Vote “Ceasefire” Write-In Campaign Launched for NH Primary

Supporters of Joe Biden aren’t the only ones organizing a write-in campaign for the New Hampshire Primary next Tuesday. Today a grassroots effort was launched urging critics of the Biden Administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza to vote for “Ceasefire.”

Vote Ceasefire, a newly formed grassroots group, is calling on New Hampshire primary voters to vote ‘Ceasefire’ as a write-in candidate “to draw attention to the urgent need to stop the violence in Palestine in the Middle East,” announced Rachel Rybaczuk, who moderated a news conference held over Zoom. “We’re encouraging New Hampshire residents to register to vote and use the power of the first-in-the-nation primary to push President Biden to call for an immediate ceasefire.”

“The United States has been funding genocide in Gaza, even though the vast majority of Americans, especially our Democratic voters, do not agree,” said Morgan Brown, who identified herself as a community organizer and health care advocate. “And although we have tried to make our voices heard in Washington, we have largely been ignored,” she said.

Bill Maddocks of Amherst, co-chair of NH Peace Action, agreed. “We as peace activists here in the state of New Hampshire have been vigiling. We’ve been calling our members of Congress, have been calling the president. We have tried to call attention to the possibility of peace. And our words, our letters, our texts, our calls are not being heard.”

“We need to get the message through,” said former Executive Councilor Andru Volinsky, who published a letter to the editor in the Concord Monitor on December 13 stating that he’d be writing in “Ceasefire” on his NH Primary ballot. His message to the Biden administration is, “You can veto a UN resolution in favor of a humanitarian ceasefire, but you can’t veto my vote.”

“I think about this in terms of ending the regional conflict, stopping the annihilation of the Palestinian people in Gaza and, returning the US to [being] a leader on the world stage when it comes to foreign policy,” Volinsky said.

Since one thing, perhaps the only thing, the Democratic Party cares about is votes, Brown suggested, the write-in campaign may be the best way to get their attention. “I want Democratic leaders to see that the American people are taking a stand against the bombing of civilians. These people are infants, they are children, and mothers and fathers and grandparents, aunts, uncles,” she said. “But I think the most important thing to remember here is that these are our fellow humans, and they deserve peace, and safety and comfort, just like we do. As a health care advocate, I cannot stand by and watch as hospitals are forced to treat wounds, like amputations, with no pain management, no sterilization, because the supplies simply aren’t there.”

It’s an uphill effort to be sure, with only a week to go before New Hampshire voters go to the polls and only a few dozen people actively involved so far. But, as Maddocks said, “If dozens or hundreds or thousands of people were to vote Ceasefire, we’d be able to make a strong statement that the candidates and the general public would be able to see.”

“Writing-in ‘Ceasefire’ in the NH primary does not help Donald Trump,” the group stated in an internal document. “This is a much better way to cast a protest vote than supporting third party candidates who would be spoilers that are actually helping Trump.”

Vote Ceasefire is hoping to spread the word – rapidly – by social media, posters, chalking, yard signs, and anything else that promotes awareness.

All votes for “Ceasefire” should get counted, said Anna Sventek, communications director in the Secretary of State’s office. “When our office tabulates the results, those votes would be categorized under the ‘Scatter’ category,” she wrote in an email message.

Volinsky, who has run for office several times and spent 25 years working as a volunteer voter protection lawyer, suggested that ceasefire supporters “self-report” their write in votes and keep an eye on the official count. “We’re encouraging everyone who writes in ‘Ceasefire’ to make that fact known,” he said.

Brown said she’s not planning to vote for Ceasefire in November, but wants to get the attention of the president and Democratic Party leaders now. “I would also really like to urge other young people to get to the polls. This is our future,” she said. “If you go to college here in New Hampshire, you can vote here, please bring your photo ID to the polls. Register, and let’s get some ‘Ceasefire’ votes in so that we can send a very clear message to the Biden administration that this massacre of people will never be tolerated.”

“If the Democratic establishment is concerned about my vote, they should be concerned enough to recognize that I care deeply about effecting a humanitarian ceasefire,” Volinsky said. “And I’m not alone.”

Maddocks said the situation in Gaza is dire, with famine conditions for thousands of people and weapons being made by companies with a significant presence in New Hampshire playing a role in the Israeli attacks. Yet, he sees hope in the recently announced deal by Qatar and France to provide medical assistance. A permanent ceasefire, he said, would open the possibility for dialog that could lead to harmonious relations between Israel and Palestine.

“This happened in Northern Ireland. At some point in that conflict that lasted for decades, the weapons flow ended, the negotiations began. And eventually, Ireland and Northern Ireland reached agreement,” he said.

“The Israeli newspaper Haaretz had a headline this morning, which was that the hostage deal is taking a backseat to Netanyahu’s political ambitions,” Volinsky said. “We want to get the hostages back, if we want to build a sustainable platform for lasting peace in the Middle East, we want to stop the annihilation of civilians, non-combatants, in Gaza. We should act this Tuesday to get our message through and write in ‘Ceasefire’ and sign up at voteceasefire.info.”

