Recently in peace movement Category
There’s some interesting follow-up on the Cindy Sheehan “resignation” (see yesterday’s post). One fellow I corresponded with years ago gave a donation then sent an email urging us not to fall into despair. It’s hard.
Go beyond Democratic Party fronts like MoveOne and you’ll find the most of the peace movement is a ridiculously shoestring operation. Nonviolence.org’s four month “ChipIn” fundraising campaign raised $50 per month but the sacrifice isn’t just short-term—just try applying for a mainstream job with a resume chock full of social change work!
Michael Westmoreland-White over on the Levellers blog talks about keeping going through the despair:
This is a cautionary tale for the rest of us, including myself. Outrage, righteous indignation, anger, public grief, are all valid reactions to war and human rights abuses, but they will get us only so far. They may strain marriages and family life. They may lead to speech and action that is not in the spirit of nonviolence and active peacemaking. And, since imperialist militarism is a system (biblically speaking, a Power), it will resist change for the good. Work for justice and peace over the long haul requires spiritual discipline, requires deep roots in a spirituality of nonviolence, including cultivating the virtue of patience.
Michael’s answer is specifically Christian but I think his advice to step back and attend to the roots of our activism is wise despite one’s motivations.
Sheehan’s retirement didn’t stop her from talking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now this morning. She talks about cash-starved peace activists and contrasts them with the tens of millions presidential candidates are raising, most of which will go to big media TV networks for ads. Sheehan says we need more than just an antiwar movement:
Like, ending the Vietnam War was major, but people left the movement. It was an antiwar movement. They didn’t stay committed to true and lasting peace. And that’s what we really have to do.
More Cindy Sheehan reading across the blogosphere available via Google and Technorati.
And for those looking for a little good news check out the brand new site for the Global Network for Nonviolence. I designed it for them as part of my freelance design work but it’s been a joy and a lot of fun to be working more closely with a good group of international activists again. Their nonviolence links page includes sites for some really committed grassroots peacemakers. This long-term peace work may not give us headlines in the New York Times but it’s touched millions over the years. If humanity is ever going to grow into the kind of culture of peace Sheehan dreams of then we’ll need a lot more wonderful projects like these.
Poor Cindy Sheehan, the famous anti-war mom who camped outside Bush’s Crawford Texas home following the death of her son in Iraq. News comes today that she’s all but resigned from the protest movement. She posted the following on her Daily Kos blog
The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party… However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”
The sad truth is that she was used. Much of the power and money in the anti-war movement comes from Democratic Party connections. Her tragic story, soccer mom looks and articulate idealism made her a natural poster girl for an anti-Bush movement that has never really been as anti-war as it’s claimed.
Congressional Democrats had all the information they needed in 2002 to expose President Bush’s outlandish claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But they authorized his war of aggression anyway. More recently, Americans gave them a landslide vote of confidence in last November’s elections but still they step back from insisting on an Iraq pull-out. The Nonviolence.org archives are full of denunciations of President Clinton’s repeated missile attacks on places like the Sudan and Afghanistan; before reinventing himself as a earth-toned eco candidate, Al Gore positioned himself as the pro-war hawk of the Democratic Party.
Anti-war activists need to build alliances and real change will need to involve insiders of both major American political parties. But as long as the movement is fueled with political money it will be beholden to those interests and will ultimately defer to back-room Capital Hill deal-making.
I feel for Cindy. She’s been on a publicity roller coaster these past few years. I hope she finds the rest she needs to re-ground herself. Defeating war is the work of a lifetime and it’s the work of a movement. Sheehan’s witness has touched people she’ll never meet. It’s made a difference. She’s a woman of remarkable courage who’s pointing out the puppet strings she’s cutting as she steps off the stage. Hats off to you Cindy.
Nonviolence.org’s fundraising campaign ends in a few hours. In four months we’ve raised $150 which doesn’t even cover that period’s server costs. This project celebrates its twelfth year this fall and accurately exposed the weapons of mass destruction hoaxes in real time as they were being thrust on a gullible Congress. Cindy signed off:
Good-bye America …you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it. It’s up to you now.
Sometimes I really have to unite with that sentiment.
I must be honest and admit that I’ve always found President Bush’s State of the Union speeches unbearable. The distortions and half-truths are infuriating and the unearned confidence of a draft-dodging rich kid turned failed military adventurer just sends my blood pressure through the roof. I wish I could be detached enough to listen at least to the art of fine speech-writing but the message gets in the way.
Better then to listen to the Democratic response, given by Senator James Web. The transcript is over on the NYTimes and the video is over on YouTube. Here’s a taste.
