Use It Or Lose It: Protests To Continue Full Steam Ahead

Ending circle in Farmington, Maine created space for activists to connect and hear from one other.

A busy week presenting a webinar on direct actions at war industry facilities Thursday night and then yesterday organizing a stand out in Farmington with around 30 people bringing a pro-Palestine message to the downtown area near a University of Maine campus.

My buddies Ken Jones and Melody Shank organize Resist Raytheon actions in North Carolina and elsewhere, and helped found the War Resisters Network that offers monthly webinars on related topics. You'll see Ken introducing me and then moderating the Q&A.

Ken and Melody used to live in Maine when they taught at the University of Southern Maine. I often joke that Maine is one big small town because our sparse population means most of us engaged in resisting imperialism and the war machine know each other. We get excited when new people show up and that's been happening a lot this past year.

I thought that was happening yesterday when I stood next to a UMF worker who seemed familiar. Turns out she had come to stand with us in Farmington last year and signed up to get email announcements, but never received any. My bad, I'm sure I misread or mistyped her email address from that sign-up sheet. After we'd stood downtown for a couple of hours we circled up in the town gazebo to share why we were there. Once she heard my last name she realized that I was an old friend of her extended family, and I realized that we'd been at Occupy Augusta together many years ago. 

You meet the nicest people standing up to the war machine. 

A less than nice person who passed us on the street yesterday started shouting that all problems would be cleared up in no time if we would just vote Republican like he did (many of us are finding 47's victory has emboldened his supporters to challenge our protests on various pretexts). Eventually my friend Bruce Gagnon said, "We're not Democrats" and the man returned a few minutes later for dialogue with some more of us. There was some concern about the safety of a woman in that conversation (which was too far away for us to hear) but I noted it was my friend Mary Beth Sullivan who just retired from a long career in social work. If it can be de-escalated, MB will de-escalate it! She reported that they found common ground in the belief that the U.S. should not be funding "all these wars."

An organizer local to Farmington has been holding standouts for Palestine weekly on Saturdays at noon in front of the post office. Several attendees yesterday want to join in and contact info was shared; later over lunch people with connections to the university strategized about what each of them could do to build the movement in their town. Students and members of the public can, for instance, engage in organizing that instructors are restricted from doing by the terms of their contract.

Everyone is concerned about legislation passed in the House last week that would enable the Treasury to designate non-profits as supporting "terrorism" and rescind their tax-free status. My own odious representative, Democrat Jared Golden, voted for it -- his advocacy for Republican causes contributed to his very narrow re-election win this week after ranked choice voting tabulations concluded.

Liberals will use this law as an excuse to curtail their own advocacy for Palestine. I'm happy to know lots of well-informed people who will continue full steam ahead taking action to say no to genocide and no to trashing 1st amendment protections for political speech. We'll continue our monthly coalition stand outs at big intersections in Maine (next up: Freeport Sat Dec 21) in addition to weekly protests in many locations, and a steady stream of direct actions. 

Use it, or lose it.

Statewide Coalition Demands No More $$ For Israel's Crimes

Our monthly antiwar coalition protests have now been seen at big intersection all across Maine. Yesterday was Waterville, next month Saturday  June 8 will be in Wells -- our first foray into conservative, populous York County. Previously we've been seen in Belfast, Topsham, Ellsworth, Skowhegan, Portland, Brunswick, Freeport, and probably a few other places I can't recall at the moment. Since I write a blog post reporting on each one, my archive here will tell the tale.

Yesterday was a strong turnout with about 10% new people including several who saw/heard us marching on Maine Street and joined in. A reporter for the Waterville Morning Sentinel did a great job of covering the full spectrum of opinion and took some good photos which made the front page: "Protesters hold pro-Palestine rally in downtown Waterville."

I was most pleased with the rich commentary in our final circle where we passed the mic and explained why we had joined the protest. New participant River shared that they had researched Israel's treatment of Palestinians during 2021 as a school assignment and then been told by their teacher, "You cannot share this with the class." This experience radicalized them (my description) and created incentive to raise their voice louder, in public.

Able leadership from our Maine Party for Socialism and Liberation coalition members included leading the march and chanting, providing signs for participants to borrow, and bringing a portable sound system. Zach and Ash do this work at risk of their ability to earn their living as teachers in the area, and I have great respect for their dedication and courage.

