[Peace-discuss] A new left/right antiwar movement?

Tue Mar 22 14:45:14 CDT 2011

Why not, indeed.
As a, "Xenophobic, Racist Rand-ite" I can think of no better future than one
peopled by progressives, paleo-cons, and classical liberals alike---in a
world of peace.
Such a unified world would embrace all ethnic, spiritual, and philosophical
differences.
In peace,
Tony

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 12:58 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森" <ewj at pigs.ag>wrote:

>  I can hardly imagine a more diverse group on the libertarian-progressive
> axis than Iraq Veterans Against the War.
>
> If one insists on Absolute Ideologic Purity, one will find that even he
> himself is found lacking.  Better that we cut everyone some slack for their
> "areas needing further growth and understanding".  I too have been guilty of
> wounding my friends at times.
>
> Carl and others have pointed out that the "Tea Party" is a quite diverse
> group and that its recent incarnation began with the Ron Paul R[3voJ]ution
> on 16 DEC 2007, a quite vocal and large libertarian group, and has been
> seriously defamed damaged and co-opted by the same-old same-old neoconnish
> elements seeking to cop a spin from the unrest and a teachable moment.
>
> One can't be a fiscal conservative or any other kind of conservative (other
> than neo-) and favour the War.  Sunday morning flag decals still won't get
> 'em into heaven.
>
> There still remains a Teachable Moment that can be taken at the cusp.
>
> Why not a paleoconservative/classical liberal/libertarian/progressive
> Coalition Against the War?
>
> If such a diverse motley crew as Ron Paul, Walter Jones, Barney Frank,
> Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Dennis Kucinich, Chuck Baldwin, Tim Johnson,
> et al can put aside deep ideologic disaggregative forces and stand together
> against the War Machine, why cant more of us find it in our hearts to do the
> same?
>
> Why not?
>
>
> On 2011-3-22 22:13, Corey Mattson wrote:
>
> I support what Iraq Veterans Against the War did in Madison on March 12 ---
> bring the anti-war cause to our natural allies, workers and students *
> fighting* the Tea Party. When I was in Madison February 19th, there were
> about 1,000 Tea Party counter-demonstrators to our 80,000. Those 1,000 Tea
> Party activists were way more than any of their number ever protesting the
> war.
>
> An anti-war Tea Party movement? Where is it? Fledgling right-wing
> libertarian groups clearly haven't been that successful in bringing them to
> the anti-war cause. It's not worth diluting the substance of our opposition
> to the war to attract a handful of libertarians who are opposed to the war
> for the wrong reasons and are our enemy on practically every other issue. In
> the proposed movement to "Stop the War, Stop the Spending," what are
> left-wingers supposed to say when their right-wing partners attack the poor,
> bust our unions, and make U.S. capitalism even more savage and inhumane?
>
> By the way, in the piece below, David Boaz gets the timeline wrong as to
> when the anti-war movement weakened, and I believe he does it purposefully
> for political points. The anti-war movement was already seriously weakened
> by 2006, maybe as early as 2005, as demoralization set in. Surely hopes in a
> electoral victory played a role, but there was no sudden death of the
> movement upon Obama's election. If Boaz is going to blame the Democrats for
> the movement's demise, he should at least get it right. I suspect that he
> wasn't involved in the anti-war movement back then and wouldn't know what
> happened.
>
> --- Corey
> Bloomington-Normal Citizens for Peace and Justice
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 11:29 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:
>
>> [From a director of the 'libertarian' Cato Institute.]
>>
>> "...the $64,000 question — though these days it would have to be at least
>> a $64 billion question — could a new antiwar movement hook up with the Tea
>> Party movement in a Stop the War, Stop the Spending revolt?"
>>
>> What Ever Happened to the Antiwar Movement?
>> David Boaz - March 21, 2011
>>
>> About 100 antiwar protesters, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers
>> fame, were arrested Saturday outside the White House in demonstrations
>> marking the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. It’s a far cry
>> from the Bush years, when hundreds of thousands or millions marched against
>> the war, and the New York Times declared “world public opinion” against the
>> war a second superpower. Will President Obama‘s military incursion in a
>> third Muslim country revive the antiwar movement?
>>
>> On a street corner in Washington, D.C., outside the Cato Institute,
