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Hang Up on War WRL has joined the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTCC) and Iraq Pledge of Resistance in launching the Hang Up on War! campaign. Each month, many people unknowingly contribute to the war policies they resolutely oppose—because every telephone bill includes a 3% federal excise tax that helps to pay for them. This tax on monthly telephone bills, while relatively small, raised $89 billion from 1966 to 2001, and about $6 billion per year since. Hang Up On War! calls on individuals to send a message to Washington that says “not with our money” by refusing to pay their federal phone tax, an act of civil disobedience. The campaign encourages participants to take their resisted phone tax money and give it to groups working to heal the wounds of war. To find out what’s involved in signing your commitment to resist the federal phone tax, see the website at (www.hanguponwar.org). Hang Up On War! P.O. Box 7396, Silver Spring, MD 20907; pledgecoordinator@starpower.net, or NWTRCC, PO Box 150553, Brooklyn, NY 11215; nwtrcc@nwtrcc.org. Thousands
Gather to More than ten thousand people gathered November 21-23 outside the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, in the most diverse demonstration yet of opposition to the School of the Americas, renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (SOA/WHISC), a combat-training school for Latin American soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared”, massacred and forced into refuge by SOA graduates. The gathering culminated with a solemn “funeral” procession. Fifty-one people were arrested, most after entering the base in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience. They likely face three to six months in federal prison. Since protests against SOA/WHISC began more than ten years ago, 210 people have been sentenced to prison and probation for civil disobedience at the school. SOA Watch activists have collectively served more than 75 years in federal prisons across the country. From inside Ft. Benning, the U.S. military blasted loud music at the peaceful, permitted demonstration outside of the gates of the base. Throughout the weekend Columbus Police used metal detectors to search every person attending the demonstration. One person was arrested by city police for refusing to participate in the unconstitutional police search. “We will not allow these blatantly unconstitutional attempts to drown out our voices,” said Bill Quigley, a professor of law at Loyola Law School and lawyer for SOA Watch. “These childish actions by the federal, state and local government only strengthen our resolve to stand up for our rights and all the victims of the School of the Americas.” The Columbus convergence concludes a week of resistance to empire and corporate globalization. Thousands gathered in Miami to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and 100,000 gathered in London during Bush’s visit to protest the invasion and occupation of Iraq. SOA Watch organizers have been coordinating with organizers in Miami and working in solidarity with organizers in England. The three mobilizations released a joint statement of solidarity. The Atlanta Independent Media Center covered the annual SOA/WHISC protests and civil disobedience live from just outside the main gates of Ft. Benning. See liveradio.indymedia.org/soa-mp3. m3ufor audio coverage. For more information, SOA Watch, PO Box 4566, Washington, DC 20017; (202)234-3440; info@soaw.org; www.soaw.org Greenpeace Indicted In a move that threatens the future of Greenpeace, the Justice Department has filed a criminal indictment against the direct action environmental group. On April 12, 2002, two Greenpeace activists boarded the Jade, a commercial ship transporting mahogany illegally exported from the Amazon rainforest. The activists unfurled a banner stating: “President Bush: Stop Illegal Logging.” Minor charges against individual activists for the action off Florida were settled last year. This past July, the Justice Department charged Greenpeace under an obscure 1872 law originally intended to end the practice of “sailor-mongering,” or the luring of sailors with liquor and prostitutes from their ships. The law appears to have been used only twice. A revised indictment was filed in November. Greenpeace activists boarded the Jade with a banner reading “President Bush: Stop Illegal Logging.” The group’s Executive Director John Passacantando said in a statement, “Their purpose was to spur authorities to search the ship and seize the mahogany, whose importation violated U.S. law. Instead, the authorities arrested the Greenpeace activists and, amazingly, did nothing to halt the mahogany smuggling.” “Across the country, leading organizations, legal scholars and citizens are calling this prosecution—the first time in U.S. history that the government has indicted an entire organization for the free speech activities of its supporters—unprecedented, troubling and vindictive,” Passacantando said. In an amicus brief, the ACLU of Florida and People for the American Way wrote, “For two hundred years, the United States government has refrained from prosecuting advocacy groups whose members occasionally engage in peaceful civil disobedience to convey a constitutionally protected message. The prosecution of Greenpeace indicates a sea change in that policy. Until now, only individual members of those groups have been prosecuted for their nonviolent, albeit unlawful, acts of civil disobedience.” If convicted, Greenpeace could not only lose its tax-exempt status, but be forced to regularly report its activities to the government. Jon Cohen 1963-2003 Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her classic poem “Conscientious Objector,” wrote:
We are grief-stricken to report that Jon Cohen, who lived the ideals of these words for forty short years, passed away on October 13, 2003, after a three-year struggle with leukemia. Jon served on the War Resisters League’s National and Executive Committees continuously for close to 20 years: his entire adult life. In the League, he has been a persistent voice challenging us to engage in conflict with each other directly and honestly, to end men’s war against women, to stop white people’s war against people of color at home and worldwide, to confront institutionalized sexism and racism within our organization, to mobilize to end all wars. In the weeks and days before his death, Jon’s voice was a strong one on national conference calls of WRL’s Anti-Racism Task Force and Hiring Committee. Shortly before he died he wrote that “white people need to stop insisting on defining problems related to race and above all, must cease from telling people of color that there is no problem when people of color indicate that they perceive a problem. People of color live with overt and covert racism every minute. Those of us who are white miss a lot of the subtleties.” Jon’s life of activism was launched with inspiration from his mother, Carole, who was active in organizing “Impeach Nixon” rallies in their home town of Great Neck, NY, and later as an organizer of Mothers and Others Against the Draft. Upon turning eighteen, Jon refused to register for the draft. In his college years at Washington University in St. Louis, Jon was active in a wide range of political work, including a partially successful anti-apartheid divestment campaign and coalition-building work between the predominately white Social Action Collective and the Black Student Union. He was one of the first to graduate with a degree in Peace Studies, a major he helped create at the university. He was also involved in anti-sexist organizing, joining the Rape And Violence End Now (RAVEN) collective, eventually becoming editor of the Activist Men’s Journal and co-chair of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (www.nomas.org). He helped launch the Brotherpeace campaign, which continues to challenge men to “break the silence to end men’s violence” against women. At the time of his passing, Jon was a nationally renowned counselor, speaker and advocate for women’s rights, and served as assistant director of the Community Change Project of the Volunteer Counseling Service of Rockland County. He traveled the country, co-leading institutes to help communities develop comprehensive strategies to prevent and stop domestic violence. As a social worker and activist, Jon made it his mission to confront men who abuse and to hold men accountable. He taught, sharing his vision of nonviolence and insisting that love can be free of control, domination or abuse. Abusiveness and violence was chosen and taught, Jon would say, especially to men. Each of us, individually and collectively, can choose another path. Barbara Deming once challenged men in WRL to set up counseling centers for men who waged war against women, in the same way WRL had set up draft and military counseling centers to help men coerced into waging war against the peoples of Southeast Asia. Jon did as much to heed this call as any man alive, but the challenge remains. Jon also served on the Local Advisory Board of WBAI/Pacifica Radio, where he helped win the fight against Pacifica’s corporatization. He was member of the anti-imperialist collective Resistance in Brooklyn. A friend and supporter of many political prisoners, he was active with the NYC Free Mumia Abu Jamal Coalition. After being diagnosed eight years ago with Ewing’s sarcoma, Jon became devoted to integrative healing, combining conventional and alternative medicine in his tenacious fight to survive. In his final years, he became a passionate critic of the abuses of the medical-industrial complex. Jon is survived by his parents, Carole and Richard, his siblings Debra and Laurie, and his devoted life partner Liz Roberts. As Liz, outreach coordinator of New York’s Brecht Forum, wrote, “He played, and danced, and enjoyed people like it was an art.” A proud bisexual, Jon was a great lover of all music, and a special devotee of the Grateful Dead and Ani DiFranco. Phyllis Frank, director of the Volunteer Counseling Service, read a group poem at Jon’s funeral, stating: “Jon was a light. Now his radiance is part of the cosmos. He is dancing on rainbows.” Jon is also survived by a world of friends whom he made family, including the two of us—who knew Jon for 20 years each. Jon’s friends are planning a celebratory memorial, to be held in New York on February 14, and are collecting tributes (which can be sent to us care of the Nonviolent Activist). Tributes, and a list of organizations accepting contributions in Jon’s memory, can be viewed at www.wbai.org. —Sam Diener and Matt Meyer Arthur Kinoy, 1920-2003 The movements for justice and peace lost one of our most heroic figures when lawyer-activist-teacher Arthur Kinoy died September 19, just days short of his 83rd birthday. Arthur was best known for his long list of innovative and, often, successful legal strategies on behalf of civil rights and civil liberties; his precedent-setting work before the U.S. Supreme Court in Dombrowski v. Pfister in 1965 resulted in a landmark ruling that barred Southern states from prosecuting many civil rights activists. Other clients included Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the Chicago Eight and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, along with unions under attack by McCarthyism and hundreds of African-Americans fighting for the right to fight for their rights. But as hard as he worked in the courtroom, Arthur worked just as energetically outside it to preserve and expand the progressive network and infrastructure. The list of progressive organizations he helped found—including the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and the National Committee for Independent Political Action/Independent Progressive Politics Network—along with those such as the National Lawyers Guild for which he provided crucial support is almost as long as that of his legal clients. (He was also a longtime member and supporter of the War Resisters League.) He had a third career, as well, teaching for three decades at Rutgers University Law School, where he helped shape the careers of hundreds of future “people’s lawyers.” Much of Arthur’s work is detailed in his 1983 autobiography, Rights on Trial: The Odyssey of a People’s Lawyer. What no book could capture, however—even his own—was the ebullience that made it a joy to work with him, even if briefly. (Not long ago, I had the pleasure and frustration of trying to moderate Arthur on a panel on civil liberties in the current political climate, a task I failed at, as had Supreme Court justices and congressional committee members before me.) Arthur’s death is a loss to all the causes he fought for, and all of us who fought with him grieve with his wife, Barbara Webster, and his children Peter and Joanne. We are all grateful that his giant legacy lives on. —Judith Mahoney Pasternak |
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