All photos by Zara Brown, member of the US delegation.
On the second day of International Week local supporters of the campaign gathered for the musical event, Wake Up Call Germany!
Nukewatch Delegation to International Week – Day 2 – July 15, 2017
Rockets’ Red Glare and Bombs Bursting in Air
Library image: US Marines fire a Howitzer in northern Syria on March 24th 2017 in support of Coalition operations. (Photo: Airwars.org, via USMC/ Cpl. Zachery C. Laning)
A June 27 Pew Research Center poll says world opinion of the United States has plummeted since Donald Trump took office. Surveying people in 37 countries, 49 percent held a positive view of the United States, down from 65 percent at the end of 2016. Maybe we could cancel the fireworks this 4th of July considering the insensitive symbolism of vicariously enjoying war.
With the Pentagon’s rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air smashing seven majority Muslim countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — negativity toward the United States is easy to understand. US drone attacks originating in Nevada, 7,200 miles from Iraq, and jet fighter-bomber strikes launched from super-carriers in the Persian Gulf are killing hundreds of frightened bystanders month after month. At least 25 civilians were killed in Mosul, Iraq on Sat., June 24 when US bombs destroyed four houses.
Every child killed or maimed by US-made weapons inevitably creates enemies among survivors. President Obama (pronounced “Oh-Bomb-Ah”) made the point himself May 23, 2013 in a speech to National Defense University. He said drone attacks “raise profound questions: about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies…” And Obama warned that, “US military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies.”
Whether bombing civilians only “risks” creating enemies or can be positively guaranteed always to do so, is a matter of opinion. But one need only consider the globalized, mechanized, mass US military reaction to 9/11 — and the country’s demonization of whole groups and religions — to know that demands for revenge, retribution, and retaliation always follow the deaths of innocents.
If your business is peddling weapons, you could be smugly satisfied about every civilian wedding party, funeral procession, hospital, or Sunday market hit by US drones, gunships or F-18s. One StarTribune headline on April 2, 2017 directed attention away from our arms dealers. It read, “Civilian deaths a windfall for militants’ propaganda.” Never mind the windfall for war profiteers.
US offers $6,000 for each dead civilian [sarcasm alert]
In the world of weapons sales, nothing is better for business than TV footage of the anguished and grief-stricken after civilians are indiscriminately attacked by “foreigners.” In the countries being bombed, we are those foreigners, occupiers, and militarists accused of cheapening human lives. You decide: when a US gunship obliterated the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan Oct. 3, 2016 killing 42, the Pentagon offered $6,000 for each person killed, and $3,000 for each one injured.
The government and munitions makers say our bombs are saving people by killing terrorists, and — being a world away from the torn limbs, the burning wounds, the screaming parents — Americans want to believe it. The US dropped 26,171 bombs across the seven states during 2016, according to Jennifer Wilson and Micah Zenko writing in Foreign Policy. Each explosion is guaranteed to produce enough newly minted militants to insure steady orders for more jets, bombs and missiles.
Even with a stockpile of 4,000 Tomahawk Cruise missiles, some in the military say the store could be run low by the bombing of Syria, Iraq and the others. “We’re expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told USA Today in December 2015. “Since then, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has asked Congress to include funding for 45,000 smart bombs in the [Pentagon’s] 2017 budget,” Public Radio International reported in April 2016. And now Trump’s SecDef, Gen. James Mattis has asked for far more in the 2018 budget for what he calls an “annihilation campaign.”
Lockheed Martin Corp. was paid $36.44 billion for weapons in 2015, and $47.2 billion in 2016, according to the Stockholm Int’l Peace Research Institute’s February 2017 report. SIPRI says that half of all US weapons exports in 2015 went to the Middle East. Last May’s $110 billion US sale to Saudi Arabia alone is bound to bring peace and stability to the region. Obama’s $112 billion in arms to the Saudis over eight years certainly did. The Kingdom’s fireworks in Yemen will cause “oooohs” and “ahhhs” of a different sort than our holiday firecracker fakery.
This cheering of faux bombs on the 4th while denying that our real ones produce enemies and prolong the war is why terrified villagers, refugees and the internally displaced of seven targeted countries will go on cringing and crouching over their children as US drones and jets howl overhead. But “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto — ‘In God is our trust’ — And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” —John LaForge
Co-Director Moving On- Thank You Arianne Peterson!
Ari and Jake
Summer Quarterly 2017
After four great years, Arianne “Ari” Stewart Peterson, Nukewatch’s unyielding defender of workers everywhere—and of The Chicago Manual of Style—will be leaving our staff to subtly educate Wisconsin college students about matters of consequence while teaching them English at the University of Wisconsin-Barron County. With her calm, understated, firm, witty, and shrewd guidance, Ari has steered Nukewatch to be an organization more in touch with multi-cultural reality and helped us to better recognize and appreciate the diversity of social justice perspectives and environmental impacts beyond the office. In her time here as our tech savvy Co-director, Ari moved the organization from the 1990’s into modernity, with a new website, membership outreach, a Facebook page, fund development plans, and an invigorated newsletter style, design and layout.
