Category Archives: War & Peace

Memorial Day musings

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Tomorrow is Memorial Day. So although it’s a day early, I’m using the occasion to repost something I wrote six years ago. It definitely needs repeating.

It’s Memorial Day. It isn’t a day that puts me in a good mood. It is a day to mourn, not to celebrate. We seem to have forgotten that part of it.

Memorial Day was officially proclaimed on 5 May 1868 by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, in his General Order No. 11, and was first observed on 30 May 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. The first state to officially recognize the holiday was New York in 1873. By 1890 it was recognized by all of the northern states. The South refused to acknowledge the day, honoring their dead on separate days until after World War I (when the holiday changed from honoring just those who died fighting in the Civil War to honoring Americans who died fighting in any war). It is now celebrated in almost every State on the last Monday in May (passed by Congress with the National Holiday Act of 1971 (P.L. 90 – 363) to ensure a three day weekend for Federal holidays), though several southern states have an additional separate day for honoring the Confederate war dead: January 19 in Texas, April 26 in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi; May 10 in South Carolina; and June 3 (Jefferson Davis’ birthday) in Louisiana and Tennessee.

The day has now become an occasion for mainstream media to pour out an unrelenting stream of stories promoting the mythology of the heroic warrior killed in battle. It’s the kind of myth that does a great disservice by aiding and abetting the glorification of state-ordered killing.

When I think about war, I think about the nearly two million men of my generation who were drafted and given a hard choice–prison or war. It wasn’t pretty, whichever choice was made. Many didn’t come back (about 18,000 draftees died in combat). Many more of those who did found their lives changed for the worse, as veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are now finding.

I think about those who were ensnared by official government lies and distortions, from the Pentagon Papers to the Saddam’s nonexistent WMDs.

I also think about victims of the economic draft, who are driven to join the military because it seems the only way to avoid chronic unemployment.

I think about the men and women of conscience who have suffered because their conscientious objection to war and killing is disrespected and marginalized, with the complicity of our mainstream media.

I think about the old white men who send young men off to kill and die.

I wonder what would happen if we had boot camps and basic training in peace making and conflict resolution, instead of basic training that breaks down our natural reluctance to take the lives of others.

And I think, as I do each and every year, how many more? How many more must die in wars before we decide there must be better ways to settle differences or manage power.

How many more?

Photo: Memorial Day Protest, Punchbowl National Cemetery, 1971. Click on the photo for more.

We’ve gone from prosecuting war crimes to threatening those who do

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We went to see Operation Finale this week. Here’s the summary of the plot from the website, Rotten Tomatoes:

Fifteen years after the end of World War II, Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad and security agency Shin Bet – led by the tireless and heroic agent Peter Malkin (Isaac) – launched a daring top-secret raid to capture the notorious Eichmann (Kingsley), who had been reported dead in the chaos following Nazi Germany’s collapse but was, in fact, living and working in a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina under an assumed identity along with his wife and two sons. Monitoring his daily routine, Malkin and his operatives plot and execute the abduction under the cover of darkness just a few feet from Eichmann’s home. Determined to sneak him out of Argentina to stand trial in Israel, Malkin and Eichmann engage in an intense and gripping game of cat-and-mouse.

The summary doesn’t mention the war crimes that made up the Halocaust during WWII, or Eichmann’s status as a war criminal who had escaped the Nuremberg Trials and taken up residence in Argentina.

I didn’t come in cold on this topic. Years ago, I read and was deeply affected by Hannah Arendt’s account of the subsequent Eichmann trial (“Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil,” and Raul Hilberg’s exhaustive account of the bureaucracy of the Halocaust, “The Destruction of the European Jews.”

This week also was marked by an attack by National Security Advisor John Bolton on the International Criminal Court, described by Newsweek as “mandated by most of the international community to prosecute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Crimes such as those that Adoph Eichmann was tried for and convicted of.

In the movie, Argentinian Nazis and Nazi sympathizers were trying to block the Israeli team from hustling Eichmann out of the country to face a public trial. You can’t help seeing them as the bad guys.

Yet here, while this movie , Bolton put the United State’s rather firmly on the side of those accused of war crimes, going so far as to threaten sanctions against judges on the International Court involved in such prosecutions.

I wasn’t born when the Nuremberg Trials were held after WWII to bring those alleged to have carried out acts of genocide to justice. The U.S. was a leading force in establishing this forum, along with the basic premise that there are consequences for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the defense of “I was only following orders” is not sufficient.

I’m sad and embarrassed by Bolton’s attack on the international court. As a nation, we should be able to say that we do not participate in, support, nor condone war crimes.

Bolton’s posture seems to be that if we may commit such crimes with impunity because, well, the United States just doesn’t care.

That’s a very sad position for a country that used to take pride in being seen as a promoter of global human rights.

Throwback Thursday: War Tax protest mid-1970s

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In honor of tax week…Protesters in a silent vigil against the nuclear arms race outside the old Federal Building in downtown Honolulu.

It was Tax Day, April 15, sometime in the mid-1970s. I credit Quaker activist Elaine “Woody” Schwartz, an Aina Haina housewife, who was a strong advocate for protests against war spending each time tax day rolled around, and drew others into the protests by her strong personal example.

