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what makes a good call-to-action?
A number of U.S. peace movement luminaries, including Tom Hayden, Medea Benjamin, Chellis Glendenning, Staughton Lynd, and Howard Zinn, have signed their names to “An Appeal to Global Conscience.” This morning Mr. Cranky Pants, filling in for me at The Picket Line, read the appeal and filed this report:
“We appeal to all peace and justice movements to stand together as a conscience of the world against the Bush administration’s bloody occupation of Iraq and drive towards an American Empire,” the appeal reads.
“We may be in for a long war.”
We who stand for democracy in the United States should continue and widen our protests especially at local community levels to:
oppose further Congressional funding for war and occupation;
develop public support for military withdrawal;
support local referendums on withdrawal and peace candidates in and ;
build non-partisan peace alliances across all party lines, from left to right;
support dissenting combat veterans, reservists and their families;
call for boycotts and termination of profiteering from war and occupation by American corporations in Iraq;
transition from fossil fuel dependency to renewable resources, conservation and energy efficiency.
Furthermore, since a “global behemoth can only be fought through global resistance… [We] call for further efforts, including:”
support for asylum in Canada and other nations for U.S. soldiers who refuse for reasons of conscience to fight in occupied Iraq;
demonstrations and political mobilizations in Europe and Latin America against President Bush’s frustrated search for “willing” allies;
continued efforts to force the withdrawal of British, Italian and other foreign troops from the occupation;
opposition to European participation in military training of Iraqi troops for an illegitimate U.S.-dominated regime.
Together we can undermine the foundations of war and occupation, make it impossible for the American government to continue its course, and begin to plant the pillars of peace.
I’ve often been amused, in an “amused & disgusted” sort of way, at how Iraq war hawks are so easily convinced that it’s worth any cost to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his UN-defying, WMD-accumulating, population-oppressing ways, so long as that cost is paid with the blood of other people, preferably Iraqi people.
But the peace movement can be just as bad in their many Calls To (Someone Else’s) Action!
Things I should do
Things other people should do
I should oppose Congressional funding for war
Congress should stop funding the war
I should develop public support for military withdrawal
The public should support military withdrawal;
The military should withdraw
I should support local referendums on withdrawal & peace candidates in and
I should build non-partisan peace alliances
I should call for boycotts and termination of profiteering from war and occupation by American corporations
Other people should boycott; American corporations should stop war profiteering
Somebody ought to engage in a “transition from fossil fuel dependency to renewable resources, conservation and energy efficiency”
Canadians should support asylum for runaway U.S. troops
Europeans and Latin Americans should mobilize and demonstrate
Europeans should engage in continued efforts to force the withdrawal of troops from non-U.S. coalition countries
Europeans should oppose European participation in military training of Iraqi troops used to prop up the puppet government
In the “things I should do” column are a number of things that require nothing more from me than voicing an opinion: e.g. “I do oppose Congressional funding for war!”; lots of calls to call for other people to do something — “hey you, boycott the war profiteers and support a military withdrawal; hey you war profiteers, knock it off;” one vaguely-worded wish about transitioning away from petroleum dependence; one pathetic call for toothless local declarations of sentiment on the ballot and support for “peace candidates” who will presumably themselves do something actually worthwhile should they win; and one actual call to accomplish something: to “build non-partisan peace alliances across all party lines, from left to right” (which would be easier to take seriously if there were more right-wing names among those at the bottom of the appeal).
Otherwise, it’s all about what other people ought to do.
We should call on other people to do the right thing.
We should support them when they do it (cries of “tally-ho” or some such).
We should oppose them when they don’t (“tsk-tsk,” “the people united will never be defeated, you know”).
None of the things on their list really require anyone who signed it or anyone in its intended audience of American peaceniks to do anything different from what they’ve been doing — holding the correct opinions, engaging in the occasional protest parade, pleading with other people to join the coalition of the right-thinking.
And that will “undermine the foundations of war and occupation [and] make it impossible for the American government to continue its course” about as successfully as it stopped the war from happening in the first place.
I think it’s worthwhile to compare the Resolution that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott to that vague anti-war “Appeal” I wrote about on .
It shows the difference between a call-to-action and a call-to-inaction, between a campaign for change and a same-old-complaint, between making something happen and having an opinion.
King introduced the resolution, in part, by saying:
The resolution formally spelled out the segregation policy of the city of Montgomery and specifically the Montgomery City Lines, Incorporated bus company, and then made very specific demands — not of them, but of every citizen in Montgomery, first and foremost those citizens who were assembled to listen to and vote on the resolution (here somewhat edited for clarity from the version in the transcript of the meeting recording):
That every citizen in Montgomery, regardless of race, color or creed, refrain from riding buses owned and operated in the city of Montgomery by Montgomery Lines, Incorporated, until some arrangement has been worked out between said citizens and the Montgomery City Lines, Incorporated.
That every person owning or who has access to an automobile will use their automobiles in assisting other persons to get to work without charge.
That the employers of persons whose employees live a great distance from them, as much as possible, afford transportation for your own employees.
That the Negro citizens of Montgomery are ready and willing to send a delegation of citizens to the Montgomery City Lines, Incorporated, to discuss their grievances and to work out a solution for the same.
