Eight of us from the We Are Not Your Soldiers Tour recently hit the first stop on the Warped Tour in Mountain View, CA. The Warped tour is a summer punk rock concert that draws thousands of youth. Our Crew included including five students who first heard the tour last Spring, and Robin Long, an Iraq war resister who spent a year in jail for refusing orders to go to Iraq .
Our booth was decorated with We Are Not Your Soldiers bandanas and graphic pictures that showed what the military is doing in the Middle East. We also had t-shirts reading “Military Recruiters: Get The Hell Away From Me”, and we put up an enlargement of the Crimes Are Crimes Statement, People stopped by the booth all day to read the statement. .
These youth went through the crowds leafletting and handing out orange ribbons. The ribbons were popular. At points you could see spatters of orange in the crowd.
Our booth was very controversial. People either hated or loved what we were doing. The majority of people we met would come up and just flat out tell us “This booth is awesome, I am so glad you guys are here because I really hate military recruiters and I am still against these wars” Some people who were active duty in the military who said we were misrepresenting what the military was about and some who were straight up hostile. We welcomed the debate. Read the rest of this entry »
End. the. wars. A powerful call to action. Obama is continuing Bush’s policies. This was part of the We Are Not Your Soldiers campus tour, filmed at UC Santa Barbara on May 7, 2010. Speech delivered by Emma Kaplan and former Army Sgt. Matthis Chiroux (an Afghanistan veteran and a war resister in Iraq Veterans Against the War) Please join the We Are Not Your Soldiers facebook page here: http://bit.ly/cxQwOj
Emma Kaplan, World Can’t Wait Youth & Student Coordinator, and Matthis Chiroux, Iraq War resister, took the We Are Not Your Soldiers Tour to a public high school in Southern CA. Emma said it felt like a prison: one entrance, one exit, and lots of cops in uniform. “You feel like you’re viewed as a criminal just stepping through the doors,” she said.
Most of the students won’t graduate. They are mainly Latino and Black, a lot of immigrants and children of immigrants. Emma wore a shirt with “Bush Regime: WANTED for Illegally Crossing Borders,” and got a lot of “I like that shirt!! Where did you get that shirt?” The school has the highest number of foster kids in the county. But the teachers genuinely care about their students and want them to have a better future, even though they’re up against tough odds.
Military recruiters are at the school once a week if not daily. There’s an active JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) program on campus. The JROTC folks say they don’t want ROTC to be for recruitment and that they want kids to go to college before they decide to join. However, you have to join ROTC and sign up to serve post-college if you want your college paid for. Matthis had done JROTC himself, and said “it’s like a gateway drug,” since it starts training you so young. Emma and Matthis observed some of the students (teenagers between the ages of 14-17) drilling with JROTC at the school, marching with rifles.
They spoke to a total of 7 classes starting at 7:30am. The number of people who knew someone in the military is huge. The idea of getting out and getting college benefits is powerful, as most kids work as well as go to school to support their families. The military is the most visible way of doing that – to the point that there’s a billboard for Marine Corps across the street from the school saying, “we don’t accept applications, only commitment.” The kids walk past it every day.
One of the teachers brings in speakers all the time and says the students are usually rowdy, not really paying attention. All the students were totally riveted today. Emma and Matthis talked briefly, showed the Wikileaks “Collateral Murder” video, and took questions. There were a lot of questions for Matthis about what he went through in the military. They wanted to know if the Army and Marines are the same: “is it okay to join one, and not the other?” Matthis said they’re both bad. He spent only two months on the ground but, “Even a day would change you. Shooting children once changes your life. I wish someone had told me what this would do to me beforehand. I’m not a stronger man for it; I’m a weaker man.” Read the rest of this entry »
Note: We got some great pictures and film of our tour. Out of respect and safety for the students in the high schools, we are not making them public and keeping names of schools confidential.