Leaflets asked passersby to consider the proportion of tax dollars going for war and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and urged withholding of war taxes.

I believe the figure on the far left in the photo, closest to the camera and holding an American flag, is longtime activist Jim Albertini, who now makes the Big Island his home.

Click on the photo to see a larger version.

The following is from a history of war tax resistance during the years of the Vietnam War by the War Resisters League. The tactic continued after that war ended and peace activists turned to grapple with the global arms race.

Indochina War

War tax resistance gained nationwide publicity when Joan Baez announced in 1964 her refusal to pay 60 percent of her 1963 income taxes because of the war in Vietnam. In 1965 the Peacemakers formed the “No Tax for War in Vietnam Committee,” obtaining signers to the pledge “I am not going to pay taxes on 1964 income.” By 1967 about 500 people had signed the pledge.

Then several events in the mid- to late-1960s occurred making this a pivotal period for the war resistance movement, signaling a shift in war tax resistance from a couple hundred to eventually tens of thousands of refusers.

A committee led by A.J. Muste obtained 370 signatures (including Joan Baez, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Dellinger, Dorothy Day, Noam Chomsky, Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, publisher Lyle Stuart, and Staughton Lynd) for an ad in The Washington Post, which proclaimed their intention not to pay all or part of their 1965 income taxes.

A suggestion in 1966 to form a mass movement around the refusal to pay the (at that time) 10 percent telephone tax was given an initial boost by Chicago tax resister Karl Meyer. This was followed by War Resisters League developing a national campaign in the late 1960s to encourage refusal to pay the telephone tax.

In 1967, Gerald Walker of The New York Times Magazine began the organizing of Writers and Editors War Tax Protest. The 528 writers and editors (including Gloria Steinem and Kirkpatrick Sale) pledged themselves to refuse the 10 percent war surtax (which had just been added to income taxes) and possibly the 23 percent of their income tax allocated for the war. Most daily newspapers refused to sell space for the ad. Only the New York Post (at that time, a liberal newspaper), Ramparts (a popular left-wing anti-war magazine), and the New York Review of Books carried it. To see an image of the ad, click on link above.

Ken Knudson, in a 1965 letter to the Peacemaker, suggested that inflating the W-4 form would stop withholding. Again, Karl Meyer was instrumental in promoting this idea, which was adopted by Peacemakers, Catholic Worker, and War Resisters League, among other organizations in the late 1960s. Inflating W-4 forms also brought a new wave of indictments and jailings by the government — 16 were indicted for claiming too many dependents; of those, six were actually jailed.

The number of known income tax resisters grew from 275 in 1966 to an estimated 20,000 in the early 1970s. The number of telephone tax resisters was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Many groups were formed around the country including “people’s life funds,” to which people sent their war tax resisted money to fund community programs.

The popularity of war tax resistance grew to such an extent that the WRL could no longer handle the volume of requests. So in 1969 a press conference was held in New York City to announce the founding of the National War Tax Resistance (WTR). Long-time peace activist Bradford Lyttle was the first coordinator. Local WTR chapters blossomed around the country, and by 1972 there were 192 such groups. WTR published a comprehensive handbook on tax resistance, Ain’t Gonna Pay for War No More (edited by Robert Calvert), and put out a monthly newsletter, Tax Talk. Radical members of the historic peace churches began to urge their constituencies to refuse war taxes.

In 1972 Congressman Ronald Dellums (CA) introduced the World Peace Tax Fund Act in Congress, which was designed to create a conscientious objector status for taxpayers. The National Council for a World Peace Tax Fund was formed to promote this legislation (later changed to National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund). The bill has been introduced into each Congress since.

During the Indochina War, war tax resistance gained its greatest strength ever in the history of the United States, and on a secular basis rather than as a result of the historic peace churches, who played a very minor role this time. The government did its best to stop this increase in tax resistance, but was hamstrung by telephone tax resisters. There were so many resisters and so little tax owed per person that the IRS lost money every time they made a collection. The cost of bank levies, garnished wages, automobile and property seizures, and even the simplest IRS paperwork was simply too expensive to be worth it.

Will we agree to restrict the use of killer robots?

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Forget the threat of Facebook’s privacy intrusions. How about killer robots? Hollywood has done a good job of getting the public used to the idea of killer robots of various kinds.

But it’s no longer just a matter of fantastic computer graphics in movies. Technology has developed to the point where the issue is not “if” we will be able to build systems of robot weapons, but when.

And, for those who are trying to maintain a legal framework for international arms control, it’s a problem that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

Put simply, the international laws of war have to be rewritten to take maintain their relevance as this new type of warfare arrives on the scene.

The Lawfare Blog just published a review of the current status of international discussions of “Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems,” or LAWS.

Though states have not agreed on a definition of LAWS, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has defined “autonomous weapon systems” as “[a]ny weapon system with autonomy in its critical functions—that is, a weapon system that can select (i.e. search for or detect, identify, track, select) and attack (i.e. use force against, neutralize, damage or destroy) targets without human intervention.”

The article links to a couple of versions of a 2014 report from an “expert meeting” organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross to discuss the issues (“Autonomous weapon systems technical, military, legal and humanitarian aspects“).

There’s also a useful link to another scholarly article, “Debating Autonomous Weapon Systems, Their Ethics, and Their Regulation Under International Law.”