The Biggest Victory of 2013

As the year ends, the temptation to dust off the hands and say "Well, maybe 2014 will be better" is a strong one. But as we look ahead, it can't hurt to remind ourselves of some of the victories won in this country over the last twelve months.

There were victories won by the courageous efforts of individuals, like Edward Snowden who followed in the footsteps of Chelsea Manning and ripped the lid off the massive snake pit of government spying on US residents and peoples and leaders around the world.

There were local victories whose impacts created national ripples, notably the election of longtime fighter Chokwe Lumumba as mayor of Jackson MS. His victory in one of the old strongholds of Jim Crow racism gave heart to many in the Black liberation struggle.

Social Movements Pick Up Steam

Flourishing social movements at a national level have not yet won decisive victories, but their growing strength and impact alone signify celebration-worthy accomplishments:

• The immigrants' rights struggle, spearheaded by young "dream warriors" has kept the issue to the fore and caused serious splits in the most reactionary wing of US bourgeois politics.
• Low wage workers, with organizational help from unions like the UFCW and SEIU and from local workers center-type outfits, have set back Walmart, McDonalds and their ilk and created public opinion for a higher minimum wage.
• The environmental movement has ramped up the struggle against fossil-fuel caused global warming. Both the national drive to block the Keystone XL pipeline and the locally-based anti-fracking struggles have drawn strength from closer links to First Nation activists like those in Idle No More.

• Resistance to the "education reform" steamroller took a big leap, undermining the billionaire-funded drive to privatize and industrialize education and crush teacher unions.

The Big One
The biggest victory of 2013, though, is one that is too easily overlooked. For the first time, the people of the US stopped an imperialist war before it could start! The Obama administration and a substantial chunk of the ruling class were hellbent on an unjust and unjustifiable attack on Syria. Popular opposition stalled, then killed, their plan. 
To be sure, there were favorable circumstances. George W. Bush's catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq tainted any push toward further imperialist adventures in the Middle East. The people of the UK, whose rulers had walked in lockstep with ours on Iraq, forced Parliament to vote No on this one. Racist hatred for Obama by Congressional Republicans and their teahadist supporters back home dried up what would normally have been a deep pool of support.

Most importantly, the anti-war movement during the preceding decade had reminded the people of the US of the bitter lessons of the Vietnam War and drawn new ones from Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite a morale-sapping decline since the powerful days of 2003-7, anti-war forces rallied heroically in the crisis and provided the spearhead of resistance.

But what did the trick was ordinary everyday people. Polls showed that opposition to even the promised "limited attack" on the Assad regime ran as high as 80%. Local protests were backed up by a rapid outburst of rejection, with literally millions of calls, emails, petition signatures and letters to the editor bombarding the White House, politicians and the media. The message was simple: Don't Do This Thing!

And we won. There was no attack on Syria, no subsequent escalation, no new quagmire. The civil war in Syria grinds brutally on, fuelled by money, arms and combatants from outside the country, much of it from the US and close allies like Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But who can doubt that direct US intervention would have made things worse for the people of Syria and the whole region?

On To 2014!

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Veterans and the Future of the Peace Movement

[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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Teaching The Anti-Vietnam War Movement Via Music

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of addressing Dr. Mark Naison's class on the '60s at Fordham. Since I spoke from a couple of scribbled notes, I'm not really sure what I said, but rather than try and reconstruct it, I'm taking the low road here and posting the notes for a CD I burned for them to listen to as homework before my stint in Bronx.

The idea was to convey to a buncha 18 and 19-year-olds the role music played in our lives back in the day and how the anti-war movement influenced rock and roll and was influenced by it, as well as to suggest the trajectory that we took from protest to resistance to (for many of us, revolution. The songs aren't in exact chronological order but group around themes I wanted to talk about.

So what, FotM reader, would you have included that I missed, and why?

I started by playing a couple of minutes of Paul Hardcastle's "19" to get them thinking about how the kids humping the boonies (and the NLF fighters seeking to liberate their homeland) were the same age as they were.

Here's the annotated playlist:


1. Baby Boom Che—-John Trudell
Trudell is a Santee Sioux who helped found and build the American Indian Movement in the ‘70s. He has since become a writer, actor and spoken word artist.

2. Masters Of War—-Bob Dylan
It’s hard today to grasp all the changes Bob Dylan sent rippling through pop music, including the raggedy-ass, intense quality of his vocals, which opened the door for half the vocalists working in rock today…

*3. Times They Are A’Changin’—-The Beach Boys
Listen hard: 50% of Dr. Naison’s class is in the grooves of this single cut.

