WIN Winter 2007

  Taking Counter-Recruitment to the Next Level The counter-recruitment movement has been hard at work trying to stop the poverty draft by educating youth about militarism, the realities of enlisting, and alternatives to military service.  We have a vibrant movement made up of seasoned and skilled activists, but unfortunately there are very few young people…

Landmines ‘R’ Us Textron started in 1923 as a small textile company.  During World War II it supplied the military with parachutes and landing boats.  After the war, the company became known for its bed linens and lingerie.  Decades later, Textron has grown to encompass everything from EZ-Go golf carts and boats to recreational Cessna…

  Originally published in the January/February issue of Left Turn magazine. 2005 June – The Zapatistas, an indigenous movement based in Chiapas, release the “Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle,” proposing the building of a national and worldwide non-electoral, anti-capitalist movement “from below and to the left.” September 16 – One hundred sixty-two social organizations;…

  On May 22, the Oaxaca state Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers went on strike, calling its 70,000 teachers to set up a protest camp in Oaxaca City’s town square, or Zócalo.  Section 22 has been striking annually for 26 years, demanding better pay and a higher education budget for school…

  In recent years, the nuclear crises — both real and imagined — in Iran, Iraq, and North Korea have underscored the ongoing threat posed by nuclear weapons, which remains undiminished despite the end of the Cold War more than a decade and a half ago.  Mainstream discourse on this issue is often couched in…

  Shortly after North Korea’s October 9 nuclear weapons test, Condoleeza Rice issued a thinly veiled threat of nuclear assault against the latest member of the Mushroom Club.  “The United States has the will and the capability,” she declared during an October 18 visit to Tokyo, “to meet the full range — and I underscore…

  Thousands Protest School of the Americas Crowds estimated at 22,000 protested outside Fort Benning, GA, on November 20, calling for the closure of the School of the Americas program that trains military personnel from Latin America in “counterinsurgency techniques” including torture and other human rights abuses. Participants in the action, organized annually by SOA…

Upon reading Eric Laursen’s “Lebanon After the Whirlwind” in your fall issue, I was disturbed to find the American left’s paradoxical flirtation with Islamic fundamentalism infecting your pages.  Laursen writes that “leftists are just as prone as Bushites to apply ideological litmus tests to Islamic culture A clear case of cultural chauvinism is in play…

  Reflections on the Stopping the Merchants of Death Strategic Conference Gathered in the lobby at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, the participants arriving for the Stopping Merchants of Death (SMoD) Strategic Conference looked pretty innocuous. Except for the telltale signs of stacks of WIN Magazine and various other pamphlets and literature, one…

As another calendar year turns, those active in the 1970s and 1980s will have duly noted the recent deaths of Jeane Kirkpatrick and Gerald Ford—prime supervisors of U.S. imperialist terror—and their Third World counterparts, the butchers of Baghdad (Saddam) and Santiago (Pinochet). Whatever the symbolic or practical value of prosecuting various politicians might be, we…