CELEBRATING PROGRESSIVE CULTURE

 (Racism, misogyny, poverty, war, environmental disaster, and extraordinary military waste make this July 4^th difficult for many of us to celebrate. However, we too have our history and our promise for a better future. HT)

(Originally posted on Sunday, April 26, 2009)

Harry Targ

Creator: Carolyn Kaster | Credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Social movements are defined in several ways; their leadership, their membership, their vision, their strategies, their resources, and their successes and failures. We often forget, however, that each of these elements are woven together by a culture. This culture can be poetic, dramatic, pictorial, or musical, or some of each. The culture provides a way for people in all different places, engaged in all different parts of the mass movement, to experience a common sense of themselves and what they share with others. It may be the case that a movement without a culture is a movement without a sense of vision, of shared purpose, of passion.

It is these thoughts that come to mind this week as we remember Pete Seeger, a man who brought song to our hearts and minds for 70 years. Pete and those musicians who were inspired by him helped influence many of us to join the great twentieth century movements for social change: labor, civil rights, feminist, ecology, anti-war. It was through his practice, getting sometimes thousands of fans to sing together in unison about building a better world, that people learned that working together is how change occurs.

And when progressives look back at the twentieth century and see a very mixed record of successes and failures, glorious victories and tragic defeats, it is the culture that reminds people of the nobility of the goals that social movements pursued and what still needs to be achieved. And no greater symbol of redemption of twentieth century progressive movements and cultures was evidenced than Pete’s leading 500,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial two days before the inauguration of President Barack Obama in singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” Pete included the verses that delegitimized private property and celebrated the continued struggle for fundamental social change.

That performance reminded older people of the fundamental justice of the old movements and the need to create new movements with new cultures in the 21st century. Vital to that brief sing out also was the message that the old political culture should not be forgotten even as new politics and culture is created. The old and the new are like links in a chain.

A few additional words:

Paul Robeson: “Continued study and research into the origins of the folk music of various peoples in many parts of the world revealed that there is a world body-a universal body-of folk music based upon a universal pentatonic (five tone) scale. Interested as I am in the universality of (hu)mankind-in the fundamental relationship of all peoples to one another-this idea of a universal body of music intrigued me, and I pursued it along many fascinating paths.”

Woody Guthrie: “I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim. Too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood….”

Malvina Reynolds:. “God Bless the grass That grows through the crack They roll the concrete over it To try and keep it back The concrete gets tired Of what it has to do It breaks and it buckles And the grass grows through. God bless the grass”

 

 Pete Seeger: “Imagine a big see-saw, with a basketful of rocks sitting on one end. That end is down on the ground. At the other end, up in the air, is a basket half full of sand. Some of us are trying to fill it, using teaspoons. Most folks laugh at us: “Don’t you know the sand is leaking out even as you put it in?” We say that’s true, but we’re getting more people with more teaspoons all the time. One of these days that basket of sand will be full and you’ll see this whole see-saw just tip the opposite way. People will say, “Gee how did it happen so suddenly?” Us, and our goddam teaspoons.”

 

Envisioning a New Society

 Harry Targ

https://fed4mr.org/2023/04/18/theres-a-big-pot-of-climate-bill-money/

 

“We live in a world dominated by global capital, a world in which capital divides us, setting the people of each country against each other to see who can produce more cheaply by driving wages, working conditions, and environmental standards to the lowest level in order to survive in the war of all against all….The most immediate obstacle, though is the belief in TINA (There is No Alternative, HT). Without the vision of a better world, every crisis of capitalism (such as the one upon us) can bring in the end only a painful restructuring--with the pain felt by those already exploited and excluded.”

 \(Michael A. Lebowitz, Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, Monthly Review, 2006, 50).

The material below is a revision of an essay I published a long time ago inspired by youthful debates many were having about what kind of society we need to create to facilitate the full flowering of humankind (“Social Science and a New Social Order,” Journal of Peace Research, 1971). As Lebowitz implies we need to return to conversations about what a better future would look like. If we fail to talk about our preferred future we will become overwhelmed with cynicism and lose the capacity to do more than react to those who want to reverse legislative gains.

