A Hundred Peace Movements Bloom

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Dec 20 10:29:02 PST 2002


***** This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030106&s=kaplan

A Hundred Peace Movements Bloom by ESTHER KAPLAN [from the January 6, 2003 issue]

...So far, the strength of the opposition is certainly not its unity, but its diversity. Here, for example, is a snapshot of the New York City antiwar movement in the final days of November: Uptown, black and Latino youth activists and tenant organizers huddle in a back room, discussing how to turn out bodega owners and taxi drivers for their December 14 march in Harlem "for schools and jobs, not war"; while downtown, a collection of apron-clad activists, from such global justice outfits as Reclaim the Streets, hold a "bake sale for the military," a propaganda stunt to promote an antiwar listserv. Some 2,000 high school students walk out of their classes to protest the war, organized by one antiwar coalition, Not in Our Name, and a week later, a thousand African-American congregants pack the rafters--and basement--of the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn for an antiwar town meeting sponsored by another national coalition, International ANSWER. Meanwhile, coalition-averse artists, interior decorators, restaurateurs and go-go boys calling themselves "Glamericans" meet to plan a star-studded antiwar bash designed to reach those who get their news from MTV.

Glance around the country and one sees this diversity multiplied: People came out for peace marches and vigils even in such conservative redoubts as Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Anchorage, Alaska. An estimated 100,000 turned out for a march in Washington. Such mainstays of the institutional movement as NOW, the NAACP, the National Council of Churches, the Conference of Catholic Bishops and the California Labor Federation--organizations that collectively represent millions of Americans--have all issued strong antiwar resolutions, as have some thirty city councils....

The groundswell of opposition, however, was ahead of any leadership....Peace Action, a descendant of SANE/Freeze, has 100 chapters across the country and calls itself "the nation's largest peace organization." But last fall, says Lynch, "we just didn't have the capacity" to coordinate a mass action. Networks of the other longstanding peace organizations--Pax Christi, the Quakers, the War Resisters League--have provided the infrastructure for many of the tiny vigils in Middle America, but nothing in the way of national coordination. "The historic peace organizations are always there," says Leslie Cagan, lead organizer of the 1982 antinuke rally in Central Park, "and yet they always need to be regrouped whenever a new war comes along."

While these sectors regrouped, far-left groups stepped into the breach. The International Action Center has built momentum since the 1991 Iraq war through an antisanctions campaign [Yoshie: Important!] and was ready to roll after September 11, convening its new antiwar coalition, International ANSWER, within days. It was ANSWER that organized the surprisingly large October 26 rallies in San Francisco and Washington, with groups like Peace Action coming along for the ride. Next in line was Not in Our Name, a more populist alternative to ANSWER, whose pledge of resistance struck a chord across the country, reproduced in small-town papers like the Sierra Vista Herald, which serves an Arizona military town, and inspired a national day of actions in early October. Much has been made recently in the left and mainstream press of these coalitions' ties to the Workers World Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party, respectively, but journalists' warnings about the risks posed by these groups lag behind conversations in the streets.

Peace activists have been strategizing about the International Action Center since an earlier guise forced dual marches during the 1991 Gulf War; at issue was their refusal to condemn Iraq's invasion of Kuwait or to support economic sanctions as a war alternative [Yoshie: As it turned out, the IAC was quite right about not supporting "economic sanctions as a war alternative." Genocidal impacts of the sanctions that followed the Gulf War have by now convinced broad swathes of activists that sanctions can have more devastating impacts on civilians than bombings. Whether or not to condemn Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was a political judgment call: on one hand, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait clearly violated the U.N. charter, even though Iraq did have legitimate grievances against a feudal monarchy with few women's rights that had been created by colonizers and was (and has been) dependent on the labor of the non-citizen majority of the population; on the other hand, condemning it demanded an action that backed up the condemnation, which is to say, if not war, at least economic sanctions. If one didn't support either, one's condemnation amounted to an exercise in futility, in effect standing on the sideline to watch Iraq incorporate Kuwait into itself, which was acceptable to some activists, but not to others. Even Alexander Cockburn was confused -- see <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021223&s=exchange>]. And newcomers like youth organizer Erica Smiley, 22, weathered painful squabbles over the DC demonstrations last April--with ANSWER moving the date of its Palestine-focused march to coincide with a national student peace march, nearly eclipsing the latter's call to "stop the war at home and abroad."

