emma_goldman
30th August 2006, 22:18
What Does an Anti-War Movement Look Like Today?
By Celina R. De Leon, WireTap
August 7, 2006
http://www.alternet .org/story/ 39913/
Marciella Guzmán was a politically conservative 21-year-old
when she joined the U.S. Navy as an information system
technician in 1998. By the time she left in 2002, she said
she had become liberal.
Guzmán, now a counter-recruitment activist in Los Angeles,
said that she lost respect for the military: "I didn't trust
that we had enough training or manpower to go into Iraq and
Afghanistan at the same time."
Despite rare glimpses of growing popular opposition to the
war, such as Cindy Sheehan or Medea Benjamin with "Bring
Troops Home Now" signs on national television, the
mainstream media still does not provide a consistent space
for a critique of American foreign policy.
And while soldiers continue to desert the military, and 72
percent think that the United States should exit Iraq within
the next year, the Bush administration and Congress cannot
seem to come up with a concrete strategy for addressing the
growing chaos and deaths in Iraq.
Impatient with the current status quo, students, war
veterans, anti-war activists and soldiers and their parents
across the country are thinking of new ways to get their
message to the government and general public.
Realizing that mass national protests did not sway the Bush
administration from staying the course in Iraq, many young
organizers focused their strategy on local
counter-recruitment campaigns. And their work seems to be
making an impact.
The Air National Guard missed its recruiting target by 14
percent last year, and the Army missed its goal by 8
percent, its largest recruitment failure since 1979.
Military recruitment costs have risen, totaling $3 billion
of taxpayers' money each year, and will only get higher if
the Iraq war continues and the ability to recruit young men
and women to enlist decreases. Right now, the Army's new
recruitment tactics increasingly include allowing young men
and women with criminal records to enlist, recruiting
members of hate groups, easing restrictions on recruiting
high school dropouts and raising the maximum recruitment age
from 35 to 42.
Spreading the real story of military life
In 1998, Guzmán needed money to go to college and thought
the military would be a good way of getting that money. But
when she stepped into boot camp, she realized she'd been
sold on lies. Paperwork battles ensued until she finally
received the higher wages and rank she was initially promised.
Her first command was stationed at Diego García, a tiny
island in the Indian Ocean. "The U.S. military personnel
basically lease the island from the British, and the only
people who are allowed there are military personnel and the
workers there -- Filipinos who are brought to the island,"
said Guzmán. "It was very difficult to see how the American
soldiers treated these people. The workers had poor
benefits, they were underpaid, and the military didn't
respect them. That reminded me of my family here. I'm
Mexican-American, and it reminded me of the struggles my
parents went through in this country. And so my ideology
started to change."
Guzmán's perspective finally shifted for good after she left
the military in 2002 and went to the VA to receive treatment
for the back problems she acquired during her service. She
had to fight to get even the most basic treatment.
Now Guzmán spends what little time she has between work and
school to educate high school students about the realities
of military service.
"I want [young people] to question why it was allowed, and
that it's still happening in the military, especially for
women," said Guzmán. "And what they're going to get into [if
they join the military]. I give them the option: 'If you
still want to go to the military, I will go with you to the
recruitment office to make sure that they don't lie to you.'
It takes so long to educate young people about the myths of
the military."
And that's where recent counter-recruitment strategies like
the Not Your Soldier initiative and STORY Collaborative come in.
"I do anti-war workshops all the time, and so often I have
very intense conversations with youth about the war in Iraq
and everyone is like, 'It's all about oil, it's all about
money, it's all about power,'" said Steve Theberge, youth
and counter-recruitment program coordinator for the New
York-based War Resisters League. "I think young people often
feel that there's not much they can do about it. There's not
a sense of empowerment or that energy or ability to make
change. Not Your Soldier is about taking that political
analysis that a lot of young folks have and translating that
into possible action."
The War Resisters League, along with The National Youth &
Student Peace Coalition, the National Network Opposed to
Militarization of Youth, the American Friends Service
Committee, and the League of Independent Voters have joined
forces with the Ruckus Society to produce the Not Your
Soldier initiative.
