The U.S. Antiwar Movement: Thoughts, Reflections & Suggestions

While we must reorganize our friends who’ve drifted away, or those who continue to fight but without a strategy for victory, it’s imperative that we also engage segments of society who’ve never been organized around these issues.

As always, there’s a lot happening in the world, specifically surrounding U.S. Empire. A quick glance at the evening news or morning paper and one will undoubtedly come across stories concerning ISIS, torture reports, NSA-surveillance programs, Libya, Yemen, Venezuela, and so forth.
In all honesty, however, a good portion of Americans couldn’t find many of these countries on a map and do not understand the nuances of NSA-spying, if they understand what the NSA is at all.
They’re not “too dumb” to figure it out. They don’t know because forty years of neoliberal education and constant doses of mass media have left many working-class and poor Americans with an inadequate understanding of the world around them. Additionally, many working-class and poor Americans are simply surviving, working several jobs while enduring levels of violence and drug addiction unseen in other industrial nations, not to mention student loan debt, conviction rates, and so on.
As Sarah Lazare recently noted, there are plenty of groups, from oil workers in Iraq to feminists in Syria, who are organizing for progressive reforms and revolutionary change in the Middle East. Without doubt, many of these groups are fighting an up-hill battle. Yet, as Sarah reminds us, it is our responsibility as leftists, organizers, activists, etc., to rebuild the antiwar movement in the U.S.
Here, however, I not only think we should make a semantical correction, but also a theoretical and a practical one, namely, redefining the movement as anti-U.S. Empire. Changing the phrase “antiwar” to “anti-U.S. Empire” allows us to properly comprehend what we’re fighting and what we want.
We don’t want a world where the U.S. still maintains 1,000 military bases around the globe, international spying agencies, torture campaigns and the ability to wage economic warfare, but with less ground wars and bombing campaigns. We want a world without any of these things.
Constantly, we hear phrases like “never-ending war” or “perpetual war,” when, in all reality, the U.S. has been at war since its inception, as David Swanson brilliantly documents in his 2010 work War is a Lie. We must be clear about this fact because people are often confused, thinking the Gulf War and Vietnam were the last two times America waged war prior to the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Clearly , we must educate citizens about what’s happening now, while simultaneously providing a historical background in order to help people understand that the U.S. Empire has been on the march for several centuries. Of course, this is no small task.
At the same time, we must encourage people to take brave actions. We know that such actions are our only hope of ending U.S. Empire. However, if they are going to work, those actions must be strategic in nature and supported by large portions of the U.S. public.
Challenging U.S. History
Obviously, one of our tasks is to reeducate people about U.S. history. In this regard, it would help to have progressive-left high school teachers and college professors who would be willing to set up community classes for free, educating citizens in the Howard Zinn-tradition of “bottom-up” history, focusing on social movements and activists who’ve participated in, and won, previous struggles.
Further, we’ll also need those educators to re-teach the so-called “benign” history of U.S. Empire, or the notion that it was U.S. “Manifest Destiny” and “Exceptionalism” that paved the way for U.S. domination abroad. Here, it’s essential to connect people with indigenous peoples, movements for black liberation and Latin Americans—three groups who undoubtedly know, firsthand, the realities of U.S. aggression.
Additionally, I think it would be helpful to reengage with anti-Empire veterans organizations. Veterans for Peace U.K. has been very active, routinely holding public events and protests. In the U.S., Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War still exist, but are not as visible as they once were. To be fair, these groups do not operate in a vacuum. Without a vibrant antiwar movement, antiwar veterans organizations and their allies are limited in what they can accomplish.
However, injecting this perspective is essential, as, again, it allows us to reeducate people about the history of U.S. Empire. Citizens are commonly surprised to hear the perspectives of VFP and IVAW members. Such stories cut against the grain and challenge common perceptions and ideologies surrounding veterans, war and the U.S. military-machine.
My friend, Professor Kim Scipes, recently said to me, “Vince, if Americans understood the true history of Vietnam, there’s no way the U.S. government could convince the public that the military is providing stability abroad.”  True, once Americans understand the genocidal history of settler-expansion/colonization, Latin American imperialism, African American slavery and post-WWII neocolonialism, I think it will be much easier for them to process what’s happening around the world today.
What Happens to Empires?
I remember when I was first starting to process information about the war in Iraq. My personal experiences aided my intellectual understanding, but once I started taking history courses in college, I felt like the veil was lifted. For me, reading about the history of Western Civilization, empires, colonialism and imperialism put my personal experiences and knowledge about the war in Iraq into a much broader context. I started to understand our place in history.
This process of learning helped me put current events in their proper historical context. In other words, I saw the continuity between previous empires and U.S. Empire. At this point, there was no way U.S. politicians and media could convince me that we were bombing Libya to “help civilians” or staying in Afghanistan to “help women” and “build democracy.”
As a result, I learned the U.S. was just another empire, an empire that will eventually break apart, one way or another. The two models I’m most familiar with are the post-WWII British Empire and end of the Roman Empire. My first exposure to these histories came from reading Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy of books on U.S. Empire: Blowback, Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis.
Basically, we have two choices, according to Johnson: 1) the U.S. Empire can continue to try and dominate the rest of the world, eventually over-reaching, which some say has already happened, leading to decay, collapse and wanton violence, or 2) the U.S. Empire can be dissembled democratically, by working-class and poor peoples’ movements pressuring the government to do so.
