Great video my friend Zack showed me. French students protest cuts to education budget in a very powerful action against an education official.

The following is an article by Clare Bayard posted on Left Turn Magazine’s website, and in the April / May issue of Left Turn Magazine. Its incredibly powerful in illustrating what the war means, or at least should me, to all of us. It brought me to tears. Here it is:
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Last night, I stood over a thousand candles on the lawn in front of San Francisco’s City Hall. Veterans for Peace had organized a vigil to mark the official 4,000 U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, which technically happened Sunday, March 24th. As people began reading the last 1,000 names aloud, my whole body suddenly wracked with mourning. My chest was exploding and I knew it wasn’t a coronary or panic attack, but grief saturated me so thoroughly I could barely stand. Loved ones held me up as we mourned together; I could hardly let go of a former Marine friend who chose military jail instead of Iraq, and I had never felt such frantic, choking relief to have him standing alive beside me. I can’t imagine the world without him now.

I say “technical count” because we don’t even have the numbers to do the math, which means the full picture is beyond our grasp.

4,000 official U.S. servicemembers killed

1-6,000 U.S. servicemember suicides- inadmissible as war casualties

over a thousand nonmilitary contractors, civilians, etc.

how many debilitating injuries?

Plus how many deeply affected partners, parents, family members, friends, lovers in the life of each one of these tens of thousands? the children they might have had, and the ones some already did?

…and, echoing in barely broken silence, the deaths of 650,000 to over a million Iraqis.

A Presbyterian minister, who participates a similar annual vigil for the deaths of San Francisco’s homeless people, began the ritual with a nondenominational invocation. She spoke of the tremendous loss of so many humans with all their talents and creativities, everything they might have brought to their communities.

I feel lucky to be alive today, walking in the spring sun and holding the fierce grief of so many deaths. I feel lucky that my father, a Vietnam Vet, is alive instead of a name on the black granite Wall in D.C., lucky that I was born.

But war doesn’t play duck-duck-goose, bypassing most people entirely and just taking a scatter of heads. No one in Iraq lives separate from the war, and in a dramatically different way neither do we in the U.S.

War defines daily reality in occupied lands. Where wars are being fought in the streets and skies, where depleted uranium underfoot rises in plumes of dust and a sudden noise might be the last thing you hear, war is everything from the toxic air to the mined soil. In the U.S. there is a myth that war is just happening “over there” where bombs are vaporizing houses and human bodies. As if war was not already here, and as if the multivariant violence of militarism does not return in the body of every veteran, alive or dead.

My perspective on this is profoundly shaped by being raised by a veteran father; the war on Vietnam lived in my house every day when I was growing up. I was lucky enough to be born. To be housed. 1 in 4 homeless people in my city are veterans. My dad’s class and race privilege and my mom’s waged and unwaged work kept us housed and together, even though war has never let him go. And in a way, I have come to understand myself as lucky to be the child of a war veteran, in the ways that it helps me to keep my heart alive during the crushing numbness of this “endless war.” I cannot see, or feel, myself as disconnected from war—either from those murdered by U.S. occupation, or those within the ranks of our military who are struggling to stay human.

War comes into homefront communities in many ways. It is the wartime economy, where every bomb explodes twice: once shattering lives in Fallujah, Karbala, Basra; then burning up our schools and universities, healthcare, levees, social system. It is the racist dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims that inflames hate crimes of street violence and hate crimes of state legislature. It is where “security” means genocide, and none of us are made at all safer by U.S. empire expanding. And war comes into our families, our neighborhoods, our workplaces and social spaces, cloaked in the silent roar of a taboo topic: how veterans return from war carrying the violence of militarism. Some kill themselves quickly, with a bullet or a rope, and even when these deaths occur on a base they are not part of the official tally. These 4,000 recognized deaths are the tip of the iceberg of U.S. war casualties. Domestic violence murders, almost entirely women, don’t qualify even when under the clearest circumstances. Other vets die slowly, self-medicating with drugs or alcohol, often on the streets. Many strain enough healing through gritted teeth to put their life back together, supported by their loved ones, not by their government, not by the drivers of SUVs decorated with yellow ribbons, and largely not by the peace movement.

