Four Elderly Activists Face Charges for Antiwar Civil Disobedience in Northampton, Massachusetts
Courtrooms create great theater. We recognize the dramatic tension between static, formal systems of protocol that protect vested interests, and the contrary movement – the human passion to tell grim stories without flinching. We live in a country that has evolved as the world’s most rapacious empire by concealing the suffering that transpires beyond the horizon. Today (December 18) in Northampton, Massachusetts the court has been reserved for a case that – in rare fashion – features global themes. Northampton may be the venue, but the issues play out far away. Our small idyllic town can’t hide from the ferocity of a cruel country that can no longer conceal its ugliest intentions. Nothing will be resolved today, but you still feel the anxiety, the excitement. For that reason the room has been packed with spectators and members of the press. The outside hallway teems with latecomers and picketers line the sidewalk outside.
In Northampton we have the rare chance to see the irreconcilable meeting of money, murder and conscience – four elderly Massachusetts residents have their judgement day for staging an act of civil disobedience in the lobby of munitions profiteer L3Harris last March, 19th. These four tossed play money soaked in red paint (blood money) on the floor of the munition icon’s lobby and brandished an improvised arrest warrant for L3 CEO, Chris Kubasik, for war crimes in Gaza. Mind you, the defendants in this episode do not struggle for their own lives as people in court often do. They come as messengers, as entertainers perhaps (for civil disobedience has a long tradition of joyful improvisation), as proxies for the wholly absent dead and dying.
One of the defendants requires a walker, another uses a cane. Such frailty facing off against the force of the greatest military on earth, staged in a place designed to reduce emotional tension into the arcane formulae of the law, promises to be strange, compelling, unpredictable and absurd. The ages of the four, draped in Palestinian scarves, and the advanced age of many court spectators today remind us that the generation associated with Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi have not all quietly acquiesced to the values of the US Empire.
If the defendants lose they will pay a small fine, but these three women and one man have come for a chance to bare their souls, to report, on the internal misery that most of us manage with basic denial. We are a perverse species blessed with the ability to manage cognitive dissonance with self-deception, but sometimes unusual individuals lose this precious ability and suffer the excruciating agonies of their own vigilance. For one reason or another, a few people experience vicarious pain from far away. Most of us distract ourselves with addictions or rationalizations, but some can’t quite escape – these people come to a crossroads where one turn leads to fatalistic resignation and the other requires confrontation. All four defendants took the latter path, and we gather in the packed courtroom to listen to their stories.
Nick Mottern, age 86, is the first to testify. For almost half a year Nick and I have been the only two people almost invariably present at 6:30 AM each Wednesday morning at L3Harris to hold up signs, wave Palestinian flags, and, in Nick’s case, hoist up an enormous cutout of Bibi Netanyahu dressed in an orange jump suit. I am, informally (as a “kid” in my waning 70’s) Nick’s apprentice in the art of civil disobedience. I am in court to support Nick, but all four defendants came to the lobby of L3Harris by means of a shared, intuitive moral roadmap. One defendant, Priscilla Lynch, had been a Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) case worker prior to retirement. She testifies that a career of protecting children had led her inevitably to the doorway of L3Harris – the perpetrator implicated in the murder of well over 20,000 Gazan children. The court learns that more than half of the childhood amputees on earth reside in Gaza. “Mandated reporters” once called Priscilla Lynch to report suspected child abuse and neglect, but how do we fathom the scale of child abuse in Gaza as being within the oversight of DCF?
Nick Mottern has placed himself in harm’s way before the power of authority as a matter of being – like breathing, like gazing curiously at clouds on the horizon at sunrise. His so called twilight years have been given to the art and science of resistance, and his mind spins ceaselessly to imagine strategies and targets to confront. Yesterday he mulled over the idea of seeking out and picketing the homes of local billionaires – “these criminals are at the root of everything,” he thinks aloud. Most people toss ideas to the wind in order to pass time – Nick plans with intent. His resolve is almost disconcerting. With countless hours of shared banter, philosophical reflection and political digression, Nick’s testimony reveals him to me in ways I have not imagined. His fearless exterior gives way to a vivid complexity – vulnerable, tortured, pursued by the images of war experienced firsthand.
Nick, a military veteran once stationed on a Navy ship out of Pearl Harbor, testifies that he had witnessed nuclear tests in the Pacific. While describing the oddly hued colors of the sky during nuclear events, he begins to sob. He recovers slowly but tears return while talking about seeing three young Vietcong soldiers killed in Saigon where he worked as a civilian correspondent for an English Language newspaper. He struggles to tell the court about seeing a shirt pulled open to expose a bullet wound to a female fighter’s chest. The grief of a half century old flashback leaps with sudden, private intimacy. Soldiers and war correspondents have the unique task of staring into the bottomless well of human cruelty, and Nick has done both jobs at a steep price.
The defense lawyer asks Nick moments later if he has ever seen starving children. Once a couple of months ago, Nick and I and another protester, Mike, blocked a food delivery truck at the L3Harris entrance while holding up a sign Nick had made reading, “L3 eats while Gaza starves.” Nick had impulsively initiated the confrontation and I had marveled at how nonchalantly he had orchestrated the whole thing. The food truck driver waved – seemingly with an air of approval – and sped on toward another entrance.