Be it further resolved, that we have not, we are not, and we have no intentions of using any unlawful means or any intimidation to persuade persons not to ride the Montgomery City Lines buses.
However, we call upon your conscience, both moral and spiritual, to give your whole-hearted support to this worthy undertaking.
We believe we have a just complaint and we are willing to discuss this matter with the proper authorities.
This resolution was put to a vote at “the first mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association” and the vote was overwhelmingly in favor.
King then addressed the assembly:
You have voted.
And you have done it with a great deal of enthusiasm, and I want to express my appreciation to you, on behalf of everybody here.
Now let us go out to stick together and stay with this thing until the end.
Now it means sacrificing, yes, it means sacrificing at points.
But there are some things that we’ve got to learn to sacrifice for.
And we’ve got to come to the point that we are determined not to accept a lot of things that we have been accepting in the past.
So I’m urging you now.
We have the facilities for you to get to your jobs.
And we are putting, we have the cabs there at your service, automobiles will be at your service.
And don’t be afraid to use up any of the gas.
If you have it, if you are fortunate enough to have a little money, use it for a good cause.
Now my automobile is gonna be in it, it has been in it.
And I’m not concerned about how much gas I’m gonna use.
I want to see this thing work.
And we will not be content until oppression is wiped out of Montgomery, and really out of America.
We won’t be content until that is done.
We are merely insisting on the dignity and worth of every human personality.
And I don’t stand here, I’m not arguing for any selfish person.
I’ve never been on a bus in Montgomery.
But I would be less than a Christian if I stood back and said, because I don’t ride the bus, I don’t have to ride a bus, that it doesn’t concern me.
The city told the taxi drivers it was illegal to give discounted fares to the boycotters.
The cops started giving out nuisance traffic tickets to cars that volunteers used to shuttle people outside of the bus system.
The city pressured insurance companies to rescind car insurance for cars involved in these volunteer shuttles.
Boycotters were physically attacked and brought up on conspiracy charges.
King’s house was firebombed.
Through it all, the boycott continued and was eventually victorious.
It took all that to get bus drivers to stop telling black people to stand up and move to the back so a white person could rest his bum, something any sensible person would know without being reminded was beneath the dignity of everyone concerned.
How much more effort do you think it will take to stop the war in Iraq or the mass incarceration in America?
How long do you think it would take the followers of a toothless Appeal like the one I discussed on , or the same old timid tactics of today’s peace movement to do the trick?
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.
The people who adopted the bus boycott resolution were making demands of themselves and of each other with the goal of eventually, through their actions, forcing their opponents to the bargaining table.
The Appeal to Global Conscience, on the other hand, makes demands almost entirely of other people, as if the appealers were already at the bargaining table.
But those other people aren’t listening, and this makes the appealers sound delusional or self-aggrandizing.
I thought the second of the recent declarations, however, showed promise, and so I spent a little time trying to find out more about the people behind it.
It seems, in part, to have been the result of urgings from Jeremy Brecher, an American historian and leftist activist, who wrote a paper for Foreign Policy In Focus called An “Affirmative Measure” to Help Prevent the Commission of War Crimes by the Bush Administration.
He writes, in part:
All Americans have a responsibility under U.S. and international law to take “affirmative measures” to bring these crimes to a halt.
This discussion paper presents one possible “affirmative measure” for consideration: A public statement pledging to encourage and support resistance to draft registration and military activities that violate international law.
At the height of the Vietnam War, thousands signed a similar statement, A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority.
Several of those involved, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and Rev. William Sloan Coffin, were prosecuted in part for their role in the Call.
The Call and the subsequent trial played a significant role in the development of opposition and resistance to the Vietnam War.
(At the time, however, Brecher was taking an even more militant stand.
In his critique of The Vietnam Moratorium from he called for a general strike to force the government’s hand.)
I like where he’s going with this.
So many anti-war declarations are just bombastic complaints.
What’s missing is the “and here’s what we’re going to do about it” clause and the
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.
Notice all of the great “we will”s.
Another similarly-inspired declaration comes from the groups Iraq Pledge of Resistance and United for Peace and Justice.
It suffers in comparison from being almost comically vague:
…we call on people to engage in acts and campaigns of noncooperation and active nonviolent resistance to the U.S. government, the military, the corporate merchants of war, and all institutions that feed the continuing conflict in Iraq.… ¶ And we cannot rest from our campaign of nonviolent resistance until our demands of peace and justice are met.
We call for expressions of nonviolent resistance that are many and varied.
From the offices of Congresspersons and Senators to military recruiters and military bases, from our payment of federal taxes to the facilities where weapons are made that become the profits and sorrows of empire, we welcome each and every person who is moved to engage in or support noncooperation and nonviolent resistance, at whatever level, to take action.
So, like, whatever many and varied expressions of nonviolent resistance you’re moved to engage in or support until our demands of peace and justice are met, man, we think that they’re really cool, and, like, we totally welcome them.
But even the Call to Resist with all of it’s concrete “we will”s suffers from putting too much of the burden on other people, I think.
A large part of what the declaration asks us to do is to counsel other people to change their lives and make sacrifices (to risk prosecution and financial hardship by deserting the military, to forgo financial aid for college by refusing draft registration, and so forth).
