What’s striking at the moment is simply that “we” won’t go away. The American antiwar movement is alive and kicking in the first domestic shock-and-awe days of this new age of war. As letters from readers have reminded me, there are demonstrations, large and small, everywhere in America. Small towns, large cities; large civil-disobedient crowds; small, quiet groups of peace vigilators. Believe me, whatever failure we feel over the war’s beginning, we haven’t departed the scene. Tomorrow (today for most of you) I’m off to New York’s demonstration and march (no small thing, given the Mayor’s opposition to marching the last time around).
And, as a number of foreign readers have indicated, what’s happening here is happening elsewhere in a truly major way: Brisbane, Buenos Aires, Turkey. We Americans do not, let’s remember, have to be the most important or largest movement. In some ways right now, our collective job at the very heart of this imperial moment may simply be to encourage the rest of the world with the news that there is opposition here too.
You barely have to glance at our media to be reminded of the self-evident truth that there is only one superpower, or hyperpower if you will, left on this earth. But in fact this is self-evidently not true. As three hundred chaotic, resistant years of history remind us — as Jonathan Schell has recently done in two issues of Harper’s Magazine and will do again in his upcoming book The Unconquerable World — the true superpower of modern history has been “the people” which has, often violently but sometimes beautifully and nonviolently, sooner or later swept all before it. It’s worth keeping in mind that — not yet but incipiently — we, not Russia, Germany and France or any other national combination you can imagine, are the likeliest candidate for the other superpower. The Busheviks don’t believe in us, but like the kings, emperors, and dictators of past centuries, they secretly fear us anyway.
There have been numerous demonstrations recently — some that I find inspiring, some doing things that I’m not particularly comfortable with, including the random shutting down of commuter traffic and the like, to which I see no particular point — but what I’d like to mention are a few other straws in the wind, symbolic acts that should be noted in this difficult moment of dissent.
Let’s start with Mary Wright, number two at the U.S. embassy in Ulan Bator, who just resigned from the State Department, the third and highest-ranking career diplomat to do so this month. According to Agence France Press,
“In a letter to Powell, Wright, who joined the State Department 15 years ago after a 26-year stint in the army and army reserves, also said she disagreed with Bush’s Mideast policy, his approach to North Korea and could not support the domestic consequences of the war on terrorism.
“‘I believe the administration’s policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer place,’ she said in the March 19 letter that arrived in Washington just hours before the war with Iraq began. ‘I feel obligated morally and professionally to set out my very deep and firm concerns on these policies and to resign from government service as I cannot defend or implement them,’ said Wright, who before Mongolia served in Micronesia, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone where she won an award for heroism in 1997.”
“‘I believe the administration’s policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer place,’ she said in the March 19 letter that arrived in Washington just hours before the war with Iraq began. ‘I feel obligated morally and professionally to set out my very deep and firm concerns on these policies and to resign from government service as I cannot defend or implement them,’ said Wright, who before Mongolia served in Micronesia, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone where she won an award for heroism in 1997.”
Then there’s the grandpoppa of news anchors, Walter Cronkite — when he turned against the Vietnam War on CBS during the Tet Offensive, Lyndon Johnson reportedly knew he was done for. Danny Schecter offers this description in his latest news dissector missive:
“A man you should have been seeing in an anchor’s chair if his retirement had not been forced, is still speaking out. Walter Cronkite was pushed out of CBS at age 65. Company rule, he was told. Dan Rather is now 70, and Don Hewitt won a contract that will pay him until he is 90. The newsman once called the most trusted in the nation was on a campus yesterday as well, at Drew University. The college paper reported him saying: ‘We are going to be in such a fix when this war is over, or before this war is over,’ he said. ‘Our grandchildren’s grandchildren are going to be paying for this war. I look at our future as, I’m sorry, being very, very dark.'”
And then there are just the tiny beginnings of military resistance — the first American refusniks — to imperial service. Here’s a piece from, of all places, USA TODAY on the subject:
A few in military refuse to fight ‘wrong war’
Activists call stance brave; critics say it’s cowardly
By Deborah Sharp
USA TODAY
March 20, 2003MIAMI — When Travis Clark joined the U.S. military at age 19, it seemed like a good way to travel and pay for college. It was 1996, the country was at peace, and Clark signed on for an eight-year hitch.
Now, with a year left on his contract, the Marine reservist from Plantation, Fla., says he won’t go if his unit is called to serve in a war against Iraq. He is adding his voice to a small chorus of like-minded military personnel who say they will not fight for a cause they do not support.
”This war is the wrong war,” says Clark, 25. ”I can’t put myself into the position of going into another country and forcing them to defend themselves against me.”
To read more of this USA TODAY piece click here
Finally, a piece on why the antiwar movement matters. The other day I sent out an essay by Robert Jensen on acknowledging fear in the antiwar movement. But at the time what I was feeling was mainly depression, not fear. On the www.commondreams.org website, Professor of religion Ira Chernus addressed the issue of depression in the face of this small group of men (and one woman) who have seized control of our global lives and seem intent on taking us to hell and calling it heaven on earth. Take a look. Tom
Don’t Feel Powerless
The Peace Movement is More Important Than Ever
By Ira Chernus
CommonDreams.org
March 20, 2003When the bombs start falling, the peace movement must either grow stronger or fade away. It can not just stay as it us. All of us who worked so hard to prevent war must now decide which way it will go.
The government will try to persuade us that the movement is over. An army of PR consultants will twist media arms to put out a single message: a wave of Gulf War-style patriotism is sweeping across the nation, drowning out peace activists and making them irrelevant. Antiwar activists will say, “We won’t give up; we’ll protest more loudly than ever.”
But let’s face it. Many of us are discouraged and tempted to give up. It’s just like any other temptation. If we understand its root causes, we can resist it more easily. One obvious cause: We are all tired.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder [email protected]