Protesters invite everyone to join the anti-war movement

Presenter: Eugene hosted multiple protests Saturday against the war on Iran. On Feb. 28, from Planet Vs. Pentagon, Sue Barnhart: 

Sue Barnhart (Planet Vs. Pentagon): This is so fantastic. Thank you all for showing up. This is like the third rally of the day for some of us, so I’m so appreciative that people have hung around for so long.

We started off this morning at 11 singing resistance songs at the First Christian Church. We marched down here, we sang for an hour, then we were all up with the union, listening to some really great talks for over an hour up at the Parks Block.

Then we marched down here. Now this is a third thing, and it’s all connected, right? It’s all connected. Our tax dollars, instead of going to life-affirming things, are going to killing people all over the world. It’s disgusting.

And with Planet Vs. Pentagon, we make the connection that, besides the fact that our tax dollars are killing people all over the world, the U.S. military is the biggest polluter all over the world, has the biggest carbon footprint.

So besides the fact that we hate war because it’s killing people, we hate war ’cause it’s destroying our planet. That’s right. 

Our tax dollars should be going to clean up this country, clean up the whole world from the climate crisis, but instead the climate crisis isn’t even talked about anymore, ’cause we’re all so worried about all the other issues. So horrible.

But it’s all connected—ICE, the military, police—it’s all connected and it all has to change. And with all of us so activated, it can change. It really can. We just can’t go back to sleep. We have to stay awake. We have to keep resisting.

If you’re interested in resisting by not paying some of your taxes, come and talk to me about that.

You know, there’s that whole thing about death and taxes: ‘Everybody has to die. Everybody has to pay their taxes.’ That’s not true. You don’t, and even if you only resist a couple dollars, if everybody here that owed money didn’t pay $10, that would make a statement. If that was happening all over the country, it’d really make a statement.

So I love you all. Thank you so much for all of you showing up. Thank you PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) for organizing this so quickly. And thank you for all the other groups that joined in today and thank you all for coming.

Presenter: From the Party for Socialism and Liberation, Sam Cook:

Sam Cook (PSL, Answer Coalition): Thank you everyone for being here. This war is not only evil, it is criminal, and it is perfectly in line with Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s MO. They’re both criminals. Trump has learned everything that he knows from the Mafia. He wants to transform the world into a protection racket for him and his billionaire pedophile pals.

What are we going to do about that?

The capitalist system that Donald Trump presides over is the system predicated on thuggery. Criminality and corruption and all of that is playing to sea. At this point. The mask is totally off. Shame. Israel and the United States are the two biggest threats to global peace, cooperation, and development.

That’s right. Their entire system is predicated upon division and the slaughter of children. That’s right. Yes, the world is looking to us right now, the American working class. It is our duty and obligation to revive the anti-war movement in this country and end this war and every other war that our criminal ruling class is conducting.

We need to hold our ruling class accountable for the millions that have been murdered in the Middle East and around the world. That’s right. We make society run and we can grind society to a halt and refuse to be party to mass murder for oil, there is no, there must be no war but class war, and we have to build the capacity for the ultimate weapon of the working class, the general strike.

We can defeat the imperialist war machine by banding together and organizing. Thank you all for being here.

Presenter: Chris Case:

Chris Case: Howdy everyone. My name is Chris. I’m an organizer and a member of the PSL, a member of About Face and a proud steward and statewide executive for SEIU.

I was also in the Marine Corps infantry for five years. The men I serve with told horror stories of their time in both Iraq and Afghanistan from seeing their friends horribly maimed and killed to dealing with officers who cared more about their careers and uniform standards than the well-being of those under them, finally to come home to limited prospects, alcohol and drug abuse, and for many suicides.

The same class of predatory billionaires responsible for 2003 is attempting the same thing 20 years later. Americans are being asked to kill and to die to protect the interests of a ‘Who’s Who’ of Epstein’s closest friends. The war criminal Netanyahu and his army of genocidaires are eager to continue their war against humanity, with reports coming out that two schools were targeted earlier today, killing nearly 100 school children.

This is what both parties have said is on offer: no healthcare, no infrastructure, no education, simply more war.

All of these conflicts from Gaza to Havana to Tehran are all the same at the end of the day, and it is our duty to stop them. I’ll leave you with this, the immortal words of two-time Medal of Honor recipient Gen. Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, who wrote a book called War is a Racket. Beautiful ideas were painted for our boys who were sent out to die.