Specific features of a new society

 Progressive visions of a new society draw upon real and imagined communities that provide for the socio-economic and psychic needs of their members. Many of these visions include the following principles:

     a) A new society requires equal or equitable distribution of economic resources. This principle presupposes also a commitment to racial justice, gender equality, the right to love and bond with whomever one chooses, and a vision of the oneness of humankind with nature.

    b) A new society should consist of basic socio-political units that do not exceed a size whereby all people in the unit can and do interact with each other. Voluntary face-to-face contact and knowledge of the values, beliefs, and desires of other community members will increase modes of cooperation which are central to the viability of the new society.

   c) Political, social, and economic decisions should be made on the basis of voluntary participation. Those decisions that affect people’s lives will be made on the basis of their involvement.

   d) Political decision-making may entail one of or a combination of three possible modes. Some communities might decide to make decisions on the basis of complete consensus and others might decide on the use of majority rule. Some communities might create representative bodies to make decisions for the larger community with regular rotation of leaders.

   e) Political, social, and economic units might be defined as temporary so that the dissolution and adjustment of these units can be carried out at any time. Communities ought to continue only so long as they fulfill the needs of their members. However, while embracing change, communities might find virtue in providing some institutional continuity over time, particularly in terms of economic wellbeing.

Assumptions of the new society

Any new society that we envision, of course, will be based upon underlying assumptions. Evaluation of each plan necessitates a critical analysis of both its central features and the explicit and implicit assumptions embedded in it. For example the proposals made above make several assumptions:

   a) A new society based upon local control and participatory democracy assumes that this control in conjunction with equal distribution of resources will decrease the level of alienation among the population and hence the incidence of social bigotry. The more humans control their own social and physical environment, the less likely they will be to project hostilities onto others. Similarly, if they have equal access to economic resources, no material justification for hostility will exist.

  b) Although it is assumed that an equitable distribution of resources, community control, and the possibility of mobility will dramatically reduce conflict between socio-political units, conflicts from a variety of causes will probably persist. However, internal and cross- community conflict will be in what may be called 'human scale' because the scope and intensity of conflict among small communities will be greatly reduced.

The 'enemy' will not be an abstraction in the new society but the real person living across one's communal borders. As political scientist Quincy Wright put it a long time ago, “the larger the group and the less accessible all its members to direct sensory contact with all the others and their activities, the less available are instinct, custom, or universal acceptance as bases of group behavior, and the more symbols and opinions about them are the stimuli and guides for behavior. In the large groups which make war in modern civilization, symbols have been responsible for initiating and guiding that particular behavior.” 'Direct sensory contact' will replace symbol manipulation by economic and political elites in the nation state.

  c)The emphasis on primary political and social control at the community level and the creation of small-scale societies necessitate the existence of some significant cross-community or cross-national units, significant for certain functions such as dispersal of funds throughout a nation or region.

Three possible superordinate units could emerge. The most likely in the near future would be the mixed centralized-decentralized system proposed by Paul Goodman whereby 'non-human' actions are carried out at the national level such as the dispersal of resources to communities, accounting operations, and other computerized actions. Intermediate units such as state governments could be eliminated, and the significant decisions affecting individuals made in their communities. Another alternative involves the creation of domestic or international regions providing the superordinate functions in conjunction with the communities. Superordinate limited political units could emerge out of transformations of regional international organizations such as the European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement. Finally, the breakdown of the nation-state might yield a new macro-micro community interaction system. Any of these possibilities requires that superordinate functions must be clearly defined, made as automatic as possible (not subject to technocratic manipulation), and structures must be continuously evaluated 

    d)Central to the new society is the assumption that society can develop a new non-work ethos, that the system of economic abundance and automation, when stripped of its false productivity, consumption, featherbedding, and the imposition of scarcities, can reduce some of what we know as laborious work. Traditional labor could be reduced although other work such as care giving is likely to increase. And given the reduction of work, human beings can find ways to use life time for sociability and pleasure as well as necessary labor. This suggests several alternative life styles, including extensive continuous education and community participation in the arts.

    e)It is further assumed that the wealth and income of the world would be redistributed transforming the economic system whereby basic needs and functional comforts are made available to all. National armies, hand-picked neo-colonial elites, and foreign corporations no longer will control the direction of change in the Global South allowing members of the latter to choose their destinies independently. Further as the new societies spread from territory to territory one might hope for the emergence of economic redistribution that provides comforts for the world’s citizens. The stimulus for change could begin locally and nationally and spread throughout the world.

    f) Finally, the vision of the new society assumes the possibility and, indeed, the necessity of humans regaining control of the technological world. Developed societies have experienced the growth and dominance of organizational/technological rationality, a rationality committed to organizational maintenance and expansion irrespective of the human needs of its members. The goal of a new society is ultimately to achieve individual and community rationality based upon means and ends in human scale. Specifically, a new social order presupposes that technology can be decentralized, that efficiency necessary for modern existence does not require centralized political and social control. Social organization can determine technological organization.

