pacifist. With my decision to forego the Naval Academy made, I started asking myself what other ramifications followed from my peace stance. Almost twenty years, here’s Nonviolence.org.
Arnold’s argument, right or wrong, does reflect my story:
bq. A draft would present every young person with a choice between two paths, both of which require courage: either to heed the call of military duty and be rushed off to war, or to say, “No, I will give my life in the service of peace.”
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Dead Horses
November 12, 2003
I am so tired of phone war tax resistance. I have a fondness for the aging hippies of NWTRCC & WRL but I thought they’d given up this dead horse by now. Well, at least they’re not “resurrecting the ‘Doomsday Clock’.
Update, 12/8/03: Robert Randall, an old friend from NWTRCC, is the first to comment on the Dead Horses post.
Recycling Dead Horses
November 12, 2003
I originally titled this entry “Why the peace movement is doomed,” but maybe that’s too strong a charge. Still, it’s hard to see how the coterie of small mainstream groups (and the older activists in charge) expect to attract new people when they keep recycling old campaigns that are ridiculous and borderline-irrelevant. A small coalition is calling for a new campaign of anti-war phone tax resistance.
A lot of U.S. war tax resisters have loved protesting the “phone war tax” over the years. Some history, from the new site: a tax on phone use was first used to fund the Spanish-American war back in 1898 and special war-related phone taxes came and went for forty years. The only problem is that it was a good funding stream, a tax the U.S. Congress didn’t want to give up. So the phone tax has been authorized and reauthorized the Second World War.
If I’m reading the site’s history right, there’s been a continuous phone tax since 1932(!) and it’s all gone into the general budget. Like all taxes, a good chunk of it has funded military action, but it’s no different percentage than any other tax. Like all taxes, we’ve needed this many taxes because the U.S. is a very militarized country and it has gone up and down in relation to military spending. But even Congress hasn’t bothered to think of it as war-related for many years now.
I’d be embarrased to try to tell some eighteen year old born in 1985 that this tax has some special war significance just because did during the Vietnam War. Back in the sixties, a bunch of radical pacifists jumped on the phone tax resistance and haven’t been able to let go in all this time. So why this clinging to phone taxes as a way of protesting war? I assume everyone likes it is because it’s safe. For those reasons it’s also entirely symbolic and almost completely meaningless.
Can’t we come up with new tactics? When will we be able to leave the Vietnam War to the historians and just move on? Many people think the old-line peace movement is a bunch of aging hippies; with campaigns like this, we kinda prove them right. Let’s brainstorm some new actions!
What I Want For Christmas
November 9, 2003
From Canadian Mennonites comes “BuyNothingChristmas.org”:http://www.buynothingchristmas.org/
Blueprint for a Mess, the planning behind the U.S. occupation
November 3, 2003
For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long article by David Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess”:www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongoing problems with the U.S. occupation of iraq:
bq. Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.
The article looks at the ideological roots of the post-war plan of occupation. A number of key decisions were made in the Pentagon’s war room with little input from the State Department. Much of the planning revolved around Ahmad Chalabi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi opposition party leader during the last decade of Saddam Hussein’s reign. Chalabi spent most of the 90s in London and Washington, where he became the darling of the Republican policy hawks who were also sidelined from political power. Together Chalabi and Washington figures like Donald Rumsfeld spent the 90s hatching up war plans if they ever took power again. Unfortunately Rumsfeld’s plans didn’t have the widespread support of the U.S. diplomatic and military establishment and Chalabi has had virtually no support inside iraq. But the conversations and decisions between the token iraqi opposition and the out-of-power Republican hawks has driven the occupation:
bq. The lack of security and order on the ground in iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Rieff is pessimistic but he backs up his claims. The article is long but it’s a must-read. The postwar occupations of iraq and Afghanistan will almost certainly be the defining foreign policy issue of this generation, and pacifists must look beyond ideology and rhetoric to understand what’s happening in iraq.
Shouting for Attention
October 29, 2003
Burning up the blogosphere is a post and discussion on Michael J Totten’s site about the “Workers World Party and International ANSWeR”:http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000131.html.
He calls them “the new skinheads” (huh?), but his critique of these organizations and the “unconditional support” they give to anti‑U.S. fascists the world over is valid.
As a pacifist it’s often a tough balancing act to try to remain a steady voice for peace: this spring we were trying to simultaneously critiquing both Saddam Hussein and U.S. war plans against iraq. Both left and right denounce pacifists for this insistence on consistency, but that’s okay: it is these times when nonviolent activists have the most to contribute to the larger societal debate. But hard-left groups like International ANSWeR refuse to draw the line and refuse to condemn the very real evil that exists in the world.
International ANSWeR has sponsored big anti-war rallies over the last year, but anti-war is not necessarily pro-nonviolence. Many of the participants at the rallies would never support International ANSWeR’s larger agenda, but go because it’s a peace rally, shrugging off the politics of the sponsoring group. I suspect that International ANSWeR’s support base would disappear pretty quickly if they started rallying on other issues.
International ANSWeR just had another rally last weekend but you didn’t see it listed here on Nonviolence.org. Other peace groups co-sponsored it, echoing the All-caps/exclamation style of organizing. It’s very strange to go the site of “United for peace,” a coalition of peace groups, and look down the list of its next three events: “Stop the Wall!,” “Stop the FTAA!, “Shut Down the School of the Americas” When did pacifism become shouting for attention alongside the Workers World Party? Why are we all about stopping this and shutting down that?
Attacks a sign of our success
October 28, 2003
I couldn’t believe it when a friend told me the news. In the wake of four coordinated suicide attacks in iraq that killed 30 and injured 200, President George Bush claimed that the “attacks were merely a mark of how successfully the U.S. Occupation is going”:www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/10/27/sprj.irq.main/index.html :
bq. “There are terrorists in iraq who are willing to kill anybody in order to stop our progress. The more success we have on the ground, the more these killers will react — and our job is to find them and bring them to justice.”
This is really his way of explaining away all opposition to the U.S.: people must be jealous of all we have and all we do. But maybe iraqis continue to be angry that we invaded their country; maybe they’re angry that we’ve only reinstalled many of their generals and many of Saddam’s henchmen. Maybe they’re waiting for a democratically-elected council. I’m sure many iraqi’s condemn yesterday’s bombings. But it’s still way too early to declare victory in the war of iraqi public opinion.
North by Northwest
October 27, 2003
One of the joys of the web is that you can think you’ve seen everything and then suddenly stumble across something new. This happened to me this morning with “West by Northwest”:westbynorthwest.org, a great web-only publication focused on progressive issues in the Pacific Northwest. Organized as a ecumenical project by area Quakers, it’s a journal of “arts & letters, ecology, and peace & social justice.” I especially recommend their “Voices of Peace”:http://westbynorthwest.org/artman/publish/peace.shtml selection.