In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind    

In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake In Mind    

 

 

Recently in discussing Sam Lowell’s relationship with mountain music, the music from down in the hills and hollows of Kentucky where his father and his people before him had lived dirt poor for generations eking almost nothing out of the land that had been abandoned decades before by some going west driven spirits who played the land out and moved on, some moving on until they reached ocean edge California, Bart Webber noticed that he had concentrated a little too heavily on the music of Sam’ s father’s  Kentucky hills and hollows. There were other places down south like in the Piedmont of North Carolina where a cleaner picking style had been developed by the likes of Etta Baker and exemplified more recently by Norman Blake who has revived the work of performers like Aunt Helen Alder and Pappy Sims by playing the old tunes. There are other places as well like down in the inner edges of Tennessee and Georgia where the kindred also dwelled, places as well where if the land had played out there they, the ones who stayed behind in there tacky cabins barely protected against the weathers, their lack of niceties of modern existence a result not because they distained such things but down in the hollows they did not know about them, did not seem to notice the bustling outside world.

 

They all, all the hills and hollows people, just kept plucking away barely making ends meet, usually not doing so in some periods, and once they had abandoned cultivating the land these sedentary heredity “master-less men” thrown out their old countries, mainly the British Isles, for any number of petty crimes, but crimes against property and so they had to go on their own or face involuntary transportation they went into the “black god” mines or sharecropping for some Mister to live short, nasty, brutish lives before the deluge.

But come Saturday night, come old Fred Brown’s worn out in need of paint red barn the hill people, the mountain people, the piedmont brethren, hell, maybe a few swamp-dwellers too, would gather up their instruments, their sweet liquor jugs, their un-scrubbed bare-foot children or their best guy or gal and play the night away as the winds came down the mountains. This DNA etched in his bones by his father and the kindred is what Sam had denied for much of his life.          

But like Bart had mentioned when discussing the matter with Sam one night sometimes “what goes around comes around” as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it had crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco. Crashed out by word of mouth at first and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who got his word from Diana Nelson who got it from a cousin from North Adamsville nearer Boston who frequented the coffeehouse on Beacon Hill and Harvard Square who had “hipped” her to this new folk music program that he had found flipping the dial of his transistor radio one Sunday night.

 

See Sam and Diana were tucked away from the swirl down in Carver about thirty miles as the crow flies from Boston and Cambridge but maybe a million social miles from those locales and had picked up the thread somewhat belatedly. He, along with his corner boys, had lived in their little corner boy cocoon out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner figuring out ways to get next to girls like Diana but who were stuck, stuck like glue to listening to the “put to sleep” music that was finding its way to clog up Jimmy Jack’s’ hither-to-fore “boss” jukebox. Christ, stuff like Percy Faith’s Moon River that parents could swoon over, and dance to. Had picked the sound up belatedly when they were fed up with what was being presented on American Bandstand and WJDA the local rock station, while they were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, and looked different from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence.

Oh sure, as Bart recognized once he thought about it for a while, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood a century or so ago and have it count has tried to draw its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of that decade, maybe the first part of the next. That big picture is what interested him. What Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed and they were fighting an unsuccessful rearguard action against the night-takers and he was forced to consider other issues. And Sam had been like that ever after. 

 

The way Sam told it one night a few years back, according to Bart, some forty or so years after his ear changed forever that change had been a bumpy road. Sam had been at his bi-weekly book club in Plymouth where the topic selected for the next meeting was the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak then since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook. He had along with Bart and Jack Dawson also had been around that time discussing how they had been looking for roots as kids. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of their  generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree.

 

Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave had spilled them onto these shores was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So their generation had had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

 

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he had started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different after Diana had clued him in about that folk music program. Although for a while he could not find that particular program or Carver was out of range for the airwaves. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he fortunately had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week and so it was before long that he was tuned in.

 

His own lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music to comply with whatever necessary FCC mandates went with the license.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a new guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music. Those coffeehouses were manna from heaven, well, because they were cheap for guys with little money. Cheap alone or on a date, basically as Sam related to his book club listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs.

 

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on the radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys. Norman Blake just starting his rise along with various expert band members to bring bluegrass to the wider younger audience that did not relate to guys like Bill Monroe and his various band combinations, and some other bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

 

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school. He furthermore had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement too of Bobby Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.  

 

Then one night, a Sunday night after he had picked up the Boston folk program station on the family radio (apparently the weak transistor radio did not have the energy to pick up a Boston station) he was listening to the Carter Family’s Wildwood Flower when his father came in and began singing along. After asking Sam about whether he liked the song and Sam answered that he did but could not explain why his father told him a story that maybe put the whole thing in perspective. After Sam’s older brother, Lawrence, had been born and things looked pretty dicey for a guy from the South with no education and no skill except useless coal-mining his father decided that maybe they should go back to Kentucky and see if things were better for a guy like him there. No dice, after had been in the north, after seeing the same old tacky cabins, the played out land, the endless streams of a new generation of shoeless kids Sam’s father decided to head back north and try to eke something out in a better place. But get this while Sam’s parents were in Kentucky Sam had been conceived. Yeah, so maybe it was in the genes all along.          

