Nov.-Dec. 2005:
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The Outsider
A Bear’s Life
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(Un)covering the War
The Lost Boys
Wobblies! A Graphic History
Why They Kill
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War Tax Resisters Strategize

Approximately 70 people from at least 22 states and the District of Columbia met the weekend of October 7-9 for the National Strategy Conference on War Tax Resistance (WTR). Hosted by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC), this was the first such conference since 1982 and 1983, when NWTRCC was formed. Organizers initiated the conference, feeling that given the current times, a hard look at war tax resistance and strategic redirection had been long overdue.

Attendees gathered on Friday at St. Vincent Ferrer Church in Brooklyn, and were treated to the rousing revivalism of Rev. Billy and the Stop Taxing Choir. Several participants shared their own political journeys in words, pictures, and song.

Although the conference Although the conference did not draw broad participation from all segments of the peace movement (as organizers had hoped), those present represented a wide variety of other causes and organizations. About half were NWTRCC “old hats” and about half “new folk.”

The conference first focused on “repackaging” the message of the war tax redirection movement to make it more accessible to young people. Saturday morning, a panel of young adults—Lincoln Rice, Sherrill Crosby, Alice Liu, Oliver Waters, and R.J. Maccani—shared their experiences and perspectives on the war tax resistance movement, along with some recommendations for attuning it more toward young people. Small groups then used this input to develop ideas for action. Organizers used a similar process to explore various models for war tax resistance organizing.

On Sunday, ideas coming out of these strategy sessions translated into the creation of new working groups. One was set up to develop a war tax resistance intro DVD. Another was created to develop a survey to gauge the degree to which people would engage in war tax conversion as part of a campaign to boycott war.

In addition, the conference facilitated the formation of a Young Adult Review Panel to look at all of NWTRCC’s literature and work and make recommendations for improving outreach to young people. Other projects folks are working on are a new youth-oriented W-4 piece, a cell phone war tax resistance campaign, making links with the counter-recruitment movement, and the redirection of war taxes to youth and student groups.

The next NWTRCC meeting will be May 5-7, 2006, in Seattle. For more information about war tax resistance and redirection:

Contact: NWTRCC, PO Box 150553, Brooklyn, NY 11215; Email: nwtrcc@nwtrcc.org; www.nwtrcc.org.

—Robert Randall

Forty-one anti-uranium weapons activists were arrested at the offices of Alliant Techsystems in Edina, MN, on October 24, in a nonviolent protest against the company’s production of indiscriminate weapons.

Edina police officers corralled several dozen people in the company parking ramp after they walked onto Alliant property. All the demonstrators were issued citations alleging trespass in violation of a new Edina city ordinance and then released. One minor was escorted to her high school by the police. The citation carries a possible $200 fine.

Organized by Alliant ACTION and Nukewatch, the gathering—dubbed “U.N. Day at ATK”—celebrated United Nations Day, Oct. 24, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the U.N. Charter outlawing wars of aggression.

The U.N. Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights has twice condemned the use of “depleted” uranium munitions saying their use is incompatible with existing humanitarian (armed conflict) law.

Millions of the armorpiercing uranium shells have been machined and sold by Alliant to the Department of Defense. Hundreds of tons of munitions, which are toxic and radioactive, have been used in U.S. bombardments of Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo. The resulting uranium contamination has raised health and environmental concerns around the world.

No arraignment date was set by the citations. Several dozen other protesters face similar charges for protests at the company offices last July 13 and August 8.

For more info contact Alliant ACTION: (612)701-6963, (651)388-4814; or Nukewatch: (715)491-3813; (715)491- 3813; P.O. Box 649; Luck, Wisc. 54853

—Nukewatch

On September 23, the 137th anniversary of Puerto Rico’s Grito de Lares revolt against Spanish colonial rule, an FBI agent shot Filiberto Ojeda Rios, founder and leader of the revolutionary nationalist Boricua Popular Army (Macheteros), inside his home in Hormigueros. A fugitive living underground for the past 15 years, Ojeda Rios lay bleeding from the wound while radios throughout the island broadcast his annual speech celebrating the anniversary.