A heckler who drove around us at the intersection of Maine Street and College Avenue screaming, among other things, "What Jew would rape women?" waited until we marched and then cut down the iconic banner created by the Maine Union of Visual Artists AART! group back in 2014. 

Iconic banner displayed in Skowhegan earlier this year provides evidence that attempted genoicide in Gaza did not begin on October 8, 2023 as many in the U.S. seem to believe.

When the thief stopped to talk with the reporter, our intrepid Mary Beth said, "This is our property. I'm taking it back now," so thankfully I will not have to explain to Natasha Mayers how I had lost it. 

Join us in Wells next month if you're able! Saturday June 8 intersection of Routes 1 & 9, at 1:30pm.

Dissent Is Possible!

Some of the dissenters who gathered at Woodford Corner, Portland, Maine on May 6 

Noam Chomsky famously called the U.S. population the most propagandized people in history, and one has only to read the comments on this local report of our Saturday antiwar protest to feel this truth. Of course as my good friend Bruce Gagnon pointed out in his post about our protest, the military employs numerous keyboard warriors tasked with leaving derogatory comments on any news of dissent from the Pentagon's warmongering. (You can thank President Obama for making it legal for U.S. taxpayers to fund our own propaganda. Government-funded propaganda aimed at audiences in other countries is de rigueur, and I don't want to pay for that, either.)

We have a graphic artist with us now! TY Elizabeth Olbert for the cool poster.

The reporter interviewed several of us and while I spoke with her at length, I'm thrilled that she chose to quote something I often say about protesting: 

“My target audience is the kid in the back seat who asks his parents what we’re doing,” she said. “The young person has seen dissent is possible.”

Good to see that we remembered the massacre of trade unionists by neo-Nazis in Odessa May 2, 2014

Our gathering of 40 or so people and dogs again covered the gamut of political opinions but we are united in our objection to sending even one more dollar for the war in Ukraine. Many of us also object to NATO belligerence and the ramping up of aggression aimed at China.

Longtime peace activist and defender of marine life Russell Wray was interviewed as having come the farthest to stand at Maine's busiest intersection in Portland. 

“We’re basically involved in a proxy war with Russia. The risk of getting into actual war with Russia is very high, and that could escalate to nuclear war,” Wray said. “If we get into a war with Russia, that’s it. We have to do what we can to try to prevent this from happening. A war with Russia could end life on this planet.”

But based on our broad demands we saw and heard many dissenting views including that National Press Freedom Day was a farce in the U.S. as the name Julian Assange can pass no government official's lips. He's only the most prominent journalist of his generation, certainly the one with the biggest impact on history for revealing the war crimes of the U.S. in Iraq (some, ironically, that targeted journalists). 

Portland residents Bill and Ursula Slavick supported the demand that the U.S. taxpayer stops funding apartheid Israel's brutal war crimes against the Palestinian people.

Tom Nadolski of Brunswick had NO WAR, NO NATO on one  side of his sign and the other side referred to the now iconic (but heavily suppressed) report by Pulitzer prize winner Seymour Hersh,"How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline." I also liked Tom's quote in the paper a lot (and I appreciated that the reporter talked to some of the younger people among us oldsters who've been protesting U.S. lies and wars of aggression since Vietnam).

“I don’t want war. I have a couple of nephews I’d like to see become teenagers,” he said. “I think our billions of dollars could be spent in a more productive way than killing people.”

Up next in our protest series in Maine, we'll bring our messages to some additional locations:

Saturday May 20 at 1pm in Belfast (route 1 near Hannaford)

Saturday June 24 at 1:30pm in Lewiston-Auburn (Bernard Lown Peace Bridge)

exact date in summer TBD in Ellsworth (Union River Bridge)

Our demands:

• Peace in Ukraine - No weapons, no money for the Ukraine War
• Abolish NATO – End U.S. militarism & sanctions!
• Fund people’s needs, not the war machine!
• No war with China!
• Protect Earth's environment from the deadly insult of war!
• End U.S. aid to racist apartheid Israel!
• Fight racism & bigotry not war!
• U.S. hands off Haiti!
• End AFRICOM!

