 Welcome to this webinar on policing and militarism. My name is Jodi Evans and I'm a co-founder of Code Pink, a women-led organization that works to end militarism and bring the money home to the life-giving needs of our community. Policing and militarism hold up white supremacy, capitalism, and the oppression of black and brown people globally. They need to be abolished and the lies that undergird them need to be dismantled. We know as feminists that policing is a tool of the patriarchy. We work to end violence, yet we can't do that if more money is invested in violence than anything else, than anything else. The war economy, the oppressive destructive extractive economy is the literal underpinnings of our culture and it needs to give way to the feminist peace economy, the giving, sharing, caring, thriving, relational, resilient economy that we are cultivating to create conditions conducive for life because the current systems are for death and destruction. As feminists, we know it's the well-being of all of our communities and the planet that create security, not the prison industrial complex or the military industrial complex. And as Senator Nina Turner said on our radio show this week, we need to drop the mic, the military industrial complex, because the militarism abroad continues to come home to our communities and it needs to stop now. So I am thrilled to be facilitating this conversation with these fabulous women creating a feminist future, a radical feminist future. Zoe Samuzi is a medical sociological PhD student at the University of California San Francisco where she is studying that Herero and Nama Genocide. She's a feminist writer and co-author of the book As Black as Resistance, Finding the Conditions for Liberation, which identifies new ways of engaging with black radical politics using anarchist frameworks. Zoe's a visionary of black radical futures and community building both inside and outside of academia. At the end of 2018, she curated a show in Oakland dedicated exclusively to black female artists. She's a curator also of publicly accessible knowledge through her Twitter, which we suggest you follow to expand your own knowledge. And we're going to put the Twitter handles in the chat so you can get them. Jamie Teiberg is a movement organizer and anti-imperialist based in New York City. She's a member of New Dota, an organization of diaspora Koreans, fighting for decolonization here and unification back home. Jamie is a voracious reader, writer, and community worker who brilliantly connects global issues like imperialism and identifies how they manifest in our local communities. By actively engaging in her community, she helped co-found an after school club at the High School for Environmental Studies dedicated to developing young climate justice organizers. So Zoe, first I want to ask you, since I've talked about what you're studying, and you're studying something very important, can you tell us a little bit about the Herrero and Nama genocide? Yeah, it was Germany's first genocide, one of the first kind of discrete genocides of the 20th century. It was a part of Germany's kind of colonial project where they had colonies in East and Southwestern Africa, as well as in China, as well as in Samoa. And long story short, it was a settler colonial project, and with all settler colonial projects, the objective is necessarily to eliminate the native obstacle to land conquest. And the Germans ended up killing what, like 80% of the Herrero people and half of the Nama people and both communities are still fighting for reparations from the German state today, as well as fighting to get the remains of their ancestors that are incarcerated in museums in the United States and in Germany. Thank you for starting us out right where we need to start out at the place of heartbreak, at the place of this has gone on for so long, we know who it serves. And Jamie, you know, why don't we just start with the intersection of policing and militarism and your, you know, your work is on that and maybe a little bit of the devastation that you've seen from both? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what I always say about the police and the military is that the police do at home what the military does overseas. That's a phrase that I picked up from, you know, anti-war protests. And I think it's important to remember that both the police and the military have a very definite function in the history of capital. I think it's a bit easier for us to condemn the actions of the police. Or maybe it's easier for the military because it's not at home. And it's easier to judge something from afar. But I think what's missing is that the US is also not America's. Despite, you know, occupying this land and having made home on this land, it's still indigenous territory. And every inch is policed for that very reason to protect this land, which is how the US was able to accumulate its wealth and become an empire as it is today. And in that, they are also very connected in who they target. At home, they target the internal colonies of the United States, which include, you know, indigenous communities and reservations, black neighborhoods, sites of incarceration. And it's same overseas. It's rarely white countries. It's rarely... And the one time that it was white people, or it happened on the continent of Europe, you know, that is kind of the only history that Americans are aware of. And I think also, thirdly, they are both huge environmental polluters. Of course, in the military's activities overseas has