Nobel Peace Prize Jury Under Investigation February 4, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Peace, War.Tags: alfred nobel, fredrik heffermehl, nobel fooundation, nobel peace, obama novel, peace, peace prize, roger hollander, war
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Probe: Has Nobel Peace Prize Lost Its Way?
Today marks the 2012 deadline for nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, but as the prize committee meets this year to discuss what individual or group has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace,” they will be under heightened scrutiny to be sure their choice fulfills the original intent of its founder, Alfred Nobel.
The reason for the heightened pressure rests on an investigation by the Stockholm County Administrative Board of the committee’s recent choices prompted by ‘persistent complaints’ by author and peace researcher, Fredrik Heffermehl, and roundly criticized choices by the committee in recent years — most notably US President Barack Obama, a war commander governing over numerous military conflicts at the time he was awarded the auspicious “peace” prize in 2009.
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Heffermehl, author of the book The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted and a Norwegian lawyer, argues that the Nobel committee has violated the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will, which established the prize. He states that for decades, the parties in the Norwegian parliament have misused the Nobel committee seats to reward party veterans lacking insight in the peace ideas that Nobel wished to support. Heffermehl writes that over half of the awards since 1946 have not conformed with the intention of Nobel, who wished to change the international system in order to end wars and armaments.
Heffermehl said today:
The Swedish inquiry responds to a complaint against mismanagement that I lodged last month. The Nobel Foundation has been asked to comment in particular on the secret private diaries of former committee chair Gunnar Jahn which indicate that no attention is paid to the directives in Nobel´s will. These diaries, [which were published for the first time by Heffermehl] show that Jahn repeatedly protested in vain against awards that ignored the intentions of Nobel. The diaries clearly demonstrate that the Norwegian awarding Committee already 50 years ago ceased to pay any regard to Nobel and what he wanted.
The Norwegian Parliament had already then taken over the Nobel award and started using it as their own. I have now struggled for four years to have the committee respect the rights of the intended recipients, but I’ve found that in Norway there is no interest in Alfred Nobel and what he wanted.
The Swedish inquiry also encourages the Board of the Nobel Foundation to comment on an article by a member of the Nobel family, Michael Nobel, who in an article last month in Aftenposten said that Norway may be deprived of control over the prize if the mismanagement continues.
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According to Reuters:
“Do you see Obama as a promoter of abolishing the military as a tool of international affairs?” -Fredrik Heffermehl
Sweden Questions Nobel Peace Prize Selection Basis
…In [Heffermehl's] view the last qualified peace prize winners were the United Nations and its then-secretary general, Kofi Annan, in 2001.
Heffermehl [...] won the ear of Stockholm County Administrative Board, whose duties extend to making sure the country’s 7,300 registered foundations fulfill the wishes of their dead benefactors.
“Mr. Heffermehl has a couple of good arguments,” Mikael Wiman, the board’s attorney, told Reuters after he sent a letter this week to the Stockholm-based Nobel Foundation board seeking comment.
Heffermehl’s approval did not include Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who won the prize jointly in 2007 for their work on climate change, and certainly not to Barack Obama, who won the prize in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts” in international diplomacy.
“Do you see Obama as a promoter of abolishing the military as a tool of international affairs?” Heffermehl asked rhetorically.
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The Associated Press reports this morning:
Nobel Peace Prize Jury Under Investigation
Nobel Peace Prize officials were facing a formal inquiry over accusations they have drifted away from the prize’s original selection criteria by choosing such winners as President Barack Obama, as the nomination deadline for the 2012 awards closed Wednesday. [...]
If the Stockholm County Administrative Board, which supervises foundations in Sweden’s capital, finds that prize founder Alfred Nobel’s will is not being honored, it has the authority to suspend award decisions going back three years — though that would be unlikely and unprecedented, said Mikael Wiman, a legal expert working for the county.
Obama won in 2009, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won in 2010, and last year the award was split between Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen.
Happy 71st John! Imagine Peace Tower lights up today October 9, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Peace.Tags: anti-war, bjork, iceland, imagine, john lennon, peace, peace tower, reykjavik, yoko ono
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Imagine Peace Tower will be relit by Yoko Ono on October 9th 2011 in memory of John Lennon. He would have been 71 today (Sunday). The tower will be lit at 8pm Reykjavik time and the event will stream live on the internet.
The site at Viðey, Reykjavík, Iceland was chosen because Iceland is regarded by Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono as an eco-friendly and peaceful nation. She will light the beam at 8pm local time (9pm London, 4pm New York, 4pm Toronto, 1pm Los Angeles, 5am Tokyo). A live EarthCam feed can be viewed here. The Imagine Peace Tower is a tall “tower of light”, and considered a work of art, projected from a white stone monument that has the words “Imagine Peace” carved into it in 24 languages. Ono will remain in the country to perform with her band, the Plastic Ono Band, at the Iceland Airwaves Festival, which will also see Iceland’s premier pop superstar Bjork performing.
Ono has also requested anyone can send wishes and messages of peace on Twitter (@IPTower) and Facebook. There is also a live world map showing white glowing dots, each one representing a real live person, online at that moment watching the Imagine Peace Tower web page. The light beam often reaches cloud base and can often be seen penetrating through the clouds. Buried underneath the light tower are over half a million written messages or wish trees.
Roger’s note: the first step is Imagination, breaking what William Blake referred to as “mind forg’d manacles.” Genuine imagination leads to action. The war mongers and war profiteers and corporate media and pundits and their political frontmen in the presidency, congress and courts want us to believe that a peaceful world is impossible due to human nature. Imagination confronts that cynicism head on. Happy Birthday, John Lennon!
Why I Can’t Celebrate the End of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell October 8, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in LGBT, Peace, War.Tags: Afghanistan War, Civil Rights, civilian casualties, dadt, gary lehring, gay bomb, gay rights, Iraq war, lesbian rights, lgb, lgbt, militarism, roger hollander, war
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Many are applauding the repeal of DADT as an advance for gay and lesbian civil rights. And while any advance in civil rights is difficult to oppose, I am troubled by the celebration and fanfare that has accompanied the repeal of this policy. After eighteen years of such a costly and repugnant policy, why do I not rejoice at this step forward in legal protections for LGB individuals? Why can’t I celebrate the end of DADT as an advance in civil rights?
