Project AWOL

There are so many more convincing reasons to leave the US military than there are to stay in it.

For generations in the US, the “economic draft” has ensured that our “volunteer” military would have enough soldiers.  That is, without formal conscription, the way the system works — or the way it intentionally doesn’t work — is anyone who is too poor to afford to pay for a college education can join the military for a few years and then get their degree.

So, in other well-off countries, like in Europe, college is free, but in the US, it’s only nominally affordable if your parents have six-figure incomes, or if you’re an exceptionally talented youth and can qualify for all kinds of scholarships.  Everyone else can either skip it, or join the military.

When people sign up, the recruiters assure them that in all likelihood they won’t see any combat — they’ll learn useful skills, make money, and see the world.

They’re lying, of course, as anyone knows who actually joins.  The reality is almost every new president, for generations now, takes the US into a new war of one kind or another.  And even if you don’t have to risk or lose your life or kill innocent people in the course of following your orders, you will spend much of your time in the military constantly exposed to toxins such as DU munitions that will shorten your life and cause your future children to have deformities as a direct result.

We can be absolutely certain that anywhere in the world where US soldiers may be found, within their ranks are people who are deeply questioning the situation they find themselves in.  People who need more information, people to talk to, and help considering their options.

During the war on Vietnam, there were millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians killed due to the indiscriminate air war on the whole region.  Millions.  A staggering number that forever stains the American empire.

And there were 58,000+ US soldiers killed.  Of whom, about 5,000 died being shot out of combat aircraft.  No one is safe in those planes.

As US conscripts increasingly realized they were expected to slaughter people indiscriminately and risk their lives in the service of an expansionistic empire that cared nothing for them or for the lives of their supposed enemies, they abandoned their posts.  Tens of thousands of soldiers went to prison for refusing orders.  There were thousands of cases of officers being killed or maimed in grenade attacks carried out by their own men (that was called “fragging”).  Hundreds of thousands of soldiers went AWOL.

There’s no question that these soldiers were motivated by their experiences in the military to do what they did, such as deserting.  But their thinking and their actions were often guided by the antiwar movement that was in their midst, represented by some little collective running an antiwar coffeehouse near the gates of every military base in the US, and many others around the world.

One of the most effective tools the antiwar movement had to truly communicate with those soldiers thinking about deserting was music.

Long before someone might be ready to read books and develop a deeper understanding of things like the economic draft or the role of the US military throughout the past couple centuries to suppress liberation movements and support corporate interests, they are ready to listen to music.  Listening to music just happens, whether you’re trying to be influenced by the songs or not, if it’s playing in the background anyway.

In my own experience as a traveling performer, doing a “counter-recruitment tour” of US high schools circa 2003 and 2004, I found that any time I had 45 minutes to talk and sing to a group of students at one of those schools, I would successfully convince at least one young man to reconsider their plans to join the US military — often much to the chagrin of the kid’s parents.

Music is powerful.  Science has even demonstrated how songs go straight to the emotional centers of the brain, and affect people in a way that spoken words generally don’t.

The basic MO of Project AWOL is this:  find ways to play music for soldiers.  Be creative.  There are lots of ways to do this.  For example, you could have a show on a community radio station near a military base, whose signal reaches the base.

If you’re up for being more public and having more impact, you can set up near the gates of a military base with a big banner and other interesting and thought-provoking props, along with a battery-powered speaker on a speaker stand (I recommend a Bose S1 if you can afford it) blasting appropriately seditious music.

There’s lots of great music you can use for this purpose, that will have the desired impact on at least some of the folks who get exposed to it.  There’s also a lot of music you could choose for this purpose that could absolutely backfire spectacularly, so choose carefully.

The playlist below consists entirely of songs written and recorded for the purpose of helping people understand the wars the US and Israel are waging on Iran, Lebanon, and the Palestinians, and why they should oppose these wars, the ethnonationalist Israeli project, and US imperialism generally.  This playlist is updated regularly, with the most recent and most relevant songs generally closer to the top.