Photos by Kamal Moon
Anti-war activist Ann Wright, a retired Army colonel and former U.S. diplomat spoke Monday at Milwaukee Veterans For Peace’s Armistice Day commemoration.
Milwaukee Veterans For Peace’s 18th Armistice Day celebration Monday in Milwaukee City Hall rotunda featured internationally renowned peace activist Retired Colonel Ann Wright and a call to stop the genocide in Gaza.
“More people have resigned from the U.S. government over complicity with the genocide in Gaza than over any other wars,” Wright told the Wisconsin Muslim Journal in an interview before the event. She listed 15 officials who recently resigned from the State Department, the Department of Interior, the Department of Education, the White House and the military because of U.S. support of Israel’s military’s assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in the past year.
Yet, there is no outcry from most Americans, perhaps because “most of our media is just a mouthpiece for U.S. government policies,” Wright said. “The few independent voices out there like Democracy Now and The Intercept don’t reach the mainstream of the United States. Most Americans are left watching the nightly news programs and they justify the war.
“That’s why this event at City Hall as part of Armistice Day is important,” she said. “That’s why it is important we have people out on street corners with a little sign to remind people as they drive by that there are things going on in the world we need to be involved in.”
Almost 100 people attended Milwaukee Veteran’s for Peace Armistice Day commemoration, which internationally renowned anti-war activist Ann Wright said is the largest Armistice Day event in the nation.
A career Army officer and U.S. diplomat, Wright famously resigned in protest from the U.S. State Department in 2003 on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In a letter to then Secretary of State Colin Powell, she wrote:
I have served my country for almost thirty years in some of the most isolated and dangerous parts of the world. I want to continue to serve America. However, I do not believe in the policies of this Administration and cannot–morally and professionally–defend or implement them. It is with a heavy heart that I must end my service to America and therefore resign.
Musicians David H.B. Drake, Richard Pinny and Harvey Taylor led the singing of anti-war songs that many knew by heart.
Since then, Wright, now 78, has been among the anti-war movement’s most influential spokespersons. She is an advisory board member of Veterans For Peace, International Peace Bureau, World BEYOND War, Gaza Freedom Flotilla and No to NATO. She is a CODEPINK board member.
“There’s nothing I’d rather be doing,” she told WMJ.
During a two-day whirlwind of speaking engagements in Milwaukee, arranged by Milwaukee Veterans For Peace, Wright detailed the growth of U.S. military bases around the world and its distribution of armaments to countries engaged in current wars, particularly the Ukraine and Israel.
Wright spoke Monday at the Armistice Day Celebration at Milwaukee City Hall (see here), and on Tuesday to a Peace and Conflict Studies class at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the morning and a special event at Marquette University hosted by its Center for Peacemaking in the afternoon. In addition, she participated in media interviews.
For each speaking engagement, she wore a Veterans For Peace t-shirt bearing the slogan: “Veterans Against Genocide” in black, white, green and red, the colors of the Palestinian flag.
Following her talk at Marquette University Tuesday, Wright caught a flight to Washington, D.C., to be at CODEPINK’s silent procession through the U.S. Senate Wednesday “to mourn Palestinian children killed by Israel with U.S. weapons.” She joined participants wearing photos of Palestinian children who have been killed. CODEPINK cofounder Medea Benjamin is quoted on the website, stating, “This silent procession is our way of bearing witness to the ongoing suffering and to urge senators to stop sending Israel the weapons that fuel this conflict by signing on the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders.”
Reclaiming Armistice Day
Veterans For Peace, a global organization of military veterans and allies who promote peace, has been working to reclaim November 11 as “Armistice Day,” a day dedicated to ending war once and for all, and celebrating peace, its website states.
Armistice Day was an international holiday observed each year on Nov. 11 to commemorate the end of World War I, “the war to end all wars,” noted Milwaukee Veterans For Peace member Bill Christofferson, who helped organize the ceremony at City Hall. In an interview with WMJ, he explained Armistice Day initially celebrated what was thought to be a lasting peace.
After WWII, Armistice Day transformed into Veteran’s Day. In 1954, the United States changed the name of the holiday to Veterans Day and repurposed it as a day to honor veterans of the U.S. military.
Milwaukee Veterans For Peace member Bill Christofferson distributed flowers for VFP’s 21-Flower Salute.