completely turned entire regions into droughts. They've completely severed the relationship of the people and their land. And here, I mean, just like little things like the police setting off fireworks, or like parading around their jets to, I don't know, like, promote whatever holiday that celebrates soldiers. I literally don't know. It's actually not to promote a holiday. It's to promote violence and military. Right. And at the same time, you're polluting the environment. And then, of course, we know how, you know, environmentally vulnerable sites of incarceration are, whether it's prisons or jails or the lives within them. And yeah, I think in those three significant ways, the police and the military are very much two sides of the same coin. So I actually got to be with a group of women that walked across the DMZ from North Korea to South Korea. And when we were trying to figure out how to get across without being killed, it wasn't clear who kept it in place because the South Koreans were saying, well, we can't keep people from killing you. And so in the research, I realized that it was actually the United States that was that keeps that in place. And that's something that people don't know, that it is literally United States of America that has kept Korean families from being unified. And for me as a mother and as a child, I can't fathom the violence of that to an entire country to keep families apart until they're dead. Like people died not for 70 years, not getting to see their family. So, you know, part of what allows militarism and that justification you were talking about is like so much of it is unseen, you know, like Zoe's story of like how many know that story. And it's, it's that we live in so many lives that are propped up, especially in the US about Korea, which is no one knows anything really. So, but so that's talking about Korea, but you just told me that this morning they called out the private police, right, for an eviction. You want to speak to that because. Oh, yeah. One thing I'll mention about the Korea situation is that due to the status forces agreement that the US made Korea sign Korean people actually pay taxes to keep the US military on their land. And I don't even know if like many citizens are aware that like, that's where their money is going to. And the US actually tried to raise the taxes to keep them there. But yeah, the thing that you're referring to is just recently, I'm in New York, I'm in Brooklyn. And people have been rent striking since the pandemic hit. I mean, rent was already a huge issue in the city. But since the pandemic and since people are losing their jobs, many people have been going on strike and the tenants of a building in Crown Heights, many of whom are sex workers, many of whom are unemployed, you know, all people of color. They've been on strike since April and recently this week, the landlord came and changed the locks, brought a U-Haul, started removing furniture, was successfully able to evict a couple of the tenants. And then the last two standing, one had brain surgery was not able to move anywhere, put out a word to different tenants unions in the neighborhood, and a number of people came and was able to kick the landlord out and change the lock so that only the tenants have access. The landlord have called, of course, called NYPD. They came, they weren't able to do much because there were so many of us and because we weren't breaking the law or anything. And so the next thing that the landlord did was call private security. And I don't know how it's like in other areas, but in New York, a lot of NYPD officers also have second jobs as private security officers or will do security for corporations like Target. And that's also how they make, you know, over six figures. So that's a great span of like the militarism in our lives. So thank you for painting that picture. Zoe, give us your view of where militarism and policing merge. Yeah. I mean, like Jamie described, it's the bringing of kind of imperialism overseas to American soil. And something that I think is a really messed up thing that I hear a lot, you know, and I think there's a video of this as a protest and Pete, but Buttigieg said something about this when he was running. And it was like, if you want to be able to, or he was like, I had this weapon overseas and like, no one should be able to use it in a police force here or something like that. I'm adding words. But the thing that is so perverse to me is that there is this kind of acceptance of this of this violence overseas, whereas Americans shouldn't be subject to that kind of violence. And I use kind of Americans with caveats because there are so many people who are subjected to that violence. I mean, one of the clearest examples for me is the use of equipment and weaponry that has been brought from Afghanistan and from Iraq as troops have been withdrawn. And I think like a really ridiculous example is when Moundsville, which is that town in West Virginia that has like less than 10,000 people got an MRAP vehicle. And a lot of people were just like, it's a tank. But I think that it's a little bit more interesting to actually explain what MRAP vehicles are. They stand for mine resistant ambush protected vehicles. And it's a light tactical vehicle that was basically built to withstand IEDs during the Iraq war, because they were being used more and more against the US military. But that kind of that kind of light vehicle that had that specific function was actually developed by the Rhodesian military in the 1970s, and