UAE Political program
The Southern Contingent was trained in a New Left style that required analysis and then discussion prior to taking action. Several of the group tried to put something on paper that could be used as the basis for discussion.
The following is an untitled draft of a political program for the Union of American Exiles as written by Philip Mullins in June or July 1968:
For the last two months or so American draft dodgers in Toronto have been meeting almost weekly. Out of these meetings have come the beginnings of a program and an organization for American exiles in Toronto. Almost despite ourselves and by the tortured processes of non-directed growth, we are building an institution known variously as the Union of American Exiles, American War Resisters Information Service for Employment, the Housing and Job Information Committees of the TADP (Toronto Anti-Draft Programme), a social committee and a political study group now known as Toronto SDS-SSOC in Exile. We have yet to look into the future and set goals and concerns which will direct our programs and organizational work.
Our programs thus far have arisen from immediate necessities and are intended to satisfy immediate needs. We begin now to set more distant goals and to create a more distant vision of what we as American exiles in Canada can and intend to do. This draft is the beginning of such a process.
Contents |
Understanding the advantages of exile
Our first task will be to determine what being exiled means. What are the advantages and disadvantages of Canadian exile with regard to what we can do? What difference will the fact of exile make in our personal and collective life styles? Can we take advantage of the opportunities offered by our exile? We might find that our exile affords us the peace and quiet to properly utilize the skills and training that most of us already possess. Regardless of where we are, who we are and what we are, we have to redirect our efforts and redefine our goals to take advantages of our being in exile.
We have begun to realize that, far from being obsolete, the skills acquired by years of struggle in the movements for peace and freedom in the United States are of utmost importance in organizing for social, political and economic change from within Canada. However, exile means that the value of direct action politics is minimized and that the value of intensive, long-range organization to achieve distant goals is maximized. Our old skills have to be redirected toward goals that can only be realized in the distant future. Being in exile means that we can reexamine our goals, channel our energies and change our life styles to achieve the kind of social change we desire in a new and, in many ways, more exciting context.
Self-help
An important part of any program we develop will be our efforts to help ourselves to get “Landed” in Canada, to get employed, to find housing and to make initial social contacts. We have already done much in this area. We have organized committees to expand the Draft Resister’s Employment Service and to find temporary housing in the Toronto area for newly arriving resisters. The social committee is arranging picnics and parties to relieve the social exile in which so many of us find ourselves. The program committee offers aid and advice on how to adjust to life in Canada and Toronto at its Wednesday night events. This program will be continued and expanded. Eventually we will develop a more effective counseling service which will be able to function as a kind of draft dodger’s “welcome wagon.” We might want to establish a self-perpetuating loan program to help the hostels remain financially and functionally solvent. We are already learning how to tap into existing social aid programs so that our new Canadians can get by until they earn their first paycheck.
The self-help aspect of our program will probably continue to be the largest single part of our program but we must not allow it to be our only activity. The Union of American Exiles, if it is to be politically relevant, must have an outreach that is greater than this. At the very basic level, we have to reach more people than those who attend committee meetings, Wednesday night talk sessions and Sunday picnics. We have to build an effective and widespread communications network. We are already developing central nodes in this network. We have a steering committee and are well on our way to obtaining office space for the employment service and the housing committee. The political study group has begun work on our first published material.
Within the next few months we might find it desirable to begin organizing draft exiles on a national scale. There has already been one meeting of anti-draft groups in Ontario and Quebec. There has been sporadic letter writing between groups across Canada and the exiles in Montreal are publishing a newsletter, “The Rebel”. We should begin now to develop a mailing list and a periodic newsletter that can later be expended nationwide. To do this we need technical and editorial skills and the proper equipment. Most importantly, we need to know where we are heading politically.
(The third page of the draft is missing.)
In this regard, we should begin first with a survey of resources available to us both in terms of skills, machines, machine tools, land and buildings. Perhaps, as a politically oriented group, we will find sympathetic Canadians and Americans who will be willing to provide the initial capital and resources necessary to initiate communally run, economically sound enterprises. Perhaps out of our number, we will find individuals willing to forego complete integration into the Canadian capitalist economy for a while in order to contribute to the creation of self-perpetuating, economically self-sustaining utopian communities designed to continue experiments whose ultimate aim is to integrate and, at the same time, subordinate machine-production to a human-centered socio-cultural environment.
Our international role
While we are fully cognizant of the role we can play in Canadian life, at the same time we must be aware of the role we can play with regard to international politics. As elsewhere in this program it is suggested that we begin by considering the advantages exile affords us. Probably the primary advantage is that we are Americans (many with experience in the struggles in the United States) who are no longer subject either to the laws of the U.S. or the harassment of U.S. officials. In Canada we are free to develop contacts with anti-imperialist groups throughout the world and to actively aid those groups (as well as similar groups within the U.S.) in their struggles with western imperialism and a flagging capitalism. We are free in Canada to supply aid and encouragement to Cuba as well as the NLFSV (National Liberation Front of South Vietnam). We are free to organize a corps of Americans who, as a Peace and Freedom Corps, can begin to work throughout the world to aid anti-imperialist forces. We are free to organize a corps of Americans who could offer themselves, as well as medical and other aid, to embattled areas of Vietnam and elsewhere. As Americans in exile we have the great opportunity to carry out humanitarian work in areas that are closed to our brothers in the States and to aid incipient democratic movements which the U.S. government seems intent on crushing even at the cost of their own destruction.
Our role in the U.S.
The role of American exiles in the internal politics of the United States is more ambiguous. Our role there will depend only in part upon our own initiative and resources. Any action we undertake will depend upon developments in the United States and the needs of the people involved as they see them. We probably will not be able to develop and carry out independent political, social or paramilitary action within the United States without the active support of groups there. Therefore our program must derive from the expressed needs of groups in the United States. We should begin to establish communications with movement groups in the United States with the intention of offering whatever aid they seem to need and to solicit their opinion about the function of a group of American exiles in Canada.
In order to have something to offer movement groups in the United States, we must create an organization which is committed to working for the success of the Movement back home and which is capable of working effectively from this side of the border and as an exile group. To do this we need an issue to organize around. It has been suggested that if and when U.S. Senator McCarthy is elected President of the United States then the stand that we as exiles have taken will become meaningless. Furthermore if he announces an amnesty they our position will appear to be stupid.
Perhaps serious consideration should be given to the idea of organizing a group of American exiles pledged to return to the United States, via the Peace Bridge at Niagara or some other similarly symbolic route, and there to either submit to arrest for violation of the draft laws or to be repulsed by U.S. Marshals. The group could be organized on the same basis as the original draft card burning at Sheep’s Meadow. The advantages and disadvantages of such an action could be the beginning of the discussion of our role as American exiles in Canada.
