Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK, spoke Wednesday night at a speaker event in the Student Union Ballroom hosted by San Jose State’s Human Rights Institute about her new book “War in Ukraine.”
CODEPINK is a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs, according to its website.
Yesenia Sanchez Rodriguez, sociology and justice studies double major senior, introduced Benjamin and was interested in learning more about the conflict in Ukraine.
“I know I don't know much about the Ukraine war. So it would be nice to be more involved with the news and find out what's going on,” Rodriguez said before the event.
The speaker event was moderated by William Armaline, director of the Human Rights Institute and was co-sponsored by the San Jose Friday Peace Vigil and the San Jose Peace and Justice Center.
San Jose native Maha Khan, CODEPINK’s website and media coordinator, who has coordinated Benjamin’s book tour, said although she’s seen the talk a few times online she was excited to finally see it in person.
“I think it's so elucidating and enlightening to hear Medea talk about the war and the crisis from an objective perspective that kind of cuts through a lot of the pro war propaganda and things that we hear in the mainstream media,” Khan said.
Before the moderated discussion began, Benjamin played a 20 minute video that gave a cursory summary of her book. She said her book gives a more intricate and nuanced perspective for the war in Ukraine.
The video and book argue, contrary to popular media coverage, the war in Ukraine wasn’t entirely “unprovoked” and that NATO shoulders some responsibility in the escalation before the invasion on Feb. 14 citing a Feb. 28 Guardian Op-ed article in her video.
Armaline said that providing this perspective for students is really important, especially because it’s lacking in U.S. media outlets.
“The biggest thing for me is just to expose our students in our community to these other perspectives, because this is something that is of consequence to the whole world,” he said.
Benjamin also spoke about how hard it is to show this perspective in an often pro-war media climate and what she and her organization has to do to combat this.
“We don't get CNN covering us or MSNBC, or Fox News or the Washington Post or the New York Times. They won’t run our op-eds that we're constantly sending to them,” Benjamin said. “So we found that one of the most effective ways is to go where the press already is and that tends to be places like where the President of the United States is.”
During the event Benjamin recounted for the crowd the experience that started her career as an anti-war activist.
She told the story of when she was in high school and a friend of her boyfriend was drafted to fight in the Vietnam War.
Benjamin said over the course of six months her friend's boyfriend's letters from the front became increasingly alarming and dark before a package finally arrived containing a human ear on a leather cord meant to be worn as a necklace.
“He sent her a package in the mail, that she was all excited to open, and it was an ear of the enemy Vietcong with a piece of leather around it to put around her neck as a souvenir,” Benjamin said. “I went to the bathroom and vomited, and thought ‘something is terribly wrong.’ ”
After this experience she started an anti-war group in high school and hasn’t stopped advocating for peace since.
She believes those who are unaware or apathetic about international conflict should try to contextualize this into their lives and that the war isn’t that far away.
“I would say that these issues actually affect the standard of living of American people,” Benjamin said. “It affects your ability to get a college education at an affordable price. You look at European countries that spend less of their money on militarism than we do and they have a good national health care system.”