Support "Courage To Resist"-The Organization Supporting Military Resisters And Chelsea Manning -The Latest Newsletter

 



Frank Jackman comment on Courage To Resist and military resisters: 

I have always admired military resisters having, frankly, done my time in the military, Vietnam Era time, without any serious reflection about the military, my role in the military, or what was just and unjust about that war until after I got out. After I got out, began to see thing through the fog of war and got serious “religion” on the questions of war and peace from several sources. At first working with the Cambridge Quakers who I had noticed around the fringes of anti-war GI work in the early 1970s when there was a serious basis for doing such work as the American army one way or another was half in mutiny toward the end of American involvement in that war. And a serious need as guys, guys who get their “religion” in the service needed civilian help to survive the military maze that they were trying to fight. This connection with the Quakers had been made shortly after I got out of the service when my doubts crept in about what I had done in the service, and why I had let myself be drafted when I had expressed serious anti-war doubts before induction about what the American government was doing in Vietnam to its own soldiers. But, more importantly, and this was the real beginning of wisdom and something I am keenly aware every time the American government ratchets up the war hysteria for its latest adventure, to the Vietnamese who to paraphrase the great boxer Mohammed Ali (then Cassius Clay) had never done anything to me, never posed any threat to me and mine. But as much as I admired the Quakers and their simple peace witness, occasionally attended their service and briefly had a Quaker girlfriend, I was always a little jumpy around them, my problem not theirs, since their brand of conscientious objection to all wars was much broader than my belief in just and unjust wars.

Later I worked with a couple of anti-war collectives that concentrated on anti-war GI work among active GIs through the vehicle of coffeehouses located near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and Fort Dix down in New Jersey. That work while satisfying and rewarding by actually working with guys who knew the score, knew the score from the inside, and had plenty to tell, especially those who had gotten “religion” under fire was short-lived once American on the ground involvement in Vietnam was minimalized and the horrific draft was abolished as a means of grabbing “cannon fodder” for the damn war. Once the threat of being sent to Vietnam diminished the soldiers drifted off and the anti-war cadre that held things together as well.

What really drove the issue of military resistance home to me though, what caused some red-faced shame was something that I did not find out about until well after my own military service was over. A few years later when I went back to my hometown on some family-related business I found out after meeting him on the street coming out of a local supermarket that my best friend from high school, Sean Kiley, had been a military resister, had refused to go to Vietnam, and had served about two years in various Army stockades for his efforts. Had done his “duty” as he saw it. Had earned his “anti-war” colors the hard way.    

See Sean like me, like a lot of working-class kids from places like our hometown, Gloversville, up in Massachusetts, maybe had a few doubts about the war but had no way to figure out what to do and let himself be drafted for that very reason. What would a small town boy whose citizens supported the Vietnam War long after it made even a smidgen of sense, whose own parents were fervent “hawks,” whose older brother had won the DSC in Vietnam, and whose contemporaries including me did their service without a public murmur know of how to maneuver against the American military monster machine. But what Sean saw early on, from about day three of basis training, told him he had made a big error, that his grandmother who grew up in Boston and had been an old Dorothy Day Catholic Worker supporter had been right that there was no right reason for him to be in that war. And so when he could, after receiving orders for Vietnam, he refused to go (I will tell you more of the details some time when I ask him some questions about events that I have forgotten) and did his time in the military that way.          

Sean’s story, and in a sense my belated story, are enough reasons to support Courage to Resist since, unfortunately, there are today very few organizations dedicated to providing informational, legal, and social support for the military resisters of the heinous onslaughts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The organization needs the help of every ex-soldier who got “religion,” of every anti-war activist, and of every honest citizen who realizes, now more than ever, that the short way to end the endless wars of this generation is to get to the soldiers, get to the cadre on the ground fighting the damn wars. Enough said.     

All Honor To The Whistle-Blowers 

Dear friends, We want to bring to your attention to three urgent campaigns.
	Now! Support the jailed whistleblower William McNeilly who exposed the poor safety standards on Trident nuclear submarines amounting to a “disaster waiting to happen”.  Sign the Scottish CND petition calling for his pardon.
	Wednesday 27 May, 3.15 pm, Downing Street.  Timed to confront parliamentarians on their first day back to publicise the need for a new law to protect whistleblowers. Join the pop-up protest for the I AM EDNA CAMPAIGN .
	Monday 1 June, 6.30pm, come to the Whistleblower Speaking Tour at Birbeck University, Malet Stree, WC1E 7HX (entrance on Torrington Square).  Listen to a distinguished international panel of speakers which includes Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower and Eileen Chubb of the I AM EDNA CAMPAIGN. (For more information and to reserve your place click here).
Payday men’s network

 

UNACpeace@gmail.com           518-227-6947             www.UNACpeace.org

 

REPORT ON THE

'STOP THE WARS AT HOME & ABROAD!'

NATIONAL CONFERENCE

May 8-10, 2015,  Secaucus, N.J.

 (to see the report in your browser, click here)

By the 2015 Conference Organizing Committee

Against a background of seemingly endless U.S. wars abroad and growing domestic movements against racist police killings, low wages and devastating climate change, more than 400 activists gathered just outside New York City May 8-10 for a “Stop the Wars at Home & Abroad!” conference that ratified an Action Plan addressing both domestic and international issues.

Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), the conference, held at a hotel in Secaucus, New Jersey, brought together a wide range of activists, from those who primarily concentrate on international issues to mostly younger activists in the emerging movements such as Black Lives Matter, Fight for $15 and environmental change.

Conference delegates came from 29 states, as well as Canada, Britain, Germany and Ukraine. A number of now-U.S.-based activists represented struggles in their home countries of Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, Iran, Mexico, Palestine, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Syria and Venezuel also attened.

Solidarity messages were received from Cuba, Ireland, New Zealand and Russia.

A total of 116 organizations participated in the conference. There were more than 100 speakers, more than half of whom were people of color and women. There were six plenary sessions, 31 workshops and a Saturday night “Tribunal on the Militarization of the Police& Structural Racism.”

Linking up the issues

While UNAC conferences have always addressed domestic issues, this one was unique in that it was the first time a national antiwar gathering so clearly took up the need to oppose the war being waged against oppressed communities in the United States. A central theme of many panels and workshops was support for the resistance of Black youth standing up to the epidemic of police brutality.

In the opening plenary session, Jaribu Hill, founder of the Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights, delivered a stirring call for solidarity with young activists. Declaring that resistance to the status quo is the only way forward, she called the youth who rebelled in Baltimore “young Steve Bikos and Harriet Tubmans.”

Another especially dynamic speaker was Lawrence Hamm, founder and Chair of the People’s Organization for Progress (POP) in Newark, N.J. Explaining that we are really fighting one war on many fronts, Hamm called on those present to oppose “all U.S. boots on the ground, defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership, fight union busting and other attacks on the working class at home and challenge white-supremacist attacks on Black and Brown people!”

As part of the conference's Action Plan, participants endorsed the POP-initiated “Million People’s March Against Racial Injustice and Economic Inequality” planned for July 25 in Newark.

Other New Jersey organizations with speakers at the conference included Action 21, the Jersey City Peace Movement and New Jersey Peace Action.

Opposing the wars abroad

On the international front, conference participants heard from longtime antiwar activist Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, who recently completed a three-month prison sentence for protesting U.S. drone warfare. Kelly compared the reaction of the U.S. public to reports of beheadings by the extremist group ISIS to its muted reaction to the murder of thousands of surrendering Iraqi soldiers in 1991 and the deaths of more than a half-million Iraqi children from U.S.-imposed sanctions.

Other antiwar speakers included Kazem Azin of Solidarity Iran; Medea Benjamin of Code Pink; Maurice Carney of the Friends of the Congo; Bruce Gagnon of Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space; Malachy Kilbride of the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance; Ed Kinane of the Upstate (N.Y.) Drone Action Network; Ray LaForest of Haiti Support Network; David Swanson of WarBeyondWar.org; and Kevin Zeese of PopularResistance.org.

The conference also heard from retired U.S. Col. Ann Wright, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and former U.S. State Department official Peter Van Buren, all of whom are now prominent opponents of U.S. wars.

A Message from Cuba

The entire conference was exciting, but there were several especially high points.

On Saturday afternoon, the conference received a message from Kenia Serrano Puig, President of the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples, or ICAP), an NGO established in 1960 soon after the Cuban Revolution. The message opened by stating “The work UNAC does in USA in the struggle for social justice and against military interventions in other nations is a topic of utmost importance.” (click here for the full message  from Cuba)

Several Ukrainian activists attended, including three from Odessa who brought a photo display of the murderous, right-wing attack on the House of Labor in that city. The Ukrainians spoke at a plenary session and in a workshop on the expansion of NATO and the situation in Ukraine.

On Saturday evening, the “Tribunal on the Militarization of the Police & Structural Racism” heard from Michelle Kamal, whose son was murdered by police. Other tribunal presenters included Manzoor Cheema of Muslims for Social Justice in Raleigh, N.C.; Larry Holmes from the People’s Power Assemblies; and the Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou from Ferguson, Mo.

Solidarity with the struggles at home

The theme of “Stop the Wars at Home & Abroad” was first used by UNAC at its founding conference in 2010 to oppose attacks on the Muslim community that were part of the phony U.S. “war on terror.” Today this war at home is increasingly impacting Black and Brown communities, working people and their unions and the civil liberties of everyone.

By featuring voices from communities under attack here at home, UNAC and the antiwar movement made an important political turn that solidly places us in the camp of those fighting the militarization of the police, mass incarceration, climate disaster and attacks on civil liberties, while drawing the connections between those struggles and the increasing U.S. wars and U.S. proxy wars abroad.

In keeping with this central theme of the conference, domestic issues were well-represented.

Clarence Thomas of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 spoke about how his local shut down San Francisco-area ports this past May Day in support of the urban rebellions against police killings. In the past, the local has gone out on strike against the U.S. war in Iraq, apartheid in South Africa and in support of U.S. political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Other speakers for workers' rights included John Dennie of National Postal Mail Handlers Union Local 300, a founder of the Postal Defenders coalition and an organizer for the “Stop Staples” campaign; Chris Hutchinson of Teamsters Local 671 and the Connecticut Community Committee of “Fight for $15”; Charles Jenkins, President of the New York Chapter of the National Coalition of Black Trade Unionists; Shafeah M’Balia of North Carolina-based Black Workers for Justice; and Rolandah Cleopattrah McMillan of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality, representing Virginia Raise Up and the “Fight for $15 and a Union” campaign.

