> The anti-war movement, unfortunately in my view, has not sought to
> overcome this problem. If anything, there seems to be something
> approaching consensus among many anti-war activists: concentrate on the
> Iraq War, don't try to bring in "other issues," so that we can have a
> broadest possible movement. In my view, that's not necessarily a wrong
> approach, if that's applied only to this or that demonstration, but
> one-issue organizing is, ultimately, not only limited in terms of
> political education, but it probably narrows rather than broadens
> participation in the anti-war movement, too, after reaching a certain
> threshold.
What you describe are attitudes found in the liberal-left wing of the anti-war and peace movements. An example would be the knee jerk reaction to people bringing "Free Mumia" signs to anti-war protests. I agree that it's pretty off message and dumb to bring signs like that, but who cares? Let people bring what they want to bring. One "Free Mumia" sign is far better than 200 robots holding pre-printed ISO antwar placards.
Another example is the controversy between ANSWER and UFPJ about bringing the Palestine issue into anti-war protests. This usually revolves around speakers on stage. The only purpose of having ten hours of anti-war speakers is to put some radical voices on C-SPAN. ANSWER blows hard about this issue and UFPJ so far hasn't had the estrogen to tell ANSWER off about how tokenizing ANSWER is towards activists and movements. ANSWER only makes noise about Palestine at their stupid protests to create some radical street cred for their fake coalition.
I'm unaware of any meta-discussions in the movements about overall strategy. I'm involved with the War Resisters League so I know what they are trying to do. Otherwise it's impossible to have one strategy for "The Movement" because one singular movement just doesn't exist.
What kind of strategy would Rev. Chuck0 propose if he had the ears of the movement?
One thing I've brought up on the anti-authoritarian anti-war movement list is that timing is a crucial factor right now. Several political moments have opened up for us, given the large public opposition to the war and the Bush regime campaign to turn their crisis into something positive for them. The current anti-war strategy of having mass immobilizations every six months in Washington and San Francisco is about as boneheaded as you can get. The time to strike is now, this month or next. I've argued that the movements should focus on a strategy now of more *frequent* visible protests, all over the country.
The movement is so disorganized that weekly protests are out, so one day a month of coordinated local protests would be a good start. Ideally, if the movements were tighter, we could be doing daily protests coordinated by phone, email, conference calls, MySpace bulletins and text messaging.
The liberal left is blowing an opportunity right now to pressure congresspeople during their winter break. I'm sure that some of this is going on, but I would think that Moveon and similar groups have the resources to turn up the heat.
The movements should also marshall their legal resources right now to file more FOIA requests and suits against local police departments. The spying scandal is huge and pervasive. A larger, coordinated campaign right now would keep the scandals on the front page. This would hurt Bush and the neo-cons and make it harder for them to promote the Patriot Act. More locally, turning up the heat on local police departments will tie their hands when it comes to dealing with future dissent.
The counter-recruitment movement is one of our string points right now, but it could be extended to create more peace groups in high schools. the conditions for this extension are ripe. Many high schoolers are already organizing themselves--we may be on the cusp of another youth rebellion like the early 1960s.
A few thoughts...
Merry Solstice,
Chuck Munson Infoshop.org