Home > The Antiwar Movement Isn’t Where You Think It Is
The Antiwar Movement Isn’t Where You Think It Is
by Open-Publishing - Tuesday 6 December 20053 comments
Movement Wars and conflicts USA
By Dave Stratman,
On October 29 of this year there was an antiwar rally on Boston Common. My wife and I and our daughter and two young granddaughters took part. After a few speakers one of the rally organizers announced to loud cheers that a contingent of antiwar demonstrators had gone to join gay activists who had been since 8 a.m. two blocks away outside the Tremont Temple Baptist Church. Later many other antiwar demonstrators plus the rally sound truck reportedly joined the gay activists outside the Temple, screaming and chanting their anger at what was going on within. The focus of their rage? A conference entitled "Love Won Out," organized by Focus on the Family, on recovering from homosexuality.
Whatever else they did that day, the antiwar rally organizers certainly made clear who is welcome in their antiwar movement, and it doesn’t include anyone who is unenthusiastic about homosexuality or gay marriage.
The curse of the real antiwar movement is that it is largely invisible. It may show glimpses of itself in polls or in heartfelt letters from military families or interviews with bereaved mothers like Cindy Sheehan. But for the most part the profound antiwar sentiment of the majority of Americans is more likely to register only as a few words exchanged between friends at a local bakery or dry cleaner or a conversation over coffee at a diner. The real antiwar movement is not on the radar screen of the corporate media and appears to be just as invisible to the official Left-wing antiwar movement?the onee that organizes periodic demonstrations in Washington, DC and which organized the demonstration on Boston Common?and also to its Libertarian Right-winng counterpart on the Internet.
The invisibility of the real antiwar movement to those involved in the visible ones struck me once again when reading a new by John Walsh, "A Fractured Antiwar Movement," posted on Counterpunch and Antiwar.com. Walsh proposes that the Left and Right wings of the antiwar movement unite. It seems to me, however, that he has completely missed the real problem of the visible wings of the antiwar movement and has thereby come up with a strategy that has no chance of working.
The American people are overwhelmingly opposed to the war in Iraq and want an immediate end to it, and yet these millions of ordinary people remain invisible and unwelcome to the Left wing of the antiwar movement, represented by such organizations as United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (A.N.S.W.E.R). Whatever their conflicting views of the Democratic Party and the timing of withdrawal, the Left organizations are united in their contempt for people who do not pass the Left’s litmus tests of civic virtue: support for gay marriage, gun control, affirmative action, and unlimited abortion rights. The Left wing of the antiwar movement remains united in the conscious exclusion from its movement of the great majority of Americans who oppose the war.
Unfortunately ordinary Americans are also absent from Walsh’s article. While Walsh acknowledges the overwhelming antiwar sentiment among Americans, he doesn’t propose that the Left overcome its contemptuous and exclusionary approach to ordinary people. Instead he proposes that two self-isolated groups come together: the gay-marriage-loving Left should unite with the unfettered-capitalism-loving, Social-Security-and-Medicare-hating Libertarian Right. Surely that will solve the problem.
Walsh apparently believes a powerful antiwar movement can be built by wrenching the war free from its social context, thereby allowing Left and Right to bury their disagreements?as if these two puny groups have the powwer to overcome the Great American War-Making Machine without engaging and effectively mobilizing the majority of Americans against it. This is sheer fantasy.
The war in Iraq is part of the class war being waged not only against Iraqis but also against American working people and workers everywhere, and it can be successfully opposed only on this basis. The war in Iraq and the war on terror are meant to frighten us and drive us into the arms of our leaders while they steal our pensions, cut our wages, out-source our jobs, test our children into despair at school, and construct a police state around us. As Steve Lopez wrote in the "There’s a dirty secret [behind this war] no one has told you, and here it is: This war is not about changing Iraq, it’s about changing America....The whole idea is to train you to expect less and to feel patriotic about it."
Ordinary American workers?the people who build our cars, teach ouur children, nurse our sick, build our houses, harvest our crops, keep our offices and hospitals and airlines running?are under attack as never before. Theey are opposed to this war?it is, after all, their sons and daughters who aare being "poverty-drafted" or "stop-lossed" to fight it?but the sheer ferocitty of the assault on them at work and their children at school and their elderly parents in their homes is distracting and debilitating. People are under assault from so many different directions that they find it hard just to keep running in place.