“We should resist and let the recruiters know that they are unwanted”- Bay area high school student
Today at a high school in the bay area CA: 100 students heard Emma, Matthis and Robin Long present We Are Not Your Soldiers. 2-3 classes came, brought by their teachers. The school is extremely diverse: white, Latino, Black and Asian. Some of the students are already doing projects about military recruiting. One of the students researched, and found that this high school is the most heavily recruited from school in the Bay Area. Other students were already working on a “counter-propaganda” campaign within the school against military recruitment using posters.
Emma spoke, then Matthis and Robin spoke. Then they showed the Wikileaks video. One young woman started crying, saying her dad was in the military and she wanted to join but now she didn’t want to. Matthis had asked a question and this young woman raised her hand and said, “My dad was probably in a helicopter like that killing children. Maybe he had to do that to survive. Maybe if he was a stronger person and refused to do those things maybe he would have been killed.” Others pointed out that the soldiers in the video didn’t have to kill people to survive in that helicopter – it was obviously not in self-defense. A number of students actually said they changed their minds after hearing from Emma, Matthis and Robin about joining the military.
Robin Long, another Iraq Veteran against the war who recently spent a year in prison for refusing to fight in Iraq joined in, saying a few things about his experience – going to Canada, getting deported, getting court martialed. It made a big impression the students and the teachers. When they were brainstorming about things that the students could do, some people raised questions about whether there would be repercussions- would they get in trouble? Other people pointed out that Robin Long had been in prison for a year and this put the potential repercussions the students might face into perspective. A lot of students wanted to get involved… this is controversial at the school since not all the teachers/administrators are against the war. In the course of the event, some of the students left the room and came back with a Marine recruiting poster from elsewhere in the school. They took it in front of the room and ripped it apart, demonstrating how they felt about the whole enterprise in a really dramatic way. The rest of the students were transfixed, but one of the teachers said you can’t just do that. So the other students responded in support of the action, arguing that the teachers should also support this kind of righteous action. Read the rest of this entry »
On May 5th, the tour will be going in to the high schools in the Bay Area. FridayMay 7 at 7:00pm, we will be at the Multi-Cultural Center-Theater on the Campus of UCSB. Don’t miss this! The We Are Not Your Soldiers Tour, a project of the World Can’t Wait, is not your typical counter recruiting presentation. World Can’t Wait Activists and Iraq war veterans have teamed up to present the reality of ongoing wars of occupation, and the need for a resistance movement led by young people that can spark and inspire a much needed and more determined anti-war movement. The future of the young and the future of the people of the world are intertwined as we all hang in the balance.
Collateral Murder?
It’s not an aberration.
It’s not acceptable.
This whole war is illegal and immoral!
SPEAKERS SCHEDULED TO APPEAR AT UCSB
**Matthis Chiroux**
Matthis joined the U.S. Army at age 18. For five years, he worked in Public Affairs until being discharged as a sergeant in ‘07 following tours in Japan and Germany, with shorter deployments to the Philippines and Afghanistan. He publicly refused activation and deployment to Iraq from the IRR in ‘08 and won a victory for resisters when the military discharged him under honorable conditions as a result. Mathis has been going to high school classrooms all over New York City on the We Are Not Your Soldier to tell students the truth about what happens when you join the U.S. Military. Mathis currently sits on the Board of Directors for Iraq Veterans Against The War.
**Emma Kaplan**
Emma Kaplan is the National Youth & Student Coordinator of World Can’t Wait. She has organized protests against torture,military recruiting centers, and against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is going to trial in August for participating in the protests with Port Military Resistance, where people formed human blockades to prevent the Stryker brigades from being sent to Iraq. Most recently Emma has spoken to hundreds of students at assemblies & classrooms around the country on the We Are Not Your Soldier Tour.
Endorsers to date: Students for Justice In Palestine
This event is open to the community. Don’t miss this event!
