Anti-war graphic by Krime
Anti-militarist graphic by Krime
“THEIR WARS, DESTROYING OUR CLIMATE, AND LIFE ON EARTH.”
This print is a part of the Dissenters’ portfolio and booklet, DE-MIL-I-TA-RISE.
Dissenters is a movement organization leading a new generation of young people to reclaim resources from the war industry, reinvest in life-giving institutions, and repair collaborative relationships with the earth and people around the world. They are building local teams of young people across the country to force institutions to divest from war and militarism, and reinvest in what our communities actually need. From campuses to congress, they are building grassroots power to cut off war elites once and for all.
‘Bring the Wars Home’
Screenprint by Roger Peet
Shannon Airport Plowshares
“The image was inspired by time spent in Ireland in May of 2003 and witnessing the Irish anti-war movement. The text reads “Are ordinary citizens powerless to stop the US-led war machine and the war in Iraq? Not according to two extraordinary acts of resistance by peace activists in Ireland. On January 29, 2003, Mary Kelly, a fifty-one-year-old nurse and mother of four, voiced her objection to Shannon Airport being utilized as a refueling station for the US military by smashing the nosecone and fuel lines of a warplane with an axe. Less than a week later, the Pit Stop Ploughshares, five members of the Catholic Workers, snuck into Shannon Airport and attacked a US Navy plane with household tools, causing an estimated 2.5 million dollars in damages. Deidre Clancy, Nuin Dunlop, Karen Fallon, Ciaron O’Reilly, and Damien Moran were arrested and spent four to eleven weeks in Limerick Prison each. They were tried three times and ultimately acquitted. A Dublin jury determined that their actions were reasonable considering that they were acting to save lives in Iraq and in Ireland.”
From the 31th of july to the 6th of August the War-Starts-Here camp will set up in Potzehne (close to Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt,Germany). For several years now the War-Starts-Here camp has brought together lots of different people close to the modern and important military training site in Germany, the “Gefechtsübungszentrum Heer”, abbreviated as GÜZ. Antimilitarist discussions as well as practical resistance left a persistent mark on both the participants of the camp and the surrounding region.
The images of refugees vanished from public perception. Though they are still existing: countless people have to leave their homes day by day, facing inhumane and life-endangering hurdles on their search for nothing more than a secure place to live. Still, hundreds of people drown in the Mediterranean. Hundred-thousands persevere under precarious conditions in camps beyond the borderline of Fortress Europe, almost without any prospect for change. They seem far away, too far for many to see their persisting distress and the inhumanity they face.
And here?
Many people became involved in welcoming arriving refugees and are still staying with it. The – especially in Germany – publicly invoked “Welcoming Culture” was politically thwarted in almost no time by further eroding the right of asylum to its de facto annulation. Instead, militarisation of Fortress Europe and agreements with dubious regimes on camps trapping refugees within the countries they are fleeing from are being put in place to prevent people seeking shelter here. More and more states are being declared as “safe” countries of origin, into which refugees can be deported easily, which is done on a daily basis. Refugees are enduringly trapped in a demoralising loop, persistently facing uncertainty and fear, while desperation and powerlessness reinforce their traumatising experiences of war, terror and flight.
Those who try to oppose, struggling for a human treatment of refugees and borderless solidarity, are confronted with harsh restrictions and repression by the state. And instead of abolishing causes of flight, governmental action in terms of defence exports, further armament and war deployments creates even more of them. By this, feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness may be intensified, but for us they also support our will to take action against this misanthropic policy.
It’s time to gather in order to develop new strategies of hands-on resistance, of how we can overpower together the paralysing powerlessness and of how to unite in solidarity – small steps of transformation, that reflect glimpses of another possible world.
With the War-Starts-Here Camp we’ll take a strong stand against the belligerent situation underlying war, terror, flight and migration. We’re struggling for a world in which no one is forced to leave one’s home due to war or wo*man-made devastation of one’s basis of life. For a world without borders, that’s worthy to live for everyone!
We gather to gain and share knowledge about wars and their preparation, to figure out the situation we are living in and to analyse its internal relationships. Perspectives in emancipatory movements are highly diverse – and so are the views on military and war. This in mind, we want to further develop common ideas of resistance, strengthen the local antiwar-initiatives grown over long years and also discuss our differences respectfully. It seems highly important to us, that we make a step towards the locals and talk with them about their experiences…and maybe more…
For this year’s camp we build on last year’s main issues. The motto “Krieg.Macht.Flucht.” is still up-to-date, saying “war causes flight” while making use of the ambiguous German word “Macht” (translating both as “makes”/”causes” and “power”). This time our focus will be the development of common anti-militarist and anti-racist perspectives of resistance. Let’s overpower our powerlessness – the camp in Potzehne wants to provide a space for that. We want to have discussions at a horizontal level with everyone sharing our radical refusal of the global destructive circumstances.
Training, exercise, preparation and export – war starts here! We want to make this deadly site publicly visible, since it is of crucial importance to war preparation. Through various antimilitarist actions we want to disturb the “normal” operation on the GÜZ, let’s mark, block, and sabotage this full-speed-running machinery of war!