“Go vote. Go register. Bring a friend,” Volinsky advised. And make a poster to display outside the polls which says, “Write in ‘Ceasefire.’”

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Francesco Da Vinci Refused to Kill

Review of I Refuse to Kill: My Path to Nonviolent Action in the 1960s, by Francesco Da Vinci

This article was first published in the War Resisters League’s section of Waging Nonviolence on January 12, 2022.  Click here for more information about the War Resisters League.  Click here to read and subscribe to Waging Nonviolence.

Some months after my 18th birthday a letter from the Selective Service arrived in my mailbox. I had not yet registered for the draft, it stated correctly, adding that failure to do so could land me in prison for up to five years or require me to pay a hefty fine, or both. Yikes.

Growing up in an affluent Massachusetts suburb, where nearly everyone went to college and barely anyone joined the military, the U.S. war in Vietnam was almost as far away socially as it was geographically. Sure, I knew the war was on and that I’d probably be against it if I thought much about it. But it didn’t really affect me or anyone I knew. However, with the threat of prison as an alternative, I headed to the closest draft board office, signed up, and soon was issued a draft card.

The memories came back as I read “I Refuse to Kill: My Path to Nonviolent Action in the 1960s,” an engaging new memoir by Francesco Da Vinci. Born into a prosperous family in an affluent Virginia suburb, Francesco grew up without much religious training and little direct exposure to pacifism. But his psychiatrist father taught that love was a transformative power. And it was the dawn of “the 60s.”

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Like others of his generation, Francesco was swept up in the idealism unleashed by the election of John F. Kennedy as president. While his best friend Jerry talked about enlisting in the armed forces, Francesco stepped tentatively into an antiwar perspective and belief in nonviolence, if not yet activism. Though his parents forbade him from attending the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King’s example and the courageous acts of other civil rights activists helped shape his moral outlook. “Each call to conscience that I experienced planted a seed,” he recalls, a seed that would eventually sprout into an application for exemption as a conscientious objector, or CO.

With engaging prose and photos — many from Francesco’s own camera, which he started carrying with him in high school — the memoir chronicles a young man’s principled encounters with the war system in which he refused to participate. Along the way, he becomes a skilled photographer, falls in love, starts a peace center, and tries repeatedly to convince his Virginia draft board that his objection to war is sincere.

Francesco Da Vinci with Cesar Chavez, 1970

Like many other men of his generation, Francesco had to become intimate with the bureaucratic complexities of the draft. Exemptions. Deferments. Classifications. Inductions. And local draft boards which had the authority to determine who was eligible for what.

The system, which exists to this day despite a brief hiatus in the late 1970s, has evolved since the U.S. Civil War, when the only way to avoid conscription was to pay for someone to take your place. In World War I, members of Christian churches with established pacifist beliefs could be exempt from military service. However, they were often cruelly treated, and some 500 conscientious objectors were sent to federal prison.

By World War II, members of other religious groups could gain CO status, but they remained a minority among Quakers, Mennonites, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Brethren. Many — more than 12,000, according to the Center on Conscience and War — performed alternative service, such as forestry, farm labor and work in hospitals for people with mental illness. Other pacifists, who refused to cooperate at all with the system, went to prison.

When the U.S. waded into the “big muddy” of Vietnam, a successful CO application still required belief in a “Supreme Being.” By the time the war ended, Supreme Court decisions had expanded the definition of CO twice, first, in the 1965 Seeger decision to include religious objectors who did not believe in a Supreme Being, and second, in the 1970 Welsh decision to include those who held moral or ethical beliefs akin to religion.

For CO applicants like Francesco, the challenge

Quaker woman reading names of US soldiers who died in Vietnam outside the Los Angeles Induction Center, 1969.  Photo: Francesco Da Vinci

was not only to articulate their views, but to show that they were sincerely and deeply held to the satisfaction of the local draft board. And since draft boards, appointed by Pentagon officials, tended to be skeptical of anyone who tried to evade military

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service, it was no simple task. This was especially so in conservative areas, like the Virginia county where Francesco grew up and submitted his registration form.

With a student deferment while he attended the University of Maryland, Francesco initially occupied himself with studies and recreation. “My previous goal of applying nonviolence in the service of others conveniently slipped to the back-burner,” he recalls. But as the war escalated and continued to gnaw at his conscience, Francesco began to contemplate applying for CO status and going to prison if his application was turned down.

With his girlfriend, Jane, Francesco’s antiwar journey finally stepped out of his head and into the streets when he joined a massive march on the Pentagon in 1967. In the crush of protesters, a soldier whacked him in the ribs with a rifle, but he writes, “We had reached a turning point in our lives. No longer were we watching history; we were making history.”

Francesco Da Vinci at the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968.

His conscience was bolstered by exposure to widespread antiwar sentiment during a family trip to Europe and the antiwar candidacies of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. By 1968, Francesco was ready to leave his student deferment aside and apply to be a CO. It was not an easy step to take. “Just because you don’t believe in the war doesn’t mean you have to be a martyr,” his father tells him. “You realize, of course, that if you go ahead with this, you’ll end up in prison?”