 Strategies for change

Political activists spend much time discussing strategies for change. Scrutiny of relevant history and assessments of contemporary practice are most beneficially used by progressives to guide their efforts to bring about change within communities, nations, and the international system. It is presumed that to bring about a new society such as that discussed above, a multiplicity of strategies need to be utilized, giving credence to personality, environmental, and systemic variations--and class, race, and gender--with particular emphasis upon spontaneity, creativity, self-doubt, and constant reappraisal.

Of continued importance to change and of utility for achieving a new society is continued education—education for change which would be truly revolutionary.  Education involves, where relevant, academic argumentation, political organization around specific issues, and personal commitments in visible ways to new value systems and life styles. Substantial change requires mass support: hence large numbers of people must be exposed to the spirit of a new society so that they see alternatives and, hopefully, choose to work for their achievement.

Along with educational value, the building of new institutions may provide the skeletal structures of a new society within the parameters of the old. With increasing tension and disarray in 21^st century societies, the existence of new, more appealing alternative embryonic structures will provide the substance for new loyalties and commitments when the threshold of tensions make new institutions crucial. As Staughton Lynd has argued, radical social change in the United States occurred when people, of necessity, built new institutions at the community level and crises stimulated the development of new loyalties to these institutions. Eventually the substance of these institutions spilled over from community to community across the nation. The growth of worker cooperatives might be an example.

Finally, those seeking the achievement of a new social order should involve themselves in the ongoing political process, openly and honestly articulating the substance of principles explicit in the quest for a new society. This means the utilization of electoral politics, street heat, and left organizing to communicate with the public, to build people power, and to achieve policies that move towards a new society.

Let us fight cynicism and resume the debate about building a better future!

 

 

 

SATURDAY ‘STAND FOR PEACE’ CALLS FOR AN END TO THE BLOCKADE OF CUBA

Harry Targ

 photo credit to Mariah Hiles 

Cuba has been victimized by a United States blockade since 1962, sometimes called an “embargo,” that has included a unilateral ban on trade with Cuba. In addition, US policy since President Trump came in office has included pressuring other countries to suspend all commerce with the island nation. Travel to Cuba is heavily regulated. Also, Trump put Cuba on the “state sponsor of terrorism” list to further restrict Cuba’s access to loans from the World Bank and other financial institutions and the ability of other nations to engage commercially with the island. In a word, United States policy toward Cuba is designed to “starve” the Cuban people. And while presidential candidate Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign promised to end Trump’s vicious policies he has not done so.

To protest these brutal US policies toward Cuba Wisconsin Peace Action, paralleling weekend actions occurring around the nation, devoted its weekly “Stand for Peace” rally on June 24 to demand an end to the Blockade of Cuba and particularly to take Cuba off the terrorism list. The Milwaukee rally was organized in collaboration with the Wisconsin Coalition to Normalize Relations With Cuba and the Milwaukee chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).

Thirty activists stood with signs at four corners of a busy Milwaukee intersection calling for the normalizing of relations with Cuba, taking Cuba off the terrorism list, and reminding passersby that Cuba, contrary to the US, has a free, sophisticated health care system available to all. Other Stand for Peace activists carried their placards calling for cuts in military spending and urging the United States to exert its influence to end the fighting in Ukraine.

The Wisconsin Cuba Coalition and PSL have worked diligently to encourage Milwaukeeans to write President Biden, urging him for starters to take Cuba off the terrorism list. In part, the letter says that “leaving Cuba on this list is indefensible, as Cuba works to recover and reboot its economy after the Covid-19 pandemic…The world community recognizes that Cuba has a long history of providing healthcare and saving lives around the world. Cuba has nothing to do with ‘sponsoring terror’.”

photo credit to Mariah Hiles 

To find more information about the letter and joining in the campaign to normalize relations with Cuba  go to www.WICuba.org or write WICubaCoalition@gmail.com

The Wisconsin Cuba Coalition and the Party for Liberation and Socialism will be sponsoring a “Healthcare for All, in Cuba and the US” film and discussion, Tuesday, July 25, 2023, 6 pm. at the Mitchell Street Library, 906 W. Historic Mitchell Street, Milwaukee. Everyone in the area is welcome to attend.