We are publishing this statement in the NY Review of Books – due to appear May 13th. Deadline to raise $11,825 is now Tuesday, April 27th. Donate now and help bring this message to a national audience. Click to enlarge.
I know that these incidents happen more often than not. This is reality, not some video effigy edited to demonize soldiers. What you see in this video and the entire occupation is illegitimate.
Atrocities like this were commonplace in 2004-2005 when I was there with the First Cavalry Division, it’s was common in 2007, and innocent casualties are still piling up. The continued “Insurgency” in Iraq is fed by these kinds of atrocities.
If a military force came to my neighborhood in Chicago with this kind of unchecked aggression, there would be a formidable “insurgency” here too. Most of us have more in common with the people murdered in this video than we do the bourgeois right-wing madmen propagating their destruction.
The Rules Of Engagement (ROE) do not protect the innocent people of Iraq, how do you think we’ve managed to cause such a staggering death toll in that country? It’s shocking to hear people try to come up with ways to improve the ROE so that we, the soldiers, might become kindler-gentler-more accurate killers in a country we had no right to be invading and occupying in the first place.
If this video, which I find to be unbiased, isn’t a wake up call to the citizens of the United States, Read the rest of this entry »
Watch this footage from 2007 – interviews with residents of the Baghdad neighborhood from the day after the now-notorious massacre of civilians caught on tape by the US military and released this week by Wikileaks. At the time, their reports went basically unnoticed.
Now, with the military’s own footage showing people walking down the street being gunned down by an unprovoked team of US troops circling above in an helicopter, there is widespread outrage and questioning.
What is the government’s response to this outrageous footage being released?
As Craig Considine writes:
“Wikileaks.org, a publicly accessible Internet Web site, represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army,” a secret report authored by the Army Counterintelligence Center and leaked by the notorious truth-seeking website explains.
…In order to stop WikiLeaks, it is suggested in the document the person (or persons) responsible for the leaks be hunted down and prosecuted.
Right. So the response to this outrageous war crime is not panels, investigations, calls from prominent people to immediately uncover the identities of the people who ordered this massacre… but a call to find out who is blowing the whistle and prosecute them.
Be apart of spreading this video everywhere. This week, students around the country will be showing this video. To be apart of hosting a showing at your school or to bring the tour into your school, volunteer
The We Are Not Your Soldiers Tour, a project of the World Can’t Wait, is not your typical counter recruiting classroom presentation. World Can’t Wait Activists and Iraq war veterans have teamed up to present the reality of ongoing wars of occupation, and the need for a resistance movement led by young people that can spark and inspire a much needed and more determined anti-war movement. The future of the young and the future of the people of the world are intertwined and hang in the balance.
Liz Lazdins, an activist with the World Can’t Wait and Anthony Wagner, an Iraq war veteran, teamed up earlier this week, and traveled to Columbus and Cleveland Ohio. They spoke with close to 200 high school students, and were able to observe military recruiters swarming the campuses, strutting through the hallways, swaggering into lunchrooms, obsequiously delivering luncheon platters into faculty rooms, and taking students out for lunch at local restaurants.
A number of students told Anthony that they feel very bothered by this. They feel harassed. Others told him that recruiters have called them at home continuing the army “sellathon “ by promising money for college, a good steady paycheck, job training……a bright future…and one student was even told that he would definitely not be sent to Iraq. Another student shared with Liz that his cousin, who is in the military, cried uncontrollably when he got redeployment orders for Iraq. Both Liz and Anthony also met students who felt it was patriotic and important to fight for freedom and democracy, and that they had relatives in the military who proudly serve.
After students heard Anthony dispel most of the recruiter promises, and tell some of his personal experiences of the horrors of combat, and heard Liz break down the historical time frame and steps leading to the never-ending wars of occupation, they had a chance to view a portion of “Rethink Afghanistan”,(Glen Greenwald film). The reality of the stories and the images had an impact on the classes.
accept applications, only commitment.” The kids walk past it every day.
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