While a CO exemption was perfectly legal, Francesco writes that refusal to serve in the armed forces was widely seen as a sign of cowardice and lack of patriotism. “The aspersions hurled at COs were even worse than those aimed at antiwar marchers: draft-dodgers, commie sympathizers, subversives, saboteurs of our country’s war effort,” he writes.“Many regarded the act of applying as a conscientious objector in and of itself as treasonous. Almost nowhere in the media were COs being supported, and whatever was written about them was almost invariably distorted.”

“Most conscientious objectors could state that the light of traditional organized religion guided them. In my case, I was guided by a non-religious but spiritual philosophy — a set of ethics that countered violence and racial injustice with nonviolent action. I suspected my individualistic religion of ‘nonviolent activism’ would undoubtedly put my CO case in jeopardy,” Francesco states. He was right: the Fairfax County Draft Board turned him down, 4 to 0.

“By late 1960s, an estimated 5,000 war resisters and prisoners of conscience were serving sentences for refusing to participate in any way with the war machine, even alternative service,” according to the Center on Conscience and War. Heading for his first induction physical, Francesco thought he would be one of them.

His “Kafkaesque” experience at the induction center brings to mind Arlo Guthrie’s tale of being “injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected.” Like Arlo, when Francesco declared he would not serve in the military, he was singled out for special questioning, fingerprinted and sent away. (Or as Arlo was told, “Kid, we don’t like your kind. We’re gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington.”)

Francesco’s story goes on, through a move to California, a series of appeals, a succession of lawyers, exposure to the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, marriage to his college sweetheart, a phase of self-righteous preachiness (“obnoxious as a newly converted non-smoker”), and the establishment of a peace center in San Diego, where he led regular trips to the bus station to leaflet young men on their way to induction. Throughout,

Francesco speaks to a skeptical draft board clerk in San Diego, 1971

he describes his deepening commitment to nonviolence amidst the clamor of a changing antiwar movement.

I won’t give away the ending, other than to say he does an excellent job of capturing the emotions and tensions which accompanied his chosen path. The book is full of dialogue, taken from journals Francesco began keeping in his youth, and concludes with an excerpt from his final CO application, in which he articulates his nonviolent philosophy. I appreciated the addition of context helpful to contemporary readers, like using a quotation from Colin Kaepernick to accompany his account of police brutality during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Looking back on the My Lai Massacre and the Phoenix Program, he asks, “In our democratic society, are we to remain silent in the face of terrorist activities sanctioned by our government?” It’s a question that is disturbingly timely. 

For those unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the draft, such as the difference between alternative service and non-combat military service for COs, additional details would be helpful, since young men are still required to register with Selective Service within 30 days of their 18th birthdays. In fact, an effort to force young women to register, too, is gaining traction in Congress, where it’s being promoted — by Democrats — as a step toward gender equality. Although no one has been prosecuted for years, the maximum penalty for non-compliance — even failing to provide the agency with address changes — is still punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a hefty fine, which has been raised to $250,000. I would have also liked to learn more about the non-lawyers who mastered the details of the system and conducted regular counselling sessions to help young men decide what to do. 

“I felt saddened that we were venturing to the Moon when we still had not learned how to live on Earth,” Francesco reflected about the 1969 moon landing. “In the realm of our solar system, only Earth was teeming with life. Perhaps, I hoped, space exploration would awaken humanity to the dire need for change among the super powers — a major redistribution of wealth coupled with a reduction of their excessive military budgets. Without the conversion of war economies to peace

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economies and without corporations paying their fair share, the gap between the haves and the have-nots would continue to widen. The result — a needless cycle of global suffering and death.” Need I say more?

In the end, my own path to nonviolent action bypassed the Selective Service. During my first year of college, everyone born the same day as me drew #6 in the draft lottery, placing us near the head of the list for induction. Selective Service sent me a form asking if I were eligible for any exemptions or deferments. Without knowing much about it, I checked the box for “conscientious objector” and sent it back. But when I received another form, asking me to explain the nature of my beliefs and demonstrate their sincerity, I had no idea where to turn for advice. Lucky for me, the draft ended, for which I can thank Francesco Da Vinci and the thousands of others who said “No, I refuse to kill.”

Francesco says Robert Richter, whose documentaries about nuclear weapons and the School of the Americas were nominated for Oscars, has expressed interest in making a film based on the book.

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Abolish Draft, Don’t Expand it to Women

This piece was first published in the New Hampshire Bulletin on December 22, 2021.  It was prompted, in part, by an earlier article in the same publication which talked about “allowing women to be included in the selective service” and referred to coercive measures as “incentives.”

Plans to mandate Selective Service registration for women were dropped in last-minute negotiations over the National Defense Authorization Act, which passed Congress on Dec. 15. But they will no doubt return. So will proposals to end mandatory registration for men. The latter is a better step toward gender equality.

