This Holiday Season We Say No More War!

This Holiday Season We Say No More War!

Speech by Meredith Aby-Keirstead on 12/20/2019 at the MN Peace Action Coalition protest at Hennepin and Lagoon in Minneapolis

Today we are here to send an anti-war message for the holidays.  This is especially appropriate considering last week’s report in The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers that the U.S. government  knew the war in Afghanistan was doomed to fail and would kill senseless numbers of Afghans and Americans but chose not to speak out. Instead, dozens of consecutive generals and senior U.S. officials repeatedly lied about what was happening in Afghanistan in order to justify their endless war.  A war that we have been protesting now for 18 years!

In addition to opposing the large scale occupations and wars the U.S. directly leads – we are also here to speak out against the coups and regime changes the U.S. sponsors around the globe.  Did you know that since 2009, multiple elected heads of state have been deposed with U.S. backing, including in Honduras, Paraguay and Brazil?  

The most recent one of course is the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales.  He was forced out of power by military forces trained in Ft. Benning, GA at the “School of the Americas”.  Morales dared to sign deals with China and Europe to sell them his country’s prized resource, lithium. 

Morales explained to Glen Greenwald this week, “This is not just an internal coup d’état; orchestrated by the Bolivian oligarchy, some members of the armed forces and the police. It is also an external conspiracy. My crime, my sin, is to be an Indian. And secondly, to have nationalized our natural resources and removed international corporations from the hydrocarbon sector and mining. But also that I reduced extreme poverty with social programs. Transnational corporations are behind this coup, as is the United States too, because of the lithium issue.”

Finally, we are here to send a message to all the candidates running for office.  In the Thursday night Democratic presidential debate, the candidates’ responses on foreign policy showed us again that the 1% and their politicians generally agree on the need for U.S. imperialism.  We must be loud all the time – but especially during this campaign – because we need to change the conversation from how much we should sanction Iran and how much we should fund Israel’s war on the Palestinians to instead focusing on dismantling U.S. imperialism.  We need to demand that all the troops in the Middle East and Afghanistan come home. We need to say NO to U.S. sponsored coups.  

We need to learn from the success of the Dreamers who changed the debate in 2008 by taking over the Obama campaign offices around the country to demand passage of the DREAM Act.  Now no one would even consider running for president as a Democrat if they didn’t have a plan to support the Dreamers!  

We need to insist that there be real change in U.S. foreign policy!  We need to not settle for just better than Trump.  We don’t want bombs dropped by a president who has a vocabulary above the 4th grade but happens to be a woman or gay.  We want the bombs to stop being dropped!