Associazione Culturale Linux Club Italia and
U.S. Citizens for Peace & Justice
present:
The Anti War Movement
From Vietnam to Today:
A Chorus of Voices Against War
A Talk with Michael Uhl
Linux Club
via G. Libetta, 15c
Saturday, April 29, 6pm
An evening with: Michael Uhl, Vietnam vet and long time anti-war activist. [see bio below]
Speakers include: Gianluca Peciola, Assessore Municipio Roma XI Francesco Tupone, Associazione Linux Club Italia Stephanie Westbrook, U.S. Citizens for Peace & Justice Nella Ginatempo, Bastaguerra Micaela Serino, Women in Black - Rome Phil Rushton, author of the book "Riportiamoli a casa: Il dissenso militare nelle forze armate statunitensi" Mehmet Yuksel, representative of the Information Office of Kurdistan in Italy
At the same time as the national demonstration for peace, justice and democracy in New York, a panel discussion with Michael Uhl, Ph.D., Vietnam veteran and for the
past 35 years, a national organizer of the anti-war movement among
soldiers and veterans in the United States. Michael Uhl will discuss the anti-war movement in the U.S., comparing conditions of the Vietnam period with those of today. Uhl will be joined by Italian anti-war activists from civil society as well as politics.
The evening will also include coverage of the national March for Peace, Justice and Democracy in New York City. www.april29.org
Michael Uhl
Michael Uhl grew up during the 1950s in the Long Island, New York suburb of Babylon. The beginning of his activism was when he spent a memorable year as a student at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 1964, and witnessed the U.S. inspired military coup that overthrew the democratically elected Goulart government, and dragged Brazil into an abyss of barbarism and political repression for the next twenty years. It was in the weeks preceding the coups, that Michael first heard the word "imperialismo" from his Brazilian friends at the university.
In 1967, Michael graduated with a B.S. in Theoretical Linguistics from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Soon thereafter, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps. In late 1968, he was sent to Vietnam, where he commanded a combat intelligence team with the 11th Light Infantry Brigade. It was the routine exposure to torture and atrocities inflicted on the Vietnamese population that he witnessed during his tour that led him to understand the true nature of the war.
Returning from Vietnam, Michael became immediately involved in the antiwar movement. He was the National Veteran Coordinator of the Citizens Commission of Inquiry on U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam (CCI), which organized the anti-war Vietnam veterans, and led to the now legendary Winter Soldier Investigation. In the fall of 1970, Uhl testified at the International War Crimes Enquiry in Stockholm, Sweden, and in the spring of 1971, toured Australia and New Zealand at the invitation of their respective antiwar mobilization committees. CCI also participated in Dewey Canyon III, the veteran encampment in Washington in April, 1971, and organized ad hoc war crimes hearings in Congress under the chairmanship of Ronald V. Dellums, a freshman African American congressman from Oakland, CA.
Uhl testified that year before Congress on his experience with the Phoenix Program, created to assassinate the so-called VCI, Vietcong Infrastructure in Vietnam. Also in 1971, Uhl co-founded with activist attorney Tod Ensign, the New York City-based Citizen Soldier, an advocacy organization for veterans and GIs which is still going strong after thirty-five years.
Uhl and Ensign co-authored G.I. Guinea Pigs: How the Pentagon Exposed Our Soldiers to Dangers More Deadly Than War, an exposé on the human health effects of agent orange and radioactive fallout to which many GIs had been exposed, either in Vietnam or at the open air atomic tests in Nevada during the 1950s.
In the 1980s, Michael moved to the midcoast of Maine, where, in 1986, he became a charter member of a new organization called Veterans For Peace. He became a writer by trade, and a part time university lecturer. He is also a critic whose articles and reviews have appeared often in The Nation magazine and the Sunday Boston Globe Book Review. He holds a Ph.D. in the combined disciplines of American Studies and Creative Nonfiction. Uhl most recently (2005) taught a course at the University of Maine, entitled: The Sixties Study Circle: The Vietnam War and the Movement That Opposed It.
In February 2003, just before the American invasion of Iraq, he toured Greece at the invitation of the Greek antiwar movement. Uhl remains active in local peace and justice groups in Maine, and with Veterans For Peace, for whom he serves as volunteer editor of the group's national newsletter.