Although military conscription ended in 1973 and the Defense Department appears to have absolutely no interest in restoring the draft, the federal government has required since 1980 that all men submit their names and contact info to a massive data base. Failure to do so within 30 days of a man’s 18^th birthday makes him potentially subject to five years of imprisonment or a fine of $250,000 or both. So does failure to notify Selective Service of an address change, something that is frequent among the 18- to 26-year-old set that would be subject to the draft should it be revived.

No one has been prosecuted under the Selective Service Act for decades, but Congress and many state governments have adopted additional sanctions to coerce young men to register. For example, male applicants for federal job training and jobs in federal executive branch agencies must prove that they have registered or that they are exempt, according to the Center on Conscience and War. Many states have adopted similar measures, including requirements that men be registered before receiving a driver’s license. In New Hampshire, male non-registrants are barred from state jobs and admission to state-funded institutions of higher education.

The draft itself ended in 1973 due to the unpopularity of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Registration ended in 1975. But President Jimmy Carter brought it back in 1980 out of a desire to look tough following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Since then, young men have been required to sign up and the Pentagon maintains a network of draft boards – one for each county – ready to spring into action should conscription be renewed.

Maintenance of the system cost the taxpayers $27.9 million this year, enough to provide pre-school for 4,213 children at $6,622 each, which the Private School Review says is the average pre-school tuition in New Hampshire.

If you’re looking for an example of wasteful government spending, you need look no further than the Selective Service System. As Bernard Rostker, director of the Selective Service System from 1979-1981 testified to the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service in 2019, “The current system of registration is ineffective and frankly less than useless.”

If you’re looking for a way to promote equal opportunities for women, draft registration is the wrong approach. As Tori Bateman of the American Friends Service Committee says, “This is not feminism; it simply expands an unjust system to more people.”

“Selective Service registration for males is a pillar of the U.S war culture and economy,” adds Bow resident Mary Lee Sargent, a longtime feminist peace activist and teacher of American history. “Expanding this system to include women is the opposite of what feminists should support; it strengthens a system and values that must be abolished, not expanded.”

Instead of expanding the Selective Service System, Congress should end it once and for all. Fortunately, Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., and U.S. Reps. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and Rodney Davis, R-Ill., have sponsored legislation to end the Selective Service System entirely. That is the best path to equality.

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Where is the Peace Movement?

When I began a review of notes from my early years with AFSC, I already remembered many of the details of the New Hampshire peace movement in the early 1980s. Following the lead of AFSC in Vermont, we coordinated the introduction of resolutions into dozens of Town Meetings in March of 1982 calling on the United States and Soviet Union to halt—or “freeze”–all further production, testing and deployment of nuclear warheads and the missiles and planes designed to deliver them to targets across the globe. The surprising success of the Town Meeting campaign, in communities which by and large voted Republican, caught the attention of national political leaders and changed the discourse over nuclear weapons at a time in which a popular president was leading a massive military build-up against a foe he termed “the evil empire.” Within three years, Ronald Reagan had shifted from a strategy based on waging and winning a nuclear war with the Soviet Union to one built around negotiations for nuclear limits. In 1985, Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came close to agreeing to the abolition of nuclear weapons. The basic story is clear in my memory.

But there were a lot of details of the peace movement’s vibrancy which had slipped from my memory. For example, the month after Freeze resolutions were adopted in 48 of the 61 New Hampshire towns which considered them, my staff report mentioned plans for a “New Englanders for Peace” march in Portsmouth, with 1000 people expected. The following month, rather casually, my report said 2500 people marched from Pierce Island, across the Piscataqua River from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to Pease Air Force Base in Newington. Fourteen busloads went from New Hampshire to New York for the massive peace rally in Central Park in May 1982, timed to coincide with a Special Session on Disarmament at the United Nations.

Meanwhile, seventeen organizations, including the NH People’s Alliance and the NH chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, were participating in a NH Fair Budget Coalition, which sought to get the attention of elected officials to skewed federal budget priorities. My notes report that among the 40 or 50 people attending an April 1983 “fair budget” forum were Congressman Norm D’Amours and Will Abbott, then state director for Congressman Judd Gregg. “I set up a ‘penny poll,’” my notes say, “where people got the opportunity to ‘vote’ on how they wanted their tax dollars spent; military spending proved very unpopular compared to health care, education, transportation, and housing.”

And as I contemplate our current situation, in which a president averse to diplomacy and enamored of nuclear weapons drives a mostly horrendous foreign policy with little public resistance and shifts the public treasury more and more to military programs, I have to wonder why we were able to mount an effective peace movement in the Reagan period and seem to be unable to do so now.

I offer some thoughts on this and invite yours.

“We are surrounded by wars and rumors of war.”

First, let’s look at the current situation. Paul Shannon summed it up recently in a talk at the conference on “The Next Two Years and Beyond,” held in Boston shortly after the 2018 election. After describing the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Yemen, with weapons sold to U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, Paul observed, “That’s just one war, Yemen.’ He went on:

But we are surrounded today by wars and rumors of war:

A new base in Syria

War in Afghanistan

Troops back in Iraq.

