July-August 2004:
The RNC & Pacifist Strategy
Sovereignty, U.S. Style
Billions for Arms
Youth & Counter-Recruitment
Where to Go During the RNC
Letters

Homepages:
War Resisters League
The Nonviolent Activist

More on Docs Vs. Nukes

Janet White Loeb (Letters, May-June) is quite right about the very important role that Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War played in the antinuclear movement. But she is wrong when she says PSR was founded by Helen Caldicott in the 1960s. Actually, it was founded at that time by Bernard Lown and was revived by Caldicott in the late 1970s. The history of both organizations is covered at length in by book, Toward Nuclear Abolition.

—Lawrence Wittner
Albany, NY

Haiti Invasions

In “Why the United States Keeps Invading Haiti” (May-June), David L. Wilson’s critique of Jean-Bertrand Aristide ignores the powerful constraints under which Haiti’s elected governments operated. The U.S.-led development assistance embargo, which stopped almost all foreign aid for literacy, healthcare and land reform made progress extremely difficult. Military pressure from U.S.-backed insurgents based in the Dominican Republic escalated over the last few years, as paramilitary forces made at least three coup attempts, attacked the electrical grid, and murdered police and other officials.

Wilson’s article effectively exposes U.S. propaganda from the end of the Duvalier regime, but then buys into it from 2000 on. The State Department would find little room to improve the “From Cleric to Caudillo” section, with its familiar, but never documented, theme of Aristide’s loss of popularity. While many progressives joined the Bush Administration in announcing Aristide’s fall from grace, U.S.-sponsored Gallup polls showed President Aristide to be by far the most respected and popular public figure in Haiti (the polls were then classified).

Wilson’s criteria for judging President Aristide are those of the well-fed in the United States and Haiti. Poor peasants whose front door would not resist a robber’s kick understand why a president under attack by the U.S. and Haitian elites would hire private security. The Haitian masses who have fought persistently for freedom for centuries understand that durable gains come slowly, not overnight in a flash of ideological purity.

It is odd to see an article in “The Nonviolent Activist” dismissing the significance of Aristide’s demobilization of the military. Instead of blaming Aristide for not mobilizing the masses for self-defense, Wilson should examine why the international solidarity movement failed to denounce the violent overthrow of one of the world’s two demilitarized democracies while there was still time to prevent it.

—Brian Concannon Jr.
Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti
Joseph, OR

David L. Wilson’s article “Why the United States Keeps Invading Haiti” (NVA, May-June, 2004) devotes much attention to the perceived shortcomings of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but ignores the crucial current reality in Haiti: The Bush-backed coup regime is systematically targeting Lavalas members and driving Haiti’s already desperately poor majority into even deeper poverty. Death squad killers freed from prison by coup forces are scouring the countryside systematically raping and torturing anyone who spoke out against them, but Wilson would rather focus on Aristide’s deviations from a rigid U.S.version of Left ideological purity.

—Leslie Fleming
Berkeley, CA

WRL and Nonviolence

Editor’s note: The following letter, referring to an article in the November-December NVA, was written last January, misplaced, and re-sent more recently. Thanks for printing excerpts from presentations at WRL’s anniversary conference.

Though I attended—attentively, I believe—I missed some of the content. I remember appreciating Mario Hardy Ramirez Africa’s educating me to the origins and agenda of hip-hop: “a culture of peace … love … unity and togetherness … a culture of resistance.” How we need that! So what shall I make of his description of AWOL magazine and CD—where I may hear ideas about what nonviolence is: “Some of that may have to do with people who decide to pick up guns …” What does picking up guns have to do with nonviolence? Does AWOL support taking up guns as part of a “nonviolent” resistance? More to the point, does WRL support this stance? As a long-time member and supporter of WRL, I thought the only guns WRL promotes are broken rifles.

—Mary Sprunger-Froese
Colorado Springs, CO

The Right of Return

A letter by Bill Weinberg (Letters, May/June) states that Michael Lerner refuses “to budge on the right of return for refugees.” The supposed “right of return” is code for the demographic destruction of Israel and has long been an extremist Arab position. At a time when the left has slipped disgracefully into the cesspool of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, I am disappointed to find that expression in the pages of WRL’s Nonviolent Activist.

—Bruce A. Birnberg
East Brunswick, NJ

Bill Weinberg responds:
“Disappointed” to find a controversial point of view in the Nonviolent Activist? So much for free speech. As to the substance of Birnberg’s protest, the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is not only sloppy thinking but very dangerous propaganda, which is ultimately inimical to the real security of Jews around the world. The persistent belief in a state where citizenship is determined by ethnicity or religion among so-called progressives is what is truly “disappointing.”