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Peace At Home, Peace Abroad

By Ben Chitty

Report on a conference sponsored by the Veterans Peace Council and the Dave Cline Commemoration Committee New York City June 6, 2015.

Introduction

Ben Chitty.

Is it possible to achieve peace abroad without achieving peace at home? Or to achieve peace at home without peace abroad? If we had a desegregated, equal opportunity, green US military, would it not still be the military arm of the US empire? When hundreds of thousands took to the streets to oppose the invasion of Iraq, the media called them "the second superpower," so why did we not stop the war?

In his 1967 Riverside speech "Beyond Vietnam," the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of the obstacles to peace and justice. "We must rapidly begin the shift," he said, "from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society... When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." Until we overcome these giant triplets, we will remain a country which fights wars like Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq.

As long as we measure success by the things we buy and not by the kind of future we make for our children and their children, we will leave them a world without peace and without justice. Progressive movements are many and diverse: we work to end racism and sexism, or to save the environment, or to transform our toxic culture, even to oppose US imperialism. Worthy goals, but each tackled alone will not succeed in transforming our society. That transformation requires a shift in social consciousness, and the giant triplets bar the way. We can constructively discuss these issues only so long as we maintain respect for one another.

Racism/Sexism/Misogyny

Racism encourages us to see enemies as "the other," deserving extermination. The Nazi treatment of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals is the paradigmatic modern example. But racism and sexism are more than individual attitudes and choices, they are structural forces entrenched in our society.

Health care is representative: in Baltimore's minority neighborhoods, life expectancy is 66 years, similar to that in Kazakhstan or India; elsewhere in Baltimore, it is 71 years. Household wealth: African American borrowers pay more interest on home loans than whites — $15,000 over the life of the loan.

Why is this a veterans issue?

First, because justice is indivisible: an injury to one is an injury to all.

Second, globalization links these issues as it links economies: global economic structures exploiting racial and sexual oppression siphon profits to the 1% (whose interests the military protects and serves).

Third, our organizations suffer from "white skin privilege." This is not just a minority membership numbers game, but a collective difficulty in grappling with issues affecting minority communities. For example, drug use may look like a matter of individual choice, but drugs function as a means of social control, and the racialized enforcement of drug laws devastates minority communities diminishing economic opportunity and suppressing political participation.

Veterans grasp solidarity with others and enjoy a high level of social respect. Our participation in movements for social change is valuable. We can reach out to fellow veterans and their families who have been impacted by war, economic injustice, and racism. We can testify to the corrosive effects of the rank misogyny used to train recruits. We can speak from experience about joining the military to young people, a demographic targeted by a multi-million dollar public relations campaign.

Militarism

Militarism is almost everywhere you look.

Military spending — including veterans benefits — approaches two thirds of the US budget, and we spend more than the combined totals of the next ten countries in the world.

Military technology is transferred to domestic police forces for use in the "wars" on drugs and terrorism, almost half a million pieces of equipment since 1997, including Tasers and APCs (Armored Personnel Carriers), deployed everywhere, and LRADs (Long Range Acoustical Devices) which cause permanent hearing loss, severe headaches, and panic, used in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Oakland, and NYC. More are on the way: "Skunk" crowd control weapons which discharge a foul-smelling liquid that induces nausea and vomiting, and ADS (Active Denial System technology), which excites water and fat molecules in the skin, heating them much like a microwave oven. Many of these so-called "non-lethal" weapons were developed for crowd control in occupied countries.

Police forces adopt military tactics like surveillance, including cell traffic and social media ("open source intelligence"), "shock & awe" (overwhelming force), arbitrary detentions. Dissent = terrorism. Environmental activists, anti-NATO/WTO/WB protesters, animal rights activists, are subjected to treatments used on alleged adherents of Al Qaeda or the Islamic State - surveillance, entrapment, provocation, arbitrary detention.

The US military enjoys legal "impunity" abroad — "status-of-forces agreements" exempt US military personnel from most local laws and prosecutions. Behind the "blue wall of silence," police enjoy impunity in the communities where they impose public order.

Force is preferred to negotiation, war over diplomacy. Force suppresses challenges to US economic and political interests abroad, and rebellions against injustices at home.

Materialism

Materialism refers both to mindless consumerism and to an economy planned to support and enhance private profit.

Consumer spending is the linchpin of the for-profit economy, and popular culture promotes and nurtures habits of getting and spending. This undermines the organic solidarity of communities, whether veterans, workers, or even neighborhoods, and leaves them defenseless against changes which appear to be impersonal and inevitable — job loss, urban blight, and toxic waste deposits.

The economy is structured and restructured to enhance profits. Social services are privatized. Charter schools compete with underfunded public schools. Congress hobbles the Post Office with a mandate to over-fund its pension plans, making it difficult to compete with private carriers. Prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, highways, can all be milked for private profit.

Even military force is privatized. The ranks are filled with "volunteers," many seeking the opportunity denied them in a hollowed-out economy. Mercenaries and contractors conduct military operations abroad; at home private security supplements police. Military bases (like prisons) become sources of employment and economic stability, making them hard to close even when they are no longer (or never were) needed.

Veterans in the Movement for Peace and Social Justice

The Veterans Peace Council can promote the participation of veterans in the movement for peace and social justice.

We may focus on domestic issues, but we cannot neglect international issues — the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Russia in Ukraine, China in the South China Sea — or veterans of foreign military forces such as British Vets For Peace or Combatants For Peace in Israel and Palestine.

Veterans groups are not political parties, but we can learn from organizations resisting austerity like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain.

Corporations — empowered by Citizens United and other court decisions giving them constitutional "personhood" — are the main obstacle to progressive social change. Why? Because their profits depend on exploitation of the status quo. We could work to revoke their charters, a proposal in the spirit of Thomas Paine.

The Council could reestablish a local veterans speakers' bureau, with a focus on counter-recruitment and the real history of the American War in Vietnam. Individual veterans already speak in schools, but if the effort were coordinated, every request would be filled.

The Council could campaign to award the Medal of Honor to Army Warrant Officer Hugh Thomson (1943-2006) who intervened to stop the massacre at My Lai in 1968, and to replace slave-owner Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Union veteran Harriet Tubman.

The Council could coordinate congressional delegations, where groups of veterans visit local congressional offices to promote the "peace economy," as well as specific issues like the HR 2114 Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2015.

The Veterans Peace Council of Metro New York and the Dave Cline Commemoration Committee are joint projects of the local chapters of Veterans For Peace and the Clarence Fitch Chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Last June, the Council sponsored an all-day conference on the topic, "Peace At Home, Peace Abroad." This report was drafted by VFP Associate Wendy Fisher and VVAW Member Ben Chitty, and reviewed by the Council.

Ben Chitty is a shellback Navy veteran of two deployments to Vietnam, and a long-time member of VVAW.