Drone attacks all over.

Our president withdraws from the Iran nuclear deal even though Iran lived up to all its requirements. Instead he imposes deadly sanctions on Iran that will kill many as they did in Iraq under Bill Clinton. And he builds a dangerous alliance with Saudi Arabia and Israel specifically to confront Iran. A massive new war is not out of the question.

Our president has announced he will withdraw from the INF nuclear treaty with Russia, the very treaty that ended the cold war in the late 1980s.

Meanwhile Washington continues Obama’s trillion-dollar modernization of our nuclear arsenal.

The Pentagon’s new nuclear posture review makes using nuclear weapons thinkable.

NATO conducts military exercises near the Russian border after Russia has conducted its own massive military maneuvers. And the demonization of Russia by liberals and the Democrats rolls on.

And tragically we see the growing glorification of the military as the only institution in the country that Americans feel proud of.

Paul says, “The peace movement is building itself up again to counter these dangers and offer alternatives.” I hope this is not just wishful thinking.

It’s not that there is no activism. Consider the 2017 “Women’s March,” considered “the largest single-day protest in U.S. history” (although the largest assembly, in Washington, was still smaller than the 1982 disarmament rally in New York). Or consider the Families Belong Together rallies of 2018, when mobilizations took place in some 700 cities and towns to protest the cruelties of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement practices.

The Peace Movement is Hard to Find in “The Resistance”

And yet, the anti-war movement is hard to detect amidst the “resistance” to Trumpist assaults on democracy and human rights. Opposition to militarism and ranks low on the progressive agenda. Presented with a resolution my own town passed earlier this year calling for a shift of public resources away from the military, my liberal Congresswoman said the issue ranks too low among her constituents’ concerns for it to matter.

Imagine you are a high school junior, born in 2001. Your country has been at war in Afghanistan for your entire life, but you will rarely hear about it in what passes for the news. And while working class people continue to enlist in the military – perhaps out of a sense of patriotism, perhaps out of a need for gainful employment with benefits, perhaps for lack of other attractive options – you may not know there are people in your own community who oppose the war and want it to end. If you think about it at all, you might conclude that perpetual war is a normal state of being.

It might be said that the urgency of other issues – racist police practices, institutionalized xenophobia, climate disruption, toxic masculinity come to mind – distracts attention from international events and U.S. foreign policy. But when I think back to the 1980s, I recall a period disturbingly similar to the present period, yet with a powerful peace movement.

Donald Trump’s Political Ancestry

In a sense, Reagan can be seen as Trump’s closest political ancestor. Coming out of the world of entertainment, with little interest in policy details and an understanding of the world based on the plots of movies in which he starred, he was known as “the great communicator” for his ability to sway people with platitudes and a promise to return America to a (white) paradise that never was. Reagan’s domestic policy priorities were tax cuts, deregulation, and increased military spending at the expense of human welfare programs. Sound familiar?

Reagan brought with him into his administration a troop of ideologues who would be right at home in the Trump White House. There was Attorney General Ed Meese, a Reagan confidante who was forced to resign in the midst of a corporate bribery scandal. As top law enforcer, Meese believed there was no need for police to inform suspects of their right to remain silent. “The thing is,” he told US News and World Report, “you don’t have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That’s contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.” (Meese later served on Trump’s transition team.)

There was James Watt, the Interior Secretary who believed environmental destruction was a sign that the second coming of Jesus was at hand. There was Oliver North, who ran arms to Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries out of the National Security Council after Congress barred the CIA from doing it themselves. There was Chester Crocker, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, who engineered the “constructive engagement” approach to South African apartheid as a friendlier alternative to the Carter administration’s human rights focus. And there was General T.K. Jones, head of civil defense planning in the Pentagon, who famously said of nuclear war, “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.”

Resistance in the Reagan Era

The people rose up. When the AIDS crisis emerged, gay activists protested the administration’s callous disregard for their lives and forced the pharmaceutical industry to produce affordable drugs. The anti-apartheid movement spread from city to city, state to state, and campus to campus, forcing governments to withdraw economic cooperation with the South African regime, aiding in its eventual collapse. Nearly half a million people joined the AFL-CIO sponsored Solidarity March in Washington after Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers.

A massive solidarity and anti-intervention movement grew up in response to the administration’s aggression against Nicaragua and its support for brutal right-wing regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala. People of faith flocked to the border between Nicaragua and Honduras to “witness for peace.” Churches offered sanctuary to immigrants who had fled violence only to be denied a lawful right to remain in the U.S. Activists developed a “pledge of resistance,” a plan for nationwide sit-ins at local Congressional offices in the event of a Nicaragua invasion. When the administration declared an economic embargo instead, “Pledge groups across the country planned and executed acts of civil disobedience across 80 cities in 16 states, with over 10,000 demonstrators and 2,000 arrestees,” according to the Global Nonviolence Data Base. Pledge of Resistance actions expanded to 42 states by 1985.