Thoreau saw through this sort of thing :
As it turns out, one month after the U.S. invaded Iraq, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee issued a call for support — using as its template the very same Vietnam-era Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority that Brecher cited.
Unfortunately, this new declaration tried to straddle the line between being a call to take action and a call to applaud other people who get to actually do the heavy lifting:
[W]e, the undersigned individuals, believing that war tax refusal under the present circumstances is fully justified on moral and ethical grounds, publicly declare our encouragement of, and willingness to lend support to, those persons of conscience who choose to take this step.
Aren’t those persons of conscience over there simply wonderful!
Hip hip!
Seems to me the next logical step is to combine the best ideas of the bunch, and come up with a declaration that calls on those who ratify it to commit to tax resistance.
For broadest appeal, perhaps, the declaration shouldn’t demand that everyone resist all of their taxes all at once — but should instead demand that each person start practicing at least one of the many war tax resistance methods, some of which are quite practicable even by the timid, while at the same time having a “the more the better” attitude of encouraging practical resistance over symbolic resistance.
I continued a series of Picket Line entries critiquing some of the calls-to-action that have been coming from the anti-war movement.
My intent was to do this in the spirit of constructive criticism, but I allowed myself to get a little carried away in paraphrasing the The National Pledge of Resistance, which I characterized as “being almost comically vague.”
The group Iraq Pledge of Resistance has released a new call, however, which is much improved, in that it calls for more-specific actions and asks the people signing on to the call to be the ones to take the action (as opposed to those many and worthless calls to urge other people to take action).
In short, the new call announces a coordinated effort to disrupt military recruiting efforts, and to encourage U.S. troops to refuse their orders.
Please note that this National Call for Nonviolent Resistance encompasses both legal actions and civil resistance/civil disobedience.
We intend to serve notice to our government that we will be acting forcefully, nonviolently and — for some of us — risking arrest, legal jeopardy and our own freedom to underscore our determination to end this war.
For those who cannot take such risks at this time, we encourage you to participate in the campaign by supporting those who are.
We urge all to act according to their conscience, talents and organizational capabilities to resist the war in Iraq and challenge this administration’s ability to wage it.
Specifically, “[t]o in any way support or encourage a soldier to disobey orders is an illegal action, as specified in 18 United States Code, Sec. 1381 and Sec. 2387” and “we intend to support soldiers who are speaking out and otherwise resisting by organizing widespread, coordinated civil disobedience of this law.”
We are calling for this action to be done in a widespread and massive way to demonstrate to the government that its citizens will willingly break a law that abrogates our right of free speech and dissent, and which conceals the truth about this immoral war and its oppression of our soldiers — and that we will freely risk the consequences of doing so in the service of the higher moral principles at stake.…
As we organize this act of nonviolent resistance to support the troops, we must be fully aware that soldiers are at far greater risk in resisting the war then we on the outside might be for supporting them in doing so.
Therefore, it is our moral responsibility to share that risk to the extent that we can by openly and publicly violating these laws.
While we understand that many among us have pacifist principles which compel us to resist all war, the focus of this action is not to compel members of the military to refuse their orders, nor to blame those who do not, but rather for us to collectively disobey an unjust law while simultaneously offering encouragement and support for soldiers who choose to refuse orders to fight in Iraq or who otherwise speak out.
This represents real progress, in my opinion.
It acknowledges that to end this war is going to take some serious individual sacrifice and effort, and it takes pains to say that they’re not just expecting other people to do this work for them.
The statutes voted Best Laws to Violate in by Peacenik Magazine are:
18 USC § 1381. Enticing desertion and harboring deserters, Whoever entices or procures, or attempts or endeavors to entice or procure any person in the Armed Forces of the United States, or who has been recruited for service therein, to desert there from, or aids any such person in deserting or in attempting to desert from such service; or Whoever harbors, conceals, protects, or assists any such person who may have deserted from such service, knowing him to have deserted there from, or refuses to give up and deliver such person on the demand of any officer authorized to receive him — Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
§2387. Activities affecting armed forces generally (a) Whoever, with intent to interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States: (1) advises, counsels, urges, or in any manner causes or attempts to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States; or (2) distributes or attempts to distribute any written or printed matter which advises, counsels, or urges insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States -Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction. (b) For the purposes of this section, the term “military or naval forces of the United States” includes the Army of the United States, the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, Naval Reserve, Marine Corps Reserve, and Coast Guard Reserve of the United States; and, when any merchant vessel is commissioned in the Navy or is in the service of the Army or the Navy, includes the master, officers, and crew of such vessel.
Long-time Picket Line readers will know that I have been very critical of some of the large-scale anti-war declarations that have come out, for instance ’s “Appeal to Global Conscience” and an early draft of the “Pledge of Resistance.”
Some of these pledges and appeals are really pleas for other people (particularly those people who have no interest in their advice) to please stop perpetrating this war they’ve gone to so much trouble to start, while we complain about them and demonstrate our self-righteousness by writing down our signatures.
[That] resolution formally spelled out the segregation policy of the city of Montgomery and specifically the Montgomery City Lines, Incorporated bus company, and then made very specific demands — not of them, but of every citizen in Montgomery, first and foremost [of] those citizens who were assembled to listen to and vote on the resolution…
Pretty well: on the plus side, it’s very title demonstrates that it is a call for action on the part of us, not them.
