How you can resist funding the government →
other forms our opposition can take →
disrupting the military →
counter-recruitment →
actions at recruiting stations
On I criticized the Appeal to Global Conscience that was issued by some anti-war figures.
Although the appeal was worded as though it were a call to action, it was mostly a call for someone else to take action, and for the right-thinking readers of the appeal to urge them on from the sidelines.
On MLK Day I contrasted that Appeal with the resolution that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott and showed how that resolution was not a call for someone else to take action, but a determination by the people who adopted the resolution to take action themselves.
Now there’s a new anti-war appeal that is much better in this regard: A Call to Resist the War in Iraq.
A group of (mostly Christian, but theoretically interfaith) religious leaders from Connecticut called Reclaiming the Prophetic Voice has started circulating the appeal and plans to make it public .
Here are the calls to action embedded in this new appeal:
We believe it is the moral responsibility of every U.S. citizen to raise our voices and take action to stop this illegal war and bring our soldiers home.
We believe it is our duty as both Americans and members of the international community to insist that our government immediately adhere to the international agreements binding us, including the Geneva Accords protecting prisoners from torture and indefinite detention.
Many members of the armed services are seeking ways to avoid service in Iraq or leave the military completely; some young men are refusing to register for Selective Service.
Increasing numbers of enlisted men and women are risking prison sentences or forced immigration in order to avoid collaboration in an immoral war.
We applaud these choices and will do all that we can to encourage others to follow their example.
More specifically, we support and will spread the word about the G.I. Rights Hotline and other efforts to support soldiers in withdrawing from the military.
We will counsel young men turning eighteen on the moral obligations as well as risks inherent in a refusal to register with the Selective Service, and we will raise funds to support them in their legal defense.
Should a draft be reinstituted we will encourage young men and women not to comply.
The War Crimes Tribunals following World War Ⅱ declared, “Anyone with knowledge of illegal activity and an opportunity to do something is a potential criminal under international law, unless the person takes affirmative measures to prevent the commission of the crimes.”
We, the undersigned, commit ourselves to undertake all affirmative measures available to us to fulfill our obligations under these treaties, which have guided our world for half a century.
We will continue to raise our voices and engage in nonviolent resistance until our government has withdrawn from Iraq and brought our soldiers home.
It’s kind of vague, but if you take away the fuzzier calls to “raise our voices” or “insist that our government” behave there remain calls to action that are actually calls to action.
An email announcing this put things more directly:
…we are organizing around two specific, and very connected acts of nonviolent resistance to the war for : first, by deliberately violating, on a nationwide scale, the federal law which tells us that we can not encourage a soldier to exercise their right of conscience by refusing his or her orders to fight in an immoral war; and second, by organizing nonviolent actions at recruiting stations, where young people are lured into the military (and this war) with false promises.…
…we will [also] be encouraging and organizing a variety of resistance tactics and strategies in an ongoing nonviolence campaign, including (but not limited to) alternative direct action strategies and the “Hang Up On War” campaign of federal phone tax resistance.
Our goal is to involve the greatest number of fellow citizens and activists possible in some form of nonviolent resistance against the war, and to focus these energies to build public opposition and bring the war to an end at the earliest possible moment.
This is a call for people to obstruct military recruiting, to counsel soldiers to disobey their orders and to give them sanctuary and support as they turn their backs on the military — in other words, actions that are probably considered high treason over much of your AM dial.
Attorney General Gonzales will probably spend many a wistful daydream imagining such traitors as these being dipped in boiling oil or broken on the rack.
In other words: That’s more like it!
A while back I posted a few links to examples of some of the new directions anti-war protest is taking these days.
Among these were protests targeting the homes of such figures as Donald Rumsfeld and John Negroponte (who is also being well-hounded at his public appearances).
Demonstrators have started standing outside of military processing stations to remind recruits that they still have a chance to get out.
Here are some pre-dawn photos of demonstrators holding up signs reading such things as:
“Need a Ride Home? We can help!” and “Don’t sign anything! Take your contract home to read it.”
“I wanted to see how far they’d go to get another soldier,” says [David] McSwane, a reporter for the Westwind at Arvada West High School in Arvada, Colo.
So he set up a sting investigation, posing as a high school dropout with a marijuana habit and went down to his local Colorado Army recruitment station to enlist.
