Yankee Stay Home!

To answer it by saying the U.S. jails are not pleasant places is a laugh when one thinks what innocent Iraq people are facing. The answer that individuals going to jail wont help is not an argument. The more they organize by internet and social meeting and publicity, the more they will not be going to jail unnoticed. The most that dissenting U.S. militia men and women (and others who might be drafted) can do to end the war in Iraq is to fight in the U.S. and fill the U.S. jails. Why? Being jailed costs the U.S. government. Being jailed keeps the dissenters in the U.S. public eye. In addition, for every jailed dissenter there are usually two parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, and grandparents, and friends who don’t want them in jail and who consider jailing them an insult. By going to jail each dissenter increases the pressure on the U.S. government by at least ten times his (or her) own action. The cost to the U.S. government is many times more huge than the financial cost of jailing. It becomes a growing public relations disaster for the U.S. government. As a close observer and a writer on the draft dodgers in Canada during the Vietnam War, one of the things that was most obvious to me was that the U.S. government did almost nothing to stop dissenters from crossing the border into Canada. We know since 9/11 the U.S. will quickly pass undemocratic and draconian legislation when it wants to control movement in the U.S.A. It did almost nothing to prevent the draft dodgers from coming to Canada, I believe, because it wanted them to come to Canada. If forty or fifty thousand draft dodgers (who it is said came to Canada) had stayed in the U.S. and fought there, and if they had gone to jail there, the Vietnam War would have ended earlier than it did. By running away to Canada, those dissenters got out of the eye of the U.S. public so that the U.S. government could more easily conduct the war against the Vietnamese. Another way of describing the effect is to say that the Canadians who helped and gave sanctuary to the draft dodgers of the Vietnam War were helping the U.S. government to get a problem off its hands so that it could continue the war more effectively. Canadians who argue for Canada giving sanctuary and refugee status to U.S. people wanting to keep out of the Iraq War have to face those facts. The Canadians may be assisting those U.S. people to avoid the moral task that is before them and which – especially as U.S. citizens – they have the deepest obligation to take up. And those Canadians may, more importantly, be assisting the vicious and inhuman policies of the Bush government. I think the case made here so far is unarguable from a moral point of view. And on moral questions of importance, we are always called to the core of the matter. When AIDS first began, for instance, some people didn’t like homosexuality, didn’t like to talk of sexually transmitted diseases, didn’t think “society” should be responsible for individual acts. Then as the seriousness of the disease and its spread became evident, people turned to the basic considerations: the sanctity of human life, our obligation to relieve suffering, our sharing together the human condition. That must also be the case when we think of the U.S. people who don’t want to fight in Iraq but want to come to Canada to avoid the whole issue. We are not free to accept their own personal view of the matter – for there is no longer a “personal” view. The moral question provoked by the War in Iraq is too large for “personal” views to matter. Having said that, and having argued what I think is the core question concerning the military dissenters involved with the War in Iraq, I’ll add a little more – of secondary importance. Some of it comes from my experience observing, meeting draft dodgers from the Vietnam War, thinking about them and writing about the situation. Who – in a general evaluation – are the (mostly) men who are expected to go to Iraq as soldiers and don’t want to go? They are ordinary U.S. males of a youngish age. That means they have been well indoctrinated with U.S. values and ideas. They will be, mostly, U.S. liberal, anarchist individualists. That means they believe the individual is sacred. The individual comes first. In fact, the individual comes second, too, and even third. And so the individual looks after himself first, second, and third. That is one – only one – of the reasons the dissenter doesn’t want to fight in the U.S. to end the War in Iraq but wants to come to Canada and avoid the larger implications of the War. The sad truth about the draft dodgers from the War in Vietnam was (as far as Canada is concerned) they didn’t come to Canada. They left the U.S.A. If Mozambique had been across the border, they would have gone to Mozambique. They didn’t leave the U.S. because they believed Canada had a better system and constitution. They didn’t know anything about Canada. Canadians have no idea how little U.S. people know about this country. They disagreed with one matter of U.S. policy only – the U.S. government wanting them to fight in Vietnam - but they were still highly indoctrinated U.S. citizens coming from “the greatest country in the world”, the land – of all others – that leads in liberal anarchist individualism. The propaganda for anarchist individualism never stops in the U.S.A. because it is one of the roots of Capitalism. The individualist (capitalist) in the U.S.A. has the right to do what he can get away with to accumulate wealth and personal power (break unions, deny medicare, refuse to sell cheap AIDS drugs to Africa, rob shareholders, invade Iraq for its oil, and so on.) Sometimes there’s conflict among the individualists. The big individualists want to make the mighty capitalist U.S.A. mightier by hatchetting one more innocent population. But some of the little individualists don’t want to do the hatchetting. Because the little individualists are also indoctrinated sons of the U.S.A., they say: “Me first. I’m gettin outa here. I’m hittin the road to Kenada.” They are not – make no mistake – saying what anybody in any country would say under the same circumstances. They’re saying something very special to the U.S.A. The U.S. liberal anarchist individualist runs away. Remember Huck Finn. He didn’t say, “I don’t like things in the U.S.A. I’m going to change them.” He said he didn’t like being told that the social order demanded some things from him, so he said that he was lighting out “for the territory”. The territory was the place where social law didn’t exist and a liberal anarchist individualist could do what he pleased without coming up against “law”. Many people have said to me: “Don’t they think they should stay and fight? If they’re good U.S. people, shouldn’t they work to make the U.S. better?” The answer is “No”. Huck Finn said “No”. Real U.S. people say “No”. And U.S. literature is full of Huck Finns. The simple fact that they don’t want to go to Iraq and have their hips shot off is not surprising. That is a universal response. And that, deep down, they care about what is being done to innocent people in Iraq is universal, too. But what they do in that situation is not universal; it is peculiar to the U.S.A. So let’s look at the situation with a cool, Canadian eye. Anger at the U.S. War in Iraq is widespread outside the U.S.A. After several years it’s even breaking through the concrete-thick wall of indoctrination in the U.S.A. The Bush administration is uneasy. U.S. boys and girls are being killed and maimed in Iraq. U.S. folks don’t like that. If U.S. military dissidents have fairly large vision and are human beings of worth, they will want (a) the Iraq War to stop, and (b) Iraq people to be freed from the on-going slaughter caused largely by the U.S.A. and its helpers. Can those things be made to happen by running away? By running away to Canada? No. They cannot be. The way for those dissident men and women to influence policy in the U.S.A. is to stay there, fight against the war publicly, fight against being ordered to go, and then going to jail as a protest. In jail, they will cost the U.S. money. They will be an embarrassment to government. They will spur on resistance to the war. They will be a continuing thorn in the side of the Bush administration. Even though doing that is not in the great U.S. tradition, they should do it. If they come to Canada, the Bush people can forget they exist – just what the Bush people want. If the moral question made us believe that taking the U.S. military dissidents to our bosoms in Canada would do the most to free the world of the ugly, vicious, illegitimate, criminal activity called the War in Iraq, then that is what we should do. But the moral question answered honestly and directly says something quite different. It says U.S. military dissidents should stay in the U.S. and fight peacefully with everything they have. That’s why this column is entitled: “Yankee Stay Home”.

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