Get the US war machine out of everywhere, starting with Palestine
I’m interested in how we build true global and internationalist solidarity by those impacted by US exploitation and war. I want to follow those most impacted, but how do we build those relationships abroad while living inside the empire? Following the Palestinian leadership and Jewish Voice for Peace in recent years has been very important, as well as new immigrants, specifically those undocumented.
I have been going back and forth on writing this piece for the past six months. Partly for feeling like the issue was too big to do justice to in writing and with the time I have, and more recently partly because of fear of how the current administration might respond or target me in the future. However, I decided to write this piece precisely for both of those reasons today. I’m going to write it out in one sitting and not put pressure for it to be perfect, and I’m going to write it precisely because I’m a little nervous about this living on the public record in the current political climate.
Summer before election: Democratic National Convention, Chicago
I joined the March on the DNC in Chicago: A relatively ordered protest, in reaction to a horrific genocide.
I believe this election lays more clear than any election I’ve seen before who is okay with the United States as an imperialist concept (in history and in current practice) and who is not.
“As long as you think that we should get Mississippi straightened out before we worry about the Congo, you’ll never get Mississippi straightened out.” -Malcolm X
Guiding principles my activism. I focus on addressing the military prison industrial complex (MPIC) because its what fires my feels most, bodily autonomy, and also what in my mind needs to go before real healing can begin. American progressives I know forget about the US military/ feel like it’s not their “issue” while living in the heart of empire. I grew up in a military town with lefty leaning parents, so it’s always baffled me that more politically active people aren’t touching the fact that the US and its forces abroad are responsible for more harm than we can quantify.
Connecting struggles
The 2024 March on the Democratic National Convention (DNC) wasn’t my first anti-war demonstration rodeo, but it was the strongest one I’ve ever been to. Previously I had been in circles with the older peace movement crowd from the ’70s, but their ideas just weren’t catching on with my generation. I am so hoping it’s catching on now as people reckon with what it means to live in an imperialist state, and watch a genocide abroad unfold daily on hand held social media stories for the first time ever.
I’m also hopeful because at the DNC protest the connections were made that abolishing the police, prison and border patrol at home goes hand in hand with abolishing US military control abroad and that the US as state depends and is funded by the Military Prison Industrial Complex (MPIC). A renewed call for local and international land back movements and decolonization of the mind and the state system was felt at the protest.
Of course, there was heavy police presence the entire time.
What is happening in Palestine is horror, and the US and us US taxpayers are to blame for the weapons used. It connects to the other imperialistic horrors of the world past-present-and-future together, and hopefully strengthens resistance to it in the form of a renewed anti-imperial and anti- war struggle which has been deeply suppressed in my lifetime growing up in the post 9/11 years.
This election isn’t being decided by 3rd party or abstaining voters, it’s being decided by who politicans who, instead of working to end racism and violence in the world, are funding continuing genocide and imperialist violencec.
I am not going to sit here and say I haven’t done my fair share of attempting to block out the horrors, because I definitely have and have done as recently as today. We still have to survive within a hellish nation state where school shootings, racist police and prison violence, xenophobic and transphobic violence is perpetuated daily. But we the US people are also not the ones directly giving the go ahead to ship weapons abroad to Israel and other countries for imperialist bloody means. When elected officials sign up to speak for the people, they should also expect to be confronted by the people.
“Change we can believe in”
My hopes for anti war candidates were crushed with the presidency of Obama when I was 18. I was so excited when he was running, and naively thought that he was going to be the peace dove candidate to Bush’s war hawk. When Obama then became the drone strike in chief president, and largest immigration deporter president, I think I became disillusioned with the concept of a Democrat in the US being able to be anything but a war machine, and in that way they were basically the same as republicans.
International issues have always weighed heavily on me in politics in a way that it hasn’t always seemed to as much for my leftist peers. Which has baffled me, because we are literally in the belly of the beast. How can we work for our collective liberation to be better without taking in how our nation is fucking the rest of the world constantly?
Part of this is that we can’t all be lit up by the same thing, but part of this I think is laziness and not reckoning with this world and defining privilege we hold as US citizens playing chess with the lives of the people of the world, and also our own people.
Mike Brown being killed in St. Louis Missouri in 2014 was an awakening to me in that the police are just the domestic military, and if I’m concerned about things abroad I also need to be concerned about things here in the US. I now understand that the desire to abolish the US military has to be connected to the growing movement in the US to abolish the police.
False Choice
The idea that this needs to divide us, that we have to choose “our people in the US” or “Palestinians” a false choice. There is a long history in the US of dividing marginalized peopel against each other so they can’t believe power together. I first learned about this reading Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History and how the landowners started sowing homegrown US racism to divide the poor whites and poor blacks who were seem as equal and had started to build power together.
Let’s not let this happen one more time. I recognize that I am writing this with immense privilege from the perspective of a white woman in America, so I want to acknowledge that. But I am taking my cues from the same queer Black femme thought leaders who I listened to during the George Floyd protests and the Mike Brown protests. They are saying it’s all connected and we don’t have to choose one or the other. We have to demand better.
I’m working through my vote, but much more improtant than that to me- I am trying show up regularly for the cultural revolution which is needed to push any leader in the direction that the people want, the opposite direction of capitalism and gains for those in power.
The USis a war corporation. Are you ashamed to be a part of it? We are complicit. The same company that built the border wall in Gaza is building the southern border wall in the US. It’s all connected.
Syracuse activist and acquaintance Aly Wayne noted that:
“The Obama administration […] broke deportation records without winning even a modicum of support or acknowledgment from conservatives, moving the entire conversation further to the Right. In the same way, it may surprise folks, but in terms of raw numbers, the Biden administration has deported more folks than the Trump administration. But since the Republicans don’t want to give Dems a win, they keep asking for more and their demands grow more xenophobic every cycle.”
Below are some articles I’ve written over the years from the peace movement:
Today
Usually my parents are like, no you have a right to rebel!
But now they were like, maybe it is risky…
Where are we, collectively?
