TD ORIGINALS

The Resistance Before the #Resistance

COMMENTS

L.A. Resistance Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

It was a watershed year in American history. In 1968, protests and marches erupted almost daily; riots broke out across the United States; the Fair Housing Act was signed into law; Richard Nixon was elected president; and the back-to-back assassinations of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. and Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy threatened to tear the country apart. The Vietnam War, which had been simmering for more than a decade, suffered its highest body count on record.

Today, the U.S. military relies on a volunteer army to fight its forever wars. But in the 1960s, you could get a draft deferral only if you were married, had children, were a registered college student or had a medical condition that precluded you from service. The Resistance was a local organization based in Los Angeles whose mission was to stop the war though dedicated, nonviolent noncooperation with the federal Selective Service System. Members turned in their draft cards in protest, but their dissent came at a heavy price; some were fined up to $10,000 or sentenced up to five years in prison.

“We Won’t Go: the Los Angeles Resistance, Vietnam and the Draft,” an exhibit of The Resistance archives on display from June 22 to Aug. 19 at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Getty Gallery, explores these young men’s commitment to social justice. The collection features posters, leaflets and legal documents created by the Peace Press, along with newspaper clippings, draft cards, videos, and images by photographer Charles Brittin.

“Having the Resistance archives here [is] significant as they document their activities during an important time in our political history,” said Ani Boyadjian, research and special collections manager at the Central Library. “They were answering Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for a Vietnam summer by creating a movement of nonviolent draft resistance with the aim of ending the war.”

Bob Zaugh, one of the original members of the Resistance, graduated from Gardena High School in 1962 and promptly registered with the Selective Service. “The war in Vietnam wasn’t heating up yet, but I didn’t want to be drafted. So I took a 2S,” he said.

Zaugh enrolled at El Camino College, and like so many other students his age, enjoyed the security of a college deferment.

In the summer of 1967, the war intensified and riots broke out in Los Angeles. Concerned about the deadly conflict and an impending draft, the political science major from Torrance attended a speech on the UCLA campus. The speaker was David Harris, the student body president at Stanford University.

“Everything changed after hearing his electrifying speech,” said Zaugh. “That’s when I got in involved with The Resistance. I was given a deferment while poor people and people of color didn’t have that privilege.”

Zaugh dropped out of school and turned in his draft card. From 1967 to 1968, the Los Angeles Resistance held peaceful protests outside the Selective Service offices in Westwood, where busloads of young men were inducted into the military. Vietnam was not their father’s war.

RELATED ARTICLES

Have We Learned Anything From My Lai?

BY BARBARA MYERS

An Epic Film on the Vietnam War Stops Short

BY BARBARA MYERS

How a Death Row Inmate Made Injustice Pay Off

BY ERIC ORTIZ

In 1967, Zaugh began working for the Peace Press, a political collective backed by founder and UCLA graduate student Jerry Palmer. “The sentiment in the country at the time was overwhelmingly pro-war, which made us very unpopular,” said Zaugh. “We had to teach ourselves how to print because nobody else would print our literature.”

Booted by landlords unsympathetic to their cause, and hounded by the FBI and CIA, the Peace Press relocated several times over the course of its 20-year existence from 1967 to 1987.

The ultimate objective of the Resistance was not only to end the war but the draft itself. Draft card turn-ins were held twice in 1967 and 1968. “We also refused inductions and physicals,” said Zaugh. These acts ranged from felonies to federal offenses; resisters eventually had to appear in court, many without attorneys. One of Zaugh’s friends was given three years in prison at the Federal Correctional Institution in Lompoc, while another was subjected to solitary confinement.

Even Harris was indicted. Convicted of draft evasion, he served 15 months in federal prison in 1969. When Zaugh had his day in court, he decided to represent himself despite his hatred for public speaking. Luckily, he found an ally in federal Justice Harry Pregerson, a liberal former Marine and veteran of the battle of Okinawa in World War II. Said Zaugh, “He thought my argument was terrible, told me I was going to lose and had me acquitted.”

Zaugh said he and his fellow members of the Resistance felt it was their responsibility to let the public know what their government was doing in Vietnam. “We wanted people to pay attention to our foreign policy and what we could do about it,” he said.

Eventually, the powers that be realized the war was unwinnable.

“The Resistance was a very potent organization,” noted Zaugh. “The government did its best to keep us out of the public eye and keep stats on the number of men who were breaking the Selective Service laws under wraps.”

As many as 206,000 people were reported delinquent during the entire war period, according to the Antiwar and Radical History Project. Fewer than 9,000 out of 209,517 accused draft offenders were convicted.