4. Vietnam Blues—-J. B. Lenoir
J.B. Lenoir was a great bluesman in Chicago in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He had already cut “Korea Blues” and “Eisenhower Blues” in the ‘50s, though his record company, Parrot, changed the name of the latter to “Tax-Paying Blues.”

*5. Eve Of Destruction—-Barry McGuire
1965. The first protest song to hit number one on the charts. But is it a folk song? And what is it protesting?

6. Ballad Of The Green Berets—-Sgt. Barry Sadler
This little ditty was the number one song in the US for the year of 1966.

7. 2+2=?—-The Bob Seger System
Bob Seger was a working class kid out of the Detroit area, whose father bailed on the family when he was ten. One of his first recordings was a takeoff, “Ballad of the Yellow Beret,” mocking draft dodgers. This come out a couple years later. People changed fast in those days.

8. The “Fish” Cheer / I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-To-Die Rag—-Country Joe & The Fish
The band played this at Woodstock, if you do YouTube, it’s here. Watch us rise to our feet starting at about 2:15.

9. War-–Edwin Starr
Starr uses blunt contempt where Country Joe & The Fish use blunt sarcasm to deal with an increasingly insane-seeming war.

10. We Gotta Get Out Of This Place—-The Animals
Written by Brill Building aces Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil in NYC and intended for the Righteous Brothers, it was bought by British manager Mickie Most for one of his best bands, The Animals. It became the theme song of the grunts in Vietnam.

*11. Talkin’ Vietnam Potluck Blues—Tom Paxton
A ‘50s peacetime vet, Paxton was part of the early folk scene in Greenwich Village. This talking blues (a pre-hiphop spoken song form) highlights the absurdity of the war.

12. Sam Stone--Swamp Dogg
The other side of the previous song. This is best known in the version by its author, singer-songwriter John Prine, but I threw this one in because the southern soul version lends a little variety to this CD and to put in a plug for the weird and wonderful Swamp Dogg, who made Dick Nixon’s personal enemies list and authored romantic songs like “If I Ever Kiss It (He Can Kiss It Goodbye).”

13. Four Days Gone—-Buffalo Springfield
Buffalo Springfield was one the California-based groups that transformed rock and roll in the late ‘60s. Their first hit was a protest song--“For What It’s Worth.” (Know what hiphop cuts this was sampled on?) This one could be about a draft dodger or someone who went AWOL, as tens of thousands did.

14. White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land—-Phil Ochs
Phil Ochs was one of the great protest singers and his buoyant “Draft Dodger Rag” (But one thing you gotta see/That someone’s gotta go over there/And that someone isn’t me) was an anti-war movement anthem. This came a few years later.

*15. Bring The Boys Home—-Freda Payne
Even in the presence of these other tunes. I hold that this is one of the two best songs to come out of the movement against the Vietnam War.

Freda Payne was a jazz singer who was trying to make a soul breakthrough and was brought by Holland-Dozier-Holland to their new Invictus label after they broke away from Berry Gordy at Motown.

*16. Honorable Peace-—B.J. Thomas
This is the other of the two best tunes of the anti-war era.

A bit of background: B.J. Thomas was a kinda soft rock guy, best known for his 1970 #1, “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.” He had studio time booked in late December 1972, when Nixon launched the murderous “Christmas Bombings”–4000 bomber sorties that pounded North Vietnamese cities day and night over 12 days. Gerry Goffin, who with his ex-wife Carole King, had written some of the Brill Building’s greatest songs, cranked this out in a fit of rage and persuaded Thomas to record it on Christmas Eve. The pick-up band at the recording session included two guys who had been in the blue-eyed soul group, The Rascals.

17. Ohio--Steve Earle & Marah
Neil Young wrote this just days after the National Guard opened fire and killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio during the largest campus upsurge this country has ever seen, in May, 1970. I include this version because I think the rawer, grindier sound is more appropriate than the CSNY original. Sue me. [A blog post I wrote about “Ohio” as part of a series on the May 1970 events is here at FotM.]

18. What’s Goin’ On?—-Marvin Gaye
“I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world.”

*19. What About Me?—-Quicksilver Messenger Service
A San Francisco band from the same scene as Dr. Naison’s beloved Janis Joplin. Even more than in the Marvin Gaye tune, deceptively mellow music masks a deadly serious view of the world.

*The songs with an asterix are the ones I played during the actual class.

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BP's Gulf Blowout And Our Future

[My friend M sent me the following thoughts which I post with permission.]

Our son-in-law, Lee, earns his living as a fisherman in Key West. Has done so for 30 years. Today is his 52nd birthday and he is now, effectively, jobless for the rest of his life. Being a small fisherman has always been an iffy proposition, because you're dependent so much on the weather, and for the last few years, the weather has become totally unpredictable. Also for the past five years NOAA has been imposing increasingly severe restrictions on what fishers can catch -- how much and when and where -- all in the name of preserving fish populations.

