By Matthew Behrens
Earlier this year, Michael Walli made a blunt
confession in a Tennessee court. “I was employed as a terrorist for the United
States Government,” he told the judge hearing his case. And sure enough, Walli
is facing down a potential 35 years in prison for what his prosecutors
successfully argued was an action that fit the “federal crime of terrorism.”
Walli
is an army combat veteran of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, and is
certainly not the first to take some
personal responsibility for America’s genocidal occupation and relentless
bombing of Southeast Asia (with at least
3 million murdered). Indeed, as the recent book Kill Anything that Moves reminds us, American military units were
committing so many atrocities that the Pentagon opened up its own, secretive
war crimes investigation unit.
But
his participation in such crimes is not what led Walli to that Tennessee court.
Rather, it was a peaceful protest against nuclear terrorism and the U.S.
construction – in clear violation of the nonproliferation treaty – of a new generation of nuclear weapons. Unlike
Iran, the U.S. has used – and threatened to use – nuclear weapons for almost 70
years, in the form of atomic bombs as well as depleted uranium-coated
ammunition that has left a cancerous wasteland behind in Iraq, among other
countries where it has been used by U.S. and NATO forces.
Walli,
joined by Sister Megan Rice (aged 82) and Greg Boertje-Obed, all veteran peacemakers,
entered the Y12 nuclear weapons site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee on July 28, 2012,
cutting through four fences and making their way right to the Enriched Uranium
Materials Facility which, as the venerable magazine Nuclear Resister notes, is “the largest storehouse of bomb-grade
uranium in the world. They marked the building with blood, painted disarmament
messages on the wall and hung banners. Symbolic of beginning to transform
swords into plowshares, they also hammered a few chips of concrete from the
building’s foundation before being seen by security guards and arrested.”
It
was the latest in a 33-year legacy of scores of similar protests known as Plowshares
Actions that have directly confronted militarism in its most physical forms,
from pouring blood on B-52 bombers to hammering on nuclear weapons nose cones
at a General Electric factory in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. All such
actions have been well-planned, almost always involve a faith-based statement,
and are committed to nonviolence.
On June 20 of this year, Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, according to an
Associated Press dispatch filed from Berlin, appealed “for a new citizen
activism in the free world” to reduce nuclear stockpiles and confront climate
change. Yet his Attorney General has piled on the charges
against the Plowshares activists who were engaging in just such citizen
activism. All are scheduled to be sentenced in September. While lengthy prison
sentences have often been the fate of those confronting the nuclear state, the
equation of nonviolent protest with terrorism is consistent with what critics
have long argued is one of the main purposes of so-called anti-terrorism
legislation: squashing dissent.
In
his usual unctuous fashion, Obama’s dishonest speech in Berlin belied the facts
of nuclear weapons development. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI), at the start of 2013 eight states possessed approximately 4,400
operational nuclear weapons. Nearly 2,000 of these are kept in a state of high
operational alert. SIPRI also notes that if all nuclear warheads are counted – operational
warheads, spares, those in both active and inactive storage, and intact
warheads scheduled for dismantlement – the United States, Russia, the
United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan and Israel possess a total of
approximately 17,270 nuclear weapons. As SIPRI indicates in their 2013 annual
report, the five leading nuclear weapons powers “appear determined to retain
their nuclear arsenals indefinitely.” Last year, NATO concluded that nuclear
weapons would remain a core component of their arsenal and strategic planning
(with no peep of protest from Canada).
Canada’s response to this reality is,
among other activities, a secretive working plan to ship large amounts of bomb
grade uranium from Chalk River through the Ottawa Valley and to the United
States for “reprocessing.” Anyone who thinks this uranium will not wind up in a
new nuclear weapon might be interested in some oceanfront Arizona property. Until
2008, Canada had mined more uranium than any other country in the world –
including the raw materials for those first flashes of unforgettable fire that
decimated two of Japan’s civilian cities during World War II – and now accounts
for over 15% of worldwide production. Among its largest clients are countries
that continue to violate the non-proliferation treaty. At the same time, those
who are front-line victims of the chain of nuclearism are indigenous people who
have mined the uranium and had its waste dumped on their lands.
