People gather at Monona Terrace last month to protest a weapons manufacturers symposium.
By
From June 24 to 26, a joint conference called National Space & Missile Materials Symposium & the Commercial and Government Responsive Access To Space Technology Exchange was held at the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center.
Often for conferences at Monona Terrace, there is a prominent welcome message with the name of the group on a large sign on John Nolan Drive. Not this time. The symposium was listed on Monona Terrace’s website calendar with the words “closed for a client event.” Was this clandestine aura to hide our city’s complicity with the war machine?
Monona Terrace was built with funds from the city and is managed by city-appointed trustees. The event brought representatives here from the world’s largest weapons manufacturers and military technical providers, including Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
In October 2023, Madison divested from nuclear weapons investments through the Back from the Brink resolution. Then in December 2023, our City Council unanimously supported a resolution calling for “an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and urgent political action to both de-escalate the crisis and to prioritize truth, reconciliation, restitution and the building of a future for the Palestinian and Israeli people.” Dane County followed suit, approving a similar resolution in February 2024.
The city has made a commitment to the living planet via the Climate Forward Madison plan, which states: “Climate change threatens our health, our economy, our environment, and our quality of life. Simply put, it is one of the greatest threats of our time, and we all need to do our part to fix it. Madison is ready to do its part.” Our city has set ambitious emission reduction goals, and rightly so.
We are part of Madison for a World BEYOND War. War is organized mass murder. We are part of a growing global movement for war abolition. We call for cease-fires and negotiations in all armed conflicts. Wars end in negotiations. Why not skip the killing and start with negotiating? Almost all human conflicts are resolved nonviolently, between individuals and between nations. Only a tiny number of conflicts lead to people killing each other. But once wars get started, they are addictive and terribly hard to stop. We at World BEYOND War don’t take sides. In war, the only winners are the people selling the weapons.
Many of those merchants of death were at the symposium at Monona Terrace, honing their technologies to kill people. It is incongruous and unconscionable for Madison to welcome weapons manufacturers and staff of the so-called Department of Defense, which rather than defending us, acts around the world offensively and often brutally, and now has us on the brink of a nuclear war with Russia.
These groups sustain and deepen wars and the war mentality while perpetuating the greatest single institutional source of fossil fuel emissions: the U.S. military. They create, produce and supply armaments that are now indiscriminately killing Palestinian citizens — among them more than 14,000 children to date. They fuel conflicts all over the world with immeasurable human and environmental destruction.
This symposium of masters of war did not belong in Madison. We ask the mayor, City Council and the trustees of Monona Terrace to initiate a process to assure such an event does not occur here again. By engaging in this process, we will contribute to creating space for reconciliation, restitution and the building of a future not only for the people directly affected today by wars, but also for the planet as a whole.
This is what Madisonians and life-respecting people stand for and want. There is no future in looking the other way.
Susan Freiss, Stefania Sani and Janet Parker are members of Madison for a World BEYOND War.
