So far, so good.
> ...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....
Is anybody getting this yet? When I've made similar arguments over these many months, that there is more than one peace movement, my writing either fell on deaf ears or was attacked as being "sectarian" and "divisive." So now that the Nation has recognized this fact, am I vindicated or marginalized again?
> 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.
This, of course, is nowhere near the truth of what happened. I've explained in earlier emails how the IAC had engaged in a process of creating competing demo to anti-globalization movement convergences, with few activists taking the bait. The only reason why the IAC was "ready to roll" after 9-11 was because they opportunistically capitalized on months of organizing work that had been done by the Mobilization for Global Justice and the Anti-Capitalist Convergence. The ACC was screwed by the IAC in many ways, but we were also fucked by the circumstances. The IAC and MGJ had held press conferences before 9-11 and the ACC had decided to wait. In all the pot-9-11 chaos, the media went with the IAC as being the organizers of the Fall protests, when in fact they had done little to organize. The ACC had done the bulk of the national and international outreach work for the anti-WB/IMF protests, with the authorities predicting, prior to 9-11, that close to 100,000 were expected for the protests. The mobe decided not to do any protests, which fucked up the ACC because many activists from other cities were sharing buses. The IAC pretty much surfed on the work of the ACC and MGJ.
As far as the anti-sanction campaign is concerned, I see little impact that their work has had on anything.
> 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.
Actually, it could be argued that the protests on October 26 organized themselves, since many people were itching to protest anyway. ANSWER did some organizing, but they more or less rode the wave.
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.
That last statement simply isn't true. Many rank and file activists have been talking about the WWP and RCP. Journalists are just picking up on that street discussion.
> Peace activists have been strategizing about the International Action
> Center since an earlier guise forced dual marches during the 1991 Gulf
> War;
Activists have simply been annoyed at the IAC mroe than anything else. After a while, you can only tolerate so many hijacked protests and only so much of their coperation with the police.
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."
Yeah, like it takes a rocket scientist to figure this out.
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>].
The anti-war movement at that time was confused for many reasons, most of which had nothing to do with the IAC. In my neck of the woods, it seemed like the peace activists were stuck in the 1960s.
>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."
Wouldn't it be nice if this writer delved more into what ANSWER did last April? Once again, after the WEF protests in NYC, they set up a protest date in April, thinking they could take over the anti-IMF/WB protests. When it became obvious that autonomous groups and the anti-glob movement were going to protest the preceding weekend, the ANSWER issued a series of false press releases stating that they were cooperating with the other groups in moving the protests. I talked to some of the organizers of the other protests--they did not want the IAC to move its protest and they did not come to some agreement with ANSWER as ANSWER claimed. This was simply an attempt by ANSWER to move their leadership back in front of the activist movements.
What's more, they then proceeded to hijack the street protests outside of the AIPAC convention. ANSWER spins this as them working with Palestinian solidarity groups when in fact they pissed these groups off.
> 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
This is more pro-ANSWER bullshit. This writer is simply reprinting ANSWER's propaganda without citing any of these activists. In fact, many activists were pissed off all weekend at ANSWER. ANSWER may have organized some of the folks in the Arab-American community, but they didn't do all of this work.
--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.
Sorry, but those activists who choose to work with answer do so with their fingers pinching their noses. Many activists out there can't stand ANSWER.
> 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."...
ANSWER is already becoming irrelevant, due to the broad upswell against the war. This is a good thing, but I wonder how long it will take younger and newer activists to learn the lessons that us veteran activists learned about the IAC/ANSWER long ago.
> 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.
Organized labor's reaction to the war and the War on Terrorism has been abysmal.
> 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.... *****
Not a bad article, but it gets a bunch of stuff wrong about ANSWER.
Chuck0
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