Not Your Soldier was first marketed through MySpace and
through word of digital mouth like emails and text messages.
"It's an educating tool that they themselves can use and
pass along," said Adrienne Maree Brown, executive director
of Ruckus Society, based in Oakland, Calif. (Full
disclosure: Brown serves on the WireTap advisory board.)
Through Not Your Soldier, youth can participate in the
anti-war and counter-recruitment activities by visiting
NotYourSoldier. org, watching the Flash movie "Punk Ass
Crusade," the "Addicted to Oil" Flash movie, attending Not
Your Soldier camps and going to concerts for revolutionary
hip-hop band The Coup.
"We've recognized the need to go beyond training," said
Theberge. "For a long time we've hoped that we would be able
to provide training and somehow somewhere, somebody else was
going to step up and organize on the local level. We have to
shift our tactics. A lot has changed, and unfortunately the
anti-war movement hasn't."
Not Your Soldier also connects young people on an emotional
level by connecting them with men and women who have served
in the war in Iraq. Theberge said, "I can throw as many
stats out there as much as I want. I can talk as much as I
want about the war. But I think that, for many people,
hearing veterans speak is about as close as you can get." To
that end, the group has put on three regional camps this
summer and plan to host several more in the coming year.
"I think if you look at the anti-war movement, it's a lot of
really good people, but it's not a lot of young people,"
Brown said. "A major belief of Ruckus is the impacted
community has to be at the forefront of your work. We have
to find ways for soldiers and students to be active
components of their own liberation and guaranteeing their
own rights."
Boots Riley, leader of the socially conscious hip-hop group
The Coup, is currently on tour and talks about the Not Your
Soldier initiative in the middle of every concert.
"I sometimes see people from the military coming to my shows
and saying that they're fans. And not just someone who is in
the Army, but someone deep in the military," Riley said.
"There have also been military recruiters. And after the
show they're like, 'I really agree with what you say, but
being a military recruiter is just my job.' And I'm like, 'I
guess.'"
Riley added that he's always found people against the war in
his audience. "I'm talking about Old Smith, Montana. I'm
talking about El Paso, Texas. I'm talking about Alabama. I'm
talking about Ohio," said Riley. "Everywhere people were and
are against the war. And these weren't just people who were
coming to see a revolutionary hip-hop show."
Providing another option to enlisting
Riley can relate to the military option so many young people
feel they have to take. Although he's been a progressive
organizer since he was 14, when he thought he was going to
be a father at age 17, he considered joining the military.
Riley's dilemma is one of the greatest challenges of the
anti-war movement, according to Doyle Canning of smartMeme,
a nonprofit collective of long-term organizers, strategists,
trainers and communications professionals based in
Burlington, Vt.
Canning said, "The U.S. military-industrial complex, for
better and for worse, is selling young people on the idea of
economic opportunity. And how does the progressive community
offer that opportunity? And how can we actually do
counter-recruitment -- like actually not just say, 'Hey, the
recruiters are lying. Don't join the military'?"
In response, smartMeme has come up with a different
strategy. They are working to build a network of
organizations -- nonprofits, for-profits, institutions,
businesses, farms and more -- that are willing to provide
another option to young people who feel that they have no
choice but to enlist. Canning said, "We have to ask [these
young people], 'Why don't you come and become an intern at
this progressive organization? '" And he said smartMeme is
asking organizations, "Would you be interested in giving an
opportunity to someone who is thinking about joining the
military?"
Early in July, smartMeme gathered young Iraq veterans,
students, counter-recruiters and peace activists, all under
the age of 30, for an intimate retreat to discuss the
anti-war movement at the historic Highlander Center in
Tennessee. The project, the STORY Collaborative to End the
War in Iraq, is online and soon will be publishing its
findings. While no concrete answers came out of the
Collaborative, Canning views the stories as the keys to
gaining connection and momentum throughout the movement.
"The stories are at the center of our strategy," he said.