then kind of adapted by the South African National Defense Forces in the 80s. And so this is obviously a super rawnor for me because my family is from Zimbabwe. And it's been really, especially post deal and roof, it's been really kind of horrifying and like infuriating to see the way that apartheid in South Africa and in Rhodesia occupies such a really central role in the kind of white supremacist and white nationalist imaginary in the United States. But basically these vehicles were developed in order to be used against the insurgents, or rather the indigenous people who are fighting for independence from colonial governments. And not only is this kind of a concrete example of the militarization of kind of civilian society with this tiny town with like very, like no murders or like really low crime rates, you know, being given a tank that was even though it was free costs a lot of money to maintain. And it's also a really good example of the way that settler governments develop military technology and then exchange those technologies internationally. So the United States gave a lot of money to the Rhodesian government through trade. You also see the Rhodesians and the South Africans working together. And you also see the Israeli government offering a lot of military support to both the Rhodesians and South Africa. And I think that it's really critical to understand how all of these settler nations, you know, militarize their own, like Jamie already, you know, call them, you know, internal colonies and export that violence around the world as well. So yeah, you mentioned Israel, but it's also the U.S. supports Israel in the apartheid against the Palestinian people. And as you've talked about these weapons being developed in Rhodesia and South Africa, Israel has been developing the weapons and the policing that has come to the streets of the U.S. also. So yes, continues. I don't know if I would necessarily agree with that ordering. I think it's really important, yes, to highlight, you know, the export and the sale of drone technology and all of that. But the United States is like 170 years older than Israel, than the creation of the state in 1947 and 1948. And I think that, you know, Jamie talked about the policing of indigenous communities and reservations here. And it's really important to think about how the police evolved out of slave patrols. And the police were treating racialized communities like as internal enemies like long before Israel did offer, you know, tactical or or or departmental or whatever support. I think that just like that ordering is really important because yeah, even despite despite the fact that there is a really, really important alliance there. I mean, America was doing it by itself and, you know, for a really long time. And, and, and, you know, Oh, yeah, I totally did not mean they taught U.S. how to police. But they've been using more and more extreme tactics that they're able to get away with in Israel and normalize that then they teach U.S. military more extreme tactics. Because we've watched some normalization of some pretty horrible things happen in Israel, but you're right. Really extreme horrible things have been happening from the police in the United States for a very, very long time. So thank you for that correction. So we've talked about it, you know, as we look at policing, but what are like less obvious material ways where we see militarization and policing? You know, we call it a could think the war economy culture that we're not even aware of where where can you point out some of those things. So maybe Jamie, if you want to start with some like we're in the culture, do we see? I mean, I work in a lot of environmental circles. So my mind is going straight there because I feel like the environmental impact, especially as they play out very slowly and have generational impact is I think one of like the more silent impacts of the military or the invisible impacts of the military. I mean, I think like the most notable example is all the children that are born in like war torn countries with defects. Because I think that's that's like visually striking for people, especially Americans. But I mean, like I was mentioning like Iraq used to be a self sustaining country. Now they have to import 80% of their food. And that, you know, trade relationship is entirely dictated by the West. They also bombed Iraq's National Library, which is which has artifacts and art from cultural items from like a 5000 year old civilization that will never get back. That's generational theft that those people will never have or see or touch again. In Korea, for example, the the fad base in the small village of Seoul, Seoul, Seoul, Lee, fad is the terminal high altitude, something, something. It's essentially a giant machine that can like track, I guess, like different military warfare in surrounding areas. So the US military really set it in South Korea to monitor China and Russia and North Korea. There was no other reason but that. That area now has polluted polluted river streams. The grandmas that live there are now completely like occupying the streets to the fad base. Every time they try to block a new like shipment from coming in, people are injured. The environmental is polluted. And I just feel like a lot of what's happening to earth because of the military is just not as discussed. You know, yes, like the number of lives lost is prominent and must be discussed, but the invisible, like the unseen impacts on like our water on our air is I think really