In 1977, realizing the draft resisters were too numerous to imprison, President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to those who fled abroad, allowing them to return to the United States.

Since the war’s conclusion, Zaugh has continued his involvement in social activism, peacefully protesting the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in Avila Beach and Gary Tyler’s four-decade incarceration in Angola, La. Zaugh also spent 13 years working for “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, a loyal Peace Press customer, at his Bongo Comics Group.

PHOTO ESSAY | 6 photosThe Resistance Before the #Resistance

Liesl Bradner

Reviewer

Liesl Bradner is a Los Angeles-based journalist covering the arts, culture and history for the past 15 years. She has been a book reviewer for Truthdig since 2014. The Pennsylvania native graduated from Florida State University after studying English literature at Cambridge University. Soon after a stint at the Orlando Sentinel, she landed at the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in the New Republic, The Guardian, Variety, and World War II and military history magazines. She has also contributed essays for Taschen books' “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and “Matthew Weiner's Mad Men.” A member of the West Los Angeles Veterans Home Support Foundation, Bradner is currently co-authoring the upcoming book “Snapdragon: The WWII Exploits of Darby’s Ranger and Combat Photographer Phil Stern,” to be published in spring 2018.

IN THIS ARTICLE:

antiwar and radical history project charles brittin draft cards fair housing act gary tylerjimmy carter rfk richard nixon the los angeles resistance the peace press vietnam

COMMENTS

The West Point Soldier Who Called It as He Saw It

COMMENTS

Fist raised, Spenser Rapone displays a slogan written inside his cap after graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., in May 2016. (Courtesy of Spenser Rapone via AP)

Editor’s note: On the outside, Spenser Rapone’s West Point graduation uniform looked like all the other cadets’. Underneath his dress uniform, however, was evidence of his political views: a T-shirt bearing Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara’s image, and a cap that read, inside, “Communism will win.”

The shirt and hat made waves in the U.S. military community after Rapone posted photos of them on social media in September, and now he has been given an “other than honorable” discharge. According to The Associated Press, he was charged with “conduct unbecoming of an officer” after an Army investigation determined that he “went online to promote a socialist revolution and disparage high-ranking officers.”

In the following statement for Truthdig, Rapone explains his political beliefs.

I am a combat veteran with the First Ranger Battalion, a recent graduate of West Point and a former second lieutenant who was stationed at Fort Drum, N.Y. Since identifying myself as a socialist, there has been much controversy generated by a number of my public statements.

It began with my post on social media, in which I expressed my full and enthusiastic support of former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in his fight against racial injustice, white supremacy and police brutality. After revealing a picture of myself in uniform with the hashtag #VeteransForKaepernick, I was met by solidarity from my fellow soldiers, as well as harsh blowback from my chain of command.

To this day, I stand by my convictions, despite the efforts of ranking officers to pressure me into silence. I believe that standing up for the exploited and the oppressed is the most honorable thing we can do as people. No job should hinder or repress this pursuit, which is why I decided to resign my commission as an officer in the United States Army. My conditional resignation was denied by the secretary of the Army. Instead, the military forced me into either submitting an unconditional resignation or appearing before a board of inquiry—an adversarial trial in which a jury of senior officers would determine my fate. Rather than submit to the antics of what amounts to a show trial at best, I tendered my unconditional resignation. Passing judgment on me one last time, the military determined the character of my service to be “other than honorable.” Despite the brass prolonging my time in service, I have come to the conclusion that leaving the military altogether, whatever the circumstances, is the only moral way forward. During this ordeal, I have learned that I am far from alone in my feelings of disillusionment and betrayal within the rank and file of the U.S. military.

As a teenager, I believed the United States military was a force of good for the world. I thought that I signed up to fight for freedom and democracy, to protect my loved ones and my country from harm. My experiences showed me otherwise.

After bearing witness to the senseless destruction in Afghanistan during my combat deployment to Khost Province in the summer of 2011, I knew that our wars must be stopped. I was assigned to my platoon as an assistant machine-gunner. I took part in missions where human beings were killed, captured and terrorized. However, the horror wrought by the U.S. military’s overseas ventures is not limited to combat engagements alone. Some nights, we barely did anything at all but walk through a village. As such, the longer I was there, the more it became apparent that the mere presence of an occupying force was a form of violence. My actions overseas did not help or protect anybody. I felt like I was little more than a bully, surrounded by the most well-armed and technologically advanced military in history, in one of the poorest countries in the world. I saw many of my fellow soldiers all too eager to carry out violence for the sake of violence. There is no honor in such bloodlust; quite the contrary. I saw firsthand how U.S. foreign policy sought to carry out the subjugation of poor, brown people in order to steal natural resources, expand American hegemony and extinguish the self-determination of any group that dare oppose the empire. Idealistic and without a coherent worldview yet, I thought that perhaps pursuing an officer’s commission would allow me to change things and help put a stop to the madness. I was wrong.

