SUPPORT OUR
SPONSORS

Organic Valley

Dr. Bronner's
Magic Soaps

Botani Organic

Aloha Bay

Eden Foods

Ode Magazine

Mountain
Rose Herbs

The Green Guide

Time for a New Peace Movement

From: Michael Albert <sysop@zmag.org>
Subject: Michael Albert - Peace movement prospects

Peace Movement Prospects
By Michael Albert

September 11 went well beyond tragic. Worse is possible. Much better is
also possible. And to achieve better is why activists need to not only
mourn, but also to educate and organize. But many people I encounter doubt
peace movement prospects. I find this wrong for two reasons.

One, doubting prospects wastes time. Even when prospects of change are
dim, to work for better outcomes is always better then to bemoan
difficulties.

Two, contrary to despondency, current circumstances auger hope. "Are you
crazy?" some people will ask. It is one thing to urge action, but it is
another thing to surrender reason to desire. However, it is not desire
that gives me hope, but evidence.

Last night there was a two hour marathon Hollywood extravaganza broadcast
by all major networks and watched by millions. Elites are urging lock-step
obedience. Johnny and Jill are supposed to be donning marching boots. Yet
this was no pep rally for war. There was nearly courage of those who
worked to save lives, often giving their own. The evening's songs sought
restraint and understanding and explicitly rejected cycles of retribution
and hate. Don't get me wrong. The evening wasn't ZNet set to music. But
nor did it support piling terror on top of terror. If the right-wing were
actually as ascendant as so many fear, we would have had the Bob Hope and
Charlton Heston Hour. We didn't.

More, in the last few days there have been scores of small and also some
quite large demonstrations and gatherings. Reports indicate there are 105
scheduled today, Saturday. There is no war yet. But there is resistance,
and it is growing rapidly.

Just two days ago I was asked to be on a national radio call-in show with
a listenership of roughly two million from all over the country. The host,
a Republican, thought there would be division emerging about any war plans
and he wanted to offer diverse voices (which is itself a good sign). He
told me I'd be on for fifteen minutes. The time came, they called, I was
asked how I differed from Bush. I answered, and the discussion continued
for two hours. The host eventually left hostility behind, becoming more
and more curious. Many callers were hostile, sure, but they were also open
to cogent commentary. The simple formulation that attacking civilians is
terrorism, that terrorism is horrible, and that therefore we should not
attack civilians, was irrefutable. More interesting, no one even tried to
rebut contextual argument and evidence. They made clear they knew my
claims about U.S. policies in Iraq and elsewhere were true and they would
with a few exceptions even grudgingly assent to them, so the remaining
issue was whether the U.S. should be bound by the same morals that we hope
others will be bound by, a dispute that is easy to win with anyone but a
fanatic. I won't proceed with details. The point is, even in a right-wing
forum, many people will hear our views, understand them, and even change
their minds.

U.S. elites like war. War sends the message that laws do not bind U.S.
elites, that morality does not bind U.S. elites, that nothing binds U.S.
elites but their estimates of their own interests. It trumpets that
everybody else better ratify our plans, or at least get out of the way.
Likewise, for U.S. elites, war preparedness is good economics. Military
spending primes the capitalist pump and spurs its engines, but crucially
military spending doesn't give those in the middle and at the bottom
better conditions or better housing or more education or better health
care or anything else that will make people less afraid, more
knowledgeable, more secure, and particularly more able to develop and
pursue their own agendas regarding economic distribution. War empowers the
rich and powerful, but its real virtue is that it disempowers working
people and the disenfranchised poor. War annihilates deliberation. It
elevates mainstream media to dominate communication even more than in
peacetime. War abets repression by demanding obedience. It labels dissent
treason, or in this case, incipient terrorism. Elites like all this, not
surprisingly. So while elites gravitate toward a war on terrorism for
these reasons, what, if anything, might obstruct their plans?

When Bush says that attacking civilians for political purposes is wrong
and urges that we must find ways to eliminate such terrorism - he is very
compelling to almost everyone. But when in the very next breath Bush urges
as the method of doing so diverse military attacks on civilians (or
starving them), his hypocrisy begs critique. As a solution to the danger
of terrorism, committing more terrorism that in turn breeds still more,
will not sustain support. Likewise, to fight fundamentalism with
assertions that God is on our side, will also prove uninspiring.
Five-year-olds can and will dissent. And so will adults.