It was 24 hours before medical professionals and local authorities were granted access to the scene by the FBI. Seventytwo- year-old Ojeda Rios was found lifeless, lying face-down, having slowly bled to death. The assassination has drawn criticism even from those who advocate statehood for the island. Calls for an independent investigation of the FBI operation have come from human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, members of the U.S. Congress, the archbishop of San Juan, and the government of Puerto Rico itself.

A reported 300 FBI agents—at least 20 of whom had been in Hormigueros since Sept. 9 and had staked out Ojeda Rios’ farmhouse since Sept. 20—chose to carry out the operation on the most politically charged national holiday, not only for independentistas, but Puerto Ricans across the political spectrum. Neither the Puerto Rico Gov. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, nor the island’s Chief of Police Pedro Toledo had been informed of the operation. The FBI claims to have been enforcing an arrest warrant issued against Ojeda Rios in 1990 for cutting off an electronic monitoring device he had been ordered to wear while awaiting trial for charges related to the 1983 robbery of $7.2 million from a Wells Fargo depot in Connecticut.

Most Puerto Ricans do not agree with the methods employed by the Macheteros. Yet the circumstances around Ojeda Rios’ death have united a politically diverse Puerto Rico. The last time these sectors united was following the death of a young Puerto Rican man caused by a bomb on the U.S. Navy base in Vieques. The mobilization resulted in the Navy’s exit from Vieques in May 2003.

A procession of more than 1000 cars followed Ojeda Rios’ body to Naguabo, where he was born. It is reported to be the largest funeral procession in the history of Puerto Rico.

—Yeidy Rosa

Though the words “I have a dream” are better known than “I pledge allegiance,” King’s commitment to peace, justice, and radical social change is not nearly as strictly followed as people’s general obedience to the government. Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at the Iliff School of Theology George Tink Tinker called on the participants of the Peace and Justice Studies Association’s (PJSA) 2005 Annual Conference to “Give birth to a new dream.” We’d better start working together toward a new vision of what this world needs to be, Tinker urged. The problem, according to Tinker, is that “We have inherited a history of violence that knows no end.”

From October 6 to 9, more than 250 academics, students, and activists came to the small town of Goshen, IN, to work—as the conference title suggested—“In Solidarity: Engaging Empire.” Whether exploring the problems of divisiveness and the “radical possibilities of openness” with Third Wave feminist and author Rebecca Walker, or reviewing the attempts to crush freedom of speech with De Paul Professor Norman Finkelstein and Bernice Carroll of Purdue, PJSA members and friends joined with colleagues in the Plowshares Peace Studies Collaborative and throughout the peace activist community for a dynamic and exciting weekend.

One of the most vibrant aspects of the event was the involvement of students, who made up close to half of this year’s attendees. Recent Earlham graduate Ali Mamina, a native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Manchester student Camilo Velasquez Mejia of Nicaragua; and Goshen student Erin Williams from Indiana, provided the student leadership of the conference. The annual PJSA Peace Educator of the Year award was given to WRL member Jill Sternberg. A nonviolence trainer with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, Sternberg spoke her experiences in Africa, East Timor, and New York State. Sternberg implored folks to work with cultural sensitivity and never to give up hope.

—Matt Meyer

In an October 4 letter to the principal of Hutchinson Central Technical High School (“Hutch Tech”) in Buffalo, NY, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has called for an end to the illegal practice of “automatically” enrolling freshman students in the Junior Reserve Officer Trainings Corps (JROTC) without either theirs or their parents’ permission.

The NYCLU wrote to the school follow-ing complaints from Hutch Tech parents whose daughters had been “automatically” enrolled in JROTC, a military training program for high school students. The school’s practice violates the Education Law, which provides that no child may be compelled to participate in JROTC and requires prior written parental consent.

Parents reported that they had two days before the school year began to submit “optout” forms removing students from the program, but the forms were not widely circulated and many parents did not even know they existed. More importantly, a school may not legally enroll students in JROTC by default. Education Law Section 802(3) provides that participation must be “voluntary on the part of the student and written consent of a parent or guardian” must be submitted.

