What about Gaza is germane to Hartford?
I love the Hartford listserv. The town I grew up in didn’t have anything like this, and I wished it did. We had the internet; we just didn’t use it like this, like a real community. In 1997, in the fourth grade, I started a chat room on the early chat protocol, “mIRC.” My room was called “#Kids97”. Mostly I had fun programming the “bot” that patrolled the room. I could have it boot out anyone who said this word or that. I had lots of fun with my little power trip, loading in a long list of swear words. Perhaps “Gaza” is such a swear word here. I regret my 11-year-old policing of the internet. Don’t be like me.
Monday evening I attended a conference call, err, conference Zoom, with several Hartford residents and at least one person involved in the pro-Gaza, anti-genocide resolution recently passed by the Lebanon town council. Much of their discussion centered why Gaza is germane to Hartford. It’s not just the tax dollars we all send over in the form of weapons. (I hear Sharon’s selectboard recently featured a calculation of the amount their town’s residents send to arm Israel.) The Hartford connection is about our local Congressional delegation, as I mentioned earlier. It’s the environmental impact, which we know affects us. Scientists have estimated the flattening of Gaza has released more CO2 than 20 small nations do in a year. It behooves Hartford residents to know about police training: how it’s well-documented that many police-training operations have been designed and tested in Israel, on Palestinians. And it’s about a slippery slope. If we don’t agitate about this being done in our name, then what’s to say the next one that follows—or the one after that—doesn’t touch Hartford physically? Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. (MLK again.)
All this and more is why Hartford residents are organizing to present a ceasefire resolution to the Hartford selectboard, akin to the ones passed in at least thirteen other Vermont towns. A list of those towns is here:
Lots of folks have weighed in about what they feel is an acceptable form, or topic, of discussion. On the listserv and among the Selectboard, which again, I don’t represent here. I think THIS is the most germane thing to Hartford: our discussing with one another, civilly, about what constitutes acceptable speech and protest, and why. This is *it*. This is what my home town was lacking. So I don’t post here all the time, but when I do, I want it to count. Noam Chomsky famously said that any truly meaningful statement, if compressed into what can be featured in a 30-second sound byte, would sound like the ranting from someone *unwell.* Because it’s not enough time to explain your evidence or your thought process. So here I am, writing long. I’m not doing it to spite you!
President Biden’s remarks over the weekend about a few hundred student protesters were more pointed and irate than he’s ever been about the killing of more than 30,000 Gazans. Let’s put that in context. Yesterday, more than 300 bodies were discovered in mass graves in a second hospital complex in three weeks. The bodies of many people in scrubs, and many minors, were discovered with their hands and feet bound, indicating they were killed in that state. We’re supposed to believe college students trying to force divestment from this is more of a problem than the thing itself? Do we really believe that my saying the wrong thing at the wrong time is the primary problem here?
I had always thought that us educated folk drew the line, of what can be protested, somewhere well before “genocide.” Now I’m not so sure.
This week, someone shouted me down to say they disagree with my posting here. Totally fair! I was eager to hear their argument. (They keep a really nice yard and I respect their opinion on guns.) Their argument was that “breaking the rules,” for instance the rules of a listserv—which again, I maintain I only bend—is similar to what Donald Trump does; why Trump is bad news. They said it feels dangerous when someone thinks rules don’t apply to them. My thought is this: the severity of rule-breaking is context-specific. Courts usually acknowledge this. Protesters break rules to call attention to something. To make others think “why would they risk getting thrown in jail? Is this so important to them?” In other words, to educate. It’s pretty clear Donald Trump breaks rules for his own personal gain. Perhaps Biden, too, as he continues to ignore the Foreign Assistance Act.
If we can’t tell the difference between these two contexts, we might be lost indeed.
Epilogue: As of Monday, college students, including some from Hartford, at the following institutions have started encampments demanding divestment from Israel: Columbia, Barnard, NYU, The New School, MIT, Emerson, Tufts, UNC Chapel Hill, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, Washington University. At many of them, administrators have had students and/or professors arrested for their speech. (See a theme?) Dartmouth students, many of whom live in Hartford, held an emergency meeting Monday night to discuss whether they should start their own action. I don’t know the outcome of their meeting.
On “decorum” and things like it
Hi, all. I’m writing for the folks who appreciate my writing. And the folks who are willing to think “What if he’s onto something? What would that mean?” rather than simply “He’s wrong,” at the outset.