insidious. Yeah, I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, Zoe. I think that the clearest example for me about kind of less material kind of destructive understandings or destructive roles that the kind of militarized policing plays is the war on terror or the so-called war on terror. Obviously, there's the aspect of the international coalition based military campaign and the illegal invasion and all of that. But another really important part of the post 9 11 racist panic was the kind of securitization of Muslim immigrant and refugee communities here in the United States, especially with the creation of categories like domestic terrorist or the I'm still trying to figure out what the hell was going on, but the unlawful enemy combatants, which is basically a completely invented and legally baseless category that can be used to describe individuals that have believed association with terrorist groups. So this basically turns civilians like a diasporan sending money abroad to a family member in a country that the US is has some kind of terror related conflict with to a person or a family overseas. Sorry, there's a baby that's trying to go down in the room next to mine to a person whose family abroad, you know, houses someone or gives resources to their kid or to their family member that actually maybe is fighting against the United States, whether in a terror group or a group of like militants who are trying to fight against the American occupation or an American citizen who does commit some kind of critical criminal act, but isn't related to the conflict at hand. You know, it turns everyone into combatants that can be that can be brought into military custody or forced to stand trial in front of a military tribunal. And this for me at least this this kind of racialized criminalization by association doesn't feel super different from how the US police profile, you know, overwhelmingly black and Latinx people in communities when they create gang databases. You don't know if your name is on the database and there's often no real way of challenging the placement of your name in that database. And because of the way that gang affiliation is characterized so broadly the way that like terrorist activity, you know, especially when we're thinking about domestic terrorism, or if we think about, for example, the United's the Homeland Security, you know, creating the category of the black identity extremist, which could be anywhere from like an armed militant cell that trains in the woods to someone who is a part of a Black Lives Matter protest. It's so broad the particular way that people are criminalized can be so random. And because of the way that gang affiliation works in these neighborhoods where like a lot of people interact with a lot of different kinds of people who may or may not be in gangs, it makes a lot of people really vulnerable to arrest and conviction and even possibly deportation. The idea of the continuous creation of the internal enemy, which is, you know, generally not white until the, you know, the Boston Marathon guys came around and no one knew how to talk about people who were Caucasian. You know, it's very obviously racialized. That is so powerful. Thank you very much for that because, you know, I live in Los Angeles and it's a heartbreaker that the military that the police can decide, you know, it's really authoritarian. And when they talk about authoritarian regimes elsewhere, I'm like, it's happening in my city. So that's profound. Thank you so much for sharing that. Well, you know, let's talk about the impacts of militarization and policing on women, on all trans people and other marginalized genders, you know, when bodies are policed, who's most at risk? Jamie? Yeah. Just on the authoritarian thing, though, I want to mention that another thing that they do is, you know, manufacture narratives in order to repress any sort of like resistance within the United States. And I see that happening a lot with the DPRK or North Korea, as Americans call it. You know, it's any time there's any sort of domestic unrest within the United States. There's some random news happening about the DPRK and whether they're going to nuke us or whether like China is going to help them. And I feel like, you know, the media really does that intentionally to show that if we don't calm down here, then they will, you know, be much more aggressive and turn this country into what they claim the DPRK to be, like Guantanamo Bay is literally not still open. But on how the military impacts women, I mean, just in terms of Korea, I would encourage everyone to look up comfort women. I'm not really going to go into it, but it's a really harrowing story involving Japanese colonizers aided by the US military. But for the US military, women who are serving in the military are more likely to be assaulted by fellow soldiers than they are to be killed in combat. The risk that they take by joining is not to be assaulted by their soldiers. Yet that's what they end up facing every single day. And in fact, I read that sexual assault cases happen, or that there are over 70 incidences per day, which is enough to be called an epidemic. And I found that figure to be quite interesting, because it's also the same number of bombs that the US dropped per day in Afghanistan. So not only are there 70 incidences of sexual assault happening within the US military every 24 hours, but during the war on Afghanistan, in the span of a year, they dropped 24,000 bombs, which comes out to 70 per day. So just coincidental figures that really highlight