Re: slogans for the anti-war movement

[Ben C <benj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Following the articles posted by Jose Perez and Fred Feldman:

Perhaps one of the problems with "support the troops--bring them home
now" is that it is so overly defensive of the troops rights it forgets
to serve up to Howard and/or Bush their due.

I support "Troops out of Iraq" or whatever variant (they amount to the
same thing) as the overarching demand of the movement. And "I support
the troops -- bring 'em home" (and variants) seems fine for a particular
audience IMO. "Bring the troops home" is somewhere in between, but I
don't see anything positively bad about it.

But perhaps rather than defending the troops we need to attack the
imperialists. For their lies, their corporate welfare, their naked
imperialism, their bleeding health and education half dry. War is a
horrible thing and it's easy to get defensive, demoralised, to take the
easy, quasi-patriotic line of sympathy for the troops. But really, war
is a terrible risk for the imperialists, it shows the inner workings of
their system in sharp relief, and obviously it can go wrong in military
terms as well. We should go on the offensive.

How this pans out may be different in the US (which has a lot of unhappy
troops sitting in the Iraqi desert sun) and Australia (which has very
few troops O/S and is just shouldering the old White Man's Burden to
look after the poor benighted souls of the Pacific (well, their
resources at any rate) on the back of sending asylum seekers there to
keep them out of sight and mind.

But overall, with fine tuning for the different audiences, we need to
keep going with the demand "Troops Out of Iraq", IMO we have to augment
it with a few slogans (official or otherwise) like the (mysteriously
dropped) "No blood for oil" and "Iraq for the Iraqis" and whatever else.

Ben C