Syria: The Next Nicaragua? (Activist Triumphs the World Forgot)

Going to war is habit for Americans.  Essentially, we’ve done it every twenty to forty years since we became a country, but really, if you count the wars waged against all the different Native American communities throughout the lands and especially if you count the quashing of slave revolts, the first 100 years of the United States was a time of more or less constant war.  And since the Civil War, rather than getting less warlike, we’ve actually gotten bloodier and bloodier.  For all the talk of peace dividends and the end of the Cold War in the nineties, Clinton bombed or invaded 12 countries during his eight years.

It's not very surprising that the US public doesn’t have much faith in the prospects of antiwar movements.  Our record of stopping wars before they started is pretty dismal, and only two have been noticeably shortened by the presence of a grassroots antiwar movement – the Mexican War and Vietnam.

That makes what has happened in the last two weeks pretty remarkable.

Last Saturday, the San Francisco Chronicle’s lead afternoon story was “Possible US-led attack on Syria sparks rallies.”  The article, from the Associated Press wire, covered demonstrations of 100 people in Houston, 200 in Boston and Los Angeles, two dozen in Arkansas and 40 in Chicago.  The 15 or so in Oakland didn’t make the cut.

Today’s paper contains this news: 

“More than 30 protesters gathered Saturday outside the federal building in Lincoln to oppose possible U.S. military action in Syria.  The Lincoln Journal Star reports that among the crowd was 32-year-old Haidar Kazem, holding a Syrian flag and a sign aimed at throngs of Nebraska football fans that read "Go Big Red, No 'Little' War.”

Excuse me, 30?  Need I detail the demonstrations of hundreds or thousands I’ve attended that have been completely ignored by the press?  Remember when the New York Times justified not covering Occupy Wall Street by saying there were only a few hundred people involved?  The baffling fact that the demonstration in San Francisco today, which drew at least 1500 people, didn’t get a mention does not lessen the marvel that the mainstream media seems to be beating the bushes for antiwar activity to report on. 

Even more extraordinary is that Obama and his team, who appeared all set a week ago to go it alone, despite being rebuffed by the British Parliament, suddenly backed off.  CBS News mentioned the US public’s 20% support of an attack as one factor in that decision.  Another was that 140 Congresspeople, led by the East Bay’s own Barbara Lee, signed a letter demanding a say.  It’s easy for us here, and I’m certainly one of them, to assume that we just vote for Lee to make ourselves feel good, that she and other progressives in Congress don’t have any real power.  Indeed, it usually seems that way, but lo and behold, one of the most out-there members of Congress set something in motion that – at least momentarily -- stopped the war machine in its tracks.

Obama has backed himself into a corner, because on one hand he drew a red line, so his ego and all that are at stake, but on the other he made this big speech about democracy and letting Congress decide, so if he can’t get Congress on board, then he will look bad if he does it.  Which makes a call to your Congressperson a little less futile than usual.

Obama and the media have told us we’re “war-weary,” and that’s kind of nervy.  Afghans are war-weary.  Iraqis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, the guys still stuck in Guantanamo.  Except for the troops themselves – who are actually speaking out against a new war themselves -- and the very small percentage of people who have a family member in the military, we have no right to be “war-weary.”  Weary of what exactly?  We don’t even hear about the wars most days.

Nonetheless, it seems like even the media folks who couldn’t wait to attack Iraq, while they are not challenging patently false assertions like the 1400 dead in the chemical weapons attack that the US officials are hammering like a drumbeat (the Syrian Human Rights Observatory puts it at 502), are saying, “Enough already.”  It seems like our taste for blood may be waning slightly.  And that’s a good thing.

A study released last week purports to find that “the absence of a strong and visible anti-war movement, the way there was during the George W. Bush Presidency” is due to the desertion of Democrats following the election of Obama.  Now the authors’ data documenting a decline in participation by identified Democrats seems solid, but I dispute that there was a “strong and visible” peace movement during the period of the Bush presidency they’re looking at, which starts in 2007.  My recollection is that our ability to pull out more than a few hundred people plummeted in the six months after March 19, 2003, and that by 2006 the antiwar movement was more or less dormant.  I credit the decline much more to the perception that demonstrating just doesn’t do any good – that when millions out in the street couldn’t stop the Iraq war, the balloon essentially popped.

Now is a good time to blow it up again.  It actually turns out that the record of movements for stopping wars in recent times is not quite as poor as we think.  Historian Lew Rockwell reminds us that 

“Popular pressure against U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua [in the 1980s] not only blocked the dispatch of U.S. combat troops, but led to congressional action (i.e., the Boland amendment) cutting off U.S. government funding for the U.S. surrogates, the contras.”