In my thinking, future movements must do two things: a) build organizations that can effectively engage in direct actions, hindering the state’s ability to maintain and operate the empire, and, b) create political parties and coalitions large enough to capture large sections of the state in order to redirect funds, personnel, mechanisms, etc.
Building Agency
We must remind people of their agency and power. Sure, many people have disempowering  and alienating jobs, positions in society, and so forth. Yet, they also have power.
Even the most menial jobs contain a certain level of power. For instance, the maintenance employees working in Lockheed Martin buildings can also shut those buildings down. They need to be reminded of this. The same goes for workers in ports, truck drivers and railroad workers. They have tremendous power. Obviously, such actions will take a long time to organize, but we should be talking about them now.
Those sorts of actions allow people to truly “take power” and express their “agency.” People quickly become tired of petition writing campaigns and protests. I think one of the mistakes we make as organizers and activists is to assume that people won’t be interested in more radical actions because they haven’t been involved in the past.
Sometimes, people are quickly radicalized, as was the case in Ferguson and Occupy. But instead of sporadic explosions of direct action and radicalism, we need strategic maneuvers and long-term plans aimed at dismantling the levers of power and entities that prop-up U.S. Empire.
In Australia, my friends with the Whistleblowers Activists and Citizens Alliance are conducting an ongoing campaign directed at arms manufacturers, where they recently shut down a Lockheed Martin building, occupying the roof of one of their buildings. Indeed, they are engaging in actions against various companies in the form of blockades, acts of  public civil disobedience and propaganda campaigns. The anti-U.S. Empire movement in the states would be wise to connect with our friends overseas, as Sarah Lazare mentioned in her essay.
How can we better coordinate international solidarity? That’s a question we should all be asking and addressing. We should be using all of our resources to constantly put each other in contact with those we know overseas. The more connections and communication, the better.
Undoubtedly, in the U.S., there will be contradictions we’ll have to work through. For example, as Chalmers Johnson also wrote, the U.S. system depends on what he calls “Military Keynesianism,” or, what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “Military Industrial Complex.” In short, if we are to dismantle U.S. Empire, we must also understand that many millions of Americans work in industries that benefit from the status quo.
And, as Nick Turse pointed out in his 2008 book The Complex, anti-U.S. Empire organizers must sharpen our critique of the Military Industrial Complex because it’s not just arms manufacturers who benefit from a bloated Pentagon—it’s also restaurants, toothpaste companies, Oakley sunglasses, Sony Pictures, etc.
Getting these folks to understand that no one benefits from the status quo in the long-term is not going to be an easy task. But I think there’s plenty of opportunities, as I have no doubt the vast majority of scientists, biologists, engineers, mathematicians and computer programmers working for the Military Industrial Complex would rather focus their energies on more productive and useful work. Of course, some won’t, but they’re not our focus.
The Long Road Ahead
Right now, the U.S. Empire is engaged on all fronts: Venezuelan-coup plots, strong-arm diplomacy in Cuba, daily military actions in Africa, a new Cold War in Ukraine, increasing capacity in Australia, containing China (Obama’s Asian Pivot), fighting, bombing, torturing and subverting democracy in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, and elsewhere. Yet, all of this becomes much easier to understand and process if looked at through the scope of U.S. Empire.
Those who are already aware, and involved, should continue to educate their friends, coworkers and family about U.S. Empire, lobby their representatives, hold rallies and engage in direct actions. However, even at the height of antiwar activities in the modern-era, so basically 2003-2008, the movement seemed small, fragmented and disconnected from domestic struggles and campaigns surrounding workers’ rights, environmental issues and so on.
Routinely, I would make the drive to Chicago, participate in an event, only to drive home 45 miles to the east only to encounter entire communities who were not involved, aware or being organized. It struck me the, as it does now, that our movement often operates in a bubble, totally detached from regular society.
In order to change this, we must coordinate and mobilize the anti-U.S. Empire activists who haven’t “went home” under Obama. As others have commented, there’s still plenty of us around.
Yet, we’ve been terrible at building lasting institutions, organizations and coalitions. Moreover, too many of the existing anti-U.S. Empire groups are tied to sectarian organizations who are more of a hindrance, than they are of help. At the same time, they’re out there, organizing, however ineffective they may be. Back in 2013, during the debate around whether or not the U.S. should bomb Syria, many of the groups who were in the street were connected with political organizations that have terrible politics.
This was clear when my friend and I went to a rally in Chicago, only to have one of the protestors hand us a Syrian flag, while saying, “Stand with Assad against the West!” Again, much of this goes back to a lack of education within the movement, and an inability to connect and identify with movements overseas who are fighting for progressive changes. This particular protestor probably didn’t understand that he could simultaneously critique Assad and Western Imperialism, but it’s our job to teach him.
Educating American citizens about the history of U.S. Empire, the history of Western Empires and strategies for success in ending empire, will be difficult, no doubt. We, like the U.S. Empire, have many fronts to engage. While we must reorganize our friends who’ve drifted away, or those who continue to fight but without a strategy for victory, it’s imperative that we also engage segments of society who’ve never been organized around these issues.
I think the more people write about what needs to be done, and how to do it, the more we can get people involved with movements seeking to end U.S. Empire. My friends often ask, “What can I do about it?” We must have answers, and not easy answers, but informed and effective answers and suggestions.