STILL: THE MEANINGS OF FERGUSON AND MILWAUKEE IN 2024

(Portions of this essay, “The Meanings of Ferguson,” appeared on August 20, 2014 in Diary of a Heartland Radical).

Harry Targ

 

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of T. Rasul Murray

In addressing violence, researchers, educators, journalists and religious leaders have usually concentrated on its most visible forms: murder and war. The central features of such violence include physical assault and killing. In our own day terrorism has joined war as the most popular common subject for study.

Over the years, peace educators have developed intellectual tools to uncover more diverse meanings of violence, their differences and their connections. Structural violence has been distinguished from direct violence. Researchers continue to analyze direct violence, physical assault and killing, but also study structural violence, the various forms of human suffering that take more time; impose pain, sickness, depression, and death on populations; and are perpetuated by leading institutions and relationships in society. Structural violence includes economic inequality, low wages and poverty, inadequate access to health care and education, and the psychological damage that economic suffering causes. These injustices, the concept of structural violence suggests, are embedded in economic, social, and political institutions.

It is possible to disaggregate further the structural violence that is embedded in institutions. Institutional violence refers to unequal distribution of power and influence in major societal institutions: political, criminal justice, and educational, for example.

Finally, cultural violence refers to the images, symbols, and educational materials that value some population groups over others. Culture refers to the public consciousness of history, traditions, and popular narratives that describe people. Stereotypes are short-hand representations of a culture.

In total then violence is direct, structural, institutional, and cultural. These kinds of violence may occur separately but in most cases are inextricably connected. It is this fourfold conception of violence that is relevant to the crisis that unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri.

Ferguson, Missouri 2014      

The tragedy of Ferguson, Missouri came to national attention because of direct violence. A Ferguson policeman shot and killed an unarmed young African American male. In response to the collective expression of community outrage that followed, the local police initiated a multi-day barrage of tear gas, strong-arm arrests, and threatening street protestors with military vehicles and loaded rifles. The images on television screens nationwide were of a people under assault, parallel to Israeli bombings in Gaza and United States targeted air strikes in Iraq. The fear that young African American males in Ferguson have historically felt every time they stepped into the streets of their city escalated since the killing of Michael Brown.

Beyond the threat of direct violence in Ferguson is structural violence, less visible but as important. Brookings Institute researcher Elizabeth Kneebone (“Ferguson, Mo. Emblematic of Growing Suburban Poverty,” brookings.edu, August 15, 2014) reported that the community of Ferguson experienced a qualitative economic decline over the decade before the shooting. The city’s unemployment rate increased from 5 percent in 2000 to 13 percent by 2010. Earnings of community members declined by one-third. One-fourth of the population was living in poverty. 

Kneebone indicated that poverty rates have doubled in suburban neighborhoods surrounding the 100 largest cities in the United States. “By 2008-2012, 38 percent of poor residents lived in the neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. For poor black residents in those communities, the figure was 53 percent.” Of course, poverty is highly related to declining schools, inadequate access to health care, lessened prospects for jobs, and large-scale youth unemployment.

Institutional violence is reflected in a 300-year history of slavery and racism. Professor Clarissa Hayward, Washington University, said: “The St. Louis metropolitan area has been an extreme example of racial segregation for 100 years.” She pointed out that St. Louis geographically was at the nexus of the South, the Midwest, and the West and added: “The practices and politics of St. Louis created the problems that underlie the tension that boiled out in Ferguson this week.” (Puneet Kollipara, “Wonkbook: The Social and Economic Story Behind the Unrest in Ferguson,” Wonkblog, The Washington Post, August 18, 2014). 

In terms of the Ferguson political system, two-thirds of the community is Black and the local government has been almost all white. At the time of the shooting of Michael Brown, five of six city council members were white, the Mayor was white, and six of seven school board members were white. And fifty of 53 police officers were white.