Rockwell further points out that during the consumerist eighties, the dead period following the activist sixties and seventies, “the Nuclear Freeze campaign … organized the largest political demonstration up to that time in U.S. history, and drew the support of more than 70 percent of the public. In Europe, much the same thing occurred, and in the fall of 1983 some five million people turned out for demonstrations against the planned deployment of intermediate range nuclear missiles. Reagan was stunned.”  Rockwell posits that this led Reagan to pull back from Cold War rhetoric and seek an arms control agreement.   

I was part of those movements in the eighties and I never before thought about how successful we were.  When people talk about successful social movements, they don’t talk about Central America.  That’s partly because for many of us, our goal was an end to US imperialism, if not social revolution at home, and we didn’t get that.  It’s also because the media never credited us; they continued to make fun of us as a throwback to the sixties.

But we did do it, and we can do it again.  Today.

Listening to Black America

I have been wanting to write something since the Zimmerman verdict came down.  Wanting to write about why these cycles of extrajudicial killing and judicial legitimization keep happening, why the national "we" (as opposed to most of you) keep being shocked by them, why we keep demanding "justice" through the criminal courts while knowing that those courts exist to perpetuate injustice.  Mostly wanting to write about how it can possibly be that a majority of whites (nearly 60%, according to a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll) believe that we have achieved a "color-blind" society - or more precisely, that "America is a nation where people are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

 

I've been wanting to write about the protest movements that so predictably rise up around these killings and how and why they fail to demand or deliver real change.  About what it will take for the whole country to become North Carolina, with its "Moral Mondays" -- weekly civil disobedience actions by a multiracial coalition at the state Capitol.

But when I sit down, I put my hands on the keyboard and nothing comes out.  I finally realized, my hands might be telling me that this is a good time for well-intentioned white people to shut up and listen to what Black people are saying.

Here are two of my favorite things I've read in the last couple weeks.  I would love to see yours.

StrangeFruitvale

The eerie intersection of Trayvon Martin and Fruitvale Station

By Wesley Morris on July 25, 2013

...
The collective reaction to the Zimmerman verdict is striking. These protests and demonstrations aren't directed solely at another race, at white people (black people know Zimmerman is also half-Peruvian and that the president is half-white). The outrage is directed at a system that's demonstrably harmful to non-white people. It's the institutions and all they've wrought that people are sick of. We don't yet live in the world the Supreme Court thought we did when it struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act and weakened the case for affirmative action. More than ever, we live in a time of racism without racists, just racist laws, racist policies, and racist ideas.

This is how the writing on Mad Men can be so sagacious and imaginative about life in America for one set of characters and so casually insulting for another — not because its mastermind, Matthew Weiner, is a racist but because auteurist television is capacious and permissive enough to subscribe to the institutions of racism, the racism you sense, the racism you breathe, the racism that makes you turn to your friend and say, "That just happened, right?" There is n-word racism. Then there are the lingering, toxic particles that centuries of n-word racism leave in the air. We all breathe them, but we don't always like to talk about it. So it is heresy to mention that, say, the strategic use of Planet of the Apes in the same Mad Men episode that featured Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination might itself be heretical. It's still hard to talk about negative depictions of race in culture without comments sections and Twitter feeds turning infernal. We're breathing the same air, and yet we're not.

Perceptively, the president picked up on the central frustration with the calls for a national conversation. Lots of people want to talk, but fewer want to listen. This is also how it has always been at the movies and on a lot of television. Hollywood tells the world what life is like for black Americans without black Americans being able to say what life is like for themselves....

Read the rest 

Who Will March for Marissa Alexander?

By Marissa Jackson

...

I, too, stewed and brewed in the immediate wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal. I worried a lot, as I always have, about my two burly black younger brothers, knowing that their prestigious college degrees and multicultural groups of friends will not save them should some vigilante feel intimidated by their existence and decide to shoot them to death. I worry about my husband, who speaks mostly French and recently arrived in the United States from a country where blackness is the norm--what would happen to him if he were stopped and frisked? Would he know how to behave, or would he freak out, unintentionally committing suicide-by-cop? But I also felt in my stomach a deep grief for black womanhood, and a jealousy of sorts, that our oppressions will never mean as much as those of our brothers. I felt absolutely browbeaten over the sobering reality that if Trayvon Martin’s life meant nothing, than the lives of my sister and I mean less than nothing--even to members of my own community.