the fact that the military must be abolished and does not serve anybody or our planet. Thank you. So Zoe, maybe you could tell us also that's the militarism, but also, you know, the policing of our bodies too. I think that one of the most important parts of of imperialism was the kind of creation and unfortunate of what we understand to be the gender binary, as well as the kind of medical, the biomedical logics that tether sex to gender, as well as just like what the body is, what the body is supposed to be doing. And, you know, when I look at all of the different countries around the world that are beginning to decriminalize, I'm not going to say queerness, but like specifically like homosexual sex, generally, they tend to be like former British or whatever other colonies. I don't want to get like super Foucault, but like everything is a prison. And I think that when we're talking about the abolition of prisons and the abolition of police, that we also really have to think about the function or like the meeting of like the medical industrial complex and the prison industrial complex when we think about how trans people, if they're not forced to into housing that corresponds with the sex that they were assigned at birth, they're put into administrative segregation. And we know that solitary confinement is torture, like the UN has been saying it. Any respectable, I think medical or psychological psychiatric expert says that, you know, solitary confinement is torture. And so I think it's really important to see, you know, not only are we thinking about, you know, if we're talking about trans folks, not only are we seeing a community that is more likely to experience like housing instability or interface with law enforcement because there are, you know, large parts of the community that happen to also be like sex workers. And we see with the NYPD, there was a moment where people were being arrested under suspicion of being sex workers. And the evidence of their sex working was having condoms on their person. We have to look at the policing of gendered identity as well as like the policing and the stigma of LGBT communities, like with regards to pandemics like HIV. And, you know, also seeing the ways that people are deprived hormones and other like transition related resources when they are incarcerated or not able to access like mental health resources or antiretrovirals or whatever else that they need that the prison becomes like a really critical site of the enforcement of cisnormative violence and as well as kind of the punishment of allowing someone to succumb to a health condition that might otherwise be manageable or preventable. Like we're looking at like a, I don't even have words for like how horrifying it is to see coronavirus like running through prisons across the country and governors refusing to decarcerate because of the investment that they have in inflicting punishment and violence on the bodies of people who are understood to be criminal or deviant in other ways. So I think that, yeah, gender is a really important part of it, a part of this, this, this structure of control and criminalization. Yeah. Thank you so much. So yes, it's so great to just span how big this is in our lives. I'm getting some questions from the audience. So the first is, how can we as activists take action to stop the militarization of our police forces? To either of you? I mean, you know, find out in your local town what the budget is for your police department, start an investment campaign, find out whether you have local jails or prisons and start building with people that are incarcerated or rather, you know, connect with the organizations and the people that have already been doing that work. Zoe? I think that Jamie said whatever I would have imagined saying. Building power is, you know, the answer to every question right now in stopping militarization on policing because what's unfortunate, as I said in the beginning, is that they are so crazy funded, 115 billion dollars for police inside the United States while nothing else is getting funded. And whenever we say we need universal healthcare or housing, there's no money, right? One of the things that we have at Code Pink is a campaign that we've had for like six years, trying to get the 1033 program to be shut down, which is the program that Congress created during the drug war to move military equipment to the streets of the United States. So those listening can go to codepink.org backslash 1033 program. There's both an initiative that's in the current NDAA that will be voted on soon and there's a bill that's been offered so that we can keep fighting to get them out of our streets. But, you know, this is, Elan Omar did a fantastic speech yesterday where she said, you know, this is great to work on criminal justice, but the whole system is oppressive and that we have to work on dismantling the entire system of oppression. And you have both spoken to that so well that it is a system and it's a patriarchal system and as feminists, we have our work and we need to be building power locally. So I appreciate that you both understand and do that. There's another question, something about what Zoe said about gang databases being part of making everyone a combatant. Military recruiters do the same when they go to low income high schools and colleges. So that's another one of the situations we run into with codepink is that we don't want a draft, we don't want women drafted, but there is a draft and it's already been happening and it's the poverty draft. And