Most of you, neighbors, have been the former, and for that I am so grateful.
Since I last posted, I got some solid guidance from Vermont League of Cities and Towns on what I, as a newly minted selectboard member, can say publicly, per the laws on these things. If I make clear that I’m just representing myself and don’t purport to be speaking with any authority granted me by the office, then I don’t forfeit first amendment rights. Happy to share the precise guidance with any who are curious.
Speaking of the board! I read 260 pages of briefing material for this week’s board meeting, and about 200 pages each for the three meetings before that. I’ve crafted policy that I’m excited to try to implement, should I get buy-in from stakeholders. And yet I still care about some “social issues.” So here I am, writing for you, for free. And I got paid to write for six years, full time!
(Did you know that the number of jobs in journalism in the U.S. decreased by more than 70% from 2000 to 2024?)
About social issues, a wise local friend told me recently that “folks who want their electeds to remain silent on many issues actually want support from those same officials on *other* issues. As it turns out, we *all* care about social issues.”
I have a hunch that that’s not a bad thing.
Here’s the meat of what I wanted to say today:
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote this in his 1963 letter from a Birmingham jail:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
As you may judge by the fact that I am posting this, I agree wholeheartedly. I think the person who often disagrees with the method of achieving justice can be said to *effectively* disagree with that justice.
One pithy saying is that the centrist or moderate—I wonder if this also applies to the “good ol’ Vermont liberal”—always opposes the last war but never the current one. Always opposes the injustice that appears resolved but never the one clearly happening now. May I never be this person.
Gaza has now been more thoroughly obliterated than Dresden when the allies carpet-bombed it, according to those who’ve studied this. The Biden Administration has been *publicly* promoting a “two-state solution.” This would feature sovereign states of Israel and Palestine, both with separate territories not in dispute. But as of Wednesday this week, we know that in private diplomatic cables—where it counts—the administration has been advocating *against* a two-state solution. The revelation comes from a leak obtained by an old reporting buddy of mine, Ken Klippenstein. One must ask: what the heck are we doing?
I’ll share at this juncture something a radio host, Jesse Brenneman, wrote on social media last month:
“One trick for critical thinking I recommend is that if the behavior of a person or group defies all logic and seems like a series of baffling unforced errors that undermines their stated goal, try considering whether there’s a different goal that would align with that behavior.”
I’ve been saying something like this for years but Brenneman said it better. In other words: The purpose of a system is what it does. Do you think Israel needed to destroy the homes of 1.5 million people, as they’ve done—that’s like every residential unit in Chicago—just to incapacitate or get revenge on a few hundred, or a few thousand, Hamas fighters? If not, then perhaps the primary purpose is making this land a place its former residents don’t want to, or can’t, return to. At very least, we need to consider the possibility that this is the Israel’s goal and that of it’s biggest ally, our own government.
When I was a writer, my primary weapon was public shame. I’d like to return to that era for a minute with a fact-based story. When the Biden administration stopped contributing funding to UNRWA, the aid agency feeding Gazans, Biden cited the idea that UNRWA staff had been assisting Hamas. Canada followed suit in refusing funding. But when it was revealed that the “confessions” were likely untrue, and had been tortured out of those aid workers, Canada and other countries reinstated funding.
Shortly thereafter, on March 26, our own lawmakers had the opportunity to make a correction based on this new information. After all, two million trapped people are in danger of starving to death; one million of them children. A member of Congress quickly proposed a foreign aid bill that didn’t restore UNRWA funding. Almost all other members voted for it. Vermont’s Becca Balint and Bernie Sanders, with some principle, voted against. Norwich resident and U.S. Senator Peter Welch inexplicably voted for it, continuing to keep back funding from the aid agency that provided the most life-saving food.
At last count, the number of trucks of food that Israel allows to enter Gaza today is something like 1/36th of the number of trucks before this “conflict” started, when no one was starving. Roughly the same number of people live there today. Let’s be real: what term would most accurately describe this situation? People in Gaza continue to eat animal feed. Israel recently issued a decree prohibiting animal feed from entering Gaza.
We’re all “good guys” and we’re all “bad guys.” Each of us individually, and this country we live in. It behooves us, both individually and as a country, to ask ourselves in what way we are the bad guy. And to deal with it. Not at some undefined future time as MLK would admonish—but right now. Not while maintaining the utmost respect for norms (which helped get us to this place), but by throwing norms out the window, if that’s what’s required to not be the “bad guy.”
