War is Hell! Peace is Better?
If We Want to Stop the War, We'll Have to End the Peace!

As probably just about everyone here today knows, everyday life in peacetime is deadly for people all over the world.  Many people die but many more survive for living deaths -- lives without hopes or dreams.

There’s a connection between the deaths of peace and the deaths of war. The war deaths are intended, in part, to teach the survivors to put up with the living deaths of peace.  Missiles and bombs from high in the sky that leave only blood and ashes are intended to teach us all that resistance is futile and that there is no power able to challenge those with the weapons.

Their power is indeed impressive.  But, we would do well to understand why they are willing to use it for such barbarous purposes.  We’d suggest that our rulers are desperate to find a way to keep things the way they are -- simply enough, the maintenance of capitalism round the world.  Their desperation results from the fact that the order they wish to preserve has outlived its usefulness and that political and economic crisis has become all but permanent.  

In spite of lots of evidence to the contrary, there is a power that can challenge theirs.  But, for almost thirty years, resistance to their power in the United States has largely taken the form of small acts of refusal and rebellion.  In spite of the hopefulness that such resistance can inspire, it has failed to reverse a devastating series of setbacks.  The challenge of the day demands that small acts of refusal and rebellion become grand insurgencies.  Who are the potential grand rebels?  Soldiers, sailors, prisoners, illegal immigrants, sex workers, drug addicts, people with AIDS, fast food workers, truck drivers and health care workers, students who are taught nothing and students who are taught foolishness, and many more.

We need to move from insubordination to mutinies and desertions, from sickouts and sabotage to sit-ins and takeovers, from protests to insurrections.  Those who oppose war can assist in the development of those insurgencies by acting as one with all those who have pressing reasons to refuse to go along with everyday exploitation and degradation.  Acting as one with them will demand that we abandon all notions that they are victims in need of our help or claimants on the government’s benevolence.  They are fighters for the future and we should be with them on the frontlines.  The specifics of our roles and responsibilities will become clear as fists are raised high and chains are broken.  The danger of war demands the danger of action to end the peace that makes war inevitable.

RACE TRAITOR - February 2003