Neighbors Times: April-May 2006 #5

Respecting Whose Authority?

Why is civil disobedience essential at this time?  Neighbors for Peace believes that U.S. policies which lead to imperialist wars and terrorize people in other countries must be challenged. Likewise, citizens of this country must also oppose and resist laws that threaten their civil liberties.  Active resistance can and should include acts of civil disobedience. Those who commit it demonstrate their determination to changing  repressive and undemocratic measures imposed on our increasingly passive society.

 We must face the fact that our elected officials no longer serve the interests of their constituency, and should account for their dereliction of duty. The United States’ experiment in  democracy seems to be failing, and the evidence is mounting that we live in a militarized oligarchy, controlled by corporate and elitist interests.  In a true democracy, laws and policies would be structured to protect the people’s interest, not to control and criminalize legitimate behavior.  Dissent would be honored, not greeted with tear gas, brutality¹, surveillance² and prolonged imprisonment, as in the case of Josh Wolf³.  Military servicemen who refuse to serve in Iraq, such as Ehren Watada and Agustin Aguayo, would not face court martials⁴. To create a democracy, the true builders are those who have decided to stand up and work for one, even if that involves arrest, jail or death.

 "Saying no" is one thing, and many today "say no" to war and civil rights abuses by attending anti-war rallies, writing letters to the newspaper and to their elected officials, and performing other legal acts of protest.  But "acting no," as Jim Wallis of Sojourners Magazine contends, is something else again.  The number of non-violent activists who have been sentenced to jail for committing acts of civil disobedience for peace-related issues has risen. Some have gone to prison independently, following a conscience that compelled them to resist war mandates of the state, such as military recruitment and preparations for nuclear attack. Some go as part of a movement, as do the Plowshares activists who court arrest by symbolically "hammering swords into plowshares" and the many people arrested and imprisoned each year for "crossing the line" at the School of the Americas (now WHINESC or Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) in Columbus, Georgia.

As will be shown in this issue, resisters no longer believe in the authority that the state asserts over them. They believe that the moral or philosophical authority that prompts their acts has its own legitimacy and power to bring about change. In these uncertain times, becoming conscious of these concepts should lead to questions such as, “By what authority does the United States assert its right to global domination?”  If its claim to dominance is upheld only by its overwhelming military arsenal, then it lacks moral and legal authority.  It is this absence of  moral and legal authority that moves today’s resisters to protest the Iraq War. Their actions seek to demonstrate the ineffectiveness and immorality of raw force and power to shape people’s hearts and minds.

In a broader sense, civil disobedience becomes the obligation of every concerned citizen in this society. If one looks carefully at the breakdown in the rule of U.S. law under our current government, one can see why resistance is more a protection of current law than disobedience to it. Even in this most tepid and irresponsible  journalistic climate, we regularly hear of major corruption in high places: the Bush Administration’s lies and cover-ups that are being exposed on a regular basis;  the disintegration of our civil liberties via restrictive and unconstitutional laws; the intelligence community’s illicit activities; the refusal of Congress to hold the Executive Branch accountable for its crimes. As for respecting international law, both the Clinton and Bush administrations have refused to allow this country to be subject to the authority of the International Criminal Court. Yet our officials have no reservations about regularly  manipulating organizations like the United Nations and the World Court, which  seek to provide a body of international law for the global community. Our public opposition to U.S. government is in many ways the only thing that holds back an even greater outpouring of terror and aggression against vulnerable regions in the world.

Derrick Jensen, an environmental activist and writer,  challenges the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.”  He asserts, “It would be more precise to say that it is not the Right of the People, nor even their responsibility, but instead something more like breathing – something that if we fail to do we die.  If we as a people fail to rid our community of destructive institutions, those institutions will destroy our community.”⁵ Practitioners of civil disobedience are embracing the very positive idea that their community, their values and their manner of living are worth the violation of questionable edicts from a questionable authority.

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1.  World Trade Organization  protests in Seattle in 1998 and FTAA protests in Miami in 2003 were met with excessive brutality and unjust arrests: protests at the Republican National Convention, in New York City in 2004, involved illegal arrests and excessive brutality.

2.Illegal domestic surveillance in the United States has been a long standing issue with this current administration.

3. Read about Josh Wolf at joshwolf.net.

4.Ehren Watada is the first U.S. Army Officer to refuse to deploy to Iraq as a conscientious objector.  Agustin Aguayo is a U.S. army medic who has refused to deploy to Iraq. He is in jail serving an 8 month term after having been found guilty of desertion.

5. Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words, pg. 370.