Part of my reticence to celebrate comes from the current news coverage that suggests that the repeal of DADT is the final victory of a monolithic LGBT community that has been fighting for inclusion in the military for decades. But the gay community has never been uniform in its support for military inclusion. Eighteen years ago Clinton’s decision to lift a ban on homosexuality in the military was met with reservation from many quarters of the LGBT communities who opposed the creeping militarization o f our lives and communities . This reticence and resistance from within our communities is missing from this celebration of civil rights. While “inside the beltway” activists honor and defend as a civil right every individual’s decision to serve their country through military service, are LGBT communities obligated to support such a corrupt, misogynistic, and homophobic institution? Have we forgotten the Pentagon’s plan in 1994 to develop a “gay bomb” that would release female pheromones on the battlefield, thereby triggering uncontrollable lust among enemy combatants on the battlefield, rendering this newly created gay enemy unable to fight? Such adolescent misunderstandings of masculinity, sexuality, and human nature should be enough to make LGBT communities question if the military is really an institution worth joining.
What might a progressive and/or a radical LGBT community response to the repeal of DADT look like today? We might begin by acknowledging that while ending this ban will make it easier for LGB people in the military to stay there, and easier for others to join, there are larger political implications to this inclusion. This civil rights victory entitles LGB persons to serve as “the mercenaries of a military industrial complex” as Barbara Smith said. These “mercenaries” have succeeded in killing more than 110,000 civilian non combatants in Iraq, and more than 10,000 civilian noncombatants in Afghanistan. Is this truly progress, and if so for whom? Our military leaders claim that the creation of a stable democratic society is the goal in these countries. Nonetheless the Pentagon was slow to condemn anti-gay honor killings in Iraq and seems not to think that rampant violence directed at sexual minorities is incompatible with a democratic society. Should progressive LGBT communities not also be globally engaged ones? Should civil rights victories here manipulate us into abandoning our moral courage and outrage at homophobia and sexual violence abroad ? When Abu Ghraib revealed homosexual rape to be part of the military’s humiliation of prisoners, I wondered if that could have happened if an LGBT service member had been present. Yet, today, I fear that misplaced patriotism, jingoism, demonization of the enemy– all well worn practices of the United States Military–will create camaraderie among queer and straight soldiers long before it would help gay servicemen and women see their own connection to sexually subjugated enemy combatants.
A truly radical LGBT response would go further still. We might be working to dismantle the military industrial complex and shift those billions of dollars to help the very economically distressed communities and individuals that military recruiters target to make their monthly enlistment quotas– sites which will now include LGBT community centers. Deploying promises of a steady income, high tech training, college grants, and upward social mobility, the US Military targets the highest risk populations in our society for recruitment. Suspect under normal conditions, during a prolonged recession this strategy is simply dishonest and exploitive. It seems even more exploitative when one realizes that all of these promised benefits have become comparatively less generous and less effective in recent decades.
A radical LGBT community movement might also demand that the savings from the repeal of DADT be directed toward those LGBT community centers that are now targeted for recruitment: a kind of queer combination of a Peace dividend and reparations to a community for historically egregious official discrimination. With more than 13,000 GLBT service members fired under DADT and an average investment in their training priced at $52000 per service member, a queer dividend of $383 million invested at the community level over the next 18 years could help address the many forms that LGBT discrimination takes today.
But of course no such dividend will be forthcoming. In the current budget debate as the military insists that any cuts to its budget will cripple its readiness, we should remember that this $383 million was money the military squandered upholding a discriminatory policy. Surely, this is a painless budget cut that all taxpayers can applaud. Unfortunately, like the Cold War “Peace dividend,” the end of this war on LGBT people by the US military will bring no advantage to these communities nor to American taxpayers. The military will simply find another unneeded weapons system in which to invest, another politically connected Halliburton to which to funnel taxpayer dollars.
Although it is tempting to see any advance of civil rights as a good thing, I cannot celebrate the repeal of DADT. If the goal is the advance of LGBT civil rights, many areas exist where national leadership and congressional action would make a more significant impact on the lives of beltway activists, progressive GLBTs and Radical queers all. National laws making it illegal to discriminate against LGBT people in housing, in adoption, in civil unions, in immigration or in the workplace would have far reaching consequences for many. A law that ends discrimination in the workplace could bring truly progressive change to greater numbers of people in the United States and might also have been applied to the military as one of the country’s largest employers. When finally the Employment Non Discrimination Act, or some future incarnation of it, passes and becomes the law of the United States, I will celebrate. Until then, consider me “Section 8,” but the military is no place for queers.
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Gary Lehring, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Government and Gender Studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is the author of Officially Gay: The Political Construction of Sexuality by the US Military.
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Truman Lied, Hundreds of Thousands Died August 8, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in History, Nuclear weapons/power, Peace, War.Tags: anti-war, atomic bomb, david swanson, eisenhower, harry truman, hiroshima, history, nagasaki, nuclear arms, nuclear war, nuclera nonproliferation, peace, roger hollander, world war II, world war two
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On August 6, 1945, President Harry S Truman announced: “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.”
When Truman lied to America that Hiroshima was a military base rather than a city full of civilians, people no doubt wanted to believe him. Who would want the shame of belonging to the nation that commits a whole new kind of atrocity? (Will naming lower Manhattan “ground zero” erase the guilt?) And when we learned the truth, we wanted and still want desperately to believe that war is peace, that violence is salvation, that our government dropped nuclear bombs in order to save lives, or at least to save American lives.
We tell each other that the bombs shortened the war and saved more lives than the some 200,000 they took away. And yet, weeks before the first bomb was dropped, on July 13, 1945, Japan sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan’s codes and read the telegram. Truman referred in his diary to “the telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” Truman had been informed through Swiss and Portuguese channels of Japanese peace overtures as early as three months before Hiroshima. Japan objected only to surrendering unconditionally and giving up its emperor, but the United States insisted on those terms until after the bombs fell, at which point it allowed Japan to keep its emperor.