And attending the conference were several members of United Steelworkers Local 8751, which represents Boston school bus drivers. This union had recently beaten back a vicious company-inspired frame-up of several of its leaders, who then went on to win re-election in a landslide victory. Recently-elected local President Andre Francois addressed the conference, surrounded by union members.

Marilyn Zuniga, a teacher from Orange, N.J., who was recently fired after some of her students wrote get-well cards to ailing Mumia Abu-Jamal, won support from the conference for her fight to regain her job.

Other speakers addressing important domestic issues were Gerry Condon of Veterans for Peace; Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report; Imani Keith Henry of The Equality for Flatbush (N.Y.) Project (E4F); Cheri Honkala of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign; climate change author and activist Antonia Juhasz; and John Parker, a leader in the Los Angeles ballot initiative to win a $15 minimum wage.

As in past UNAC conferences, Muslims fighting for social change played important roles. These included Malik Mujahid of the Muslim Peace Coalition and Chairman of the Parliament of World’s Religions; Sharmin Sadequee of the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms; Manzoor Cheema, founder of Muslims for Social Justice; as well as members of Project SALAM, which works on issues of pre-emptive prosecution of Muslims. Joe Iosbaker, a member of the Antiwar Committee-Chicago, himself a target of FBI repression, spoke about the case of Palestinian-American political prisoner Rasmea Odeh.

The “Free Political Prisoners” panel heard about the cases of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui of Pakistan; Simon Trinidad of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia); and Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar Louis Rivera, who for four years was a U.S. prison cellmate of Fernando Gonzalez, one of the Cuban 5. (click here for the message Rivera wrote to Gonzalez in solidarity with Cuba)

Also speaking on this panel was attorney and former political prisoner Lynne Stewart. Pam Africa spoke about the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the MOVE commune in Philadelphia and the continuing case of U.S. political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The conference endorsed MOVE's May 13 rally on the anniversary of the bombing.

National& international speakers, culture & resolutions

Other speakers at the conference included former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney; Born King Allah of the Nation of Gods & Earths; “Addicted to War” author Joel Adreas; Palestinian author and activist Susan Abulhawa; Johnny Achi of Arab Americans for Syria; Abayomi Azikiwe of the Pan-African News Wire; William Camacaro of the Alberto Lovera Bolivarian Circle; Dr. Ghias Moussa of the Syrian American Forum; and U.S-based Honduran activist Lucy Pagoada-Quesada, among others.

International speakers included Elizabeth Byce of the New Democratic Party of Canada, Socialist Caucus; Chris Nineham of the U.K. Stop the Wars Coalition; and Elsa Rassbach of the German National Drone Campaign, which is demanding the closing of the Satellite Relay Station at the U.S. Air Base Ramstein and the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in Stuttgart. A Yemeni family that lost members from a US drone strike has filed a law suit against the German government to be heard on May 27 for allowing Ramstein to be used; U.S. solidarity protests have been called.
A statement of solidarity to the conference was received from the Mobilization Against War & Occupation (MAWO) in Vancouver, Canada.

Also addressing the conference were central UNAC leaders Judy Bello of the Upstate (N.Y.) Coalition to Ground the Drones & End the Wars; Ana Edwards and Phil Wilayto of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice and Equality; Bernadette Ellorin of BAYAN USA; Sara Flounders of the International Action Center; Joe Iosbaker of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression; Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report; Jeff Mackler of Bay Area UNAC; and UNAC Co-Coordinators Marilyn Levin and Joe Lombardo.

People's culture was represented by the Hip Hop duo Rebel Diaz, the Filipino dance group Potri Ranka Manis and Syrian poet Avin Dirki.  The conference was opened with a poem by Raymond Nat Turner of Black Agenda Report. 

A full list of speakers can be found at the conference website: http://UNACconference2015.org.

From education to action

The Action Resolution passed at the final conference session included a call for coordinated antiwar and social justice actions in October; support for Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist, pro-women and pro-LGBTQ groups calling for actions on May 21; support for a call for a national presence on Sept. 19 in Richmond, Va., to defend slavery-related sites threatened by for-profit development; support for the “Fight for $15 and a Union” movement; support for international actions planned to protest the expected and tragic failure of the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP 21 or Conference of Parties) set for Paris, France; and a resolution supporting Iran’s Red Crescent ship taking humanitarian supplies to challenge the U.S. and Saudi Arabian blockade of Yemen, among others.

Click here for the full Action Plan.

The conference was live-streamed by GoProRadio.com, enabling many more people who were not able to attend to follow the proceedings.  Much of the conference can be seen on video from GoProRadio.com  and provided below.

Videos of many of the sessions can be found at:  http://nepajac.org/conferencevid.htm

All in all, the conference was unique for the antiwar movement. Not only was it the most diverse antiwar conference in memory, it also helped bring the antiwar movement together with the other developing movements for social change. In doing so, it identified our common enemy and our determination to fight together for justice and peace.

