Women's peace camps target U.S. missiles

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National teach-in called on Central America 16 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1984 ACTION The Women's Peace Camp at Greenham Common (Berkshire, England) issued a call in June for 10 million women to come to Greenham Sept. 20-30 to celebrate the third anniversary of the founding of the encampment. Women from other encampments all over the world, including a number from the Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice just outside the Seneca Army Depot in Romulus, N.Y., responded to the call. The base at Greenham is the launching site for Cruise and Pershing Il missiles, which are shipped to it from the Seneca Depot.

Utilizing an idea at least as old as 411 B.C.—when Greek playwright Aristophanes' heroine, Lysistrata, called upon the women of all the states of Greece to join together, "take" the Acropolis, and refuse to sleep with their men until they had agreed to end the "madness" of war-women in the United States, Western Europe, and Australia, inspired by the Greenham example, have been joining together in the encampments. They are enduring physical hardship and arrest as they engage in acts of civil disobedience to express their profound repugnance at U.S. militarism.

The main targets Great Britain, with its 102 U.S. air bases, has been the location of the most persistent and effective activity—activity which has created linkages with other countries and other struggles. The Sept. 17 International Viewpoint reports that one of the first acts of the striking coal miners' wives was to send a delegation to Greenham to express their support. The Greenham women have reciprocated by appearing on the miners' platforms and on the picket lines.

Another English encampment has been established by men and women outside the base at Upper Heyford where F1-11 long-range aircraft are stationed. Here, as at Greenham, the seven gates of the base are occupied and periodically blockaded.

Well into its second year is La Ragnatela, Donne per La Pace [the Spider's Web, Women for Peace], situated in Comiso, Sicily. This camp grew up in response to the arrest and trial of 12 women for their participation in an International Women's Day demonstration at the Magliocco NATO airbase in March 1983.

The women, seven of whom had come from Greenham, repeatedly blockaded the entrance to the base where 112 cruise missiles are now deployed and aimed at the Middle East. According to the June 1984 Womanews they were imprisoned for six days, subjected to gratuitous violence resulting in broken arms for one woman, and were to be deported immediately to England.

The deportation order was lifted for the trial, which resulted in a significant legal victory for the women's peace movement. The Sicilian magistrate's court found the women not guilty of blockade and trespass, conceding that they had extenuating motives "of particular moral value."

The juridical acceptance of moral arguments for nonviolent direct action against nuclear weapons sets an important precedent, especially in view of the fact that Greenham women had been attempting unsuccessfully to base their defense on such an argument.

Seneca women

In the United States the focus of the encampment movement seems to be slightly different than in Europe. The several thousand women who have passed through the Seneca encampment during the last two summers have come not only to express their outrage at the deployment of Cruise and Pershing II Women at Seneca, N.Y. peace camp missiles in Europe, but-equally important to them-also to build an alternative all-women community.

As Andrea Doremus, a coordinator of the Seneca camp, expresses it:

"The Cruise and Pershing II missiles are the most extreme examples of a whole society that has totally warped prioritieswhere profit and violence and greed are above human need. So we focus on the Cruise and Pershing and say: 'Here is the most blatant example of a world gone crazy. And yet we're also trying to create an alternative way of interFaculty for Human Rights in El Salvador and Central America (FACHRES-CA), a national organization of university professors, has issued a statement calling for Oct. 24, 1984, to be a day of education and protest against U.S. policy in Central America and the Caribbean. The chosen date is also the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Grenada.

The statement, signed by seven professors, urges that Oct. 24 be a day when "no business as usual" occurs on the campuses. Referring to the teach-ins that helped initiate and build the movement against U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s, FACHRES-CA proposes that a schedule of counteractivities to ordinary university classes be planned to discuss the nature of U.S. involvement and strategies for opposing it.

FACHRES-CA was formed several years ago in response to a wave of repression against faculty and students in El Salvador. For example, on June 26, 1980, Dr. Felix Ulloa, the rector of the University of El Salvador, was assassinated. Then, on Feb. 10, 1981, 20 members of the High University Council were seized during a meeting of the Council and subsequently imprisoned without charge for nearly two months. By June 1981, the junta was already responsible for almost 2000 violent deaths in the academic community throughout the country, including 179 teachers and 1005 students.

