The Latest From The United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! -Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! No One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!

 

Click below for link to the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) website for more information about various anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist actions around the country.

https://unacpeace.org.

 

Sam Eaton thought it was funny that every time that he and his old time comrade from the anti-war struggles here in America, Ralph Morris, seemed to run out of steam the government would, under both Democratic and Republican Presidents, force them to dust off the old “Stop The War” you fill in the blank which war banners, write up some new leaflet denouncing the latest government rationale for blowing people in other countries to smithereens or raise dough from their circle of ex-radical and left liberal friends guilty about having left the struggle to send people to D.C. or New York to once against voice their opposition. Sam had thought it funny just then as the President had just authorized another escalation (you fill in the President and the country) because the pair had been doing this kind of fairly lonesome work for a long time although they too had had some fairly long periods of inactivity for personal reasons like raising kids and the like.

They had thought, and had talked about the matter several times when they would get together for a few drinks when Ralph was in town and to talk about the old days, that they would be able to “retire” from the anti-war fights once they had reached occupation retirement age. But that was not to be, not the way they were built. See they had met down in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971 when a lot of radicals, revolutionaries and just plain thoughtful liberals who were totally fed up with the seemingly never-ending Vietnam War (fed up about other issues too, but that was the burning one) and decided to take matters into their own hands by trying to shut down the government if the government did not shut down the war. Now the idea of civil disobedience has a long and proud history and if any situation required civil disobedience to try and stop the madness it was that damn war but the whole scheme was as Ralph called it at the time “utopian” since the anti-war forces were totally inadequate for the array of forces the government had sent out to stop them in their tracks that day. So for their efforts Sam, Ralph and many thousands of others wound up in the bastinado, would up in their case spending about four days in detention inside the Robert F. Kennedy football stadium that on autumn Sundays was the home field of the Washington Redskins before they just walked out of a side exit and nobody stopped them.

They had met in the stadium after Ralph had been picked off by the police around Massachusetts Avenue and Sam on his way up Pennsylvania Avenue headed to the White House. Ralph had noticed that Sam was wearing the button of a supporter of Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and had asked Sam if he was a veteran. Sam answered no but that a close friend had been killed there and that had triggered something inside him to oppose the war after he had been rather indifferent about it previously. He told Ralph he felt most comfortable with VVAWers once he told them his motivation for supporting their efforts and they had welcomed him. So one the things that drew them together was that they had similar motives for being in Washington at that time. Sam from Carver (the cranberry bog capital of the world) a working class town about thirty miles south of Boston and Ralph from General Electric-dominated working class Troy in upstate New York had had very personal reasons at the time. Sam like he had said had lost a close hang around guy from high school, Jeff Mullins, out in some jungle outpost in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Although he was exempted from the drat as the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away from a heart attack in 1965 that lost affected him deeply, at the time more deeply than any intellectual argument anybody could have presented. Those arguments would come later. Ralph had served in Vietnam (1967-1969) and although he survived what he had seen there led him to total opposition to the war once he got back. So the unlikely pair struck up a friendship that has lasted ever since.

What both Ralph and Sam did not figure on was that they would still be at it with some breaks over forty years later. At a point sometime in the mid-1970s they both had figured out that the big wave of the 1960s had ebbed and so they slipped away from the movement, or at least their 24/7 devotion to it to go back to “normalcy,” Sam to restart his print shop that he had left behind after he got “religion” on the war question and raise a family and Ralph to take over his father’s electrical shop when he retires and raise a family. They would stay in contact, periodically as their kids got older would have shared vacations together in the Adirondacks and sniff around whatever struggles needed a little help like the opposition to the American government in Central America, the fight against apartheid in South Africa and the fast over first Iraq War in 1991. Nothing big but they had a profile.     

Then all hell broke loose after 9/11 when with the same kind of governmental hubris that Sam and Ralph were very familiar with from Vietnam War days began to rear its head in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly Iraq. In late 2002 when the drums of war were being beaten savagely by the Bush administration they met at Jack Higgin’s Grille in Boston, Sam’s in-town watering hole and vowed now that they again had some time that they would wage “peace” as Sam called it until the American troops left the Middle East. Knowing that such efforts requires some kind of organizational affiliation Ralph as a member and Sam as a supporter joined Veterans for Peace a group Sam had heard about in Boston at an anti-war march. And they have been involved as best they can ever since, although Ralph has had some medical issues of late.     

Along the way, especially after the furor over the Iraq War faded once that war actually started (that faded something both men could not understand having witnessed the rise of the opposition to the Vietnam War go in the other direction as that war escalated and dragged on), the would run into and join the dwindling other groups and individuals who wanted to oppose the permanent war policies of the American government. Around 2010 or so in the “dog days” of the anti-war opposition when Barack Obama was riding high they would attend meetings of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) which was trying to unite all the various, mostly small, groupings under one umbrella. Sam, a little better at writing stuff than Ralph, after their most recent discussion about how long they had been at the struggle against war, wrote something to try to make sense of what they were doing. Here is what he had to say and see if that helps at all:      

“A while back, maybe last year [Fall, 2014] as things seemed to be winding down in the Middle East, or at least the American presence was scheduled to decrease in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and before Ukraine, Syria, Gaza and a number of other flash points erupted I mentioned that every once in a while it is necessary, if for no other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. I also mentioned at the time that while endless marches are not going to end any war the imperialists decide to provoke the street opposition to the war in what appeared then to be the fading American presence in Afghanistan or whatever else the Obama/Kerry cabal has lined up for the military to do in the Middle East, Ukraine or the China seas as well as protests against other imperialist adventures had been under the radar of late.

Over the summer there had been a small uptick in street protest over the Zionist massacre in Gaza (a situation now in “cease-fire” mode but who knows how long that will last) and the threat of yet a third American war in Iraq with the increasing bombing campaign and escalating troop levels now expanded to Syria. Although not nearly enough. As I mentioned at that earlier time it is time, way beyond time, for anti-warriors, even his liberal backers, to get back where we belong on the streets in the struggle against Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama’s seemingly endless wars. And his surreptitious “drone strategy” to "sanitize" war when he is not very publicly busy revving up the bombers and fighter jets in Iraq, Syria and wherever else he feels needs the soft touch of American “shock and awe, part two.”

The UNAC for a while now, particularly since the collapse of the mass peace movement that hit the streets for a few minutes before the second Iraq war in 2003, appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-drone, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise, or support but the key ones of late are enough to take to the streets. More than enough to whet the appetite of even the most jaded anti-warrior.

So as the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama, abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate as well as internationally, orders more air bombing strikes in the north and in Syria,  sends more “advisers” to “protect” American outposts in Iraq, and sends arms shipments to the Kurds, supplies arms to the moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to, guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like my friend Ralph Morris who has kept the faith, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world might very well be excused for disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation. And all the time saying the familiar (Vietnam era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops.

 Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, cannot rely on the Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to get whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be? Now not every event in history gets exactly repeated but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time vets might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq –Stop The Bombings- Hands Off Syria! 

Here is something to think about:  

Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden. 

 [Whatever unknown sister or brother put that idea together sure has it right] ”




Here’s a plug for UNAC
Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc. From Afghanistan! Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq- Stop The Bombings-Stop The Arms Shipments To The Kurds And Shia-Stay Out Of The Civil War! No Intervention In Ukraine! Defend The Palestinians! No U.S. Aid To Israel! Not One Penny, Not One Person For Obama’s War Machine!

BostonUNAC.org | 781-285-8622 | BostonUNAC(S)gmail.com