The intent of these restrictions would be believable if the same restrictions were placed on sportsfishers, but until this year, that hasn't happened. Instead, commerical fishers are restricted from catching, say, grouper in certain weeks because they're spawning, and they have to sit idle while sportsfishers pack them in, put them on ice, and take them home to their families and friends.

Why does this happen? Because Tourism is king in Florida. The giant cruise ships come into port regularly in Key West, and dump their loads, polluting the area, with disastrous effects on the coral. And the Navy moved their firing operations to the Keys when protests finally closed Vieques. So things have been hard for Lee and his fellow small fishers lately -- extremely hard since the recession, because tourism is down quite a bit and Lee sold most of his fish to local restaurants and the main fish market in Key West. That market closed two weeks before the oil blowout.

Lee has been scrambling for work -- any kind of work. Captaining boats, scraping barnacles off boat bottoms, anything to bring in money. He's a worker, always has been, and this is very hard for him. He's also become a local spokesman for the small fisher community because he's smart and articulate and a no-bullshitter. Since the oil blowout, he and his fellow small fishers and others in the Keys who are out of work because tourism is down have all taken haz/mat training at the local college, at a cost of $550 a head.


BP gave the college a grant to run the training, a few thousand dollars, and also the promise that those who completed the training would be reimbursed for their costs. Of course they're all hoping for work with BP to help clean up the oil when it hits -- which it will do eventually, and get swept into the Gulf Stream and get carried to other Caribbean countries, but also to the coasts of Europe and Africa. The dispersants, highly toxic to humans and all living creatures, will break up the oil into tiny drops making it less visible on beachers but infinitely harder to deal with. Like sending coal ash into the air.

I am put in mind of the lyrebird, which resides in the Indonesian rain forest. This bird is noted for its amazing capacity to imitate the sounds of the forest all around it, incorporating the sounds into its mating song. In recent years ornithologists have recorded the lyrebird's songs, which include the sounds of the bulldozers and chainsaws cutting down the very trees around it. That's how I see Lee and his fellow fishermen, working to save the ass of the industry that has spelled their doom.

I agree with Bill Fletcher's article -- we just watch and do nothing. We feel hopeless. We all know that nobody at BP will be prosecuted. Oh, probably the CEO will step down, but there will be someone new and nothing will change. Just recently, Biden and Kerry were promoting Big Oil, saying how dependent we are as a nation on BP to provide oil for our war in Afghanistan. This is why the antiwar movement has to be linked to the environmental movement.

We can't really tackle the Fossil Three (oil, gas, coal) and their radioactive playmate Big Nuclear until we confront the fact that this nation's only purpose is as a War Machine. And we can't really stop the War Machine until we deal with our abject and unnecessary dependence on fossil fuels.

We need to start a grassroots movement for solar -- as an individual solution for those who can manage it, and in coops, something akin to the Food Coop. A solar community bank that would fund people going off the grid. I would look to California to see what's happening there. I think another big part of this fight has to be to unite the Food First people, the Greenpeace types, and those fighting to preserve water and waterways. These are really core to our survival and can be readily understood by people because they directly affect their lives.

I've copyedited a few books lately about these issues -- one about grassroots organizing against factory farms; a book that I did earlier this year and was just sent a copy of called The Fate of Earth -- looking at the impact of the Exxon Valdez 20 years later -- which human communities (and other species) recovered and which were destroyed forever. There's a movement out there but it hasn't coalesced and it isn't very visible. But it's who we're going to have to rely on to combat the neofascist Tea Baggers.

I have begun to think that electing Obama was, in fact, a huge setback for the movement. He's every bit as bad as Bush, as regressive on education and war and financialization and civil liberties. He's a corporatist, 100%. There's no question of him unleashing his "inner FDR," as Bob Herbert called for -- he doesn't have an inner FDR. He doesn't even have an inner LBJ. But he's articulate and deceptive, and that has lulled us into doing nothing. I have finally begun to understand how nobody in the USSR rebelled. We feel there's no point whatsoever. We have no leaders. We have no voice.

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May '70: 17. May 21 In The Streets...

Though the national student strike was three weeks old on May 21, 1970, it was not yet over. While this is a day late for the 40th anniversary, I am going to highlight the day in two separate posts.

Ohio State University saw one of the biggest clashes of the whole May upsurge with hours of mobile combat as students and townspeople from Columbus took on the Ohio National Guard, even though they were the force that had gunned down four students at Kent State University on May 4.