And they’ve put some thought into what is meant by things like “civil disobedience” and “nonviolent resistance,” which is a very good sign.
When it comes to specifics, however, the emphasis does seem to be on the sort of symbolic, “cargo cult” civil disobedience tactics that aren’t good for much aside from building an arrest record and getting 45 seconds on the nightly news:
A group could sit down in the entrance of a U.S. or British government installation in any country, refusing to leave when the U.S. Marines or other security agents order them to disperse.
They could insist on having a meeting with the ambassador or the officer in charge of the military base, or they could wait for a clear statement from Washington, D.C., or from London of the date when all their soldiers will be withdrawn from Iraq.
If those doing civil resistance are not able to enter U.S. or British property, they could sit down on the street or sidewalk in front of the building or base, or they could lie down in a “die-in” representing the victims of the war.
In any case those involved in civil resistance might be carried out of the building or away from the entrance and arrested by the police.
The impact of these actions on public opinion, the mass media, and governments would come from their sheer quantity and geographical diversity, on the same day, as well as from the clarity of their message and the disciplined nonviolence of the tactics.
As this invitation spreads through the internet and other media, we expect that hundreds of actions could be held in scores of countries around the world, all with the same purpose — to demand an end to the violent military occupation of Iraq.
But the call leaves room for a variety of non-violent resistance tactics, and certainly doesn’t exclude more effective and direct action:
We, the undersigned, invite peace-makers throughout the world to participate in an international campaign of massive, nonviolent civil resistance to stop the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.
These actions could be organized to include both non-violent civil resistance and legal demonstrations.
Of course, the proof of such a pudding is in the eating.
If the upcoming events turn in to yet-another-peace-parade with a handful of people being led away from “die-ins” in zip-tie cuffs by grim-faced cops — the same sort of protests that haven’t really made a dent in “business as usual” several times now — the results will be easy to predict.
If on the other hand the people who oppose the war and the torture policy do come to believe that to march and chant and plead isn’t enough and that they have to move from protest to resistance, the war will be over, because that’s how it’s done.
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.
I was very encouraged to hear about the “Declaration of Peace” project, and its call for people who are opposed to the Iraq War to commit to nonviolent civil disobedience.
The Declaration calls upon its signers “to take bold, powerful and peaceful steps… tangible, nonviolent action to end this war and to declare a new era of peace and justice.” This is a great idea.
However, I am worried that this, by itself, is too vague — I’m afraid that it sounds a bit like an empty threat.
I think in a case like this we need to call for bold, powerful, peaceful and specific, practical action, and furthermore we should lead by example by starting such action ourselves as soon as possible.
When I think of successful declarations of this sort — that is, those declarations that were actually followed up by determined, large-scale, nonviolent action that was effective at challenging the powers-that-be — two examples come to mind right away: the pledges that accompanied Gandhi’s successful campaigns in Champaran, Kheda, and Bardoli; and the declaration that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Here is an excerpt from the former:
After having fully understood and considered the conditions essential for the starting of mass civil disobedience, this Conference of the inhabitants of the Bardoli Taluka resolves that this Taluka is fit for mass civil disobedience…
…this Taluka will immediately commence mass civil disobedience under the advice and guidance of Mr. Gandhi and the President of the Conference.
This Conference recommends that those tax-payers of the Taluka who are ready and willing to abide by the conditions laid down by the Congress for mass civil disobedience, will refrain, till further instruction, from paying land revenue and other taxes due to the Government.
And here is an excerpt from the latter:
[B]e it therefore resolved as follows:
That the citizens of Montgomery are requesting that every citizen in Montgomery, regardless of race, color or creed, to refrain from riding buses owned and operated in the city of Montgomery by the Montgomery Lines, Incorporated, until some arrangement has been worked out between said citizens and the Montgomery City Lines, Incorporated.…
That every person owning or who has access to an automobile will use their automobiles in assisting other persons to get to work without charge.
That the… employers of persons whose employees live a great distance from them, as much as possible, afford transportation for your own employees.
I include these excerpts to show how specific these declarations were and the extent to which they were concrete pledges of action on the part of the people involved.
If Gandhi had merely called for unspecified “bold, powerful and peaceful steps” or if Dr. King had called on the citizens of Montgomery to please go off on their own and engage in a “tangible, nonviolent action” of their choosing I don’t think their campaigns would have been as successful.
As to what this specific action should be in our case, there are probably many candidates worth considering.
For my part, I believe that a tax resistance campaign has much to recommend it.
For one thing, tax resistance is something that everyone can participate in, with various levels of risk and commitment.
You can be a tax resister without risking arrest or government harassment (through various legal means of tax avoidance), or you can be very confrontational about it and court government retaliation.
A person who signs on to a declaration of tax resistance may start meekly and then increase the strength of his or her protest as encouragement and enthusiasm builds or as more people join the campaign.
For another, it seems to me that the bare minimum that we should expect of people who oppose the war is that they stop supporting it!
