Re: AUT: RE: antiwar movement

[Newdem@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 3/22/2004 12:44:01 AM Eastern Standard Time,
s0metim3s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
What's so special or effective about campaign
unity? Why is anyone being invited to see One
Nation as a political partner?  I can't see how
campaign unity is a condition of stopping the war.
It's a condition of creating a space in which
various organisations/people can pitch themselves
for the upcoming election, for recruits and for
political capital - but what does that have to do
with stopping the war?....
Angela--

I'm a little unclear as to your point here, but I think we are essentially in
agreement. I didn't talk about "unity" in my article, but about building a
movement that is sufficiently broad and powerful that it can defeat the
warmakers, which I do not believe can be done without revolution. To that end, we need
to understand who is in the antiwar movement and what it represents. If we
mistake the various antiwar organizations and the "progressive" antiwar
candidates for the movement, we will be excluding from our vision a major portion, if
not in fact the majority, of the American people who oppose the war and
occupation.

The situation in Australia sounds rather different from that in the US, but
the principle we are both espousing is, I believe, the same: that the broad
goal of ending the war and occupation should not be sacrificed to the electoral
ambitions of any coalition participants. As you put it, "I'd be happy to see
the antiwar coalitions sacrificed to an agenda which prioritised stopping the
war/occupation."

Dave Stratman
Editor, New Democracy
newdemocracyworld.org
5 Burr Street
Boston, MA 02130
617-524-4073
*******************
The Antiwar Movement Is Not Progressive -- And That's a Good Thing
by Dave Stratman
March 18, 2004
newdemocracyworld.org
massrefusal.org

The movement against war in Iraq before the war began offers us an
unprecedented opportunity to change the direction of American society, but only if we
understand who is in this movement and what it stands for.
The movement included the expected voices on the Left, such as Noam Chomsky
and Howard Zinn, who produced searing indictments of the imminent war. But
vocal opposition came also from the Right -- Pat Buchanan, Lew Rockwell, and a
host of others.
The mass antiwar movement in the streets reflected a similar breadth. Huge
marches took place not only in Washington, D.C. and New York City, but also in
towns and cities across the country, and included many people who had never
before protested. More than 90 U.S. city councils passed resolutions against the
war.
The marchers did not represent the full scope of antiwar feeling. Leslie
Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the premiere elite
policy organization in the United States, after traveling the country in late 2002
to advocate war on Iraq, reported that "I have encountered enormous
opposition to my terribly persuasive arguments...80 to 90 percent of audience members
were against an invasion." Thomas Friedman, a pro-war New York Times columnist,
wrote eighteen days before the invasion, "[D]on't believe the polls. I've
been to nearly 20 states recently, and I've found that 95 percent of the country
wants to see Iraq dealt with without a war."
The range of antiwar opinion is reflected in the scope of the lies that the
administration, with its Republican and Democrat and media allies, felt
compelled to deploy to justify war. It is true that, once the invasion began and
American troops were in harm's way, antiwar sentiment faltered. But the startling
fact remains that, even after twelve years of propaganda calling Saddam
Hussein "worse than Hitler," even after the national trauma of 9/11, even after the
Bush Administration and the media had created the completely false impression
of a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the antiwar movement
encompassed a huge majority of the American people.
The movement's amazing breadth developed in spite of the fact that many of
the leading antiwar organizations share a "progressive" outlook. The scope of
the progressive agenda varies, but it generally includes such programs as gun
control, affirmative action, "diversity," abortion rights, feminism, and now gay
marriage. While one may agree or disagree with this agenda, it is surely much
narrower in its appeal than the antiwar position itself.
The progressive wing of the antiwar movement is now being courted by Dennis
Kucinich and Ralph Nader, who will be joined in June by Green Party candidates
-- progressives all. We need a much bigger tent for the antiwar movement than
these campaigns can possibly provide if we are to bring inside everyone who
belongs there.
If the movement gets defined by its progressive agenda, the vast antiwar
population which does not share that agenda may well become invisible to the
organized movement, if it is not already. The tendency will be to ignore and
possibly alienate the "non-progressive" part of the movement.
The ruling class constantly works to divide us on issues from the trivial to
the profound. To attempt to fit the antiwar movement with a particular
candidate or party with a progressive agenda is to limit its appeal, undermine its
power, and fail to realize its democratic potential. We should not impose this
strait jacket on so vital a movement. That is why I believe an election boycott
is the best way to nurture this movement.
The antiwar movement should focus not on candidates but on the underlying
decency of the vast majority of Americans and their moral superiority to the
ruling, war-making class. Never again should we allow the war-makers to claim to
speak for "the silent majority."
Mass opposition to the war revealed a vast chasm between the ruling elite and
the people. This fault line between war and peace, between elite rule and
democracy, runs very deep in our society -- far deeper than the myriad issues
which usually divide us.
What separates us from the rulers is what binds us together as people: a
sense of human values, a sense of decency, a sense of what is right and fitting
that led us to cry out against the war and to call on our government to stay its
hand.
We should look to our common rejection of the war as the basis for a
redemptive movement in America, a movement in which we overcome divisions among people
of varying backgrounds and beliefs to focus on the most important division:
between the war-makers and the people. Our mass rejection of the war
demonstrated conclusively that most Americans at some fundamental level share common
values. We should discover in these shared values a new democratic vision, more
powerful and more real than the democratic vision on which the nation was
founded. In it lies the redemptive vision for a second American revolution.


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