I do not mourn these 4000 deaths (and the other invisibilized U.S. deaths) any more than the uncounted Iraqi lives, nor any less. The judgment that some lives are disposable is part of what we are struggling against, in demanding justice and peace. I don’t hold these 4000 accountable for engineering this war, nor do I excuse them for participating. To do so would remove their agency in the situation, and dishonor the choices that many U.S. soldiers are making every day to refuse orders, resist compliance with occupation. I won’t devalue the choices that the majority of young people in this country are making to not enlist at all, despite the outrageous lack of options facing them, especially working-class kids and youth of color. Every day, people act to resist the U.S. military, from around the world, from within its ranks. And how do we know how many of those names read out last night belong to resisters? How many were carrying an unloaded weapon, like Agustin Aguayo did for a year while the Army denied his conscientious objector status? How many were considering going AWOL? How many were pursuing, if they knew the option existed, a conscientious objector status? How many had done something recently to stand up to racism, misogyny, or some random violence within their unit? Mostly we’ll never know because now their mouths are filled with dirt and their stories will be carried only by those surviving them. The singers among them, the writers, the kid who was so good at math, the girl with the fierce will, the boy who protected his best friend from queerbashers, the dreamers, the confused, the 20 year old with a 2 year old daughter, the one who died so homesick, the one who learned Arabic to talk to the neighborhood kids, all the ones you and I will never meet, who died in a country that’s losing millions of its people to death and escape.

We do not stop organizing. We can’t. But as we keep organizing, we do also need to mourn. It keeps us human to mourn, to truly recognize the grievous loss of millions of people, to stand with their loved ones in remembrance and in defiance—to spit in the face of war. We say: no more lives, war, we will not feed you. All of us are needed, and war, we shall starve you.

About the Author:
Clare Bayard heads the Anti-War program of Catalyst Project, organizing to connect work against wars abroad with domestic racial and economic justice struggles, and building the G.I. resistance support movement. Clare serves on the National Committee and Organizing Task Force of the War Resisters League, an organization that seeks to end all wars and the root causes of war.

Resources:

• Catalyst Project: www.collectiveliberation.org
• War Resisters League: www.warresisters.org, www.notyoursoldier.org
• Check out the brand new Iraq Veterans Against the War’s Winter Soldier hearings archive at: www.ivaw.org — Iraq Veterans Against the War
• Servicewomen’s Action Network: www.servicewomen.org
• Courage to Resist: www.couragetoresist.org

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“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far,… go together.” - African proverb

Conversations around revolutionary change almost always unearth concerns about issues of violence, repression, police, and imprisonment - and for good reason. Most obviously, these concerns are central in the minds of those who believe that a violent revolution is necessary in the United State. For those who see revolution differently, especially those who believe that a mass, popular, and largely-nonviolent revolution is possible, the questions stem from a different concern. From what I’ve seen so far, revolutionary democrats often ask: “could we really win?”

Its an important question to explore.

The Battle of Seattle

My friend Michael is a staff member at ZNet & Z Communications, which is an independent progressive media and political education organization in Massachusetts. He recently told me about what news coverage in relation to the resistance to the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle in 1999 looked like. First, for anyone that doesn’t know, the protests against the WTO were held in November of 1999, in response to the WTO’s role (along with the IMF and World Bank), in pushing countries in the Global South / Third World, into even greater poverty through “liberalizing international trade” (i.e. giving countries loans they can’t pay back, at high interest, in return for them opening up their markets to multinational corporations, cutting progressive national/regional regulations against pollution, worker/human rights violations, etc…).

What Michael explained to me, is that for the months leading up to the demonstrations, ZNet (and most left media outlets), received increasingly more news reports, calls-to-action, proposals for new organizations, photo/audio/video submissions, analysis articles, visionary proposals for the future, ideas about movement building, and so on, that people wanted to publish on ZNet. These continued to be submitted to ZNet in ever greater numbers as November 30th approached.

People were excited about building popular, democratic power. They were determined to shut down the WTO meeting and all it symbolized. They were talking about hope, change, democracy, feminism, racial justice, solidarity, and the future. Movement building was framed in positive, compassionate, and creative ways.

But when the meetings begun, something very different happened. Almost instantaneously, the talks about “peace, democracy, hope, change, vision, strategy, and a better world,” Michael said, “turned into nonstop submissions what the police were doing.”

The state repression that was brought down upon many of the protesters, caused many to allow their actions, their hopes, their story, and their message, to be silenced. Not only was the state violence harming protesters and leading to arrests, it allowed the greatest uprising against a meeting of world capitalists in history be portrayed as an ineffective mob of unruly, stereotypical leftists/protesters in the corporate media, and allowed revolution to be framed in terms of “opposing the cops” and “stopping repression” (as our main goal), in our own independent media. The Government didn’t just attack the Left, it got us to forget what we really were fighting for, it got us to slip off message, it got us to stop talking about our vision.

