critiquing Posts

Just a little note to everyone that I've blogged a couple of posts over on Nonviolence.org. They're both based on "peace mom" Cindy Sheeran's "resignation" from the peace movement yesterday.

It's all a bit strange to see this from a long-time peace activist perspective. The movement that Sheehan's talking about and now critiquing is not movement I've worked with for the last fifteen-plus years. The organizations I've known have all been housed in crumbling buildings, with too-old carpets and furniture lifted as often as not from going out of business sales. Money's tight and careers potentially sacrificed to help build a world of sharing, caring and understanding.

The movement Sheehan talks about is fueled by millions of dollars of Democratic Party-related money, with campaigns designed to mesh well with Party goals via the so-called 527 groups and other indirect mechanisms. Big Media likes to crown these organizations as the antiwar movement, but as Sheehan and Amy Goodman discuss in today's Democracy Now interview, corporate media will end up with much of the tens of millions of dollars candidates are now raising. Sheehan makes an impassioned plea for people to support those grassroots campaigns that aren't supported by the "peace movement" but this reinforces the notion that its the moneyed interests that make up the movement. I'm sure she knows better but it's hard to work for so long and to make so many sacrifices and still be so casually dismissed--not just me but thousands of committed activists I've known over the years.

There are a few peace organizations in that happy medium between toadying and poverty (nice carpets, souls still intact) but it mystifies me why there isn't a broader base of support for grassroots activism. I myself decided to leave professional peace work almost a decade ago after the my Nonviolence.org project raised such pitiful sums. At some point I decided to stop whining about this phenomenon and just look for better-paying employment elsewhere but it still fascinates me from a sociological perspective.

Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of Christ is a challenge for many modern Quakers. Most of the rich metaphors of co-mingled joy and suffering of the early Friends have been dumbed-down to feel-good cliches. Can the debate on this movie help us return to that uncomfortable place where we can acknowledge the complexities of being fervently religious in a world haunted by past sins and still in need of conviction and comfort?

Burning up the blogosphere is a post and discussion on Michael J Totten's site about the "Workers World Party and International ANSWeR":http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000131.html. He calls them "the new skinheads" (huh?), but his critique of these organizations and the "unconditional support" they give to anti-U.S. fascists the world over is valid. As a pacifist it's often a tough balancing act to try to remain a steady voice for peace: this spring we were trying to simultaneously critiquing both Saddam Hussein and U.S. war plans against iraq. Both left and right denounce pacifists for this insistence on consistency, but that's okay: it is these times when nonviolent activists have the most to contribute to the larger societal debate. But hard-left groups like International ANSWeR refuse to draw the line and refuse to condemn the very real evil that exists in the world. International ANSWeR has sponsored big anti-war rallies over the last year, but anti-war is not necessarily pro-nonviolence. Many of the participants at the rallies would never support International ANSWeR's larger agenda, but go because it's a peace rally, shrugging off the politics of the sponsoring group. I suspect that International ANSWeR's support base would disappear pretty quickly if they started rallying on other issues. International ANSWeR just had another rally last weekend but you didn't see it listed here on Nonviolence.org. Other peace groups co-sponsored it, echoing the All-caps/exclamation style of organizing. It's very strange to go the site of "United for peace," a coalition of peace groups, and look down the list of its next three events: "Stop the Wall!," "Stop the FTAA!, "Shut Down the School of the Americas" When did pacifism become shouting for attention alongside the Workers World Party? Why are we all about stopping this and shutting down that?