Ari conducted investigative reporting and mapping for, and co-edited, Nukewatch’s Revised Edition of Nuclear Heartland: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States which came out late in 2015. She has researched and written dozens of remarkable, well-respected articles for our Quarterly. Her amusing command of the Chicago Manual has helped us avoid sounding too much like bumpkins from the countryside. Ari is the only person who could single-handedly run the entire Nukewatch office. She’s just not replaceable. Happily, Ari will continue to serve on the board of our parent organization The Progressive Foundation and help out as an occasional consultant. Bon Voyage Ari!
The Trouble with Our State
Through the prism of nonviolence
By John Heid
Summer Quarterly 2017
Jamar Clark, 24, was shot and killed Nov. 15, 2015 by Minneapolis police officer Dustin Schwarze while officer Mark Ringgenberg held him on the ground. No criminal or civil charges were brought against the officers. In June his family filed a federal lawsuit against the officers saying the police subjected Clark to unreasonable seizure and excessive force.
The trouble with our state / was not civil disobedience, / which in any case, was hesitant and rare./… / The trouble with our state / — we learned it only afterward / when the dead resembled the living who resembled the dead / and civil virtue shone like paint on tin / and tin citizens and tin soldiers marched to the common whip / — our trouble / the trouble with our state / with our state of soul / our state of siege — / was / Civil / Obedience.
— Excepted from “The Trouble with Our State” by Daniel Berrigan
“I am troubled by the ongoing civil disobedience.”
— Judge Christian Sande, Hennepin County District Court, Minn., March 29, 2017
The verdict in most political trials is usually anticlimactic. The heart of such trials lies in our testimony, and, once in a blue moon, in a prosecutor or judge’s statements. Every now and then a ray of light makes its way through the decorum into the “halls of justice.” This actually happened in Hennepin County District Court in late March when Eddie Bloomer of the Des Moines Catholic Worker and I were tried on charges stemming from an April 2016 Black Lives Matter/Catholic Worker action in Minneapolis.
My defense to the charges of trespass and obstruction of transit was based on my claim of right to stand precisely where I did, in front of a Metro Transit light rail vehicle, in order to raise awareness and create a tension that would pressure Minneapolis police to address their lethal policies and practices toward people of color. Our vigil focused particularly on the murder of an unarmed young man, Jamar Clark, who was shot in the head by a Minneapolis police officer. The investigation into Jamar’s killing was closed earlier in the year by the Minneapolis Police Department without charges against the officer involved.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. carefully laid out the rationale for the practice of creative tension in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” I referenced this hallowed letter in laying out my “claim of right” defense. Throughout the three-day trial presiding Judge Christian Sande paid careful attention. Then during pre-sentencing remarks he gave a stern, thought- provoking rebuke to the rationale for my defense. He began by saying: “I am troubled by the analogies that I see—particularly, the Letter from a Birmingham Jail…. Dr. King talks about constructive tension. But again, the constructive tension he was citing in the Letter… had to do with a direct challenge to an unconstitutional law and a public sentiment that supported that unconstitutional law. This (Eddie’s and my cases) was much more amorphous and so it’s much harder for the community and the Court in a situation like this to really do much to address the issues.”
Judge Sande’s comments are a rare courtroom gift. They summarize the mindset of status quo “liberal ideology—for the record. True, we were not protesting the trespass laws or the right-of-way for public transit. What we were protesting was the violation of Jamar Clark’s constitutional right to due process, civil and human rights, and to a fair trial by a jury of his peers. A Twin Cities police officer had robbed him of these rights by playing the roles of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. In a single irretrievable moment in time.
With a bullet. There is no appellate court for Jamar, let alone a trial. This killing was not an isolated incident in the Twin Cities or in our country for that matter. It is a nation-wide matter of fact and an epidemic.
Our vigil followed carefully what Dr. King laid out from his Birmingham jail cell. He wrote: “Its (Birmingham’s) ugly record of police brutality known in every section of this country.” Minneapolis’s track record of death-by-cop is not so widely published, but is well known in the black community. Dr. King was labeled an outside agitator. Yet he had local ties. We, catholic workers were invited to the Twin Cities by local human rights workers including people of color. Regardless, Dr. King reminded us from his cell that, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We were victims of a broken promise… and the dark shadow of disappointment settled upon us. So we had no alternative except for that of preparing for direct action.” In Minneapolis the investigation into Jamar Clark’s murder closed without charges. Negotiations had failed.
Judge Sande’s comments articulate the point of view that believes the system can self-correct by means of checks and balances, by petitions, sanctioned rallies, town hall meetings, and the ballot.