If you pay taxes to the U.S. government, you are giving practical support to the war makers, and all your marching and chanting won’t undo that. (As Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, famously put it “let them march all they want, so long as they continue to pay their taxes.”) [This quote has proven difficult to verify and may be apocryphal―♇]
For another, tax resistance is a form of direct action that takes place on an ongoing basis — it is not a single sit-in and arrest, but a number of deliberate choices that transform your life from one that supports the war machine to one that does not.
It is a way of voting with your life and making your actions agree with your attitudes.
For another, tax resistance is eminently practical!
It is not an action that aims first and foremost at influencing public opinion, persuading politicians, or attracting media coverage.
On the contrary, its first goal is to withdraw actual, practical support from the war-makers.
I was at a demonstration in Oakland recently in support of conscientious objectors who had refused to fight in Iraq and elsewhere.
I was reminded of what Thoreau had to say on this point:
I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico, — see if I would go;” and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute.
The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war…
Conscientious objection is a choice for the taxpayer just as it is for the draftee or the soldier, and it is time that we exercise that choice.
Lately I’ve been giving some thought to how to motivate anti-war activists to become war tax resisters, and specifically how to craft a message about war tax resistance that is influential and motivating.
War tax resisters have various opportunities to get a message out — sometimes indirectly through the news media, sometimes deliberately through advertisements and literature, sometimes in face-to-face conversation.
In this, like in a lot of sports, there’s an offensive game and a defensive game, each of which requires different strategies.
The offensive game is all about knowing what message you want to get out, crafting it well, practicing it, and deploying it effectively.
The defensive game is about anticipating questions and objections, listening carefully and actively to make sure you understand what the real concerns are, having good answers ready that address the concerns, and not getting thrown so far off-message that you get into a thicket and can’t get back out.
When crafting a message designed to encourage people to do something, you need to know what motivates people to make the choices they do.
It seems to me that these motivating factors fall into three categories: needs, fears, and values.
Needs are concrete and immediate things — these can be stepping stones toward long-term goals, or simple necessities like food, shelter, security, love, and the like.
Fears are pretty self-explanatory.
Values are a little fuzzier.
In the values category, I include long-term goals, dreams for the future, ideals, and also self-image, integrity, and ethics.
So to motivate somebody to do something, ideally you try to show them that doing it will give them something they need, protect them from something they fear, and be consonant with the values they hold and the person they want to think of themselves as being.
You don’t necessarily need all three, but you may need as much of each as you can muster.
When the government tries to motivate people to pay taxes, they concentrate mostly on fears and values (it’s hard to convince someone that their needs are met by giving away their money).
Fear is important: in this case, fears of IRS enforcement action, criminal penalties, social ostracism, financial troubles, and so forth.
But values are even more important.
Economists consider tax compliance to be an irrational behavior.
That is, the penalties for tax evasion are not severe or certain enough for it to be an economically rational decision not to try to evade your taxes.
And yet, to a great extent, people willingly cough up what the government tells them to.
Why?
The IRS Oversight Board asked a set of taxpayers that very question.
Among the findings: When asked what factors are important to them when deciding to pay their taxes accurately and on-time, how motivating is fear of an audit?
35% said that was very important, 26% said somewhat, 35% said not very or not at all.
How important is “personal integrity?”
76% said it was very important, another 15% said somewhat, and only 7% said it was not very or not at all important.
People pay their taxes because they identify taxpaying with being honest, with being fair, with being a good citizen, with their value system as a whole.
War tax resisters offer a second path to integrity.
We are also motivated by wanting our behavior toward taxes to be aligned with our values.
We need to communicate this.
The more we speak about our values and how they motivate us to become tax resisters, the easier it is for people who share our values to imagine themselves living with integrity as tax resisters.
Fear is also important.
When Bill Ramsey organized a survey of 1,100 anti-war activists who had never done tax resistance before, he asked them why they hadn’t. The number #1 answer: “Fear legal consequences.”
Asked to list what they thought were the two most likely consequences of war tax resistance were, 31.6% listed jail time as one of them!
Asked what was the one thing they most needed before they could consider tax resistance, the #1 answer: “clear idea of likely consequences.”
People imagine the consequences of tax resistance to be much more frightening and difficult than they are in reality.
That’s a message we need to get across loud-and-clear.
Not “tax resistance is perfectly safe” but this: there are many methods of tax resistance, with different levels and varieties of risk; you can learn these risks in advance, and take steps to mitigate them; the risks of well-planned tax resistance are much smaller than what you’ve probably come to expect; hardly anyone does any time behind bars for war tax resistance.
And we need to be able to back this up with specifics, depending on who we’re talking with and what their particular goals and concerns are.
And while the IRS has a hard time motivating taxpayers by appealing to their needs, I think war tax resisters have a good angle.
How many times have we heard anti-war activists say that they’re tired of going to marches and rallies and demonstrations and meetings — they want to do something, something practical, something that has a real effect.
That’s a need, and war tax resistance is a way of meeting that need.
Moving to defense, there are certain concerns and questions that come up again and again when war tax resistance is discussed.
And these, too, can be grouped roughly by the needs / fears / values categorization:
Is war tax resistance effective?
(Needs) For instance:
Won’t the government just end up getting more money in the end, with interest & penalties?
How can one person refusing taxes have any effect on the vast military budget?
Is war tax resistance dangerous?
(Fears) For instance:
Won’t the government throw me in jail or take my home if I refuse taxes?
