In this post-9/11 "Era of Permanent War Crimes," U.S. antiwar activists have not yet been able to create a U.S. antiwar movement to end the U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq or the U.S. government support for the Israeli war machine.
Cindy Sheehan, the Vacaville mother of a fallen soldier who reinvigorated the anti-war movement in the U.S. last year during her vigil outside Bush's ranch near Crawford, Texas, is planning another "Camp Casey" this August when George W. Bush takes his annual vacation.
After receiving a new home and a chance to start over in southern Thailand, Suphanee Tapsunthorn is moving forward. She is thankful that she still has her life and her five children to comfort her and even allows herself a wary smile. But Suphanee is also living in a constant state of fear. Deep down she feels that nothing can ever truly compensate her for all that she has lost.
Murray Bookchin, the visionary social theorist and activist, died during the early morning of Sunday, July 30th in his home in Burlington, Vermont. During a prolific career of writing, teaching and political activism that spanned half a century, Bookchin forged a new anti-authoritarian outlook rooted in ecology, dialectical philosophy and left libertarianism.
[Speech given at a First Amendment Rally in Brevard County, Florida]
Despite our First Amendment guaranteed Constitutional right to assemble, the US government is moving in the dangerous direction of undermining those rights. I am a father, a husband, and a suspect. My peaceful, law-abiding protesting over the last three years, my petitioning of the government, has earned me an FBI number and, in 2004, also the label of ‘suspect’ by Florida’s Brevard County Sheriff’s Office.
For five weeks in the late spring of 2006, we toured the eastern half of the United States to promote two books–"Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out" (Nation Books, 2005) and "Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity" (AK Press, 2006)–and to get at least a cursory impression of sectors of the movement in this country. We viewed each of the twenty-eight events not only as book readings but as conscious political conversations about the state of the country, the world, and the movement.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019