Honoring a veteran
I would like to use this post to honor a veteran who lived in Quebec.
Jacob Flickinger was a US-Canadian citizen. He was killed Tuesday by Israeli military while delivering food aid in Gaza.
Flickinger was a retired master corporal who served 11 years in the Canadian Army, including a tour in Afghanistan. He was father and sole provider to a one-year-old son.
The founder of the food aid organization he was working for, which employs several of my former kitchen colleagues, has said the organization got permission from the Israeli military to be where they were, and kept the Israelis abreast of their exact location. Three vehicles in the aid convoy were destroyed in three separate air strikes within minutes.
The founder, Chef José Andrés, says they were targeted “systematically, car by car.” Flickinger was one of seven food aid workers killed in the strike.
Multiple Israeli military officials, since October 2023, have stated in interviews that “all” of Israel’s bombs and shells come from the U.S. One said, “We couldn’t do this if it wasn’t for the U.S.”
President Biden has sent at least one arms package per week to Israel since October, each of these packages just smaller than the size that U.S. law requires the White House to report to Congress, according to a Washington Post investigation. Legal experts have spoken out about how this “military aid” also runs afoul of a federal law that prohibits arms gifts or sales to countries that block humanitarian aid. (Foreign Assistance Act Section 620I)
Please join me in a moment of silence for Jacob Flickinger and his family.
A map to creating fewer veterans while respecting those we have
I’m one of three newer members of the Hartford selectboard. I’m going to explain why I probably won’t vote against posting a dozen or more banners featuring veterans on poles in downtown White River Junction for six months out of the year.
It’s my first elected position after a lifetime of following politicians, and holding them accountable, through writing. Mostly getting paid with just “sandwich money,” as my girlfriend likes to say. While I probably* didn’t risk my life for a cause, the pay wasn’t much different from that given to members of our armed services right now. They’re getting so little, especially considering they put their lives on the line.
And we never have paid them much. My best friend from high school was deployed to Iraq. He and I were the only protesters at the George W. Bush rally in Chillicothe, Ohio. (Technically we were protesting the Patriot Act, which eroded civil liberties.) My buddy came back a changed man. I think that, like my uncle who came back from Vietnam, my friend would say it wasn’t worth the money. It was, however, worth learning how devoted you can be to a cause, and how deeply you’re able to bond with fellow humans.
It must, and should, be said that these things can be had outside the military. Those two veterans and I have shared a viewpoint: Support all veterans. Oppose all wars.
Opposing all wars necessarily means opposing the bureaucratic, and wildly profitable, human machine that nudges us into those wars. (It must be said that some part of that “machine” is public messaging in small towns like ours.) In a post a couple weeks back to social media and my personal website, I quoted Dwight Eisenhower on how “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Other wealthy countries have tax rates around 40%. With these taxes, they provide education, healthcare, child care. In the U.S., we pay for most of these services privately, out of our own pockets. Though we aren’t being taxed by the government for them, we are still paying for them. Some studies show that these services combined now cost average American families around 70% of our paychecks. So much for “low taxes.”
Instead, much of our tax money goes to the military. Around 50% of U.S. federal tax revenues—this year and every—go toward warmaking. Possibly more. (Receipts provided at the post on my website.) Many well-reported articles, including a bombshell in Rolling Stone in 2019, show what audits show: record-keeping at DOD is a farce. They can, and likely do, spend whatever they want. As Eisenhower said, each of those dollars is just wasted effort that can no longer be put to use for us.
The value we get out of the war machine isn’t what you might think. China, the next-largest spender, pays for one tenth what we do. Even if we spent only what China spends, we’d almost certainly face no challengers, given our network of allies. For its part, China hasn’t bombed anyone in 80 years. In that time, we’ve bombed 28 countries. If you’re curious about the devastation we’ve wrought, read “The Jakarta Method.”
Perhaps you think the question is only whether I support veterans, not whether anyone supports or opposes warmaking generally. And yet. Huge swaths of veterans say that to support service members and veterans, you *must* oppose all wars.