Finally, cultural violence addresses the issue of ideology, consciousness, images of the other, and additional ways in which whites see African-Americans. Racist culture socializes the dominant class and race to reflect its superiority. For example, Missouri Lt. Governor Peter Kinder said shortly after the shooting: “That’s one of the great advances of Anglo-American civilization, that we do not have politicized trials. We let the justice system work it out.” The mayor of Ferguson declared that his community was free of racism.

Since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, police and politicians organized a campaign to demonize the victim of the police killing. The tall young man, an African-American, was a robber, a drug consumer, and violence-prone. Also, the days of protest in Ferguson were framed to privilege the peaceful, religious, mourning adults and to explain night-time violence not as police violence but violence perpetrated by outside agitators from New York, Chicago, and California. The fact that young African Americans left their houses at their own risk could not, the frame implies, engender outrage.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin 2016

And in August, 2016 Milwaukee, by many measures the most segregated and racist big city in the United States, experienced the police shooting of Sylville K. Smith followed by two days of frustrated rebellion by some residents of the Sherman Park neighborhood. State violence, poverty, and racial segregation have created a tinderbox of frustration and anger in that city. According to a 2015 NPR report, the state of Wisconsin invests more in prisons than education, incarcerating a higher percentage of Black men than anywhere in the country. “…in Milwaukee County more than half of all Black men in their 30s and 40s have served time.” In one zip code alone 62 percent of Black men have been incarcerated for some time by the age of 34. The prison population of the state has tripled since 1990.

NPR also quoted a study finding that Milwaukee has the second highest black poverty rate in the country with an unemployment rate four times higher than whites (Kenay Downs, “Why is Milwaukee So Bad for Black People?” NPR, March 5, 2015). A Madison, Wisconsin group, the Young, Gifted, and Black Coalition, after defining the idea of a “neighborhood,” found that 31 of Wisconsin’s 56 Black neighborhoods are jails and an additional 21 neighborhoods are apartment complexes or section 8 housing or both. Prisons and poverty dominate the life of Black communities (YGB, “31 of Wisconsin’s 56 Black Neighborhoods are Jails,” ).

Summing up the situation in Milwaukee, Alderman Khalif Rainey said: “The Black people of Milwaukee are tired. They’re tired of living under this oppression. This is their life.” (Tanzina Vega, “Milwaukee’s Staggering Black-White Economic Divide,” CNN Money, August 17, 2016, money cnn.com).

So from police violence--killing, gassing, beating--to economic despair, to lack of political representation to cultural rationales for state violence, the basic characteristics of American society are uncovered. And once again, the victimization of people of color, as well as workers, and women, suggest the following conclusions:

--the root cause of exploitation, racism, and sexism is structural violence (capitalism).

 --physical violence is used to crush rebellion against class exploitation and racism.

 --unrepresentative political institutions are dominated by the wealthy and powerful.

 --dominant cultural stereotypes and specific narratives about society reinforce the economic system, the political system, and justify the police violence in the St. Louis area, Milwaukee and all around the United States.

Black Lives Matter

But between Ferguson and Milwaukee a new social movement emerged, Black Lives Matter, led by young women and men represented over 60 organizations around the country. They issued a powerful programmatic statement “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice, The Movement for Black Lives." It presented six demands, each with detailed recommendations:

 -End the War on Black People

 -Reparations

 -Divest-Invest

 -Economic Justice

 -Community Control

 -Political Power

These demands represent African Americans, Women, Workers, and all oppressed peoples. They address direct violence—Stop the Killing—and structural violence—Redistribute Wealth and Income, Political Power, and Opportunity for Human Development for All. The struggles continue.

 

THE UNITED STATES BOMBS HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

An Event and Reflection

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Lanterns for Peace

Peace Action Wisconsin

Saturday, August 9, 2025, 6-9 pm

Zao MKE Church, 2319 Kenwood Blvd. Milwaukee

Peace Action Wisconsin will hold a remembrance of the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and renew its commitment to a world free from nuclear weapons.

