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The Cost of Empire:The Iraq/ Afghanistan Memorial Installation

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The Cost of Empire:The Iraq/ Afghanistan Memorial Installation February 13, 2008 Dear Friends, The loss of our dear friend and colleague Ralph DiGia has hit all of us hard here at MUSTE the Muste building. Ralph lived a great News from the A.J. Muste Memorial Institute life, and left the movement with a great legacy. His boundless sense of humor, his smile, his jokes and his passion for life infected us all. As someone who spent more NOTES than 70 years in the peace movement, Ralph understood better than most of us VOL. 15, NUMBER 3 SPRING 2008 that our mission won’t end anytime soon, and that we should enjoy ourselves along the way. Ralph always felt he was lucky to The Cost of Empire:The Iraq/ be working for a better world, and he shared that sense of happiness with all of Afghanistan Memorial Installation us who knew him. We’re gratified to report that our end- The Muste Institute made a $2,000 acknowledge the ongoing senseless of-year fundraising letter has drawn an grant this past December to allow the deaths, both military and civilian, Iraq/Afghanistan Memorial Installation to enthusiastic response. Thanks so much to resulting from these wars. So he created be updated and transported to additional the Iraq/Afghanistan Memorial all of you who contributed. If you haven’t sites for display. This article was written for Installation, a series of three by six foot yet done so, it’s not too late. Your support Muste Notes by Joe Mowrey, coordinator vinyl banners with the names, faces and is needed and appreciated. of the installation. brief biographies of U.S. Military per- We hope to have news about the future In the Spring of 2003, Tim Origer, a sonnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. of our building in the next issue of Muste disabled veteran, was attending weekly The Memorial also includes information Notes. Meanwhile, thanks to your dona- demonstrations against the invasion about civilian deaths in both countries. tions, we are keeping up our vital and occupation of Iraq held at a major The installation, which currently assistance to grassroots groups engaged in intersection in Santa Fe, New Mexico. consists of 95 banners containing nearly This was shortly after the infamous 4,500 names, is now 600 feet long and is nonviolent action for social justice here in “Mission Accomplished” statement growing every month. In the last five the U.S. and around the globe. made by George Bush on the deck of a years our group of volunteers has U.S. aircraft carrier. Someone driving by installed the Memorial at dozens of Sincerely, yelled at Tim, “Go home. The war is locations in northern New Mexico, over.” In response to this kind of heck- including the University of New ling, he conceived of a memorial to the Mexico, the College of Santa Fe, Tewa U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq as Women United functions and the New Murray Rosenblith well as in Afghanistan. Tim, a combat Mexico State Capitol in Santa Fe. The veteran who lost his leg to a land mine Executive Director banners have also been carried by in Vietnam, feels it is important to marchers in demonstrations and com- munity parades. Y E While those of us involved with the R W project make no secret of our opposition O M to war, the Memorial itself contains no E O J political content. Its impact seems to Y B transcend the politics of those who O T O experience it. This allows us to put a H P human face, not only on those whose lives are being sacrificed in these tragic occupations, but also on the antiwar movement which is often characterized in a negative, “anti-American” light. Gathering the information and for- matting the Memorial is often a gut-wrenching task. After two years of working on the project Tim became overwhelmed by the constant exposure to the faces and stories of the young men and women whose lives are forfeited to these ongoing occupations. At that A solitary moment for a viewer of The Afghanistan/Iraq Memorial Installation on the campus of the point, I took over the research and pro- University of New Mexico as part of the annual Peace Fair held by the Peace Studies Department. continued on page 2 2 • Muste Notes Spring 2008 Memories of Ralph 1914-2008 S Ralph DiGia passed away on D Ralph shows off his L O famous smile at a February 1 at the age of 93 at St. N Y E Muste Institute Vincent’s Hospital in New York City R C where he had spent several weeks M board meeting in D I the early 1980s struggling to recover from a broken hip. V A Ralph joined the staff of the War D with fellow board Y Resisters League in the 1940s after B member Linnea O T serving a prison