Statement in Support of Veteran-Led Resistance to Current US Military Policies, December 16, 2010
S. Brian Willson
The magnitude of the US policy of full spectrum dominance, and the extraordinary level of deceit that seeks to mask its egregious nature, is beyond the pale. With no genuine people’s process available to address this grotesque militarism while our domestic society heads toward collapse, the popular business must now be resistance and more resistance as we relocalize our lives into thousands of locally sufficient economies networked with one another.
Our country’s current exaggerated militarism and plunder is but the latest in a long pattern of aggression since our founding, itself based on a gargantuan genocide. Examination of the empirical record reveals at least 560 overt military interventions in scores of countries and territories since 1798. Since the end of WWII, 390 of these overt aggressions have occurred mostly in what we call “The Third World”, along with thousands of covert interventions in more than 100 countries (bombing 28 of them). Additionally, US warships have sailed thousands of times into foreign ports since the post-Civil war days. Today, the US military, in contingents of 100 or more, are dispatched to at least 150 countries at over 1,000 installations. US military planes fly in virtually every airspace; US ships sail in virtually every seaspace.
This is astounding but represents a nation that with but 4.6 percent of the world’s population insists on continued insatiable consumption of anywhere from a quarter to a third of the world’s resources. This systematic theft can only occur by force or its threat, but is always rationalized in noble sounding rhetoric, repeated over and over.
This incredible barbarism is so pervasive it is the equivalent of what philosopher Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evil. The political process, and many of her citizens, barely question its absurdity and diabolical nature, even if it is noticed.
Thus our task, as veterans and citizens, is to reclaim our genuine and evolutionary universal humanity from the pathology of the nation state. Resistance, through various forms of creative and bold nonviolence, no matter the risks involved, especially at the local level everywhere, is now our obligation knowing our survival with dignity is at stake.
Veterans who choose to become truth tellers are among our most important resources in the United States.
S. Brian Willson
USAF, 1966-1970, Viet Nam 1969. Trained lawyer. Activist.
