Welcome to the place of lakes and bomb-makers

Like you, perhaps, we have been thinking about war.

We—workers, students, artists, Minnesotans—have been reckoning with the fact that the place we call home is also deeply hospitable to weapons manufacturers.

And not by accident, either: as materials from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (included below) make plain, our state government—while presenting itself publicly as a bastion of liberal, even progressive ideals—has put decades of patient, insidious effort into courting weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and other war profiteers, all under the guise of promoting “innovation” and “security.”

We reject the equation of “innovation” with the most efficient death-dealing technology the planet has ever seen. We reject the idea that building weapons used to execute and exterminate human beings makes any of us “secure.”

As Midwesterners, we live in the heart of the United States empire, the belly of the beast, where much of the manufacturing of bombs and warplanes and ammunitions occurs, the same bombs and warplanes and ammunitions that fuel violence and death all over the world—all to the tune of unfathomable profit for American corporations and the billionaires that control them.

We find this unconscionable, and we expect that if you are reading this, you probably do, too. We’re not sure exactly what to do about it but we’re hoping we can figure it out together. We’re hoping this newsletter, where we plan to share our findings about Minnesota’s active complicity in the military industrial complex—as well as the many, many people working to change this—is just the beginning.

Or rather, another beginning. From the Christian-led mass civil disobedience organization “The Honeywell Project” of the ‘70s and ‘80s, to the Jewish affinity group “Hannah Arendt Lesbian Peace Patrol” of the ‘80s and ‘90s, to the Indigenous people who’ve resisted imperialism since European colonizers first arrived, local people have been fighting the war machine here since long before any of us were born. We stand on their shoulders, their torch ours to keep lit.

(Pictured: Twin Cities Jewish person Alissa Oppenheimer, founding member of the Hannah Arendt Lesbian Peace Patrol, in the April 12, 1989 issue of local newspaper Equal Time.)

In her book Abolition Geography (2022), Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes that “Freedom is a place,” a place that we must “make, and make, and make.”

Minnesota—a settler name which comes from the Dakota phrase Mni Sóta Makoce, which translates to “the land where the water reflects the skies”—is a place, too, that we must make, and make, and make.

Without bombs, and without bomb-makers.

Without ammunitions plants and defense contractors and engineers developing “smart” drones which routinely target the wrong people—although we would oppose this murderous technology even if it wasn’t so inaccurate—serving only to terrorize whole populations and further divorce us as members of oppressor states from our humanity.

We can (re)make the places they used to inhabit in a better, safer, holier way—whatever holiness means to you. We can start building right relationships with each other, the land, and people everywhere, right from here in “Minnesota,” or wherever else we happen to live.

We hope you join us. This work needs you, too.