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Lynn Koh's blog

On the 10th anniversary, Militarism in Miniatures

Wed, 2013-03-20
Lynn Koh

Snapshots of a decade of war, through the lives of refugees, immigrants, service workers, survivors.  Followed by a piece of mine first published by War Times in 2006. 

2006 I bump into Ali Hussein at a mosque in Damascus with my friends Gary and Muna.  We strike up a conversation, and learn he is an Iraqi refugee.  He surreptitiously invites us to his house the following day. In his home, we drink orange juice. “Whoever sees death would accept sickness,” he tells us. The US occupation has made even Saddam Hussein’s regime look preferable.  I think about Ali a lot these days -- wonder if he has managed to make a home in Syria, if he managed to smuggle himself to Greece as he hoped to, or if he stayed in Damascus only to flee violence again a few years later.

Gary and I are traveling through Jordan and Syria with a larger group of peace activists, meeting with organizations serving Iraqis that have fled the war. Muna is the translator and guide for our trip.  She left Baghdad – ‘crazy Baghdad’ she says – as violence spiraled through the city’s neighborhoods.  Her two sons are still there, living with their grandmother. After the trip, Muna will pack up and move to Lebanon, where she thinks it will be easier to make a living. Shortly after I return to California, Israel starts bombing Southern Lebanon. Muna will eventually reunite with her children in Brooklyn.

2009 I’m visiting Francisco, an older Filipino who is active in our union.  His wife Betty is home and as always during my visits she tries to make me eat something – a pungent stew or, if I’m lucky, fried bananas.   On their table is a picture of a young man in a beret and military uniform.  Betty explains how her son has returned from Iraq with traumatic brain injury, how once at the VA hospital he thought he was in battle and tried to take cover.   After my visit, Francisco walks me to my car.  He tells me that war is where you prove you are a man.

2004  I work the graveyard shift at a hotel front desk.  The night-time security guard, Richard, tells me how he almost wanted to punch Foad, an Iraqi in our engineering department.  It’s the day after the residents of Fallujah dragged the bodies of four military contractors through the streets and hung them over the Euphrates.  I’m too scared to say anything.

2003 The war has just started.  I’m in the living room of my housing co-op, watching it on a tv screen.  The next day, dozens of activists from our school go to San Francisco to take over the streets.  Some lock arms, some chain themselves together.  A  drama professor lectures the arresting police officers about the history US imperialism.  I stay on campus to organize the local rally and march.

At the end of the night, a friend tells me we must act as if the bombs were falling on our friends, our neighborhoods. 

2006 In Amman, Jordan, we meet Haj Ali, who works in an anti-torture NGO.  He says he’s the man in the picture.  That picture, the one with the black hood, arms splayed outwards, body balanced atop a box, electrical wires springing out from the body. I can’t decide if it matters whether or not it’s true.

2008 The fifth anniversary of the war.  Ana, a leader of our union, speaks at an anti-war rally.  Her son is deployed in Iraq, and she stays up each night wondering if she’ll get the call.  She's already lost her husband shortly after they immigrated from El Salvador.  The previous week, I visited her at her home to ask her to speak at the rally.  She lives in a trailer park, and has raised her kids in a space smaller than the hotel rooms she cleans every day.  I ask myself – if this were my hood, would I have said no to the recruiters?

2012 I'm driving to work when I hear about Danny Chen's suicide on the radio.  Every Asian American knows exactly what he went through – the taunts, the bullying, the bottled-up desperation.  Pressure can build in the precise way that causes implosion rather than explosion. 

2013 Another boy from New York’s Chinatown, whose father is also a cook and whose mom also did garment work, says he wants to enlist.  He’s my best friend’s brother.  

2006 Gary, Muna, and I have found a quiet spot in a hill overlooking Damascus.  We bought some soft drinks and are sitting down to talk about life, forget about things, and try to laugh.  The air is cleaner up here than anywhere else in Damascus or Amman, Beijing or Philadelphia, San Jose or New York.  The lights of Damascus shine familiarly below us and then taper out over the expanse of land.  Beyond the horizon, Francisco’s son is becoming a man; Ana’s son is listening to a recruiter; Danny Chen is getting ready for his freshman year;  Muna’s children are waiting for her in Baghdad; and across the border, for five more years, we will keep killing our brothers and sisters.

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Point Zero. Militarism and Gender (part 3)

Lynn Koh

 

This will be my last Militarism and Gender post for a while.  My next couple pieces will be about organizing in China and Hong Kong, and then I'll come back to this, hopefully with a review of 'What Kind of Liberation' and 'Sexual Decoys'.

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Review of Revolution at Point Zero by Silvia Federici

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Have It Your Way! We're Walking Out...