Presidential advisor James Byrnes had told Truman that dropping the bombs would allow the United States to “dictate the terms of ending the war.” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in his diary that Byrnes was “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.” Truman wrote in his diary that the Soviets were preparing to march against Japan and “Fini Japs when that comes about.” Truman ordered the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th and another type of bomb, a plutonium bomb, which the military also wanted to test and demonstrate, on Nagasaki on August 9th. Also on August 9th, the Soviets attacked the Japanese. During the next two weeks, the Soviets killed 84,000 Japanese while losing 12,000 of their own soldiers, and the United States continued bombing Japan with non-nuclear weapons. Then the Japanese surrendered.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that,”… certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” One dissenter who had expressed this same view to the Secretary of War prior to the bombings was General Dwight Eisenhower. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy agreed: “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
Whatever dropping the bombs might possibly have contributed to ending the war, it is curious that the approach of threatening to drop them, the approach used during a half-century of Cold War to follow, was never tried. An explanation may perhaps be found in Truman’s comments suggesting the motive of revenge:
“Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, and against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international law of warfare.”
Truman could not, incidentally, have chosen Tokyo as a target — not because it was a city, but because we had already reduced it to rubble.
The nuclear catastrophes may have been, not the ending of a World War, but the theatrical opening of the Cold War, aimed at sending a message to the Soviets. Many low and high ranking officials in the US military, including commanders in chief, have been tempted to nuke more cities ever since, beginning with Truman threatening to nuke China in 1950. The myth developed, in fact, that Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for nuking China led to the rapid conclusion of the Korean War. Belief in that myth led President Richard Nixon, decades later, to imagine he could end the Vietnam War by pretending to be crazy enough to use nuclear bombs. Even more disturbingly, he actually was crazy enough. “The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? … I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes,” Nixon said to Henry Kissinger in discussing options for Vietnam.
President George W. Bush oversaw the development of smaller nuclear weapons that might be used more readily, as well as much larger non-nuclear bombs, blurring the line between the two. President Barack Obama established in 2010 that the United States might strike first with nuclear weapons, but only against Iran or North Korea. The United States alleged, without evidence, that Iran was not complying with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), even though the clearest violation of that treaty is the United States’ own failure to work on disarmament and the United States’ Mutual Defense Agreement with the United Kingdom, by which the two countries share nuclear weapons in violation of Article 1 of the NPT, and even though the United States’ first strike nuclear weapons policy violates yet another treaty: the UN Charter.
Americans may never admit what was done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but our country had been in some measure prepared for it. After Germany had invaded Poland, Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Britain in 1940 had broken an agreement with Germany not to bomb civilians, before Germany retaliated in the same manner against England — although Germany had itself bombed Guernica, Spain, in 1937, and Warsaw, Poland, in 1939, and Japan meanwhile was bombing civilians in China. Then, for years, Britain and Germany had bombed each other’s cities before the United States joined in, bombing German and Japanese cities in a spree of destruction unlike anything ever previously witnessed. When we were firebombing Japanese cities, Life magazine printed a photo of a Japanese person burning to death and commented “This is the only way.”
By the time of the Vietnam War, such images were highly controversial. By the time of the 2003 War on Iraq, such images were not shown, just as enemy bodies were no longer counted. That development, arguably a form of progress, still leaves us far from the day when atrocities will be displayed with the caption “There has to be another way.”
Combating evil is what peace activists do. It is not what wars do. And it is not, at least not obviously, what motivates the masters of war, those who plan the wars and bring them into being. But it is tempting to think so. It is very noble to make brave sacrifices, even the ultimate sacrifice of one’s life, in order to end evil. It is perhaps even noble to use other people’s children to vicariously put an end to evil, which is all that most war supporters do. It is righteous to become part of something bigger than oneself. It can be thrilling to revel in patriotism. It can be momentarily pleasurable I’m sure, if less righteous and noble, to indulge in hatred, racism, and other group prejudices. It’s nice to imagine that your group is superior to someone else’s. And the patriotism, racism, and other isms that divide you from the enemy can thrillingly unite you, for once, with all of your neighbors and compatriots across the now meaningless boundaries that usually hold sway.
If you are frustrated and angry, if you long to feel important, powerful, and dominating, if you crave the license to lash out in revenge either verbally or physically, you may cheer for a government that announces a vacation from morality and open permission to hate and to kill. You’ll notice that the most enthusiastic war supporters sometimes want nonviolent war opponents killed and tortured along with the vicious and dreaded enemy; the hatred is far more important than its object. If your religious beliefs tell you that war is good, then you’ve really gone big time. Now you’re part of God’s plan. You’ll live after death, and perhaps we’ll all be better off if you bring on the death of us all.
But simplistic beliefs in good and evil don’t match up well with the real world, no matter how many people share them unquestioningly. They do not make you a master of the universe. On the contrary, they place control of your fate in the hands of people cynically manipulating you with war lies.
And the hatred and bigotry don’t provide lasting satisfaction, but instead breed bitter resentment.
This is excerpted from “War Is A Lie”
War Resisters Inject Truth into Military Recruitment July 21, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Peace, War.Tags: anti-war, conscientiousw objector, eleanor j. bader, honorable discharge, military, military recruiters, military recruiting, military recruitment, peace, peace activists, roger hollander, school recruiters, school recruitment, selective service, stop-loss, truth-in-recruiting, war, War Resisters
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The setting changes but the scene does not: Men and women in crisply pressed uniforms enter public high schools across the country and cajole the teenagers they meet into signing on the dotted line to serve Uncle Sam.
Thanks to Section 9528 of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, recruiters from the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marine Corps and Navy have the same access to secondary school students as college recruiters or potential employers. This, in concert with mandatory Selective Service registration for all 18-year-old males and the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery [ASVAB] exam that is given to nearly three-quarters of a million high school juniors and seniors each year, has prompted many domestic peace activists to organize opposition to the militarization of youth. They advocate “truth-in-recruiting,” arguing that lofty promises made at the time of enlistment — extensive travel, scholarships or an easy route to U.S. citizenship — often fail to materialize once service begins.