If anti-war activists become tax resisters, won’t the government use this to crack down on dissent?
Is war tax resistance ethical?
(Values) For instance:
Don’t we all have a responsibility to pay our fair share of taxes?
Why should I be able to decide on my own where a democracy spends my tax money?
In each of these cases, it can be useful when you answer to address not just the specific question or concern, but the whole category it represents.
In other words, answer the specific question about tax resistance’s effectiveness at meeting some immediate need, but then append to your answer, “and one reason why I’m a war tax resister is because war tax resistance is a practical way of doing X, Y, and Z;” answer a specific question about values and then add something about how your war tax resistance expresses your values.
There are many ways to meet a question honestly.
Sometimes, meeting it head-on and directly and answering it as-asked is the best way.
Other times, it’s better to put the question into a larger context, or to address some of the assumptions behind the question.
It can pay to practice meeting common questions in multiple ways.
There are some kinds of questions though, where the best policy is to evade and avoid.
There are questions that lead into traps that keep you off-message and in a thicket of controversy.
If you’re about to begin an answer that looks likely to end with you defending some particular political philosophy or Constitutional interpretation, pacifism, anarchism, what Jesus really meant, or the truth about what happened on 9/11 — take a deep breath and try another angle.
For example: Someone asks me “do you think everybody ought to be able to decide for themselves what their tax money is spent on?”
I could answer, “Yes, actually.
I’m a free-market anarchist, and for some very good reasons, I think a society in which people made their own decisions about how to spend their money would be a big improvement on the current one.
For instance…” and pretty soon I have to defend anarchism, free-market thinking, and I’m way off-message.
The question had a couple of purposes.
The first was that it expresses a concern about whether tax resistance is an ethical thing to do.
The second is more subtle, but involves the questioner searching for an excuse not to change his or her behavior to become a tax resister.
The questioner hopes to show that I hold some particular dogma (anarchism, pacifism, whatever), that adhering to this dogma is an essential part of being a tax resister, and that therefore he or she doesn’t have to consider the possibility anymore since he or she doesn’t hold such views.
I could answer more like this: “Whether everyone ought to be able to spend their tax dollars as they choose or not, I can tell you that the war tax resisters I know spend their tax dollars a lot more fairly and wisely than Congress does.
If war tax resisters were budgeting more money and Congress less, I think we’d all be breathing a lot easier.
By taking personal responsibility for how my tax dollars are spent, I make sure that Congress isn’t spending them irresponsibly.”
Sometimes you can use comparisons and juxtapositions to put things into context:
“Anti-war protesters are willing to be arrested doing sit-ins and blockades, and risk jail time and fines.
Why are the much smaller risks of war tax resistance so scary?”
“If people are willing to pay 20% interest on their credit cards to pay for Christmas presents, I think I can risk a few percentage points of interest and penalties to fight for what I think is right.”
“We want our Congressional representatives to take political risks by cutting off funding for the occupation, and I want to show that I’m willing to take risks as well.”
When you’re playing defense like this, look for opportunities to get back on offense.
Keep in mind the message you want to convey, and keep looking for opportunities.
Like in that alternate second example answer I gave to the question about whether people should be able to decide for themselves how to spend their taxes.
In that answer, instead of launching into a defense of democracy or anarchism, I reiterated that war tax resisters are acting from motives of fairness and responsibility and concern for society — the same sort of shared values the government likes to promote as motives for tax-paying.
Switching to offense is especially important when you’re trying to get your message out through the news media.
Don’t let the reporter’s questions drive the agenda.
Take charge and put your message front-and-center.
You’re not out to try to convince the reporter to be a tax resister.
Cooperate with the reporter by delivering your message in pithy, well-practiced soundbites that will be easily packaged.
If you’re giving a telephone interview, write some key phrases down ahead of time so you can be ready to rattle them off when the right moment comes:
…deliberate, practical, and has bottom-line results…
…I want to be at ease with my conscience…
…I feel responsible for what I do with my money…
…I feel more honest now when I say I don’t support the war…
…time to put my money where my mouth is…
…in Washington, money talks…
…I used to just disapprove of the war, now I oppose it…
…direct action I do all year ’round…
I think war tax resisters have what frustrated anti-war activists need — they just don’t know it yet.
If we can learn how to get this message across, the war tax resistance movement will grow, and the anti-war movement will become more energized and effective.
Jodie Evans of Code Pink was on KPFK a week ago, talking up the Don’t Buy Bush’s War campaign.
(Here’s an MP3 of the show — the Evans segment starts at about 22 minutes in, and she starts talking about the campaign at about 34 minutes in.)
In all, good stuff.
But some of the message needs work — particularly the part about how war tax resistance isn’t as risky as many people believe it to be.
This message wasn’t delivered in a particularly convincing way, and it used some dubious factoids.
Evans said (I’m paraphrasing from memory) that nobody gets put in jail anymore for war tax resistance like they did in because they’ve changed the laws since then.
The radio host read another factoid from the campaign’s web site that reads “ only one war tax resister has been prosecuted, and he was sentenced to 8 hours per week of community service.”
Neither of those statements is accurate.
In fact, there were very few war tax resistance prosecutions during as far as I know, but there have been four people who have done time for tax resistance , and at least ten .