This was the war to end wars. This was the war to make worlds safe for democracy. No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them as they marched away that they’re going and they’re dying would mean huge war profits.

No one told these American soldiers that they would shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built by the United States. They were simply told it was just going to be another glorious adventure.

Long live the workers, long live the fighters, free Palestine. Thank you very much.

Presenter: Bethel educator and union member Selina: 

Selina: …to all my people out there. I just want to take a second to make a quick connection to how our community is directly tied into the working-class community of Iranian people.

As an educator here working for the future of the working-class children here in Eugene, a special educator at that I recognize very quickly every morning when I walk through the doors that our children are not having their needs met.

Gen ed, special ed across the board—my students’ accommodations have not been given once this entire school year because our district has no money. Our district has no budget, and any single thing that I bring up to the district, to my principals is always a money issue. And so when I wake up in the morning, this morning for UR and I look at my phone, I see my children’s accommodations being shot into another school in Iran, slaughtering 85 young girls in the south of Iran.

Children that want to gain an education to participate in society, to be doctors, lawyers, et cetera. You know, they no longer have a future. And I wonder to myself, if my students have a future at this point. We have about 80% I believe, of our tax budget is going to war constantly year over year, and that budget only gets bigger while teacher’s budgets shrink.

Yay. I cannot afford on my salary to even buy groceries. I can afford to pay my rent and my bills, and that’s it for the rest of it. I have to figure it out on my own. Because again, we are sending missile after missile to country after country and we see nothing for it. And even if we did, it is morally abhorrent to slaughter, innocent working-class people across the globe for any reason.

So I just want to say to those people out there who are still wondering whether or not this is a good idea, to Donald Trump and all of those people who think that the Ayatollah has brought hard times upon the Iranian people, I say to you: You don’t know hard times, especially not the ruling class.

Because hard times are when teachers are fighting tooth and nail just to get a 1% increase in their salaries to teach the future of our working class here.

Hard times are when trade unionists all across this country come home late. They don’t get to tuck their children in, and many times they go weeks without even speaking to them because they’re working so hard just to scrape by. That is hard times and hard times.

Hard times. It’s when I have to wake up twice in less than two years to my best friend from Iran crying to me, pleading to me what do I do? And I can’t say anything that my friends is hard times and I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired of hard times.

I don’t know about you. I for one, am not going to sit around and allow my tax dollars to continuously be used to slaughter children in elementary schools across the globe, in Gaza, in Congo, in Sudan, and in Iran.

So to that, I say, what do we do about hard times, my friends? We stand up and we fight back, exactly. So let’s get up, let’s get out, let’s get organized.

Presenter: From Indivisible Eugene Springfield, Stan Taylor:

Stan Taylor: One of the things we need to realize is that this country itself was founded on the twin evils of imperialism and racism. When the colonists came to this country, they came as settler-colonizers, moving into someone else’s land, and to exploit that land, beginning in 1619, they had slaves that started in this country.

When we became a new country, the Declaration of Independence was signed. What did we find? We find that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder, and that he believed in the principle of continental destiny. Continental destiny, not manifest destiny, but continental destiny. The idea that we should move across the continent.

And what do we do? He got the Louisiana Purchase. There was the Mexican War that in 1848 with the Treaty of Hidalgo brought the southwestern part of the United States into the States. So parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California, all became part of U.S. territories. At the same time, there was colonization in the Oregon territories, and again, when we came into this nation as a territory, Oregon became a state in 1859, we declared ourselves free and white.

As you move forward in our history, you can look at the beginning of the 20th century with Teddy Roosevelt. We get the Spanish-American War that brings the Philippines and Puerto Rico into our territories. It’s again colonization and racism combined together.

Coming out of World War II, we get Truman signing a bill that brings the national security state into being: the National Security Act. It created the CIA, the National Security Administration, and the four permanent branches of the military. This is where we got the national security state.

And if you look out after that happened, that’s when the CIA becomes an arm of imperialism. It’s not just to keep enemies at bay, it’s to project American power in the world.

And one of the first of those projections was in 1953 when Mossadegh was overthrown in Iran by the CIA. You can look at this history as it moves forward, and we are involved everywhere around the world: Guatemala, Nicaragua, Somalia. You could spend an hour here just talking, reading the names of the places that the U.S. has intervened in since World War II.