Actually Governor Rhodes had initially mobilized the Guard at the end of April, because OSU had already blown wide open, even before the Cambodia invasion and the start of the national student strike. As at other campuses, the issue of racism was an initial trigger, with two Black students brought up on charges after a March 13 protest.

On April 20, 100 students in the School of Social Work had walked out, demanding more student voice in decisions, followed a day later by protests targeting recruiters for corporations from the military-industrial complex at a campus jobs fair. Various activist groups united and issued a joint call for a student strike to begin on the April 29, a call quickly endorsed by the student government.

The strike started successfully with picket lines closing classes and a 2000 strong rally on the Oval. By evening it had evolved into a blockade at the campus gates to keep out the Ohio Highway Patrol, called in by the administration. After a night of fighting and 300 busts, student heading for the Oval on the 30th found their campus occupied by the Ohio National Guard.

The Guard teargassed a rally of 4000 students that day. Following days saw more fighting and more gas. On the May 4, the administration finally started making concessions, even as the Guard occupation and the strike continued. Once the news from Kent State hit, it was too little, too late. The protests stepped up!

Two days later the administration announced the suspension of classes. OSU was closed effective May 7 at Governor Rhodes’ urging. They tried to reopen it on the May 19. Mistake. Two days later, renewed clashes erupted on the campus and spilled into adjacent Columbus. Scores were arrested. The strike was still on!


Click here to read this series from the beginning.

Click here to read the next installment.

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Protesting Works! (and not much of anything else does...)

[Crossposted from the Iraq Moratorium website.]

It’s no surprise that the anti-war movement is in a lull. The war in Afghanistan this month passes the War of Independence to become the second longest in US history. Thanks to a feeble news media, many in this country don’t even know that there are still 120,000 US occupation troops in Iraq (and about as many “private contractors” your tax dollars are paying for).

Now Barack Obama, the 2008 “peace candidate” whose victory drew heavily on support from voters sick of these wars, is sending 30,000 more young men and women into harm’s way in a country where drone attacks kill kids and create new insurgents on a weekly basis.

Many who have organized against and demonstrated against the wars since 2002 are worn out and hear the mournful strains of the old “protest is just self-indulgent and ineffective” song in their mind’s ear.


Well, folks, let me present to you the students in the California.higher education system and their allies: teachers, staff, parents and the community at large. They started fighting budget cuts last spring and in November, when the U of C trustees announcedan additional 32% increase in tuition, they erupted in militant protest, closing classes, seizing buildings and blocking traffic.

The authorities responded with police attacks and arrests, while denouncing the students as selfish and spoiled for failing to do their part to help with the state’s budget crisis. Politicians and media mouthpieces tut-tutted about their strident language and inappropriate tactics.

Guess what? On Wednesday, Republican governor Arnold Schwarznegger proposed an amendment to the California constititution prohibiting the state from spending more on its prisons than its educational system, a long-standing practice in the state. He proclaimed that “choosing universities over prisons” would be “a historic and transforming realignment of California’s priorities.”

And what made the Governator change his tune? His chief of staff spilled the beans to the NY Times: “Those protests on the U.C. campuses were the tipping point. Our university system is going to get the support it deserves.”

Let’s savor that: “Those protests...were the tipping point.”

We may not be close to the tipping point that will end the occupations, but let’s not get sidetracked. The more we protest, the sooner the tipping point will be reached. The more we shrug and sigh, the longer the killing and dying, the waste of lives and money will go on.

As the Moratorium slogan says: It’s Got To Stop. We’ve Got To Stop It.

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Afghanistan & Heroin: Unmentioned Costs Of War

[This summer, I had several conversations with Zach Rudes, a very perceptive young writer, on the heroin epidemic in NW Connecticut, where high school students report that it's easier to score than marijuana! At my urging, Zach wrote this piece for Fire on the Mountain. He has crossposted it at his own blog, And Just Like That I Became A Pseudo-Journalist, which I recommend for your perusal.]

by Zach Rudes

President Obama's recent decision to send tens of thousands of additional American troops into Afghanistan got a lot of people talking. Suddenly, I was hearing questions being asked that should have been asked years ago. Some people wondered, "How much money is this going to cost?". Some people asked, "Do we really need to send over 30,000 more soldiers?" Others questioned, many for the first time, the need to fight this war in the first place.

Others were more occupied with the question "How many American lives is this costing us?" A quick internet search shows that something to the tune of 900 American soldiers have been killed since the start of the war in 2001. While 900 dead soldiers is 900 too many, I think the actual tally of lives lost is much much higher.

Quick! How many heroin users can you name off the top of your head? I can easily rattle off a dozen without taking a breath, all from the lovely rural northwest corner of Connecticut. And those dozen or so are just the tip of the iceberg. So where is this ruiner of lives coming from?You guessed it, folks. Well over 90% of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan. Before the war, our extremist friends put the 'ban' in Taliban and made the cultivation of poppies illegal. Heroin production plummeted.

