Latin American-Caribbean antimilitarism stance concerning this war… and all other wars.

War is the authoritarian moment suffered by the territories that brings renewal to the pedagogy of violence and militarism, through the massive war propaganda operation which is war itself. People are taught in schools, in movies, in universities, in iconography, to know war, when war is renewed in a territory (and only when it is renewed) it draws our attention again by repeating what has already been repeated. For this reason, in the face of war there is no room for silence.

War is waged so that we don’t forget that we must suffer the war and that under it, we will endure, in all its extension, the authoritarian experience with all its practice and content of arbitrariness, hierarchy and disdain for humanity. War is the moment in which power, the synthesis of the paradigm of domination and violence that we experience, unfolds in all its intensity, exaggeration and without embellishments, despite being romanticized by the clichéd and heroic narrative, which renews itself at the same time.

Against this war, and this, its time of renewal, is that the anti-militarists of Latin America and the Caribbean have spoken out bluntly[1], radically expressing their solidarity, support, and affection for those who strike at war by not participating in it, whether by deserting, exercising their human right to conscientious objection or any form of insubordination and refusal to comply with the patriarchal and capitalist mandate of war.

As a new war [2] that is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is the perfect time for these renewal as it is a frightening and spectacular novelty, insofar as a nuclear power is involved in it, as an aggressor. The news, the memes, the conversations are full of, refreshed, wrapped in war, war, war, and more war. We must live the catechism of war to convert, whether we like it or not, to the worship of the pragmatic acceptance of the military cult.

That is what Latin American and Caribbean antimilitarism rejects, contradicts and denies now and before. For coherence and survival, given that antimilitarism is the politically expressed social resistance to the militarization of societies by the states that occupy the territories in which these societies live and develop, militarization that gave rise to these states and allows their persistence in history. That is why the renewal of war is essential to the survival of the State as an institution, even though some form of the State may disappear in the war. In war, propaganda dictates that freedom is always something that will happen when war is over. And it will not happen, because power (domination-violence) has already made its pedagogy.

Antimilitarism is opposed, for the survival of communities, territories, societies, to any military institution, wrapped in any uniform, under any flag, and in tune with any political ideology, as every military institution is a solid pillar of both the paradigm of power (domination-violence) as well as the institutions that execute power in daily life: states, patriarchy, capitalism, and discriminatory racial and linguistic hierarchies. The reproduction of militarism is also the reproduction of capital, patriarchy, and discrimination. It is militarism, under whatever flag it may be, reproducing itself insofar as it is a constitutive part of the current and permanent state of things, of the things that dominate and violate us

And therein lies a limit for Latin American and Caribbean antimilitarism: militarism has historically deployed a great propaganda that, through romanticization, has built a range of followers, fans and propagators that go from the extreme right to the extreme left (and vice versa). This moment of war, of militarism renewal, its propaganda and pedagogy, provokes ideological orgasms in the militarist left with images of Ukrainian neighbors preparing Molotov cocktails and Russian tanks carrying flags of the Soviet Union, without any contradiction. The recalcitrant right orgasms thinking about what Trump, or Bolsonaro or Modi could have done against Mexico, Venezuela, and Pakistan respectively, if they had had Putin “guts”, who has just put an end to the international scheme built in 1945, after the defeat of German Nazism and Japanese militarism, refurbished in the 1990s for the consent of the United States empire.

Militarism, then, has kidnapped the thoughts and actions of many rebellious people who, when it comes to the military arena, are not at all rebellious, since they accept the same Power as a solution to Power (domination-violence), but different, renewed, ideally by that same rebellious people. These so-called progressive, rebel and academic calls for “pragmatism” regarding this war in Ukraine and all the others, show the ideological submission of these political actors to militarism. The militaristic fantasies of a good part of the left (including anarchism) helps in a reactionary way to keep current the permanent state of affairs that sustains the economy, politics, and the relationships that we know. Antimilitarism, in the face of this, is the uncomfortable voice insofar as it is anti-imperialist of all empires, anti-war of all wars, anti-patriarchal of all patriarchies, anti-capitalist of all capitalisms.

War, as a renewal of authoritarianism, is a display against all the forms that the societies that make up the Latin American and Caribbean territories have to rebel against the instituted: the community, the neighborhood, the laughable, the happy, the gifted, the shared, that is, everything that makes freedom socially constructed and that was expressed in all its potential, for example, in the Andean spring [1] and the resistance to the militarized pandemic [2].  It is simple and sad, especially for those who call themselves anarchists, but war is incompatible with the experience of socially constructed freedom. Either you are with the war, or you are with the freedom of the communities because all war is concrete, current oppression, absence of freedom, liberticide, ecocide.

 Remaining at ease with the options they give us is submitting, and Latin American and Caribbean antimilitarism, coherent within its flexibility, does not submit and is against war, against this, others, and all wars, because they are the same, against communities on the one hand and favoring extractivism and financial exploitation that also (and above all) affects us in the global south.

Pelao Carvallo

Translated by Claudio Ekdahl

From original source:

https://ramalc.org/el-antimilitarismo-latinoamericano-caribeno-ante-esta-guerra-y-las-otras/ 27/02/2022

[1] https://ramalc.org/__trashed/ [in Spanish

[2] Not quite, it really started in 2014. Or in 1991. Or in 1921.

[3] https://www.clacso.org/la-primavera-andina-florece-en-pandemia/  [In Spanish]

[4] Bulletins on militarization in pandemic: https://ramalc.org/publicaciones/ [In Spanish]