Ward Churchill on Peace Has No Borders

As a member for life of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, I will carry to my grave the psychic scars accruing from my participation in America’s genocidal aggression against Southeast Asia. My memories of the era are vivid, not only of the war zone, but of the resistance into which I merged after returning to the States. Not the least poignant in the latter regard are of visiting friends who’d been granted sanctuary in Canada after either refusing conscription into the U.S. military or, once in the armed forces, to play their unlawfully assigned roles in a wanton slaughter of innocents. That these political exiles, of whom there were thousands, had each made a vastly more honorable choice than I was a realization that haunts me still. Such things are supposed to be the stuff of a period piece, of course, a sort of baggage peculiar to my own “Vietnam Generation.” The reality that they are happening again, this time in response to the bloodbaths unleashed by their country’s onslaughts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Third World has been invisible to most Americans. So, too, the routine denial of sanctuary to would-be exiles by Canada’s reactionary Harper régime. Peace Has No Borders brings all this into focus at long last, and does so in a way making evasion or denial of the implications all but impossible. Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller are to be commended for making such a film.

Ward Churchill
activist/author