It soon dawned on me how pervasive the military-industrial complex is. I studied, examined my own experiences and began to grasp more completely the horrors and impact of U.S. imperialism. Learning that over a million people have lost their lives since 9/11—the vast majority being innocent civilians—began to haunt me. Seeing that up to a trillion dollars a year were being diverted from education, health care and infrastructure in the U.S. to support our 800 military bases around the world began to feel increasingly maddening. Within the Army itself, one out of three women are sexually assaulted. The death of football player and later soldier Pat Tillman by friendly fire was covered up to sell a war. Generals responsible for war crimes—from the unbridled destruction of Afghan and Iraqi villages to the construction of torture prisons—are rewarded with accolades and political power. These sad and dishonorable truths increasingly grew impossible to ignore. The military was not the noble and selfless institution the commercials and Hollywood movies made it out to be—far from it.

At West Point, I soon found myself at odds with my future role as someone tasked with the responsibility of leading soldiers into battle. However, leaving West Point after my junior year would have meant returning to the enlisted ranks or finding a way to come up with a quarter-million dollars to pay the academy back. So I stuck it out, hoping I would find a way to reconcile this contradiction. Again, I was wrong. Upon returning to Fort Benning, Ga., to begin my training as an infantry officer following graduation, I was filled with dread. It was like I was in a place simultaneously familiar and unknown. There were things I noticed that my 18-year-old self could not have recognized before. Most strikingly, I observed the scope of the brainwashing within the ranks, from bald, buzz-cut, mostly teenage infantrymen fresh out of training, to college graduates eager to lead those naïve soldiers into America’s next war. I felt witness to a collective delusion—one that I was once a part of, but had somehow miraculously escaped. After nearly a year there, as I prepared to move to my new duty station at Fort Drum, one thing became clear: I cannot be a part of this any longer. I cannot kill or die for the U.S. military—no one should.

I know that I am not alone in feeling this way. My feelings and experiences are not an anomaly. I know, because I have had conversations with others who have expressed the same sentiments.

You are out there, and should you take the same steps that I have, I am with you. While the prospect is daunting, united together we have far more power than all of the generals and politicians combined. We possess the ability to grind this entire military machine to a halt. It is high time we live up to the trust and respect bestowed upon us by the people. Let our mutual love of humanity and our desire for liberation and peace be our guiding principles.

Most importantly, let us find common cause with the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Libya and so many others who have suffered at the behest of the United States. To those soldiers who I’ve heard from, and to those I haven’t yet, I hope that you too find the courage to lay your weapons down with me, and refuse your orders to kill and die for the benefit of a handful of ruling-class elites at the great expense of the rest of us. Freedom lies on the other side. Together, let us fight to put a stop to these endless trillion-dollar wars, and let us join our brothers and sisters around the world in putting a stop to all forms of exploitation, oppression and senseless violence.

Spenser Rapone

Spenser Rapone is a former Army Ranger and Infantry Officer who resigned his commission in June 2018 due to his opposition to United States…

IN THIS ARTICLE:

afghanistan che guevara communism iraq libya palestine politics rapone che guevararapone communism rapone political beliefs rapone west point spenser rapone syriaus military west point yemen

Reflections On Inauguration Day, 2017-The First Days Of The Resistance-Down With The Trump Government!

Reflections On Inauguration Day, 2017-The First Days Of The Resistance-Down With The Trump Government! Build The Resistance! 

By Fritz Taylor

Frank Jackman, the old time 1960s radical, sometimes writer and a guy who thought he knew a few things about the world, about the American world anyway was as bowled over as anybody on the morning after. No, not the morning after some drunken carouse or tome virtuous sexual escapade as had happened many a time although the latter not much of late but The morning after the 2016 election to wake up his Internet server homepage announcing that one Donald J. Trump had been a surprise victor in the American presidential race against one Hillary Rodham Clinton, heiress of the Clinton high-flying, well-financed and organized political dynasty soon to turn to dust (or had already turned to dust and we just catch up with the fact the morning after). 

