It is a difficult thing to be anti-militarist in my shoes. I am a veteran. I come from a military family. The Pacific Northwest is home to a shocking array of military facilities, from nuclear subs to Stryker brigades, helicopters to C130s, and an appallingly militarized police climate. The Seattle Police Department, known for its racism and brutality, recently attempted to build a bunker for the storage of an ever-expanding arsenal of equipment originally designed to occupy and oppress people of color overseas, but increasingly being employed against people of color in our own streets. The region remains bizarrely affectionate of the military, though it has cooled somewhat toward police.
Today’s modern police trace their legacy directly back to the same white men who captured those escaping to freedom and delivered them back into captivity.
The United States Government, through the deployment of the United States Military, is responsible for the largest human genocide in history. This isn’t something the military did after being founded on valid principles and then later went awry: this was the military from its very inception. It is also the military today, as governors call up National Guard soldiers to oppress protesters at Ferguson (where the National Guard called protesters “enemy forces”), Standing Rock (the Army once more using eminent domain to strip natives of land for profit), Charlotte. It is the police today who have necessitated many of those protests to begin with.
The Supreme Court has ruled that police today do not exist to protect the people, they exist to enforce laws, the majority of which deal with protecting property (profit) and do nothing to protect the vulnerable and oppressed in society. This system is a direct legacy of US slavery, not just through slave patrols, but also through debt peonage and convict leasing. Today’s privatized prison systems, and playground-to-prison pipelines are elaborations on the same basic exploitative oppression. This is even before the individual and cultural legacies of white supremacy and internalized racism come into play that make an officer “fear for their safety” from a twelve year old boy.
The US military does not fight for the freedom or safety of the US people. It fights for the interest of the military industrial complex for the purposes of profit. Even those wars we might be moved to label “Just Wars” like WW2 were not motivated by altruism by the United States. In fact, many facts about WW2 are deliberately ignored in the west in order to maintain the myth of Just War. The first of which is that slavery in the United States had ended well in advance of WW2, being made illegal after the Civil War. In reality, slavery remains fully legal in the United States provided that the person to be enslaved has been incarcerated for some crime.
From the end of the civil war until 1941, a type of slavery existed lawfully in the United States which Douglas A. Blackmon described thusly:
It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery – a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.
Perhaps you recall what else occurred in 1941 that might have cause the United States to want cleaner hands in issues of race and slavery?
The Nazis took many strategies from the history of the US. Our genocide against the indigenous peoples of northern america was an inspiration for the Nazi “Germanization” of Russia. Of course, eugenics were just as popular in the USA as they were in Nazi Germany, if not more so. Zyklon B, specter of the Shoah’s killing chambers, even appeared in both countries.
No one knows how many people were killed on the Mexican-US border by Zyklon B. Like so many aspects of the southern US border, it remains shrouded in a bizarre, racist cloak of mystery. Wars on drugs, immigration, and terror (all of which are simply covers for white supremacy) have repeatedly brought police and military to the border in increasingly oppressive and frightening ways. The most recent election has only inflamed this sort of rhetoric, and I expect we’ll likely see the National Guard re-deployed to the border sometime in the next 4 years in some fashion.
Major General Smedley Butler (one of the most decorated Marines in history) knew that war was a racket long before we provoked the Japanese into Pearl Harbor. To be clear, he predicted World War II, and he was correct.
Muhammad Ali knew that the military industrial complex was inherently racist. And he knew how to act in solidarity with people of color being oppressed by our military industrial complex, by becoming a conscientious objector rather than comply with the draft.
I am not new (late by about 40 decades) in pointing out that the American soldiers and marines in Vietnam who burned “hooches” were essentially the inheritors of the legacy began by American cavalrymen burning “teepees”. Today we drop a drone bomb and there are no photographers embedded with a ground unit to catch a picture of the children burning and expose to the world the truth of the war and win a photojournalism prize.
Instead our whistleblowers sit in prison cells or in exile avoiding transfer to prison cells. They are, of course, “guilty” of revealing classified secrets which “hurt” the United States. Chelsea Manning’s own court martial failed to convict her of endangering US troops. She received 35 years under the Espionage Act, despite having initially attempted to give the documents to US journalists and not having done so for profit (the Espionage Act is designed to prosecute people selling US secrets to foreign governments, not whistleblowers exposing war crimes as Chelsea did).
Many of our war resisters, people of conscience who refused to fight an illegal, immoral war remain in Canada, unpardoned by the Obama administration and threatened with expulsion by Trudeau.
The unconscionable prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba remains open, full of (by and large innocent) men who have been tortured in ways that thankfully defy my comprehension.
We who hold that the military needs abolishing are often accused of focusing on only the “bad examples” of militarism. This is about as true as saying the problem with policing is merely a “few bad apples”.
The “Just War” hypothesis is invalid. Even the Catholic Church is currently reconsidering its policy in that regard. It shouldn’t be very difficult: they already oppose state murder of convicted criminals. Now they just have to oppose state murder of varying other groups of people, many of whom are total civilians who didn’t even support the leader who got them into this mess.
It shouldn’t be difficult for anyone on the left who sat through two Bush terms to understand how easy it is for a country to be taken down a path which the people oppose by the leadership is dedicated to. There is nothing just about waging war on those people. And it is always the people who suffer.
As the war on people of color has increasingly become militarized in the united states, as the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex become one privatized industry, it has become increasingly difficult to criticize either. Even understanding the full scope of either system is difficult because we know so little about them; what little we do know we owe to brave whistleblowers who have risked their own freedom and often their lives to reveal information about how the state utilizes military and police forces to conduct massive surveillance, organizes to put down popular uprisings, conceals war crimes, and wages war without our consent or knowledge.
In the struggle for liberation we face many enemies. The state has many tools to manipulate and control us. We also have many ways in which we can withdraw our consent. Not every person can practically withdraw consent in every way, but most people can withdraw consent in meaningful ways.
- We can refuse to vote for candidates who support the MIC/PIC.
- We can refuse to pay taxes to fund wars and police departments (there are many ways to become a tax resister and I suggest doing your own research and consulting/retaining an attorney).
- We can refuse to enlist, exit the military (contact the GI Rights Hotline for assistance), engage in counter recruitment and truth in recruiting.
- We can hold space for veterans of both the military and police to talk about their experiences as oppressors, and help create processes of truth and reconciliation so that former oppressors may become comrades in struggle.
- We can demand that our communities provide our children better opportunities than prisons and battlefields.
- We can demand that our governments stop spending money on guns and not on educating and feeding our children.
- We can insist that the discussion be framed in terms of spending money on children to create a world where police and militaries aren’t necessary rather than neglecting children into dysfunctional adults who perpetuate the belief that militarism and policing are necessary to keep “those people” in order, whomever today’s scapegoat might be.
- We can lobby our city councils to divest from the MIC/PIC.
- We can support related movements in building solidarity, and understanding how the MIC/PIC uniquely impacts the lives of our allies, and provide tools to other communities to cope with the impacts of militarism.
- We can engage in reparations with communities negatively impacted by our past participation with the MIC/PIC.
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We can end this racket by making our own, much louder, much more joyous racket.
Cascadian Against War 