Like so many other Americans, today and throughout our history, we serve and have served, not for political reasons, but because we love our country. On the political issues those matters of war and peace, and in some cases of life and death we trusted the judgment of our national leaders. We hoped that they would be right, that they would measure with accuracy the value of our lives against the enormity of the national interest that might call upon us to go into harm’s way. We owed them our loyalty, as Americans, and we gave it. But they owed us sound judgment, clear thinking, concern for our welfare, a guarantee that the threat to our country was equal to the price we might be called upon to pay in defending it.
Worth a look: Josh Marshall over at TalkingPointsMemo.com had the neat idea to set up a YouTube group for people to give their own video responses to the State of the Union.
In the news: more than 1,000 service members sign petition to end Iraq War (Stars and Stripes), organized by the Appeal for Redress campaign sponsored by a handful of military antiwar groups including Nonviolence.org alums Veterans for Peace. The simple petition reads:
As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.Supporting the troops means making sure American lives aren’t being wasted in dead-end wars. Their service and their sacrifice has been too great to continue the lies that have fueled this conflict since the very beginning, starting with the mythical Saddam/Al Qaeda connection and the phantasmic weapons of mass destruction. The current escalation (euphemised as a “surge”) of troop levels is simply an escalation of a badly-run war plan. When will this all end?
Update: President Bush has admitted that the Iraq government fumbled the executions.. Meanwhile, the UN puts the 2006 Iraqi death toll at 34,000. When will Bush admit he’s fumbled this whole war?
On Saturday, November 26, 2005 four members of Christian peacemakers Teams were abducted in iraq. On March 20th the body of American Quaker Tom Fox was found; on March 23rd, the remaining three hostages were freed by U.S. and British military forces.
Here at Nonviolence.org, we have always been impressed and highly supportive of the deep witness of the Christian peacemakers Teams. Their members have represented the best in both the peace and Christian movements, consistently putting themselves in danger to witness the gospel of peace. Not content to write letters or stand on pickett lines in safe western capitals, they go to the frontlines of violence and proclaim a radical alternative.
While we can be grateful for the release of the three remaining hostages, we should continue to remember the 43 foreign hostages still being held in iraq and the 10-30 iraqis reportedly taken hostage each and every day. As iraq slips into full-scale civil war we must also organize against the war-mongerers, both foreign and internal and finde ways of standing alongside those iraqis who want nothing more than peace and freedom.
Here’s links to recent articles on the situation.
Memorials to Tom Fox |
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And a personal note from Nonviolence.org’s Martin Kelley: I myself am a Christian and Quaker and one of our folks, Tom Fox, of Langley Hill (Virginia) Friends Meeting is among the hostages. I don’t know Tom personally but over the last few days I’ve learned we have many Friends in common and they have all testified to his deep committment to peace. Some of the links above are more explicitly Quaker than most things I post to Nonviolence.org, but they give perspective on why Tom and his companions would see putting themselves in danger as an act of religious service. I am grateful for Tom’s current witness in iraq—yes, even as a hostage—but I certainly hope he soon comes back to his family and community and that the attention and witness of these four men’s ordeal helps to bring the news of peace to streets and halls of Baghdad, Washington, London and Ottawa.
Action Step:
If you have a blog or website, you can add a feed of that will include the latest Nonviolence.org-compiled links. Simply add this javascript to the sidebar of your site:
(An earlier problem with the javascript not working properly has been repaired).
The UK News Telegraph is confirming what many of us in the peace movement have been worrying about all day: that at least some of the four westerners abducted in iraq over the weekend were members of the Christian peacemakers Teams
A British anti-war activist abducted in iraq was investigating human rights abuses with a group called the Christian peacemakers Team when he was held.
Norman Kember, 74, the only publicly-named abductee, is a former secretary of the Baptist peace Fellowship in England and a board member of the English Fellowship of Reconciliation. He’s been an outspoken opponent of the war in iraq. In the April/May 2005 edition of FOR’s newsletter (pdf) he talked about challenging himself to do more:
Now personally it has always worried me that I am a ‘cheap’ peacemaker (by analogy with Bonhoeffer’s
concept of ‘cheap’ grace). Being a CO in Britain,talking, writing, demonstrating about peace is in no
way taking risks like young service men in iraq. I look for excuses why I should not become involved with
CPT or EAPPI. Perhaps the readers will supply mewithwith some?
Here at Nonviolence.org, I’m occassionally chatised for being more concerned about western victims of violence (indeed, how many iraqis were abducted or killed this weekend alone?). It’s a fair charge and an important reminder. But perhaps it is only human nature to worry about those you know. I’ve probably met Norman in passing at one or another international peace gathering; I might well know the three unidentified abductees. I suspect a peace movement veteran like Kember would be the first to tell me that pacifists shouldn’t sit contentedly in middle-class comfy armchairs simply souting slogans or dashing off emails (Quaker Johan Maurer, wrote an impassioned blog post about this just last week). Part of the reason folks put themselves on the lines for organizations like Christian peacemakers Teams is that they want to do their peace witness among those facing the violence. When the victims aren’t just “them, over there” but to “us, and our friends, over there” it becomes more real. This is what the families of the American military casualties have been telling us. Now, with Kember and the three others missing, our worry is made more real. For better or worse, the peace movement is scanning the headlines from iraq with even more worry tonight.