It wasn’t like Frank had not seen certain signs that there was an uprising going on down at the base of society, the base of society that he was very familiar with since that stratum was where had had come from, come from the Riverdale “projects,” had come of age there. So he knew of hunger, of being hungry for the main chance, of not getting the fucking brass ring, of being left behind although truth to tell he had survived and not badly so he was little rusty in the hunger department. Yeah, Frank knew that there were a lot of frustrated angry people out in the vast American dark night, some who loathed the idea that a black man had been President of the United States for not one but two terms. Loathed the idea that a well-educated articulate woman might just take over the reins of power right after him, who loathed the idea that their cities and towns were looking a lot more like a world-wide melting pot than the old stand-by white European melting pot they had grown up with whether or not they had read old Professor Moynihan on the subject, who loathed that everybody but them and theirs was getting ahead in the globalization race to the bottom, and who loathed the whole political correctness thing that one Donald J. Trump was saying was fucked up.

He knew all that by heart but Frank had more current experiences going through the saw mill of the discontents down at the base that should have tipped him off more decisively to avoid that morning surprise. He and his golfing buddies, Sid, Kaz, Keith and Pat had during the whole previous year been around golf courses, public golf courses not Trump venues where older white guys go to die-or pass away the time until then. (The standing joke among that golfing brethren was that if Trump won he would privatize those public courses or burn them down-take your pick).They had run into serious Trump supporters along the way from guys who said they had voted for Obama or had not voted for a long while but had sent money to the billionaire Trump and wished him god speed. But Frank had been carried away just as much as the whole traditional and social media networks being way off the mark (except followers of the trollers who were wreaking havoc on the planet for kicks-and the “fake news” in favor of Trump) by the improbability of a political novice who was not a general like Grant or Eisenhower beating a seasoned political operative and her vaunted organization like a gong.

Shame on him for believing anything the paid pundits, commentators, bloggers, gurus and their tenacious hangers-on had to say about anything, anytime on any subject. That was then though, the morning after blues. By that late afternoon Frank had regrouped himself and began to understand what he needed to do to project his new political profile. He had been rather neutral about the outcome of the election prior to that morning since for a variety of other reasons he would be opposing Mrs. Clinton and her very upfront and frankly scary war policies which she intended to thrust on the country when she was sworn in (and he had taken much flak from friends and loved ones for not believing that there was a qualitative difference between this pair of rogues). But the reality of the Trump triumph and the accompanying sweep of everything in sight by the ghoulish Republicans, those who favored him or not, who had their own reactionary agenda to push through had placed him on immediate war footing.                      

That “war footing” idea was no literary flourish although those same friends and loved one would tell you that Frank was entirely capable of such flourishes but an understanding that it would be necessary to begin the resistance to Trump and his government whatever it looked like (and in the end it looked very much like a rogue’s gallery of the 1% that he had been campaigning against for the previous decade or so-in who were being tagged by Trump in person in some cases to put their grimy fingers on the affairs of state). That afternoon he wrote a blog for a website, American Politics, that he wrote for occasionally arguing that the election results along with the general dead-end trend of American politics and the extreme divisiveness pulling society apart, putting it into two distinct and visible camps had confirmed against his better hopes from the evidence of the past year that the country was in a state of cold civil war (with the unstated implication going back to ante-bellum times that the nation was on the cusp of that turning into a “hot” one).         

From that afternoon on he would when making commentary use that slogan or mantra if you will-“the cold civil war has started” whenever he posted anything politically relevant on his various sites (although a strong argument could be made that it had only come into the open and that had started years before-at the very beginning of the Obama era-maybe earlier on the economic side with the tremendous loss of decent jobs). Frank though is, has been an activist, a left-wing of some sort of activist since he was a kid. Since back in 1960 when he was a slip of a teenage boy hanging out with Quakers and pacifists publicly protesting against the escalation of nuclear weaponry in favor of disarmament. So the axis of his slogan was not to make abstract and academic political points, he would leave that to the egg-on-face pundits and bull-shitters but to help prepare for the social struggles ahead once old Trump was sworn in. To get people prepared to go into the streets since the electoral process had proven bankrupt. He argued and would continue to argue that unlike the died-in-the-wool Democrats who were miffed about how unfair things had turned out and looked forward to some future utopian electoral victory with a “better” candidate that the resistance needed to be organized on the streets-and maybe given the way the political deck was stacked the only place that mattered for the duration.            