It is very rare, though.
And typically you have to really want to go to jail — stubbornly refusing many opportunities to cooperate — before they finally throw the book at you.
A war tax resister isn’t at all likely to suddenly be handcuffed and tossed in the back of a paddy wagon without warning.
We have the facts on our side here, but our message has to be credible and clear and convincing, and in this it can’t hurt to be accurate.
Much of the U.S. peace movement has been anesthetized by the one-two punch of Hope and Change, but Cindy Sheehan stayed alert and noticed that the war, militarism, and torture policies are just as worthy of disgust and revolt now as they were before the last election.
She recently tried to rally what remains of the active anti-war movement at Martha’s Vinyard, where Obama was taking a Summer break (Obama was no more interested in meeting with her than was Dubya back in the day).
Those in attendance have composed something they call an International People’s Declaration of Peace.
(This link may be to a draft, not the final declaration; I’m not sure.)
I could quibble with some of the details, I suppose, but I like the look of it.
It’s fairly tightly-focused on war & militarism, without trying to throw in a horn-of-plenty’s worth of concerns, which I think is a good thing.
Most crucially, it represents a commitment by the signers themselves to certain actions — it’s not just a set of demands they’re making of the powers-that-be, which is where many such declarations flounder.
Although it’s an “International” declaration, its focus is on the United States.
This is for the very sensible reason, the Declaration says, “that the United States of America is still, as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the ‘greatest purveyor of violence in the world today’ and the biggest arms dealer and war profiteer; citizens of the USA should acknowledge the special role that must be played and the sacrifices that must be made to help lead this planet on the path to peace and worldwide reconciliation, as the US has allowed its leaders to lead this planet in aggressive behavior.”
The signatories of the declaration pledge, among other things, that “We will not allow the fruits of our labor to be used by our governments to finance wars.”
This is the sort of thing I’ve been hoping to see for years now.
However, the peace movement is at an ebb, and the influence that Sheehan and the other signatories (I haven’t seen a list of drafters or signers yet) over what remains of this movement is uncertain.
It may be that with the collapse of the fair-weather, luke-warm liberal support of the anti-war movement, a more dedicated core remains who may be more willing to rise to the challenge of such a declaration than the more dilute movement ever was.
Hard news about this Declaration has been difficult to come by, but I think the folks putting it together are hoping to roll it out in a final form at the White House protest action being organized by the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (formerly, Iraq Pledge of Resistance).
I was happy to see that that group has prominently linked “War Tax Resistance” on its web site.
The root of all war is profit and we will not allow the war profiteers to own our labor or steal the fruits of that labor to be used solely for their greed of power and money.
We will boycott products and/or services from companies that profit from war and/or companies that support nations that make war on others.
Indeed, I doubt most people will see this as a call to war tax resistance at all.
An earlier draft of the declaration included the sentence: “We will not allow the fruits of our labor to be used by our governments to finance wars.”
This was much less ambiguous.
I’m sad to see the change.
The problem with vague and ambiguous vows like these is that they are so difficult to precisely interpret that people end up interpreting them to require no action or change on their part.
Have you vowed to boycott products and/or services from companies that support nations that make war on others?
That would include every taxpaying company in the United States, you know.
You are not seriously going to consider boycotting all of them, so you will look at whichever ones you already boycott or just happen not to frequent and check the box next to that solemn vow and be satisfied that you’re doing your part.
And so your vow ends up meaning nothing at all.
Have you vowed not to allow the war profiteers to own your labor or steal the fruits of that labor to be used solely for their greed of power and money?
Better stop paying taxes, then.
Oh, but they don’t use our taxes solely for their greed of power and money; they must have other reasons too.
So I don’t really have to do anything different here, either.
Check the box; the status quo wins again.
Translating Juan Carlos Rois’s “War Tax Resistance as a Human Right” was challenging for many reasons, not least of which was my poor command of Spanish.
A second challenge was that, as a technical writer/editor, I kept wanting to trim Rois’s tangled branches of clauses and unnecessary verbal throat-clearing down to simple declarative sentences.
Memo to radical theoreticians and would-be manifesto drafters: The Revolution Will Not Be a Complex Compound Sentence in the Passive Voice! Furthermore, any sentence that embeds half a dozen commas ought to be transformed into a bulleted list, a set of distinct sentences, or one sentence configured properly instead of sliced up and jumbled about like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
And please drop the “royal we” and the general condescending looking-down-the-nose tone.
Who teaches people to write this way, and why?
It’s arrogant and off-putting without any offsetting advantages that I can see.
Maybe some people are effectively intimidated by the tone of superiority.
Ahem.
But now that I’ve got that off my chest, I’d really like to take a look at the substance of the paper.
When was the last time conscientious tax resistance got this much critical attention in English?
There were a couple of good examples about a century ago when tax resistance to government-funded sectarian education was a big deal in Britain, but I can’t think of much since.
I look forward to a time when the modern war tax resistance movement earns serious criticism of this sort.
I think that Rois’s core criticisms of efforts to legalize a form of conscientious objection to military taxation (or even to enshrine it as an internationally-recognized human right) are mostly spot-on.
I resist paying taxes to the U.S. government not because I think that conscientious people like me ought to be excused from paying such taxes, but because I think such taxes ought not to be paid, such a government ought not to be supported!