About UNAC

Founded in 2010, UNAC is now the largest antiwar coalition in the United States, with nearly 120 member organizations opposing U.S. wars in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South America and the Caribbean.

UNAC's unifying principles are opposition to all U.S. wars, interventions, sanctions, blockades or interference in the internal affairs of other countries; opposition to the wars at home, as addressed at this conference; support for the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination; promotion of mass actions as the primary, but not only, method of struggle; independence from the two major political parties; and a democratic decision-making process.

(Click here for a message read at the conference to the Cubans and his former cell mate Fernando Gonzalez of the Cuban 5 by Polical Prisoner Oscar Louis Rivera.

 

For more information on UNAC, go here: http://UNACpeace.org

 

For videos of much of the conference, go here: http://nepajac.org/conferencevid.htm

 

Here Are the Navy's Plans to Bomb the Arctic

Dahr Jamail on May 21, 2015 - 10:54AM ET

Lituya Bay in the Gulf of Alaska (Alaska ShoreZone Program NOAA/NMFS/AKFSC; Courtesy of Mandy Lindeberg, NOAA/NMFS/AKFSC, CC BY 2.0)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.
[This essay is a joint TomDispatch/Truthout report.]
I lived in Anchorage for 10 years and spent much of that time climbing in and on the spine of the state, the Alaska Range. Three times I stood atop the mountain the Athabaskans call Denali, "the great one." During that decade, I mountaineered for more than half a year on that magnificent state's highest peaks. It was there that I took in my own insignificance while living amid rock and ice, sleeping atop glaciers that creaked and moaned as they slowly ground their way toward lower elevations.
Alaska contains the largest coastal mountain range in the world and the highest peak in North America. It has more coastline than the entire contiguous 48 states combined and is big enough to hold the state of Texas two and a half times over. It has the largest population of bald eagles in the country. It has 430 kinds of birds along with the brown bear, the largest carnivorous land mammal in the world, and other species ranging from the pygmy shrew that weighs less than a penny to gray whales that come in at 45 tons. Species that are classified as "endangered" in other places are often found in abundance in Alaska.
Now, a dozen years after I left my home state and landed in Baghdad to begin life as a journalist and nine years after definitively abandoning Alaska, I find myself back. I wish it was to climb another mountain, but this time, unfortunately, it's because I seem increasingly incapable of escaping the long and destructive reach of the U.S. military.
That summer in 2003 when my life in Alaska ended was an unnerving one for me. It followed a winter and spring in which I found myself protesting the coming invasion of Iraq in the streets of Anchorage, then impotently watching the televised spectacle of the Bush administration's "shock and awe" assault on that country as Baghdad burned and Iraqis were slaughtered. While on Denali that summer I listened to news of the beginnings of what would be an occupation from hell and, in my tent on a glacier at 17,000 thousand feet, wondered what in the world I could do.
In this way, in a cloud of angst, I traveled to Iraq as an independent news team of one and found myself reporting on atrocities that were evident to anyone not embedded with the U.S. military, which was then laying waste to the country. My early reporting, some of it for TomDispatch, warned of body counts on a trajectory toward one million, rampant torture in the military's detention facilities, and the toxic legacy it had left in the city of Fallujah thanks to the use of depleted uranium munitions and white phosphorous.
As I learned, the U.S. military is an industrial-scale killing machine and also the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet, which makes it a major source of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. As it happens, distant lands like Iraq sitting atop vast reservoirs of oil and natural gas are by no means its only playing fields.
Take the place where I now live, the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. The U.S. Navy already has plans to conduct electromagnetic warfare training in an area close to where I moved to once again seek solace in the mountains: Olympic National Forest and nearby Olympic National Park. And this June, it's scheduling massive war games in the Gulf of Alaska, including live bombing runs that will mean the detonation of tens of thousands of pounds of toxic munitions, as well as the use of active sonar in the most pristine, economically valuable, and sustainable salmon fishery in the country (arguably in the world). And all of this is to happen right in the middle of fishing season.
This time, in other words, the bombs will be falling far closer to home. Whether it's war-torn Iraq or "peaceful" Alaska, Sunnis and Shi'ites or salmon and whales, to me the omnipresent "footprint" of the U.S. military feels inescapable.