term as a draft resister O Capps. H during World War II. He remained P active in the League for the rest of his life. He was also a founding board member of the Muste Institute and con- tinued to serve on the Institute’s advisory committee. An effort to describe Ralph’s incred- ible life would take a whole book. Instead we share with you some memo- segregation in the prison mess hall. population. But not for very long. Several ries from Muste Institute board About 16 of us COs, including Ralph of us former strikers were hustled off to secretary Bernice Lanning and advisory and me, were then put in a separate other federal prisons because the author- committee member Albon Man. wing of the prison, where we were ities were afraid that we would continue Bernice Lanning: “I was not part of locked in individual solid-door cells. So to make trouble at Danbury. Ralph and I the movement yet, it was the first we had to communicate with one were taken in a car (flanked by a couple demonstration I was ever on, it was at another by lying on our cell floor and of guards) to the federal penitentiary at the old Women’s House of Detention in hollering through the cracks under our Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to spend the Greenwich Village, and I was picketing doors. I had many conversations with rest of our sentences. Ralph was a won- for the first time with my friend Ralph under those circumstances. derful person to do prison time with. His Catherine, and I noticed that people “After four months we won the strike sunny disposition kept everybody’s went off the line and got coffee and and were let out into the general prison morale up.” came back. So I went across the street, and there at the corner of Greenwich and Christopher there was a man served with in Iraq were on it. He was (continued) holding a lot of papers. When I’m Memorial so overcome with grief at the acknowl- nearer to him, they start to fall out of his duction of the banners. It is sometimes edgment of those deaths, he could think hands, so I reach over to take some, to painful work, but to look into the eyes of of no other response. On another occa- help him. He had the most beautiful the casualties of war is to truly grasp the sion, a young man discovered the name smile anyone had ever seen. And he need for opposition to the folly of vio- of an old childhood friend of his whom said, ‘give them out, give them out.’ I lence as a solution to political conflict. he was unaware had died in Iraq. didn’t know what to do. I walked a few There is a large veteran community We hope that the Memorial will have steps. And someone took one. I was in New Mexico and we experience fre- a short lifespan. The horror of the occu- leafleting. And I did all of that for the quent encounters with veterans pations of Iraq and Afghanistan must rest of my life. And it was his smile. returning from both Iraq and come to an end. It is up to each of us to That’s really what it was. I afterwards Afghanistan, many who have served reach out in whatever way we can to heard from so many people who had more than one tour of duty. Perhaps the wake people up to the senselessness of the same experience.” most powerful personal experience I war. I will consider our project a success Albon Man: “I got to know Ralph have had with the Memorial was the the day we are able to put it away per- well when both of us, as nonreligious day an Iraq veteran took down a banner manently and devote our energies to COs, were sent to the federal prison in and brought it to our table. He asked us other much-needed activities related to Danbury, Connecticut, in 1943. There to remove the banner from the display human rights and social justice. we went on a work strike against racial because six friends whom he had —Joe Mowrey Board of Directors David McReynolds Executive Director Superintendent Karl Bissinger Peter Muste, Chair A.J. Muste Murray Rosenblith Salvador Suazo Susan Kent Cakars Jill Sternberg James A. Cole Nina Streich Memorial Institute Program Director Newsletter Designer Christine Halvorson Robert T. Taylor 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012 Jane Guskin Judith Rew Melissa Jameson Martha Thomases, phone (212) 533-4335 fax (212) 228-6193 Carol Kalafatic Vice Chair email <[email protected]> website: Associate Director Bernice Lanning, Diane Tosh www.ajmuste.org Jeanne Strole Secretary John Zirinsky, Treasurer Printed on Recycled Paper 3 • Muste Notes Spring 2008 Counter-Recruitment Grants, December 2007 The Muste Institute’s CR Fund makes Chico Peace and Justice Center, Chico, ature and a street theater project to reach grants for grassroots efforts to inform CA: $500 for the Partners in Peace project, youth in the Fort Worth area.
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