I say let’s not “support” veterans in the half-measure way we support pregnant women: all our effort going into persuasive efforts, into message-making, and comparatively little effort going into caring for women or their babies. This is how I see these banners: all smoke and no fire. I would much rather we offer better services to veterans, and better opportunities to connect in the community.
A couple weeks back, when I voiced my opposition, I sent a letter to the group that proposed the banners. Rather than six months, I recommended, perhaps we fly them a few days around each of the two veteran-focused holidays. I also stated a couple other conditions for my full-throated support: a design review by some panel of long-time downtown stakeholders; and the ability for an anti-war veterans group, Veterans For Peace, to design about 1/5 of the total banners. I didn’t receive a response from the group.
Perhaps the free speech I’m using to say these things was won for me by service members. But not *necessarily* so. It’s not self evident. Lots of countries have free speech beyond ours (as rated by organizations who study this kind of thing), and they’ve had wildly varied military histories. Several of them have no militaries at all. Others had ground invasions, defended themselves, and then disbanded most of their military, as George Washington had hoped we would do here.
When it comes to brass tacks, how I vote will have more of a personal motivation. It’s about my conscience. If there’s any chance that even one more kid could sign up due to how I vote, then I must decline. And you can’t deny there’s a chance.
As I said, I’m new to official public service. I don’t represent the board; I represent myself. I’m trying to remain true to myself. (Would you have me be any other way?) For what it’s worth, I do represent a contingent of Hartford residents who share my beliefs. About half the letters I received in response thanked me. The letters were nice. None had a hint of disrespecting veterans. On the contrary: we’re doing what we think will help create fewer veterans. That’s something my vet friends can get behind.
Epilogue: A lot of mass media in recent years has been happy to point out how we’re all so very different. As a former investigative reporter, I can’t help but ask: who benefits from that? From us being so quick to dismiss one another; to assume things about one another? I know one thing: if we were united against military spending, then they couldn’t spend what they do. And we will never be united against military spending if we can’t talk openly and honestly about how to do precisely this: show vets we respect their personal sacrifices without any promotion of America’s way of war.
Brandon Smith is a member of the Hartford Selectboard but writes as a private citizen. His writing has been published in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Daily Beast, and Chicago Reader. Smith has won an investigative reporting award from the Associated Press, and was the youngest-ever winner of the I.F. Stone award, the only U.S. award for independent journalism. He now works for a house builder in the Upper Valley.
How I think about the U.S. military
All the countries the U.S. has bombed since WWII. The list represents the nations of approximately 1/3 of the humans on earth. The next largest military spender, China, spends 1/10 what we spend and has bombed no other nations since WWII.
A preface:
When I was a high schooler, the History Channel flew myself, our history teacher, and a couple other classmates to DC. They interviewed us for our work at the cemetery near us. We had discovered documents in county archives that indicated there was a part of this cemetery where Civil War veterans of color were buried. They had been segregated into their own regiment of sorts: the “U.S. Colored Troops,” or USCT. Unfortunately they had not been given headstones, so we didn’t know where their bodies were. We used ground-penetrating radar to locate them, and we applied to the VA to get them headstones. (As you may know, if a veteran cannot afford a headstone, then one will be provided to them.) Then we installed the headstones at their gravesites. The VA Secretary at the time brought us to his office and gave us nice letters of thanks. But we had done the work for those soldiers. And now more people would know about their sacrifices.
I wanted you to know that before I say what I’ll say here.
We have a vote Tuesday, on the Hartford Selectboard, to weigh in on placing banners honoring local veterans on poles in downtown White River Junction. I’d like to explain my position on that, which cannot be separated from my larger views on the blood and treasure we devote to the military. (I’ll discuss those too.)
I would prefer to not help local military recruiters, if at all possible. This awful economy, and especially the paucity of services and safety nets compared to other developed nations, does the recruiters’ work for them.
My belief is simple: “support troops and veterans, but oppose all wars,” a belief many—if not most—vets and active duty service personnel share.
I think these banners would give the idea, to the more impressionable of young folks, that serving in the military is the most, or at least one of the most, honorable life paths. We don’t seem to honor any other life path with banners downtown. I don’t fault folks for signing up for the service, and I’m sure it takes lots of courage and skill. But I’ve talked with a heck of a lot of veterans who say that, once they were in, they learned how pointless (or simply empire-bolstering, take your pick) our military actions have been. Many other vets say that, if they had been able to access the social services every other developed nation provides by virtue of paying taxes—particularly healthcare and education—then they wouldn’t have joined up.