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REMEMBERING HIROSHIMA and NAGASAKI (a repost)

Harry Targ

In these early August days, we reflect on the decision to drop atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. The official explanation for the use of these horrific new weapons was that they were required to end the World War in Asia. But subsequent historical research has indicated that the United States chose to drop the bombs to threaten the former Soviet Union and as a result to facilitate the United States construction of a post-war world order that would maximize its economic and political vision.

United States foreign policy over the last 150 years has been a reflection of many forces including economics, politics, militarism and the desire to control territory. The most important idea used by each presidential administration to gain support from the citizenry for the pursuit of empire is the claim that America is “exceptional”. 

Think about the view of “the city on the hill” articulated by Puritan ancestors who claimed that they were creating a social experiment that would inspire the world. Over three hundred years later President Reagan again spoke of “the city on the hill” (and the image of American Exceptionalism continued  as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the Clintons and others referred to the US as ‘the indispensable nation’).

One can recall public addresses by turn of the twentieth century luminaries such as former President Theodore Roosevelt who claimed that the white race from Europe and North America was civilizing the peoples of what we would now call the Global South.  Indiana Senator Beveridge’s stated it clearly: “It is elemental….It is racial.”

From the proclamation of the new nation’s special purpose in Puritan America, to Ronald Reagan’s reiteration of the idea, to similar claims by virtually all politicians of all political affiliations, Americans hear over and over that we are different, special, and a shining example of public virtue that all other peoples should use as their guide for building a better society and polity.

However, the United States has been involved in wars for 201 years from 1776 to 2011. Ten million indigenous people had been exterminated as the “new” nation moved westward between the 17th and the 20th centuries and at least 10 million people were killed, mostly from developing countries, between 1945 and 2010 in wars in which the United States had some role. In addition, world affairs was transformed by the use of the two atomic bombs; one dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 instantly killing 80,000 people and the other on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 killing another 70,000.

Comparing the image of exceptionalism with the domestic reality of American life suggests stark contrasts as well: continuous and growing gaps between rich and poor, inadequate nutrition and health care for significant portions of the population, massive domestic gun violence, and inadequate access to the best education that the society has the capacity to provide to all. Of course, the United States was a slave society for over 200 years formally racially segregated for another 100, and now incarcerates 15 percent of African American men in their twenties.

Although, the United States is not the only country that has a history of imperialism, exploitation, violence, and racism US citizens should understand that its foreign policy and economic and political system are not exceptional and must be changed.

Finally, are there any common threads that run from 1945  when two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese people?  First, a small number of politicians, elected and appointed, made decisions of monumental importance to the victims of the bombing and the subsequent danger of nuclear war.

Second, the decisions were made in the face of overwhelming evidence that the use of these horrific bombs was not needed to end the war in Asia.

Third, Truman and his aides made their decisions in contradiction to warnings of the dangers of atomic war for civilization. Opposition came from significant sectors of the scientific community, including some scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the bomb.

Fourth, the decision to use atomic weapons was profoundly political. Demonstrating that the United States had this powerful new weapon sent a message to the Soviet Union. In addition, key decisionmakers including General Leslie Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project; James Forrestal who would become the first Secretary of Defense; and James Byrnes, Secretary of State, were virulently anti-communist. Also, the decision to drop the bomb, whether a motivation or not, communicated to the American people that President Truman, not seen as particularly qualified for the job, was tough and potentially a great leader. He, like some historians and former advisors, continued to defend the decision for years to follow.

Finally, a better future and the survival of humanity require a realization, as Paul Robeson once suggested, that what is precious about all people is not their differences but their commonalities. Exceptionalist thinking separates people and facilitates decisions like the dropping of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sharing what we have in common as human beings, both our troubles and our talents, is the only basis for creating a peaceful and just world.