But then, much to the relief of Afghanistan's poppy farmers, corrupt officials, and anyone else who could get in on a piece of the poppy pie, the Americans came, dismantled the regime, and production once again surged.

What a strange situation. Let's look at a hypothetical example of how this could play out.
Step 1: War is declared.
Step 2: A taxpayer's money is used to fight a war.
Step 3: The war allows massive poppy cultivation to be restored.
Step 4: Excellent quality heroin floods parts of America, namely the Northeast.
Step 5: Taxpayer's child becomes a raging addict.
Step 6: Addict commits a petty crime spending more taxpayer money on judicial and incarceration costs (mom and dad can pick up the rehab bill)
Step 7: Vicious cycle of heroin addiction leads to life of incarceration at great cost to taxpayers and eventually death due to AIDS or health consequences.

Of course, not every person who tries Afghan heroin will spend their lives in jail until they die prematurely. All too many will, however. In addition to the user, heroin addiction takes a gigantic toll on friends, families, and communities. Those involved pay for heroin addiction in grief, money, time, and loss of life.

But just how many lives are lost? We just don't know. No government agency releases numbers on exactly how many fatal heroin overdoses occur each year in America. And even if we had that figure, how could we possibly account for all the dreams shattered, friendships broken, or families destroyed? How could we tally the total amount of property value lost in towns where heroin use has spooked potential homeowners? How many people die from AIDS complications who contracted HIV from sharing needles? I could ask a hundred questions like this.

But I have the sneaking suspicion these types of questions aren't being asked enough by the United States government. When Obama went strolling through Arlington on a soul search about the loss of life in times of war, I wonder if it occurred to him to take another walk through D.C.'s most heroin-inflicted neighborhoods to see the true magnitude of his decisions.

The heroin question pops up from time to time in newspaper articles, but for my little corner of Connecticut, it is an epidemic that cannot afford to be ignored. Many people in small towns in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, or New York State would agree with me. Others in cities like Hartford, Providence, or Baltimore could certainly say the same.

Political analysts like to talk about our disconnect from war and how removed we are from the reality of war. I'm calling bullshit. This war is everywhere. It is in your smashed car window, in your empty jewelry box, in your prison, and in your local emergency room.

So how much is this war costing in terms of human life?

The answer is simple. It's just like determining how many anti-war protestors march on Washington. You take the official estimate and you add many many many more.

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Obama's Million Dollar Gift To Anti-War Organizing

A million dollars a year!

That's what it costs to put one--that's right, one--soldier or Marine on the ground in Afghanistan and to house and supply him or her there. This figure comes directly from the White House and was widely quoted in in the flurry of PR around President Obama's West Point speech announcing his 30,000+ escalation of the occupying force in Afghanistan.

A million bucks a year. That's a nice round figure. A more useful tool for those of us working to revive the anti-war movement is hard to imagine.

This struck me yesterday when the Transit Authority here in NYC, faced with a severe budget crunch, decided to eliminate passes for kids going to and from school, to close whole subway lines and bus routes, to cut services and crowd trains more, and to limit the Access-A-Ride program for seniors and the disabled. All of this, one report said, would save $139 million in the first year.

The math is easy--simply don't send 139 troops to Afghanistan next year. That would cover the cost of averting brutal cuts to a public transit system used by more than 5 million people every day.

You get the idea. Call it what you want--a "troop year" perhaps. Anytime some government agency grappling with revenue collapse caused by the economic meltdown announces an increase in fees or a cutback in services, just figure how many troops not being shipped into harm's way in Helmand Province it would take to make that budget good.

Then spread the word! Use the fact in conversations, letters to the editor, emails to friends and family, leaflets, faxes to Congresscritters who are about to vote to appropriate more money for the war.

People in this country may not like thinking about the war, but they sure can't help thinking about the economy. This is a nice clear way to help them make the connection.

You know those college students in California who are in the middle of a fierce battle to block an unbelievable 32% tuition increase? That's right, just bring 505 troops who are already in Afghanistan home in 2010. Some of them might even want to enroll, too.

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Remembering the Rant That Shaped a Movement

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of a George Bush quote so spectacularly dumb that it will make any greatest hits collection--no need to buy the box set.

"There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush told reporters at the White House. "My answer is bring them on."

When Bush's interview was carried on the news, a retired Special Forces non-com named Stan Goff in Raleigh, NC went into a white-hot rage. He sat down at his keyboard and ripped out a response entitled "Bring 'Em On?" You may well remember it, although it was five years ago today. Within hours it swept across the Internet like a prairie fire.