If it’s looking like we’re heading toward approving these banners (again, I do heartily support veterans), I would advocate for every other banner to be from an organization that opposes all wars, such as War Resisters League or Veterans for Peace. Poll all local veterans; I bet a majority would support this.
I’m a huge fan of—Republican war hero!—Dwight Eisenhower’s views of our warmaking apparatus once he became president. I think you’ll be surprised to hear what he said. It’s even more true today than it was then.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
I fear that it’s impossible to have a president today who would speak this. Our current system of funding federal elections, which requires giant checks from giant businesses like defense contractors, all but ensures nothing like this could be said by a mainline candidate, ever again.
As you might be able to tell, I am fairly passionate about military spending—that is, cutting it. To say nothing of the moral issues of death & destruction, and meddling in other nations’ affairs, it’s just such a waste. Eisenhower said it more eloquently, but here’s an adjacent thought: put a dollar into education, or into a business startup loan program, and that dollar makes 5, 50, or 500 dollars of “dividends” for our society. Put a dollar into a bomb and it yields $0 of future value for us. It has the same effect as setting our cash ablaze. And frankly, if we did that, the world would be better off.
Easily 50% of our taxes goes to war and warmaking. Some say realistically it’s more. Back when the Pentagon budget was $470B, we were spending nearly double that (~$1T) on warmaking, annually, because the DOD budget doesn’t include all kinds of other expenses the war juggernaut requires:
- interest on debt due to “defense”
- the VA
- the nukes program (it’s in DOE)
- the actual wars being fought at any given time (most folks don’t know that doesn’t come from the DOD budget)
- the warmaking parts of the CIA
- the war-prosecuting parts of the FBI… and on and on.
With the DOD budget in 2024 now at $840B, and the bulleted items likely costing as much or more, that’s nearing half of our ~$4.9T tax revenues.
Oh, and the military has never once passed an audit. See this 2019 article about the clown show that is trying to audit the military, and know that we haven’t passed an audit since then, either.
In one of the many failed audits in recent years, the margin of error was something like 20x the budget of the Army. In another, the margin of error was several times the U.S. GDP. In other words, audits of so-called defense in this country are a farce; those who run this machine laugh in the faces of those who would try to hold them accountable. And remember, they *can* spend roughly infinite money, since money comes into existence when the government writes a check. So all the hemming and hawing about the DOD budget means—as my grandma would say—diddily squat.
“But we have to defend ourselves!” you might say. Well, even our official military budget is 10x the next largest spender in the world, China. So if we only spent as much as them, chances are we’d still be fine because we have a mutual defense pact with so many other countries. For it’s part, China hasn’t bombed or invaded *any* other country since WWII. It has military bases in *no* other countries. Since WWII, the U.S. has bombed countries that collectively contain 1/3 of the people on the earth (see the list at top of this post), and we currently have military bases in about 90 other countries.
Perhaps attempting to reduce military spending is the “conservative” position, in the old definition of that word. Prudent. Thinking of long-term benefit rather than short-term goals. What has happened to this country’s conservatives? Now, the word “conservative” tends to mean you want to strip-mine every resource, natural and human, for the most profit as quickly as you can get it. In other words, the opposite of its original definition. This makes me think of the government from George Orwell’s fictional dystopia, which has convinced the public of its slogan: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
C’mon, folks. Words have meaning. And that meaning matters.
So no, I’m not keen on flying banners implying that it’s among the most honorable of paths to choose death, or risk of death, for the system I describe above. The path is courageous for sure. But alas, we don’t know whether the lost souls whose photos would blow in the wind, and who may have otherwise been our neighbors, would choose the path again. Especially if they understood what I’ve outlined today. For all we know, they might have vehemently opposed using their image in this way. (If they’re your relatives, sure, you may know. At least until the point at which they last communicated, openly and honestly, with the outside world.) I think the best data is from vets who’ve returned—and they’re generally pretty salty about it all, if not outright war protesters now.
Speaking of the prescience of fiction: I’ll paraphrase a social media post by user @austerrewyatt1: We all root for “the resistance” to empire when it’s portrayed in Star Wars, The Hunger Games, The Matrix, V for Vendetta. When it’s fiction we understand. But so many of us refuse to see it when it’s the reality we’re living in.
Brandon Smith 