"Recentering ourselves with our stories and realizing that
we have such different stories, and that we have different
relationships with the war in Iraq . . . people of
Arab-American backgrounds, people who live on the border and
who see the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border, and
people from the South, people from Oakland, people from all
over, saying, 'Yeah, we have different experiences, and we
have different stories, and we have different relationships
with this war. But we were able to come together and find
some common ground.'"
Echoing the Ruckus Society's beliefs, Canning is clear that
the anti-war movement needs new leadership: Those most
impacted by the military's recruitment and the poverty draft
need to be empowered to work against the struggle that most
affects them.
"When we're talking about counter-recruitment , we're talking
about the U.S. military targeting low-income people and
youth of color, and that's for real. And so the role of
traditionally white-led peace and justice organizations is
to work in solidarity with those communities in resisting
U.S. militarism. And that needs to be a collaborative
relationship in order to really support the leadership of
young people of color in those communities, " said Canning.
Canning feels the anti-war movement should take notice of
another important fact: Young people listen to young people.
"That's the whole lesson of MySpace," he said. "That's the
whole lesson of all this huge spiral roll marketing stuff.
It's about peer-to-peer networks. It's about who we listen
to are people who we can relate with, people like us. And so
how do we incorporate that learning into our
counter-recruitment work?"
Ruckus Society founder John Sellers is hopeful that the new
direction his organization is taking to contribute to the
counter-recruitment movement is going to produce results.
"Basically, in a year or two, it's very likely that [the
anti-war movement] will be as dynamic as college campus
activism during the anti-apartheid movement. It's definitely
spreading down to high schools, which is critical because
that's where most recruitment comes from -- high school-age
young folks from rural and urban backgrounds. " He also
likened the present day to the last time this country had a
vibrant anti-war movement. "During Vietnam, we had the
draft. Now we have the poverty draft. But we think that, by
making all of the military recruiters miss their quotas,
that's going to impact how Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney are
going to view this war -- if they have less cannon fodder at
their disposal."
Celina R. De Leon is a contributing writer for WireTap.
http://www.alternet .org/story/ 39913/
By Celina R. De Leon, WireTap
August 7, 2006
http://www.alternet .org/story/ 39913/
Marciella Guzmán was a politically conservative 21-year-old
when she joined the U.S. Navy as an information system
technician in 1998. By the time she left in 2002, she said
she had become liberal.
Guzmán, now a counter-recruitment activist in Los Angeles,
said that she lost respect for the military: "I didn't trust
that we had enough training or manpower to go into Iraq and
Afghanistan at the same time."
Despite rare glimpses of growing popular opposition to the
war, such as Cindy Sheehan or Medea Benjamin with "Bring
Troops Home Now" signs on national television, the
mainstream media still does not provide a consistent space
for a critique of American foreign policy.
And while soldiers continue to desert the military, and 72
percent think that the United States should exit Iraq within
the next year, the Bush administration and Congress cannot
seem to come up with a concrete strategy for addressing the
growing chaos and deaths in Iraq.
Impatient with the current status quo, students, war
veterans, anti-war activists and soldiers and their parents
across the country are thinking of new ways to get their
message to the government and general public.
Realizing that mass national protests did not sway the Bush
administration from staying the course in Iraq, many young
organizers focused their strategy on local
counter-recruitment campaigns. And their work seems to be
making an impact.
The Air National Guard missed its recruiting target by 14
percent last year, and the Army missed its goal by 8
percent, its largest recruitment failure since 1979.
Military recruitment costs have risen, totaling $3 billion
of taxpayers' money each year, and will only get higher if
the Iraq war continues and the ability to recruit young men
and women to enlist decreases. Right now, the Army's new
recruitment tactics increasingly include allowing young men
and women with criminal records to enlist, recruiting
members of hate groups, easing restrictions on recruiting
high school dropouts and raising the maximum recruitment age
from 35 to 42.
Spreading the real story of military life
In 1998, Guzmán needed money to go to college and thought
the military would be a good way of getting that money. But
when she stepped into boot camp, she realized she'd been
sold on lies. Paperwork battles ensued until she finally
received the higher wages and rank she was initially promised.
