11 Comments

1. Sex Worker from Oz:

   Have fun Stan! I look forward to hearing you speak at the APSC.

   23 March 2005, 3:51 am

2. Bruce A. Dixon:

   Truth tellers coming out of the military are important. By 1967 there were already veterans of Viet Nam coming back with stories of how they had witnessed and/or committed war crimes. A black high school senior trying to learn what he could about the world, and help organize other students, I was introduced to some of these guys. We took them around to three or four churches on the south and west sides, and an equal number of black high schools. Back then there were no locked down campuses, no cops and metal detectors at school doors, you just walked in (somebody passed out flyers beforehand) claimed an empty classroom or one somebody told you was available and talked to a couple dozen or more students.

   They told us that VC were sparing black soldiers whenever they were close enough to differentiate between them and their white counterparts, and that they hollered questions and taunts sometimes at night like “Black man, why are you here?” and stuff. They said they believed Uncle was losing that war, not winning it, and that casualties were higher than what was being reported. They talked about the murders and rapes and such they’d seen and how they’d shot in the air or turned away or been powerless to stop any of it. They told us they could not sleep at night and that they hoped telling it would let them live with all this. They said they would not have gone into the Army or Marines if they’d known any of this. But now, they said to us, you know and you have a decision to make.

   All this was powerful stuff to pour into the ears of inner-city black teenagers while the war was still going on. This was what made me and some friends of mine definitely decide not enlist or let ourselves be drafted, and to encourage everybody we knew to do the same. This was counter-recruitment, although we didn’t know it by that name. It was the fall of 1967. Not many weeks later, Tet happened, solid confirmation that their estimate of that war’s winnability was correct too.

   I can no longer recall the names or faces of the brothers only a couple years older than us, who came out of that war and shared what they knew so we could make better choices than they had, and so they could sleep better at night. So I drove from Atlanta to Fayetteville last weekend to shake the Feral Scholar’s hand and to thank him along with those guys from thirtysome years ago, and all the rest of you for doing what you are doing right now. It’s important stuff that’s got to happen and that’s all there is to it. I know it made a difference then and it will now and in the future.

   23 March 2005, 5:58 pm

3. oz feminista:

   stan – wow – you did alot in your “out again” time – so glad you were at the asia pacific solidarity conference here in sydney – so much thought, action and discussion went into it – as you said it’s a 4 year degree compressed into one four day weekend – great energy and solidarity – I look forward to you picking up on the developments in the pornography thread when you get back to it. Most emotional was to see you with other war veterans now on the same side of struggle.

   29 March 2005, 8:26 pm

4. Louise Walker:

   Yes, thanks so much for coming to Australia, Stan. Your report about organising resistance to the Iraq war among soldiers and veterans was inspiring and instructive, and on its own worth travelling from Melbourne to hear. Am now half-way through your Hideous Dream – fascinating, and a very handy way to spend my lunch breaks over the next few days. Its all making a difference. Would be happy to tell you more about socialist regroupment in Australia some time, which you expressed an interest in. A luta continua!

   30 March 2005, 2:09 am

5. Stan:

   Out for a few more days, starting Friday, it seems. My son is being sent to Afghanistan next month, so we’re off for a visit with him and the grandbaby.

   Then I’ll start posting again.

   Here is my letter to Max Lane, which I asked him to share:

   Dear Max,

   I’m having my second morning coffee after sleeping off the long trip home from Australia, and I am still completely overwhelmed by the experience I had there. I hope you will send along this note expressing my deepest gratitude to you, all the other organizers, the Australian participants, and the international guests. I am especially grateful to you, both for making the trip feasible for me in my dodgy circumstances these unemployed days, and for your dogged persistence in getting me there. I can honestly say that it was one of the finest experiences of my political life, and I was equally moved on a personal level by the warmth and friendship of all the comrades there.