Sparked by the letter's urgency and the response it triggered, a group of veterans and military family members made contact with one another and assembled the Bring Them Home Now! campaign. BTHN! kept the "Now" to the fore in the anti-war movement and helped coordinate within it a strong presence for forces from what some called the "military community." Stan not only took a central part in the campaign, but went on to act as adviser to the just-born Iraq Veterans Against the War in their crucial first year.

"Bring 'Em On?"

By Stan Goff

In 1970, when I arrived at my unit, Company A, 4th Battalion/503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade, in what was then the Republic of Vietnam, I was charged up for a fight. I believed that if we didn't stop the communists in Vietnam, we'd eventually be fighting this global conspiracy in the streets of Hot Springs, Arkansas. I'd been toughened by Basic Training, Infantry Training and Parachute Training, taught how to use my weapons and equipment, and I was confident in my ability to vanquish the skinny unter-menschen. So I was dismayed when one of my new colleagues--a veteran who'd been there ten months--told me, "We are losing this war."

Not only that, he said, if I wanted to survive for my one year there, I had to understand one very basic thing. All Vietnamese were the enemy, and for us, the grunts on the ground, this was a race war. Within one month, it was apparent that everything he told me was true, and that every reason that was being given to the American public for the war was not true.

We had a battalion commander whom I never saw. He would fly over in a Loach helicopter and give cavalier instructions to do things like "take your unit 13 kilometers to the north." In the Central Highlands, 13 kilometers is something we had to hack out with machetes, in 98-degree heat, carrying sometimes 90 pounds over our body weights, over steep, slippery terrain. The battalion commander never picked up a machete as far as we knew, and after these directives he'd fly back to an air-conditioned headquarters in LZ English near Bong-son. We often fantasized together about shooting his helicopter down as a way of relieving our deep resentment against this faceless, starched and spit-shined despot.

Yesterday, when I read that US Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush, in a moment of blustering arm-chair machismo, sent a message to the 'non-existent' Iraqi guerrillas to "bring 'em on," the first image in my mind was a 20-year-old soldier in an ever-more-fragile marriage, who'd been away from home for 8 months. He participated in the initial invasion, and was told he'd be home for the 4th of July. He has a newfound familiarity with corpses, and everything he thought he knew last year is now under revision. He is sent out into the streets of Fallujah (or some other city), where he has already been shot at once or twice with automatic weapons or an RPG, and his nerves are raw. He is wearing Kevlar and ceramic body armor, a Kevlar helmet, a load carrying harness with ammunition, grenades, flex-cuffs, first-aid gear, water, and assorted other paraphernalia. His weapon weighs seven pounds, ten with a double magazine. His boots are bloused, and his long-sleeve shirt is buttoned at the wrist. It is between 100-110 degrees Fahrenheit at midday. He's been eating MRE's three times a day, when he has an appetite in this heat, and even his urine is beginning to smell like preservatives. Mosquitoes and sand flies plague him in the evenings, and he probably pulls a guard shift every night, never sleeping straight through. He and his comrades are beginning to get on each others' nerves. The rumors of 'going-home, not-going-home' are keeping him on an emotional roller coaster. Directives from on high are contradictory, confusing, and often stupid. The whole population seems hostile to him and he is developing a deep animosity for Iraq and all its people--as well as for official narratives.

This is the lad who will hear from someone that George W. Bush, dressed in a suit with a belly full of rich food, just hurled a manly taunt from a 72-degree studio at the "non-existent" Iraqi resistance.

This de facto president is finally seeing his poll numbers fall. Even chauvinist paranoia has a half-life, it seems. His legitimacy is being eroded as even the mainstream press has discovered now that the pretext for the war was a lie. It may have been control over the oil, after all. Anti-war forces are regrouping as an anti-occupation movement. Now, exercising his one true talent--blundering--George W. Bush has begun the improbable process of alienating the very troops upon whom he depends to carry out the neo-con ambition of restructuring the world by arms.

Somewhere in Balad, or Fallujah, or Baghdad, there is a soldier telling a new replacement, "We are losing this war."

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Beyond Despair--The Young People Are Our Hope

[Not long after I saw my friend Jeri Reed, mother of an Iraq vet and a fighter to end this catastrophic war since before it began, at Winter Soldier, she sent me this passionate and hopeful piece. Anyone who wants to repost it has her permission.]

I stood out on the street Monday night with about fifteen others. Two members of the Oklahoma National Guard, one a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, both about to deploy to Iraq. Another mother whose two sons have been in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan, one son is in the Green Zone right now. Safer? She worries that he is in the middle of Baghdad, in the middle of Iraq, surrounded by millions of Iraqis who could one day get sick and tired of the American occupation once and for all.