Elizabeth Beyer organized other students to opt out of JROTC before the school year began. Her father said,“Isn’t it amazing that, while you have to go out of your way to get your child into sex education, ROTC at Hutch Tech is mandatory?”

—New York Civil Liberties Union

Rosa Parks, whose 1955 act of civil disobedience made her a civil rights legend, died October 24 in her Detroit home.

On December 1, 1955, on a city bus in Montgomery, AL, Parks refused to yield her seat to white passenger. Her arrest sparked the 13- month Montgomery bus boycott that ended legal segregation on public transportation, launched the career of the young Montgomery minister Martin Luther King Jr., and made nonviolent direct action the winning strategy of the civil rights movement.

Yet contrary to popular belief, Parks was not the simple needleworker of legend, who just didn’t feel like obeying [the driver’s] demand” that she give up her seat; her refusal to yield was no spur-of-the-moment decision. She had been deeply involved in the civil rights movement, studied at the famed Highlander Folk School for organizers in Tennessee, and in 1955 was secretary of the local NAACP. Ever since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education had stricken segregated schools from the South’s repertoire of legal apartheid, the movement —then mostly African-Americans in the South and a red-hunt ravaged Left in the North— had been looking for another focus. The Montgomery NAACP had its eye on the city’s segregated public transit; in the late fall of 1955, the group acted.

The boycott’s spectacular success catapulted Parks into fame as the “mother of the civil rights movement.” She and her family were so harassed by Montgomery’s resentful white population that they left the South and moved to Detroit, where Parks founded a non-profit institute giving career guidance to Black youth, and worked for a Michigan member of Congress until she retired at 75.

In the days immediately following her death, in an unprecedented tribute to the power of nonviolent direct action, the U.S. Congress voted to allow Parks’ body to lie in honor in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, making Parks the first woman, the second Black person, and the first activist ever to be so distinguished.

—Judith M. Pasternak

We received belated notice that WRL’s first paid employee, Abe Kaufman, died at the age of 95 in September 2004, and we apologize for taking so long to pass this notice on to our members. We were also saddened to hear that Ida Kaufman recently passed away on Septmeber 6.

Born in 1908, Abe grew up in a Bronx neighborhood of socially conscious immigrant Jews. He was exposed to socialist debates as a pre-teen, so when he noticed his tenth-grade English teacher, WRL founder Jessie Wallace Hughan, wearing a button for a candidate he supported, his interest was peaked.

Thus began his long friendship with Hughan, who ran the WRL out of her home at the time. Her ideas and example led Abe to become a pacifist, and in 1926 he signed the WRL pledge. After Abe graduated from City College in 1928, Hughan and her sister hired him to do office work for the fledgling organization, a position that came to be called executive secretary. Abe worked for the WRL until he resigned in 1947 for both personal and political reasons—among them that he did not endorse the direct action tendencies of new members radicalized by resistance to World War II. He and many League members felt that civil disobedience would be divisive and alienate potential supporters.

Abe left his paid position but was elected to the Executive Committee and served on it for another few years until the political differences—particularly over working with government bodies on recognition of conscientious objectors—prompted his resignation from the organization. The League worked to accommodate “traditionalists” like Abe as well as the radicals coming out of the Peacemaker movement and WWII resistance, but it could not heal the rift.

Abe focused his energy on family, the Brooklyn Ethical Culture Society, and the Socialist Party, but his secular pacifism remained the undercurrent of his politics until the end of his life. After he and his wife Ida—who shared his pacifist politics—retired to Florida they stayed active in the peace movement. They helped organize weekly vigils of the Charlotte Citizens for Peace to protest the Gulf War in 1991, and they returned to New York for WRL’s 70th anniversary dinner where they received WRL’s Peace Award for their contributions to the organization in the 1920s.

Abe died in Minnesota where he and Ida had moved to be near their daughter Rachel and her family. Much more on Abe Kaufman’s tenure at WRL can be found in Scott Bennett’s book, Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915-1963.

—Ruth Benn