Mainers Turn Out On Tax Day To Say NO $$ For Ukraine War

About 50 people and 2 dogs turned out April 15, 2023 (not all stayed for our group photo)

A slew of new people, many of them young and many of them first-time protesters, came to our tax day protest yesterday in Topsham, Maine. 

One told me they have family in Germany who see the Ukraine war as a reenactment of WWI with its trench warfare stalemate dragging on indefinitely. 

One told me they drove almost two hours to join us after seeing me the previous evening on the Jimmy Dore Show promoting the event. 

One told me they'd been reading my blog and looking for the next opportunity to get out and protest. 

One told me how excited they were to be joined by fellow members of the UU Church. 

 

And a group from the Party of Socialism & Liberation brought cool signs, a megaphone, and indicated they plan on returning each time we do this. 

Hooray!!

What I learned yesterday: there is a LOT of pent-up desire to resist supporting the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. And many people don't know where or how to express it.

In some cases, this is because the groups they belong to don't object to this war in particular, or imperial wars in general (for example, Peace Action Maine is siding with NATO in the overture to WW3).

In some cases, they're individuals who engage on social media but for the first time came out on the pavement to communicate with the thousands of people who drove through the intersection.

Several people who may not be the expected audience for the Ric Tyler George Hale show listened to my interview there Friday morning, and felt motivated to join us.

It was great to see so many Veterans for Peace out with us yesterday, stalwarts of the resistance to imperial wars for decades now.

One lovely person I've been standing with for years observed that passing around the megaphone at our closing circle was a smart idea. They said,

"Some shaky voices spoke up for the first time. Today was a gust of fresh air!"

Ukraine: Biden Administration’s 'Wag the Dog' Diversionary War? Asks Black Alliance For Peace

Full disclosure: I support the Black Alliance for Peace with a (very modest) monthly donation which I recently doubled. I admire their work and you can support them, too, by going here.

For immediate Release

Media Contact
press@blackallianceforpeace.org
(202) 643-1136

Ukraine: Biden Administration’s “Wag the Dog” Diversionary War?
 

January 27, 2022 --- The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) along with the ANSWER Coalition, CODEPINK, Maryland Peace Action, Popular Resistance, and many other organizations will gather in Washington today at noon in front of the white House as part of an emergency mobilization of anti-war activists to express opposition to the unnecessary and extremely dangerous possibility of war in Ukraine.

With a 39% job approval rating, more deaths from covid than during the Trump administration, and a failure to deliver on most of promises made during the 2020 presidential campaign, the intentional escalation of tensions by the United States with  Russia appears as a clumsy attempt by the Biden administration and the democratic party to divert attention from the historic failures of the administration’s domestic policies.

There could be no other rational explanation for why the Biden administration would encourage the Ukrainian coup government to reject the Minsk II agreement that provided a diplomatic framework for peacefully resolving the internal struggle between the Ukrainian government and regions that declared themselves independent of that government, unless, according to BAP National Organizer, Ajamu Baraka:

“The manufactured crisis with Russia over Ukraine, demonstrates once again the incredible recklessness and outrageous opportunism that the U.S./NATO/EU Axis of domination is prepared to achieve its geo-strategic objective of full-spectrum economic and political global domination.”

Whatever the explanation, it is clear that for African peoples, the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination continues to represent the greatest threat to peace, human rights, and social justice on the planet today. That is why it is so absurd to see the Black Misleadership class lining up to demonstrate their support for war with Russia while Black people still face the structural violence of capitalism and the terror of state violence from the domestic army occupying our communities that are referred to as the police.

BAP says that it is irrational for any African to embrace the agenda of empire by giving credence or legitimacy to the crude mobilization of public opinion for conflict on behalf of NATO, a structure created to perpetuate white power and the colonial/capitalist project.

We are clear: we say once again, not one drop of the blood from Black workers, the colonized and nationally oppressed in defense of the U.S. capitalist oligarchy. 

No Compromise, No Retreat!

###
 

U.S. Army Tweet Backfires On Memorial Day

For Memorial Day I visited the family cemetery and removed the flags placed on my father's and brother's graves at the behest of the VFA (Veterans of Foreign Wars) in Skowhegan. I've asked them to stop doing this, but the cemetery manager says he has to do what the VFA says.

