On September 27, 2025 Bill Ayers and the Under the Tree Podcast met up at Pilsen Community Books with Aaron Hughes and Arti Walker-Peddakotla of About Face: Veterans Against the War, a dynamic and powerful group involved in building an irresistible movement for peace and against war and fascism. About Face builds on and highlights the legacy and revolutionary power of GI resistance against the backdrop of military mobilizations to violently suppress people’s movements. They walk a difficult and necessary path, organizing inside the military as they support GI resistance and the right to refuse, and outside as they create structures of care and support that prevent enlistment in the imperial death machine in the first place. Their work dances a difficult dialectic as it embraces a fundamental contradiction: confronting and resisting the real harm erupting from the war-makers, and providing paths for radical reorientation for people who (like all of us) can be both perpetrators of harm and victims of a racial capitalist system. They are the authors of a new zine, State Violence, Abolition, and GI Resistance.