A big supporter of IVAW who distributes their newsletter in his small Oklahoma town drove up from his farm to join us. His Marine son was killed in Iraq on September 6 last year, my birthday, he is my birthday soldier, which probably all of us have by now. We were supposed to be commemorating the death of the 4000th soldier in Iraq. But people weren't even honking any more like they used to. I'm sure a lot of people drove by thinking we were just foolish for even bothering. What's another dead soldier in a sea of so many? What's another dead Iraqi?

We keep standing out there even though it really does not do much to end the occupations. I wouldn't know what else to do. When my son rolled across the Iraq border five years ago on March 21, 2003, it became my eternal responsibility to do something, even if it seemed hopeless, which it does. But maybe that is what a lot of people think---why bother?

We are powerless to end this war, so why try? Better to just ignore it and keep our minds elsewhere. A lot of people have turned their attention to electoral politics, putting their faith into one of the dismal presidential candidates. At the same time, I have not talked to anyone who really believes that any of the candidates will actually end the war in Iraq, and of course, few people think to consider Afghanistan at all.

But some small events have given me hope, actions that have been criticized by others as rash and disruptive. Actions by young people guided by their passion and certainty that the occupation of Iraq is a crime against humanity that needs to stop immediately, by their youthful disbelief that such things could take place and no one would do anything to stop them. On Easter Sunday, six young people, members of a street theater group called Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War, entered the services at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago and staged a die-in, they spread fake blood around, right in the aisle in the middle of respectable parishioners there to quietly hear the mass, not be reminded of the atrocities happening thousands of miles away. They yelled out "Even the Pope calls for peace!" and lay down in the aisles as if dead. They vocally objected to the priest, Cardinal George, meeting with a known war criminal, George W. Bush.

They were arrested, and face felony charges for their actions, bail was set at $25,000 for five of them, $35,000 for Donte Smith allegedly due to a previous arrest at the School of the Americas, they are presently all free after putting up $16,000 of borrowed money. It made me so glad; it gave me so much hope. I was so proud of them.

Because if anyone thinks, after five years of this outrage, after one horrible year of my son invading another country and helping to wreak havoc and death and destruction, after a year of him being mortared almost daily, wading through depleted uranium which is like the ticking time bomb of our lives, after two years of trying to help him deal with the aftereffects to no avail, which of course we are supposed to keep to ourselves so as not to disturb others and simply smile and go about our normal lives which are not normal, after filing for bankruptcy the first year and continuing to sink money I don't have into fighting to end this war, we all do, those of us affected, our cards if we still have them are maxed out, we don't pay our bills. After sharing the pain of hundreds of other families and soldiers for five years, of all of those friends whose kids did not return from Iraq or Afghanistan, of all of those members of Iraq Veterans Against the War who despite the fact that they must deal with their own deep injuries physical and mental are courageously willing to put themselves on the line, even if they are active duty, even if they are in Iraq. Saying nothing of course about the tens of thousands of dead and wounded Iraqis and Afghanis or the lives they must lead in devastated nations, the fear that they live with daily, the sorrow and anguish they face daily. If anyone thinks that after all of this pain and death and disruption and destruction of our lives and the lives of all the people in Iraq and Afghanistan, I care if Easter Mass at Mayor Daley's church was disrupted by six young people with fake blood and cries for an end to this atrocity, they would be wrong. Good. I hope they do it some more. They are our hope.

I'm just saying that because I was looking for updates on the Holy Name 6, the name they have acquired, and ran across a message board, a generally anti-war message board made up of "progressive" Democrats, where opinion seems to be running against them, how dare they, on Easter Sunday yet, disrupt a church service. The innocent parishioners should have been allowed to enjoy their Easter in peace, to think of peace, perhaps to pray for it, then head to their homes for nice Easter dinners with their families. There were children present after all. They were scared.

There are children in Iraq. They are scared. They are wounded. They die. They have needed us to end this occupation for five years. They needed us to stop the invasion before it began. We failed. *None of us are innocent.* If our young people are willing to take risks to try to shock some compassion and concern into the American public who would rather look the other way and spend their time on football scores rather than thinking about the number of dead Americans and Iraqis and Afghanis, we need to support them. This is our hope--sedate crowds of marching old people have failed, devoted prayers of peace have failed, polite conversations with spineless and lying politicians have failed.

The action at Holy Name last Sunday is not the only sign of hope. Earlier this month at the University of Alabama, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Students for a Democratic Society were arrested for staging a mock incident between soldiers and Iraqis in one of the university's buildings. Recreating the day-to-day behavior of soldiers in Iraq towards Iraqi citizens was simply too alarming for those nearby, or in the words of the dean of students, it was disruptive and wrong because it was "mimicking a true emergency." This is a true emergency.