 

 

Conversations about Daniel Ellsberg: Ehrlich and Targ

 

 

The Grass Is Greener - Ehrlich And Targ On Ellsberg -2023 - 06 - 20 by WXRW riverwestradio.com 104.1fm

THE EMPIRE IN DISARRAY: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

 Global challenges to the international order

 (Originally posted 10 Aoril, 2013 in The Rag Blog)

Harry Targ

 

We are experiencing a dramatic transformation of international relations. Central features of it involve the relative decline of US/NATO hegemony and the growing integration of policy preferences of countries of the Global South. One element of this story is “dedollarization.” This 4-minute video below describes what is happening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkMgqg_wFuM&t=5s

These changes pose fundamental questions about how and in what ways the US peace and justice movements should proceed (June 4, 2023)

Latin American and African dependency theorists and “bottom-up” historians have argued for a long time that resistance must be part of the understanding of any theory of imperialism.

A whole generation of activists has “grown up” conversant with the central place of empire in human history. Children of the Cold War and the “Sixties” generation realized that the United States was the latest of a multiplicity of imperial powers which sought to dominate and control human beings, physical space, natural resources, and human labor power.

We learned from the Marxist tradition, radical historians, scholar/activists with historical roots in Africa, and revolutionaries from the Philippines and Vietnam to Southern Africa, to Latin America. But we often concluded that imperialism was hegemonic; that is it was all powerful, beyond challenge.

A “theory of imperialism” for the 21st century should include four interconnected variables that explain empire building as well as responses to it.

First, as an original motivation for empire, economic interests are primary. The most recent imperial power, the United States, needed to secure customers for its products, outlets for manufacturing investment opportunities, an open door for financial speculation, and vital natural resources such as oil.

Second, the pursuit of military control parallels and supports the pursuit of economic domination. The United States, beginning in the 1890s, built a two-ocean navy to become a Pacific power, as well as institutionalizing its control of the Western Hemisphere. It crushed revolutionary ferment in the Philippines during the Spanish, Cuban, American War and began a program of military intervention in Central American and the Caribbean. The “Asian pivot” of the 21st century and continued opposition to the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions reflect the 100-year extension of the convergence of economics and militarism in U.S. foreign policy.

Third, as imperial nations flex their muscles on the world stage they need to rationalize exploitation and military brutality to convince others and their own citizens of the humanistic goals they wish to achieve. In short, ideology matters. In the U.S. case, “manifest destiny” and the “city on the hill,” that is the dogma that the United States has a special mission as a beacon of hope for the world, have been embedded in the dominant national narrative of the country for 150 years.

However, what has often been missing from the left-wing theoretical calculus is an understanding of resistance. Latin American and African dependency theorists and “bottom-up” historians have argued for a long time that resistance must be part of the understanding of any theory of imperialism. In fact, the imperial system is directly related to the level of resistance the imperial power encounters.

Resistance generates more attempts at economic hegemony, political subversion, the application of military power, and patterns of “humanitarian interventionism” and diplomatic techniques, called “soft power,” to defuse it. But as recent events sugge, resistance of various kinds is spreading throughout global society.

The impetus for adding resistance to any understanding of imperialism has many sources including Howard Zinn’s seminal history of popular movements in the United States, The People’s History of the United States. Zinn argued convincingly that in each period of American history ruling classes were challenged, shaped, weakened, and in a few cases defeated because of movements of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, middle class progressives, and others who stood up to challenge the status quo.

More recently, Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations, compiled a narrative of post-World War II international relations that privileged the resistance from the Global South. World history was as much shaped by anti-colonial movements, the construction of the non-aligned movement, conferences and programs supporting liberation struggles and women’s rights, as it was by big power contestation. The Prashad book was subtitled A People’s History of the Third World.

The 21st century has witnessed a variety of forms of resistance to global hegemony and the perpetuation of neoliberal globalization all across the face of the globe. First, various forms of systemic resistance have emerged. These often emphasize the reconfiguration of nation-states and their relationships that have long been ignored.

The two largest economies in the world, China and India, have experienced economic growth rates well in excess of the industrial capitalist countries. China has developed a global export and investment program in Latin America and Africa that exceeds that of the United States and Europe.

In addition, the rising economic powers have begun a process of global institution building to rework the international economic institutions and rules of decision-making on the world stage. On March 26-27, 2013, the BRICS met in Durban, South Africa. While critical of BRICS shortcomings Patrick Bond, Senior Professor of Development Studies and Director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, in a collection of readings on the subject, introduces BRICS with an emphasis on its potential:

In Durban, five heads of state meet to assure the rest of Africa that their countries’ corporations are better investors in infrastructure, mining, oil and agriculture than the traditional European and U.S. multinationals. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-SA summit also includes 16 heads of state from Africa, including notorious tyrants. A new "BRICS bank" will probably be launched. There will be more talk about monetary alternatives to the U.S. dollar.

