How to Stop the Bombing

Abolish Nuclear Weapons, End Star Wars, and Nafta Fast Track
All in 24 hours a Day!

by Ann Fagan Ginger

Right now we have to stop the bombing in Afghanistan and prevent the use of land forces there, or anywhere else, by the United States.

We have to do this as we grieve the loss of lives on September 11 and demand that the terrorists be found, tried, and punished.

This means we have to build a movement for peace in this country that is much broader, and more effective, than any that we have ever had.

We have to join everyone in the U.S. working for peace and we have to figure out how to bring more people into the movement.

Then we have to figure out how this large movement can convince the people with power over the U.S. military to stop their present drive that can lead to World War Three. That means more effective work with members of the House and Senate who actually have a vote on what happens.

In other words, we must learn all about the existing system for reaching peace, and then we must insist that these steps be taken.

Semicolon.

At the same time, we have to keep working against racism and on immigrant rights and the rights of all workers, and the right to protest government policies and all of the other issues that we have been working on because they are all necessary to build the peace movement and to prevent steps backward in constitutional rights.

And there are still only 24 hours a day in which each of us can do any of these things.

This is a daunting agenda for each of us. We are going to have to rise to new levels. We are going to have to learn how to do some things more quickly and with less argument and discussion. (And we are going to have to skip some things in our personal lives, like combing our hair the second time, or ...)

Since Sept. 11th, I have participated in a great many teach-ins and community meetings. And, through Indy Media, I have participated in many talk-shows across the country, from Boston and Pittsburgh to Santa Cruz, including many youth and African American call-in shows. And I have gotten emails from young people in the military service who want information on conscientious objector status because they just discovered that they cannot go along with current U.S. military actions in and near Afghanistan.

I think that at this moment in the history of the world, if we think and talk and reason very hard, we can come up with ways of stopping the terrible actions and reactions of the U.S. government/military.

The peace movement needs to turn, urgently, to the well organized environmental movement. People who care about the earth and the air and the water and the trees are more likely than some to see that carpet bombing will destroy some considerable part of each of these natural resources. If the members of the Sierra Club were to lobby their Congressmembers and Senators, and the EPA, and the President, to stop bombing for environmental reasons, that would be news.

If all of the people working for a living/liveable wage were to turn their attention to stopping the bombing, a great many workers who know how to lobby on labor issues would help us learn how to lobby more strongly on peace issues. And so with elders concerned about saving Social Security. And so with educators concerned about having enough money to begin to overcome some of the negative attitudes of teachers and students in so called "poor neighborhoods."

This is not a new problem for the Guild, this semi-colon business.

In 1963, as the southern civil rights movement was really becoming serious, the Detroit Chapter insisted that the Guild drop every other project and focus solely on helping the Negro people throughout the South fight for their rights. The New York Chapter flatly rejected this idea. They had truly important issues to fight in New York, including racism in that northern city.

It was a very, very hot debate. And I think, in the long run, everybody won. The Detroit Chapter became much more active at the national level and also much better known in Detroit. Many New York lawyers did go to the South and contributed, and learned, in the process. New York did NOT stop all its other projects, and it DID contribute to the civil rights movement in the South. And many victories were won.

The Detroit Chapter at that time did not talk in terms of fighting in the South in the civil rights movement semi-colon and continuing to fight in the North and West on remaining Cold War and labor and criminal justice and many other issues period. This formulation was not acceptable at that time.

Today, based on this history, we can have a policy openly including a semi-colon. We can absolutely acknowledge the importance of other issues, and the inter-connectedness of those issues with stopping the war issue. But it would put stopping the bombing first.

While this step can be easier today, if we follow the semi-colon policy, the other problem today is more difficult.

Knowning the Basic Law

Everyone in New York, as well as in Detroit and Mississippi, had read the U.S. Constitution, had studied the Supreme Court opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, and some Guild members handled some leading civil rights cases.

