Conspiring to Commit Nonviolence
By Tom Howard-Hastings

On Earth Day, April 22, Stop Project ELF activists Tom and Donna Howard-Hastings cut down three transmission-line poles at the U.S. Navy s ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) transmitter in Luck, Wis. (Project ELF has been the target of strenuous opposition since it was first proposed in 1968.) After the action, they turned themselves over to ELF security personnel. As the NVA went to press, they had been charged with criminal destruction of property.

Two days earlier, Tom had written and mailed for Earth Day delivery to the NVA the following article about his plans and hopes.

It s Earth Day, and we are beating up on the bomb. Nothing could feel better.

What we Donna Howard-Hastings and I are doing is jumping into a conspiracy to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the nuclear arms machinery. It s a very little monkey wrench and a very big machine, but we are doing our best.

I write this just before we go out and mail it, hoping that we aren t shot or otherwise stopped before we can act. We will act in faith, understanding the risks.

Specifically, we will bring saws to the ELF antenna that sends commands to all U.S. nuclear submarines, and we will cut down three poles that support that antenna of death.

We ll go to prison.

I think to myself, how can I leave my life so abruptly, so completely? How can my wife and I go to jail instead of helping to organize opposition to the policies we both see as needlessly attacking poor people? How can I agree to serve on the national committee of the War Resisters League and then go off to ... resist war?

I ve gone and painted myself into a rhetorical corner, haven t I? I suppose the best I can do at this time is to offer to help out in any way I can from what will presumably be my position once you read this, i.e., in jail, awaiting trial and conviction. If the War Resisters League can t find something for an imprisoned National Committee member to do, what group can?

Some are saying that direct disarmament is unhelpful, unwise and a waste of human resources. I d appreciate a moment of your time to defend this act and to go even further and ask for your complicity.

Democracy has failed to function in this instance. The entire arms race whether against some "competitor" (enemy) or in an insane pursuit of what runners call personal best (collective worst, in this case) the whole thing is so patently wrong that what we do is actually part of a conspiracy of hundreds who agree.

It s true. I d guess, conservatively, that 300 or more knew about this before we acted. No one knew all the details except Donna and me, but a huge community knew that we were going to do an act of nonviolent resistance to Trident, ELF an the military-corporate junta that has seized our democracy by its throat.

I taught a class, Dilemmas of War and Peace, through the University of Wisconsin Extension. My boss in the philosophy department knew. All my students knew. They wished me good luck.

I wrote a column for years in an aerobic sports magazine. I wrote my editor a letter of resignation and told him of our plan to do enough civil resistance to guarantee some serious time behind bars. He wrote back with a touching letter of support and an offer to hold the column for me.

We sent envelopes containing media packets to several people in cities across the country. These people are bringing the sealed releases to daily newspapers from ocean to ocean.

We told friends that we were divesting ourselves of the little property we owned and that we d be needing some stamps and paper money while incarcerated by the state. We asked for a hundred favors and the response was virtually unanimous: Sure, of course. What else can I do?

Most important, we began hearing back from friends who said that our plans challenged them to get active again, to put their shoulders to the bumper of the cart of resistance. These were people who had burned out, who had done nonviolence until they hurt. They said our intentions fired them up again. I cried a couple of times when I heard that, and I m a trained American male I don t cry. Usually.

But God, something s got to happen. The Pentagon is the largest single consumer of oil and strategic minerals on Earth and is responsible for creating more Superfund sites of gross pollution than any other entity. As WRL National Office Director Ruth Benn has eloquently pointed out, we go on and on spending $75 million each day in this land to prepare to end life on Earth, more than the next ten largest military budgets in the world combined. The WRL Pie Chart says it: once again, more than half the available monies are funneled to the military. The people of the United States have ponied up more than $4 trillion on the Pentagon in the last few decades and we are spending more now, in 1995 dollars, than we did during the World War II years. Noam Chomsky calls it a wealth transference, not so much a military budget, and William H. McNeill, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, notes that humanity s "only significant macroparasites" are those who, "by specializing in violence, are able to secure a living without themselves producing the food and other commodities they consume."

Democracy has been beaten senseless by the military. Common goodness is gone, hate rhetoric is at high flame, and the Republicrats are in full and shrill splendiferous hypergobble. People with disabilities, children with poor parents and educators, environmental law enforcers, labor, farmers and artists are on a chopping block hewn from the bodies of the Old Ones from our ancient forests, dwindled to a tiny remnant of the original.

Writing letters is important, but not enough for us any longer. Organizing demonstrations is crucial, but we need to address the Nuclear Beast and all it stands for directly this time. We need to spit in its eye and call it a coward (even as we shake in our shoes, we must admit).

That beast is still alive. Notices of its demise, to twist Samuel Clemens, are greatly exaggerated. There are 16 Tridents at sea, with (unbelievably) two more under construction, each carrying more firepower than all wars in history along with the potential to make our planet radioactive. Many studies of human technological enterprise have come to the conclusion reached by Boston College sociologist Diane Vaughn and Nobel physicist Richard Feynman about the Challenger explosion, the President s Commission about Three Mile Island, and Yale sociologist Charles Perrow and Canadian psychologist Gerald Wilde about high-tech disasters in general: Those were "normal" accidents. All efforts short of abandoning the technology do not, in short, make it safer. It is only a matter of time before something goes catastrophically wong. Donna and I feel that, by this calculus alone, a few years in prison are worth one day when there is no chance that ELF can send the fire order to the Trident and first-attack fleets.

Most of all, we feel like a nonviolent expression of Ch Guevara s dictum that a revolutionary among the people is like a fish in the sea. So many people knew. So many breathed together on this project, even if they only knew one detail that it would be nonviolent. We feel like an outgrowth of a popular sentiment, a manifestation of a collective will to confront the thieves who take and take.

We are just a drop in the coming flood of resistance. The military industrial complex wants it all, and average citizens are feeling it more and more personally. They are beginning to revolt. We join them. Our primary task will be to try to keep it nonviolent.

We undertake this act in the belief that the best way to manage conflict is nonviolence and that nonviolence occasionally involves risk and sacrifice or it is a hollow thought, an empty sentiment, a quaint idea whose time has passed. The chips are down today. They know we mean business. We are emboldened by the deep swell of support: Nonviolence is the force of the people.

[War Resisters League Website] [Nonviolent Activist Index]
MAY-JUNE 1996: [Conspiring to Commit Nonviolence] [The Sovereign Nation of Hawai'i: Come Again?] [Tax Day USA ]

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