 

REMEMBERING THE SHORT OPENING OF SPACE FOR INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGE WITH CUBA

 

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

BLOCKADE ON CUBA STIFLES INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGE

(The Obama administration has begun to make modest changes in United States policy toward Cuba , such as easing travel to the island by Cuban Americans and transferring money to relatives, but the economic, cultural, and educational blockade of the island remains. The mainstream press continues to publish decontextualized accounts of "dictatorship," "bureaurcracy," and"economic chaos" on the island.

For example, The New York Times published a story recently pridefully announcing that with US Homeland Security support "6,000" Cuban doctors and other health professionals have fled the island or their humanitarian assignments in other countries to come to the United States since 2002. The article, by Mirta Ouito, "Doctors in Cuba Start Over in the U.S."August 4, 2009, does mention that Cuba has sent 185,000 health professionals to 103 countries over the last 50 years. But she writes: "Yet for many Cuban doctors, who earn the equivalent of $25 a month, the lure of a life of freedom and opportunities in the United States is too strong to resist." She sites an American Medical Association official who estimates that one of four doctors in the United States was trained overseas. While the author describes the difficulties Cuban medical defectors face in pursuing their profession, she seemed undisturbed by the irony of a US government program designed to attract trained health professionals from doing important work in countries of the Global South at the same time that the most developed country in the world has to increasingly rely on international doctors to meet the needs of the American people.

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Below is reprinted a 2004 article that described one example of literally hundreds of academic exchanges that flourished before former President George Bush tightened the blockade of Cuba. The 50-year blockade must end and egalitarian exchanges between the people of North America and Cuba must be reestablished for the benefit of all).

Harry Targ
June 17, 2004

Fourteen students and two professors returned to Purdue University on June 9 from an 18 day study abroad trip to Cuba. The students, from the Schools of Agriculture and Liberal Arts, completed an interdisciplinary course called “Experiencing Cuba.”The course included four days of formal instruction at the Agrarian University of Havana, an institution much like Purdue. In addition site visits were made to a tobacco farm and factory, an urban garden where the new Cuban commitment to sustainable agriculture was illustrated, an ecological preserve, and a botanical garden specializing in exhibiting and studying tropical plants. Students also toured a special facility for Cubans with mental and physical disabilities. As to politics, culture, and history, students visited museums specializing in Cuban history, religion, and the arts. The Purdue group had occasion to interact with Cubans in many places including the university, in neighborhoods, and in other urban and rural settings. The trip was capped by a six-day 700 mile ride across the island from Havana city to Santiago de Cuba on the Caribbean.

The course was organized by faculty in the School of Agriculture and Liberal Arts as part of a project to link Purdue University to appropriate academic institutions on the island. The project would link Purdue and Cuban faculty with interests in collaborative research, graduate students who wish to pursue research projects involving Cuba, and undergraduate students who wish to study in Cuba. It is hoped that at some time Cuban faculty and students will be able to study at Purdue University when United States policy toward Cuba changes.

The organizers of the Purdue/Cuba project launched the program because Cuba has had special historic ties, positive and negative,with the United States that warrant study. Also, Cuba for the last 45 years has been a social laboratory for the development of diverse social, economic, and cultural policies that interest peoples around the world as well as the United States. For example, Cuba’s health and educational programs have long been of interest. In the 1990s Cuba’s adoption of policies to promote sustainable agriculture have been seen by some as a possible model for other developing countries.

The Purdue study abroad course in Cuba was not among the first. In fact, over the last decade the Treasury Department has issued education licenses to over 750 colleges, universities, and high schools to develop such courses. During the Purdue visit to the island, for example, there were faculty/student groups from the University of Georgia, the University of Charleston, Duke, and William and Mary. A University of Michigan group was to arrive in June.

Treasury Department licensing of university programs is required because the United States has had a 40-year economic embargo and travel ban on free and open exchange with the island nation. Established by President’s Eisenhower and Kennedy, the embargo and travel ban were designed to cause economic and political chaos in Cuba that would lead to the collapse of its revolutionary government. Since the policy never led to the desired outcome, the U.S. in the 1990s began to modify the policy to let selective groups of people travel to Cuba, and in 2001 to allow so-called humanitarian sales of food products to the island on a pay-as-you go basis. U.S. academic institutions and other organized trips to the island would be authorized by Treasury if the programs had a clear educational purpose. Just during the first quarter of 2004, 1,300 Americans participated in 60 educational programs in Cuba. Despite the broad-based support by liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans to abolish the economic embargo and the travel ban, the Bush administration piece-by-piece has been eliminating the minimal educational and economic connections with the island.