>> there’s a metal box that controls traffic signals. During the Bush years
>> there was hardly a day that it didn’t sport a poster advertising an antiwar
>> march or simply denouncing President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. But
>> the marches and the posters seemed to stop on election day 2008.
>>
>> Maybe antiwar organizers assumed that they had elected the man who would
>> stop the war. After all, Barack Obama rose to power on the basis of his
>> early opposition to the Iraq war and his promise to end it. But after two
>> years in the White House he has made both of George Bush’s wars his wars.
>>
>> In October 2007, Obama proclaimed, “I will promise you this, that if we
>> have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first
>> thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this
>> war. You can take that to the bank.” Speaking of Iraq in February 2008,
>> candidate Barack Obama said, “I opposed this war in 2002. I will bring this
>> war to an end in 2009. It is time to bring our troops home.” The following
>> month, under fire from Hillary Clinton, he reiterated, “I was opposed to
>> this war in 2002….I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and
>> I will bring this war to an end in 2009. So don’t be confused.”
>>
>> Indeed, in his famous “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to
>> slow” speech on the night he clinched the Democratic nomination, he also
>> proclaimed, “I am absolutely certain that generations from now we will be
>> able to look back and tell our children that . . . this was the moment when
>> we ended a war.”
>>
>> Today, however, he has tripled President Bush’s troop levels in
>> Afghanistan, and we have been fighting there for more than nine years. The
>> Pentagon has declared “the official end to Operation Iraqi Freedom and
>> combat operations by United States forces in Iraq,” but we still have 50,000
>> troops there, hardly what Senator Obama promised.
>>
>> And now Libya. In various recent polls more than two-thirds of Americans
>> have opposed military intervention in Libya. No doubt many of them voted for
>> President Obama.
>>
>> There’s another issue with the Libyan intervention: the president’s
>> authority to take the country to war without congressional authorization. As
>> many bloggers noted over the weekend, in 2007 Barack Obama told Charlie
>> Savage of the Boston Globe,
>>
>> The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally
>> authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an
>> actual or imminent threat to the nation.
>>
>> Candidate Hillary Clinton spoke similarly:
>>
>> If the country is under truly imminent threat of attack, of course the
>> President must take appropriate action to defend us. At the same time, the
>> Constitution requires Congress to authorize war. I do not believe that the
>> President can take military action – including any kind of strategic bombing
>> – against Iran without congressional authorization.
>>
>> And candidate Joe Biden:
>>
>> The Constitution is clear: except in response to an attack or the imminent
>> threat of attack, only Congress may authorize war and the use of force.
>>
>> Fine words indeed. Will their supporters call them on their apparent
>> reversal?
>>
>> It’s hard to escape the conclusion that antiwar activity in the United
>> States and around the world was driven as much by antipathy to George W.
>> Bush as by actual opposition to war and intervention. Indeed, a University
>> of Michigan study of antiwar protesters found that Democrats tended to
>> withdraw from antiwar activity as Obama found increasing political success
>> and then took office. Independents and members of third parties came to make
>> up a larger share of a smaller movement. Reason.tv looked at the dwindling
>> antiwar movement two months ago.
>>
>> With his launch of a third military action, President Obama seems to have
>> forgotten a point made by Temple University professor Jan C. Ting: “Wars are
>> easy to begin, but hard to end.” Americans haven’t forgotten, though.
>>
>> Nearly two-thirds of Americans now say that the war in Afghanistan hasn’t
>> been worth fighting, a number that has soared since early 2010. Where are
>> their leaders? Where are the senators pushing for withdrawal? Where are the
>> organizations? Could a new, non-Democratic antiwar movement do to Obama what
>> the mid-2000s movement did to Bush? And the $64,000 question — though these
>> days it would have to be at least a $64 billion question — could a new
>> antiwar movement hook up with the Tea Party movement in a Stop the War, Stop
>> the Spending revolt?
>>
>> http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2011/03/happened-antiwar-movement/
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