Civil Disobedience

“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when tyranny or inefficiency are great and unendurable . . . In other words when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”

Henry David Thoreau was of course referring to the Mexican American War, but his words hold true for any number of our military incursions, either overt or covert, via the CIA, into the Philippines, Yugoslavia, Panama, Cuba, Chile, Sudan, and today, Iraq.

What form could Thoreau’s exhortation to commit civil disobedience take today to actually be effective? The way I see it, every American soldier would have to refuse to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. Bush and the neocons went to war despite the millions worldwide who took to the streets to express their vehement opposition to the invasion. They’re certainly not going to end the war even if people are enraged enough to continue to stay in the streets or smash windows like they did in Seattle. During the Vietnam War we managed to stay in the streets, largely, I guess, because of a sustained youth movement fomenting on college campuses, the emerging of identity politics with Black Power and the Brown Berets, and the thousands of body bags that were brought home that touched thousands of other lives.

But what really ended the Vietnam War was when the soldiers there started to mutiny, refusing to fight the people the U.S. government told them were the enemy, and deciding the real enemies were their commanding officers. And oftentimes they were, literally as well as figuratively. For the past few years I’ve arranged for a group of Veterans for Peace from Santa Fe to come to the high school in Peñasco to make a presentation on Full Disclosure Recruiting. The Vets, who served in Korea, the Vietnam War, and the first Gulf War, try to provide the kids the kinds of information they need to make an informed choice, when deciding to join the military. It’s always disheartening when the first thing they ask is how many of the students have family or friends who are currently serving in the military, and 75 percent of them raise their hands. Military recruitment in northern New Mexico is extensive, and many of the kids have a long family history of military service.

One of the Vets who came was a woman named Joan Guffy. She served as an Air Force nurse in the Vietnam War, where she was exposed to Agent Orange and was twice raped by American military officers. She suffered from ovarian cancer and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: “The military is a macho system where women are demeaned. I had to be afraid of my own soldiers.” Joan died in 2007.

The soldiers who served in Vietnam were drafted, of course, and were there by default: their families weren’t rich enough and they weren’t educated enough or life-experienced enough (most of them were taken right out of high school) to be able to avoid the draft. The dehumanizing conditions fueled already existing feelings of futility and hopelessness, and their training to be killing machines backfired: there are stories of soldiers throwing grenades into their commanding officers tents and mutinying in the middle of battles, leaving the officers to make it on their own. Today, the men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are military volunteers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t from the same families and communities that supplied the Vietnam War. What will it take to raise their consciousness as to the futility of both their personal and societal positions, to “rebel and revolutionize” against their commanders and refuse to fight?

Maybe the straw that breaks the camel’s back will be the gut wrenching returns to duty of those who thought they were only signing on for one tour—or the older, National Guard men and women who have families, jobs, and lives that are devastated by two or three tours. There just aren’t enough of these volunteers, or guardsmen, to maintain a force that even the Bush administration begrudgingly admitted wasn’t enough to “liberate” Iraq. There’s even a movie about it playing right now, called Stop-loss, which all the critics say no one is going to go to because no one wants the war to be any closer than reading another article on the inside pages of the local newspaper.

In an interview we did with Ike DeVargas for La Jicarita News in the late 1990s, he told us how he had come to his activism. “Most of us went there [Vietnam] believing what the government told us, that what they were doing over there was good and necessary, and most of us came back knowing that if they were lying to us over there they were lying to us here, too.” It took Ike only one tour to make the connection, and it led to a lifetime of civil disobedience. If only all the other soldiers would refuse to take up their weapons, just one time, all together, we could end these obscene wars.