Our prayers are with Kember, as they are with all the missing and all the victims of this horrible war.
Protesters and police scuffle at the Biodemocracy Rally in Philadelphia. The well-dressed (and hatted) people are the civil affairs police officers. Apparently one of them suffered a heart attack in the meele and had to be evacuated on stretcher. See the full photo set here.
Update: The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that one of the police officers at the center of this scuffle has died of an apparent heart attack
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| Deep Throat in an 1958 FBI publicity photo. From Wikipedia |
Although I was far too young to follow the events at the time, the Washington Post stories combined with the followup book and movie to create a popular images of the fearless investigative reporter, the showdowy government insider with unclear motives and the newspaper publishers taking a risk for the big story.
So it seems ironic that Deep Throat—no excuse me, W. Mark Felt, the number two man at the FBI in the early 1970s—was a close assistant of the notorious FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and was himself convicted in 1980 for authorizing government agents to break into homes of suspected anti-Vietnam war protesters (looking for suspects from the radical Weather Underground bombings).
The War Resisters League is part of a National Call for Nonviolent Resistance, though this is the first we at Nonviolence.org have heard of it (lucky we surfed by this morning, does the peace movement take pride in its insularity?). See the iraq Pledge of Resistance for more info. Unfortunately with this little advance notice, we won’t be going to DC’s events this weekend. If any Nonviolence.org readers do we’d love a report.
Over on AlterNet, Normon Solomon is asking why the internet progressive group MoveOn has dropped iraq from it’s agenda: “When a large progressive organization takes the easy way and makes peace with war, the abdication of responsibility creates a vacuum. Ironically, a group that became an internet phenom by recognizing and filling a void is now creating one.”
It’s been five years since the instantly-famous world trade protests in Seattle invented a new sort of activism. Angry confrontations with police dominated the pictures coming from the protests. The protest marked the coming-out party of the Independent Media movement, both both brought together and reported on the protests.
In the Seattle Weekly, Geov Parrish asks Is This What Failure Looks Like?:
But it’s one thing to shut down a high-level meeting for a day; it’s quite another to get your priorities enacted as public policy. And so, in the half-decade since Seattle’s groundbreaking protests, anti-globalization and fair-trade organizers in the United States have struggled to find ways to not simply create debate but win.
I’ve always respect Geov, who’s been one of the rare pacifist organizers who’s acted as a bridge between the gray-haired oldline peace groups and the younger Seattle-style activists. So it’s kind of funny to see his thoughtful article described by Counterpunch this way. Read Charles Munson’s critique, Seattle Weekly Trashes Anti-Globalization Movement.
The WTO protests were a landmark and radicalized a lot of new activists. But despite being 99% peaceful, they never shook the image of the black-clad anarchist spoiled brats throwing bricks through windows. Although I had friends who donned the black hankerchiefs, the black bloc always reminded me of the loser high school kids who turn over dumpsters behind the 7-11; the high political rhetoric seemed secondary to the joy of being “bad.” It was look-at-me! activism, which is fun and occassionally useful, but not the stuff to create fundamental social change.
I participated in a few post-Seattle events: the anti World Bank protests in Washington DC and the Republican National Convention protests in my hometown of Philadelphia, serving as an Indymedia worker for both. I witnessed wonderful creativity, I marveled at the instant community of the Indymedia Centers, I was fasincated by the cell-phone/internet organizing.
But there was also this kind of nagging sense that we were trying to recreate the mythical “Seattle.” It was as if we were all derivative rock bands trying to jump on the bandwagon of a breakthrough success: the Nivana clones hoping to recatch the magic. It was hard to shake the feeling we were play acting ourselves sometimes.
It’s good to honestly reflect on the protests now. We need to see what worked and what didn’t. The fervor and organizing strategies changed activism and will continue to shape how we see social-change organizing. The world is better for what went down in Seattle five years ago, and so is North American polticial organizing. But let’s stop idolizing what happened there and let’s see what we can learn. For we’ve barely begun the work.
Over on the Picket Line, more questioning of peace movement sacred cows. PL questions whether the Peace Tax Fund is just an accounting trick and follows up looking at the benefits enumerated by its organizers.
He sums it up with this great analogy: “It would be as if the government told conscientious objectors that they had to take up arms and shoot at the enemy just like everybody else, but that they didn’t have to take credit for their kills if they didn’t want to.”
