[Peace-discuss] Assessment of Antiwar Organizing and Activism:

[Brussel Morton K.]

The peace-discuss list has become overwhelming, but I can't help  
forwarding this summary of what the anti-war movement is about and  
what it ought to be doing.  See, for details from which this summary  
is composed:

http://www.warresisters.org/node/406

--mkb



It was a real privilege to hear from so many smart and dedicated  
people from across the country who are working for peace and justice.  
It’s difficult to know how to even begin trying to summarize such a  
wealth of insights. For all the antiwar movement may be lacking, we  
found no shortage of brilliant analysis and ideas. And creative  
tactics and campaigns are happening everywhere—from counter- 
recruitment to GI resistance, from public demonstrations to town hall  
meetings, from calling up legislators to occupying their offices.  
However creative and dedicated the movement is, our primary challenge  
seems to be that there are far too few of us and we are operating  
without adequate money, resources, infrastructure, and relationships  
to a broad base. Fundamentally, we need to grow our capacity if we  
are to mount a real challenge to the forces we are up against.

We are up against trillions of dollars. The corporate interests— 
especially the petroleum and weapons industries—are entrenched in the  
political machinery. The past few decades have been a period of  
extreme right-wing governance, perhaps culminating with the Bush  
administration, which was able to use 9/11 to propagate fear, turning  
tragedy into political capital. Considering the United States’ status  
as the world’s leading imperial power and how heavily invested this  
power is in the Middle East, one realizes what a difficult task it is  
to end the current occupations.

To add to our challenge, we are not riding the momentum that existed  
in the Vietnam War era, with the victories and mass movement-building  
of the civil rights movement and the global upsurge of decolonization  
struggles around the world. We are instead deep into decades of  
social cutbacks, profound wedges between social movements, and an  
individualist and consumerist culture that breeds a dog-eat-dog  
mindset that makes organizing collective action all the more difficult.

We have very limited resources to accomplish an enormous task—so how  
do we use what we’ve got to put the movement on a growth trajectory?  
Rather than investing in reactive battles with diminishing turnouts,  
how can we channel our energy into the kinds of organizing that will  
bring in additional energies and build toward the capacity we need?  
War Resisters League launched this listening process in part because  
we saw a lack of long-term base-building within our own organization  
and in the broader movement. The organizers we interviewed helped to  
illuminate key reasons for this, and also provided instructive  
examples of places where strategic base-building is happening.

One simple reason why base-building is particularly difficult in  
antiwar organizing is that a very small percentage of the population  
feels the weight of the current occupations on a daily basis. The  
most obvious exception to this is soldiers, veterans, and military  
families. Iraq Veterans Against the War in particular has been  
exponentially expanding its leadership, membership, chapters, and  
public campaigns—most notably Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan.  
Supporting organizing efforts within military communities is  
strategic not only because the military is the linchpin of U.S.  
foreign policy, but also because the leadership of antiwar veterans  
may prove crucial to activating the broader society. Ilyse Hogue of  
MoveOn said that “strategic base-building intentionally and  
consistently profiles those who have lost the most or who have the  
most to lose, because there’s a moral value that people respond to  
there,” with the potential of “commanding the attention of broad  
swaths of the American people who oppose the war.”

Along the same vein, Jose Vasquez of IVAW said, “If the Longshoremen  
received a phone call from Iraq Veterans Against the War saying,  
‘We’d like to talk to you guys about possible action,’ we would  
probably get a response, out of respect for the veteran part of it. I  
think the opportunity is almost ripe for the picking.”

If more than 70 percent of the U.S. population opposes the Iraq  
occupation, the proportion is probably much higher in left-leaning  
organizations, and particularly in communities of color and low- 
income communities, which historically and currently lean toward  
antiwar sentiment. From community organizations like the Ella Baker  
Center in Oakland and Desis Rising Up & Moving in Queens to the  
NAACP, unions, and religious institutions—the opportunity is there to  
meet with these organizations’ rank and file and leadership, to  
support them in adopting a strategic antiwar component in their work.

Nearly everyone in the United States is negatively affected by war  
and occupation, and part of our job is to make this clearer.  
Grassroots political power tends to come from large organized  
constituencies. Mass movements are typically not built from scratch  
or by only recruiting individuals one at a time. Getting buy-in from  
already organized and resourced sectors is the only way to build a  
broad-based antiwar movement that is powerful enough to effect  
change. A central challenge we face is a system that obscures the  
connections between intersecting issues. An organization that has  
built a large base focusing on a particular issue will reasonably  
hesitate to take a strong stance on another issue. As Michael  
McPhearson of Veterans For Peace said, “Sometimes if you work with  
one group you risk alienating a wing of your organizational core. …  
The process to decide what kind of political stance to take on  
certain things can be difficult.”

We need to appreciate the reality of this dilemma, not scorn the  
organizers who are stuck in it. The answer is not for every  
organization to adopt a laundry list of demands to address every  
issue under the sun. What is needed is a far more nuanced process  
that takes time and relationship-building. And, in order for  
organizations to devote even a small portion of their organizational  
resources to something, they also have to be convinced that there’s a  
winning strategy.