On the Latin American continent, most residents of the region are mourning the death of Hugo Chavez, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution. Under Chavez’s leadership, inspiration, and support from oil revenues, Venezuela launched the latest round of state resistance to the colossus of the north, the United States.

Along with the world’s third largest trade bloc MERCOSUR (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela and associate memberships including Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru), Latin Americans have participated in the construction of financial institutions and economic assistance programs to challenge the traditional hegemony of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

The Bolivarian Revolution also has stimulated political change based on various degrees of grassroots democratization, the construction of workers’ cooperatives, and a shift from neoliberal economic policy to economic populism. With a growing web of participants, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and, of course, Cuba, the tragic loss of Chavez will not mean the end to the Bolivarian Revolution. It might lead to its deepening.

But the story of 21st century resistance is not just about countries, alliances, new economic institutions that mimic the old. Grassroots social movements have been spreading like wildfire all across the face of the globe. The story can begin in many places and at various times: the new social movements of the 1980s; the Zapatistas of the 1990s; the anti-globalization/anti-IMF campaigns going back to the 1960s and continuing off and on until the new century; or repeated mass mobilizations against a Free Trade Agreement for the Americas.

Since 2011, the world has been inspired by Arab Spring, workers’ mobilizations all across the industrial heartland of the United States, student strikes in Quebec, the state of California, and in Santiago, Chile. Beginning in 2001 mass organizations from around the world began to assemble in Porto Alegre, Brazil, billing their meeting of some 10,000 strong, the World Social Forum.

They did not wish to create a common political program. They wished to launch a global social movement where ideas could be shared, issues and demands from the base of societies could be raised, and in general the neoliberal global agenda reinforced at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland could be challenged.

The World Social Forum has been meeting annually ever since in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the United States. Most recently, the last week in March, 2013, 50,000 people from 5,000 organizations in 127 countries from five continents met in Tunis, the site of the protest that sparked Arab Spring two years ago. Planners wanted to bring mass movements from the Middle East and North Africa into the collective narrative of this global mobilization.

Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, reported that a Tunisian student, when asked whether the Social Forum movement should continue, answered in the affirmative. The student paid homage to the Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who committed suicide and launched Arab Spring. He declared that “for all those who have died struggling for justice, we must continue to learn from each other how to build a world that does not respond to the greed of dictators, bankers or corporations, but to the needs of simple people like Mohamed Bouazizi.”

 

ANTI-WAR ACTIVISM: SOLDIERS, VETERANS, AND MILITARY FAMILIES: A BOOK REVIEW

 Harry Targ

(a repost)

Fighting for Peace: Veterans and Military Families in the Anti-Iraq War Movement by Lisa Leitz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. (306 pages; paper)

One of the biggest scholarly secrets about social movements since the Vietnam War is the magnitude and vibrancy of the anti-war movement inside the military. “Sir! No Sir!” a 2005 film documented the militant anti-war movement that spread throughout the United States military in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The movement included acts of civil disobedience at military bases, networks of coffee houses near military installations, anti-war newspapers targeted to military readers, and a spreading network of anti-war families and loved-ones as the movement percolated throughout U.S. society.

Fighting for Peace by Lisa Leitz, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Director of Project Pericles at Hendrix College, fast-forwards in a rigorous way to the study of the military anti-war movement from 2005 to 2012; involving veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, loved-ones of those serving, extended families, and networks of military families. The volume uses a variety of methods--questionnaires, extended interviews, archival materials, and ethnographies of organizations and individual military anti-war activists and their families. While surveying anti-war movements against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Professor Leitz concentrates on the participation, vision, rhetoric, activism, tactics, and contradictory “identities” of five organizations: Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Gold Star Families for Peace, and Gold Star Families Speak Out.

The narrative begins with the formation of some of these groups and growing tensions between them arising after the dramatic anti-war protests initiated by Cindy Sheehan, mother of a son who was killed in Iraq. The site of this demonstration in Crawford, Texas was adjacent to the summer residence of President George Walker Bush.  For Leitz, the camp site that was created and named after Sheehan’s deceased son, Camp Casey was “a watershed moment for this movement.” In addition to inspiring the anti-war movement generally “…the vigil brought together veterans of the current wars, veterans of past wars, families of dead military service members, and families of current service members who were all critical of the Iraq War” (3).

