Kenyon Farrow

Opposing a GI & Veteran-Focused Anti-War Movement: Seven Reasons

By Tamara K. Nopper
July 9, 2007

As an activist involved in anti-war and counter-military recruitment work, I have been increasingly concerned about the growing GI and veteran-focused tendency of the broad anti-war movement. When my friend returned from the US Social Forum held in Atlanta recently, I became even more concerned when I saw the number of anti-war panels emphasizing GIs and veterans. Finally, after reading different announcements promoting veteran and military family gatherings on this past 4th of July, including the problematic discourses used to frame some of these events, I felt compelled to write.

Some may be surprised about my concerns given my anti-war work. Some may accuse me of just trying to be ultra-leftist, or worse, unsympathetic of the different realities faced by those who enlist. However, I also suspect that there are many out there, who, like me, struggle with what it means to understand the realities of GIs and veterans while simultaneously being active in anti-militarization and anti-imperialist work.

Specifically, I struggle with what is becoming the left’s uncritical embrace of GI and veteran-focused organizing. While I understand the importance of GIs and veterans speaking out against war, I struggle with some of the deep contradictions embedded in GI and veteran-focused work and what it means for organizing not only against the current war in Iraq but US militarization and empire. This is the political conundrum that I face when I talk with veterans that I know, read listservs and articles, attend events, or engage in anti-war and counter-military recruitment work. Thus, I write this essay to express my concerns and to connect with others who share them. And despite the obvious criticism from those who demand a solution before struggling with the problem, I do not pose a grand solution to this conundrum that I am exploring. Simply, I outline seven reasons why I am currently opposed to a GI and veteran-focused anti-war movement.

# 1: GI and veteran-focused activism over-emphasizes Iraq and Afghanistan as the only problems

While US GIs and veterans have been gaining more cache among the left for opposing the war in Iraq, not all of them oppose war and militarization in general. As such, we hear more about Iraq and then Afghanistan than any other military build-up, site of combat, or use of troops. This is a problem because it presumes that the only military build-up or expression of US supremacy through its military industrial complex is located in Iraq or Afghanistan. Or, it posits the notion that the build-up in Iraq and Afghanistan are unjust but that it is necessary to have US military presence in other countries.

To be fair, many GIs and veterans have, like other anti-war groups, “made connections” between Iraq and other sites of war or militarization, including Vietnam, Palestine, and New Orleans. In regards to Palestine, some groups have suffered for bringing attention to the Zionist occupation there. Activists have also made connections between Iraq and forms of domestic repression. It is important to make connections between different sites of militarization and state sanctioned violence. However, such gestures usually lead back to Iraq. When other situations are brought up they are automatically connected to Iraq as if they independently don’t deserve our attention. This was most obvious when, in the direct aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many activists depicted Katrina as if it could only be understood in relationship to Iraq—as if Katrina didn’t have a historical basis that preceded the current Iraq War.

Of course the current war against Iraq is of political and material importance. But I think that Kwame Ture provided us with a useful vocabulary for how to think about the over-emphasis on one locale. In 1966, Ture, then known as Stokely Carmichael, gave a speech opposing the Vietnam War at the University of California, Berkeley. As he put it, “One of the problems with the peace movement is that it’s just too caught up in Vietnam, and if we pull out the troops from Vietnam this week, next week you’d have to get another peace movement for Santo Domingo.” Related, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) made it a point, in their important 1966 statement on the Vietnam War, that US imperialism was not simply expressed with the spectacle of Vietnam. Indeed, SNCC emphasized those parts of the world that for the most part continue to be ignored today among anti-war activists, most noticeably African countries such as the Congo, South Africa, and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). In other words, Iraq and Afghanistan, like Vietnam, aren’t the only places anti-war activists need to focus on.

#2: GIs, veterans, and their supporters over-emphasize congressional and legal definitions of war and public support

Many who support a GI and veteran-focused movement tend to emphasize the “illegal nature” and supposed “contradictions” of the war in Iraq as their basis for speaking out and challenging US imperialism. Several well-known GI support groups and veterans organizations emphasize the illegal nature of the current Iraq War and that the war was predicated on lies and deception. They also go out of their way to point out that the current war in Iraq is an “unpopular war.”

The Bush regime was deceptive and the war in Iraq does violate international law—as do many US practices that a variety of activists have tried to bring before an international courtroom during the 20th century. Yet emphasis on notions of “unjust” and “illegal” war implies that wars are morally permissible if Congress ratifies it with no deception. More, the focus on Bush’s deception puts way too much attention on the Bush regime as the problem.

While I am no fan of Bush or his regime, we seem to forget that the Congress who helped, in the immediate sense, get us in the current Iraq War approved to give Bush unlimited war powers shortly after 9-11. Only Representative Barbara Lee stood alone in her dissent, just like the three individuals before her who refused to give unchecked power to presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson for World War II and the Vietnam War, respectively. That more did not join Representative Lee in her dissent is indicative of their cowardice or shared interests with the Bush regime.

Even some groups’ celebration of the Democrats getting back into Congress privileges a congressional interpretation of war and again, gives far too much moral power to those elected to office. Yet history and the present reveal that Congresses are willing, even with more information, to pass legislation that is extremely damaging to communities here and abroad. For those of us who understand the bankrupt notion of American electoral politics, Congress’ approval of Iraq, with or without information, is not the issue.

Related, an emphasis on the legalities of war suggests a belief in the fallacy of US democracy and civil society. The consideration of US democracy as a benign but now misdirected or unchecked process is predicated on political amnesia regarding both the nature of and implementation of US democracy and the related function of the US military.

