Resisting the War on Gaza: An Appeal from the New Haven Sunday Vigil

Joan Cavanagh, vigil participant

We are witnessing, in real-time, ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza. It could not occur without US military aid and financial support. We urgently appeal to you to join the New Haven Sunday Vigil for Peace and Justice as part of your other efforts to end this atrocity.

The vigil began in May of 1999 as a project of the Connecticut Peace Coalition/ New Haven in response to the US bombing of Kosovo. Similar to the postal service before privatization, defunding, and DeJoy, we’ve vigiled most Sundays since, in sun, rain, snow and sleet, in temperatures ranging from several degrees below zero to 95 degrees above. Our message is simple: Resist this Endless War. By this we mean, resist our permanent state of war and preparations for it, overseas and at home.

Participant numbers have fluctuated from a “high” of 15 to 20 during the initial post-911 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 war on Iraq to a “low” of three to four in recent years. Occasionally, we’ve been told by a dismissive passerby that the US is “at peace.” Not exactly. Consider our ongoing nuclear weapons buildup; our drone bombings against many countries of the world; our “covert” operations and global regime change maneuvers; and our funding of wars conducted by client states. Consider our government’s war on poor and vulnerable populations to benefit a smaller and smaller number of global ultra-rich. Remember that these are ongoing, bipartisan issues.

When our regular vigil participants dwindled to a new low at the end of last summer, we figured we’d had a good run and considered ending it. Then came the terrible October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, followed immediately by an orgy of collective punishment supported by US funds and materiel against civilians in Gaza. It has, as of this writing, taken the lives of over 25,000 people, an estimated two-thirds of whom are children.

We continue with more urgency than ever. We need your help. For more information about the content of the vigil and how to join, please call 203-668-9082 or contact [email protected] or  [email protected].

Students Call for Yale Corp to Divest from Weapons Manufacturers

by Nora Wyrtzen, Endowment Justice Coalition

On Friday, Dec. 1, 2023, 175+ Yale students and allies shut down and occupied the College St./Grove St. intersection, a central traffic hub on Yale University’s campus, for nearly two hours.

Organizers of the action are demanding that Yale Corporation immediately divest Yale’s endowment from war and weapons manufacturing in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza….

Illustration 1: Ben Raab photo

Friday’s demonstration was part of an extensive student mobilization on campus in response to the Corporation’s closed-door conversations.

Following are excerpts from Yale Daily News article by Ben Raab, Dec. 1, 2023

More than 20 demonstrators gathered outside Woodbridge Hall early Friday morning to tape a 60-foot banner to the building’s front door and call for the Yale Corporation — the University’s principal governing body — to divest Yale’s endowment from weapons manufacturers.

The banner read “Yale Corp Divest From Weapons” and was rolled out over the steps and onto the building’s walkway. It displayed the names of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war.

Demonstrators stood in front of the building with signs reading “Divest Now!” and “Yale Divest.” One banner read “It’s Your Yale. They’re Your Bombs….”

The demonstration also comes on the morning of the Yale Corporation’s scheduled visit to campus for meetings that will last through the weekend….

On Nov. 2, University President Peter Salovey told the News that the University is “revisiting” its policy on weapons manufacturing under the University’s ethical investment framework. In 2018, Yale divested from assault weapons retailers, citing violence in communities across America. …
Since Thursday night, community members have sent over 600 letters to the Corporation calling for divestment from all weapons manufacturing via an online campaign sponsored by the Endowment Justice Coalition. …

[For links and the full YDN article: https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/12/01/students-call-for-yale-corp-to-divest-from-weapons-manufacturers-in-front-of-woodbridge-hall]

Veterans for Peace Joins International Delegation to Gaza Border

by Gerry Condon, Veterans for Peace

I have the honor of representing Veterans for Peace on an international delegation currently in Cairo, Egypt. We are seeking permission to travel to the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, where hundreds of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid are being held up. We are calling for an immediate end to the US-backed Israeli slaughter of innocents in Gaza. And we are calling for the border with Egypt to be opened up to allow the massive delivery of desperately needed food, water, medicine, and fuel.
We are among the first of many international humanitarian and human rights delegations that are heading for the Gaza border in order to provide practical and moral support to the Palestinian people.

We encourage people all over the world—and especially in the United States—to continue pressing for a Ceasefire, Humanitarian Aid, the Release of All Prisoners, and Negotiations that respect the Palestinians’ Right to Survival, Dignity, and Self-Determination.

Below are excerpts from the press release we released on Sunday, November 12.

“ …In response to the Palestinian and Arab calls for civil society to challenge Israel’s deadly occupation by heading immediately towards the Egyptian-Palestinian crossing to bring urgent humanitarian relief to 2.3 million people, we have just submitted a request to the Egyptian authorities for permission to travel to Rafah….