In early May, 2004, the administration announced that it would accept a series of draconian recommendations from an appointed task force on Cuban policy to stimulate “regime change” in Cuba. Universities which in the past had been issued two-year licenses for educational travel would now have to apply for a new license each year. Educational programs shorter than a full semester would require special permission and would have to adopt the goal of U.S. policy toward Cuba, that is “regime change.” Faculty who engage in research on Cuba or who travel to the island to arrange for educational programs will be further limited in their right to travel.

Along with the efforts to eliminate the academic exchanges with Cuba, the new Bush policies cut dramatically the rights of Cuban Americans to travel to visit relatives on the island. Heretofore, they could travel once a year and such travel could be to visit extended family members. Now Cuban Americans can travel to the island only once every three years and to only visit parents or children. The amount of money Cuban Americans can send to their relatives on the island was radically cut as well.

In 2003, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is charged with enforcing sanctions against several countries and terrorist networks and drug traffickers, as well as overseeing travel to Cuba, spent $3.3 million of its $21.2 million budget on Cuba. Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security has used extensive personnel and resources to interview travelers to and from the island. Enforcing the archaic ban on Cuba has used disproportionately large amounts of resources compared with the struggle against terrorism and drugs in the world.

Almost all the Purdue students who traveled and studied in Cuba reported that the experience was intellectually stimulating. While student evaluations of the strengths and weaknesses of the Cuban experiment varied, most shared the belief that free and open exchange of experiences between peoples is truly educational. It is time to end the U.S. blockade and travel ban on Cuba so that two peoples, so close and yet so far from each other, can learn from each other’s experiences.

THE 60 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE GULF OF TONKIN: FOREIGN POLICY LIES LEAD TO WAR

 Harry Targ

    

                                                    Wikipedia photo

Former Arkansas Senator, J. William Fulbright in describing how he was tricked by his old friend President Lyndon Baines Johnson to support a resolution authorizing escalating war in Vietnam said: “A lie is a lie. There is no other way to put it.”

On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese armed motor boats attacked two U.S. naval vessels off the coast of North Vietnam. The administration of Lyndon Johnson defined the attacks as an unprovoked act of North Vietnamese aggression. Two days later it was announced that another attack on U.S. ships in international waters had occurred and the U.S. responded with air attacks on North Vietnamese targets. President Johnson then took a resolution he had already prepared to the Congress of the United States. The so-called Gulf of Tonkin resolution declared that the Congress authorizes the president to do what he deemed necessary to defend U.S. national security in Southeast Asia. Only two Senators voted “no.” Over the next three years the U.S. sent over 500,000 troops to Vietnam to carry out a massive air and ground war in both the South and North of the country.

Within a year of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incidents, evidence began to appear indicating that the August 2 attack was provoked. The two U.S. naval vessels were in North Vietnamese coastal waters orchestrating acts of sabotage in the Northern part of Vietnam. More serious, evidence pointed to the inescapable conclusion that the second attack on August 4 never occurred.

President Johnson’s lies to the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin contributed to the devastating decisions to escalate a U.S. war in Vietnam that cost 57,000 U.S. troop deaths and upwards of three million Vietnamese deaths.

Forty years later, George W. Bush and his key aides put together a package of lies about Iraq imports of uranium from Niger, purchases of aluminum rods which supposedly could be used for constructing nuclear weapons, development of biological and chemical weapons, and connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

As the Vietnamese and Iraqi cases show, foreign policies built on lies can lead to imperial wars, huge expenditures on the military, economic crises at home, and military casualties abroad.