The War Comes Home

In 2013, U.S. Navy researchers predicted ice-free summer Arctic waters by 2016 and it looks as if that prediction might come true. Recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that there was less ice in the Arctic this winter than in any other winter of the satellite era. Given that the Navy has been making plans for "ice-free" operations in the Arctic since at least 2001, their June "Northern Edge" exercises may well prove to be just the opening salvo in the future northern climate wars, with whales, seals, and salmon being the first in the line of fire.
In April 2001, a Navy symposium entitled "Naval Operations in an Ice-Free Arctic" was mounted to begin to prepare the service for a climate-change-induced future. Fast forward to June 2015. In what the military refers to as Alaska's "premier" joint training exercise, Alaskan Command aims to conduct "Northern Edge" over 8,429 nautical miles, which include critical habitat for all five wild Alaskan salmon species and 377 other species of marine life. The upcoming war games in the Gulf of Alaska will not be the first such exercises in the region—they have been conducted, on and off, for the last 30 years—but they will be the largest by far. In fact, a 360% rise in munitions use is expected, according to Emily Stolarcyk, the program manager for the Eyak Preservation Council (EPC).
The waters in the Gulf of Alaska are some of the most pristine in the world, rivaled only by those in the Antarctic, and among the purest and most nutrient-rich waters anywhere. Northern Edge will take place in an Alaskan "marine protected area," as well as in a NOAA-designated "fisheries protected area." These war games will also coincide with the key breeding and migratory periods of the marine life in the region as they make their way toward Prince William Sound, as well as further north into the Arctic.
Species affected will include blue, fin, gray, humpback, minke, sei, sperm, and killer whales, the highly endangered North Pacific right whale (of which there are only approximately 30 left), as well as dolphins and sea lions. No fewer than a dozen native tribes including the Eskimo, Eyak, Athabascan, Tlingit, Sun'aq, and Aleut rely on the area for subsistence living, not to speak of their cultural and spiritual identities.
The Navy is already permitted to use live ordnance including bombs, missiles, and torpedoes, along with active and passive sonar in "realistic" war gaming that is expected to involve the release of as much as 352,000 pounds of "expended materials" every year. (The Navy's EIS lists numerous things as "expended materials," including missiles, bombs, torpedoes.) At present, the Navy is well into the process of securing the necessary permits for the next five years and has even mentioned making plans for the next 20. Large numbers of warships and submarines are slated to move into the area and the potential pollution from this has worried Alaskans who live nearby.
"We are concerned about expended materials in addition to the bombs, jet noise, and sonar," the Eyak Preservation Council's Emily Stolarcyk tells me as we sit in her office in Cordova, Alaska. EPC is an environmental and social-justice-oriented nonprofit whose primary mission is to protect wild salmon habitat. "Chromium, lead, tungsten, nickel, cadmium, cyanide, ammonium perchlorate, the Navy's own environmental impact statement says there is a high risk of chemical exposure to fish."
Tiny Cordova, population 2,300, is home to the largest commercial fishing fleet in the state and consistently ranks among the top 10 busiest U.S. fishing ports. Since September, when Stolarcyk first became aware of the Navy's plans, she has been working tirelessly, calling local, state and federal officials and alerting virtually every fisherman she runs into about what she calls "the storm" looming on the horizon. "The propellants from the Navy's missiles and some of their other weapons will release benzene, toluene, xylene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and naphthalene into the waters of twenty percent of the training area, according to their own EIS [environmental impact statement]," she explains as we look down on Cordova's harbor with salmon fishing season rapidly approaching. As it happens, most of the chemicals she mentioned were part of BP's disastrous 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which I covered for years, so as I listened to her I had an eerie sense of futuristic déjà vu.
Here's just one example of the kinds of damage that will occur: the cyanide discharge from a Navy torpedo is in the range of 140-150 parts per billion. The Environmental Protection Agency's "allowable" limit on cyanide: one part per billion.
The Navy's EIS estimates that, in the five-year period in which these war games are to be conducted, there will be more than 182,000 "takes"—direct deaths of a marine mammal, or the disruption of essential behaviors like breeding, nursing, or surfacing. On the deaths of fish, it offers no estimates at all. Nevertheless, the Navy will be permitted to use at least 352,000 pounds of expended materials in these games annually. The potential negative effects could be far-reaching, given species migration and the global current system in northern waters.
In the meantime, the Navy is giving Stolarcyk's efforts the cold shoulder, showing what she calls "total disregard toward the people making their living from these waters." She adds, "They say this is for national security. They are theoretically defending us, but if they destroy our food source and how we make our living, while polluting our air and water, what's left to defend?"
Stolarcyk has been labeled an "activist" and "environmentalist," perhaps because the main organizations she's managed to sign on to her efforts are indeed environmental groups like the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, the Alaska Center for the Environment, and the Alaskans First Coalition.
"Why does wanting to protect wild salmon habitat make me an activist?" she asks. "How has that caused me to be branded as an environmentalist?" Given that the Alaska commercial fishing industry could be decimated if its iconic "wild-caught" salmon turn up with traces of cyanide or any of the myriad chemicals the Navy will be using, Stolarcyk could as easily be seen as fighting for the well-being, if not the survival, of the fishing industry in her state.