My brother never enlisted, but he bears a similar name to a Civil War vet ancestor of ours who died by his own hand. My father, who was in the Army in Korea post-combat, passed on what his WWI vet father taught him: "Don't believe them when they say the next war is a good one. There is no such thing." (My father enlisted after his father died of his war injuries, before I was born.) My little granddaughter wanted the flag because she loves the stars and stripes design.

It is marketing like this that keeps the Pentagon death cult churning out wars and victims.

But marketing can only take you so far into denying reality. Two of my favorite thinkers blogged about a now infamously ill-advised tweet by the U.S. Army last week, "How has serving impacted you?" The number of responses was only at 5,300+ when Bruce Gagnon, himself an Air Force veteran, weighed in with "Army: It's not a job, it's an adventure..."

• “My daughter was raped while in the army,” said one responder. “They took her to the hospital where an all male staff tried to convince her to give the guy a break because it would ruin his life. She persisted. Wouldn’t back down. Did a tour in Iraq. Now suffers from PTSD.”

• “I’ve had the same nightmare almost every night for the past 15 years,” said another.

• “Someone I loved joined right out of high school even though I begged him not to. Few months after his deployment ended, we reconnected. One night, he told me he loved me and then shot himself in the head. If you’re gonna prey on kids for imperialism, at least treat their PTSD.”

By now various authors have compiled some of the 10,ooo responses. Caitlin Johnstone all the way down in Australia posted "The US Army Asked Twitter How Service Has Impacted People. The Answers Were Gut Wrenching."

“My dad was drafted into war and was exposed to agent orange. I was born w multiple physical/neurological disabilities that are linked back to that chemical. And my dad became an alcoholic with ptsd and a side of bipolar disorder.” 

~ 

“i met this guy named christian who served in iraq. he was cool, had his own place with a pole in the living room. always had lit parties. my best friend at the time started dating him so we spent a weekend at his crib. after a party, 6am, he took out his laptop. he started showing us some pics of his time in the army. pics with a bunch of dudes. smiling, laughing. it was cool. i was drunk and didn’t care. he started showing us pics of some little kids. after a while, his eyes went completely fucking dark. i was like man, dude’s high af. he very calmly explained to us that all of those kids were dead ‘but that’s what war was. dead kids and nothing to show for it but a military discount’. christian killed himself 2 months later.”

George Marlowe writing for World Socialist Web Site, "Memorial Day 2019: US Army tweet prompts outpouring of antiwar sentiment," pointed out what I've been thinking since I saw the original thread on Twitter: "This outpouring of rage on Twitter highlights the latent but deep going antiwar sentiment in the American population[emphasis mine] that finds no expression in the current political system or the corporate media. "  

How can we antiwar activists do a better job of leveraging this?

I would love to hear your thoughts in comments.

What I Really Care About: The War On The Poor

"They got money for wars but can't feed the poor." Tupac Shakur, 1993 (photo source: Huffington Post)

When I started this blog what I really cared about were the USA's many, many wars against the poor both within and without our wealthy nation.

Children were and are being burned up in their beds at night by drones, flying killer robots controlled by soldiers in air conditioned trailers somewhere thousands of miles away. Also by conventional bombs dropped from airplanes with humans in them. Civilian casualties are pretty much ignored once they've been assigned marginal status as "collateral damage" in the U.S. wars for empire. This goes on with a ka-ching of the cash registers whether the person in the White House had a D or an R after their name.

The children killed and maimed are nearly always brown, and the soldiers and their commanders are usually white.

In the years since I started my blog, cell phones and body cameras have elevated the traditional policing practice of beating and even murdering black and brown bodied people who are unarmed and pose no threat. Also the traditional practice of not holding police officers accountable for their racist violence. So that is also a grave injustice that holds my attention.

Meanwhile, through my activist community, I've learned a lot more than I knew about the apartheid state of Israel and their occupation of Palestine. I grew up on Zionist propaganda in the corporate media and had lots of Jewish friends whose families subscribed to what filmmaker Eric Axelman calls "Israelism."

Now comes Rep. Ilhan Omar pointing out that lobbyists like AIPAC exert enormous influence on Congress by means of funneling money to our so-called representatives.