Lynn Koh

Who could avoid feeling warm this holiday season when hundreds of workers at Wal-Mart stores across the country went on strike during Black Friday?  And today, workers at New York City fast food outlets walked off the jobs, to demand $15 per hour wages and the right to organize. 

There are decent articles at In These Times and Salon.

For those of us who have been around the labor movement for a minute, it seems like a wave of actions sweeping through non-union and low-wage workplaces.  For the moment, the number of workers involved are probably not large enough to win major demands.  But they are certainly creating the inspiration for other workers to stand up and fight. 

The fast food workers have their work cut out for them.  The structure of the industry (based on franchising), and the competitive pressures in an industry where fixed capital is a relatively small, means no owner will want to be the first to crack.  I am guessing the workers will be combining their workplace actions with a legislative push around the minimum wage.

Reading about the workers' motivation to strike, I am reminded of a former airport worker who is now a union leader.  His first action was handing out a flyer which read 'A burger, fries and a drink costs more than I make in an hour.'  Bosses who force their workers to raise families on $7.25 an hour should be behind bars.

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Living Along the Fenceline: Militarism and Gender (part 2)

Lynn Koh

This is a review of the documentary Living Along the Fenceline, second in an ongoing series about militarism and gender. The first part of the series is here. If you think there is something I should review (a book, a movie, anything), please let me know. 

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What is the story of U.S. imperialism? What happens on and around the 1000 U.S. bases which grip countries across the globe, from Afghanistan to Korea?  Living Along the Fenceline is a documentary directed by Lina Hoshino and Gwyn Kirk, and co-produced by Deborah Lee; it brings us the story of seven women organizers who live next to military bases in Texas, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Guam, and Hawai'i.  

While each of the segments begin with some background information about the military bases in each region, the documentary mostly focuses on the women's concrete experiences with militarism, told in their own voices. This delivers a richness that a strictly analytical documentary about militarism could not capture.  Thus, nearly all segments weave together a number of themes with the particular history of an area, a family, or an individual.  

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Chicago Teachers' Strike

Lynn Koh

I don't have time to write a lot about the Chicago Teachers' Strike.  It is hugely significant; one friend said it's the most important strike since the Teamsters' strike of 1997.

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First, because it is in the best tradition of the labor movement -- a struggle led by a militant rank-and-file. This was not organized overnight, but reflects work done within the CTU by union reformers over the past decade. A group of teachers decided to become active in the union as the city launched one attack after another on the public school system. They sought to transform their union into a fighting organization, and deeply involve its members in the union's democratic process.  

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Militarism and Gender (part 1)

Lynn Koh

This is a book review of Cynthia Enloe's Maneuvers. It's the first in a series of posts I hope to do about Militarism and Gender. If there are other books or films you think should get discussed, let me know.

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“Imagine,” Cynthia Enloe asks towards the beginning of her book Maneuvers, “ the story of the American Revolution if it could be told by the scores of women who followed -- and served -- the British and American troops” (43). Upon reading that, my brain promptly did a somersault. This is something other than a shift in perspective, looking at something familiar from a different point of view; it’s more like learning that you had subconsciously, but perhaps intentionally, avoided noticing a door in your living room. In this case, what lies behind the door is the vast web of practices that sustain militaries but are invisible even to antiwar or anti-imperialist critics who do not connect militarism to gender.

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From Hope to Fear and Back: Obama & the Absence of a Progressive Bloc

Tue, 2012-08-14
Lynn Koh

We all remember that night in 2008.   In Oakland, as in cities across the U.S., strangers hugged each other and filled the downtown streets.   Stephen Colbert broke character and got teary-eyed.  Many wondered, was the US charting a different path into the future?[1]  This year, an Obama victory will likely produce a very different reaction – celebration by the faithful, of course, but on the larger left perhaps a simple, vast sigh of relief at a catastrophe avoided.  

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Reflections on the debt debate

Lynn Koh

Hi friends, I'm offering this long-ish essay -- written a few weeks ago -- on the heels of both Obama's announcement to forego regulation of ozone-destroying pollutants as well as his call for a second stimulus package. It will be properly footnoted/hyperlinked in a week or so (please ignore the # signs in the meantime).

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Hard Times?

Lynn Koh

Not if you're a Silicon Valley CEO. According to the San Jose Mercury News, which does an annual survey of CEO compensation called 'What the Boss Makes,' CEO compensation increased 37 percent, while the median worker pay increased 1.6 percent.  Median profit for companies surveyed was $35 million.

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Capitalism: back to normal?

Lynn Koh

Mother Jones has a great chart detailing CEO pay alongside what happened to the CEO's workforce this past year.

 

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