War Gaming the Community

The clock is ticking in Cordova and others in Stolarcyk's community are beginning to share her concerns. A few like Alexis Cooper, the executive director of Cordova District Fishermen United (CDFU), a non-profit organization that represents the commercial fishermen in the area, have begun to speak out. "We're already seeing reduced numbers of halibut without the Navy having expanded their operations in the GOA [Gulf of Alaska]," she says, "and we're already seeing other decreases in harvestable species."
CDFU represents more than 800 commercial salmon fishermen, an industry that accounts for an estimated 90% of Cordova's economy. Without salmon, like many other towns along coastal southeastern Alaska, it would effectively cease to exist.
Teal Webber, a lifelong commercial fisherwoman and member of the Native Village of Eyak, gets visibly upset when the Navy's plans come up. "You wouldn't bomb a bunch of farmland," she says, "and the salmon run comes right through this area, so why are they doing this now?" She adds, "When all of the fishing community in Cordova gets the news about how much impact the Navy's war games could have, you'll see them oppose it en masse."
While I'm in town, Stolarcyk offers a public presentation of the case against Northern Edge in the elementary school auditorium. As she shows a slide from the Navy's environmental impact statement indicating that the areas affected will take decades to recover, several fishermen quietly shake their heads.
One of them, James Weiss, who also works for Alaska's Fish and Game Department, pulls me aside and quietly says, "My son is growing up here, eating everything that comes out of the sea. I know fish travel through that area they plan to bomb and pollute, so of course I'm concerned. This is too important of a fishing area to put at risk."
In the question-and-answer session that follows, Jim Kasch, the town's mayor, assures Stolarcyk that he'll ask the city council to become involved. "What's disturbing is that there is no thought about the fish and marine life," he tells me later. "It's a sensitive area and we live off the ocean. This is just scary." A Marine veteran, Kasch acknowledges the Navy's need to train, then pauses and adds, "But dropping live ordnance in a sensitive fishery just isn't a good idea. The entire coast of Alaska lives and breathes from our resources from the ocean."
That evening, with the sun still high in the spring sky, I walk along the boat docks in the harbor and can't help but wonder whether this small, scruffy town has a hope in hell of stopping or altering Northern Edge. There have been examples of such unlikely victories in the past. A dozen years ago, the Navy was, for example, finally forced to stop using the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as its own private bombing and test range, but only after having done so since the 1940s. In the wake of those six decades of target practice, the island's population has the highest cancer and asthma rates in the Caribbean, a phenomenon locals attribute to the Navy's activities.
Similarly, earlier this year a federal court ruled that Navy war games off the coast of California violated the law. It deemed an estimated 9.6 million "harms" to whales and dolphins via high-intensity sonar and underwater detonations improperly assessed as "negligible" in that service's EIS.
As a result of Stolarcyk's work, on May 6th Cordova's city council passed a resolution formally opposing the upcoming war games. Unfortunately, the largest seafood processor in Cordova (and Alaska), Trident Seafoods, has yet to offer a comment on Northern Edge. Its representatives wouldn't even return my phone call on the subject. Nor, for instance, has Cordova's Prince William Sound Science Center, whose president, Katrina Hoffman, wrote me that "as an organization, we have no position statement on the matter at this time." This, despite their stated aim of supporting "the ability of communities in this region to maintain socioeconomic resilience among healthy, functioning ecosystems." (Of course, it should be noted that at least some of their funds come from the Navy.)

Government-to-Government Consultation

At Kodiak Island, my next stop, I find a stronger sense of the threat on the horizon in both the fishing and tribal communities and palpable anger about the Navy's plans. Take J.J. Marsh, the CEO of the Sun'aq Tribe, the largest on the island. "I think it's horrible," she says the minute I sit down in her office. "I grew up here. I was raised on subsistence living. I grew up caring about the environment and the animals and fishing in a native household living off the land and seeing my grandpa being a fisherman. So obviously, the need to protect this is clear."
What, I ask, is her tribe going to do?
She responds instantly. "We are going to file for a government-to-government consultation and so are other Kodiak tribes so that hopefully we can get this stopped."
The U.S. government has a unique relationship with Alaska's Native tribes, like all other American Indian tribes. It treats each as if it were an autonomous government. If a tribe requests a "consultation," Washington must respond and Marsh hopes that such an intervention might help block Northern Edge. "It's about the generations to come. We have an opportunity as a sovereign tribe to go to battle on this with the feds. If we aren't going to do it, who is?"
Melissa Borton, the tribal administrator for the Native Village of Afognak, feels similarly. Like Marsh's tribe, hers was, until recently, remarkably unaware of the Navy's plans. That's hardly surprising since that service has essentially made no effort to publicize what it is going to do. "We are absolutely going to be part of this [attempt to stop the Navy]," she tells me. "I'm appalled."
One reason she's appalled: she lived through Alaska's monster Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. "We are still feeling its effects," she says. "Every time they make these environmental decisions they affect us... We are already plagued with cancer and it comes from the military waste already in our ground or that our fish and deer eat and we eat those... I've lost family to cancer, as most around here have and at some point in time this has to stop."
When I meet with Natasha Hayden, an Afognak tribal council member whose husband is a commercial fisherman, she puts the matter simply and bluntly. "This is a frontal attack by the Navy on our cultural identity."
Gary Knagin, lifelong fisherman and member of the Sun'aq tribe, is busily preparing his boat and crew for the salmon season when we talk. "We aren't going to be able to eat if they do this. It's bullshit. It'll be detrimental to us and it's obvious why. In June, when we are out there, salmon are jumping [in the waters] where they want to bomb as far as you can see in any direction. That's the salmon run. So why do they have to do it in June? If our fish are contaminated, the whole state's economy is hit. The fishing industry here supports everyone and every other business here is reliant upon the fishing industry. So if you take out the fishing, you take out the town."

