Arrested in May 2010, WikiLeaks whistle-blower U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning has been imprisoned for over 1,000 days without trial.
Photos: Facebook Page for Save Bradley Manning.
By: Keegan O’Brien*—
At the end of April, the San Francisco LGBT Pride Committee announced that Bradley Manning, a Nobel Peace prize nominated gay veteran and whistler blower currently languishing inside a military prison for releasing classified military documents to Wikileaks, would be a Grand Marshal at this year’s pride parade. But mere hours after the news broke, San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee President Lisa Williams released a statement rescinding the honor and calling the decision “a mistake that never should have been allowed to happen.”
The controversy has divided the LGBT military community and drawn significant attention to what some critics have seen as Pride’s backing away from contentious issues and embracing of corporate sponsors. As a long time queer youth and anti-war activist, I couldn’t keep silent. [pullquote]Williams claims, “the hint of support for actions which placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform … will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride.[/pullquote]
Let’s start with William’s own words. Williams claims, “the hint of support for actions which placed in harms way the lives of our men and women in uniform…will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride. It … would be, an insult” But contrary to William’s intentional misrepresentation of the facts, investigations have demonstrated that no military personal have been harmed as a result of Manning’s actions. Rather, Manning’s bravery has revealed to Americans the gruesome reality behind U.S. wars and occupations abroad. The only people endangered by Manning’s actions are the politicians and military officials accountable for engineering, covering up, and justifying the U.S. war efforts.
Most glaring in William’s statement is her blatant disregard for the lives of LGBTQ people beyond the borders of American soil. What about the violence carried out by U.S. military forces against the LGBTQ people of Iraq and Afghanistan? The death and destruction inflicted by military drones against the people of Pakistan and Yemen, plenty of them queer? Or the countless LGBTQ Palestinians forced to endure the trauma of living under Israeli apartheid and occupation in Gaza and the West Bank? Do the lives of Arab, Muslim, and brown queer people, and what Bradley Manning’s actions have done to highlight the injustices carried out against them by our government, not matter to the San Francisco Pride Committee? [pullquote]Rather, Manning’s bravery has revealed to Americans the gruesome reality behind U.S. wars and occupations abroad.[/pullquote]
While the Board feels it necessary to bar Manning from the post of Grand Marshall they are more then willing to embrace a slew of corporate sponsors that commit enormous levels of economic violence on working class and poor communities and violate countless laws and regulations in their pursuit for profit. Writing in the Guardian, a publication that picked Manning as its “Person of the Year” in 2012, blogger Glenn Greenwald highlighted how corporations like AT&T, Bank of America and Wells Fargo underwrite San Francisco Pride for their own marketing purposes.
It would be nice to be able to say that the Committee’s decision is surprising. Unfortunately, pride parades across the country have become increasingly corporatized and visibly less connected to political activism and social justice. Half naked glittered men, dykes on bikes , and spectacular drag queens still parade through major city streets in June, but they do so “sponsored by” massive Budweiser floats, Bank of America tents, and opportunistic politicians eager to court queer money and voting power. So, it’s ironic to see Williams charge those who pushed for Manning to be chosen as Grand Marshall as symbolizing “a system whereby a less-than-handful of people may decide who represents the LGBT community’s highest aspiration” when it’s her and the forces she represents who have steered Pride away from its original radical and defiant sprit.
The Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 and the first Gay Freedom Day parades organized in its aftermath began as demonstrations for sexual and gender freedom and opposition to injustices everywhere. Solidarity and resistance to all forms of oppression, not obedience to Corporate America and the military industrial complex, were the spirit of the Gay Liberation Movement. [pullquote]Unfortunately, pride parades across the country have become increasingly corporatized and visibly less connected to political activism and social justice.[/pullquote]
Bradley Manning’s bravery to stand in solidarity with occupied people everywhere by speaking truth to power makes him a hero who stands in the best tradition of LGBTQ history. He deserves to be honored as Grand Marshal. The San Francisco Pride Committee doesn’t speak for the vast majority of LGBTQ people, most of whom still believe in a basic commitment to social justice, human rights, and solidarity. I’ll be at Pride this year, holding the biggest “Free Bradley Manning” sign I can find, and I hope you will be too. It’s time to take Pride back.
