Brandywine Peace Community
War is a class phenomenon. This has been an unbroken truth from ancient times to our own, when the victims of the Vietnam War turned out to be working-class Americans and Asian peasants. Preparations for war maintains swollen military bureaucracies, gives profits to corporations (and enough jobs to ordinary citizens to bring them along). And they give politicians special power, because fear of ‘the enemy’ becomes the basis for entrusting policy to a handful of leaders, who feel bound (as we have seen so often) by no constitutional limits, no constraints of decency or commitment to truth.*
What began with hundreds of people occupying Wall Street on September 17, 2011, grew to thousands of similar peaceful occupations, protest demonstrations, and civil disobedience across the United States and around the world, challenging the toxic greed of Corporate America’s 1 percent who profit at the expense of the rest of us—the 99 percent.
Occupy Philly began on Thursday, October 6, the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, at Philadelphia City Hall’s Dilworth Plaza, in the center of the city’s corporate and financial district.
At the very start of the encampment, longtime WRL affiliate Brandywine Peace Community stood in support of the Occupy movement with “Welcome, occupy Philly” signs and banners that made the connection between the corporate control of U.S. democracy and the corporate militarism of such war profiteers as Lockheed Martin, the world’s number one war profiteer and Pentagon weapons producer.
Throughout the duration of the encampment, we held Tuesday rush-hour protests in front of the tent city, holding large banners and displays, introducing to thousands of rush-hour passersby what we began calling the “top guns of the 1 percent super rich”: Northrup Grumman, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, which for decades has been the focus of Brandywine’s campaign of nonviolent action. We also began showing to occupiers and involved groups Robert Greenwald’s short video Meet the 0.01 Percent: The War Profiteers.
Other encampments and related demonstrations occurred throughout the greater Philadelphia area. Droves of people supported the occupiers in Philadelphia with food, tents, medical supplies, sleeping bags, and more and camped, marched and protested.
In the 1930s, homeless people erected large shantytowns around the country, illustrating the reality of the Great Depression, calling them “Hoovervilles” after President Hoover, who presided over the worst economic collapse in U.S. history.
Seeking to bring the radical economic justice message of the Occupy movement visibly and directly to Lockheed Martin and its major weapons complex in King of Prussia, on Thanksgiving Saturday, november 26, 2011, we set up a Lockheed-ville shantytown made of several large wooden A-frames, covered in tarps, along with pitched tents. Lawn signs up and down the main highway in front of Lockheed Martin and behind the King of Prussia Mall (the largest shopping mall on the East Coast) bore the message: “Stop the Top Gun of the 1% Super Rich” along with our large banner reading: “Welcome to LOCKHEED-VILLE: where the business of war matters, and people don’t!”
After weeks of threatened eviction notices, Occupy Philly was cleared in the early morning hours of November 30. Police arrested more than 50 occupiers. The encampment was evicted to make way for a multimillion-dollar reconstruction of the west side of Philadelphia City Hall that will include restaurants and an ice skating rink.
The Occupy movement has really just begun. The peace and antiwar movement needs to move with it, bringing the history of U.S. empire, militarism, and war profiteering to the fore as this movement develops a more defined strategic framework confronting the lethal power of corporate America.
A worldwide movement of nonviolent action for peace and justice would mean the entrance of democracy for the first time into world affairs. That’s why it would not be welcomed by the governments of the world, whether ‘totalitarian’ or ‘democratic.’ It would eliminate the dependence on their weapons to solve problems. It would bypass the official makers of policy and the legal suppliers of arms, the licensed dealers in the most deadly drug of our time: violence.*
Robert M. Smith, staff
Brandywine Peace Community
* from Howard Zinn’s Declarations of Independence (1990). In memoriam: Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922–January 27, 2010).
