War is destroying lives and our planet, and it is draining the resources needed to transition to a survivable future. On a national and global scale, we most focus on meeting basic human and ecological needs. War has no place in our plan for survival.
Building Unity for Peace and Environmental Justice:
We will never achieve our dream of a peaceful world unless we first struggle for it here in our own neighborhoods and communities. Although few of us directly experience the violence of the U.S. war machine, the devastating impact of it is all around us, if we care to look.
Powerful forces in Wisconsin, as elsewhere, benefit from endless war and the arms industry. Meanwhile, the poor, the working-class and people of color continue to suffer. In Madison, the Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin and most of the Wisconsin Legislature are trying to force one of the worst manifestations of the military industrial complex on a low-income community that doesn’t want it. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Jet is the most expensive and controversial weapon in warfare history. The powers-that-be aim to stick it in the middle of a high-density, low-income community on Madison’s east side.
How do they get away with this total lack of decency and common sense? Simple. Although many defense critics call the F-35 an engineering boondoggle, the weapons system is state-of-the-art when it comes to “political engineering.” That’s a term coined in the 1970s by a Pentagon analyst and it’s defined as “the art of spreading a military project to as many congressional districts as possible, and thus maximizing the number of members of Congress who feel that if they cut off funding, they’d be hurting themselves.” Those who make parts for the F-35 are intentionally spread to nearly every state in the U.S., as well as various foreign nations.
The F-35 is truly an offensive weapon system in every sense of the word. The jet is designed to carry the B61-12 nuclear bomb, called the most dangerous nuclear weapon because it is small enough for some war planners to consider using it. With its stealth technology and the accuracy of the B61-12 bomb, the F-35 is designated a first strike nuclear weapon, not a “defensive” one.
According to Wisconsin journalist and peace activist John LaForge, the U.S. is planning to site 200 of the B61-12 bombs in Europe, (replacing an older version). Despite the fact that 90 percent of German people want the U.S. nukes removed from their country, our military plans to shove them down their throats anyway, just as they plan to do to the people of Madison.
The Wisconsin National Guard claims it has been a “good neighbor” to Dane County even though it has callously polluted our soils and water with PFAS for half a century and refused to clean it up. The F-35s are likely to bring more air, water and noise pollution to the people who can least afford to deal with the consequences.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the hypocrisy of many of our local and national leaders. We have inadequate resources to meet our health, safety and security needs here at home, while unlimited resources are wasted abroad to fight one failed war after another.
We must challenge these reckless and malevolent policies and focus our efforts on the tangible ways in which militarism robs us of real security and the ability to sustain ourselves and our planet. We need to work together on local campaigns to demand that government and corporations divest from all aspects of the war industry.