Legendary Peace Activist Offers Critique of “Civilization”
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
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Because of what
he was doing the day he lost his legs — September 1, 1987, in Concord,
California, when he was run over by a train he and his fellow activists were
trying to stop before it could deliver arms to Right-wing governments and
private armies in Central America — and his involvement in the Veterans for
Peace organization, most people who’ve heard of S. Brian Willson think of him
as an anti-war activist. But he’s considerably more than that. At his most
recent San Diego appearance September 4 to promote his book, a combination
autobiography and work of political philosophy called Blood on the Tracks, Willson presented a far-reaching critique of
so-called “human civilization” and suggested it’s all been downhill since the
Neolithic period, when economic scarcity forced humans to live in small
communities and share equally with each other.
Willson was born
on July 4, 1941 in Geneva in upstate New York. He was an unquestioning patriot
— he still has a drawing he did as a boy of himself in a Fourth of July parade
— until March 1969, when his U.S. Air Force unit was sent to Viet Nam. “We
landed at Binh Thuy airbase in the Mekong Delta,” Willson said. “We were there
to protect the airbase from being attacked.” With Richard Nixon recently sworn
in as president and committed to a process of “Viet Namization” of the war — in
which U.S. forces would remain simply to “train” the local troops — the mission
of Willson and his unit quickly expanded.
“One month after
I got there, I was asked by the Viet Namese base commander to go with one of
his officers,” Willson recalled. “We had just given them a whole new fleet of
fighter-bombers and we were going to be upping the body count. He had heard
that the VC (Viet Cong) were infiltrating pilots who were sabotaging the
bombing missions. I found the targets of the missions were inhabited farming
villages. The first village I went to, the Viet Namese lieutenant went with me,
and when there was smoke coming through the grass, he said to stop. The first
thing I heard was cries of pain from a burning water buffalo, and when I turned
around all I saw were bodies.”
Willson’s
consciousness registered not only the cruelty of the attacks on civilians but
also their military pointlessness. “This was midday, and the VC were only
active at night,” he explained. “I started walking to my left, and soon I
couldn’t walk any further because the bodies were too densely packed on the
ground. I looked at a young woman holding three children, all blackened by
napalm. They were dead, but their eyes were open. The napalm had melted their
eyelids.”
According to
Willson, he tried to report to his superiors that the raids were “a war crime
and a violation of our rules of engagement,” and got exactly nowhere. “They
laughed,” he recalled. “They said, ‘There are no rules of war,’ and they’re
right.” When he was finally discharged from the Air Force, he returned to law
school and actually got to be an attorney — only he lasted just two weeks
because his body refused to allow him to stand when the judge entered the
courtroom. “I left the courtroom after two weeks and never looked back,” he
said. “It was a blessing that I didn’t have a career.”
In the 1970’s,
Willson said, “my focus was criminology and the brutality of the U.S. justice
system. For a while the Unitarian-Universalist Service Committee even paid me
to do that. Then I had a psychotic flashback in 1981. I thought I had escaped
the psychological issues of Viet Nam veterans, and then in 1981 I was working
for a Massachusetts state senator investigating brutality at Walpole State
Prison. I was right at the end of a study after almost 12 months. I was at the end
of a cell block, interviewing prisoners through a little hole in my cell door.
It was about 5 p.m. and the guards had gone through a staff change and had
either forgotten I was in there or didn’t care. I saw two guards stomp on a
prisoner and hit him with billy clubs, and at that moment I flashed back. I
immediately left my interview and took the briefcase with me when I staggered
out of the cell block because I was stepping over bodies on the runway — or at
least that’s what my brain was perceiving.”
After a long
period of recovery — “a lot of therapy, rap groups and being the director of a
veterans’ center in Massachusetts before I was diagnosed with my own PTSD”
(post-traumatic stress disorder) — Willson got involved in the Central American
solidarity movement of the 1980’s. The movement sought to protect the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua from the rebel attacks by U.S.-backed contras and also to help people in Guatemala and El Salvador
protect themselves against repressive and often openly brutal U.S.-supported
governments.
In 1986 Willson
and three comrades started the Veterans’ Fast for Peace on the steps of the
U.S. Capitol. “The fast was 47 days,” he said. “It did not seem to be causing
that much consternation to the Reagan administration, but there were 500
solidarity actions across the country. We were placed on a terrorist watch
list.” It was that label, Willson said — plus the solidarity trips to Nicaragua
and Cuba he took later in 1987 — that got him on a government hit list and led
to what he believes was a deliberate attempt to murder him by train on
September 1, 1987.
The Five Blips in
History
Willson regards
himself as a “recovering white male” and says that “we are the products of five
blips in history.” The first, he said, was humanity’s development of
agriculture, which meant for the first time that human communities could
produce more than they needed for their immediate survival. This meant, Willson
said, that “we decided we were not part of nature,” but rather something apart
and entitled to rule over nature.
According to
Willson, agriculture also made it possible for humans to amass what economists
call a “surplus,” which meant that the work of the many could be used to
support a handful of non-working few at the top of the social order. This,
Willson explained, led to “what we call ‘civilization,’ vertical, hierarchical,
patriarchal societies built on militarism and a class structure from which we
have never recovered.”
The second
“blip” Willson described was the “Eurocentric conquest, from 1500 to now, in
which 20 percent of the world plundered the other 80 percent, including
dispossessing the native tribes and capturing Africans to be chattel slaves.
These blips shaped our thoughts, structures and values.” The third “blip” was the
industrial revolution, which Willson said started with “the use of coal to
speed up transportation and manufacturing.”
The fourth blip
was “the oil blip of the last 150 years, in which we took one-half the earth’s
entire carbon supply out of the ground and put it in the air, water and soil,
and sped up agriculture and manufacturing.” The fifth and most recent blip was
“the American middle class,” Willson said — particularly in the 1950’s, when,
flush with victory after World War II, we “sped up consumption and promised
ourselves a wonderful life. I have for some time realized that I am recovering
from that whole process.”
Willson said
some things at his presentation, sponsored by the local progressive
organization Activist San Diego, that may have shocked even his friendly
audience. He said flat-out that people should not vote or participate in the
electoral system in any way, on the ground that it only validates an
essentially inhuman system. Asked about the ability of people outside the U.S.
to admire Americans as people even while opposing the policies of our
government, Willson said they shouldn’t let us off the hook that way. “I see
ourselves as much more complicit than they do,” he said. “No power structure can function without the consent of
the people.”
What Willson
wants to see is the U.S. people turning out in the streets in massive numbers
and withdrawing that consent. He’s organizing people around the country for an
action starting October 6, what he calls a “U.S. Autumn” — analogous to the “Arab
Spring” — in which people will go to Washington, D.C., occupy its buildings and
streets, and refuse to leave. “The friends I know are buying one-way tickets,”
Willson said, “ and I know if I go to that action I’m not planning to do
anything else for a long time. It’s about arrest or risking arrest, injury or
death. I have to be willing to do that.”