So what obstructs war? People do. It's that simple. People who first doubt
the efficacy and morality of piling terror on top of terror. People who
slowly move from quiet dissent to active opposition. People who move from
opposing the violence of war and barbarity of starvation to challenging
the basic institutions that breed war and starvation. If elites choose war
as a national program they will do so in hopes that it can defend and even
enlarge their advantages. If we act so that war instead spurs public
understanding, and opposition not only to war, but in time even to elite
rule - then elites will reconsider their agenda. Indeed, I bet many are
already having grave doubts.

So how hard is our task? What do most people think about this situation,
before activism has countered media madness? Well, it certainly isn't
definitive, but Gallup polls give us more reason for hope.

First question: "Once the identity of the terrorists known, should the
American government launch a military attack on the country or countries
where the terrorists are based or should the American government seek to
extradite the terrorists to stand trial?" In Austria 10% said we should
attack. In Denmark 20%, Finland 14%, France 29%, Germany 17%, Greece 6%,
Italy 21%, Bosnia 14%, Bulgaria 19%, Czechoslavakia 22%, Croatia 8%,
Estonia 10%, Latvia 21%, Lithuania 15% Romania 18%, Argentina 8%, Colombia
11%, Ecuador 10%, Mexico 2%, Panama 16%, Peru 8%, Venezuela 11%, and even
in the U.S. only 54% favor attacking. Gallup didn't get numbers for China,
for the mideast countries, etc.

Gallup next asks: "If the United States decides to launch an attack,
should the U.S. attack military targets only, or both military and
civilian targets?" In Austria 82% said only military targets. In Denmark
84%, Finland 76%, France 84%, Germany 84%, Greece 82%, Italy 86%, Bosnia
72%, Bulgaria 71%, Czechoslavakia 75%, Estonia 88%, Latvia 82%, Lithuania
73% Romania 85%, Argentina 70%, Colombia 71%, Ecuador 74%, Mexico 73%,
Panama 62%, Peru 66%, Venezuela 81%, and even in the U.S. 56% favor
attacking only military targets, 28% attacking both military and civilian,
and 16% gave no answer.

It seems clear that we do not inhabit a world lined up for protracted war.
We live, instead, in a world that is prepared for arguments against war,
for opposition to war, and even, in time, for addressing the basic
structural causes that produce war. Humanity does not lack scruples or
logic, but only information and knowledge. If people have information and
if they can escape media manipulation and conformity, they will draw
worthy conclusions. Our task is to provide information and help break
conformity.

Finally, regarding the issues at hand, how hard is it to understand the
obvious? The U.S. postal system is not run by exemplary humanitarians or
geniuses, much less by radicals. Yet in response to workers killing others
on the job--which is called "going postal"--the postal service did not
decide to determine where the offending parties lived and attack those
neighborhoods for harboring terrorists. They also did not say that the
stress of postal work justifies serial homicide in the workplace, of
course. They instead legally prosecuted, on the one hand, and also
realized that stress was a powerful contributing factor and so worked to
reduce stress to in turn diminish the likelihood of people going postal.
Anyone can extend this analogy. It isn't complicated.

For that matter, the U.S. government, which is certainly not a repository
of wisdom or moral leadership, doesn't generally decide about terrorism to
hold whole populations accountable. When Timothy McVeigh bombed innocents,
the Federal government called it horrific, accurately, but did not declare
war on Idaho and Montana for harboring cells of the groups McVeigh was
associated with -- much less on all people sharing McVeigh's race or
religion. The government opted to prove McVeigh's culpability and to
employ legal means to restrain him and try the case. What makes September
11 different regarding our government's agenda is not so much the larger
scale of the horror, but instead its utility to the government's
reactionary programs. In the case of McVeigh, bombing Montana wouldn't
benefit elites. In the case of September 11, elites think bombing diverse
targets will benefit their capitalist profit-making and geopolitical
interests. That's harsh. That's about the harshest thing one could say, I
guess, in some sense, in this situation. It is devilish opportunism. Yet,
I honestly think that at some level everyone knows it's true. It has
gotten to that point in this country. They play with our lives like we are
their little toys, and we know it, and we have to put a stop to it, a step
at a time.
_____________________________________________________________________
Published on Saturday, September 22, 2001

Time for a College Anti-War Movement?

by Chris Toensing

As the apparent US military intervention in Afghanistan to hunt down Usama
bin Laden and "those who harbor him" gathers steam, it's hard to find a
single cautionary voice in the mainstream media. Not surprisingly, the
nascent movement against "America's new war" is being told not to challenge
the wisdom of its elders. In our debased democracy, condescension and
ridicule are often more effective weapons for stifling dissent than force
and intimidation.

