Local War Resistance Pictured: Part 1
Popular Education & Mass Protests Supporting Direct Action
We know there is no one right way to be involved in the struggle for our collective liberation and a future without weapons. This post includes snapshots of the multitudes of groups, peoples, tactics and movements that have existed in the history of the struggle for liberation in Mni Sóta Makoce.
While the Minnesota government has pandered to weapons manufacturers for generations, we also have an equally long history of resistance to the military industrial complex. Many tactics have been used experimentally and effectively here, including popular education, mass protest, encampments, mutual aid, war tax resistance, buying stock to attend and vote in shareholder meetings, lobbying workers to quit their jobs, property destruction, and the collective creation of art and community.
We are working to uncover and uplift the resistance history here in occupied Minnesota, and in that spirit we share this collection of pamphlets, illustrations, articles, and photos from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Content warning: two photos of people grievously harmed by U.S. weapons.
Popular Education
Note: Excerpts have been bolded and typed from the photocopies for more clarity and ease of understanding.
The Minnesota Clergy and Laymen Concerned published a fact sheet, pictured below, about the U.S. bomb usage in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
“The Plain of Jars (in Laos), once a thriving agricultural area of 50,000 people, is now a wasteland.”
“One of the most fearsome weapons used for the US’s “urbanization” program in SE Asia is the antipersonnel fragmentation bomb (or cluster bomb).”
“The war may be winding down for the American people, who read of lower GI casualties, and units coming home. We are encouraged to turn to other concerns - the economy, buying a second car, or a new snowmobile. But for the people of SE Asia, living underground to hide from American bombers, there is no ‘winding down’.”
“Our weapons turn ‘night into nightmare’ reads the ad of one weapons manufacturer.”
The following drawings, photos, articles are from newsletters and pamphlets written by The Honeywell Project.
“The individual may be struck by several fragments; each of them must be removed surgically. As the trajectory of these tiny projectiles is long and irregular inside the body, the lesions caused by the fragment alone are numerous, varied, difficult to detect, and require difficult operations… sometimes the projectiles cannot be removed… such as the young teacher who testified before the (war) Tribunal, whose brain had been injured in the bombing of her school.”
“As more information about the use of Honeywell made cluster bombs became available, activists in Minneapolis decided to assume responsibility for the instruments of carnage being manufactured in their community.”
“In Namdinh, [U.S. jets] indiscriminately bombed and strafed densely populated residential quarters, sanatoria (medical care center), the Ho Tung May primary school and economic establishments. As a result, many civilians were killed and wounded, many dwelling houses destroyed.”
Mass Protest Supporting Direct Action
The following excerpts are from a few of the hundreds of actions against Honeywell for its role in creating cluster bombs and nuclear weapons, led by a multitude of anti-war and anti-weapons groups.
These actions included trespassing onto Honeywell property, leafleting Honeywell workers, blocking Honeywell employees from entering work, breaking windows of Honeywell facilities, singing, chanting, marching, and feeding each other. Hundreds of people were intentionally arrested during this time, with hundreds to thousands of demonstrators showing up to actions over two decades.
Other direct actions took place as well:
Demonstrators destroyed thousands of draft files during the Vietnam war by breaking into Minnesota government buildings and post offices (“The Minnesota 8”).
Honeywell Project member joined the Weather Underground, a group of white radicals who bombed government buildings around the United States.
The Software Pair broke into Sperry Corporation, hammering the nose cones of nuclear warheads and pouring blood from their bodies onto the weapon blueprints.
“The protest at Honeywell featured gigantic puppets from the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater in Minneapolis. Below the looming puppets, the resisters and several hundred supporters shared bread and sang.”
“Honeywell management apparently lost patience at this time, twenty hours into the protest, and security guards soon arrived to explain that the protestors were illegally occupying private property. That warning, which would become part of the ritual of civil disobedience at Honeywell, preceded the arrests by Minneapolis police officers.”
Learning our resistance history is particularly potent at this moment as the current U.S. government attempts to quash and criminalize protests against war profiteers.
In future posts, we hope to keep highlighting how similar the oppressors of the present are to those of the past. In doing so, we plan to share stories of Indigenous resistance, acknowledging that whiteness is centered in written history. We also hope to expose how the malicious marketing of weapon manufacturers disguises their true destructive nature. We hope these snippets will inspire action and demonstrate the need for movements to center community, art, and relationship.
As we resist, we must deepen our understanding of this rich local history, much of which is hidden and erased by mainstream media and education. Our present-day movements must learn from movements in the past—the good, the bad, and the in-between.
When we move from a place of knowing our history, healing can and will happen—but it’s up to us to unearth what’s true, and to root ourselves in our resistance legacy.
Look out for more posts about local war resistance history in the near future.