Finally, to suggest that a war should be stopped because it is unpopular only contributes to the idea that a war is morally permissible if the majority of people within a nation support it. A logical extension of this conclusion is a faith in the ethics of the US public. This is a suspect assumption given that we have numerous examples demonstrating that only a minority of people in the US have any ethics when it comes to putting social justice before individual self-interests marked by race, gender, sexuality, and economic positions.

#3: Most GI and veteran-focused activism fails to address white supremacy

One of the major problems of GI and veteran groups today is that most fail to address white supremacy and its relationship to gender and sexuality politics. Many groups never mention racism, let alone white supremacy, among their main reasons for why they are against the war in Iraq. The closest some get is to claim that the war is unfair to the Iraqi people. While such statements are commendable, there is rarely mention of racism as an inherent part of any imperial project.

This is not much different from the statements of anti-war groups less preoccupied with GIs and veterans. Although many of their statements mention racism, the recruitment of communities of color, and even racial profiling, they give far more attention to detailing how immigrants or South Asians, Arabs, and Muslims have been affected by the “war on terror.” While of course repression of immigrants and South Asians, Arabs, and Muslims is inherently a white supremacist project, emphasis on these groups, for the most part, is not the same as fleshing out how other racialized groups have experienced homeland security measures or the “war on terror,” for that matter. Basically, whether GIs and veterans are featured or focused among organizations it generally results in either a silence regarding white supremacy or an over-emphasis on immigrant groups.

This is not to suggest that individual GIs and veterans don’t address racism in their work. Nor is it to minimize the efforts of more race and gender conscious GI and veteran-focused groups such as the recently formed Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN). Nevertheless, the failure among many GI and veteran-focused groups to have racism front and center in the debates regarding the military, raises a question about the leadership and operations of these organizations. Why is it that among GI and veteran-focused organizations (and the anti-war movement in general) we will see more about corporate profiteering (an economic and therefore “universal” concern among the broad spectrum of the middle and working classes) but very little about racism? And when racism is mentioned, why does the gesture seem obligatory? Why is it that critiques expressed by GIs and veterans that are given the most airtime tend to be limited to “economic” issues such as oil, land, corporations, and contracts? How is it that we have anti-imperialists with little or no race analysis becoming the most prominent GI and veteran-focused activists? Whatever the case, perhaps this is why David Duke voiced support for the positions of some of the most loved white anti-war activists expressing such rhetoric.

When racism is addressed among the GI and veteran-focused anti-war movement, it is usually in the context of non-white enlistees who have refused to go to or return to Iraq. It is important that the face of Iraq War resisters does not remain white. Yet this tendency to focus on people of color who refuse to go to Iraq misses the complexity of the non-white military experience.

For example, many veterans experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but the rates tend to be higher for non-white veterans and/or women. Researchers have argued that the experiences of racism and sexism (including physical and sexual violence), both in and outside of the military contribute to these higher rates of PTSD. More, research also shows that many African American veterans return to civilian life and experience the same meager job opportunities and discrimination in employment that may have compelled some of them to join in the first place. And the largest military court martial in US history was not the result of GIs and veterans resisting war (in the obvious sense)—it was in response to Jim Crow and the assault on Blacks attempting to defend themselves from police abuse.

In August of 1917, 150 Black soldiers of the Third Battalion of the Twenty-fourth US infantry marched on the city of Houston in response to Jim Crow both in the military and the civilian world. They were also responding to inaccurate reports that a Black corporal named Charles Baltimore had been killed while detained after intervening on behalf of a Black soldier who was assaulted and taken into custody for defending an African American woman being beaten by two white police officers. The white townspeople retaliated and several Black soldiers were killed and more than a dozen residents died. Subsequently, over sixty soldiers were tried in the first of several court martials. As L.V. Gaither describes in his book Loss of Empire: Legal Lynching, Vigilantism, and African American Intellectualism in the 21st Century : “Five were acquitted, four convicted of lesser charges, forty-two handed life sentences, and thirteen were sentenced to die. These men were summarily hanged on the morning of December 11, even before their sentences were publicly announced.” It is reported that many of the executed men were dumped in unmarked graves.

This situation reminds us that non-white GIs have not only risked their lives for challenging specific wars or unjust military policies. It reminds us that racism, as well as gender and sexuality politics, inform what soldiers experience and how they get dealt with by the military outside of the designated combat zones. More importantly, this situation reminds us that some of us are vulnerable to a myriad of issues that exist in the civilian world way before we enlist and possibly challenge the military from within. Demonstrated with this example, military personnel have been forced to address their lived realities of being racialized, gendered, and sexualized in the world. They have not only had to express political militancy against “unfair wars” but have had to deal with the reality of racial profiling, state and public violence, and everyday forms of discrimination and repression that affects life chances. But these realities are not addressed in the universalized calls against war promoted by many GIs, veterans, and their supporters.

This is not to suggest that organizations have no people in them raising these issues. People of color who are and/or promote GIs and veterans do raise these issues both within and outside of the organizations in which they work. Nevertheless, the general failure of GI and veteran-focused groups to emphasize white supremacy in their mission statements or platforms raises some urgent questions. For one, are there any possible linkages between the over-emphasis of the Iraq War by anti-war activists, the growing increase in GI-focused activism, and the fact that many white anti-war activists proclaim (with a sordid delight) that more white soldiers are dying on the front lines of the current war in Iraq than in the Vietnam War? Notwithstanding that such a comment is usually a disturbing way of saying “fuck you” to race-minded anti-war activists, it does make me wonder if there is any connection between GI-focused activism on the left and the continued absence of a conversation about race among the organizations given the most attention for their work with GIs and veterans. (more…)