[Peace-discuss] Re: The case against anti-war adventurism in the U.S.

[C. G. Estabrook]

On anti-war tactics.

The article by Justin Raimondo (titled here "The case against anti-war
adventurism in the U.S.") raises questions about how the anti-war movement
in general should proceed.  I circulated it because I think it helps us to
think about what AWARE should do.  Several points:

[1] The most important task is to broaden the local opposition.  We do
that by making people "aware."  USG supporters try to narrow and isolate
anti-war forces.  Compare the demonization of the Vietnam antiwar movement
-- the lie that real Americans went to war and "hippies" spat on them when
they came back, etc., etc.  On the contrary, three-quarters of Americans
came to see the Vietnam War as a crime, and the campuses *supported* the
USG *more* than ordinary people did.  (Mythology about "the sixties"
misrepresents all that.)

[2] Raimondo argues that some sorts of civil disobedience (particularly
the narcissistic kind) in the anti-war movement could contribute to that
isolation.  (Civil disobedience in the civil rights movement was
substantially different, as he points out.)  He thinks that "direct
action" in the present anti-war movement will often underestimate the
response of the authorities, offend the very people we're trying to
conscientize about the war, and prove largely ineffective as a tactic, and
I think he's probably correct.  Far from being "a narrow, self-defeating,
and insulting polemic," Raimondo's piece broadens the discussion on how to
oppose this war.  ("Adventurism" BTW is my word, not Raimondo's.)  What
the Chinese authorities found dangerous in 1989 was *talk* in Tiananmen
Square and the country at large -- not a guy standing in front of a tank.

[3] To break though the most sophisticated propaganda system in history,
the US media, we need to work hard -- and *not* try to manipulate people
as that system does.  People are not fools.  We have to avoid tactics that
isolate the anti-war movement, but we also have to avoid statements that
concede too much and condition our opposition to what we think people
believe.  E.g., "the war is wrong because it's unilateral" -- would it
have been OK if the UN had approved?  or, "the war will cost too much" --
would it be justified if it comes in under budget?  The Anderson article I
circulated (which some people whose opinions I respect also found "narrow,
self-defeating, and insulting") seem to me to make important points about
not conceding too much in argument.

[4] As those of us old enough to remember Vietnam know quite well, the
loudest supporter of "direct action" -- the one who keeps saying that
serious people are ready to put their bodies on the line -- is usually the
police spy.  Only after the Vietnam War -- and COINTELPRO -- did we learn
how often state, federal, and local cops used provocateurs: "Tommy the
Traveler" in upstate New York, the leader of the poor peoples' movement in
Cambridge MA, etc., etc.  I'm sure all members of AWARE know that the
local FBI, city cops, et al. monitor our activities.  We should also
realize that they are capable of encouraging "actions" -- CD or otherwise
-- that will allow them to arrest people and ostentatiously strike a blow
against domestic terrorism...

[5] Finally, one last point on CD: it only works with civilized people.
Look at the photos of Rachel Corrie
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1248.shtml> or recall that "On
May 4th, 1970, a group of National Guardsmen turned, and from a safe
distance of 60 feet, fired 67 times into a crowd of student protesters on
the Kent State university campus"
<http://www.blish.org/gens/g_history/kentstate.html>.  While the US was
backing torture and murder by the Argentine generals during the Dirty War
1976-83, our papers were full of the success of the protests by
Solidarnosc in Poland; the Argentine journalist Jacobo Timmerman was asked
why Argentineans didn't try something similar.  "It's simple," he said.
"They'd all be killed."

That American satellites could be far more murderous that Soviet ones is
no news, and I don't mean to suggest that we face anything like that in
the US -- especially people as privileged as we.  (Things are of course
different for the poor in America.)  But CD works, as in the Civil Rights
Movement, only when the authorities and the populace can admit the
injustice of the law when brought face to face with it.  But the "black
bloc" in the anti-globalization movement (largely police in disguise in
Genoa in July 2001) and Raimondo's traffic-stoppers (like some DC
demonstrators in 1971) get what they deserve, in many people's eyes.

That's why the cure for Bush's atrocious speech is more speech.  We have
to find ways to talk to people who aren't sitting at home in their safe
rooms, cowering before an orange alert, as the USG wants them to.  Let's
imagine and promote an impeachment movement perhaps, and a war-crimes
trial.  We can work for the day when Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld
and their deputies occupy adjacent cells in The Hague...

Regards, Carl

  ==============
  Carl Estabrook
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [MC-190]
  109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana IL 61801 USA
  office: 217.244.4105 mobile: 217.369.5471 home: 217.359.9466
  academic: <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>
  business: <cge at shout.net>
  ==================================
  "We must make clear to the Germans
  that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial
  is not that they lost the war,
  but that they started it.
  And we must not allow ourselves
  to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war,
  for our position is that no grievances or policies
  will justify resort to aggressive war.
  It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."
  --Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, US prosecutor at Nuremberg
  ==================================================================