What’s more, these peace activists say that they are paying particular attention to female recruits, warning them of potential pitfalls: The risks associated with wartime service even in “non-combat” positions, as well as the too-common experience of sexual harassment and assault by unit supervisors and peers.
Little-Known Facts
The War Resisters League, an 88-year-old national group with more than 25 chapters across the U.S., targets students and, when possible, tables at schools to provide little-known facts about the military: One in four soldiers gets a less than honorable discharge, making them ineligible for college money; nearly one-third of females seeking health care from the Veteran’s Administration report experiencing a rape or attempted rape while conscripted.
“Up until the economic recession began, the military had a hard time finding recruits,” says Kimber Heinz, National Organizing Director of the War Resisters League. “But now the military is not only meeting its quota, it’s a de facto jobs program and you have recruiters preying on students who can no longer afford college or find work.”
One of its brochures, Know Before You Go, offers this information for those thinking of signing up: “The military contract states, ‘Laws and regulations that govern military personnel may change without notice. Such changes may affect pay, benefits, and responsibilities as a member of the Armed Forces regardless of the provisions of the enlistment document.’” In other words, beware: Even though a recruit has signed a contract, the terms can be modified at the military’s discretion.
“We let people know that if we’re at war a recruit can be stop-lossed and might end up on multiple tours,” Heinz continues. “The recruit has no control over this. We always remind people that the military is the only job where if the worker quits, he or she goes to jail.” The organization also provides data on what it means to be a conscientious objector and outlines the penalties for failing to register for Selective Service.
Other truth-in-recruiting messages are also hammered. For one, despite promises to the contrary, Heinz reports that skills learned in the military are rarely transferable to the civilian world. “We make it clear that many, many people come out of the military traumatized or disabled,” Heinz continues. “We ask people to think about what it means to be an occupier of someone else’s land and we try to get people to consider whether they’ll be able to live with killing someone or seeing someone killed.”
It’s a heavy message, and it is repeated by more than 75 local organizations throughout the 50 states.
Joanne Sheehan is an adult advisor to YouthPeace, a student-led social justice group at the Norwich Free Academy, a public, regional high school in eastern Connecticut. Since 1998 YouthPeace has raised issues including military recruitment and Islamophobia with the student body.
Students Can Opt-Out
For the past seven years, members have also coordinated an annual opt-out campaign to inform students that the law allows them to request that their contact information be withheld from recruiters. “Schools typically send student names, addresses, and phone numbers to the military in October, so we have about a month once school starts to publicize the opt-out provision,” Sheehan says. “A few years ago we pushed the superintendent to put information about opting-out in the first paragraph of a letter that is sent to parents at the beginning of the year. We want to be sure they understand that their children don’t need to provide data to recruiters, that it’s something they can opt-out of.”
In some schools recruiters have free rein in the hallways
The peace groups also broach a broader anti-militarist agenda, even in places like San Diego with a heavy military presence and 110,000 military employees. There, the school board recently voted to ban students enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps [J-ROTC] from taking in-school marksmanship classes. “Fifteen of the 18 high schools in San Diego have ROTC. One of them, Lincoln, was temporarily closed for rehabbing and when we saw the plan for the renovation, we saw that it included a firing range. We brought this to the community’s attention and formed the Education Not Arms Coalition,” says Rick Jahnkow, coordinator of Youth and Non-Military Opportunities, known as Project YANO.
The consensus, Jahnkow says, was to focus on ending gun classes rather than campaigning against ROTC more generally because group participants felt an anti-ROTC campaign would fail. Education Not Arms pointed to the pervasive gun violence already plaguing the Lincoln area and denounced planned cutbacks in Advanced Placement classes needed by college-bound pupils. The efforts paid off: The school board ended all in-school gun training.
Boosted by this victory, Project YANO and Education Not Arms next turned their attention to school-based recruiters. In late 2010 San Diego activists succeeded in restricting recruiters to two school visits per year, similar to policies in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland. As a result, recruiters must schedule specific times to meet with potential conscripts and cannot disrupt “normal school activities.”
“In some schools the recruiters eat lunch with the kids, hang out and chill in the parking lot, and have free rein in the hallways,” says Pat Elder of Maryland’s PeaceAction Montgomery. “In most places, what they get to do depends on the principal. I’ve seen schools where male recruiters are always around, playing one-on-one basketball with kids who don’t have fathers.”
This scenario led New York City’s Youth Activists-Youth Allies Network to monitor recruiters to ensure that they obey the regulations that circumscribe their access to individual students.
YA-YA Network staff — all but one of whom are between 15 and 19 — also lead workshops about U.S. foreign policy and the costs of war and militarism. “Several years ago I asked participants what their peers thought about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” says YA-YA advisor Amy Wagner. “The wars were not very present for them. I talked about how during the Vietnam War when you turned on your TV you always heard the number of dead soldiers. They thought about this and concluded that facts were being hidden from them on purpose. They did a lot of research and the result was a short video now up on YouTube, called The War Will Not Be Televised.
Terms can be modified at the military’s discretion
The YA-YA Network is presently focused on making sure that schools abide by regulations that mandate that a school staff person be appointed to provide guidance on military recruitment in each high school. “We first want to investigate and see if this is being done,” Wagner says. “If not, why not. If it is, we want to know where these people are getting their info and who’s training them. We want to give students the information they are entitled to so that they fully understand their range of options.”
Indeed, it is this idea of options that propels organizing against militarism. Take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test, a four-hour recruiting tool used in nearly 12,000 high schools nationwide. To date, Maryland is the only state to require schools to select a provision that stops student scores from being sent directly to recruiters.
“Look, if you take even moderate Democrats and sit them down and ask them who they think should give student data to the military — mom and dad or the Pentagon – they’ll all support parental decision making,” says Pat Elder of PeaceAction Montgomery.
They want students to understand that becoming a soldier is not necessarily the best way to show personal strength or valor. “A lot of people want to be tough and powerful, so they enlist,” says the War Resisters League’s Kimber Heinz. “They ultimately learn that enlisting is not a good way to test how strong they are.”