REVISITING THE FIVE PRINCIPLES OF PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE: A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PEACE CHARTER

Harry Targ

(a repost for peace)

The Need for a New Peace and Solidarity Vision

Peace activists have influenced the debates about foreign policies of states for centuries. Despite the fact that World War 1 which led to 20 million deaths was not averted, peace activists opposed to that war such as Jane Addams and Eugene V. Debs became models for peace advocacy for the remainder of the twentieth century.

After the next World War which added another forty million deaths to the century’s devastation, peace activists restrained the worst features of state violence and educated younger generations about war, colonialism, imperialism, and the links between the drive for oil and violence. Peace activists formed organizations such as The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, The War Resisters League, The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, and Peace Action. Massive mobilizations and civil disobedience in opposition to the Vietnam War, the United States wars in Central America in the 1980s, and bombings of Serbia in the 1990s characterized protest during the last forty years of the twentieth century. During the early part of the twenty-first century movements sprung up to oppose the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the links between militarism and climate change. In addition, progressive trade unionists, feminists, communities of faith, Communists, Socialists, and some Democratic, Republican and third party activists have opposed war and the preparation for war over the years.

Given the new, more complicated international and domestic environment that has emerged since the last century, it is time to revisit the theory and practice of the peace movement. Effective approaches to peace must be adapted to new circumstances. This Peace Charter proposes three peace principles--peaceful coexistence, economic conversion, and international solidarity--which might serve as a guide to peace movement practice. 

The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence

In 1954, the governments of China and India signed a treaty based on what became known as the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. At the first meeting in 1955 of what would later become the Non-Aligned Nations, China articulated the Five Principles as a guide to their foreign policy. Although the sixty year old treaty between China and India based on the Five Principles was established in a different time and place, they still can serve as a standard by which the peace movement can evaluate the foreign policies of their country and others as well.

The Five Principles, as first articulated by the treaty signed on April 29, 1954, are:

1. Mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.
2. Mutual non-aggression.
3. Mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.
4. Equality and cooperation for mutual benefit.
5. Peaceful co-existence.

The first principle suggests that a just foreign policy requires that nations respect the territory and sovereignty of each and every country. The history of empires indicates that dominant powers failed to give minimal respect to the institutions, cultures, and economic life of citizens of other countries. The United States has been shaped in its worldview and policies by claims of “exceptionalism,” or its being “the last remaining super power” with particular obligations to oversee the conduct of other countries. Many influential foreign policy elites today still articulate the view that the United States is “the indispensable nation.”  

The second principle makes clear that a just nation does not engage in aggression against others; not in wars, subversion, covert military assaults, or in economic blockades that are designed to disrupt, destroy, and create havoc. To the contrary, the United States since the end of World War II, for example, has engaged in at least 75 military operations that have led to the deaths of at least ten million people and the displacement of millions more. The peace movement should demand that the United States and all the other countries abstain from aggression.

The third principle, paralleling the second, makes it clear that nations cannot interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Interference takes many forms. Some are as suggested above. Others include the use of economic techniques, the internet, penetration and manipulation under the guise of religion, education, and various forms of non-governmental activities in targeted countries.

The fourth principle, assumes a very different lens or vision concerning the relationships between states and people. The old vision, derived from certain Western philosophical traditions, emphasizes the struggle of each against all. The world is a Social Darwinian world, this view suggests, in which only the strongest shall survive. An alternative vision, as suggested by this principle is that mutuality of cooperative relationships can create mutuality of benefits. Experience suggests that cooperation is the essence of human development. And, despite claims to the contrary, the vast majority of human interactions are cooperative, not competitive. Particularly the peace movement must challenge the assumption broadly marketed by militarists that war is perpetual.

Finally, and in conjunction with all of the principles articulated above, the goal of any nation’s foreign policy ought to be peaceful coexistence. To the extent that the United States violates this principle, the peace movement should demand a new agenda.