She has been vilified for stating this obvious truth. As organizer Philip Savage observed, "Progressive Democrats say Listen to women of color, but as soon as Ilhan Omar said something true they turned on her."

So I wrote to my new white man in Congress, Rep. Jared Golden, asking him not to join the "leadership" of the Democratic party in censuring Omar. What I got back was a boilerplate response that indicates Golden is completely ignorant of facts on the ground in Palestine, and suggests that he is already in AIPAC's hip pocket. (Because AIPAC's minions work fast and are extremely good at the wrong thing that they do.)

March 8, 2019

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for contacting me about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  It is my honor to serve as your representative in Congress, and I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

Israelis and Palestinians have suffered from heartbreaking violence for far too long. I believe that a negotiated two-state solution would bring security for both Israelis and Palestinians, and that it is the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a democratic and Jewish state.

The United States has had some success in brokering peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors. In 1978, we led the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. In 1994, we led the Wadi Araba Treaty between Israel and Jordan. I believe that the United States should build on this strong record and work to establish peace negotiations once again.

I respect the diversity of views that Americans hold on this conflict. As we grapple with this complex and painful issue, we must remain open to legitimate policy debates and reject all forms of bigotry.

Thank you again for reaching out to me on this important issue. I hope you will continue to inform me of the issues that matter to you.

Sincerely,

Jared F. Golden
Member of Congress

Golden was supposed to be our saver because he replaced Bruce Poliquin, a Wall St. lackey who was tremendously out of touch with his constituents in the poor half of Maine.

As a candidate, Golden was glorified as a veteran. That worried me, but some of my best friends are veterans who learned firsthand that war is hell and came home to honestly address their moral injuries.

He has now made his first voting blunder by opposing background checks on gun sales. This is entirely in touch with the 2nd district of Maine, full of hunters, doomsday preppers, and adults who grew up pretending to shoot people for fun.

So, the NRA -- a lobby so powerful it rivals AIPAC -- may or may not have already gotten to Golden. Time will tell.

In the meantime I will write back to Golden and strongly urge that he educate himself about the situation in Palestine, Israel, and the role of the U.S. in perpetuating problems there. For starters, recognize that the two-state solution is virtually impossible since the U.S. has permitted and supported the Balkanization of Palestine for the last several decades.

Source: International Middle East Media Center
"New Israeli government plans to annex 1/3 of West Bank by ‘legalizing’ illegal settlements" May 15, 2015

I know that I have already lost the interest of the scores of new readers I attracted by covering the mascot controversy in Skowhegan. But the two issues are actually not that different. 

Beneath the surface, both involve a dominant culture of white settlers stealing land and water resources, and herding the indigenous people into tightly confined spaces with limited civil rights. Also plenty of propaganda to characterize those targeted for genocide as undesirable, in many cases even less than human.

My next campaign will not involve demeaning stereotypes like mascots or even stopping the theft of Palestine from the Palestinians, an ongoing concern that would require my retirement to pursue in a meaningful way.

Design by Russell Wray

My next campaign will be close to home: the conversion of Bath Iron Works, which is owned by mega wealthy weapons manufacturer General Dynamics, to peaceful production. Pressuring a corporation is a whole lot different and more difficult than pressuring a small public entity like a school board to do the right thing. But it can be done, it has been done, and it will be done.

Someday I believe we will stop building weapons and start building sustainable energy solutions like solar and tidal power components.

Conversion will make us all safer. Because weapons don't make anyone safer. and because climate change is the biggest security threat facing human life on the planet today.

If you want to join me, consider taking the Natural Guard pledge and/or signing our petition about conversion of BIW.

Also consider an act of civil disobedience the next time a warship is "christened" in Bath, probably this spring. This kind of political advocacy is way more fun that attending school board meetings but the two have this in common: you meet the nicest people.

Stay tuned...

Movie Review: THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD, Narrated By Those Who Did

Source: archives, Imperial War Museum, London (colorized)

It was my grandfather's experiences in WWI that led him to teach his only child, my father, who passed it along to us: Don't believe them when they say the next war is a good war; there is no such thing. Brooks Elliott Savage was wounded on the 11th day of the 11th month, basically the 11th hour of the war, by shrapnel and then mustard gas. He suffered through a long recovery and it took his parents in Skowhegan, Maine most of a year to even find him. 