Obama Wins Nobel War Prize June 25, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Peace, War.Tags: Afghanistan, afghanistan troops, Afghanistan War, anti-war, drone missiles, Iraq, Iraq war, libya, libya war, military resistance, nobel peace, obama nobel, obama war, pakistan, partriot act, peace, roger hollander, troop withdrawal, us military bases, war
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“The President Will Begin By Thanking Congressional Democrats
‘For Campaigning In 2006 On The Antiwar Agenda, And Then Turning Around
Once In Office And Funding The War They Claimed To Oppose’”
Obama Wins Nobel War Prize by Sandy K, Military Resistance Organization.
As the July 2011 deadline for Afghan troop withdrawal nears,
President Barack Obama is gearing up for another significant milestone,
the Nobel War Prize awards ceremony, which will be held in Oslo next
month.
Obama has been selected as this year’s winner of the first inaugural
prize to commemorate the world leader who has “best advanced the goals
of war and militarization across the globe,” amongst a notable cast of
runners-up that includes NATO’s head Anders Fogn Rasmussen, China’s
premier Wen Jiabao, and former President George W. Bush.
The selection committee includes a host of venerable war-makers in
their own right, including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah
Saleh, and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi — each of whom will be honored in a
special category celebrating the “Leaders that Wage War on Their Own
People.”
Among Obama’s list of war accomplishments, the committee highlighted
Obama’s decision to double the number of troops and expand the number of
private contractors in Afghanistan, as well as his dramatic escalation
of drone strikes and targeted assassinations in Yemen and Pakistan.
According to one committee member, “Two years ago, we worried that
President Obama would rollback Bush administration policies and pursue a
peace agenda, but in fact he’s expanded the militaristic Bush approach
to counterterrorism. He’s managed to get the U.S. involved in three wars
in the Middle East, keep Guantanamo open, and dramatically expand the
use of covert CIA capture/kill operations across the globe. We could not
think of a more worthy candidate for this award.
” News this week that the CIA is building a secret military base in the Middle East had the committee buzzing with excitement.
One judge noted, “We applaud Obama for presiding over 865 military
bases abroad at a cost of over $102 billion annually. At a time when the
country is faltering from the economic crisis, Obama’s decision to
approve the construction of more bases deserves praise.”
Obama’s speechwriters are hard at work preparing his acceptance
remarks, and PolicyMic managed to obtain a preview of the speech from a
source inside the White House.
The president will begin by thanking congressional Democrats “for
campaigning in 2006 on the antiwar agenda, and then turning around once
in office and funding the war they claimed to oppose.”
He will also thank Congress for “stepping aside and allowing me to go
to war in Libya without Congressional approval and once again approving
the Patriot Act despite years of supposed opposition.”
Ceremony organizers carefully timed the event in order to nudge Obama
toward breaking his pledge to begin a significant troop withdrawal in
July — a course the president is strongly considering.
They are urging the president to permanently take the Nobel Peace
Prize down from his bookshelf and replace it with the war prize next
month.
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Extracted from Military Resistance, (formerly GI Special), the magazine of the Military Resistance Organization. See the next post for more information about the organization
Daniel Berrigan: A Lifetime of Peace Activism May 9, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Peace, Religion, War, War on Terror.Tags: activism, Afghanistan War, berrigan brothers, daniel berrigan, deena guzder, drone missiles, extrajudicial killings, pacifism, pakistan, peace, peace activist, peace movement, predator, religion, roger hollander, social justice, war, war on terror
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Jingoistic crowds erupted with frat-boy glee shortly after President Barack Obama announced the extrajudicial assassination of Osama Bin Laden earlier this month. After all, America’s public enemy Numero Uno — our own veritable Darth Vadar – had lost what the mainstream media depicts as a Manichean battle ten years in the making. The lone voices in the wilderness that dared to point out the covert operation violated elementary norms of international law were quickly dismissed as “fanatics”. 
Notes:
[1] Joe Sabia, “The Cornell Catholic Community is in Crisis” Cornell Daily Sun. September 23, 2003
Deena Guzder is an independent journalist who has reported on human rights issues across the globe. She is the author of Divine Rebels (Chicago Review Press 2011), which includes a profile of Daniel Berrigan. Please visit her website: www.DeenaGuzder.com
Obama: Turn In Your Phony Nobel Peace Prize March 28, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Peace, War.Tags: nobel, nobel peace, Obama, obama nobel, peace prize, peace.roger hollander, war
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I have begun a petition to demand that President Obama return the Nobel Peace Prize, the awarding of which was a gross error. His continued warmongering in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Libya tells us that he has adopted the Bush Doctrine of permanent war. That such a person should hold the world’s most prestigious peach prize is a cruel joke. Demanding the return of Obama’s Nobel is a symbolic gesture, but such gestures can be a powerful means of expressing outrage.
You can sign that petition at the following link.
http://www.change.org/petitions/obama-return-nobel-peace-prize?te=seia
Midshipman, Then Pacifist: Rare Victory to Leave Navy February 23, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Peace, Religion, War.Tags: anti-war, Christianity, civilian casualties, conscientious objection, conscientious objector, just war, Michael Izbicki, naval academy, pacifism, pacifist, paul vitello, peace, quaker, religion, roger hollander, us navy, war, wwjd
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Shortly after Michael Izbicki, now 25, graduated from the Naval Academy in 2008, he decided that his Christian beliefs would not permit him to take part in war.
By PAUL VITELLO
Shortly after Michael Izbicki, now 25, graduated from the Naval Academy in 2008, he decided that his Christian beliefs would not permit him to take part in war.
Published: February 22, 2011
NEW LONDON, Conn. — The question that changed Michael Izbicki’s life appeared on a psychological exam he took not long after graduating in 2008 near the top of his class at the United States Naval Academy: If given the order, would he launch a missile carrying a nuclear warhead?
Ensign Izbicki said he would not — and his reply set in motion a two-year personal journey and legal battle that ended on Tuesday, when the Navy confirmed that he had been discharged from the service as a conscientious objector.
In the process, Mr. Izbicki, 25, went from Navy midshipman in the nuclear submarine fleet here, studying kill ratios, to resident of a small Quaker peace community a few blocks from the Thames River, where he prays several times a day, studies Hebrew and helps with the organic garden.