Economic Conversion

“From Forrestal’s day to the present, semi-warriors have viewed democratic politics as problematic. Debate means delay. To engage in give-and-take or compromise is to forfeit clarity and suggests a lack of conviction. The effective management of national security requires specialized knowledge, a capacity for clear-eyed analysis and above all an unflinching willingness to make decisions, whatever the cost.

With the advent of the semi-war, therefore, national security policy became the preserve of experts, few in number, almost always unelected, habitually operating in secret, persuading themselves that to exclude the public from such matters was to serve the public interest. After all, the people had no demonstrable ‘need to know.’ In a time of perpetual crisis, the anointed role of the citizen was to be pliant, deferential and afraid.” (Andrew Bacevich, reviewing a biography of James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, in The Nation, April 23, 2007).

Andrew Bacevich reminds us that a permanent war economy has been part of the political and economic landscape of the United States at least since the end of World War II.

The War Resisters League pie chart of total government spending for fiscal year 2015 indicates that 47 percent of all government spending deals with current preparation for war and past wars.

In addition, “war support” contractors, such as KBR, have made billions of dollars in the twenty-first century from military spending. Virtually every big corporation is to some degree on the Department of Defense payroll.

Because of the economic crisis which began in 2007, debate about military spending increased. In 2010 Congressmen Barney Frank and Ron Paul initiated a study addressing needed cuts. The report prepared for them in 2010, “Debt, Deficits, and Defense,” called for across the board reductions in spending--procurement, research and development, personnel, operations and maintenance, and infrastructure---of $960 billion over the next decade. The report noted that over the last decade 65 percent of federal discretionary spending went to the military.

President Obama in January, 2010, proposed spending cuts of $480 billion over the next decade (reductions in projected increases, not existing funding). He coupled recommendations about future spending with a firm statement that the world must realize that the United States remains committed to maintaining its military superiority.

The President indicated that spending reductions in the future will be tied to greater use of “special operations,” drones, and shifting existent forces from Europe to Asia.

The magnitude of military spending represents what Bacevich referred to as the permanent war economy articulated and defended by the “semi-warriors” dominating U.S. foreign policy in each administration since World War II.

These semi-warriors gained influence after the Truman Administration accepted recommendations in National Security Document Number 68 (1950) that defense spending should always have priority over all other government programs. NSC 5412, approved by President Eisenhower, gave legitimacy to covert operations around the world allowing any president to “plausibly deny” any connections with such operations.

Subsequently virtually each president proclaimed a doctrine justifying more and more military spending--Eisenhower for the Middle East, Carter for the Persian Gulf, Reagan to rollback “the evil empire,” Clinton for “humanitarian interventions” and Bush for “pre-emptive attacks.”

The Obama administration, through speeches and actions, has constructed what might be called “the Obama Doctrine.”

First, as the last remaining superpower and the beacon of hope for the world, the United States once again reserves the right and responsibility to intervene militarily to enhance human rights anywhere.

Second, U.S. humanitarian military interventions will be carried out from time to time preferably with the support of our friends.

Third, new technologies such as drones will allow these interventions to occur without “boots on the ground.” They will be cheaper in financial and human cost (primarily for American troops).

Finally, assassinations and covert killings have made it clear that the Obama Doctrine overrides recognized judicial proceedings and the sanctity of human life.

Since the establishment of the permanent war economy in the 1940s millions of proclaimed “enemies” have been killed and seriously injured, mostly in the Global South. Permanent physical and psychological damage has been done to U.S soldiers, predominantly poor and minorities as they too are victims of war.

In addition, military spending has distorted national priorities and invested U.S. financial resources in expenditures that do not create as many jobs as investments in construction, education, or healthcare. And the permanent war economy has created a culture that celebrates violence, objectifies killing, dehumanizes enemies, and exalts super-patriotism through television, music, video games, and educational institutions.

These issues need to be more vigorously related to those raised by the grassroots campaigns that have sprung up to defend the rights of workers, women, people of color and those experiencing discrimination for various reasons; to oppose growing income and wealth inequality; and to defend working people’s homes from foreclosures.