Part of what we need to recognize is that we are now living this circle again. In 1953, Mossadegh was overthrown in order to protect the British Petroleum interest in oil. Mossadegh was a democratically-elected president. We helped to bring the Shah to power, and when the Shah came to power, he repressed his own people, such that in 1979 there was a revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power.

Since that time, we have seen the projection of geopolitical power into the Middle East in a variety of ways. Certainly what we’re seeing in Israel and the Gaza Strip and Gaza is part of that projection and what we’re seeing in Iran now is the full circle coming back again.

What we need to do is to provide ourselves to create a social movement that provides for blowback domestically to this international atrocity, and let’s also realize that these things are connected. We are seeing, at the same time we’re seeing the projection of power internationally, we seeing that same power turned on us domestically.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll know that the Department of Homeland Security has been stockpiling military grade weapons in huge amounts. Those weapons are military-grade weapons that are designed to be turned on us as Americans. So we need to recognize that imperialism is both external and internal.

And we need to organize—organize labor and organize civil society so we are standing as one movement in resistance to create a better world. Thank you.

Presenter: From Veterans For Peace, Shelley Corteville:

Shelley Corteville: Oh, hi. Thank you for being here. My name is Shelley.

So here we are again. Another war. I’d like to say I’m surprised, I’d like to say I’m shocked, but I’m not. I’m not. And that saddens me that I live in a country where I am not shocked or surprised that our government has bombed another country.

How can that be? We’re part of a genocide in Gaza. We’re part of the genocide in the Sudan. We’re part of warring on Venezuela, in Cuba, many other places in the world, and we’re happy with that.

We just want to continue on and Trump says, ‘Hey, it’s okay. A few more people have to lose their lives, but that’s okay. That’s all right.’

His kid won’t go. (That’s right. That’s right.) The millionaire’s kids won’t go. The billionaire’s kids won’t go. We went. Your kids will go, it’ll be the poor people’s draft.

But beyond that, beyond that, it’s inhumane. War is inhumane. (That’s right.) War is just inhumane and it’s a legalized murder is what it really is. It is just government legalized murder and it has nothing to do with you or me. (Right.)

It has everything to do with what the government wants, and it has nothing to do with anything that benefits us, with anything that takes care of us, with anything that takes care of anybody in any other country. It doesn’t free anybody in any other country. It doesn’t help anybody in any other country.

You don’t devastate another country and magically help them and feed them and get them medical care. That’s not how it works. You devastate their lands. When you go to war, that’s what happens in a country.

All you have to do is look at Palestine. That’s been upfront. That’s been the first war I think, that we have actually seen closeup photos of in decades since Vietnam, because we don’t have boots on the ground.

So the government’s willing to show us those photos, those videos. They won’t show us the reality of what we do, boots on the ground.

So here we are, another war with Iran. We don’t really have any allies anymore. Not like we used to anyway. ’cause we p—– them all off. What we have now is something completely different. We have the Board of Peace, whatever in the hell that is, and whatever that means.

We need to stop this war. We need to do everything we can to stop this war.

We keep making it okay. We keep looking at all these things we are involved in and thinking that that’s kind of okay because it’s not here.

But everything that goes on outside of our country is a mirror of what goes on inside of our country. Everything we do outside of our country, we make it okay to happen inside of our country.

We have got to stop this insanity. We have got to stop this. I can tell you as veterans, we will not stand for this. Thank you.

Presenter: From the Democratic Socialists of America, Will: 

Will (DSA Eugene Springfield): Hi everyone. My name is Will. I’m a member and a leader in our local Eugene Springfield Democratic Socialists of America.

Yeah, so last night our evenings were interrupted when we learned that the U.S. and Israel had gone to war with Iran. Of course, the fascist Republican Party began beating the drums of war and walking out the same tired Islamophobic talking points that they’ve been touting for decades.

So what did our opposition leaders in the Democratic party do? Did they condemn the war of aggression? (No!) Did they recognize the role of the CIA’s 1953 coup of Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, which we undertook for access to oil and because of perceived Soviet influence? (No!) No, they didn’t.

Chuck Schumer said, ‘Trump needs to make a convincing argument why we need to go to war.’ Do we care what Trump says? (No!) Yeah. I don’t think we care about what the pedophile fascist in the White House says. But why weren’t Schumer and the Democratic establishment making the argument against the war weeks ago when it became clear that this was going to happen?

It’s because our foreign policy in this country is uniparty. The Democrats chose the Gaza genocide over keeping Trump out of office. There are two political parties for the ruling class in this country, and we, the working class, need one of our own. As many folks have said today, this starts with building powers in our communities.

