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- WRL Activist Ellen Barfield Gets Jail Time for “Blood Money”
- 100s Demand Obama End Afghan & Iraq Wars, Close Guantanamo and Bagram, Surge Spending on Housing and Jobs, 61 Arrested at
- Coffin Walk to protest the Peace Prize for the War President
- Nicholson Baker to Give the War Resisters League’s “Dave Dellinger Lecture on Nonviolence”
- October 1, 2009 - Anti-War Groups Demand End to Afghan War, Demonstrate at the White House
- Justice Delayed is Justice Denied: Accountability, Torture, and the Obama Administration
- Anti-Torture Activists to Fast and Rally Sunday to Call on Obama to Close Guantanamo
- War Resisters Block IRS HQ, 32 arrested
- Killing People Is Not What I Am
- 61 Anti-Torture Demonstrators Arrested at The White House
NYC War Resisters League “Coffin Walk” to protest the Peace Prize for the War President
NYC War Resisters League "Coffin Walk" to protest the Peace Prize for the War President
DATE: Thursday, Dec. 10
TIME: Noon to 1 pm
BEGIN: Dag Hammarskjold Plaza (E. 47th St. and First Ave.)
END: Times Square Military Recruiting Station (43rd St. & Seventh Ave.)
On December 10, President Barack Obama accepts the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. The prize was established in 1895 to recognize "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies...”
Please join New York City War Resisters League as we march across mid-town Manhattan carrying coffins and the faces of war victims to declare that peace prizes should not go to war presidents.
We begin 12 noon at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza (East 47th, near 1st Avenue) Process across 42nd Street to the Times Square Recruiting Station Please email frida.berrigan@gmail.com if you plan on coming so we can plan for the number of coffins and signs we will bring.
At times, the prize has gone to tireless advocates for peace and justice like Martin Luther King Jr, Rigoberta Menchu Tum of Guatemala, Wangari Maathai of Kenya, Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams of Ireland and Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma. At other times, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee seems to make a choice out of George Orwell's 1984, where "war is peace.”
Just a week before traveling to Norway to accept his prize, President Obama announced to a war weary nation that he was sending 30,000 more men and women to fight in Afghanistan.
We march with coffins and the faces of Afghan victims of war.
We march to remind our fellow New Yorkers of the human costs of war.
We march because it is unconscionable that President Obama can increase the troops one day and accept a prize intended to honor the one who has done “the most or the best work … for the abolition or reduction of standing armies” just days later.
We march in solidarity with people in Norway and around the world who are protesting this choice on December 10.
We march because we believe that war is never the answer, that it is a failure of the imagination, something to be mourned and resisted instead of celebrated and extolled.
And, finally, we march in the hopes that President Barack Obama will heed the words of his fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner, Martin Luther King, Jr, who said as he accepted the Prize 45 years ago: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must
spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”
Read the Press Release
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