Worldwide war spending, including for nuclear
weapons, now tops $1.75 trillion, an amount perhaps so infinite that it becomes
meaningless. As hunger and other social ills plague billions of people, few in
the political world dare question this massive waste of resources, including the over $20 billion annually
flushed down Canada’s own rathole of militarism. Indeed, the official NDP opposition
last ran on a platform of equaling the Harper government’s war spending.
As
we approach the landmark days in August marking the anniversaries of the murderous
use of atomic weapons against the undefended cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
it is a good time to not only reflect on the nature of nuclearism, but
militarism itself. We must also remember the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden, the
napalming and carpet bombing of Southeast Asia, the NATO terror bombings of the
former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq – clearly war crimes as defined at
Nuremberg – as well as all atrocities supposedly committed in the name of
religion, freedom, and democracy.
Militarism
creates its own state of permanent exception: anything done in the name of
“national defense” is above the law, any calls for accountability are laughed
off as unpatriotic, and resistance is treated as heresy. While eminent scholars
Richard Falk and Robert Jay Lifton once argued that nukes were “indefensible
weapons,” perhaps it is time to shift our frame to the whole business of war as
not only indefensible, but completely incompatible with democracy. Shifting the
language might help as well, reminding people that War is Always Terrorism.
Canada’s own War Department, it was recently
revealed, is so bloated, so over-funded, that it has been sitting on a pile of over
$2 billion in unspent cash. While social programs suffer, the homeless die on
Canadian streets, and women cannot find shelter from male violence, the War Department
remains a sinkhole of taxpayer monies, the largest single use of discretionary
federal spending and one that is increasingly immune to oversight given its
refusal to share details – even with officials such as the Parliamentary Budget
Officer – of its operations and spending plans. Indeed, the Ottawa Citizen reports that former CSIS
head Richard Fadden, now a deputy minister at the War Department, has recently written
to say he will not provide Parliament with any details on new warships, armoured
vehicles, and other unnecessary purchases.
All
this serves as part of a long-standing trend in which democracy is sacrificed
on the altar of a war economy. Whether
it is the clear deception that the Harper government continues to employ to try
and sucker Canadians into spending scores of billions on stealth fighter
bombers, shutting down Parliament to prevent hearings on Canadian complicity in
the torture of Afghans, or the secretive plans to ship by truck highly
radioactive uranium down Highway 417 along the Ottawa River so the U.S. can
continue to upgrade its nuclear weapons, it is clear that the objections of
citizens have been pushed to the side as
an unwanted annoyance.
This
is, of course, not new. Indeed, shortly after the passage of Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act,
resisters against militarism, who were holding weekly vigils in 2002 to
transform Toronto’s Moss Park Armoury into housing for the homeless and
underhoused, found "Security Zone in Effect” signs around the perimeter,
language coming directly out of the Anti-terrorism Act and clearly aimed at the
organizers from Homes not Bombs. Similarly, at Hancock Air Force Base in New
York State, special injunctions seeking to bar peaceful protesters from the
entrance have been issued to maintain the silence around the drone strikes that
are launched from within. At protests outside Canada’s drone manufacturer of
choice, L3 Wescam, protesters were threatened with civil action for nonviolent
trespass.
The antidote for such diseases as
militarism and the secrecy that undergirds it is democratic participation, perhaps
through education, boycott and protest. For others, it may take the form of direct
interference with the tools of global genocide via Plowshares Actions or the
nonviolent civil resistance action that last week saw 23 people arrested at a
Honeywell plant in Kansas City, where key components for that new generation of
nuclear weapons are being developed.
Not everyone is prepared to risk
jail for their conscience. But at the very least, we can support those who,
with love in their hearts and a passion for justice that burns brighter than
any weapons flash, continue to push back against the state of exception called
militarism. One thing everyone can do is write a letter to members of Transform
Plowshares now looking at being jailed until 2048 – essentially life
imprisonment – for their simple act of
saying “No.”. They are also encouraging people to send letters to the judge who
will sentence them in September. More information is available at http://transformnowplowshares.wordpress.com/
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