The Navy's Free Ride

I requested comment from the U.S. military's Alaskan Command office, and Captain Anastasia Wasem responded after I returned home from my trip north. In our email exchange, I asked her why the Navy had chosen the Gulf of Alaska, given that it was a critical habitat for all five of the state's wild salmon. She replied that the waters where the war games will occur, which the Navy refers to as the Temporary Maritime Activities Area, are "strategically significant" and claimed that a recent "Pacific command study" found that naval training opportunities are declining everywhere in the Pacific "except Alaska," which she referred to as "a true national asset."
"The Navy's training activities," she added, "are conducted with an extensive set of mitigation measures designed to minimize the potential risk to marine life."
In its assessment of the Navy's plans, however, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), one of the premier federal agencies tasked with protecting national fisheries, disagreed. "Potential stressors to managed species and EFH [essential fish habitat]," its report said, "include vessel movements (disturbance and collisions), aircraft overflights (disturbance), fuel spills, ship discharge, explosive ordnance, sonar training (disturbance), weapons firing/nonexplosive ordnance use (disturbance and strikes), and expended materials (ordnance-related materials, targets, sonobuoys, and marine markers). Navy activities could have direct and indirect impacts on individual species, modify their habitat, or alter water quality." According to the NMFS, effects on habitats and communities from Northern Edge "may result in damage that could take years to decades from which to recover."

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Captain Wasem assured me that the Navy made its plans in consultation with the NMFS, but she failed to add that those consultations were found to be inadequate by the agency or to acknowledge that it expressed serious concerns about the coming war games. In fact, in 2011 it made four conservation recommendations to avoid, mitigate, or otherwise offset possible adverse effects to essential fish habitat. Although such recommendations were non-binding, the Navy was supposed to consider the public interest in its planning.
One of the recommendations, for instance, was that it develop a plan to report on fish mortality during the exercises. The Navy rejected this, claiming that such reporting would "not provide much, if any, valuable data." As Stolarcyk told me, "The Navy declined to do three of their four recommendations, and NMFS just rolled over."
I asked Captain Wasem why the Navy choose to hold the exercise in the middle of salmon fishing season.
"The Northern Edge exercise is scheduled when weather is most conducive for training," she explained vaguely, pointing out that "the Northern Edge exercise is a big investment for DoD [the Department of Defense] in terms of funding, use of equipment/fuels, strategic transportation, and personnel."

Arctic Nightmares

The bottom line on all this is simple, if brutal. The Navy is increasingly focused on possible future climate-change conflicts in the melting waters of the north and, in that context, has little or no intention of caretaking the environment when it comes to military exercises. In addition, the federal agencies tasked with overseeing any war-gaming plans have neither the legal ability nor the will to enforce environmental regulations when what's at stake, at least according to the Pentagon, is "national security."
Needless to say, when it comes to the safety of locals in the Navy's expanding area of operation, there is no obvious recourse. Alaskans can't turn to NMFS or the Environmental Protection Agency or NOAA. If you want to stop the U.S. military from dropping live munitions, or blasting electromagnetic radiation into national forests and marine sanctuaries, or poisoning your environment, you'd better figure out how to file a major lawsuit or, if you belong to a Native tribe, demand a government-to-government consultation and hope it works. And both of those are long shots, at best.
Meanwhile, as the race heats up for reserves of oil and gas in the melting Arctic that shouldn't be extracted and burned in the first place, so do the Navy's war games. From southern California to Alaska, if you live in a coastal town or city, odds are that the Navy is coming your way, if it's not already there.
Nevertheless, Emily Stolarcyk shows no signs of throwing in the towel, despite the way the deck is stacked against her efforts. "It's supposedly our constitutional right that control of the military is in the hands of the citizens," she told me in our last session together. At one point, she paused and asked, "Haven't we learned from our past mistakes around not protecting salmon? Look at California, Oregon, and Washington's salmon. They've been decimated. We have the best and most pristine salmon left on the planet, and the Navy wants to do these exercises. You can't have both."
Stolarcyk and I share a bond common among people who have lived in our northernmost state, a place whose wilderness is so vast and beautiful as to make your head spin. Those of us who have experienced its rivers and mountains, have been awed by the northern lights, and are regularly reminded of our own insignificance (even as we gained a new appreciation for how precious life really is) tend to want to protect the place as well as share it with others.
"Everyone has been telling me from the start that I'm fighting a lost cause and I will not win," Stolarcyk said as our time together wound down. "No other non-profit in Alaska will touch this. But I actually believe we can fight this and we can stop them. I believe in the power of one. If I can convince someone to join me, it spreads from there. It takes a spark to start a fire, and I refuse to believe that nothing can be done."
Three decades ago, in his book Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez suggested that, when it came to exploiting the Arctic versus living sustainably in it, the ecosystems of the region were too vulnerable to absorb attempts to "accommodate both sides." In the years since, whether it's been the Navy, Big Energy, or the increasingly catastrophic impacts of human-caused climate disruption, only one side has been accommodated and the results have been dismal.
In Iraq in wartime, I saw what the U.S. military was capable of in a distant ravaged land. In June, I'll see what that military is capable of in what still passes for peacetime and close to home indeed. As I sit at my desk writing this story on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, the roar of Navy jets periodically rumbles in from across Puget Sound where a massive naval air station is located. I can't help but wonder whether, years from now, I'll still be writing pieces with titles like "Destroying What Remains," as the Navy continues its war-gaming in an ice-free summer Arctic amid a sea of off-shore oil drilling platforms.

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