He is one of only a few graduates of the nation’s military academies to be granted conscientious objector status in recent years. And while every case is deeply personal, his long struggle for an honorable discharge offers a glimpse of a rarely viewed side of military experience in the post-draft, all-volunteer era: the steep challenge facing any service member — and especially a graduate of a service academy — who signs up as a teenager to become a warrior and then changes his mind in adulthood about his willingness to kill.
The Navy fought his request hard, in much the same way that the Army contested the conscientious objector application of Capt. Peter D. Brown, a West Point graduate and an Iraq war veteran who was discharged in 2007 after a protracted court battle.
Academy graduates accounted for only a dozen of the roughly 600 applicants for the special status between 2002 and 2010, spokesmen for the service branches said. Of those requests, fewer than half were approved. And like many of the other academy applicants, according to lawyers who handle such cases, Mr. Izbicki won his discharge only by taking his petition to federal court.
The Navy rejected Mr. Izbicki’s application twice, questioning the sincerity of his beliefs despite the support of several Navy chaplains and the testimony of two Yale Divinity School faculty members who said his religious convictions seemed to be mature and sincere.
One Navy commander suggested that the pacifist strain of Christianity that Mr. Izbicki embraced was inconsistent with mainstream Christian faith. The same commander likened the Quakers, who supported Mr. Izbicki, to the Rev. Jim Jones and his People’s Temple, a suicide cult.
J. E. McNeil, executive director of the Center on Conscience and War, a nonprofit group in Washington that helps service members navigate the conscientious objector process, said that a case like Mr. Izbicki’s posed a profound challenge to the military. “You were someone they thought was going to be a leader,” Ms. McNeil said. “They spent four years training you. Now you want nothing to do with that world.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, which filed a federal lawsuit on Mr. Izbicki’s behalf in November seeking a reversal of the Navy’s decision, announced on Tuesday that the Navy had granted Mr. Izbicki his discharge. Mr. Izbicki, who has continued to work at a Navy desk job, may have to reimburse the service for all or part of the cost of his education, said his lawyers, Sandra Staub, legal director of the A.C.L.U. of Connecticut, and Deborah H. Karpatkin and Vera M. Scanlon, of New York.
Mike McLellan, a spokesman for the Navy, said Mr. Izbicki had been discharged as a conscientious objector because “the Navy Personnel Command determined there was sufficient evidence to satisfy the requirements for this designation, and determined that it was in the Navy’s best interests to discharge him.”
Mr. Izbicki, a National Merit Scholarship finalist in high school, chose the naval academy at Annapolis, Md., over a bevy of colleges, including the California Institute of Technology, that offered him four-year scholarships, because he felt an obligation to serve his country during wartime, he told investigators in his application for discharge.
He grew up attending nondenominational Christian services in San Clemente, Calif., and remained a regular churchgoer during his four years at the academy, where Christianity is the dominant faith. Cadets are required in their junior year to study the “just war” theory, a doctrine justifying military action, based largely on the writings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Not until his senior year did Mr. Izbicki register a sense of unease over what he would refer to in his application as “the frankness with which people talked about killing.” He wrote: “The training did not live up to the ideals of the just war as I envisioned them. I saw formulas for calculating the number and types of casualties that would result from using each of our weapons systems. We calculated the extent of civilian casualties and whether these numbers were politically acceptable.”
Still, Mr. Izbicki said, he remained convinced that his Christian beliefs could be reconciled with military culture, and that as an officer he would be able to effect change from within.
After graduating from the academy, he earned a master’s degree in computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University in preparation for what he said he expected to be a career in nuclear submarines.
But Mr. Izbicki said he also began exploring his commitment to Christianity. He studied the Gospels, read widely about the early history of the church, took up Hebrew so he could read the Old Testament in the original, and started to measure his faith according to the evangelical touchstone “What would Jesus do?”
It was in that light that he encountered the exam question about launching a nuclear missile in early 2009, shortly after he was assigned to submariner school at the Nuclear Power Training Command in Charleston, S.C. Seeing the question spelled out like that, he said, made it impossible to hide his emerging pacifism any longer.
“I realized that I could not be responsible for killing anyone,” he later explained.
His answer flagged him for psychological testing, and a consultation with a Navy chaplain, who was the first to suggest that Mr. Izbicki consider applying for discharge as a conscientious objector.
“I had never really heard of it,” Mr. Izbicki, a reserved, soft-spoken man, said in an interview last week at St. Francis House, a Quaker residence. “It was one of those things people did in the ’60s.”
The transcripts of the hearings on his two applications for a discharge — which read partly like a court-martial, partly like oral exams for a doctor of divinity degree — run to more than 700 pages. They include esoteric queries about “just war” theory, the letters of St. Paul and the protocols known as the Six Capabilities of the United States Navy’s Maritime Strategy.
Mr. Izbicki’s beliefs are probed intensely for inconsistencies and deviations from conservative Christian belief.
One investigator, Lt. Cmdr. John A. Price, expresses surprise when Mr. Izbicki says he is not convinced that every word in the Bible is inspired by God. He questions how Mr. Izbicki can be sure, then, that the Sermon on the Mount, on which he bases his claim to know what Jesus would do, is accurate: “You realize that there’s a danger when you start believing that some stuff in the Bible’s not true, because then we might start believing that Jesus is not true.”
At another point, Commander Price asks, “If Jesus was a pacifist, why didn’t he tell all Roman soldiers to leave the army?”
Navy officers tried to persuade Mr. Izbicki to consider alternatives to discharge: Could he become a Navy medical officer or dentist? He replied that his pacifist beliefs were irreconcilable with any effort to prepare troops for battle. “I could not contribute in any way whatsoever,” he said.
Mr. Izbicki said he had made no plans for the future other than a return to his parents’ home in California. His discharge, he said, “has opened the whole world up to me.”