Brooks, who had marched off as an idealistic high school graduate, was talking to his son about the Korean War, hyped at the time as crucial to fending off communism emanating from Red China. My dad went anyway after his dad died, but by then it was post-combat. Still, the suffering of the Korean people who had lost millions of family members and couldn't feed their kids made an impression on him.

Source: archives, Imperial War Museum, London (colorized)

War is hell, is what he taught us. There's nothing glorious about living the rest of your life with a bum leg, bad lungs, and a guilty conscience.

THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD is an historical marvel,  but it isn't a good film. Cobbled together from archival footage as a project of the Imperial War Museum in England by New Zealand director Sir Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies), the documentary applies modern technology to restore images and insert sound tracks. Lip reading was used to render some of the dialogue, but most is voice over narration drawn from BBC oral history interviews with veterans. The title of the film is never explained; we are meant to understand that it is a reference to a poem glorifying the "Great War" at its inception. 

They shall grow not old; as we that are left grow old: 

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

wrote Robert Laurence Binyon in "For the Fallen," published in 1914.

I beg to differ, as the years have condemned the one million imperial troops who died in the scramble for the colonial spoils of the unraveling Ottoman Empire. To a student of history like me, WWI set off a bloody chain of events that led directly to WWII and thence to the Zionist project in Palestine and the so-called War on Terror (or WWIII if you prefer). As the grandmother of a friend remarked after returning from an organizing meeting in NYC as the U.S. prepared to enter WWI, This whole thing is about nothing more than Mosul Oil.

Thus, the city of Mosul in what is now Iraq has been ravaged by battle after battle justified by the ideology du jour. The Muslim extremists largely funded by the empire are the enemy now, right?

Or maybe the war on communism is back on again as Russia sits astride her thawing permafrost full of petroleum reserves? Certainly Venezuela is in the empire's cross hairs now, because socialism and oil just don't mix well for the former Exxon executives in Washington DC.

Source: archives, Imperial War Museum, London (colorized)

No mention of any of that in Jackson's disingenuous personal introduction to his film. He didn't want to impose his views, he tells viewers, as if the curating and assembling of two hours of footage from the hundreds of hours collected by the museum were a morally neutral act devoid of political agency.

Like Ken Burns' VIETNAM WAR documentary, this film made to mark an important anniversary of an imperial war is the wolf of war porn in the sheep's clothing of archival footage.

Remember how THE WIZARD OF OZ burst into technicolor to signal that Dorothy (Judy Garland) is not in Kansas anymore? THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD bursts into colorization to signal that the scrawny teens of working class England have entered the Great War. With their undernourished limbs whipped into shape by regular meals and bullying drill sergeants, they start to resemble an imperial army. As long as they keep their mouths shut; nothing, apparently, would be done about their fantastically bad teeth. The rot lurking in their goofy smiles as they head off for their great adventure is an omen.

Source: archives, Imperial War Museum, London (colorized)

The industrial scale carnage is no surprise to us but it was to many of the lads. Amid the cacophony one can almost hear the ka-ching of the cash register as merchants of death offscreen supply the machinery of war. Real human beings firing missile after missile aren't worth much and are easily replaced amid the sophisticated propaganda campaigns and coward-shaming back home.

It's a deeply sexist film, but such an ugly and amoral picture of human endeavor made me proud to be an anti-military woman. There are no nurses ever at any point in the film, which is historically ignorant, nor suffragette antiwar activists. Just a few moms who don't want their sons mangled, and lots of prostitutes. As the credits roll, we're treated to a lengthy version of a contemporaneous song with rude lyrics about women, for example:

Oh, Mademoiselle from Armentieres, Parlez-vous? (repeat) 

She'll do it for wine, she'll do it for rum, 

And sometimes for chocolate or chewing gum!

It's unclear to me why Jackson displays his lack of analysis or historical perspective devoid of ethics as if they were sources of pride. Sexism -- and racism -- hiding behind historical drama is a hallmark of what passes for Anglo culture in the 21st century.

It may be true, but it's nothing to be proud of.