More recently, FACHRES-CA has expanded its activities to include a variety of efforts to study and criticize U.S. policy throughout the region, as it affects many aspects of Central American and Caribbean society. These activities include the sending of fact-finding delegations of professors to El Salvador and Nicaragua. Upon their return they hold press conferences and issue reports. Also, FACHRES-CA organizes campaigns to save the lives. of political prisoners, makes resources available for Mima Cataldo acting...to build something positive while we're saying no to something else."

This effort to create an alternative society in microcosm has had two aspects this past summer, according to Doremus. The women are attempting to build a safe and legal living space on the 52 acres of land now owned by the encampment and open to visitors until Oct. 31 of this year. The camp was granted its health permit this summer by dint of a massive effort and the running up of a large debt.

The encampment is also now giving top priority to educational work, both teach-ins, and issues a number publications and newsletters.

At the present time, in addition to organizing for Oct. 24, FACHRES-CA is collecting signatures of hundreds of professors from across the country to appear in an ad in the New York Times at its funniest By LARRY COOPERMAN Repo Man is a surreal comedy about a young man, Otto, who is lured into the semi-illegal trade of auto repossession. Woven into the daily life of this young man are grocery store robberies, gang fights, and random threats and acts of violence. And throughout this film, an older man, sometimes halfdead, is driving around in a brown Chevy Malibu whose trunk, when opened, can vaporize a human being, leaving nothing standing but its victim's boots.

MOVIE REVIEW There is more to this film, however, than just random acts of violence. There is a romantic interest, as well. The hero, or anti-hero, meets a young woman who is trying to escape several men who are pursuing her because she knows the truth about the contents of the brown Chevy Malibu's trunk." He gives her a lift, hears her story, believes none of it, and asks her for a date. At the end of the ride, and after a brief unpleasant exchange between the two, they hop, in accelerated motion, into the back seat of his repossessed car and initiate a brief relationship that is characterized by passion, torture, and, in the end, aloofness.

The characters in this film, all decked out in the finest punk chic, have a few within the camp and in the surrounding community. Three "days of focus" were conducted during the summer, with workshops and discussions built around important issues. These included a Labor Day weekend workshop on the problems of conversion of war industry to peaceful uses.

High on the agenda for the winter months, according to Doremus, will be the building of a network of women all over the country who can utilize information and experience acquired from Seneca to create more such communities.

The July 1984 Nuclear Times reports that there are now at least five other encampments in the United States. The newest, the Women's Peace Presence to Stop Project ELF (a proposed Navy communications system for nuclear submarines), located 300 miles north of Madison, Wis., opened on Memorial Day.

Other encampments include the Silence One Silo Peace Camp near Great Falls, Mont.; the Savannah River Peace Encampment near Athens, Ga.; the Minnesota Women's Camp for Peace and Justice in St. Paul; and the Puget Sound Women's Peace Camp in Kent, Wash.

Information requests about the Seneca encampment and urgently needed contributions can be sent to The Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice, 5440 Rt. 96, Romulus, N.Y. 14541.

in October. This ad will demand complete withdrawal of U.S. support to "contras" and to reactionary regimes in Central America. It calls upon the American people to keep up their protests and not to imagine that any supposed peace candidates in the elections are going to end U.S. intervention.

Further information about FACHRES-CA can be obtained by writing to: Room 613 Eshelman Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA. 94720 (415642-7783) things in common: They do not care about anybody else-not family, friends, or lovers-and they have no objectives beside immediate ones (rob the grocery store, repossess the car, drive around in a brown Chevy Malibu). For that reason, and because it is filled with comic situations and dialogue, this film is destined to become a cult classic.

The nihilism of Repo Man, the total absence of comprehensible objectives or actions, is a reflection of punk culture. The film is filled with a clear contempt for the existing society; it parodies the American family, work situations, cops, friendships, and relationships. Yet, Repo Man offers no hope of any change from the bleakness of the situation.

Punk culture has represented a form of youth protest of bourgeois morality. As with other cultural forms, it can be filled with different, even contradictory contents. That is why there are so many punks who are consciously left-wing, while others display—pierced through their cheeks—swastikas. It is therefore interesting to contrast the apolitical style of Repo Man to the Clash's film, Rude Boy, in which the protest against bourgeois society is focused around the struggle against racism in Britain.

Despite its limitations, Repo Man is a very funny film. It is currently on its second life-after a first release failed to attract the movie-going crowd. If your car hasn't been repossessed, go see it.