[Today, I attended a day-long Conference on the Veterans Peace Movement. Activist from vets groups, military families and other sections of the anti-war/peace movement gathered as part of an ongoing process of brainstorming directions for the movement in the coming period. The excellent short speech posted here concisely lays out the magnitude of the challenges facing that movement.]
Ben Chitty (left) with Dayl Wise
Veterans & the Politics of Peace
by Ben Chitty
What do
you think "veterans against war" or "veterans for peace"
really mean? Seems like it should be simple, but it’s not. When
David Cline, Clarence Fitch, and Mike Gold revived the NYC metro area
chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the 1980s, people used
to ask, "What war?" or "Why not just 'Vietnam Veterans
Against War'?"
You can
slice and dice the concepts "veteran against war" or "veteran
for peace" in many ways. Here’s one approach. You start by asking
where you want to go and what that will take – what would it take
to stop this war, whatever war that happens to be; what would it take
to stop our own wars, the wars our country fights; what would it take
to stop all war, to make war obsolete. You can say it in positive
terms: make peace with our enemy; make war our last national policy
option; make over our society to eliminate the causes of war -- end
oppression and exploitation, so that war can be abolished. That’s a
tall order. But look around you -- you can spot someone at almost
every point on this spectrum. And every one you see -- every one of
us -- is against war and for peace.
I do
not have to tell you how many ways you can become sick of war.
Brutality, hypocrisy, impunity. Misogyny and homophobia. Bad
medicine, environmental degradation. Killing poor people to protect
the rich, or people of color to preserve white skin privilege. The
military industrial complex, which must be the most wasteful economic
engine ever built. Add up the cost of the military, calculate how
many schools could be built, or bridges repaired, or superfund sites
cleaned up, for the price of one aircraft carrier -- about $13.6
billion dollars for the USS Gerald Ford, now scheduled to float out
of dry dock next November -- that’s almost a full year’s budget
for the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science
Foundation combined.
So,
what about stopping one particular war? Actually, we have no idea.
To
begin with, it's hard even to imagine stopping a war before it
starts. Many, maybe even most, Americans opposed the Spanish-American
War and the annexation of the Philippines, the first World War, the
first Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq. All these wars started anyway.
So much for democracy.
Some
wars don’t stop until someone wins. As long as you believe you’re
winning, you won’t be much interested in stopping the war.
Stalemates are different. There are two key questions. Can one side
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