*Keegan O’Brien is a long time LGBTQ youth activist in Boston, anti-war organizer, a student at UMass Boston, a former board member of BAGLY, and member of the International Socialist Organization in Boston. He also has written extensively on LGBTQ social justice websites.
[This article was first published at TheNation.com]
All this anti-democratic authoritarianism emanating from the Pride SF board is enough to drive one to libertarianism. And I mean libertarianism in the good sense of the word, like Glenn Greenwald.
It’s like some strange militaristic curse has engulfed our society. (I could have called it a strange heterosexual curse, but the sudden outpouring of self-righteous indignation by our hardy ranks of Ernst Röhm wanabes only goes to show that LGBTs are no better than anyone else.) And here I mean militaristic in the bad sense of the word, like the actions of the SF Pride board. Combine authoritarianism with gross incompetence, unaccountability and self-righteous piousness, and what comes out the other end is not a pretty sight. But nevertheless, that describes the US military, and the Pride SF board, today.
But that’s not the military that Bradley Manning and those of us who support him are squared off against. No, we’re pitted against something entirely different. It’s a romanticized military, sanitized and faultless, that in the real world does not exist. And in the contest between the real and the sublimities the human mind is capable of dreaming up, the imaginary will come out on top every time.
Many of those who write of military life today, including a Professional Homosexual class of Democratic Party court queers, seem to assume that they can be as arbitrary as they wish in their formulations. They have created a territory for infantile self-expression and intellectual anarchy. They write as though military life exists only in light of their belated regard, and they publish interpretations of military experience which would not hold true for their own or for any other form of human life. It is in the no-man’s land which lies between this imaginary world created by neocon/neoliberal pundits and the reality of military life in which Bradley Manning and his supporters are trapped.
For those of you who like art, there’s an absolutely superb German movie, Napola, which is available on youtube. It juxtaposes the myth and the reality of “elite” militarism, and in a superbly artful way. (An analytical analysis of what Andrew Bacevich calls “the new American militarism” is equally devastating to militarism, illuminating the yawning gulf that exists between the myth and the reality of militarism.)
One of the subplots of Napola involves a 16 year-old boy, Albrecht Stein, who is sent to one of the Führer’s elite military schools, Napola, by his father. His father is the regional head of the Nazi Party. Albrecht, however, is a very sensitive boy who speaks in a rather high-pitched voice and whose passions are poetry, writing and literature. He is not very good at sports, which greatly disappoints his father. His father wants to transform him into a ruthless, merciless, cold-blooded killer type like himself, but the transformation never takes place. After participating in an incident in which several Russian escapees were killed, Albrecht writes an essay in defiance of his father, which can be seen on youtube here:
“Despite being a bit childish, winter and a view of freshly fallen snow awakens in us a feeling of inexplicable joy. Perhaps because as children, we think of snow in relation to Christmas. In my dreams I am the hero who saves the virgin from the dragon, one who frees the world from evil. When searching for the escapees yesterday, I remembered the boy who wanted to save the world from evil. Upon returning I realized that I myself am that evil, the very evil I wanted to free the world from. Killing the captives was wrong. They weren’t armed, as Stein had told us, just to bait us. We didn’t shoot men, but helpless children.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=61NRJRfCWaQ#t=4877s
Stein reminds me of Manning. And like Manning, he suffered devastating personal consequences for his overt defiance of “elite” militarism.
Stein also reminds me of Ethan McCord, one of the foot soldiers sent in to clean up the bloodbath in the aftermath of the “Collateral Murder” incident (the video of which Manning has now admitted he released to Wikileaks). In a video interview, here’s what McCord had to say:
“I wanted to be that soldier, that hero. So I went, and realized…that there was no enemy. The only terrorists when I was in Iraq was us. We were the terrorists. We were the one terrorizing people.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=YnF5X7xF8zc#t=2642s