antiwar movement – Engaging Peace

Veterans Speak Out, Part 3

Posted on January 12, 2018 by kathiemm

by Ross Caputi

Grassroots Reparations

The cause I am advocating is grassroots reparations. By grassroots reparations, I mean a kind of solidarity work that combines direct aid with truth-telling — replacing a warrior ethos with a rhetoric of responsibility and reconciliation.

In practice, grassroots reparations means reaching out to the communities that we helped hurt, making good on our moral debt to them by mobilizing resources under their leadership. At the level of discourse, a reparative framework means that we need to bring an awareness of our moral agency and responsibilities to our thinking and speaking. It means not only interrogating our individual roles in military violence, but also dismantling the mythologies and secrecies that have obscured the real impact of our actions, either by concealing or valorizing them. This means providing our victims with a platform to speak, while undermining the privilege of our own voices.

Grassroots reparations won’t replace the need for protest or marches. But I do believe that a reparative framework lends a lot of moral clarity to the veteran relationship with the antiwar movement.

Now let me address some potential objections:

1) Veterans are very often used as war propaganda. So why shouldn’t the antiwar movement highlight the voices of antiwar veterans to subvert these appeals? It’s akin to dismantling the master’s house with the master’s tools.

I think it would be unsatisfactory for white allies to try to support Black Lives Matter in a way that does not also undermine their own privileged position in society. I think the same logic applies with veterans.

2) We need to prioritize ending wars over repairing their damage, so our focus should be on crafting slogans, arguments, and narratives for a domestic audience.

Historically, we haven’t been very successful at preventing or ending wars, and I don’t feel good about asking our war victims to wait for us to achieve our long-term political goals before we start addressing their needs. Fortunately, I don’t think we have to choose only one or the other. I think of grassroots reparations as just another kind of direct action. If we build compelling and informative media campaigns to accompany our reparations projects, this kind of work can have an important domestic impact and supplement the broader antiwar movement.

3) Grassroots reparations work only by mobilizing guilt. We should not let the state off the hook, and we must keep working for state reparations.

I think there’s a big difference between mobilizing guilt and cultivating a culture of responsibility, and I’m trying to do the latter. I think we should be vigilant about how the way we live affects others and do what we can to repair the harm we cause. And I don’t think this lessens the importance of state reparations, or precludes us from working for both.

Ross is the cofounder of the Islah Reparations Project. He is also the director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a veteran’s journey after Fallujah. The full essay, from which this post is excerpted, can be read at VeteranReparations.org.

Veterans Speak Out, Part 2

Posted on January 9, 2018 by kathiemm

by Ross Caputi

Veteran Privilege

I worry that by using the authority and privilege of veteran voices to spread our antiwar message and deflect criticism, we in the antiwar movement have inadvertently made veterans into a kind of propaganda, packaging an antiwar message within a familiar warrior ethos. In effect, we are using the very same culture of soldier worship that we should be dismantling.

I worry also that the antiwar movement assumes a “truthiness” about veteran war narratives. The common refrain is that no one knows the horrors of war better than veterans. However, the experiences of veterans do not always lend themselves to a single antiwar interpretation. To assume that they do is just another iteration of what James Campbell has called combat gnosticism — “a construction that gives us war experience as a kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge which only an initiated elite knows.”

The culture of the antiwar movement has created a kind of veteran identity politics that regards veteran voices as given goods. But combat gnosticism can be dangerous when it leads us to become uncritical of our soldiers, even the ones who share our political beliefs.

I’m not saying that veterans have nothing to offer the antiwar movement. I’m arguing that we should not rely on them as sources of informational or moral truth. This does not help us build a culture of critical, independent thinking, responsibility, equality, and antimilitarism.

An alternative contribution that antiwar veterans could make is to offer stories and self-reflection that renounce the authority and privilege we enjoy in our society, that recognize our moral agency, that confess our mistakes in enlisting and participating in unjust wars, and that announce our responsibility to our war victims. This would be a first step in a process toward full reparations that not only seek to repair the harm done, but that also address the root causes of the violence: power, privilege, and imperialism.

Veterans Speak Out, Part 1

Posted on January 5, 2018January 5, 2018 by kathiemm

Note from Kathie MM: This post from long-time guest author Ross Caputi begins a new series on ending violence; his focus is on the role of veterans in promoting repair as an antidote to violence.

Veterans Speak Out, Part 1

By Ross Caputi

Ever since I got out of the military, I’ve felt that those around me, conservatives and progressives alike, have bent over backwards to give me an opportunity to talk about my experience in Iraq. I think many people do it because they think they owe me this courtesy.

But others seek me out and ask me to speak about my experience because they know and I know that veteran stories accomplish a lot of political work. I always accept, because I have an agenda to push.

I want to end war and prosecute war criminals.

But I’ve always felt uncomfortable with using the authority of my voice as a veteran to accomplish anti-war work. It’s a strange corner that I feel backed into where I have to identify myself as a former soldier so that I can try to undermine our culture of soldier-worship. And I can’t help but feel troubled by the contradiction between the means and ends of this rhetorical strategy.

No doubt, the privileged status of soldiers/veterans in the US is a major reason why we play such an important role in the anti-war movement. Our biggest contribution is that we help civilians navigate support-the-troops jingoism and accusations that anti-war ideas are unpatriotic. For whatever historical reasons, veterans enjoy a near sacred status in US culture and society. We carry with us an enormous amount of symbolic capital, and our voices are privileged like none others. We then bring this symbolic capital and privilege with us to the antiwar movement.

Simply by letting us make short speeches at anti-war rallies, or even letting us wear our cammies in an anti-war march, organizers know that audiences will be more willing to listen and less likely to criticize. In short, veterans help legitimize anti-war ideas by vouching for them.

But we can do more than that. Stay tuned.

Ross is the co-founder of the Islah Reparations Project. He is also the director of the documentary film Fear Not the Path of Truth: a veteran’s journey after Fallujah. The full essay, from which this post is excerpted, can be read at VeteranReparations.org.

Historical strands of peace activism

Posted on April 18, 2013March 11, 2021 by kathiemm

Review of Soldiers of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement, by Thomas F. Curran (228 p, Fordham, 2003).

Review by Edward Agro

I’d long been anxious to read Soldiers of Peace, hoping it might shed light on successes as well as missteps in the current-day antiwar movement. And so it has.

The main character in Soldiers of Peace is Alfred H. Love, who was possessed of the idée fixe that the only way to peace before, during, and after the Civil War was to rebuild government and civil society on a Biblical model.

Reading the story of Love and the Universal Peace Union (UPU) he founded leads to an understanding of several strands of American civic culture and activism of 150 and more years ago that contribute substantially to perspectives we bring to peace and social change work today.

Curran’s evidence persuasively shows how doctrinal rigidity within the UPU and its secular twin, the American Peace Society, most likely lessened the positive things both groups could have accomplished. On the other hand, enough people, including Love as he aged, were able to get far enough ahead of their preconceptions to lay the groundwork for many of the progressive campaigns and organizations of the 20th century.

This review doesn’t do justice to Curran’s contribution to the untangling of the many threads that led to present-day activist consciousness, or his evidence regarding the practice of war tax refusal.

I don’t want to oversell the book; it probably won’t be much help to activists on the barricades on behalf of one or another immediate campaign. But for those whose street-fighting days are perhaps over, who have the luxury of trying to understand where we come from and where we might be going, it’s a treasure.

Ed Agro is a long-time peace activist whose autobiographical statement was published in Forbes.