McSwane, 17, knew he would have to document his conversations with the recruiters, so he taped the telephone conversations, enlisted his sister to pose as a proud sibling so she could photograph parts of the process, and asked a friend to operate a video camera across from a local head shop.
But how did McSwane get an recruiter to visit a head shop with him? Simple.
The honor student, pretending to have a ganja habit he couldn’t kick, went there to score a detoxifying kit the Army office claimed had helped two previous recruits pass drug tests, according to a taped phone conversation broadcast on local TV.
McSwane told his recruiter he didn’t know what the detox formula looked like, so the man agreed to go to the store with him.
Aside from his drug problem, McSwane said he had no high school diploma — which at that time was true, as he graduated about two months later — and that he had dropped out of high school.
No problem, the recruiters told him.
There are Web sites where anyone can order a diploma from a school they make up.
“It can be like Faith Hill Baptist School or whatever you choose,” one recruiter can be heard saying on one of the taped exchanges.
…Within a few days the boy’s sting had made national headlines, and the U.S. Army froze recruiting operations nationwide for a day.
(His two would-be recruiters were suspended.)
“It’s been kind of cool to see a reaction from the Pentagon on a story done in a high school paper,” the teen reporter says.
The demonstration was run by, and mostly featured, young people — that is, people in the demographic being courted by military recruiters, which seems like a good sign.
I didn’t catch much of what the speakers had to say (the sound system was a couple of tinny battery-powered speakers atop some two-by-four scaffolding mounted to a wheelchair), but it seemed mostly to be complaints about the mendacity of the powers-that-be, sometimes delivered in verse.
This was preaching to the converted, for the most part, but an obsessive fringe blogger like me shouldn’t be caught complaining too loudly about that.
And I remember when I was younger and just being allowed to broadcast my opinion in some forum felt really empowering — I was already a regular letter-to-the-editor writer before I entered my teens.
“Empowering,” I think, is one of those words I promised not to use — one of those fluffy adjectives that often embellish worthless gestures.
Aw, heck.
Folks who are fighting the good fight, or who are just trying to figure out how it’s done, need all the encouragement they can get.
If it helps ’em to grab a bullhorn and yell out some familiar complaints to blow off steam, that’s okay with me.
Frank Chu was there, with his opinion about Bush & Cheney’s “treasons,” and I got corralled by somebody who wanted to impress upon me that the World Trade Center went down in a controlled demolition because 9/11 was an inside job just like the JFK assassination.
Someone was sternly waving an upside-down American flag with “Indian Land” spray-painted on it in black, and there was a smiling, round-faced fellow holding a sign reading “Support our fraggers: Free Hasan Akbar!”
There were lots of white guys with beards and a few punks in black hoodies with tattoos and canvas shoes.
There were conscientious objectors from this war and others.
There was some schmoe coming in from the airport to a downtown hotel and conference center who shouted at nobody in particular as he went by:
“Conscientious objectors? We call ’em ‘conscientious cowards!’ ”
There was a skinny guy walking up to people and trying to get them to buy his Street Sheets
There was a big papier-mâché-and-bedsheet dove on stilts.
There were lots of signs that looked like they had been painted by young children or by right handed people using their left hands.
If you’re playing at home, you can call out “BINGO!” at any time.
There were security officers from the business plaza in dark suits and reflective glasses talking into cell phones and keeping their distance.
There were cops in cop mustaches and all-black uniforms where even the patches were dark-gray-on-black — even the red-white-and-blue was gray-gray-and-black.
The largest patch, along their backs, read “NEGOTIATOR” in no-nonsense bold.
There were a couple-dozen other cops staying discreetly nearby on side streets.
The demonstrators marched a few blocks down the middle of Broadway with a small and effective drum corps keeping things lively.
When they got to the military recruitment office they set up shop in the middle of the street and continued their rapping and denouncing while a few plastered large posters over the office windows and others set up information tables.
A reporter from the Oakland Tribune asked a NEGOTIATOR why they were just standing around and allowing all of this vandalism and traffic-obstruction to go on without interfering or making any arrests.
The NEGOTIATOR told her that she should ask so-and-so.
She replied that it was so-and-so who told her to ask him.