Winter Soldiers Confront the White House: Mass Arrests as They Put Their Bodies on the Line for Peace December 23, 2010
Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, Peace, War.Tags: Afghanistan War, anti-war, chris hedges, civil disobedience, daniel ellsberg, Iraq war, linda pershing, pakistan war, peace, roger hollander, veterans, veterans for peace, war, winter soldiers
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Thursday 23 December 2010
by: Linda Pershing, t r u t h o u t | Report
Vietnam veteran Bill Homans chained himself to a lamppost near the White House fence. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
On Thursday, December 16, the term “winter soldier” took on special meaning. Blanketed by snow flurries and enduring freezing temperatures, several hundred military veterans and peace activists gathered in the nation’s capital to stage a dramatic political protest. As they have done many times since George W. Bush announced the military attack of Afghanistan in 2001, concerned citizens from across the country traveled to Washington, calling for an end to US military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as drone attacks on Pakistan and Yemen.
Since 2001, I have joined thousands of Americans to raise our voices against the wars at peace actions in Washington, DC, including marches from the White House to the Capitol, vigils at the White House and civil disobedience in the streets and in the halls of Congress. This event felt different. Responding to a call from the leaders of Stop These Wars(1) – a new coalition of Veterans for Peace and other activists – participants came together in a large-scale performance of civil resistance. A group of veterans under the leadership of Veterans for Peace members Tarak Kauff, Will Covert and Elaine Brower, mother of a Marine who has served three tours of duty in Iraq, sponsored the event with the explicit purpose of putting their bodies on the line. Many participants were Vietnam War veterans; others ranged from Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans in their 20s and 30s to World War II vets in their 80s and older. They were predominately white; men outnumbered women by at least three to one. After a short rally in Lafayette Park, they formed a single-file procession, walking across Pennsylvania Avenue to the solemn beat of a drum. As they reached the police barricade (erected to prevent them from chaining themselves to the gate, a plan they announced on their web site), the activists stood shoulder to shoulder, their bodies forming a human link across the “picture postcard” tableau in front of the White House.
Veterans for Peace activist and event organizer Will Covert, reading the Veterans for Peace Statement of Purpose and Pledge of Nonviolence at the rally in Lafayette Park, Dec. 16, 2010. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
The powerful symbolism of the event focused on reclaiming public space, dissenters lining the fence that separates the presidency from the populace. For several minutes, activists, sang and chanted the customary peace songs and slogans; all the while, the park police seemed calm and relatively unconcerned. Then, suddenly, one of the veterans breached the waist-high barricade, lurching toward the White House fence and calling others to join him. Within moments, all 131 activists jumped over or maneuvered around the barricade, staking their claim to the fence. The visual effect was stunning and eerie, particularly in the falling snow. Some activists secured their wrists to the fence with metal handcuffs. Former Veterans for Peace President Elliott Adams affixed a metal, u-shaped, bicycle lock around his neck and fastened it to a post. He explained, “We’re trying to stop these stupid wars. We’ve (Veterans have) been in the wars, we fought the wars and now know they’re stupid. They’re bad for the nation, they’re bad for the people, they’re bad for the economy and they are only good for the filthy rich. And, it’s time we quit killing people of other nations and killing our own children just to make a few people rich.”(2) Veteran Bill Homans (aka Watermelon Slim) echoed an action he took in 1972, when he chained himself to the captain’s cabin of the USS Constitution to protest the Vietnam War. With the help of a fellow veteran, Homans fastened himself to a lamppost near the White House fence with a thick metal chain.
Journalist and author Chris Hedges speaking at the rally in Lafayette Park, Dec. 16, 2010. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
The park police brought in eight officers on horseback, four on either side of the crowd, presumably to intimidate. They also tried to contain the action by placing metal barricades not only in front of the fence, but also vertically across Pennsylvania Avenue, narrowing the accessible area to a small section of the street directly in front of the White House. As they moved in to make arrests, they used yellow caution tape (with the words “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS”), preventing supporters, especially those with cameras, from closely observing or documenting the arrest process. They parked large buses and vehicles along the curb on the far side of the street, blocking the view of onlookers, who were forced onto the sidewalk of Lafayette Park. Few were able to see the action up close. A handful of journalists and others managed to hold their places on the sidelines; several were harassed by the police as they attempted to document the arrests. One by one, the police detained the activists, securing their wrists behind their backs with plastic ties. If they refused to walk to the buses awaiting them, two police officers dragged resisters across Pennsylvania Avenue. Many activists, men and women alike, declined to walk of their own free will and accepted the consequences. The process could have been carried out much more quickly, but it took nearly four hours for police to complete the final arrest. Those remaining at the fence for the duration were wet from the snowfall and extremely cold, reinforcing the clear message from the authorities: if you exercise civil resistance of this kind, we will make it extremely uncomfortable for you.