It’s interesting reading this along with the article questioning the peace movement’s misplaced excitement about a possible military draft.
Rick Jahnkow argues in May’s Nonviolent Activist that there’s a Decreased Likelihood of Draft. There are many aging pacifists that have become obsessed lately with the idea that compulsory military service might be returning to the United States. For example, I’ve watched the leader of one annual anti-draft workshop predict the draft’s imminent return year after year, in ever more excited terms and wondered what evidence this organizer has seen that I haven’t.
Jahnkow watches this issue as much as anyone in his work for the San Diego-based Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft and he’s been watching the hype build as he’s become more skeptical:
Warnings about an impending draft have been circulating on the Internet for months now. Some are tying a possible draft to the election and predicting with bold certainty that conscription will be introduced in 2005… The energy that�s been generated on this topic has been both amazing and, I have to confess, somewhat seductive to anti-draft organizations like the one for which I work.
Most of the people I’ve seen get excited by a possible return of the draft were in their teens back in the Vietnam War era. Their organizing sometimes seems almost nostalgic for the issues of their youth. They’re trying to save the current generation from having to go through the same trauma. But the older activists’ anti-draft work is often patronistic and self-congratulatory, for it doesn’t take into account the fact that younger Americans don’t need saving.
The bottom line truth is that the Pentagon simply couldn’t reinstate the draft. Jahnkow cites a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that found that 88 percent of people 18-29 oppose a return of the draft. There would be mass mayhem if the draft returned. While some young men would surely obey, a huge percentage would actively defy it. Even if only 10% dramatically refused, the system would break down. This is a generation raised in a post-punk culture and many of its members aggressively question authority. They were raised by parents who lived through the sixties and saw widespread lies and abuse of power, including the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The media mythology around sixties-era radicalism has kept us from realizing that there’s a baseline of everyday radicalism today that far overshadows much of what was going on thirty years ago. The Pentagon knows this better than the peace movement does.
It’s not the only nostalgic protesting this generation is engaging in these days and I’ve compared revived organizing around phone war tax resistance to “recycling dead horses.” I agree with Rick that today’s teens and twenty-somethings have real issues which we need to address. He says it so well:
The latter point leads me to the second reason why I have some negative feelings about the current concern over the draft: Much of the anxiety is coming from people who are ignoring the more pressing problem of aggressive military recruiting, which, among other things, disproportionately affects non-affluent youths and people of color. In essence, there has been a draft for these individuals�a poverty draft�and yet it has drawn relatively little attention from antiwar activists. There is a race and class bias reflected in this that needs to be seriously considered and addressed by the general peace movement.
Here’s the link to his article again
Related:
- Last November we published a provocative article by pacifist Johann Christoph Arnold arguing that A Military Draft Would be Good for Us and a personal response piece I wrote about how the pressures of a military draft can force an eighteen year old to really think hard about issues of war and peace.
- Nonviolence.org has guide to issues of military conscription and conscientious objection. We also watch issues of the peace movement, and tend to highlight generational issues a lot.
- The Urban Legend debunkers at Snopes.com have tracked and researched the draft fear emails going around. They don’t think a draft is coming back and any time soon, citing many sources.
On the Picket Line, a funny post about the circus of the current progressive movement
In San Francisco, to be part of the anti-war, progressive movement means to be sharing the stage with a whole bunch of unapologetic Stalinists, paranoid schizophrenics, ersatz intifadists, tin-eared rhetorical broken-records, insatiable identity-politics police, new-age gurus of every variety, publicity hounds, careerist Democrats, and the like… A superficial fetishization of the theatrical residue of history gets you a renaissance faire, not a successful political movement.
The author also gives some hopeful reports from a recent conference he attended.
It’s getting scary in Amerikkka when they start rounding up peaceniks in Iowa
To hear the antiwar protesters describe it, their forum at a local university last fall was like so many others they had held over the years. They talked about the nonviolent philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they said, and how best to convey their feelings about iraq into acts of civil disobedience. But last week, subpoenas began arriving seeking details about the forum’s sponsor — its leadership list, its annual reports, its office location —and the event itself.
Mild-mannered protesters wearing 1980s-style Guatemalan clothing, talking about Gandhi and climbing the fences of National Guard bases are not a threat to state of Iowa. But this kind of strong-arm tactic is a clear threat free speech and a clear act of intimidation to those who might join the peace movement. How sad. Unfortunately I know lots of people who are already afraid to speak out to loudly—this will silence at least some of them.
Of course, it’s hard to get too worked up about Iowa subpoenas, when much more serious civil rights violations have been going on since the start of the Afghanistan War. The “prisoners of war” down in the American base at Guantanamo Bay have been held without charge or trial for two years now.