The nuclear disarmament movement, which had been quiet since atmospheric testing was banned in the early 1960s, sprang back into life. With the 1979 “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race,” the short paper by Randall Forsberg that outlined a demand for a US-USSR nuclear freeze, as a rallying point, the movement spread rapidly in response to the Reagan administration’s nuclear build-up, its doctrine calling for the USA to “prevail” in an all-out nuclear war, and the president’s inclination to see the US-Soviet conflict as a battle between good and evil. It wasn’t just the Freeze Campaign itself. There was Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament, inspired by Dr. Helen Caldicott’s apocalyptic warnings. Beyond War, a California-based group including ex-CIA officials, reached professional class audiences with the message that war was “obsolete” in the nuclear age. Physicians for Social Responsibility provided clinical warnings about the actual health implications of nuclear war. Bridges for Peace, Promoting Enduring Peace, and others promoted people-to-people exchanges with communities on the other side of “the iron curtain.” Ground Zero, founded by a former National Security Council staff member who didn’t even support the Freeze, ran educational programs on nuclear dangers alongside the rest of the movement.

Within a rather short time, the movement grew large enough to affect pop culture. I remember the “Bloom County” comic strip making friendly fun of the New England town meetings with a character introducing a resolution to fill missile silos with pudding. “99 Luftballons,” a German pop song, became “99 Red Balloons,” a warning about the danger of accidental nuclear war in a hit English language version. The movement reached its biggest cultural impact with the 1983 release of a TV film, “The Day After,” depicting the aftermath of a nuclear war. According to my staff reports, I joined the publisher of the right-wing Union Leader newspaper and a few others for a live, post-film panel discussion afterward at the local ABC affiliate.

By 1985, Reagan’s attitude had been adjusted. A new Soviet leader, determined to find a way out of endless conflict, made it possible for the US and USSR to get back on track for nuclear arms control if not on a path toward abolition. By the end of the decade, the Cold War was over, leaving too many people with the impression that the danger of nuclear war was in the past. But we had made a mark on history.

Why were we able to build such a powerful movement?

For one thing, Reagan was elected barely five years after the United States was booted out of Vietnam. By 1975, the war there was not only massively unpopular, but the resistance movement had developed a powerful critique of the U.S. policies which got us there in the first place. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had put it at Riverside Church in 1967, “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”

“These are revolutionary times,” Dr. King said. “All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born.” For growing numbers of participants in the anti-war movement, the United States wasn’t just wrong, it was on the wrong side. In other words, the war was not just built on lies, it was built on a deeply rooted and largely bi-partisan policy of aggressive imperialism. And with the ideology of the war system based in extreme anti-communism, the ideology of the peace movement was generally anti-anti-communist if not decidedly leftist.

By the mid-70s, the peace movement was looking at the U.S. role in the Caribbean, in Central and South America, in South Africa and the “frontline states,” and in the oil-rich Middle East. That Reagan’s election came before such lessons had been forgotten made it easier to mobilize the public to oppose a reprise of Cold War militarism.

Another development was the rise of the movement against nuclear power, especially in New England where the Freeze movement would find its first active expressions. After years of largely ineffective anti-nuclear intervention by mainstream environmental groups, the shift to nonviolent direct action at nuclear construction sites in Montague, Massachusetts and Seabrook, New Hampshire gave mostly young “No Nukes” activists a chance to apply lessons learned from anti-war, civil rights, and feminist struggles of the previous period. The Clamshell Alliance, the network of locally based New England groups which led the Seabrook protests, was unhesitant about linking opposition to nuclear power and weapons. It was internationalist in orientation, actively seeking ties to the anti-apartheid movement and to groups challenging the pro-nuclear, anti-communist Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines.

Although the Clamshell peaked in 1978, New England was still peppered with local No Nukes groups when Reagan was elected two years later. Not only did those groups provide fertile ground for a revived nuclear disarmament movement, they provided leaders with community and political organizing experience. Here we might single out for special attention Randy Kehler, the Vietnam era war resister credited with inspiring Daniel Ellsberg to release the Pentagon Papers. Kehler later settled in Franklin County, Massachusetts, where he was active in the local Alternative Energy Coalition opposing the Seabrook and Montague nukes. In 1980, he was the lead organizer of the referendum campaign that first put the nuclear freeze to a popular vote.

Why Not Now?

What I’m trying to understand is why a similar form of resistance, focused on U.S. foreign and military policy and especially the danger of nuclear war, has not arisen since Trump’s election. It’s not like we weren’t warned when candidate Trump revealed he had no idea what the “nuclear triad” is, or when he reportedly asked about the nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, “if we have them, why can’t we use them?”

Could it be that the intense anti-war sentiment aroused by George W. Bush’s war in Iraq has thoroughly dissipated? At the time, it seemed like anti-war sentiment was not based just on reaction to American body bags but to a fuller critique of U.S. policy in southwest Asia. Didn’t significant parts of the anti-war movement develop an analysis that probed deeper than W’s personal animus against Saddam Hussein and the orchestrated campaign of lies about weapons of mass destruction?

