Arrests for War Resistance Increase Again
By Bill Quigley. Bill is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. Quigley77@gmail.com The NUCLEAR RESISTER is published 5 to 6 times a year. They can be contacted at nukeresister@igc.org
“We can never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal,’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, but I am sure that if I lived in Germany during that time I would have comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal...we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” Martin Luther King, Jr.
There have been over 15,000 arrests for resistance to war since 2002. There were large numbers right after the run up to and invasion of Iraq. Recently, arrests have begun climbing again. Though arrests are a small part of anti-war organizing, their rise is an indicator of increasing resistance.
The information comes from the NUCLEAR RESISTER, a newsletter that has been reporting detailed arrest information on peace activists and other social justice campaigns since 1980. Felice and Jack Cohen-Joppa, publishers of the NUCLEAR RESISTER, document arrests by name and date based on information collected from newspapers across the country and from defense lawyers and peace activists.
Since 2002, the NUCLEAR RESISTER has documented anti-war arrests for protestors each year:
2002 – 1800 arrests
2003 6072 arrests
2004 2440 arrests
2005 975 arrests
2006 950 arrests
2007 2272 arrests
2008 810 as of May 1
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