Could We Really Win?

Back to the question in the first paragraph I said I hear repeated a lot: “Could we really win?”

Seattle and its aftermath didn’t mark some dramatic break from a visionary, relevant, and strategic progressive movement that existed before November 1999 - that would be an exaggeration. What it did represent is a clear example of how large segments of that movement which are on-message, and talking about relevant things, can be thrown off-message, and made to lose the clarity of their focus.

What is fairly generalizable on the revolutionary left is when we talk about social transformation, we give the State much more credit than its due. That is, we make it seem more powerful than it actually is. While the United States Government is certainly one of the most violent institutions ever created, and American capitalists control some of the most concentrated institutions of wealth imaginable, the progressive movement overestimates how hard it would be to bring them down. What I mean is this: if you see revolution as a pitched (or surprise) , violent, insurrectionary battle between “The State” and “The People”, then of course you think that revolution is some impossible task (or worse, your ideology and dogma blind you from how ridiculous this idea sounds and the fact that no sane person in the U.S. will listen to you - let alone the millions necessary to win).

However if you define a revolution as a fundamental change in the defining institutions and social relations of society. If you think that to achieve that transformation you need to engage in careful, patient, yet urgent, organizing - slow, intentional growth. If you believe that if we are to attain desirable ends, we must use desirable means. If, after looking at revolutions in the past, you see that to avoid undesirable ends, we need to talk about and plan what desirable ends would look like - that is, we must think about, talk about, write about, and experiment with, visions of what a future society could look like. If you think that we need to relate to millions of people, that indeed our revolution will be a popular and widely-waged one. If you think that our revolution needs to be of the mainstream, and not against it. And if your central concern is the number of revolutionaries in the United States (let’s say 100 million people), and not the number of cops and national guard who might oppose you, then your ideas about what a revolution in the United States would look like change significantly.

You begin to see what is plainly obvious: that institutions - including those that make up the United States Government and U.S. corporations - are built consent and cooperation, much more than on than violence or repression. When asked with the question of how could a revolutionary movement possibly defeat the United States Military and urban police forces, the obvious answer surfaces: by organizing them.

I’ll end with a Gene Sharp quote, which I saw in one of his speeches on Google Videos. I’ll take the direct quote from Aaron’s blog post “On The Shaking of Governments” (brilliant post title) since he’s been reading a lot of Sharp’s stuff. Here it is:

“Is shaking a government to the point that they disintegrate and nobody is left to surrender naivete and weakness? … There is nothing weak about a technique of struggle which can take the legitimacy away from a repressive government, which can produce a defiant population uncontrollable by the police and military forces sent to repress them.”

Finally, two great readings on nonviolent revolutions:

Globalize Liberation, George Lakey

From Dictatorship to Democracy, Gene Sharp

As the title suggests, here are some ways that events can fulfill Organizing functions. Events might be considered organizing if they:1. help to increase and solidify the commitment of new or preexisting members.2. whenever possible, recruit new members, and get the contact information of all the people (especially the new ones) who join in the events - later following up with each of them, individually if possible.3. are well messaged/framed, with language and concepts used that help to lay the foundation for the construction of a new dominant narrative throughout society - a narrative about justice, peace, equity, democracy, liberty, human dignity, diversity, sustainability, and solidarity.For example, the conservative theme of “small government”, can be exposed for what it is: the destruction of good forms of government (programs of social uplift), and the expansion of bad forms (more money for the defense industry, the nationalization of corporate debt, tax breaks for the rich). We can show that theres an alternative to that - a participatory democracy where people control their own lives and country through a system of elected delegates - as opposed to unaccountable “representatives” who represent corporate interests instead of the interests of hardworking Americans.4. elevate sympathetic voices which people can’t ignore, and indeed, can personally and collectively relate to. These voices must cut through dominant narratives that largely isolate and atomize us, while causing people to have feel solidarity with other human beings - feelings solidarity which can later be translated into solidaristic action and organizing.5. expand democratic control by the people over society. Whenever possible, activist events can be used to organize for democratic popular power by allowing people to both participate in the event, and/or take social power into their own hands. While this power must be directed in a productive direction, it is fundamental to winning a new world that people begin to have ever more practice at what it would take to run a society, and how desirable that would be. Democracy needs to be made viral and contagious.We could list more, but the above are usually pretty crucial. I will add more as I think of them - or others suggest them to me.