Could it be that the trauma induced by the 9/11 terrorist attacks was so deep that the American public has been cowed into accepting anything done in the name of national security? That’s a tempting theory, but what, then, do we make of the massive movement that opposed the Iraq war? Recall the demonstrations in 150 U.S. cities and hundreds more across the globe on February 15, 2003, termed “the largest protest event in human history.” The NY Times equated the anti-war movement to a “superpower” rival of the U.S. and its military allies.

Yes, the “baby boomers” who grew up under the shadow of The Bomb and who hid under their desks in civil defense drills were more sensitive to nuclear dangers than the millennials who grew up after the Cold War had ended. But where is the foreign policy agenda of the baby boomer progressives who make up such a large component of the anti-Trump resistance?

Did the election of Barack Obama, who ran for president as an anti-war candidate and left office as droner-in-chief, cast a magic spell over the public? Can the fact that the massive nuclear build-up began with Obama’s approval account for the fact that Trump’s policy – largely an extension of his predecessor’s – make it immune from serious scrutiny? Were progressives that reluctant to criticize Obama that their critical capacities were wiped out?

Which brings me to the relationship between progressives and the Democratic Party. Could it be that progressive activists find it harder to distance themselves from the Democrats than they did in earlier generations? The 1960s anti-war movement arose in resistance to a Democratic president with liberal tendencies on the domestic front. While the movement later found champions among Democratic Senators like McCarthy and McGovern, and some of its leaders (e.g. Tom Hayden) found their way into Democratic politics, it did not lose its ability to critique a bi-partisan foreign policy consensus rooted in Cold War ideology and the dictates of capitalism.

That Hilary Clinton was a hawk offers little explanation, for foreign policy played little role in the 2016 campaign and her support was largely based on anti-Trump sentiments.

What of Bernie Sanders, who led a serious (he called it a “political revolution,” after all) alternative approach that almost captured the Democratic Party? I recall one of his earliest campaign stops in Concord, New Hampshire, months before the first-in-the-nation presidential primary, when he was asked about the power of the military-industrial-complex. Acknowledging its unwarranted influence, Bernie was quick to shift to more comfortable territory. “The military-industrial-complex is enormously powerful, no question about it,” he said, adding “You have on Wall Street six financial institutions that have assets that are equivalent to sixty percent of the GDP of the United States. You have big energy companies who are unbelievably powerful. So, I think what you have is a ruling class in America.” Then he was back to the power of insurance and drug companies to block progress toward single-payer health care.

Bernie’s campaign, consistent with his Congressional career, was built on economic issues: jobs, wages, health care, education. For Sanders (and much of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party), even international trade is considered primarily as a domestic issue. Despite Hilary’s reputation as a hawk, Bernie never tried to make an alternative to the bi-partisan national security consensus a significant component of his campaign. Could that be why his legions of followers have failed to do so as well?

Two months before the 2018 election, Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation wrote “the progressive left’s national security policy has been mostly missing in action.“ That opinion is hard to argue with, and there are plenty of good outlines for what such a policy would be. But without some clamor from below, we can’t expect an agenda to have much clout.

Earlier this week, the town council in Durham, New Hampshire, approved a resolution calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Seacoast Peace Response, a local group formed after the 9-11 attacks, is working with activists in other communities to bring similar resolutions before City Councils and Town Meetings in the coming months. With the 2020 New Hampshire Presidential Primary about 14 months away and the tide of possible presidential candidates visiting the Granite State starting to rise, the timing is excellent.

Another ray of hope comes from the Poor People’s Campaign: a national call for moral revival. Following Dr. King’s lead, the campaign sees militarism, along with racism, poverty, and ecological devastation as inter-related pillars of an unjust system that needs radical change. As a new Congress takes office, this is a good time for a new peace movement to make its voice heard.

What do you think it will take?

December 7, 2018

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“This is our Moment” to Mobilize against New Nuclear Weapons

William Perry with Dr. Ira Helfand

The initial down payments toward the production of an entirely new generation of missiles, submarines and bombers designed to deliver a new generation of nuclear warheads are already in the federal budget. The ultimate pricetag would be in the vicinity of a trillion dollars if all the weapons on the Pentagon’s shopping list are produced. But it’s not too late to stop the nuclear assembly lines and get back to the business of nuclear abolition. That was the emphasis of a conference on “Reducing the Dangers of Nuclear War” held April 2 at MIT in Cambridge

“Once you start bending metal, it’s almost impossible to stop,” Joe Cirincione said at one of the workshops. Cirincione, a former staff member of the House Armed Services Committee who now heads the pro-disarmament Ploughshares Fund, said that means we have two to three years to stop the new weapons systems. “This is our moment,” he said.

The conference brought together an impressive array of activists and scholars, plus William Perry, the former Secretary of Defense who has joined the call for nuclear weapons abolition. “The danger of a nuclear catastrophe is higher today than at any time during the Cold War,” he warned. Perry is particularly alarmed by the proposal for a new cruise missile, the nuclear armed version of which would be indistinguishable from one carrying non-nuclear explosives until after it detonates. Eight thousand American and Russian nuclear weapons were dismantled while he was at the helm at the Pentagon, he said, but “we’re going backwards today.”

