Stan Goff
There can be no better display of the true nature of imperial militarism than how it treats its soldiers, especially those soldiers who have the audacity to believe that their experience entitles them to speak out, and the audacity to believe that they can tell the truth to the public who signs the checks for war. Dave Airhart showed that audacity wtihout hurting a single soul. He was not rewarded for bringing home the truth. He was punished for telling the truth. The recuriters cannot tell the truth. The cops cannot tell the truth. And the establishment doesn’t want to tell the truth. They want Dave Airhart to shut the fuck up and carry his experience and his insight inside himself like a shameful secret. He was valued as long as he was willing to kill and maim or to be killed or maimed. He had value as a live killer or a dead mysitfied icon, but the same imperial militarism that valued him only in this extremely narrow way wants to punish him for exercising his integrity and commitment to the truth. They want to punish him for grasping his full humanity; and they want to punish him for setting the example that shows others they can break these taboos.
The actions of the recruiters, the cops, and the administration provide no better example of why Dave Airhart was right, and why no one should sign up to do the dirty business of imperial plunder for them. And Dave Airhart provides a fine example of what it will take to stop this malicious, racist, imperial oil war. He broke those taboos. I hope people will break a lot more of them. He disobeyed. I hope a lot more people will disobey.
This whole episode had elevated the status of Dave Airhart as a human being, and it heaps shame on every coward from the recruiting office to the university administration to the police station who acted so aggressively out of fear of that same truth.
The irony of where this happened should not be lost on anyone. This is Kent State where four students laid down their lives before the same fear of the truth on May 4th, 1970, to stop another imperial war, fought with bombs and lies, and that was likewise stopped in part through the efforts of those who participated in that war and came home to bear witness to its criminality.
Dave Airhart is part of a great history — still being made.
A friend once told me that soldiers make good political scientists because politics is a matter of life and death to us. We will not keep that science hermetically sealed up inside a classroom, because it is a science for the street.
It is the science of sit-ins in congressional offices, the science of strikes, the science of street blockades, the science of graffitti, the science of refusal, the science of ending silence, and the science of banners in prohibited spaces.
It is the science of breaking taboos and the science of disobedience, and we need to study this science well. We need to study it in order to break the back of the war today, and break the back of a system that spawns the wars of the future.
The exercise of solidarity with Dave Airhart is disobedience, because it is only our reticence and fear that grant the establishment its power. That’s why they hate his lack of fear, because they know when masses of people lose their fear and begin to disobey, their power evaporates like a puddle of piss. They hate his example, and that is exactly why the efforts for counter-recruitment have to escalate. If they arrest one of us, twenty more have to fill the space. If they arrest twenty, then 500 have to fill the space. At some point, people will see what you are doing and they will eventually see the hypocrisy of loving the solider who obeys and despising the soldier who tells the truth. People will see. They saw it with burning buses in Opelika, with fire hoses in Birmingham, with police truncheons in Chicago, and with four dead students right here on the university where you all stand.
You are all being watched, and I don’t just mean by a few cops and adminstrators. History is watching you right now, and it already smiles on this honest veteran.
Some believe that they can sneak up on this system and change it while the ruling class is asleep. But the ruling class never sleeps. We will have to make the revolution right in front of them.
Warm regards to all of you from Raliegh, birthplace of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, on the border of the Black Homeland.
End the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine!
Stan Goff
Master Sergeant, Retired
US Army