Freedom Papers

Freedom Papers

International Day for Veterans of the Liberation Struggle: A Call to Action

by: Yolande Tomlinson, PhD • 
Dec 10, 2024

Trigger Warning: sexual violence; incest; state violence; genocide; imperialism; PTSD

The term veteran signifies one who has fought on behalf of their country’s national interest and been honorably discharged. But what if your government does not serve your interests? Or the interests of people you know and love? Or people you don’t know, but respect their right to exist and to govern themselves? What if your government has, in fact, been waging high- and low-intensity warfare against you and people like you? These wars have taken the forms of a war on drugs, a war on poverty, wars on indigenous peoples, or a war on Black mothers. Wars on Black men, Black children, and Black women. Wars on lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer peoples across all spheres of life. What if your government has a history of violence, enslavement, internment, and genocide against your peoples and people you love and respect? What if the very foundation of your government and the systems it has evolved to carry out, expand or deepen these wars threaten the existence of the planet on which we all live and depend? What do you call the people who fight to expose, disrupt, abolish and replace that government and those systems?

It’s long past time we begin to recognize and acknowledge veterans as the people who fight for justice, full human dignity, and the survival of our planet and all that depend on it. Fighting for human rights and liberation is an ongoing, protracted struggle. Many of us warriors do not have the privilege of fighting in one war or on a single issue. As radical queer Black feminist warriors, we do not have the luxury of retiring from the struggle for collective liberation. As such, many of us are simultaneously active duty warriors and veterans, fighting in what feels like perpetual wars. 

Every November 11th (11/11), the United States Government (USG) and “the people” honor as veterans the men and women who have “sacrificed and serv[ed]” or still serve in all branches of the United States Military. US Veterans Day recognizes living soldiers who fought or active duty soldiers still fighting in any branch of the military. The origin of the holiday is the commemoration of the ending of World War I. Ironically, many who celebrate Veterans Day do so out of a sense of patriotism and national pride in the US military, when in fact, the reason for the day is rooted in celebrating peace and the ending of “the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed,” according to the 1926 Congressional resolution, honoring Armistice Day, which eventually became Veterans Day in 1954. The US’s desire for peace did not hold, and they have the dubious distinction of perpetuating endless wars across the globe in pursuit of world domination. 

Yet, hardly anyone will recognize as veterans worthy of celebration and care those of us who have fought and continue to fight everyday against US imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy, and their constitutive systems of violence and dehumanization. By that I mean the systems of governance, categorization and devaluing of peoples and their lifeways, and deep practices of violence and domination that range from the very personal to the institutional and structural. For those of us, our communities, and our ancestors who have endured massive amounts of violence rooted in these ideas and ways of being, we know that those who fight on behalf of imperialism are not warriors, nor should they be honored and glorified as veterans or heroes. If we use the examples we are witnessing from Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, and beyond, members of imperial armies are murderers, rapists, genociders, and accomplices to the basest forms of dehumanization.

I do not honor them. They are not heroes or bringers of peace. And they are certainly not my heroes.

So why pick up the word veteran if it’s so heinous? Why claim it at all?

In reclaiming the term, I am not taking up a new position. Black liberation veteran and Black Panther party member, Safiya Bukhari has made a similar claim. In her essay, “We Too are Veterans: Post Traumatic Stress Disorders and the Black Panther Party,” Bukhari draws a direct correlation between her experience fighting for Black liberation and the liberation of all oppressed peoples and her younger brother’s experience fighting in the Vietnam War. Similar to him, they were both dealing with the disappointing realization that the United States is an imperial force murdering and stealing across the globe; the USG’s dehumanization, murdering, and imprisonment of Black people at home; and, their shared experiences of post traumatic stress disorder from their service. From this shared experience with her brother, she has come to know herself and her comrades also as veterans, who, 20-plus years later, still suffer because of their efforts to achieve “freedom and liberation of Black people in America from their oppressive conditions.”

As a survivor-warrior against patriarchy who also struggles with PTSD, I too know the ravages on the mind, the body, and the spirit. As a Black queer immigrant mother, making life and family in the “belly of the beast”, I am not only a survivor of these multiple and overlapping wars and systems of violence; I’m also a warrior against them. It’s the only way I have known to make life meaningful, purposeful. I am a survivor of multiple forms of patriarchal violence: childhood sexual abuse, incest, intimate partner rape, corporal punishment at home and school, homophobia, queerphobia, financial domestic abuse, obstetric rape, gynecological and obstetric abuse, and the normalized disinvestment and disregard for the Black female child and their feminine kind. To stop myself from going mad, I’ve become a warrior, fully conscious of the systems and circumstances that allow these things to happen in one shape or another. I am a radical queer Black feminist warrior, committed to understanding how and why this violence continues and how to transform it from the root to the seed.