Nick tells the court that he had worked in Ethiopia in 1985 for Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers gathering information on the famine that was caused partially by a protracted civil war and indirectly by the influx of US and Soviet weapons into the horn of Africa. He could not bring himself to photograph a starving 11 year old girl, “she looked so awful,” he states with an apologetic air. One can bear witness and yet find that particular point where the witnessing becomes permanently entrenched, like a scar. I imagine that Nick has seen the gears and pulleys animating the US Empire at such an inordinately intimate proximity that only direct action offers relief. For him, I speculate, civil disobedience isn’t about guilt or even about morality in the ordinary, abstract sense – it is about making sense of gruesome realities, about preserving his own mental health. Fellow defendant, Patricia “Paki” Wieland, quoted in The Daily Hampshire Gazette, says it like this, “Once you know, then you have to take an action if you have conscience.”
I learn at our L3 protest the day prior to the trial that the group’s lawyer, Jamie Rogers, will employ the “necessity defense.” He will argue that the murderous practices of L3Harris offers no means of redress other than civil disobedience. Nick explains the necessity defense to me – breaking the law can be justifiable if the “illegal” act prevents a far greater harm, he states. He describes the hypothetical example of a person who trespasses on private property to dive into a pool to save a drowning person. The University of Chicago Law School website describes the necessity defense like this:
“If the defendant demonstrated that he perpetrated his crime in order to avert a greater evil, he would be acquitted. This defense was controversial at common law and poses a perennial challenge to the rule of law even as it introduces flexibility into the criminal justice system. Today, the question of whether the defense exists in modern federal criminal law remains an open question.”
The judge, Mary Beth Ogulewicz converted the case into a civil one. She stated that the defendants should not be tried criminally. Her decision deprived the four of a jury trial but gave them more latitude to employ the necessity defense.
Toward the end of consolidating the “necessity” strategy, attorney Rogers has impressively assembled a collection of affidavits from world class experts – these reinforce two critical prongs of the defense case: 1) that L3Harris products are being utilized to commit genocide and war-crimes, and 2) that civil disobedience has a long history of successfully addressing human rights violations that could not be mitigated in any other manner.
One of the signed affidavits comes from Joshua Paul who stated on his enclosed affidavit CV that he served as “U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Political Military Affairs Director” from 2012 -2023. Paul further stated that, “specific products manufactured by L3Harris, including parts and components in the JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions – “smart bombs”), have been used against Palestinian civilians in Gaza in violation of international humanitarian law, according to multiple press reports and nongovernmental reporting.”
Another signed affidavit by Stellan Vinthagen, makes the claim that this author is, “as far as I am aware, the only endowed chair in the world of a university-level program focused on nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience.”
Vinthagen, a professor at local Umass, Amherst states in this affidavit that:
“Through several studies utilizing all available data, it has convincingly been shown throughout at least the last 108 years of history, that the overthrow of autocracy and the creation of democracy and civil peace is linked to mass participation of ordinary people in disruptive acts of nonviolent resistance.”
The two prosecutors for “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts” appear to have not read this affidavit. These two, young, good looking, well dressed representatives of state protocol (a man and a woman) listlessly belabor the point, to no seeming purpose, that the act of tossing “blood money” on the L3Harris lobby floor, has no chance of altering company policy. In contradictory fashion they both grill the defendants about whether they had first written letters about their concerns to L3Harris brass. One prosecutor wonders aloud where futile civil disobedience might lead – the obvious implication being that eventually, frustrated resistance would morph into violence. The absurdity of this sort of reasoning, considering the age of defendants whose walkers and canes lay propped against their seats, resembles a poorly timed standup punchline. Nobody laughs although all of us might have. Attorney Rogers explains patiently that civil disobedience unfolds in its own unique rhythms, and seldom creates instantaneous change.
The prosecution seems to be content to lazily go with the argument that unsuccessful civil disobedience merits a verdict of guilty. Why disturb the routine order of things if genocide has no remedy? But this ho-hum conclusion runs straight into a powerful assertion by codefendant, Patricia Gallagher – she tells the court that she sees her actions as being akin to resisting the inhumanity of the Nazi regime. That frames the context for me – the limitless power of the military industrial complex demands resistance whether such actions succeed or not. The more entrenched that state violence becomes, the more critical it is to fight back. These four activists from Demilitarize Western Mass are all the more courageous for confronting a predicament that may have no solution. To dramatically oppose violent, criminal governmental acts becomes proportionately heroic as odds of success decrease. We know that Sophie Scholl and The White Rose have become immortal in our collective memory precisely because of Nazism’s heartless intransigence. But Judge Mary Beth Ogulewicz is no Roland Freisler. She does not make a decision today. She says that she first needs to study the affidavits. I cross my fingers.
A verdict in favor of the defendants will reverberate well beyond Northampton. We nervously await the decision.