You know, we know that electoral politics can only get us so far, but we have to use every tool at our disposal. You know, we have to take this fight in the streets—to the Capitol in Salem and to Washington D.C.

So in DSA across the country, you know, we’re building the largest socialist movement this country has seen in almost a century.

Last I checked, Oregon is ranked number one for state funding in Israeli companies. And you know, we’re undertaking this historic task of building a political party for the working class, in New York City, as many of you might know, in Portland, Oregon, and here in Springfield, Oregon.

Our chapter has endorsed our member, veteran Starbucks union organizer, and Eyes Off Eugene campaign leader Ky Fireside for their run for Oregon State House District 7.

Yeah, shout-out Ky. I’m not sure they’re here today, but they’re amazing. They’re part of a slate of four Democratic Socialists across the state that we are running for state House, two of which are already incumbents in Portland and Salem.

So I hope that you’ll join us in getting Ky Fireside into our state legislature. You know, we must build this working-class socialist alternative to the two parties of the ruling class. It’s crucial that we end our state’s complicity in the Gaza genocide and the war machine that is perpetrating what happened last night and continues to happen today, these wars.

And I know that Ky will stand on their principles and not just represent our anti-war pro-worker movement, but actively use their position to help build power in our communities and fight fascism.

So, great question: How do you do that? You know, it’s through being organizers in office, through being people who use their platform not just to pass legislation, but to build the movement, to bring people into struggle and to call out fascism when we see it, not just say, ‘Oh, they need better arguments for their fascism,’ like our Democrat opposition is. 

No war but the class war. Thank you, solidarity forever. 

Presenter: Kamryn Stringfield:

Kamryn Stringfield (PSL): All right folks, I’m going to be loud because this is a moment that needs us to be loud and angry about what’s happening. If anybody knows the singer, Carsie Blanton, she’s got a song that goes: ‘Another war / I can’t wait to hear what this one is for.’ 

We have another war now, and they’re telling us it’s for democracy and freedom and all of that, but we see right through those lies.

Last night, Trump and Netanyahu launched an illegal unprovoked act of war on Iran. Shame! Iran did not attack the United States and Israel and it poses no threat to us. Trump chose to wage this war because of his insane fascist dream of running the entire world.

These governments are the same ones that have starved and murdered Gaza as part of a genocide for over two years—actually going back much further than that. 

And this new war is absolutely connected to the genocide in Palestine. It’s all a part of the same imperialist agenda to recarve the world to suit the interests of the pedophile billionaire class.

Why the hell are we spending over a trillion dollars on war and genocide and the military, when every penny should be spent on the things working-class people need? 

Folks, what are some things we should be spending that money on? Shout it out. What are some things? Education, healthcare, housing. All of these are great uses of our tax dollars, but is murdering children a good use of our tax dollars? (No!)

This war may very well spiral out of control. It kind of is already spiraling out of control. The Pentagon has 50,000 soldiers across the Middle East and deployed massive amounts of materials, including two aircraft carriers. This is the largest U.S. military buildup in the region since 2003, with the invasion of Iraq under the war criminal George W. Bush. (Shame!)

Let’s not forget the lessons of Iraq, the lessons of Afghanistan, the lessons of Libya, of Vietnam, of Korea, of Cuba, the Philippines, and Palestine. This would be much more catastrophic than these wars.

When we ramped up—this is the message I want to leave you with—when we ramped up the war with Iraq, we saw the largest protest in U.S. history to stop that war. We can, and we must do it again and rebuild the anti-war movement now.

We’ve been standing up for Palestine and Lebanon and Yemen. We’ve been standing up for our immigrant neighbors against ICE. Well, let me tell you, you need to stand up against this new genocidal war in Iran and all war across the Middle East and the world that the U.S. is purveying. 

So please get involved, keep showing up, and let’s rebuild the anti-war movement for ourselves and for others. We have to free us, before we can free Palestine or any of these places. Thank you all so much for coming out today.

Presenter: Organizers Saturday Feb. 28 encouraged residents to join their favorite group opposing the Trump administration’s expanding wars, both inside and outside the United States.

Field recordings by Todd Boyle for KEPW 97.3. You can watch the entire rally on Todd’s YouTube channel. 

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Note: Todd inadvertently excluded a speech by Kaleigh Bronson-Cook from the audio, which will be restored as soon as possible.