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A Brand-New Day Without the Pentagon

by Chris Ney

Day Without the Pentagon enters its fourth year in a political environment that is radically different from the one in which it was born.

When the program was conceived as WRL’s primary disarmament work during a retreat in 1996, the League’s Disarmament Task Force was fresh from a successful Washington protest against a half-century of nuclear arms and against the Smithsonian Institution’s unapologetic exhibit of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. The protest disrupted the exhibit’s opening, and the WRL-produced counter-exhibit describing 50 years of nuclear terror and resistance to the bomb was a hit across the country (and remains a popular educational piece for display during the August anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—see ad, p. 24).

Following the Enola Gay project, WRL decided to develop a more thorough- going challenge to U.S. militarism. The result, based on the notion that the United States commitment to militarism plays out like an addiction, was our decision to declare a Pentagon-free day every October—something like the Great American Smokeout or A Day Without Art.

On October 24, 1997, organizers protested that “addiction” at more than 50 symbols of militarism across the country—recruiting stations, weapons manufacturers, military bases, etc. In 1998 we set our sites on the best-known symbol of all: the Pentagon. WRL’s rally and civil disobedience there, timed to follow our 75th-anniversary conference, received national press coverage and was the largest Pentagon demonstration in a decade.

The next year, we went back to local actions, this time focused specifically on military recruiters. But one 1999 protest merged A Day Without the Pentagon with an action focused on very different issues: the Kensington Welfare Rights Union’s March of the Americas, which sought to bring the issue of poverty as a human rights abuse to the attention of the world community. The march united anti-poverty activists from across the Americas to march from Washington to the United Nations; on October 2—the day named for Pentagon actions—they made a special stop at Lockheed-Martin’s headquarters to point to the military giant’s role in welfare reform.

Activists Rising
The common action was emblematic of the new circumstances in which A Day Without the Pentagon is taking place. At the time of its launch in 1997, grassroots activism and nonviolent direct action were at a low ebb. U.S. militarism had slipped from public consciousness. Despite the Republican-led social-program slashing budget battles of those years, the Pentagon remained out of the crossfire. Although the Soviet Union had collapsed more than half a decade earlier, military spending was still at Cold War levels. And U.S. military incursions had become scarcely newsworthy, with “humanitarianism”—the newest U.S. rationale for its interventions in places like Haiti, Somalia, or Bosnia—splitting the long- standing alliance between human rights organizations and anti-intervention groups. There was little cooperation among traditional peace organizations, and no national disarmament network.

The last three years, however, have witnessed dramatic changes in the world—for the Pentagon and for grassroots activism. A few months after the Pentagon action in 1998, the U.S. began an extensive bombing campaign against Iraq. Earlier in the year, President Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks against Afghanistan and Sudan, allegedly to punish a suspected terrorist. Those actions set the stage for what might be termed a Clinton doctrine: Use high-tech weapons against targets of questionable military value while exposing U.S. personnel to minimum military risk on the field—and the U.S. president to minimal political risk in the polls. That strategy found more complete expression in the NATO-led war against Yugoslavia, a war that split many progressives because of its purported objective of preventing genocide. Although many claimed that those military actions were meant to distract from the president’s embarrassing impeachment hearings, they fell against the backdrop of ongoing U.S. efforts to reinforce global hegemony in a unipolar world. Seen in that context, it is not surprising that Clinton championed the largest increase in military spending since the Reagan administration and revived discussion of a long-discredited “Star Wars” missile defense system. Those efforts, along with the Senate’s stinging rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, have brought U.S. nuclear policy to the center of the current presidential race. U.S. militarism is now receiving more public attention than it has for many years.

So is grassroots action. In the aftermath of the successful actions to stop the World Trade Organization’s meeting in Seattle last November and the well-publicized protests in Washington against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund this past April, nonviolent direct action is a dramatically re-energized tactic. In addition to struggles against corporate-dominated globalization, civil disobedience has been employed more and more by activists with diverse concerns ranging from environmentalism to the death penalty and police brutality. After a long hiatus, more and more people are challenging state and corporate power. Nonviolence training, affinity groups and other protest tactics receive mainstream media coverage, bringing those ideas to a wider audience than our movements usually reach.

So far, those movements have paid scant attention to U.S. militarism, its support of global capitalism’s repression of poor communities at home and abroad and its relationship to the prison-industrial complex. But the peace movement, with its antimilitarist analysis, is growing too—and, like the other movements, becoming better organized. An important development has been the formation of the National Coalition for Peace and Justice, a network of peace groups that came together during the war in Yugoslavia and recognized the need to continue a collective effort to oppose U.S. military interventionism, expose the costs of U.S. militarism, and propose a new internationalism—in short, to challenge the myths of U.S. exceptionalism and humanitarian intervention.

It is in that context that A Day Without the Pentagon will continue to draw connections between militarism and other social ills. The League has produced a series of Day Without the Pentagon leaflets relating militarism to causes as diverse as corporate welfare, feminism and the environment. To infuse still more antimilitarist analysis into the anti- globalization dialogue, WRL’s disarmament program is preparing a packet of articles on militarism and globalization for release later this year. We’re also encouraging local organizers to organize forums and other public events with like-minded groups that have a different political focus, such as last year’s action with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union or a recent discussion we held in New York City on militarism and welfare reform. We brought together William Hartung, one of the nation’s leading experts on arms manufacture and military contractors, and Liz Krueger, an equally prominent welfare policy expert. They shared a common analysis (and suspicion toward) Lockheed-Martin for its multifaceted work manufacturing weapons and running privatized “welfare” programs. Making those analytical and organizational connections in communities across the country will strengthen our organizing and build stronger networks for progressive work.

Putting Down Roots
A Day Without the Pentagon has begun to grow roots in a few communities around the country. In the New England area, members of the Green and the Socialist Parties, Rhode Island Mobilization for Survival and WRL’s regional staff person Joanne Sheehan have worked on Day Without the Pentagon since its inception and claimed it as their own. This October, that coalition will hold a “Peace Festival 2000” to encourage participants and onlookers to rethink U.S. priorities; revel in music, art and theater as mediums for political expression; resist militarism and injustice; and recreate common notions of prosperity and progress that bring security to everyone. Organizers for the three-day festival discovered that the Native American name for the area meant Isle of Peace, a sharp contrast to the current presence nearby of both the U.S. Naval War College and Raytheon, one of the nation’s three largest military contractors. As part of the peace festival, organizers will hold an action at the War College to protest the school’s role in military planning and war preparation.

Our hope is that the New England effort will become a model for other activists around the country, and we can develop more regional actions that focus on U.S. war strategy and preparation, like the newest addition to the Day Without the Pentagon actions, which is being held in Florida in cooperation with the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

Whatever specific actions take place this year and in the future, what A Day Without the Pentagon is really about is building a constituency committed to radical antimilitarism and willing to act on that conviction. That is the purpose that WRL has striven for since it was founded in the 1920s, and it remains a cause as relevant today as it was after the horrors of the First World War.

Chris Ney is WRL’s Disarmament Coordinator.