Her first command was stationed at Diego García, a tiny
island in the Indian Ocean. "The U.S. military personnel
basically lease the island from the British, and the only
people who are allowed there are military personnel and the
workers there -- Filipinos who are brought to the island,"
said Guzmán. "It was very difficult to see how the American
soldiers treated these people. The workers had poor
benefits, they were underpaid, and the military didn't
respect them. That reminded me of my family here. I'm
Mexican-American, and it reminded me of the struggles my
parents went through in this country. And so my ideology
started to change."
Guzmán's perspective finally shifted for good after she left
the military in 2002 and went to the VA to receive treatment
for the back problems she acquired during her service. She
had to fight to get even the most basic treatment.
Now Guzmán spends what little time she has between work and
school to educate high school students about the realities
of military service.
"I want [young people] to question why it was allowed, and
that it's still happening in the military, especially for
women," said Guzmán. "And what they're going to get into [if
they join the military]. I give them the option: 'If you
still want to go to the military, I will go with you to the
recruitment office to make sure that they don't lie to you.'
It takes so long to educate young people about the myths of
the military."
And that's where recent counter-recruitment strategies like
the Not Your Soldier initiative and STORY Collaborative come in.
"I do anti-war workshops all the time, and so often I have
very intense conversations with youth about the war in Iraq
and everyone is like, 'It's all about oil, it's all about
money, it's all about power,'" said Steve Theberge, youth
and counter-recruitment program coordinator for the New
York-based War Resisters League. "I think young people often
feel that there's not much they can do about it. There's not
a sense of empowerment or that energy or ability to make
change. Not Your Soldier is about taking that political
analysis that a lot of young folks have and translating that
into possible action."
The War Resisters League, along with The National Youth &
Student Peace Coalition, the National Network Opposed to
Militarization of Youth, the American Friends Service
Committee, and the League of Independent Voters have joined
forces with the Ruckus Society to produce the Not Your
Soldier initiative.
Not Your Soldier was first marketed through MySpace and
through word of digital mouth like emails and text messages.
"It's an educating tool that they themselves can use and
pass along," said Adrienne Maree Brown, executive director
of Ruckus Society, based in Oakland, Calif. (Full
disclosure: Brown serves on the WireTap advisory board.)
Through Not Your Soldier, youth can participate in the
anti-war and counter-recruitment activities by visiting
NotYourSoldier. org, watching the Flash movie "Punk Ass
Crusade," the "Addicted to Oil" Flash movie, attending Not
Your Soldier camps and going to concerts for revolutionary
hip-hop band The Coup.
"We've recognized the need to go beyond training," said
Theberge. "For a long time we've hoped that we would be able
to provide training and somehow somewhere, somebody else was
going to step up and organize on the local level. We have to
shift our tactics. A lot has changed, and unfortunately the
anti-war movement hasn't."
Not Your Soldier also connects young people on an emotional
level by connecting them with men and women who have served
in the war in Iraq. Theberge said, "I can throw as many
stats out there as much as I want. I can talk as much as I
want about the war. But I think that, for many people,
hearing veterans speak is about as close as you can get." To
that end, the group has put on three regional camps this
summer and plan to host several more in the coming year.
"I think if you look at the anti-war movement, it's a lot of
really good people, but it's not a lot of young people,"
Brown said. "A major belief of Ruckus is the impacted
community has to be at the forefront of your work. We have
to find ways for soldiers and students to be active
components of their own liberation and guaranteeing their
own rights."
Boots Riley, leader of the socially conscious hip-hop group
The Coup, is currently on tour and talks about the Not Your
Soldier initiative in the middle of every concert.
"I sometimes see people from the military coming to my shows
and saying that they're fans. And not just someone who is in
the Army, but someone deep in the military," Riley said.
"There have also been military recruiters. And after the
show they're like, 'I really agree with what you say, but
being a military recruiter is just my job.' And I'm like, 'I
guess.'"