A chubby guy with short hair in a khaki T-shirt and camouflage pants tucked into his boots stood across the street taking pictures with a little digital snapshot camera.
I figure he was probably from the recruiting center, which had wisely closed up shop for the day.
A nice Quaker fellow tried to get me to sign a Declaration of Peace.
I asked him what it was and he told me it was a demand that Congress develop a plan to withdraw troops from Iraq.
I laughed a little, then apologized.
Three years plus into this war and we’re petitioning to demand a plan! by September! Or else!
Good heavens.
I think I was in too cynical a mood.
I took some time to talk with my petitioner and learn more about the Declaration’s features.
As you may know, I’m a self-styled critic of these sorts of manifestos (see, for instance, The Picket Line ).
But this one has some good points.
First off, notice how it starts:
Take steps to bring the troops home now —
And engage in nationwide nonviolent action if a concrete withdrawal plan is not established and activated…
The Declaration of Peace [is] A Commitment to Take Action to…
The focus of this declaration, like that of the resolution that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott that I’ve praised so much, is about what the people signing the declaration are going to do — not about the demands they’re making on other people.
That’s a good thing.
But it gets diluted by the vagueness of calls for “bold, powerful and peaceful steps” and “tangible, nonviolent action” that never quite get specified.
The specific actions that are listed (visiting legislators and candidates, participating in “marches, rallies, vigils, demonstrations and other creative expressions” and “nationally coordinated phone-ins and email campaigns”) are far too business-as-usual to be representative of the “bold, powerful” steps they are calling for.
Perhaps they mean to come up with a more specific campaign of nonviolent resistance — there is a vaguely worded threat in the Declaration that “If the deadline is not met, Declaration signers will engage in peaceful action in Washington, DC and at Congressional offices and other sites throughout the nation .”
(I’m imagining the scene at the Department of Homeland Security headquarters:
“They say if we don’t submit to their demands they will… uh… engage in peaceful action in Washington!”
“My god! Get the president on the red phone!”)
They are urging people to take nonviolent action training and to sign on to a set of guidelines from which I infer that things will eventually be heading in the direction of confrontational nonviolent civil disobedience.
Some folks from Radar called up some increasingly desperate U.S. military recruiters, impersonating some very unlikely potential recruits (a flaming nelly, someone with a cornucopia of health problems, another who’s done a small mountain of drugs, another who’s very enthusiastic about exotic weaponry, a pathological momma’s boy), and then posted transcripts of the phone calls.
was the sixth anniversary of
, and, not coincidentally, also
. To commemorate the latter, I joined up with some folks from
Northern California War Tax Resistance and
set up shop at a
BART station
to hand out flyers focusing on the cost of the gargantuan war budget.
A highlight for me was running into the fellow from the
IRS who
organizes the
VITA
center I’ve volunteered at the last several tax seasons. I’ve never let on
while I have been volunteering there that I’m a tax resister, but now that
he’s seen me with my “War Tax Resisters Aren’t Buying It” sandwichboard, I
guess I’m out of the closet. If I volunteer again this year, we’ll see if it
comes up in conversation.
A group of council tax protesters in England stormed the courtroom where one of their number was on trial and put the judge under citizens’ arrest. I don’t know much about these protesters, from an organization called The British Constitution Group, but at first glance they seem to be romantic reactionaries of a sort of old country counterpart of America’s constitutionalist, patriot movement, sovereign citizen types.
War tax resister Lamar Williamson is fondly remembered by Jeff Kellam at his blog.
evening, a group of about 150 people in Oakland, California demonstrated to commemorate 
The demonstrators marched a few blocks down the middle of Broadway with a small and effective drum corps keeping things lively.
When they got to the military recruitment office they set up shop in the middle of the street and continued their rapping and denouncing while a few plastered large posters over the office windows and others set up information tables.
A reporter from the Oakland Tribune asked a NEGOTIATOR why they were just standing around and allowing all of this vandalism and traffic-obstruction to go on without interfering or making any arrests.
The NEGOTIATOR told her that she should ask so-and-so.
She replied that it was so-and-so who told her to ask him.
A chubby guy with short hair in a khaki T-shirt and camouflage pants tucked into his boots stood across the street taking pictures with a little digital snapshot camera.
I figure he was probably from the recruiting center, which had wisely closed up shop for the day.