“We urge all peoples and governments to act urgently to end this horror. There are hundreds of aid trucks currently parked in the desert waiting to enter the Rafah crossing. We demand they be allowed to reach Palestinians whose needs are dire and desperate.”

“Stop Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza Now! Open the Rafah border Now!”
veteransforpeace.org, 206-499-1220

Oppenheimer Offers Opportunity

by Henry Lowendorf, GNH Peace Council

Oppenheimer, the film, is a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the scientific team researching, developing, and producing the first atomic bombs, with U.S. B29s dropping two on Japanese cities 78 years ago. The movie reveals two time bombs that started ticking in 1945. One scores 90 seconds to midnight on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock. The second exploded as the Cold War, right after the U.S. and its Soviet ally victoriously ended World War II, and, like cluster bombs, repeatedly bursts forth to maim its victims.

The film explores the morality of waging war not just on civilians but on civilization itself. But Oppenheimer, the physicist, realized that he had no moral authority over, or physical control of, his nuclear offspring once they were turned over to the generals and the commander in chief.

Expressing his anguish was not politic. Second thoughts about creating the existential monster of monsters that incinerated noncombatant men, women, and children in 1945, and possibly billions more, landed him in the clutches of Congressional thought-minders. The McCarthy era tore Oppenheimer’s life apart, ruining his reputation and removing his security clearance and his ability to conduct research.
McCarthyism, a product of the 1950s, continues now. The U.S. administration censors dissenting voices by members of Congress who call for diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine. The corporate media, led by the New York Times, slander activists in the peace movement who demand the same.

Beyond watching the riveting drama, what actions can viewers of Oppenheimer take? The Greater New Haven Peace Council has been handing audience members entering and leaving the theater a flier with a QR code on side one to sign a petition offered by CodePink calling for the U.S. to sign on to the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and lead the other eight nuclear-weapons states to follow suit. The petition is here: https://www.codepink.org/nonukes. Side two spells out the ongoing manmade disaster called the military budget.

To download your own file of the flyer to use: https://nhpeacecouncil.org/oppenheimer-flier-handout

Why Hiroshima/Nagasaki Vigils Again This Year? 

by Henry Lowendorf, Greater New Haven Peace Council

Why is it important to commemorate the sudden slaughter of 200,000 mostly civilians in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, actions taken 78 years ago? Why do the U.S. government and corporate media generally ignore or downplay the consequences of decisions made three-quarters of a century ago?

Today, a brutal war is devastating Ukraine in central and eastern Europe, where four participating states, the U.S., Britain, France, and Russia, hold nuclear weapons arsenals on high alert, ready to throw into the fray.

Their leaders have the ability to incinerate every city around the planet and wave civilization goodbye.

At 90 seconds to midnight, the probability of nuclear cataclysm represented by the Atomic Clock is now set at its closest since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This threat is not what the U.S. government or its corporate media megaphones want to advertise.

Consequences of the current war in Europe, in addition to wanton death and destruction, include seismic changes in the supply of energy and food, which will have an impact on much of the world.

Citizens of poor and wealthy countries impacted by someone else’s war are unable to afford fuel and food. Giant economies are in recession as industries shut down.

The only winners in this war are the Merchants of Death—Lockheed and Raytheon, among others—and the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

We have been told that only one state caused this war. The vigils on August 6 and 9 remind us, however, that ultimately we must engineer its end, not through a Pyrrhic victory, but by demanding diplomacy and negotiations as all wars end.

The anniversary vigils on August 6 and 9 offered a variety of short presentations–history, the political moment, poetry, peace songs. New Haven Mayor Elicker spoke against the giant nuclear budget. Atomic soldier Hank Bolden, on whom the U.S. military tested the effects of nuclear radiation, told us that he was sworn to secrecy until the 1990s, unable to explain even to his family his many cancers and other illnesses associated with radiation poisoning.

Channel 8 WTNH ran a story on the Hiroshima vigil that you can find here: https://tinyurl.com/HiroshimaNewHaven23. More photos and video here: https://www.facebook.com/NewHavenPeaceCommission

Kali Akuno Given the 2023 Gandhi Peace Award

by Laura Schleifer, Program Director, PEP

Over the years, Promoting Enduring Peace has realized that creating enduring peace requires social justice. Decades ago, the Board voted to give the peace award to Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Lucius Walker, Jr., Cesar Chavez, Daniel Ellsberg, and recent recipients, including the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement founder Omar Barghouti and peace activist Kathy Kelly.