Few in the Guild who are active on hate crimes and anti-racism work, on labor issues, or the prison/industrial complex, on police misconduct, or women's rights, or environmental issues, have studied the U.N. Charter. Few have litigated in the International Court of Justice or brought a complaint before the International Labor Organization. Few have ever attended a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Committee or the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination or the U.N. Committee Against Torture. So very few in the Guild know that the U.N. organs make many links between war and racism, between weapons and the environment, between war and the destruction of the lives of women and children particularly.

I think that lack of experience is at the core of the objections to my semi-colon approach.

Everyone is more comfortable working on something they know something about. And, after a while, they know more than almost everybody else on that subject and are absolutely convinced that their project is extremeley important. So how can it help to ask people to stop working on something important on which they are an expert?

Maybe because it is necessary at this precise, brief moment in history.

And it is also necessary to think we have a chance of stopping U.S. forces acting illegally in order to work most effectively.

Many in today's peace movement DO remember the struggles against the Vietnam War. We cannot go through those struggles again in the same, very slow way. Too many people will have died in too many regions by then -- from war, from starvation, from environmental degradation. And the military doesn't think it needs a draft this time, certainly not yet. So the anti-war movement that arose from draftees will not come into being now.

It is worthwhile remembering that we actually had a movement in the 1930s that won some actual victories -- not for peace, but for human rights. We won Social Security, unemployment compensation, the right to organize unions without being fired, equal pay for equal work for women, federal funding of public housing, wages and hours laws, and finally a Fair Employment Practices Commission, and other social benefits. We won them because Democratic members of Congress and a Democratic President from the aristocratic class knew that they could not remain in office unless they voted for these very basic changes in the relations between the people and the economic system administered by the governmental system.

Today, many active people in many movements have never thought about the fact that corporations are NOT in charge of our government, under the law. They have not thought about the Anti-Trust Acts passed by Congress 100 years ago by active movements of labor unions and Socialists and IWWs determined to curb the unsafe, anti-labor activities of major corporations that had begun taking over the United States, particularly oil companies.

Many people today can offer evidence that, quietly and step by step, the military/industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about has actually split our system of governance. The Department of Defense and the Pentagon, together with mighty corporations that profit from military contracts, are seeking to gain absolute power, through the President acting as Commander-in-Chief, so that Congress members automatically do what they are told.

This means that the civilian government, that is, the elected House and Senate, and the administrators in non-military departments-- Education, Health and Human Services, Interior Labor, etc.-- and the nondefense industries-- farming, civilian manufacturing and transportation, housing, education, etc.-- still seek to operate as before, but without power over the budget and without civil liberties protections.

And the media is not committed to the civilian governmental and economic systems. It does not report, in depth, what is happening, or should be happening, outside the DOD and Lockheed.

What are we to do?

Please read U.N. Charter articles 33-54 that spell out exactly what the U.S. should and should not be doing right now, and what we should be insisting the U.N. Security Council and Military Staff Committee must do. Now let us begin to develop new skills to help our civilian government take back the power from the military/industrial governmental and economic systems, which have no constitutional role in our democratic system. Let's learn how to lobby effectively and quickly with Congressmembers who see us very seldom in the halls of Congress, other than NLG National Vice President Kit Gage.

Now is the time to e-mail and fax and call individual named people who work as aides to members of Congress and the Senate, the aides who work on the issues we are concerned about. If possible, go to Washington, not to the School of the Americas or Nevada Test Sites. Let the Congress know that, of all the issues we work on in peacetime, we are now concentrating on stopping the military from destroying any nation by illegal means of warfare. And let them know why; because this is NOT a path to peace and security for people in the U.S., or the rest of the world.

Standing together, hand in hand, as we did in the Civil Rights Movement.

We shall overcome.

We can live in peace.

Orginally printed in Guild Notes, Winter 2001

Copyright 1999-2007. Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute. All rights reserved.