about.html

a m o n t h - l o n g t o u r o f i r a q v e t e r a n s , c o u n t e r - r e c r u i t m e n t a c t i v i s t s , s t u d e n t s a n d m u s i c i a n s .

The tour is now over but we have left the original blurb about it below.

The UPRISE Tour is a tour of mid-west and mid-Atlantic states aimed at advancing regional counter-recruitment efforts and linking the issues of war and military recruitment to corporate globalization and environmental sustainability. The Tour consists of student and non-student activists, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War and musicians. At each stop, members of the Tour will organize and participate in workshops, trainings, public forums, direct education and outreach, all-out street protests, as well as concerts and other creative performances. Our route runs through the Rust Belt, the old steel-towns cutting through the Appalachians into Ohio and Michigan, ending in Chicago. The tour goes from September 26th until October 27th.

One of the primary aims of the Tour to build or strengthen communities and cultures of resistance along the way. We shall address specific needs of each community, whether to support local counter recruitment efforts that are already in place, providing resources and help build efforts where there are none, or by linking to the local costs of the war, such as the economic depression of the Rustbelt. By developing networks of trust we will plant the seeds for a sustainable and robust counter-recruitment recruitment that can also withstand the heavy-hand of repression that has accompanied the recent growth of the that movement. In our travels we plan to share our experiences and insights with the people we meet with along the way but also learn from their experiences. This ever-expanding knowledge-base can then be ferried from one community to the next as well as publicized on the Tour's website.

Workshops and Events

PERFORMANCES:
Ryan Harvey, a founding-member of the Riot-Folk Collective (www.riotfolk.org) and UPRISE organizer, will be performing one-to-a-few songs at each event and sometimes full sets of 6-10 songs. He writes "People's History" ballads, anti-war and educational songs. Other artists who will be joining us at different times are Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine), Boots Riley of The Coup (hip-hop from Oakland, CA), Son of Nun, Head-Roc, D_Cyphernauts and many more. UPRISE will be organizing shows at most stops, with multiple live performances.

SPEAKING EVENTS:
We can do talks and lectures at public events. We will have guest speakers joining our tour at different times, so depending where you are, we will have a different lineup. Most notably, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War will speak about their experiences, advice for movements and thoughts from inside the military. Tariq Khan, an UPRISE organizer, is a GMU Student and Air Force veteran who was recently arrested and assaulted by campus police for protesting recruiters on campus. He will speak about his experience in the military, how recruiters' job is to lie to young people, and what we can do about it.

WORKSHOPS
We come from years of work in many different types of campaigns and can provide insight and experience from them in workshops. As anti-authoritarians, we will lead workshops in a popular education style-setup, utilizing the collective abilities of the people in the room. Our workshops are:

    -Planning Change: Organizing 101
    -Building Resistance to Recruiters at Your School: From Start to Finish
    -Working Against War Profiteers
    -Technology and Activism (video and web basics for activists)
    -Local/Global Connections: The War at Home
    -Affinity Groups: Finding Political and Social Power in Your Friends!

DISCUSSIONS
We believe that everyone has something to share and that collective energy and insight is the best way to share knowledge. We can facilitate discussions with students or youth about many topics we have backgrounds with. We would also love to take a back seat as students lead their own discussions and be on-hand to provide any info or experience if needed. Some topics include:

    -GI Resistance in Vietnam
    -Joining The Army: Why's and Why Nots?
    -Communities as Alternatives: Why Change Must Start at Home
    -Taking Our Power Back: How Our Silence Hurts Us

VIDEO
We can show a few different films that we are bringing along with us. Most Notably Sir! No Sir!, a documentary about GI resistance and soldier-led protests against the war in Vietnam. Other films include live footage from Iraq courtesy of our friend Brian from Alive in Baghdad (www.aliveinbaghdad.org).

ACTIONS
Words must be backed up with action. We will be doing non-violent actions throughout the tour, including leafleting at high schools, protests at recruitment centers and war-profiteers offices, public theater and public tabling. We are open to ideas from you and prefer to be involved in actions organized by local groups who do this work in their towns.

Our Vision

The prevailing anti-war analysis of the current war in Iraq is often examined in a vacuum with scant attention paid to the larger issues of corporate globalization and institutionalized systems of inequality in the domestic sphere. UPRISE organizers assert that there is a lack of connection between wars waged overseas and the wars waged at home in the form of racism, corporate domination, classism and sexism. The interconnectedness of such issues often goes ignored or undetected. It is impossible to weaken support for the military and effectively counter recruit young people without a more thorough examination of the circumstances that make the military appear as a "viable" option. These circumstances vary on surface but one can generally identify racism, classism or sexism as the root causes that compel military services. Whether it's appealing to dominant culture's sense of machismo through aggressive, testosterone fueled military ad campaigns or our class structured society which severely limits economic opportunities for the working class and people of color, there are forces at work both culturally and institutionally that encourage military service. Further, a more thorough examination is required of the driving forces behind war and empire, namely corporate expansion into resource rich countries and geo-political dominance. The struggle for resources and global domination is perpetuated by corporate institutions that rely either on neo-liberal or neo-conservative expansion into new markets with the goal of keeping an elite few comfortably in power.

Through education, agitation and art, the organizers of UPRISE hope to confront these forces in meaningful ways by planting seeds of resistance. In addition to providing analysis from a larger anti-globalization/social justice perspective, the UPRISE tour distinguishes itself from other tours or counter-recruitment efforts by focusing on cities and communities that are most directly affected by these factors. Currently many activist communities are isolated from one another and lack any type of network that could potentially build a stronger culture of resistance. Additionally, there are cities that serve as activist strongholds with vibrant community education and direct action while other communities languish without resources or support. The latter communities are often the ones that feel the impact of systematic inequality more immediately and have the weakest defenses. If social justice activists are to be consistent with their ideology then a "redistribution" of resources needs to take place. UPRISE hopes to aid redistribution efforts by visiting communities that are off the "activist" beaten path such as Flint, Michigan or Wheeling, West Virginia by sharing collective experience, information and basic organizing skills. A crucial element of the tour will include tailoring each visit according to the specific needs/circumstances of the individual town rather than using a formulaic presentation that may not fully address the individual needs of a certain community. UPRISE also realizes that in addition to sharing information, there will be much to learn from members of each town and hope to synthesize this information in a way that it can be freely disseminated to people outside the immediate community. This will serve two purposes: it will share a voice that is rarely heard and assist in building an infrastructure of connected communities.

The current route is set up to allow for two day weekend visits in larger cities with more active communities with the idea that a larger event can be planned in this city that will host Iraq War Vets and other speakers that are unable to participate throughout the tour's duration. The two day visits will serve as an extension of the smaller visits and allow for networking among neighboring cities. This face to face style of organizing is often more effective and builds a more concrete network of resistance.

UPRISE hopes this is the first of many tours and eventually hopes to tour each region of the country with the goal of building a connected, decentralized network of resistance to the system that perpetuates war and empire. At the same time, we hope to help create a culture that embraces ecological sustainability and rejects hierarchical systems of dominance based on race, gender, class or any other arbitrary measure of an individual's worth. It is only with the parallel goals of creation and destruction that we will achieve a socially just society that does not depend on war, dominance and systematic brutality for its very existence.