Below is a very interesting commentarty from the War Resisters League. The statement is at the bottom of this page; http://www.warresisters.org/talking_points.htm Stuart Elliott
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The Wrong Message
On Saturday, an estimated 10,000 gathered to oppose war and racism in Washington. D.C. Thousands more protested in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and points in between and beyond. Thousands marched in Sydney, Australia. CNN reported 15,000 demonstrating in Vancouver, Canada.
It was the third straight weekend of such protests, and additional various “National Days of Action” have been called already for Oct. 7 (by a coalition of traditional peace groups) and Oct. 13 (an already-planned series of national protests regarding weapons in space that has morphed, like yesterday’s D.C. gathering, into an anti-war event.)
Given the stakes, such activity on the streets isn’t surprising; to many people, after all, what is at risk is nothing less than World War III, a conflagration that has global implications in a way that Kosovo or the Gulf War never did. But the public demonstrations are severely misleading to the public in at least two important ways. First, it’s not just the tactic of a street protest that’s vaguely and disspiritingly familiar. We’re asking our political and military leaders to make new and different choices in treacherous terrain, but protest leaders are, themselves, falling back on comfortable, familiar tactics and iconography. This is not a “peace” movement, in the sense that “peace,” to most observers, means that government critics don’’t want anything done. It’s not even an “anti-war” movement, in the sense that critics of Bush’s declared “War on Terrorism” do, in fact, oppose terrorism and want it stopped.
But by highlighting what they’re against, public agitators are refusing to answer the most obvious question any observer has: “Well, what, then?” A lot of people, including a lot of Pentagon generals, doubt that full-scale military action is the best way to tackle this problem. The only way in which our country is “united” on this issue is in the belief that something must be done, both to bring September 11’s accomplices to bear for their acts and to prevent future strikes. By implying that nothing should be done, peace signs and “no war!” posters run counter to the sensibilities of nearly everyone in the country, alienating what are in fact oftentimes potential allies. What’s needed, desperately, is sound bite language for a positive program that would combat terrorism far more effectively than military action. That program might look like:
Better domestic security, without sacrificing civil liberties;
Better global police and intelligence cooperation, without giving covert operations a free hand to act illegally; and
Demanding that all governments, including ours, act in ways that promote the ideals of freedom, democracy, and economic opportunity that the U.S. wants to stand for, so as to address many of the conditions that inspire terrorism.
The ambitious might throw “religious tolerance” on to that last list, or suggest a role for the U.N. or World Court in trying crimes against humanity. But the point is that, as never before, the “peace” movement must start, in all its public pronouncements, not by emphasizing what it’s against, but by rallying support for what it favors. In this war, for once, everyone is concerned, and few people need to be convinced that war would be a dangerous step. War is a failure of imagination; what’’s needed is the alternative. Without it, what should be a massive street movement risks sliding, week by week, into irrelevance.
And that’s a shame, because the second way in which these protests mislead is that the real anti-military-response organizing is elsewhere, and everywhere. Almost all of it is both below the media radar and not being done by established anti-war groups (or various left-leaning opportunists) at all. It’s happening in one-on-one conversations, between people in their workplaces, schools, churches, on the Net or phone, or over back yard fences, as people share fears, anger, worries, and their doubts about the wisdom of an open-ended “war” against an undefinable enemy spread throughout the world.
Those are, in simplest terms, the concerns of the generals, not the peaceniks. But in this “new kind of war,” the traditional divisions don’t apply; there’s no reason a vision of a world of greater peace and economic justice cannot be wed to what makes strategic sense. We should, in fact, demand it. But until public demonstrations start focusing on what the U.S. and its allies should do, rather than what they shouldn’t, few are going to make that connection.
The preceding is a personal opinion. Try not to post more than daily.
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