Riley added that he's always found people against the war in
his audience. "I'm talking about Old Smith, Montana. I'm
talking about El Paso, Texas. I'm talking about Alabama. I'm
talking about Ohio," said Riley. "Everywhere people were and
are against the war. And these weren't just people who were
coming to see a revolutionary hip-hop show."
Providing another option to enlisting
Riley can relate to the military option so many young people
feel they have to take. Although he's been a progressive
organizer since he was 14, when he thought he was going to
be a father at age 17, he considered joining the military.
Riley's dilemma is one of the greatest challenges of the
anti-war movement, according to Doyle Canning of smartMeme,
a nonprofit collective of long-term organizers, strategists,
trainers and communications professionals based in
Burlington, Vt.
Canning said, "The U.S. military-industrial complex, for
better and for worse, is selling young people on the idea of
economic opportunity. And how does the progressive community
offer that opportunity? And how can we actually do
counter-recruitment -- like actually not just say, 'Hey, the
recruiters are lying. Don't join the military'?"
In response, smartMeme has come up with a different
strategy. They are working to build a network of
organizations -- nonprofits, for-profits, institutions,
businesses, farms and more -- that are willing to provide
another option to young people who feel that they have no
choice but to enlist. Canning said, "We have to ask [these
young people], 'Why don't you come and become an intern at
this progressive organization? '" And he said smartMeme is
asking organizations, "Would you be interested in giving an
opportunity to someone who is thinking about joining the
military?"
Early in July, smartMeme gathered young Iraq veterans,
students, counter-recruiters and peace activists, all under
the age of 30, for an intimate retreat to discuss the
anti-war movement at the historic Highlander Center in
Tennessee. The project, the STORY Collaborative to End the
War in Iraq, is online and soon will be publishing its
findings. While no concrete answers came out of the
Collaborative, Canning views the stories as the keys to
gaining connection and momentum throughout the movement.
"The stories are at the center of our strategy," he said.
"Recentering ourselves with our stories and realizing that
we have such different stories, and that we have different
relationships with the war in Iraq . . . people of
Arab-American backgrounds, people who live on the border and
who see the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border, and
people from the South, people from Oakland, people from all
over, saying, 'Yeah, we have different experiences, and we
have different stories, and we have different relationships
with this war. But we were able to come together and find
some common ground.'"
Echoing the Ruckus Society's beliefs, Canning is clear that
the anti-war movement needs new leadership: Those most
impacted by the military's recruitment and the poverty draft
need to be empowered to work against the struggle that most
affects them.
"When we're talking about counter-recruitment , we're talking
about the U.S. military targeting low-income people and
youth of color, and that's for real. And so the role of
traditionally white-led peace and justice organizations is
to work in solidarity with those communities in resisting
U.S. militarism. And that needs to be a collaborative
relationship in order to really support the leadership of
young people of color in those communities, " said Canning.
Canning feels the anti-war movement should take notice of
another important fact: Young people listen to young people.
"That's the whole lesson of MySpace," he said. "That's the
whole lesson of all this huge spiral roll marketing stuff.
It's about peer-to-peer networks. It's about who we listen
to are people who we can relate with, people like us. And so
how do we incorporate that learning into our
counter-recruitment work?"
Ruckus Society founder John Sellers is hopeful that the new
direction his organization is taking to contribute to the
counter-recruitment movement is going to produce results.
"Basically, in a year or two, it's very likely that [the
anti-war movement] will be as dynamic as college campus
activism during the anti-apartheid movement. It's definitely
spreading down to high schools, which is critical because
that's where most recruitment comes from -- high school-age
young folks from rural and urban backgrounds. " He also
likened the present day to the last time this country had a
vibrant anti-war movement. "During Vietnam, we had the
draft. Now we have the poverty draft. But we think that, by
making all of the military recruiters miss their quotas,
that's going to impact how Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney are
going to view this war -- if they have less cannon fodder at
their disposal."
Celina R. De Leon is a contributing writer for WireTap.
http://www.alternet .org/story/ 39913/