These activities do not change the fundamental character of the system. They don’t rock the boat. Activist Philip Berrigan called these “acts of consent. Ones that go along with business as usual.” The difference between consent and dissent lies in whether one believes that the system is fundamentally just—or not. The principle attitude underlying our direct action in Minneapolis was
dissent, challenging the system at its roots, which is what radical means. Dissent recognizes that the system is in need of radical transformation. Dr. King reminds: “My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.” Howard Zinn wrote in his A Peoples’ History of the United States that no social change has occurred in this country without both consent and dissent.
Two more black men were killed by Twin Cities police officers between the time of our vigil and our trial.
The challenge that Judge Sande laid out—however inadvertently or intentionally—is for activists to more clearly and consistently articulate the necessity and efficacy of dissent. Which, simply put, means more creative tension, more court time.
I close where I began with Daniel Berrigan. In the early 1970s, he and exiled Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn shared a series of midnight conversations in Paris. These were printed in The Raft Is Not The Shore. Daniel said: “But nothing is understandable while it’s going on—the sixties are only understandable when they’re over, which makes most people into morticians—ready to bury the dead. But it costs something to say while the killing is going on, ‘No one should die!’ And the killing is going on.”
Over the past 10 years, 100 percent of the people killed by the Minneapolis Police Department have been black or brown. I rest my case. Again.
—John Heid volunteers for the immigrants’ rights groups No More Deaths, and Humane Borders in Ajo, Arizona.
Reflection and Commitment on Being a Better Ally
Editorial
Spring 2017 Quarterly
In our winter fund appeal, we highlighted Nukewatch’s engagement with the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) led by Indigenous Water Protectors at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. Since then, we have reflected on our position—as a mostly white organization—in relation to a Native-led struggle, and we realize we made some mistakes that perpetuated, rather than resisted, the forces of colonialism that continue to oppress and work to erase the presence of Native people in our society.
The letter included a photo of one of our members at a Standing Rock camp holding our Nuclear Heartland banner, which shows the location of US nuclear missiles deployed throughout the Great Plains. We referenced the intersection of our anti-nuclear mission with the No DAPL movement in an appeal for funds, excerpted here:
“The combination in North Dakota of nuclear-armed missiles, dangerous oil pipelines, and 3,000 active hydraulic fracturing wells, has created a literally explosive conflation of the worst environmental threats faced by rural communities anywhere. Help us relieve the region of at least the military leg of this terrible triad by donating to Nukewatch today.”
Simply put, we used the success of a Native-led struggle for justice to draw attention—and money—to our own issues and organization. This was wrong, and we deeply regret it. Because in doing so we failed to prioritize the concern of the Indigenous people who are leading this difficult battle: the fact that they have a fundamental right to exist on the land that white colonizers have been trying to take from them for generations. Native rights are the main issue here and should not be obscured by the concerns of more racially privileged activists.
We are grateful to writer and organizer Kelly Hayes for her piece, “How to Talk About #NoDAPL: A Native Perspective,” published October 27 on her blog transformativespaces.org, which helped us realize our mistakes. Here is an excerpt:
“In discussing #NoDAPL, too few people have started from a place of naming that we have a right to defend our water and our lives, simply because we have a natural right to defend ourselves and our communities. When ‘climate justice,’ in a very broad sense, becomes the center of conversation, our fronts of struggle are often reduced to a staging ground for the messaging of NGOs.
“This is happening far too frequently in public discussion of #NoDAPL.
“Yes, everyone should be talking about climate change, but you should also be talking about the fact that Native communities deserve to survive, because our lives are worth defending in their own right—not simply because ‘this affects us all.’
“So when you talk about Standing Rock, please begin by acknowledging that this pipeline was redirected from an area where it was most likely to impact white people. And please remind people that our people are struggling to survive the violence of colonization on many fronts, and that people shouldn’t simply engage with or retweet such stories when they see a concrete connection to their own issues—or a jumping off point to discuss their own issues. Our friends, allies and accomplices should be fighting alongside us because they value our humanity and right to live, in addition to whatever else they believe in.”
Rather than referencing Standing Rock’s relationship to our anti-nuclear work in our fundraising letter, we should have amplified the voices of Native Water Protectors and called for our fellow white activists to support their efforts. We acknowledge these mistakes here as part of an effort to improve the way we work in solidarity with those fighting for racial justice. We hope our white readers in particular might be reminded by our reflections to avoid similar pitfalls through truly listening to the voices of people of color and more critically analyzing our ally roles, as we intend to do.
Nukewatch is committed to amplifying and supporting calls for justice from marginalized groups not just because they are related to our anti-nuclear work, but because they need to be heard. We will continue to take action in ways that reflect the priorities of disenfranchised activists, such as answering calls from Standing Rock to organize local protests that target banks funding the DAPL. We will also send a portion of the donations received as a result of our fund appeal to the legal defense collective at Standing Rock. If you are not already involved, please join us in defending Native rights at Standing Rock and beyond.
For more about the continuing struggle at Standing Rock go to LastRealIndians.com.
To learn more about being an ally, see the Standing Rock Solidarity Toolkit from Showing Up for Racial Justice.
—Arianne Peterson wrote this piece, representing the views of the Nukewatch staff.