The only strategy to oppose the war-makers that can succeed is one that makes the connections between the many-sided corporate and government assaults on people’s lives and the savage assault of the war-makers on the people of Iraq. Our analysis of the war and our strategy for mobilizing against it must be firmly rooted in the class war. The strategy must have as its goal not merely to stop this war or even to dismantle the war-making machine. The strategy must have as its goal the overthrow of the class of war-makers and exploiters here and abroad?the capitalist (and, in China, communist) ruling elite, tthe Wall Street financiers, the masters of great wealth?and the rebuilding off society on a new and democratic basis.
The only people who can accomplish these things are working people who, for the most part, fail the litmus tests of Left and Right. They largely oppose gay marriage and gun control, and they support Social Security and Medicare and reject any attempt to dismantle them. And yet they are deeply opposed to the war.
What needs to be done is not to join marginal Left and Right groups together in splendid isolation but to organize the movement on a new and revolutionary basis, rooted in the lives and decency of ordinary working Americans. This movement should reach out to the silent majority of people who oppose the war and help them find their voice. It should have as its goal to win the class war.
Forum posts
7 December 2005, 19:42
Mr. Stratham makes some cogent comments that needed to be said in his assessment of the anti-war movement. I’d like to add my own comments to his very insightful article:
The established political system, the Democrat-Republican Party, is essentially for all practical purposes, as far as the common American worker is concerned, one party. My reasoning for stating this is very simple: if this were a true democracy the American middle class would have a voice in Congress, & the American middle class would be far more prosperous today then ever before. The American middle class is far from being prosperous, it is barely able to keep up on a week to week paycheck as is. All the wealth of this country has gone to the conglomerates and the central banks, the top percentile, who in reality not only control the Federal Government, but created it in the first place. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can claim in all honesty that they are the voice of the middle class when so many of their domestic policies have hindered the growth of this most important of all constituencies. Without a healthy middle class a socieity will inevitably devolve into an oligarchy, something very different from a democracy.
An oligarchy is essentially what we have now in our country.
The American middle class’s real wages have been stagnant for over 30 years, any increase to the standard of living in this country is all due to technological innovations, & not to due an amassing of greater wealth for the middle class. All thanks mostly to a Federal Government that is socialist/fascistic (let’s not forget that the Nazis had a Keynesian driven economy as well) more fascist than socialist, since this country spends nearly twice as much in military expenditures than the entire world combined. The Federal Government is the Great All-knowing Kazoo that both Republicans and Democrats are forever running to help them solve every kind of social ill or problem, real or imagined that they might confront. Parasitic leaders will never possess the imagination and intellect necessary to solve our society’s ills, they are only very good at taking our money, and pretending to have served us, telling us that they have made our lives better, when in reality all they have done is made their lives better at our expense.
The American people are in dire need of another political alternative, other than the corrupt parasites that have been mis-representing us for generations. Mr. Stratham is correct in stating that the anti-war movement will not gain any ground as long as the Left and the Right wings of this movement remain hostile to each other. We need to reach common ground if we wish to claim back our nation. We need to focus on who the real enemy is to the American middle class, and tear them down, before there is no middle class left.
I offer one bit of advice to all of us: we need to stop using the language of the Democrat-Republicans, all of it twisted beyond belief. When we talk of freedom we should all be on the same page: 100% absolute protection of civil liberties for all citizens, not just lawyers and CEOs. When we talk of free enterprise, we mean free enterprise for all of our citizens, not just Halliburton, Time-Warner, or Wal-Mart. When we talk of peace, we mean the real thing brother, not just some godforsaken lie used to enrich the corrupt who already are wealthy beyond belief.
8 December 2005, 13:05
I very much concur with the sentiments expressed by the previous writer.
The interesting thing is that the situation Stratman describes in the US is similar to what is happening in most of the English-speaking, so-called democracies such as Canada, Australia and new Zealand.
