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Defense or Destruction - Focus Group #40 |
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Presenters: Gillian Gilholl, Bruce Gagnon Focus Group Summary: This focus group, on “Defense or Destruction,” was truly amazing. I’ve never before heard such a comprehensive presentation on the nefarious military-industrial conspiracy. Mercifully, there were only about 30 women who attended this group (and the leaders made apologetic comments even to some of those who apparently hadn’t chosen it). Bruce Gagnon, of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, spoke of his conversion from his Republican conservative background, reared in an Air Force family. He himself served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. He came home, went to college, and became an activist on the left. The particular focus of his Florida-based organization, since the early 1980s, has been to counter the militarization of the space program. (Most of the following material is from his presentation, but some is from a video he sold there, which he said was a duplicate of his presentation.) Gagnon weaved his tale from ominous, but often isolated, facts about U.S. military and space history. A logo of the U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs reads, “Master of Space.” The U.S. space program was started by Nazi scientists – who had earlier used 40,000 Jews and others as slave labor to build V1 and V2 rockets to bomb London and Paris for the Nazis. “So these are the origins of the U.S. Space Program,” he warns. “And I can’t help but wonder of the similarity between [the US Space Command slogan – Master of Space], and the Nazi slogan, ‘Deutschland uber allis’ – Germany over all.” We can expect greater gaps between the rich and poor, Gagnon predicted, producing greater worldwide unrest. Space superiority will allow the U.S. to see and control this dangerous situation. Control of space includes the ability to deny other the use of space. The Persian Gulf War was the first “space war,” Gagnon asserted. He quotes an official of the U.S. Space Command who says, “The future of warfare will depend on space capability. So whoever controls space, will win all the wars on the earth.” The bottom line is that the U.S. national missile defense program is “really an attempt by the aerospace corporations from the United States to move the arms race into the heavens and to make a lot of money doing it.” Missile defense is a “Trojan horse.” It’s not about defense, but about “controlling space and denying others access to space.” Gagnon continued by explaining that the U.S. is moving into Asia – using theater missile defense to threaten China and North Korea (even though the latter has “suspended its entire missile program” and has “zero” nuclear weapons). The IMF and the World Bank want to control Russia. We are not pulling our troops out of Afghanistan and Pakistan because we want to control gold mines and oil reserves in Central Asia. Long before September 11, Condoleezza Rice, speaking from the offices of a Houston oil company, warned officials of the Afghan Taliban that “you will negotiate and give us a red carpet [for an oil pipeline] or we will carpet you with bombs,” charged Gagnon. The U.S. is polluting space with “110,000 pieces of space junk,” including dangerous nuclear reactor cores that fall back to earth and cause cancer. “Only one pound of plutonium will kill everyone on earth. What we will have is global suicide if we let our country go forward in militarizing space,” Gagnon warned. NASA wants to go to Mars to set up mining colonies, he said. The aerospace industry wants to pay for its billion dollar programs by cutting social entitlement programs. The goal is for the U.S. and U.S. corporations to control space so that we can deny other nations the possibility of access to the resources of space. “With our armed forces lying in wait…we could hijack rival shipments upon return. In other words, the United States would hijack anyone else if they tried to go out and mine the skies, if they were not authorized; if they were not part of the multinational corporations who would be benefiting from this mining operation.” In short, Gagnon combines the deepest suspicions about the United States – its military, its government (including both political parties), and its corporations – with breath-taking naiveté about governments or other forces hostile either to U.S. security, or to the democratic freedoms our nation espouses. The next speaker was Gillian R. Gilhool, a representative of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). The League seeks the end of all violence and war, with “world disarmament and the peaceful resolution on international conflict through the United Nations.” Unabashedly socialist, during the 1960s through the 1980s the League worked closely with the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council. [RENEW’s 1991 Financial File reports on the League as an organization that received in-kind support from the Women’s Division.] Gilhool’s focus was on lowering the military spending in the U.S. budget, which she said was over 60 percent of U.S. discretionary spending. (Using “discretionary” spending as the baseline makes the military percentage artificially high. Military spending is less than 20 percent of the total U.S. budget.) She said, for example, that $8.6 billion was designated for missile defense, but that $8 billion would provide Head Start for all eligible children down to two years of age. Gilhool invited the participants to join in demonstrations and to lobby members of Congress. She acknowledged the daunting task, “It’s difficult to speak out now; 95 percent of the people support Bush and his now limitless war.” One of Gilhool’s resources was a song sheet of anti-war lyrics, prepared by WILPF and Raging Grannie Vermont. We sang We March to Stamp Out War to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Beneath the Nuclear Umbrella to the tune of What a Friend We Have in Jesus. I asked if we could duplicate the songs, and we were encouraged to do so. (See the copy for the flier, prepared especially for the “Sing a New Song” Assembly, attached). As the group stood to sing, she diffidently said, “I hope you don’t think this is sacrilegious.” No one said they did.
Printed for the 2002
Methodist Women’s Assembly Sing a New Song
WE MARCH TO STAMP OUT WAR The grannies march on
Washington Chorus: No more military
action We put our knitting
Chorus: No more
militarization The woman on Pacifica
said Chorus: No more military
action BENEATH THE
NUCLEAR UMBRELLA Beneath the nuclear
umbrella TA RA RA BOOM Ta ra ra boom de ay
Ta ra ra boom de ay
Songs courtesy of Esther Farnsworth WILPF and Raging Grannies Vermont efarns@vtlink.net There are WILPF/Raging Grannies groups in Vermont, Boston, and Seattle as well as an active network in Canada and Germany. |
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