Today, we have realized that not only does peace require justice, but the time for waiting for those in power to provide that justice has passed. It is time for people to create and implement ways of addressing the current social, economic and ecological crises ourselves. We need strategies that put the power directly into people’s hands–especially those most severely impacted, disenfranchised and disempowered.

In recognition of that paradigm shift, this year’s Gandhi Peace Award recipient has been chosen for creating an innovative way of addressing these issues through collective action on the local level combined with a broader long-term strategy for regional, national, and global change. This year, Promoting Enduring Peace gave its Gandhi Peace Award to Kali Akuno and Cooperation Jackson.

In Kali Akuno and Cooperation Jackson, we have found a community of activists who exemplify our organization’s mission of creating, “peace on earth, peace with earth.” Kali and his fellow members of Cooperation Jackson are creating a model for how the rest of us might be able to achieve that goal by transforming our communities on the local level and then linking them together to create a new system that provides for human and ecological needs, and also recognizes the interdependence between the two.

Based in Jackson, Mississippi, one of the nation’s poorest cities, Cooperation Jackson is a Black-led semi-autonomous community with a visionary “Jackson-Kush Plan” to build Black autonomy throughout the U.S. South and eventually challenge and replace the current political and economic systems with a new system rooted in mutual aid, food sovereignty, community care, ecological regeneration, collective self-governance, land reclamation, community-controlled production, and cooperative and solidarity economics through its People’s Network for Land and Liberation.

Read the article in its entirety at https://newpol.org/kali-akuno-to-get-2023-peace-award

The First Boat to Protest Nuclear Weapons Is Back

Ernie Alpert, Waging Nonviolence

65 years ago, the Golden Rule ignited protests that led to a partial ban on nuclear weapons testing. Now it’s back to fight for nothing short of abolition.

Writing in the February 1958 issue of the radical pacifist journal Liberation, former U.S. Navy Commander Albert Bigelow recalled that he was “absolutely awestruck,” even though he “had no way of understanding what an atom bomb was.” In that moment, he said he intuitively “realized for the first time that, morally, war is impossible.”

With his wife, Sylvia, he joined the Religious Society of Friends — becoming Quakers and turning toward the kind of activism that would eventually lead him to the Golden Rule. One of his first actions, however, was to host two “Hiroshima Maidens,” young women disfigured by radiation who came to the United States for plastic surgery in the mid-1950s.

Nonviolent direct action against the nuclear threat was only just beginning to take shape. In 1955, activists in New York and other cities began to engage in non-cooperation with civil defense drills. Outcries grew even louder when the Soviet Union and Britain joined the nuclear club — and the introduction of the hydrogen bomb greatly expanded the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. Military leaders such as Gen. Omar Bradley and public intellectual Lewis Mumford were trying to alert the public by November 1957.

The health impact of atmospheric testing had drawn special concern, including that of prominent physicists and public health experts who warned that radioactive fallout would spread cancer far from the testing sites. As Bigelow put it, “The overwhelming weight of scientific opinion said any nuclear explosion was dangerous.” The point was evident from an anti-testing petition circulated by Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, which attracted more than 2,000 signatures in just a couple of weeks. Even scientists from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, recognized that fallout would cause hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide.

To see a photo of the boat and to read the entire article, go to wagingnonviolence.org/2023/05/golden-rule-first-boat-protest-nuclear-weapons-testing-veterans-for-peace

For more on the history, see https://www.voluntownpeacetrust.org/the-golden-rule.html

Kali Akuno to Receive Gandhi Peace Award

by Stanley Heller, PEP Administrator

On Saturday, May 13, Kali Akuno, co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, will be given the Gandhi Peace Award. The Gandhi Peace Award has been given out since 1960 by the Connecticut-based organization Promoting Enduring Peace (PEP). This peace, environmental and social justice organization was founded in 1952 in New Haven. Cooperation Jackson was created in Jackson, Mississippi in 2013 to foster a solidarity economy in Jackson anchored by a network of cooperatives and worker-owned, democratically self-managed enterprises.

The Gandhi Peace Award ceremony will take place in the Q House, the Dixwell Community House, 197 Dixwell Avenue in New Haven at 2 p.m. The Q House, founded in 1924, is now in a new state-of-the-art building that opened last year. The ceremony is free. There will be a musical performance by Michael Mills and bountiful refreshments. Parking for the Q House is in back of the building off of Foote Street.

Laura Schleifer, Program and Development Officer of Promoting Enduring Peace, said, “Kali Akuno and his fellow members of Cooperation Jackson are creating a model for how we might be able to transform our communities on the local level and then linking them together to create a new system that both provides for human and ecological needs, and also recognizes the interdependence between the two.”

