resignation 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.

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.

The current war talk against Iran is hopelessly short-sighted. A successful US military action would only delay Iran's getting nuclear weapons by another ten years or so but it would greatly increase the chance that they'd want to use them. A war would justify Tehran's paranoia and legitimize a strike-back against the US or our allies when they finally do perfect the bomb.

It is widely rumored that the top US civilian leadership wants to use "tactical" nuclear weapons to destroy the underground labs where Iranian scientists are refining the uranium. The US military is reportedly very against this, and this is most likely why we're seeing all of these retired US generals calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Although a dozen-or-so countries have nuclear weapons, no one has used them since the US bombed Japan fifty years ago. No country wants to be the first to use them again, knowing there would be an incredible international backlash against them. If the US did launch even a limited nuclear attack against Iran, it would make the use of atomic weapontry more acceptable.

Nuclear weapons are a fact of life now. Iran is going to get them, sooner or later. Many of the countries in the region have bombs--Pakistan, India, Israel, China. The US can't put this genie back in the bottle. We need to build an international consensus that their use in unacceptable in any circumstance. Which means we need to stop planning on using them ourselves.

Seymour Hersh's article on US war preparations has a great quote in it from an unnamed "European official":

Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it. If there was a charm offensive with Iran, the mullahs would be in trouble in the long run.

We have two choices: bomb Iran now, which would possibly hold off the threat another ten years but would certainly turn younger Iranians against us for generations to come. Or we could manage the situation as best we can, using international inspectors to delay atomic weapons if possible but launching not bombs but the "charm offensive." We need to think about what the Iranian-US relationship will look like ten and twenty and fifty years from now. Even a "small" war now would lead to a huge war then.

All wars start decades before the bullets start flying. The seeds of World War II were in the debilitating reparations the victorious allies forced on a defeated German twenty years before at the end of World War I. By 1938 the war was all-but-inevitable. We can only stop wars if we look to the future and build friends of our enemies now. Iran will change. United States actions now will shape the future of Iran. Let's not muck it up.

The resignation of the government is Lebanon is being hailed as a "boost for democracy" Reports describe Beirut as a sea of excitement. ABC News and others are reporting that Syria is about to announce its withdrawl from Lebanon. How wonderful it would be if Beirut could emerge from its thirty years of chaos with the start of the 1975 civil war.

Even good change can cause turmoil. David Hirst, writing in the guardian, wonders whether the upheaval threatends to destabilize Syria and turn it into another iraq: "After the example of elections, however flawed, in occupied iraq and Palestine, has come this new, unscheduled outbreak of popular self-assertion in a country [Lebanon] where a sister Arab state, not an alien occupier, is in charge."

For the latest news, you can turn to the Guardian's special report on Syria and iraq. To jump in the fray, you can turn to the Nonviolence Board's thread on the resignation of the Lebanese government

In the current issue of _Fellowship_ magazine, Paul Rogat Loeb says it's a time for peace activists to be "Reclaiming Hope":www.forusa.org/Fellowship/Sept-Oct-03/Loeb.html. Talking to a peace movement that feels demoralized and beaten, he writes: bq. This response [of despair] risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy—but a movement that may still be our best hope to transform America should not be allowed to dissipate in resignation. We did well, and we got it right. I've always thought Paul can be a little overly-optimistic about future movements springing up, but he makes some good points here. A peace movement as as large and vocal as the current one has effects in Washington that no governmental leader will ever admit to. The planning and execution of the war was certainly affected by the rising tide of opposition; the Bush Administration's hawks have certainly been watching the public opinion polls to see how far and how fast they could push their unilateral war agenda before the protests mushroom even larger. Paul does a good job looking at the war from the long perspective. It can take decades to fundamentally change the balance of power and the policies of the U.S. war machine. Wars almost always brew for decades before the first shots are fired. bq. The roots of the iraq war go back decades, from the "Southern Strategy" that handed the Republicans so much political power to the US role in bringing Saddam Hussein and his Baathist party to power to begin with. These roots won't be instantly untangled. If we look only at the past few months, we didn't win what we'd hoped. We ran out of time to stop the war. But we were never in this simply to stop a single war.

The Idiot who came up with the "Terror Psychic Network" is leaving the Pentagon over the flap. What's even more striking is his identity: it's John Poindexter, one of the people at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked the Reagan Administration. For those too young to remember, in the Iran-Contra affair Reagan's kookiest spooks secretly sold arms to U.S. archenemy number 1 (Iran) in order to circumvent Congressional demands that they not fund an opposition army against U.S. archenemy number 2 (Nicaragua), with the money being funneled through the country that then and now still inexplicably isn't public enemy number 3 (Saudi Arabia). It was the circuitousness of it all more than anything that kept Reagan out of jail for all of this. Why Poindexter was ever allowed back anywhere near Washington, much less the Pentagon, is a mystery. Here are some articles on Poindexter's return to Washington and return of the Iran-Contra crew to the (Bush II) White House. Here's another article on the resignation of the Reagan crook turned Bush-II fool.