One of the root causes of this violence is the problem of domination, whether it’s the domination of children, women, queer people, peoples of color, other communities and nations, or Mother Earth. There’s no way to dominate without assuming power over others through violence, brute force, supremacist ideologies and disregarding everyone else’s needs. For imperialism to be possible, for example, you need to be willing to kill anyone and everyone who stands in the way of world domination. Similarly for patriarchal domination in the home, family members must submit or face brutality or death. We can see similar patterns with respect to the Earth and other living things. I happen to think any form of domination is wrong. I also believe any person or government that believes AND practices this, should be stopped by any means necessary, including the same means they use against people. As a radical queer Black feminist warrior, I have taken up this cause to stop the pursuit of domination– whether that’s in our homes or across the world. 

As a committed warrior against imperialism and all forms of violence, I too am a veteran. Bukhari rightfully makes her claims based on her participation in a military-style self-defense army and her time as a political prisoner under COINTELPRO. Based on my multiple and overlapping experiences and my dedication to fighting multiple and overlapping wars simultaneously, it’s necessary to broaden her definition of veteranhood.

Yes, we should be willing to bear arms in our own defense. Yes, we should honor and continue to fight for our political prisoners held in US cages and those exiled from their families and communities. I am also saying that those of us who may not have wielded a gun or been in prison, yet are conscious of and suffer under the war machine that is the United States while we commit to taking small and large strategic actions to abolish this system –we too are veterans.

Defining the struggle for collective liberation solely through those designated as official soldiers or members of a militarized unit misses the multiple ways we are all already designated as less than human, less than self-determining, and attacked on multiple fronts. Veterans of the liberation struggle are warriors fighting on these multiple fronts. Many of us don’t have the luxury of fighting one war or one system and then retiring. Many of us have become conscious of the System and how it operates because we have had to endure suffering at the hands of its agents, whether it’s the CIA, FBI, state or local police, the foster care system, or the monsters in our home. Many more of us have experienced the ways governments and religious doctrines deputize and legitimize other agents who wield violence against us in our homes, in our places of work, in our spaces of worship and play, and wherever they feel like it. We are caught in cycles of violence that do not let us rest or get access to the care we need to heal. 

Further, if PTSD is our primary or only form of corporeal receipts validating our veteran status, then many more of us than those in a militarized unit count as veterans. We know from the work of many researchers, the impact of trauma and violence is passed on epi-genetically (from generation to generation). That means we inherit our ancestors’ trauma as well as their warrior spirit. We then combine this ancestral transfer of trauma with “adverse childhood experiences,” where disruptions in the fundamental systems of care, safety and nourishment produce PTSD levels of distress for children on psychological, physical, sexual, emotional and mental levels. This can range from witnessing to experiencing acts of deep violence. These children experience the same and different levels of PTSD as soldiers who’ve gone to war, yet they aren’t classified as veterans.

As abolitionists, we have to expand beyond military strategies to define veteranhood. A child of Gaza, for example, who has not fired a rocket or even thrown a rock, who is experiencing trauma under Israeli colonization, and who has squirreled away food for a friend who is the last surviving member of their family’s bloodline is she not a veteran against Israeli settler colonialism and US imperialism? Is the family lineage she helped to preserve not as or more valuable than the 1 or 100 soldiers she may have killed with a gun? Is the survival of their people not as important as the defeat of their oppressor? 

Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us that abolition is not just about absence, it is also about presence and life affirming institutions. If our intent is not just to die for the revolution, but to also live, we have to employ multiple and varied strategies, tactics, and tools for undermining, disrupting, dismantling, abolishing, and replacing oppressive ideologies, systems, and ways of being. Critically, we have to contain military strategies as one in a plethora of other necessary strategies for abolishing imperialism, patriarchy and other forms of supremacy and domination. 

Those of us who are actively building the world we want to see. Those who are actively dismantling it through teaching others to transgress. Those disrupting it through protest and propaganda. Those who choose to live in their fullest authenticity. Those of us who are healers and caretakes. Those of us who dream and laugh and play through it all. Those of us who theorize and proliferate knowledge on the interconnection of the systems and why the fight must be intersectional. We too are veterans. We are veterans of the liberation struggle and we should recognize and honor each other as such.

To that end, I propose that we recognize December 12 (12/12) as International Day for Veterans of the Liberation Struggle. This day will honor people across all nations who have fought and are fighting to end imperialism, and all systems of supremacy, violence and domination. To commemorate this day, we encourage individuals, organizations, and communities of all sizes to observe the day through storytelling, celebrations, proclamations, moments of silence, or rest. This observance begins on December 10th, coinciding with International Human Rights Day. We invite everyone who is able to congregate, teach and commit to being a veteran of the liberation struggle. Join a social justice formation, educate yourself, and join us December 10-12, 2025, when OHRD celebrates 10 years of fighting for collective liberation. Remember, “liberation is a constant practice” so we do this until we free all of us.

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