The volume presents in-depth research on each of the anti-war military organizations. It addresses their composition: current military and veterans; families of service members and those killed and injured; and veterans of prior U.S. wars, particularly the Vietnam War. It examines the collaborations and tensions between the veterans and military families and the larger peace movement.  It describes policies, programs, and strategies. These involve anti-war positions and demands for increased services for soldiers on the ground and those returning veterans with health needs. It describes debates about how the military and military families should use their special legitimacy, experiencing war directly or through loved ones, in the mass movement. And the narrative describes how the military anti-war movement (rather than the peace movement in general) became a platform for debate between some socialist organization members who wished to incorporate it in a larger campaign to radically transform society versus those who argued that the military anti-war movement should concentrate on the more limited goal of ending the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and providing adequate services for returning veterans.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the study is the portrait of the contradictions faced by the author herself and the five organizations as they navigated through a hostile military environment. First, Professor Leitz, a visible anti-war activist was married to a career military officer. As a military spouse, she lived on military bases and carried out some of her anti-war activism in a social milieu that was hostile. She frames much of the study around how active military personnel, veterans, and military families addressed these contradictions personally and politically.

The contradiction of being anti-war activists in social networks of military personnel and families was replicated in the tensions anti-war veterans and military families experienced working with the larger, non-military peace movement. Many of the former opposed the two twenty-first century wars but believed that the U.S. military was needed and, on occasion, could engage in positive projects. This position put these military activists at odds with peace movement ideology and sometimes peace movement practice.  

This portrait of the contradictions between the military movements and the larger peace and anti-war movement provides useful information for activists who ponder how to expand participation in campaigns to promote a peace agenda. And, of course, the peace movement should appropriately respect the special experience, legitimacy, policy preferences, and more limited perspectives of those who actually have experienced war. In addition Professor Leitz describes how the military activists reflected on how their influence could be enlarged as they struggled to become part of a larger more “generic” peace movement.

Fighting for Peace can be a valuable tool for researchers as well as activists. Despite the author’s abstract framing of her research as a study of the military “insider-outsider” identity which sometimes interferes with the well-written account it remains an important contribution to the scholarly study of social movements. Furthermore the rigorous study demonstrates the issues and pitfalls that peace activists must consider as they organize to create a more peaceful world.

 

REMEMBER THOSE WHO PROTESTED WARS TOO! (Originally posted Monday, May 30, 2011)

 Harry Targ

  "In a society where it is normal for human beings to drop bombs on human targets, where it is normal to spend 50 percent of the individual's tax dollar on war, where it is normal...to have twelve times overkill capacity, Norman Morrison was not normal. He said, 'Let it stop.' "(a gravesite speech by John Roemer at the funeral of Norman Morrison quoted in Hendrickson, Paul. The Living and the Dead. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996).

On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison brought his daughter with him to the Pentagon. Outside the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Morrison set himself on fire to protest the escalating war in Vietnam. His daughter, Emily, somehow was passed to others and survived the flames. Morrison, however, died as he had lived, protesting the bombing of villages in South Vietnam, killing innocent men, women, and children.

I was part of an educational tour to Vietnam in March, 2011. We were taken to a powerful museum, known as the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. On the second floor an exhibit featured images of international solidarity with the Vietnamese people during the American war. Included there was a framed copy of an American newspaper account of Morrison’s self-immolation. Earlier, in Hue, we had seen an exhibit of the automobile used by a Buddhist Monk, Thích Quảng Đức, who killed himself in protest of the brutality of the Diem regime in South Vietnam. Presumably this act inspired Morrison’s tragic protest.

I had forgotten Morrison’s dramatic act, and the acts of several others who bravely sacrificed their bodies and lives to oppose the murderous war in Vietnam. As we celebrate Memorial Day this May 29,  I think about Morrison, the exhibit at the Vietnamese Museum, and parallel acts of self-sacrifice.

First, on reflection, I am in awe of the courage and self-sacrifice of the acts of these brave and principled people. Yet, I wish they had not made the ultimate sacrifices they did and had put their courage and willingness to sacrifice to the long-term struggles of the peace movement to end war.

However, I believe we must “take back” Memorial Days from those who celebrate war, see sacrifice only from those who kill and die, and ignore the bravery of the men and women everywhere who fight to end war. We mourn those who were sent off to fight in ignoble wars in the name of the United States. Also we must declare Memorial Day as a day to remember all the Norman Morrison’s who have said “no” to war and empire.