Most coverage of the September 20 campus protests told us that students
protest war because they're youthful idealists or because they're afraid of
being drafted. The conclusion is inescapable: those who call for peace are
either naïve or cowardly. Hardly any reports mentioned the other component
of the protests. In addition to opposing the administration's inexorable
march into battle, the students demanded that the people who planned, or
aided and abetted, the crimes of September 11 face the legal consequences of
their depredations. "We're searching for justice, and we want action," said
Michelle Oliveros-Larsen of Amherst College in the Chronicle of Higher
Education. "We just don't want violent action." You probably won't hear
about this highly sensible alternative to war - that the US treat the
September 11 attacks as crimes and pursue the perpetrators through the
mechanisms of international law - unless you're close to a college campus.
But you won't hear about it from everyone on campus.

Ruth Simmons, distinguished president of Brown University, was a guest
commentator on ABC News after George W. Bush announced the Dubya Doctrine
before Congress on the evening of September 20. Peter Jennings asked her to
explain how Dubya's uncompromising rhetoric of war would play in the scented
groves of academe. Simmons acknowledged that some students were upset by the
thought of war, but then she too ascribed these uncertainties to youth,
inexperience and possibly fear. She couldn't bring herself to say that the
protesters might be opposed to bombing Afghanistan for political reasons, or
even that college students might have a political thought during this
rapidly unfolding crisis. They're young. They don't know what to think.

This was condescension by omission. It gets a lot worse.

Walter Shapiro, columnist for the USA Today, sunk to the depths of
condescension in his piece about the campus activism. He used to be anti-war
himself, he wrote, when he was a student and the US was preparing to carpet
Vietnam with napalm and bombs. Then he grew up, and lost his innocence.
"Nothing my generation has done in life could prevent the human tragedy of
last week." True, but get ready for the quantum leap in logic. Because we
couldn't stop the terror attacks, we have no option in the current crisis
but to line up behind Dubya. When today's students are "middle-aged" like
Shapiro is, they'll probably understand this, too. But first they just have
to get that piss and vinegar out of their systems.

"So march for peace if you must," Shapiro concluded. "Feel free to mourn the
deaths of innocent civilians no matter in what country they once resided.
But, in the end, please remember that patriotism transcends mere
flag-waving. Patriotism is instead the shared commitment of 285 million
Americans to mourn those who tragically perished last week and to resolve,
with every ounce of our collective fiber, to create a world that will be
truly safe for your youthful idealism." You know that better world you want?
Only the Pentagon can get it for you. Now sit down and mind your manners.

Shapiro's silly blather reminded me of a history lecture I once suffered
through. The professor told her students that the student movement against
the Vietnam war was little but a "replay of nineteenth-century romanticism"
peopled by spoiled white rich kids who just couldn't understand that there
really are villains in the world. Well, perhaps the antiwar protesters in
the Vietnam era were mostly drawn from the comfortable middle classes, and
perhaps there were many in their ranks who joined the movement just for the
drugs and the free love. That doesn't even begin to discredit their message
that the US war in Vietnam was an unjust and ill-considered adventure that
killed thousands of defenseless peasants and ravaged a country. Thirty years
after the Vietnam war, history has vindicated them. Don't ask an old
peacenik. Ask Robert McNamara, one of the architects of the war in the
Johnson administration. A few years ago, he publicly recanted his tireless
flacking for the war while in office.

In the Vietnam era, as today, the Establishment told protesters to be quiet
and let the people in power do their job. The protesters refused. Today
there's much less room for questioning the perspicacity of the occupants of
the White House as they dispatch the armed forces to distant locales, once
again subjecting American soldiers and untold numbers of foreign civilians
to the law of unintended consequences. Protest will grow slowly, but it will
grow. Undoubtedly, as the antiwar movement finds its legs, the nation's
editorial pages will be filled with belittling comparisons of today's
protesters to the Vietnam generation.

I have a different message for the students who know in their bones that
whatever the nest of hawks in Washington cooks up to fight terrorism is
highly unlikely to prevent future acts of terror, and that the operations
envisioned in the Dubya Doctrine cannot possibly serve the interests of
peace and justice, either here or abroad. Don't be cowed into silence. Don't
shut up because you're being "disrespectful of authority." Above all, don't
let the poohbahs who shape public opinion talk down to you.

Don't march for peace and justice "if you must." March for peace and justice
because you must. In a democracy, concerned citizens have both the right and
the obligation to object when their government pursues wrong-headed policies
in their name. Since even the few genuine progressives in the Democratic
Party won't sound a discordant note in the deafening media-Pentagon chorus,
it's all up to you. You are one of the few flickers of light and hope in
this ever darkening time.

Chris Toensing is editor of Middle East Report (www.merip.org), a
publication of the Middle East Research and Information Project.