In 1967 in reference to the massive U.S. war in Southeast Asia and desperate needs of workers at home, Dr. Martin Luther King described the fundamental connections that peace activists and all progressives must pursue: “I speak of the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”

As Michael Eisenscher, National Coordinator, U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW) articulated in a powerful data-based essay on economic conversion:

We see this as just the beginning of a conversation.  This effort takes the struggle for new priorities to a new level -- to a struggle for a demilitarized economy and foreign policy --a struggle for a new, more just, equitable and democratic economy and society.  In the process, we will help to redefine the meaning of “national security” -- as determined not only by the security of our borders, the size of our military or the power of its arsenal, but also by whether people have real economic and social security--food security, health security, housing security, employment security and security in their old age – and a decent standard of living for all, not just the privileged few. (“Economic Conversion: From Military Addiction to Economic Sustainability: Charting the Course to a New Economy for All”).

 

International Solidarity

A centerpiece of the peace movement is solidarity. Solidarity refers to giving moral, intellectual, and material support to struggles for peace and justice everywhere. During the Spanish Civil War, American progressives raised money for the defenders of democracy, pressured the Roosevelt administration to give war material to the Loyalists, and even sent men and women to fight on the side of Spanish democracy. During World War II, Americans raised money for and publicly demonstrated support for the Red Army while the Soviet Union confronted 90 percent of the German army. From the 1940s until the end of the Cold War, peace and justice activists mobilized to support the Guatemalan, Cuban, Vietnamese, Salvadoran, South African and Nicaraguan people and to oppose United States policies toward these countries. 

Today, there is a major international campaign to support the Palestinian people. Initiated by many Palestinian groups, a global campaign to support boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel have spread all across the globe.  Vibrant BDS campaigns have a visible presence in the United States. Campaigns seek to isolate Israel because of its perpetual violence against Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, expanding land grabs of Palestinian land in violation of international treaties and law, and discrimination against Palestinians who reside in the state of Israel.

In the end, international solidarity is based upon the assumption that violence and war somewhere is inextricably connected to violence and war elsewhere. Particularly peace activists in the United States are animated by the proposition that their own country is connected to regimes that violate human rights and participate in the economic exploitation of subject peoples. Historically peace activists have educated publics about international affairs and have advocated for changes in United States foreign policy. International solidarity advocates for and gives material support to people struggling for peace and justice wherever they are and helps build a consciousness of the unity of people across nations and cultures. As Paul Robeson suggested metaphorically, all cultures have folk music traditions using common chord structures. He was suggesting that commonalities of human experience mirror commonalities of folk traditions. Peace activists believe that the recognition of the commonalities among people can be the basis for the construction of a more peaceful world.

Conclusion

The Peace Charter is designed to revitalize the tradition of peace and solidarity movements of the past coupled with the context of the twenty-first century. The Peace Charter is not motivated by the desire to create a new dogma but to stimulate a conversation about the theory and practice of the peace movement in the years ahead.

The Peace Charter suggests that the peace movement might identify three core guides to action. The first, the five principles of peaceful coexistence, articulates a set of rules that should guide the conduct of nations and peoples as they relate to each other. The second, economic conversion, emphasizes a central issue of peace and justice in world affairs and in the United States as well. Military spending is wasteful, generates more wealth for the few, leads to its perpetuation, and redistributes vital societal resources from most citizens to the military/industrial complex.   The third, international solidarity, underscores the necessity of cross-national work to achieve peace and justice everywhere. The old IWW slogan proclaimed in defense of the working class is also relevant to those who work for peace and justice everywhere: “An Injury to One is an Injury to All.”  

This essay includes excerpts from prior essays published in The Rag Blog and the Diary of a Heartland Radical. In addition ideas incorporated in this version were inspired by discussion during a meeting of the Peace and Solidarity Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). The conceptualization of the three peace principles was suggested by Carl Davidson.