The We Are Not Your Soldiers tour hits the Warped tour in the Bay Area

> Warped Tour is the only summer concert
> tour of its kind
> around, not only in terms of punk rock music, but in terms
> of being a
> concentration point of a certain rural/suburban demographic
> that the military
> has its eyes on and in the many cases already has its hands
> on.  Warped tour is also a
> concentration of a lot
> of what is good about the culture today - the
> rebelliousness, including against
> religion, as expressed by bands like Bad Religion, NOFX,
> and Anti-flag - and also a lot of
> what is bad, and even downright dangerous. 
> There is the huge following that conservative
> Christian bands like Under
> Oath have.  There is the
> omnipresent
> macho bullshit and the total lack of standards when it
> comes to the treatment
> of women.  There is a growing
> contingent
> of youth who spew Fox News talking points as if they were
> facts.  And there is an overall
> ignorance, including
> among those who dislike military recruiters, about the
> causes and effects of U.S. wars in Iraq 
> and Afghanistan .  
> 
>    
> 
> With all that in mind, we hit two
> stops on the Warped tour, San Francisco and Mountain
>   View .  Here are
> some of the highlights from each.
> 
>    
> 
> San Francisco 
> 
>    
> 
> Even though our booth was right next
> to the communists from
> Revolution Books, we attracted more controversy by
> far.  In fact we spent a good
> portion of the day in
> debates with pro-military people. 
> There
> was one older white guy, who claimed he was there with his
> kids, who spent the
> entire day next to our booth trying to egg people on
> against us.  This was both good
> and bad.  On the one hand, we
> were able to draw forward
> a lot of the spectators to sign up with us by exposing how
> full of shit the
> reactionaries were, including the fact that some of them
> were also Christian
> fascists who thought these were holy wars against
> Islam.  And we were sometimes
> able to sow divisions
> among them, like when two military guys approached us and
> by the time they left
> the one who was about to deploy to Iraq was thinking about
> being a
> conscientious objector and the other one was trying to grab
> the GI rights
> hotline card out of his hand. 
> On the
> other hand, we often weren't able to pay the kind of
> attention we needed to the
> people who agreed with us.  
> 
>    
> 
> The pro-military people, some of whom
> were vets/active-duty
> and some of whom were just right wing youth, would come at
> us with all the
> typical arguments: Iraq is harboring terrorists... we're
> there to keep you safe...
> we're there so you can have the freedom to have this
> booth... we're building
> schools and hospitals... I didn't support the war, but
> you have to support the
> troops... yeah, murder, rape, and torture are happening,
> but that's war... yeah
> there's rape in the military, and that's why women
> shouldn't be in the
> military... you don't know the situation, you don't
> know what happened before
> that picture, that person's probably a terrorist
> (pointing at the pictures from
> Abu-Ghraib that we had displayed)... you must be an Obama
> supporter and watch
> CNN... what about all the Americans they've
> beheaded...what if your buddy was
> beheaded...
> 
>    
> 
> That's some of the flavor of
> it.  A lot of their arguments
> about the horrors of
> what the "terrorists" have done to Americans I would
> just answer with the
> simple, "who invaded who?" 
> I also kept
> returning to the basic points about both of these wars
> being based on lies and
> being wars of aggression waged for imperialist
> domination.  Some of the military
> people who came up to
> the table were more curious than hostile, but because of
> the reactionaries
> hanging out by the table egging them on (you know they hate
> the troops), things
> got heated right away.  I found
> myself
> repeating over and over again, "just because you join the
> military doesn't mean
> you lose your ability to think critically." 
> A couple of different active duty Coast Guard folks
> came up to the table
> at different times and talked about how they were against
> the war and just
> wanted to do search and rescue missions. 
> We talked about how the Coast Guard also specializes
> in anti-immigrant
> operations and, as a part of the U.S. 
> military, can be called on to do anything they want,
> including wage war (which
> is what happened during Vietnam ). 
> A number of veterans signed up with us,
> including one Native American veteran who attends Stanford
> now, considers
> himself a socialist, and wants to be part of the We are not
> your soldiers
> tour.  
> 
>    
> 
> One other really positive factor was
> the fact that we had
> two students from Hayward 
>  High School in our
> crew.  When they called on other
> high
> school students in the crowd to join the youth movement to
> get recruiters out
> of our schools, it had a powerful effect. 
> There were also a number of other friends of theirs
> who were at the
> concert who hung around the booth most of the day, creating
> a lively scene and
> the feeling of a movement.  
> 
>    
> 
> Mountain View 
> 
>    
> 
> We didn't stir up as much
> controversy on this stop as the
> last one.  For one thing, it was
> on a
> weekday (instead of a Saturday) and so the crowd was
> younger, with far fewer
> people with articulated right wing arguments. 
> Also, a lot of the bands that attract more
> radical-minded youth, like
> Anti-flag and Bad Religion, were not playing. 
> Another negative factor was the fact that our booth
> was right across
> from a very loud (they had a DJ and an amplified setup) and
> obnoxious "Truth"
> booth - the anti-smoking people. 
> Nonetheless, we managed to get out hundreds of
> flyers and sign up dozens
> of people.  
> 
>    
> 
> The most common response of those
> coming up to sign up at
> the table was, "Is this against military recruiters?  I fucking hate the
> recruiters!"  The challenge was
> trying to turn that into
> organization for October 6, the national day of resistance
> to military
> recruiters (also the 8th anniversary of war in
> Afghanistan ).  One high school
> student from Fremont said that he and his friend were
> already planning an antiwar protest sometime soon.  As it turns out, his friend's
> brother just
> came back from Iraq 
> and committed suicide.  Two
> young women
> who came up to the booth told us that military guys are
> always coming into the
> store where they work and arguing with them about the war,
> bragging about how
> they get to blow things up. 
> Another
> young woman came up to the booth and thanked us for being
> here and wants to
> hook up with the We are not your soldiers tour; her cousin
> died last year in Iraq .  A young
> guy who is doing Warped tour with
> PETA, got a We are not your soldiers bandana and told us
> about how he helped
> get the recruiters off his college campus in Illinois last
> year.  One woman from a small
> town near Sacramento came up to us
> and took a picture of our sign that says "Shut down the
> military recruiters!" and
> sent it by text to her brother in the Army. 
> Her brother texted back, "Then they can leave this
> country."  She took some flyers
> so she could have more
> ideological ammo to use against her "brainwashed"
> brother.  Her other friends that
> came with her are into
> straight edge vegan hardcore. 
> When they
> want to have fun they play "anarchist capture the
> flag," - in other words,
> going around and ripping off as many flags as they can find
> and burning
> them.  At the end, the young
> woman with
> the hardcore friends told me she's a Jehova's Witness,
> and encouraged me to
> read the Bible.  This was all
> part of the
> (very contradictory) scene at Warped tour. 
> 
> 
>    
> 
> Overall, I think we did some
> good.  We found the youth who
> hate the recruiters, gave
> them some more (and better) reasons to hate them, and gave
> them a vehicle to
> act (hopefully) on October 6.  We were
> able to draw out the better sentiments of the average
> concertgoer who didn't
> know much about the war and didn't really have an opinion
> about the recruiters,
> but after talking with us was pretty sure that they
> weren't going to join.  Only a
> couple people tried to argue that Afghanistan is
> the "good war," but didn't have any substance to back
> it up.  There was very little
> pro-Obama sentiment.