Peace Groups rallied at the White House on Saturday February 5 over escalating tensions between the US and Russia in Eastern Europe. Photo: J. Zangas/DCMG
Washington DC—Groups opposed to war rallied outside the White House to condemn the Administration’s role in a military buildup in Europe and warned war between superpowers would come at great cost. Speakers questioned why the U.S. is involved in yet another conflict less than a year after the end of the Afghanistan War — its most recent and the longest war it ever fought — while many families can not afford adequate housing, food and healthcare, and communities buckle under crumbling infrastructure.
Speakers from anti-war groups Answer Coalition, CODEPINK Women Against War, Caudia Jones School for Political Education, World Without War, and others hammered at the social and economic implications another war would bring. They called out the excessive funding for defense as a misguided policy that inevitably leads to war with results serving only those who profit from it.
Arianna “Afeni” Evans, an anti-war activist who rose to prominence during the Black Lives Matter protests in DC June 2020, said that war funding by “the richest country in the Americas” ignored the plight of working families and left children without food and healthcare, and communities with broken infrastructure. “There are a thousand bridges that are structurally unsound in the United States of America but for some reason we can find money to build another fighter jet,” she said. “Fifteen million people got kicked off health insurance at the beginning of the pandemic and most of those people didn’t get their health insurance back because they can’t afford COBRA. Their priorities are ‘lets go to war with Russia’ because war makes us money.”
Afemi, a Peace Activist said that war comes at the cost of families and communities. Photo: J. Zangas/DCMG
Evans also admonished peace groups for the same strategy of resistance against the arms industry. “It is not enough to continue chanting and screaming. We cannot just continue to protest. The only way they’re going to listen to us is when we withhold our labor, withhold our taxes and actually challenge the structural power of this country.”
Rafiki Morris, of the Black Alliance for Peace and a long time Peace Activist, said the costs of war would take the lives of families that could least afford it. “When the war starts they’re gonna send these little black boys out here on the streets that are joining the Army,” he said.
Morris spoke about his past involvement in the anti-war movement and told those present to take the messages home with them and speak to their families about them and ask them to join the movement. “When the war starts, thats who they’re going to send. Thats who is going to die.”
David Swanson, Director of World Without War, an anti-war activist from Charlottesville, said the evil forces that need resisting are not in Moscow. “They’re over there working at Lockheed-Martin, and Boing, and Northrup-Grumman, and Fox News, CNN, and down the street at the Washington Post. They’re toiling away in the U.S. Government dealing weapons around the globe and insisting on more and more bases and missiles because it’s better for business.”
Swanson stated we need a department of defense against the war-mongers and “in its absence we’ve got to build it ourselves and do it ourselves.”
On Friday night, President Joe Biden committed to send 3000 additional troops to Eastern Europe to augment the troops already being mobilized earlier in the week. Meanwhile video footage reportedly from Belize, showed dozens of Russian Special Forces tank units moving towards the border of Ukraine.