Of course you can only effectively argue about what needs to be done when something happens-something like the inauguration of one Donald J. Trump and so Frank would point out that from day one, from noontime come January 20^th the resistance needed to be publicly organized. What Frank meant, what he  determined was necessary to show his new state of mind was that he decided he would go down to Washington on Inauguration Day and protest the swearing in of the next President of the United States. This was no mean task since Frank had purposefully avoided going to that event for all of his long political life seeing the event as a waste of time (and in recent years worthless as a place to protest since there were so many restrictions placed on protestors as to defeat the purpose). Helping him in his decision to go down the few hundred miles from his home in Dalton about forty miles west of Boston was that the next day there was to be a Women’s March on Washington and so the weekend would be one of activity and struggle.    

Frank had over the previous several years since he had slowed down his professional activities as a lawyer been to Washington on a number of occasions to protest the Obama war policies in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and wherever else that administration was bloodying its hands and also in defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning when his trial was going on at Fort Meade just outside Washington. (As one of his last acts in office Obama would commute Chelsea’s horrendous thirty-five year sentence for essentially telling the truth about American atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq via his Wiki-Leaks revelations to his thankful credit from supporters and opponents like Frank alike).

Of late Frank usually would fly to Washington but this time he decided to drive the four hundred or so miles in order to take three young passengers with him who had no resources to go otherwise. He would foot the travel bill since the cost of travel by car would be about the same as a flight for himself. (One an Iraq War veteran who was trying to stabilize his life after a serious bout with drugs and two graduate students who by definition are poverty-stricken)  He had also decided to use his hotel loyalty points in Baltimore order to have lodging for all four since anyplace closer would have been over-the-top expensive and given the lateness of his decision to go most protester-friendly places like U/U churches were filled up and or spoken for.  On the 19^th of January having picked up the three guys in Cambridge they headed south to Washington to do political battle the next day.

The next day after spending a restless and talkative night at that Baltimore hotel location the four men headed by car to the nearest Metro station at Glenmont on the Redline to get to downtown Washington. The train was not crowded (as opposed to the next day’s efforts, the gigantic Women’s March, where they would have to wait for a long time both to get into that same station and to board the train) and they made downtown in good time (and didn’t have to worry about where to park amid all the restrictions on the streets that day). They got off at Judiciary and proceeded to head toward the security checkpoint on Fourth near the National Gallery of Art so they could get a spot on the parade route to give Trump the old raspberry on opening day. (One of the reasons that Frank in recent years had decided not to go to any Inaugurations to protest was the whole security apparatus set-up, the “running of the gauntlet,” which effectively acted to tamp down any serious in-your-face protest so he knew that they would be limited in what they could carry for signs, etc.)           

That day it never got to the raspberry on the parade route point though. As Frank and his companions were standing in the slow-moving security check-point line a group of young people who later identified themselves to Frank as part of Surge Washington which had been formed mostly by young people who were students or who worked in Washington to protest in a peaceful but forceful way the impeding coronation of Trump sat down in front of the security tent and blocked the entrance. Classic tried and true honored civil disobedience. Naturally that event stopped Frank and his companions in their tracks since unlike others trying to get through the checkpoint they would not cross the line set up by their fellow protesters. This action, part of several around city, were acts of   symbolic speech and while later he and his companions would discuss the value of the particular action they were all under the bane of “picket lines mean don’t cross” an old labor slogan honored many times more in the breech than the observance.

This action which was intended to shut down the checkpoint for a couple of hours and then move on to other such locales wound up being Frank and his companions’ activities for the day and they never did get to the parade route to protest. So they moved with the protesters whenever they moved. 

Not only were they acting in political solidarity with the protesters but Frank was there to defend them against the sometimes angry spectators who could not get through whatever he thought of the tactic. (There were several testy situations when some Bikers for Trump tried to break the line at Fourth Street but were dissuaded by the Secret Service agents who had closed the checkpoint tight so nobody was getting through anyway). Their mostly young faces had heartened him that there would be another generation to pass the protest torch on to. Moreover since he was admitted as a lawyer in D.C. he could represent them if they were arrested. Throughout the day there were arrests around the city, a couple of hundred according to news sources, but no at any of the actions that Frank’s groupings were at. So that is how Frank (and his companions) spent his first day of resistance, his first day as a “soldier” in the brewing cold civil war which has been unleashed in the American dark night. 

[Frank and his friends would attend the Women’s March on Washington the next day which was spectacular but really uneventful except as a wonderful realization that there were plenty of people, plenty of women who had joined, or were ready to join the resistance. Yes, they came to Washington half a million strong to make a first full day point.]

Join the resistance!