In Australia our opposition parties whinge, whine and object to totalitatrian legislation but the gutless wonders warming the parliament’s seats with their big fat bums invariably vote FOR it. Consequently the majority of the people are unrepresented in our parliament. And whenever a new voice arises - Pauline Hanson in Australia or Haider in Austria - the media kills them for being ’racist’ when their real crime was being nationalist.
What’s going on?
The USA, Canada, Australia and new Zealand used to be independent nations and we functioned well, so what’s happened? The word ’globalisation’ as an answer is just too glib, though economists love it. As far as we officaly know, globalists don’t yet run the world for their convenience. But ... maybe they do and we, the voters in our national sovereignties, just haven’t been informed.
Dave Stratman’s inventory of the failings of the US government is mirrored in all our countries. Against the majority of the people’s wishes, jobs were exported and then people in their fifties and sixties - who worked all their life - are blamed, excoriated, humiliated and even penalized for being unemployed! Talk about chutzpah!
Pensions are a thing of the past. Though citizens paid hefty taxes all their lives suddendly they are expected to provide for their old age. That’s not fair.
And just tonight on the news I heard that the Australian federal government plans to have every school child be given an individual literacy programme. What a waste of taxpayers’ money! Children’s literacy is none of the federal government’s business in the first place. Secondly the beaurocracy required will soak up millions of dollars that could have gone directly to schools. Or the parents.
So yes, in Australia too, the war in Iraq is all about control and the centralization of power from the cradle to the grave. But they’re not interested in graves yet. The dead don’t vote.
Antonia Feitz
Ps. On the point of sending I was tempted to abort because of your cautionary message. There’s no such English word as, ’caractere’. Did you mean ’character’? If so, your caution is still grammatically incorrect but I’m more than happy to advise you on English grammar for free.
11 December 2005, 17:09
’Globalization’ might sound as a glib term to you, Antonia, but it accurately describes what is going on in the industrialized world’s controlled ’democracies’. One must look at who benefits the most when such policies as the ’out-sourcing’ of jobs are established, policies which imply not only the enforced exportation of skilled jobs, but also the forced migration of entire factories, their inventories, their equipment [inevitably a large portion of a nation’s manufacturing base], enfeebling policies that are more often than not enthusiastically endorsed by many of the industrialized west’s most powerful political parties. These policies definitely do not favor the constituencies of the political parties they represent for they inevitably make a nation’s industrial base smaller as well as making its middle class weaker. This begs the question again, who benefits the most from these warped, industry sapping, job robbing policies, since it isn’t the people of our nations?
Who benefits the most from such policies as controlled inflation, which allows a nation’s central bank to print more money, so as to give their people the illusion of a managed, healthy economy? Who benefits the most from regional treaty organizations, organizations that basically remove a more industrialized nation’s manufacturing base to that of a lesser developed country, under the deception that both nations’ working poor will prosper?
The answer is very simple: the world’s giant conglomerates and the world’s central banks. These are the ’Globalists’ in a nutshell. The world’s central banks are more than happy to subsidize the world’s largest corporations [in exchange for greater financial control over them] and make their paths easier by removing all governmental obstacles in their way, and by making sure that new sources of competition die an early death. The ’Globalists’ are only capitalists in name only, for they are all in favor of state-controlled economies.
The World Bank and the IMF have an excellent public relations department that does a great job of covering up these powerful entities’ rapacity & their efficiency in keeping the entire third world under their financial boots. These original propagators of the globalist ideal come on as benevolent life-savers to the world’s poorest countries but in reality they are from being the Samaritan organizations they depict themselves to be. They are in reality the financial enforcers of this new world order.
For an excellent website, one that I’ve found to be immeasurably educational as to what is really going on in our world’s economy, and is very forthcoming as to who truly runs it, go to: www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/. There you will find a great deal of information, as well as cogent analyses on the global economy, articles and links that will explain these vitally important issues far better than I ever could.
The whole word is fast becoming what Aldous Huxley prophesied in ’Brave New World’. However, this embryonic ’Brave New World’ uses many of the more brutal methods of mass manipulation depicted in Orwell’s ’1984’. The corrupt ’Globalists’ must think of this warped present day reality as having the best of both dystopian worlds. For the vast majority of the rest of the world, the nightmare is only beginning.