Peace activists begin their procession from Lafayette Park to the White House gates. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
Journalists focused their attention on the well-known public figures who participated to support the effort, especially Daniel Ellsberg (former military analyst who released the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War and subject of the recent film “The Most Dangerous Man in America”), Chris Hedges (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and war correspondent) and Ray McGovern (27-year CIA analyst and Army intelligence officer). Ellsberg refuted Obama’s assertion that increasing the number of US troops in Afghanistan will help keep Americans safe. He countered, “I regard that last assurance as a lie, as a big lie,” noting that Obama was aware the war was unwinnable in December 2009, when he decided to deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. According to Ellsberg, the “surge” strengthened the Taliban and, by extension, al-Qaeda, who responded by bolstering their recruitment. Hedges spoke eloquently about hope and the importance of civil resistance in response to indifference and deception by our country’s leaders:
Hope will not come in trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people…. Hope will only come now when we physically defy the violence of the state. All who resist, all who are here today, keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become an enemy of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice…. And those who resist with nonviolence are the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.(3)
Veterans and peace activists form a line at the barricade in front of the White House fence. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
Paraphrasing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., McGovern cautioned, “If we don’t do activism, democracy is out the door…. We’re going to do all we can to stop the violence being perpetrated in our name. And so, if the making of peace means prison, that’s where you’re going to find us.” Several speakers at the rally in Lafayette Park called for the release of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the young Army soldier suspected of giving secret US documents about the wars to WikiLeaks. They also denounced the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, comparing Internet publication of classified information to The New York Times’ 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg argued, “I think they [Manning and Assange] provided a very valuable service. To call them ‘terrorists’ is not only mistaken, it’s absurd.” Ellsberg noted: since President Obama has a responsibility to launch an investigation of atrocities once they are reported, he “has a very personal reason to be concerned” about the release of documents that reveal the use of torture and unnecessary killings by American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Activists move past the barricade to their goal: the White House fence. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
Ellsberg and Hedges inspired the crowd. However, the most striking feature of this gathering was the leadership provided by activist veterans, as well as their decision to be arrested in large numbers. Recognizing that more benign forms of protest have had little effect, Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program told the crowd, “We’ve tried the traditional tools. We’ve tried others ways of advocating. We’ve tried educating and organizing. And while all of these tools are important, they are not sufficient.” Former Army Sgt. Crystal Colon, who served two tours of duty in Iraq, urged active duty soldiers to refuse to fight: “Civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan are dying on a daily basis. These wars need to end and the only way we’re going to end them is if veterans and soldiers take a stand and say ‘No more!’ We’re not doing this anymore. We’re not fighting these wars. We’re not dying for political greed or corporations.” Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans spoke out about their experiences and why they oppose US military involvement in those nations. One young veteran commented on his experiences, “Helping the people of Iraq was the driving factor for me going there. And then occupying their country and doing consistent raids and pulling their homes apart … and watching the infrastructure degrade, instead of improve, it was kind of a sharp realization that there was nothing that was … benefiting the people, by any means. In fact, consistent night raids, check points and harassment [were] the daily routine for what we were doing to the people of Iraq.”(4)
Peace activists cover the fence, refusing to move or leave. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
March Forward member Zachary Choate, who was deployed to Iraq in 2006, injured by an IED and deployed back to Iraq after rehabilitation in the US, stood at the center of the fence dressed in a military uniform, plus a Palestinian scarf tied around his neck. Carrying an American flag, folded in the triangular formation used at military funerals, Choate explained why he joined the action: “I’ve been out of the military now for two-and-a-half years, and I’ve been speaking out ever since. Today, I just feel that it’s time for me to take a stand, risk arrest, whatever it takes. Why today? I can’t sit idle anymore, I can’t. I can’t sit by anymore and let these atrocities continue.”(5)
Daniel Ellsberg at the White House fence. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
Ironically, while dissidents chained themselves to the fence to decry the wars, President Obama and his staff held a press conference at the White House, commenting that the fighting in Afghanistan “continues to be a very difficult endeavor,” but that the US is “on track to achieve our goals.” When reporters questioned Defense Secretary Robert Gates about the summer 2011 timetable to begin withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan, he back peddled: “The president has made clear” that the withdrawal “will be conditions-based.” Regarding how quickly US troops will move out of Afghanistan, Gates responded, “The answer is, we don’t know at this point,” adding that the pace will depend on the progress of Afghan security forces.(6)
Iraq Veteran Zachary Choate, denouncing U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan (Photo: Linda Pershing)
The American public doesn’t seem to be buying it. An ABC/Washington Post poll indicates that general dissatisfaction with the Afghanistan war, the longest in US history, has risen by seven points just since July 2010. A record 60 percent of poll respondents believe that the war has not been worth fighting. “The public’s increasingly negative assessment comes after a new strategy, including a surge of US and allied forces, led to the Afghanistan war’s bloodiest year. According to icasualties.org, nearly 500 US soldiers have been killed and 4,481 wounded in 2010, compared with 317 killed and 2,114 wounded in 2009 and 155 killed, 793 wounded in 2008.”(7)
Women joined the action by handcuffing themselves to the fence. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
Police film the activists and arrests while simultaneously blocking the view of observers, who were forced to stand behind large busses and trucks parked in front of Lafayette Park. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
Mindful of the determination of our nation’s leaders to prolong US militarism in Afghanistan and Iraq, journalist and war correspondent Hedges reminded participants about a central principle of nonviolent activism: civil resistance and the hope it brings often requires risk and a willingness to sacrifice ones own security:
Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and more potent hope becomes.
Police used barricades to keep observers and photographers from getting close to the activists during the arrests. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
As he was cuffed by police at the White House gate, Ellsberg, age 79, commented that this marked his 80th arrest for civil resistance. Not one to “go gentle into that good night”: despite the freezing weather, he used his bare hands to flash two peace signs behind his back. Among the 131 who were arrested, between 40 and 50 activists refused to pay the $100 fine for “failure to obey a lawful order,” choosing instead to appear in court and present their case. Ellsberg encouraged the resisters: “We can say by being here, no longer does this war go on silently with the appearance of universal consent. We withdraw our consent to carry on this war. You must do it over our bodies.”
Park police arrest a member of CodePink and take her to the bus. (Photo: Linda Pershing)
Event organizers are hopeful that the arrests of the 131 military veterans and activists will spark a growing movement to oppose the government through increasing acts of civil resistance. Ellsberg agreed: “I hope this’ll be the beginning of a wave of civil disobedience, which we haven’t seen and should have seen, with respect from this atrocious war. It’s overtime, but it’s not too late.”(8)
Footnotes:
1. See “Stop the Wars,” retrieved 19 December 2010.
2. You Tube video by robkall, 17 December 2010, retrieved 19 December 2010.
3. For a full version of Chris Hedge’s essay, from which his speech on December 16, 2010. was adopted, see “Real Hope is Doing Something,” Truthdig, 29 November 2010, retrieved 19 December 2010.
4. “‘Hope Is Action’: Hedges and Ellsberg Arrested at White House Protest” (You Tube video), Truthdig, 17 December 2010, retrieved 19 December 2010.
5.You Tube video by ebecker2000. “Veterans for Peace White House Civil Disobedience to End War,” 16 December 2010, retrieved 19 December 2010.
6. Memmott, Mark. “Obama: U.S. Is ‘On Track To Achieve Our Goals’ In Afghanistan,” NPR, 16 December 2010, retrieved 19 December 2010.
7. Phelan, Julie and Gary Langer. “Poll: Assessment of Afghanistan War Sours,” ABC News, 16 December 2010, retrieved 19 December 2010.
8. “Veterans For Peace Protest War Outside White House,” The Real News, 17 December 2010, retrieved 19 December 2010.
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