The camp is self-organized and thus, in its existence, shape and impact depending on active participation. Do not miss anything you haven’t helped to organize! Together we create a social counter project: From a society deeply infiltrated by authoritarian structures, let’s set sails towards Utopia.
Our acceptance has limits: nationalist, antisemite, islamophobic, racist and sexist attacks happen much too often. Exclusions based on characteristics as clothing, age or use of language happen much too often. We are trying to be aware of, question and change our own socialized way of thinking and our behavior and we expect everybody to do the same.
More information concerning the arrival, the program and the complete call out you can find at: http://www.war-starts-here.camp/startseite/appeal-english/
“Abolish the military! Abolish the government!”
Neither Erdogan nor the army, for class struggle and revolution.
Interview with a Dismaland Artist Who’s Behind the Anti-Arms Dealer Posters Going Up All Over London
September 16, 2015
You may or may not have noticed, on your trip to and from work this morning or the day before, some unusual posters in the advertising space usually reserved for city break deals, West End theatre and sexist currency exchange companies.
Across the tube network and at bus shelters too, artists from Banksy's satirical theme park Dismaland have been hijacking ad space for an anti-militarist poster campaign criticising the biannual Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) fair – the world's largest arms exhibition – which opened yesterday morning at the ExCel Centre in London Docklands.
This year's fair – widely criticised by campaigners – features delegates from all the usual authoritarian regimes as well as states currently engaged in brutal wars. For instance Saudi Arabia, now leading a bloody aerial campaign in Yemen. It's usually just tanks and fighter jets being shipped off to repress dissent and arm child soldiers, in the past people have been able to find weapons that specifically violate UK law: In previous years Amnesty International has discovered cluster bombs, electric stun batons, shock irons and gang chain. Oh and the best part? It's part-funded by the taxpayer.
Anti-militarist groups have spent the past week doing as much as they can to disrupt the event, blocking the entrance and forcing armoured vehicles to turn back while Dismaland artists are hoping to raise awareness even further by fly-posting the London transport network. We managed to track down one of the artists behind the campaign, Darren Cullen, and asked him what the group is hoping to achieve.
Hi Darren. So who exactly is behind this campaign? Darren: There's a few artists and designers resident at Banky's current exhibition – Dismaland – who wanted to do something about the DSEI arms fair. I'm working there with my Pocket Money Loans installation, which is a payday loan shop for kids but I took a break from giving children advances on their pocket money at 5000 percent APR to help. Strike! magazine have a stall here and they've been distributing these bus stop adshell hack packs with the Special Patrol Group – a sort of shadowy militant wing of Strike! magazine – which give demonstrations to the public on how to break into advertising space. Along with the Museum of Cruel Designs – an arms-trade exhibition at Dismaland – they thought it was a good idea to put the two things together. So we designed the posters and the SPG and their small army of volunteers took them to London.
Can you tell us about some of the different poster designs and the criticisms they are making? A lot of the posters are pointing out very under-reported or ignored facts about the UK's hypocrisy when it comes the arms trade and what we supposedly believe about democracy and not murdering people all the time. It's completely perverse that our government wrings their hands and bleats half-convincingly about all the terrible conflicts which kill and displace millions around the world, but then simultaneously signs off on weapons and ammunition sales to those exact same regions, often arming both sides in the same conflict.
My own poster is one about the UK government's planned renewal of our Trident nuclear weapons programme. It points out all the potential benefits of a nuclear war, which I think are often over-looked when politicians are talking about the practicalities or costs of arming our country with the most appalling weapon mankind has ever created. When we're deciding whether to blow £100 billion on a weapons system that could lead to the destruction of life on this planet it's a good idea to spend a little time contemplating just what the consequences of that decision could be.
Why did you decide to target the tube and bus network? I guess the arms trade isn't something your average commuter tends to think about on their way to work? I think there's a lot to be said about disrupting the monotony of the daily commute for its own sake, even better if you can do it about something worthwhile. The arms dealers who are currently slithering through London would much prefer their horrible conference to pass by without any real scrutiny. By doing something like this, we're able to draw commuters attention to the fact that some of the world's worst dictatorships have come to London to pick out their preferred instruments of torture and murder.
My rationale is that anything that annoys terrible people is probably worth doing. The organisers of the DSEI are among some the worst type of awful bastard, so if we're able to send any annoyance or bad publicity their way then we can count it as a job well done.
Ad-space hacking seems to be growing in popularity at the moment. There was the anti-Metropolitan Police ad campaign and the "bullshit jobs" thing recently. Do you see this as a useful form of protest? Anything that takes corporate advertising off the streets is a good thing. Our public spaces have been privatised so that only institutions or individuals with large advertising budgets are allowed to have truly free speech. The ad space hack packs are a great way of democratising these places where we spend large parts of our day.
Advertising tries to shape culture and tell us the types of things we should be concerned about as individuals and as a society. By removing them and replacing them with our own messages we can subvert that relationship, we can put forward the issues that we think we really should be concerned about, which in this case is the fact that it is possible to make large amounts of money from the brutalisation and murder of innocent people.
The TFL has called the poster campaign an "act of vandalism"? What do you make of that? Adverts are pollution, visually and psychologically. Replacing them with art is an act of tidying up.