Rois’s approach suggests a solution to what has proven to be a vexing problem to liberal war tax resisters: how to justify their acts of conscientious objection to military taxation without inadvertently also providing a justification to nasty conservative people who don’t want to pay taxes for things they don’t like.
Rois says that it is incorrect to say that war tax resistance is valid because it is a form of “conscientious objection” but that instead you should say that it is valid because it is designed to confront and defeat militarism and militarism itself is unjustified and ruinous.
So instead of generalizing to “if you feel that some government spending violates your conscience, you should not have to pay for it” (which may let undesirables in the door), Rois’s principle generalizes to “if government spending is unjustified and ruinous you ought not to pay for it.”
(Of course this leaves open the question of which government spending is unjustified and how pernicious it has to be before you ought not to pay for it: a question these same undesirables are likely to answer in their favor.)
I noticed also how Rois wanted to flip the talk of war tax resistance as a “right” into talk of it as a “duty.”
This reminded me a bit of Thoreau’s conclusions on the subject.
Thoreau was not a do-gooder, and he wasn’t intending to address people of exceptionally refined ethical sensitivity.
He wrote: “It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him;
Thoreau’s essay reads well as a defense of individual conscientious objection, but he does not defend this as the prerogative of a finely-tuned conscience but announces it as the unpleasant duty of everyone.
To Rois, it is evident that people have a right not to be threatened by war and parasitized by militarism, that governments cannot be trusted to advance or defend this right as they are the very instruments of war and militarism, and that therefore the obligation of enforcing this right lies with the rest of us as an unpleasant duty that may at times take the form of conscientious objection.
So there was much that I liked in Rois’s essay.
But there was also a lot that I didn’t much care for, and not just the stylistic clunkiness I mentioned above.
One thing that grated on my nerves was Rois’s dismissal of individual human rights (indeed of “the individual” itself) and of conscience as ethnocentric, fictional inventions that really only have a home within the narrow bounds of the Western world.
Rois would replace concerns for the individual and personal conscience with those for communities, peoples, future generations, and the security of life on the planet.
The irony is that this laundry list, and Rois’s multicultural pretensions in general, themselves strike me as the sort of thing that — like bell-bottom trousers, bushy sideburns, wood paneling, and shag carpet in an old snapshot — reveal his supposedly ecumenical point of view to be much more culturally- and temporally-typecast than anything that can be pinned merely on “the Western tradition.”
Rois surveys the views of “the Arab world, the peoples of Latin America, or in India… all of the so-called ‘third world’ but also… perhaps those Gypsies not yet poisoned by propaganda and television” and finds that they all seem to share not the concern with individual human rights of the “Western” tradition (indeed, they seem hardly to think of themselves as “individuals” at all), but with the latest fashionable intellectual trends of the po-mo professoriat.
This variety of multiculturalism mostly reminds me of writing I found sophomoric, pretentious, and deadening when I read it back in college.
It has a superficial logic to it, but rarely amounts to anything concrete; as such, it is hard either to criticize or to learn from.
More often, it just promotes a sort of dangerous skittishness about making moral judgments (after all, who am I to say that such-and-such is wrong, as though my Western worldview had some sort of universal validity).
In particular, the idea that “the individual” is a modern Western invention strikes me as merely curious at best, but not the sort of thing that bears much weight.
It is not very useful to the extent that it’s true, and not at all true to the extent that people seem to want to make use of it.
As a sophomoric argument it can support a form of depersonalization that makes the abuse of people easier: Why should I care about Guantanamo Joe’s individual rights if I’m not even sure if Guantanamo Joe’s culture brought him up to think of himself as an “individual” in the first place?
Perhaps it would be totally alien to Joe’s cultural values to try to defend his human rights.
Better to let him take care of it himself in some culturally-appropriate fashion.
Most upsetting to me was Rois’s scare-quoting and otherwise depreciating individual conscience.
When he speaks of war tax resisters being motivated by “a moral rigor today outdated and happily locked away in the trunk of mementos” and warns us against hoping to effect “social transformation by claiming or supporting a supposed imperative of exemplary individual conscience” he is taking aim at one of the main themes at The Picket Line (and I can’t help imagining him dressed in red, stroking his goatee with one hand and fingering his pitchfork with the other).
I don’t know that I have a good answer to this, though.
Rois believes that individual conscientious direct action is scattershot and self-indulgent, and that it will take concerted political effort on the part of whole communities to make a difference.
I can’t see where this concerted effort is supposed to come from if not from individuals driven by strong conscientious imperatives (“a moral rigor,” if you will).
But it’s possible that we’re both wrong: that individual conscience is as impotent as it often appears to be when it comes to changing the course of human events, and that this also dooms the prospects for useful collective action.
Rois seems to think that we can make a more-universal appeal to a global audience by not couching our appeal in terms of “values” or “ethics” but in good, hard, objective data about the effects of militarism (and demilitarization) on our social, economic, and cultural lives.
Perhaps these things will then speak for themselves, but it seems that they, too, implicitly must be appeals to “values” for them to have any hope of universal traction.
Well, I didn’t mean to go on at such length.
Read the essay yourself it you dare.
You might find it thought-provoking.
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.