We need to conceive of already organized constituencies as the base  
of power that will pressure an end to this war. U.S. Labor Against  
the War is a strong burgeoning example of this kind of organizing,  
recently highlighted by the May Day ILWU shutdown of all West Coast  
ports to protest the Iraq occupation. Generally, organizations will  
start with less dramatic steps, building buy-in over time. Such  
efforts make antiwar something that is integrated into the fabric of  
people’s lives and identities. Instead of individuals having to  
assimilate into a counterculture in order to participate, they can  
participate as workers with their fellow workers, students with  
fellow students, people of faith with their faith communities,  
veterans with fellow veterans.

We have to remember that antiwar does not mean leftist. Antiwar  
leftists have an interest in building both, but should not confuse  
the two. Building political power requires us to work with  
organizations and constituencies that do not share all of our  
analysis. As Judith Leblanc of United for Peace & Justice explained,  
“The left in this country is very small—it can’t do anything on its  
own. The vitality of the left is only realized when it’s related to  
that broad cross-section of folks in the political center.” Some of  
the reasons for popular antiwar sentiment are problematic (because  
the United States seems to be losing or because Iraq is a distraction  
from the supposedly legitimate mission in Afghanistan). Dismissing  
popular opposition because of this is one of the worst mistakes we  
can make. We need to recognize that the majority position largely  
aligns with our specific, short-term objective of ending the Iraq  
occupation. We must do whatever we can to engage and activate and  
leverage that majority, while simultaneously looking for chances to  
deepen the political discourse.


Looking for Common Ground

While there are many external barriers to building a bigger movement,  
we can also be limited by our own mindsets—particularly the  
resignation that has understandably emerged in the context of the  
prolonged rightward shift of the past few decades. For many reasons,  
most beyond our control, antiwar and left positions have tended to be  
politically impotent. Many of today’s antiwar activists were opposing  
war when it was very unpopular to do so, and this courage to take an  
unpopular stand—especially in the time immediately following 9/11—is  
admirable. The problem is when we become so accustomed to being  
ostracized or marginalized for our politics that standing against the  
majority becomes a merit in itself, hard-wired into our circuitry. We  
cling to an identity of the righteous few who cry out in the desert,  
with no one listening. We stop looking for common ground and for  
openings and become resigned to a world in which our hopes will never  
be realized.

As Maryrose Dolezal of Fellowship of Reconciliation suggested, we  
need to “move from a defeatist framework to a positive and inclusive  
narrative that isn’t only accessible to privileged people.” Today we  
are seeing more and more space opening up in the culture, we are  
finding unlikely allies, and we are presented with opportunities to  
leverage complex fissures among the ruling elite. We have to bring  
our thinking in line with the shifting context. We need to believe we  
can make progress and to think like winners.

We need to have an outwardly focused orientation, and to take  
seriously how we are popularly perceived. Part of the problem is that  
our messages, posters, etc. are geared toward ourselves as the  
audience. We often unconsciously put more effort into expressing  
ourselves to each other—like a pep rally—than into trying to  
communicate to a broader audience. If we are to build a broader base,  
we have to orient ourselves toward communicating with specific  
constituencies. Greg Payton of U.S. Labor Against the War suggested  
in his interview that we consider standard market research  
strategies, like any enterprise that wants its message to resonate  
with a target audience—that we “bounce our messages, images, and  
campaigns off of people” from the sectors that we want to become the  
base of a broader movement. “We have what we think are good ideas,  
but often we don’t check with other people to see if they think it’s  
a good idea.”


Breaking Down Barriers

Widespread opinion against the Iraq occupation does not yet equal  
large-scale identification with a peace or antiwar movement, and it  
is probably fair to say that the majority of people who oppose the  
Iraq occupation feel some alienation from the visible movement to end  
it. Stereotypes of naïve, privileged protesters and a residual hippie  
counterculture help inoculate masses of people against grassroots  
collective action. Many of our interviewees found this particularly  
true for communities of color and working-class communities. Aimee  
Allison of the Army of None Project talked about “looking around a  
room of peace activists and thinking, ‘I can’t relate to where you’re  
coming from.’”

The current antiwar movement—which appears predominantly white and  
middle class—needs to break with the perception that it holds a  
monopoly on antiwar. As long as that view thrives in society and in  
our own heads, we will fail to build a truly mass movement. We have  
to recognize the antiwar sentiment and the leadership that already  
exists in communities that we may currently think of as outside the  
movement. For example, military enlistment among African-Americans  
has plummeted since the start of the Iraq War, but this trend is  
rarely talked about as a collective act of resistance or viewed as  
antiwar. The good news is that in this political moment we have a  
real opportunity to break down some of these perceptions and  
barriers. But to take advantage of this opening, we have to push  
ourselves out of our comfort zones.


• • •

The U.S. military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually  
come to an end. But will we be able to build a grassroots political  
force in the United States strong enough to positively influence when  
and how that happens? The details of withdrawal will be important:  
first the question of how soon it happens, then the issues of  
permanent military bases, “residual forces,” military contractors,  
etc., and also the question of U.S. reparations to Iraq. Besides all  
that, the eventual military withdrawal from Iraq will not in itself  
prevent future wars or change the nature of our permanent war  
economy. Nor will it automatically defeat the war-enabling forces of  
xenophobia and racism. Will we be able to seize on the openings  
before us enough to start moving these mountains?
The answer—the future—depends on who the “we” is.


Matthew Smucker is the national field organizer for War Resisters  
League and coordinates WRL’s GI resistance support work.
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