so, and even in Samoa, that's the only way you, that's your only answer. There's not another answer. So it continues to be to suck up everything, including young life and the fact that we think it's okay to send 18 year olds, no matter the gender, to war is a violence, is a violence as a mother. My sign, I will not raise my children to kill another mother's child. If we could just go there, then we would be in a lot better place. So there was another question about the U.S. military is the world's largest purveyor of violence. And what concrete steps can we take to address this? Again, at Codepink, we've been working with the Poor People's Campaign. And there's finally a call for a $350 billion cut in the military. And that's led by Barbara Lee and AOC and Elana Maher, obviously the women get it and are leading on it. And so that's another thing the listeners can go to codepink.org backslash defund the Pentagon. But what is happening in each of your communities about the policing? And are there any any things that are happening that are giving you hope? Zoey? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure because I'm in a place where I'm not in my community. But I do know that in the Bay where I was living, there was some really powerful work and powerful successes in getting the OPD out of public schools, which I think is important. I do want to just make one comment. There's someone who in the chat dropped a stat that said men are 16 times more likely to be killed by police in the U.S. than women. And that men are 40 times more likely to die as soldiers. And could I comment on the impact of militarism on men's lives? I think that the most important impact of militarism on men's lives is the fact that they become a danger to women. I think that we can't talk about the police without talking about the staggering rates of domestic violence. We can't talk about the police without thinking about the kind of gendered violence that they enact on the people that they arrest, that there are legal loopholes that allow the police to sexually assault people who have been brought into custody. I don't think that we can talk about the effects of militarism on men's lives without thinking about how men are socialized into structures of violence and that they become dangers not only to themselves and to one another in living more emotionally stunted and deprived lives, but they become harms to their family. They become harms to their communities. They become harms to any kind of genuine social cohesion and solidarity that could keep everyone safe. The impact is one of ideas of domination and of entitlement and if I'm supposed to be made to feel bad in some way that men are killed overseas more often than women, I'm not sure that you're going to elicit like an ounce of sympathy from me whatsoever because the women who are murdered by the police are not spoken about and the men who are killed by the police, you know, our country mobilizes and marches around. The cis men rather, the trans men are not, so that is my comment. Yeah, I mean on that note I would add that war is just not a natural activity for human beings and like all the major wars that were fought like all the soldiers had to they were not sober like it's not something that a sober human being can go and just do and in that process, yeah like the impact is what Zoe just spoke about. So thank you, that was brilliant and raising up the culture of violence that it creates and that yes women and non cis, you know, are those that really get the brunt of the effect and also thank you for bringing up how militarism plays out at home and it plays out in so many places and there's so much more we could talk about. We're getting to the end of our time and I just want to ask each of you how do we follow you and support your amazing work. Jamie starting with you? Yeah, I'm on Twitter, I'm currently on a break, but it's JTBRG and I usually only use it for like promoting different events or organizations so that's a good way to be updated on the work happening in New York. On the last question that got in the chat on private policing and security I would really, like yes private policing is bad and private prisons are bad but it's still like such a small corner of the prison industrial complex it's really, I would really focus on the state and the United States government and in addition to that I think what Americans especially white Americans can concretely do to address their military is to organize fellow white Americans. I always say this in regards to the DPRK like you know there are some like white Americans and like tankies quote-unquote who really love to defend the DPRK and what I say to them is I really don't need them to defend us Koreans know how to defend ourselves Koreans have a long history of resistance and anti-imperialist struggles we don't need white Americans help we simply don't. What you have to do is get rid of the reason why we even have to defend ourselves which is your government your military that's your job that's your lane you know don't come into communities of color don't come into like undocumented or documented immigrant communities and say oh we have to organize these people no you need to organize yourself because you are the last obstacle for everybody else in the world. I guess where can I be found I can also be found on on twitter um ZTSAMUDZI you're muted thank you thanks for being with us today thanks for sharing your wisdom and your and inspiring us onward we go for peace thank you so much for having us