   As we say, la luta continua, and along with everything else today, I have to compose a response to a tendency forming like a Trojan Horse in the antiwar movement that has attacked the military families-veterans-troop resistance organizing. I am absolutely sure that it is being originated by Democratic Party operatives who are alarmed by the sharpening anti-imperial edge that antiwar military communities are developing, and to which the antiwar movement in general is now tending. It can be easy to let the political right alarm us with their increasingly black-shirted reaction, and become desensitized to the equally dangerous cluster bomb Democrats whose primary aim has become to check the left-shift of the masses in the antiwar movement.

   I told Peter and Pip before I left that we need to think about future exchanges. I want to propose to my own comrades that we work on a way to send one or two of our young comrades to spend a little time with Resistance, both as solidarity work and as an educational opportunity. The youth work there is extremely advanced compared to ours here, and the idea of plugging into the Venezuelan solidarity work among young folks is highly intriguing. The general regroupment progress you have made there — as well as all the lessons you have learned along the way — is an inspiration. Our own commitment to seeking the refoundation of a broader left, and our struggles around building the left-pole in the labor movement (we have called this labor-left) can only benefit from studying what has worked for you there, and what obstacles you have encountered as well as how they were overcome.

   I read all the way through six issues of Links on the plane, as well as the last issue of Seeing Red. This is also the culmination of a multi-tendency left publication that we are just now conceptualizing… yet another process we can study to determine how we might go forward.

   Finally, Ran and others from around Asia-Pacific nations have thoroughly convinced me of the strategic necessity to begin international collaboration on the development of an anti-base campaign, in conjunction with the antiwar upwave in the international left right now, and given the centrality of military power projection to the imperial project in this period. Vieques has proven that it can work, and the struggles against bases in Diego Garcia, Okinawa, Korea and elsewhere must be ratcheted up. The synergy of this with the continental drift of Latin America, the US military crisis in Iraq, and the growing resistance worldwide to neoliberalism is obvious. Moreover, there is huge potential to unite anti-imperial formations, environmentalists, and women against US military bases abroad… how’s that for regroupment? (-:

   Again, please pass along my gratitude and affection to all the comrades, and give yourself an abrazo from me.

   From the belly of the beast,

   Stan

   30 March 2005, 11:14 pm

6. Marc:

   Just finished “Full Spectrum Disorder”. That’s quite a piece of work. Well done. Was a big Mark Jones fan too. Sadly missed. Will respond more fully shortly. Keep writing, keep struggling. The left needs clear heads, clear voices with experience of the military. Keep going.

   31 March 2005, 6:22 pm

7. Steve Tisdale:

   You have created a great website here Stan!

   1 April 2005, 3:30 am

8. Steve:

   What did Mark Jones write? I’ve seen references to him here and elsewhere, but his name is so common, web searches aren’t much use.

   -Steve

   1 April 2005, 4:34 pm

9. SWfO:

   Stan – dunno if you posted this but just a word of advice – I have had skirmishes with these people before not just on the net, and a lot of them are basically a mix of arseholes who hate commies, women, jews and arabs. They are just using you as an excuse for the red-baiting they would have done anyway: http://sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=53510 Though, to your credit you are probably the first person who has ever gotten even a marginal backdown out of the red hating loon pr.

   1 April 2005, 8:24 pm

10. Ned:

    More of the same nonsense at http://www.sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=53296

    2 April 2005, 8:23 pm

11. Pip Hinman:

    Thanks Stan for coming all the way downunder to Oz for the Asia Pacific International Solidarity conference. For those 500 or so who came over that weekend, you certainly made a big impression with your candid and heartfelt political analyses. Have just finished reading Full Spectrum Disorder and am just about to start Hideous Dreams. What a journey! Read your Counterpunch article. You tell ‘em. The debate here is a lot more muted; the pro-occupation “anti-war” liberals are too shame-faced to come out into the open. Tomorrow, we’re going to protest an Australian navy ship leaving for the Gulf – part of the extra troop deployment. We’ll be thinking of your March 19 protest at Fayetteville – maybe we’ll even find some sympathetic families there! NoWar in Darwin (hope to a developing new US military base in the far north of Oz) played a clip of your Fayetteville demo and all were inspired. All the best to you and your family, and safe return for your son.

    3 April 2005, 5:20 am

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