Students at the University of Iowa recently made war criminal Karl Rove very unwelcome after he was paid $40, 000 to speak there. Not only did a couple hundred students disrupt the speaking event, they surrounded the restaurant where Rove ate dinner later, calling for him to "come out with his hands up" over a bullhorn, attempting to make a citizens' arrest of this notorious war criminal, causing him to delay his exit for quite a while.

At a "teach in" near the University of North Texas a few weeks ago, I listened to students talk about ideas for actions, much of it taken from the pages of history. Members of a new SDS chapter like those springing up on campuses around the country were present. I found myself wanting to interrupt; some of the ideas sounded too much like the ideas of 20-year-old college students for me, because they were. I stopped myself from criticizing. It is all right for us to share wisdom. It is not all right to stifle our young people in this hopeless situation. We cannot tell them what to do. We have no grounds. We have failed.

Two weeks ago, Tina Richards spent the evening waiting at the juvenile facility in Washington DC for the release of her fourteen year old daughter who had been arrested blocking a street while chanting "Arrest Bush, not kids!" as part of the Stop-Loss Congress actions, along with many young people who descended on our nation's capitol for what they called Our Spring Break. This was Chrissy's second arrest. With two other young women, she was held for hours in a cell smeared with human feces and male bodily fluids, while the arresting officer kept trying to intimidate them, trying to scare them. They sang instead, they emerged with shining eyes and smiling faces, these three girls. They were proud of themselves and they should have been. And Chrissy was ready to do it again.

This is personal to Chrissy, along with her mother she has had to deal with the problems of her brother Cloy, a former Marine, now disabled with PTSD. She has had to stand by her mother as Cloy collapsed further and further after returning from Iraq, to the point where he called Tina and told her he was holding a gun to his mouth. Chrissy's life is permanently disrupted; I don't think she cares whether the rest of the country feels her pain.

I can remember how I felt when I was young, just realizing how the world really worked, I remember my shock and disbelief, my anger and my passion, and my belief that I could help change things. I think of things that I did that I would not do now, things that seem rash and dangerous. It is easy to look at the alleged excesses of the 60s and 70s with a critical eye, looking at the actions of so many young people then, the actions of ourselves. Some of them were misguided; some of them just did not work out the way they were planned. These were not things done by people who worried about their personal safety or the long-term repercussions of their actions. But then again, the Vietnam War ended and people of color in this country got more rights. None of this happened because people quietly prayed it away or went to the polls and elected the "right" people. Nothing has ever really changed in this country because people followed the rules and did the right thing and did not disturb others.

We live in the most powerful nation in the world with the biggest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, run by people who are murderers and torturers and thieves. Most of us acknowledge that we are ruled by murderers and torturers and thieves, mainly because they don't even bother to keep it from us. You could not bring enough buttons reading "Arrest Bush and Cheney" or the ever popular t-shirt "Arrest Cheney First" into the state of Oklahoma to satisfy demand. Yet no one seems willing to do anything about it. They don't want to disrupt their lives.

When the bombs started dropping on Baghdad on March 19, 2003, then my son drove into Iraq two days later, I knew we had failed. We had not been willing to disrupt our lives to stop this; I had not been willing to disrupt my own life enough even to prevent my own son from participating in these atrocities. I have always thought, what we should have done was shut down the whole country to stop it, no matter what.

None of the actions listed involved any kind of violence; they merely caused a lot of disruption and inconvenience for surrounding people, watch the video if you want to see what the Holy Name 6 actually did. None of these small incidents by themselves did much to end the war. But one can only hope that they are sparks. One can only hope. And if our young people decide that they simply do not want a future like this, that they do not want to give their silent assent to war crimes and war criminals, if they decide to disrupt the whole country to end this, to do what we have not been willing to do, we don't need to criticize them, we need to support them.

Or join them.

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Some news from the student movement

Seems those meddling kids in SDS are at it again, with a new issue of the SDS News Bulletin. Some stuff about creative uses of the Iraq Moratorium ahead of the March 20th protests and lots more. (PDF badness defanged through use of PDF Me Not, btw).

Now a question for those elders who "saw it live": how's the new SDS stacking up against the original?

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I May Wind Up Taking This Down

in a few days, after it's made the rounds of teh Intertubes, but it's a pretty damn funny anti-McCain version of the massively viral Obama video I blogged about here a few days ago.

And I may not. It does after all make the point that McCain's soft white underbelly is his rah-rah enthusiasm for the occupation of Iraq, and highlights the fact that neither of the annointed Democratic candidates is willing to take him on or even talk about the fucking issue much at all. Meanwhile, watch and enjoy.

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