Given the stakes, “backwards” is an understatement. As Dr. Ira Helfand of Physicians for Social Responsibility reminded the conference attenders, detonation of a nuclear bomb over a major city would not only kill huge numbers of people in an instant, but by destroying hospitals and the doctors and nurses who work there, the ability to respond to burns and other injuries would be crippled. And as Alan Robock, a professor of environmental science from Rutgers stressed, detonation of a relatively small share of the world’s nuclear arsenal could throw so much smoke into the upper atmosphere that it could bring on a global cooling process so severe that food production would fall worldwide by 20 to 40% for a 5-year period.

Mary Popeo of Global Zero with Joe Cirincione

“Only nuclear disarmament will prevent catastrophe,” he said.

It’s not just the number of nuclear weapons that poses a danger, it’s also their design. One of the features of the warheads now being pursued by the US nuclear weapons labs and the corporations that run them (on a for-profit basis) is increased accuracy. Aron Bernstein, an MIT emeritus professor of physics, said “when we make the missiles more accurate, we make them more likely to be perceived as a first strike weapon.” They might even be more likely to actually be intended for first strike or battlefield use, something which should not even be contemplated but which becomes an option for military strategists once they enter the arsenal.

Nuclear weapons have proven to be no use against terrorists or the regimes with which the USA has been in conflict in recent years. They certainly make no contribution to efforts to fight climate change, mass migration, growing inequality, and other dilemmas that ought to be top priorities. Whether “deterrence” even works is debatable. But nuclear weapons have proven useful to US leaders time and time again, said Joseph Gerson of the AFSC, who has documented the ways in which nuclear threats have backed up foreign policy objectives starting with their use in Japan 70 years ago. And they are certainly useful to the corporations that stand to get the contracts for new missiles, subs, and bombers.

That’s why the conference wasn’t just about spreading the alarm, it also spread news about a variety of ways to challenge the nuclear-industrial-complex. For a prime example, Cambridge’s Mayor Denise Simmons used the occasion to announce her city’s new policy of divesting city funds from corporations that build nuclear weapons. In this, her administration has the aid of a new web-based tool from MIT’s Future of Life Institute. The Responsible Investing Made Easy tool lists companies that produce nuclear weapons, cluster bombs, and landmines. It also gives grades to mutual funds which claim to be socially responsible. (Spoiler Alert: some of the funds have investments in other financial firms that invest in weapons makers.) The Netherlands-based Don’t Bank on the Bomb project has another set of useful lists.

Short of nuclear abolition there are steps, such as taking missiles off high alert status, which can reduce nuclear dangers. Ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and further nuclear reductions are important steps in the right direction. But for any of these steps to take place, the movement against nuclear weapons needs to grow. Stay in touch with AFSC and your local Peace Action chapter to get involved.

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What does the peace movement need?

A scruffy young man wearing a knapsack approached Martha Yager at a rally.  “How do I get to world peace,” he asked?

“Practice,” said Martha.

Okay, that didn’t really happen.  But it’s a pretty good summary of Martha’s message to a small group gathered at the Concord Friends Meeting House in Canterbury on September 23.

Martha, who used to live in New Hampshire but now coordinates the American Friends Service Committee’s South Eastern New England Program, was invited to make a return visit as part of NH Peace Action’s “Amazing Women for Peace” series.  Acknowledging that the peace movement is in rough shape at the moment, Martha asked her audience to find a partner and answer the questions, “When I think about the state of the world, the thing that concerns me most is __________,” and “When I think about that, it makes me feel __________.”

“It’s all pretty overwhelming,” she said, as participants expressed concerns about apathy, resource depletion, climate change, inequality, and violence.   And it’s no surprise that “people kinda’ zone out,” she said.

“It’s not an accident that people are being encouraged into isolation, disconnected from each other,” she observed.   The powers that be use their power to silence people and keep people feeling powerless even when we’re not.

Martha recommended three types of action to pursue:

First, “holding actions,” or those that help people survive with dignity in a world where that can be difficult.  Local examples might include volunteering at the seasonal homeless shelter at South Church in Concord, a project Martha started several years ago.

Second, actions that support life sustaining practices outside the status quo system.  Examples include community gardens, time banks, food co-ops, anything that helps to create “a new society in the shell of the old.”

Third, Martha said we should support actions that lead to a change in consciousness, that help us shift from a paradigm of “power over” to “power with.”

We are small actors in the midst of a complex world, so we should think about how our small actions can support changes that are likely to extend beyond our lifetimes to bear fruit. 

And we need to practice, in two senses of the word.  We need to put our ideas and values into practice, not leave them in our heads and hearts.  And we need to try them out, try them over again, and see what works. 

Martha finished up by asking pairs to fill in the blank:  “The thing I’m most passionate about is __________.”

There was some discussion of whether “passion” was what we should strive for, but the point was clear:  our capacity to make change will depend our willingness to put ourselves into it. 

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