But students, antiglobalization street activists and old-time peaceniks [sic] alike appreciate ANSWER's knack for mobilizing the unaffiliated and turning out the Arab-American community--the latter due in great part to the leadership of groups such as the Free Palestine Alliance in ANSWER's coalition. Tom Hayden recalls "similar divisions, and rival organizations and factions," in the 1960s antiwar movement, but says there was an "ecology" to it, in which "most of us recognized that there was a certain inevitability about the other camp." While some antiwar activists shun ANSWER altogether, most adopt this ecological view, and say they are ready to work with--or at least around--the coalition. Most also agree that a sectarian approach--even a liberal sectarianism that seeks to isolate the far left--will never build a broad antiwar movement. And they share the confidence, says David McReynolds, a longtime activist with the War Resisters League, that "ANSWER's monopoly has to be broken, and it will be."...

For those behind United for Peace--such as Cagan; global justice guru Medea Benjamin, founding director of Global Exchange; and former AFL-CIO official Bill Fletcher, president of TransAfrica Forum--the antiwar movement's biggest test is not what to do about ANSWER but whether it is possible to bring together the traditional peace organizations with the two most dynamic social movements in recent years: the sprawling global justice coalition that debuted in Seattle and the urban racial justice movement, with its vibrant campaigns around police brutality, racial profiling and immigrants' rights. Such a merger, they argue, would provide lasting infrastructure for an antiwar movement.

"Events are showing that these issues are interlinked," says Fletcher. "But it will be a challenge for the antiwar movement to talk about the role of empire and the dangers of domestic repression, and a challenge for organizers in communities of color, who have focused on domestic issues to the exclusion of foreign policy."

It's not an easy fit for the global justice movement, either, except perhaps for the movement's anticapitalist sector, which, says El-Amine, has "always understood that you can't have that invisible hand of the market work overseas without the fist of militarism to open up markets." Benjamin says that earlier this fall, she heard deep concern from other global justice forces, still struggling to regroup after September 11, that taking on the war might alienate labor--which was virtually unanimous in support of the invasion of Afghanistan--from its "Teamsters and turtles" alliance. But it turns out that in the view of American labor, Iraq is no Afghanistan. On Iraq, says former Teamsters organizing director Bob Muehlenkamp, "unions have begun to question their government's war policy earlier, more broadly and more seriously than ever before at such an early stage of a war threat," with giant union locals, and even two state labor federations, taking an antiwar stance....In addition, says Benjamin, the massive antiwar demonstration that burst out of the European Social Forum in Florence in early November allayed American activists' concerns about taking on the war. "It sure didn't seem [the Europeans] had a problem convincing people there that saying no to war was part of the global justice movement," she says.

But the fault line that runs between these three movements--and could easily capsize them as they combine--is what Fletcher calls "the tripwire of US politics": race. While the traditional peace movement--especially its religious wing, mobilized by early, strong leadership from the National Council of Churches--has conferred a moral legitimacy on antiwar sentiment and has reached deeply into Middle America, its organizations are mostly white and middle class. That pattern has plagued the anti-corporate globalization movement, too. This whiteness shapes everything from outreach strategies to meeting style to which messages are considered to have "broad appeal." So it will take some profound rumblings for this movement to tap the deep pockets of antiwar sentiment among African-Americans, Muslims and Latinos. (A recent poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that African-American support for the war was at a low 19 percent.)

This is why one of the most talked-about developments among antiwar activists is a new coalition, Racial Justice 9-11 [@ <http://www.rj911.org/>], formed specifically to build antiwar resistance among communities of color. The coalition's founding conference last February drew forty community-based groups from across the country that have traditionally worked only on home-front agendas, such as criminal justice reform. Coordinator Hany Khalil says that between "the shift of public money to a permanent war abroad" and the possibility "that our own home countries might be targeted down the road," RJ9-11 aims to frame the issues in a way that will break a "routinization" of priorities and focus community attention on the war. Indeed, twenty more groups have joined the coalition in recent months.

As these movements come together, serious differences of opinion are inevitable. While some at the founding meeting of United for Peace urged that a narrow message, "Stop the war on Iraq," would appeal most to Middle America, Khalil and others argue that separating the war abroad from the war at home--from immigrant roundups to stateside structural readjustment--will do little to activate people of color. (The Joint Center's poll showed that while most African-Americans oppose a war, only 6 percent rank it as the top concern.)

Likewise, some urge avoiding the third rail of Palestine, not so much because it would likely alienate Jewish institutions, which have exhibited little inclination to oppose this war anyway, but because the issue has to be carefully formulated to avoid alienating important liberal institutions as well. NOW vice president Olga Vives, for example, mentioned "balance" on the Israel-Palestine conflict as crucial to her group's involvement in a broader peace movement. But given that the Palestinian cause has galvanized the student left and will be deeply affected by any war in the region, Khalil predicts that the antiwar movement will have to take up the question.

The winning formula, Fletcher says, is to insist that "the front needs to include anyone who is in opposition to this war," to respect political differences within the movement as it expands and to work toward "a broader, anti-imperialist political analysis" that can prepare the movement to challenge future American military adventures and their domestic repercussions.... ***** -- Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>



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