SOA? Tear it down!

The following is a speech I might have given at the School of Americas protest this weekend, if I had had the time to really plan out a speech. I ended up giving the first two paragraphs while standing on a barrel right in front of the gates of Ft. Benning, GA.

Brothers and Sisters!

We can all agree that the people of Columbia and Ecuador, of Nicaragua and El Salvador, are occupied people – occupied by their own US armed, funded, and trained governments, and by the extra-legal terrorist arms of those governments, the Paramilitary death squads. Only an unjust and illegal occupier would need to maintain control of the people through torture, disappearances, and murder – in short, through acts of terrorism against their own people.

However, we must also recognize that, in a much less deadly way, the US people are in a way occupied as well. From the repression seen at the DNC and RNC – where peaceful demonstrations were brutally disrupted with teargas and batons, pepper spray and horses, concussion grenades and snow plows, and also where the voice of the media was stifled and the healing hands of the medics handcuffed; to the case of the Hempstead 15 - where Iraq and Afghanistan vets were brutalized outside the final presidential debate as they tried to ask the candidates questions, where they and their peaceful supporters were trampled by horses causing one vet to sustain serious injuries to his skull and then denied proper medical attention by the Nassau County police; to the widespread government and corporate infiltration and surveillance of all manner of social justice and peace groups, from the RNC Welcoming Committee all the way to a group in Maryland organizing against the Death Penalty; from these cases and many more we can see that the current government is not one “Of the people, by the people, and for the people” but rather one set in opposition to the People!

The State claims a monopoly on violence – it controls the police who set up these fences and watchtowers, it controls the Army which trains the Latin American terrorists at the SOA/WHINSEC, it controls the electric chairs and lethal injection tables. What we must show the State is that all its violence, all its oppression, is useless in the face of mass nonviolent direct action. Together, we take to the streets of Denver, of St. Paul, of Columbus – together, we can tear down the fences and walls that separate us – together, we can tear down the SOA! Their jails cannot contain our numbers – we masses are not huddles and yearning for freedom, but are instead rising, as one, breaking the chains of oppression and injustice.

We stand today outside the gates of Ft. Benning with the people of Latin America, fighting a far more deadly struggle than the one we wage here. But we also stand with the people of the Congo and Darfur, of Palestine AND Israel, of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, of Pakistan and Chine; we stand with people across the globe occupied and repressed by each other, by their governments, and by the multinational corporations who destroy the global economy through their greed and then demand to be bailed out – we stand here today, and we declare,

“When People are Occupied
Resistance is Justified!”