“It was all about encouraging world peace,” Christofferson said. With the name change, Veteran’s Day became “a day to celebrate militarism, where every veteran is a hero. Veterans Day parades feature soldiers in uniform and sometimes military equipment,” glorifying the military.
“Since 2008, Veterans For Peace in the U.S. started a program to reclaim Armistice Day for its original intent,” he said. “We are all veterans who have seen and experienced war. Our role is to educate people about the real effects of war so that nobody else will have to experience them.”
In Milwaukee, Veterans For Peace holds an annual program on Nov. 11 at City Hall that features a prominent national speaker and an important local speaker. This year, “we were fortunate to have Retired Colonel Ann Wright and award-winning journalist, historian and Navy veteran Reggie Jackson,” he said.
Navy veteran, historian and award-winning journalist Reggie Jackson of Milwaukee urged the audience to “become serial harassers of members of Congress and other officials” until the U.S. stops sending weapons to fuel wars.
A crowd of 90 people attended Milwaukee Veterans For Peace Armistice Day commemoration, plus others joined online, Christofferson said in his event recap. The ceremony began with Veterans For Peace’s traditional 21-Flower Salute to victims of war. Members of the audience walked to the front of the rotunda and placed flowers in a vase as a bell chimed.
“Colonel Ann Wright, a career Army officer and U.S. diplomat who resigned over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, warned of the threat to peace posed by the continued spread of U.S. military bases, now numbering 900 around the world,” he wrote. “She urged people to take action to confront elected officials, and to risk or invite arrest to see firsthand the need for reform of our justice system.”
Jackson called on the audience “to become serial harassers of members of Congress and other officials,” continually writing the letters to get their attention, Christofferson noted. “That was his ‘homework assignment’ for the crowd. Ann Wright’s was to get arrested in the cause of peace.”
David H.B. Drake (left) and Richard Penny (right) opened the ceremony with a musical prelude.
This year, Veterans For Peace is calling for “an Armistice—a permanent ceasefire—in Palestine, Lebanon and throughout the Middle East,” its website states. “Today, the looming threats of climate catastrophe and nuclear annihilation have been overshadowed by Israel’s horrific ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza,” it continues.
“For over a year, unspeakable atrocities have filled our screens and haunted our consciences. The U.S. government is complicit in Israel’s merciless campaign of ethnic cleansing. The bombs Israel drops on Palestinian children are made in the U.S.A. and provided by the U.S. government. Israel’s U.S.-backed war has now expanded to the West Bank, to Lebanon and to Iran, risking a wider war that could even go nuclear … We will not be complicit in genocide.”
Becoming a dissenter
Wright grew up in Bentonville, Arkansas, and earned Master’s and Law degrees at the University of Arkansas, where Bill and Hillary Clinton were instructors. She also has a Master’s degree in National Security Affairs from the U.S. Naval War College.
She served 29 years in the U.S. military, 13 as an active-duty soldier and 16 in the Army reserves, retiring as a colonel.
After Wright was released from active duty, she joined the State Department. For the next 16 years, she served as a foreign diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. She was on the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in December 2001, after the fall of the Taliban to U.S. forces.
On March 19, 2003, the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Col. Wright sent a letter of resignation to then Secretary of State Colin Powell. “In the Foreign Service, the job is to implement the policies of an administration,” she explained to WMJ. “If you disagree with the policies, sometimes there are ways to get around it by asking to be reassigned to different duties. But if you strongly disagree and want to speak out, your only option is to resign.”
She has been speaking out ever since. Her anti-war activism has taken her to Washington, D.C., Gaza, Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, Cuba and North and South Korea. She served in the leadership of multiple peace and justice organizations. She is the co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience, a 2008 book that profiles men and women who “risked careers, reputations and even freedom out of loyalty to the law and their fellow citizens,” the book’s jacket says. Wright received the 2017 U.S. Peace Prize from the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation.
“I spent most of this last year in Washington, D.C., lobbying Congress every single day to challenge the huge amounts of weaponry we’re giving to Israel,” Wright told WMJ. “While the genocide in Gaza is right now on the hands of the Biden-Harris administration and the U.S. Congress, the Democrats and the Republicans are equally responsible.”
Wright has been able to gain access to government officials and audiences around the world because of her background, she agreed. But she respects “the Julie Enslows and the George Martins (referring to prominent Milwaukee peace activists), and people around the country who have been challenging the U.S. government on its war policies and never giving up, through thick and thin, despite more wars. They just keep after it. And that’s what you have to do, be in it for the long term.”