We also admire Akuno’s writings, how he developed ideas on worker self-management and strategy on how to move the cooperative movement forward. He wrote “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi in 2017,” and this month released a book he co-edited with economist Richard Wolff, “Jackson Rising Redux.” We also admire his bold ideas on the climate crisis and his call for ecosocialism.

For more information visit PEPeace.org, email [email protected], or call 203-444-3578.

 

Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes FY2024

The new War Resisters League’s famous “pie chart” flyer, Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes, analyzes the Federal Fiscal Year 2024 Budget (FY 2024 is 1 October 2023 – 30 September 2024.  This FY2024 issue was published in March 2023.

Each year War Resisters League analyzes federal funds outlays as presented in detailed tables in “Analytical Perspectives” of the Budget of the United States Government. Our analysis is based on federal funds, which do not include trust funds – such as Social Security – that are raised separately from income taxes for specific purposes. What federal income taxes you pay (or don’t pay) by April 18, 2023, goes to the federal funds portion of the budget.

STOP THE NEXT WAR BEFORE IT STARTS

The massive militaries of the United States and NATO did not prevent Russia from attacking Ukraine. In fact, United States and NATO presence surrounding Russia fueled Putin’s aggression. Tensions rise with China and North Korea as the United States adds more bases in Asia, including four in the Philippines. In Okinawa, Japan, there is strong local opposition to the 31 U.S. military installations. About two-thirds of current conflicts involve one or more sides armed by the United States.

Diplomacy Not Militarism

Major U.S. wars, from Korea to Vietnam to the so-called “War on Terror,” all failed in their goals of peace and stability. The need is urgent to change priorities. A Pew Research poll in 2019 found that people around the world viewed the climate crisis as biggest threat — a crisis that cannot be solved by the military. In fact, the U.S. military is the world’s biggest polluter.

We must stop the next war before it starts. Demand drastic cuts to the military budget and a shift in U.S. foreign policy from militarism to diplomacy

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Leaflet with this flyer year-round and on Tax Day, April 18, 2023, and throughout the Global Days of Action on Military Spending, April 13 – May 9, 2023; also see demilitarize.org.

Vist https://www.warresisters.org/store/where-your-income-tax-money-really-goes-fy2024 for more charts and information.

Ban Russian Uranium, But Work with Russia against Nuclear War

by Stanley Heller, Administrator, Promoting Enduring Peace

Every year hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by U.S. companies to buy raw and enriched uranium from Russia. Profits from these sales are helping fund Russia’s war against Ukraine. It’s hypocritical for the U.S. government to demand European countries stop importing Russian natural gas while we import uranium from the very same country.

The U.S. has allowed itself to depend on major uranium imports from Russia and Russian-allied Kazakhstan, but we are not simply calling for increases in domestic uranium production. Uranium mining usually comes at a steep price in pollution of Native American land. There’s also the fact that the uranium is being used chiefly by the nuclear power industry.

Besides the usual worries about the safety of nuclear power plants and lack of a long-term plan for disposal of nuclear waste, this year we’ve learned of a grave new concern, that parties at war will not automatically give a wide berth to nuclear power plants. Russia shelled and took over the Zaporizhya nuclear power complex and its attacks on Ukraine’s electric power grid in November have cut normal and vital electric power to all four Ukraine’s nuclear power complexes.
The U.S. should stop importing Russian uranium and start a crash program to transition away from costly and environmentally damaging uranium and fossil fuel dependence.

The above is the text of a petition we are sponsoring along with the Ukrainian Socialist Solidarity Campaign. It’s a one-two punch, one punch against Russian aggression and another against the costly and dangerous nuclear power industry. We hope you’ll consider signing. We link it at our site: PEPeace.org.

Another and even bigger nuclear issue is the possibility that the war over Ukraine could become a nuclear war. Putin has made several scarcely veiled threats to that effect. As Daniel Ellsberg has said, Putin is acting like the U.S. has done on many occasions. What can be done? While we want nuclear weapons to be abolished entirely, we see that we have to do things in the short run to dampen down the possibility that wars go nuclear. The Defuse Nuclear War campaign has many good ideas: 1) Abolish the ICBMs, the land-based nuclear-armed missiles; 2) make a no-first-use pledge and structure nuclear weapons policy around it; 3) Take nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; 4) rejoin nuclear treaties that Trump renounced.

Read more about this at our site: PEPeace.org.

Coming up in late February:

Promoting Enduring Peace and Workers Voice US will support a fund-raiser for the independent miners union in Ukraine, NGPU (Independent Mineworkers Union of Ukraine). The union faces enormous challenges, first from an invader who frequently cuts electricity even while miners are below the earth and second from a government that pushes anti-labor measures in its Rada (parliament). For an interview with a miner leader see the Ukraine/Russia links in the Resources section of PEPeace.org.

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