Read the rest

The Week After the Day After

Unable to beat Obama with tried and true tactics – racist fearmongering, voter suppression and the grand coalition of pissed off white men – the Republicans are apparently going for the one thing that never fails: a sex scandal.  Somehow they are trying to tie an extramarital affair, or two, by CIA director Gen. David Petraeus to the attack on the embassy in Benghazi.  Huh?  Doesn’t matter if it makes sense.  An extramarital affair took down Clinton, it will take down Obama, even if it’s not his affair and even if House Majority Leader and superreactionary Eric Cantor also knew about the affair and didn’t broadcast it.

What’s that you say?  The Lewinsky affair didn’t take down Clinton?  Of course it did.  Just ask anyone.  History cannot be changed by the facts.

So like many of you, I breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday.  One because the right wing did not win.  Two, because a few good things passed in California and the worst ones didn’t.  And three because it’s over.

I had been pretty sure that if Obama won, Romney would refuse to concede, demanding recounts in every state, even possibly challenging the electoral college itself.  Maybe it was the fact that that particularly anti-democratic provision of the Constitution was designed to overempower the slave states, which as a number of analysts have noted, closely correspond to today’s red states, that stopped the Republicans from pursuing that strategy.  Or maybe it was the fact that they were truly shell-shocked, caught by surprise, having 100% swallowed their own bunk so that they believed they would win fair and square by cheating and lying, and had no back-up plan.  Maybe, as the new uberman Nate Silver had suggested, their minds were in such a twist that they had lost the simple ability to count to 270.  Anyway, it’s exciting to realize I’m capable of more diabolical thinking than the Republican party!  Have to consider what havoc I can wreak with that special power.

Now as for the Obama victory, I am not so ecstatic, as I’m sure most of you are not either.  As we all know, it means more drones, more deportations, more charter schools, more gay marrying while cities burn and flood.

However, I learned something about myself this election season.  And that’s that as I get older, my appreciation for left-wing self-righteousness, purity and cynicism wanes.  Now this is kind of a shock to my system, because those have been my staple foods for many years.  It’s not that I want to hold hands and sing Kum-ba-yah.  I’m definitely not going to go out there and register voters for the Democrats, or even vote for them very much (in this election, I think the only one I voted for was Congresswoman Barbara Lee, and I’m not all that thrilled with her.)  It’s just that the ability to see the cloud behind every silver lining no longer seems radical to me, instead it seems like another way of preserving and protecting the status quo.

Here are a few posts that reflect the negativism emanating from my corner of the virtual universe on Wednesday:

“I am so fucking DONE with being subtly and not so subtly called stupid by my so called friends and comrades in and around the anarchist community for making a different choice than the one they'd like to make for me. All this campaign cycle I have been paralyzed by the ways I've internalized the shaming and silencing tactics. I've been questioning my passion and then trying to quell it. It's hard to stand up and say, yes, I am one of the people you think are morons because I make this particular choice, but I wish i'd done that. Right now I am waiting for the returns and feeling really sad that i didn't go out and fight for Prop 30, and really frightened about what's going to happen if it doesn't pass. having worked on a school budget last year. And I'm pissed at myself for allowing the opinion of people who, frankly, don't care about the same things I do, matter to me.”

--RJ, on Facebook

“…the delirium of liberals this morning is understandable: the night could scarcely have gone better for them. By all rights, they should expect to be a more powerful force in Washington. But what are they going to get from it? Will they wield more political power? Will their political values and agenda command more respect? Unless the disempowering pattern into which they have voluntarily locked themselves changes, the answer to those questions is almost certainly "no"….

“With last night's results, one can choose to see things two ways: (1) emboldened by their success and the obvious movement of the electorate in their direction, liberals will resolve that this time things will be different, that their willingness to be Good Partisan Soldiers depends upon their core values not being ignored and stomped on, or (2) inebriated with love and gratitude for Obama for having vanquished the evil Republican villains, they will follow their beloved superhero wherever he goes with even more loyalty than before. One does not need to be Nate Silver to be able to use the available historical data to see which of those two courses is the far more likely one.”

Glenn Greenwald, "Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory?"

“I’m really ready to be done with the in-fighting among the Radical Left….Some folks voted for President Obama, albeit in a range from enthusiastic to reluctant support. Some voted for progressive third party candidates like Jill Stein, choosing to give the side eye to the binary of the prevailing two party system. Others abstained altogether, rejecting the notion that voting for the lesser of two evils is any choice at all.  The Radical Left is not a monolithic entity, but rather a diverse set of communities that approach the realization of justice in a variety of ways. I’m not suggesting that we become more alike, but I am concerned that the way we talk about our differences is not only unproductive but oftentimes a violent distraction from our shared goals….The past two years have been like a family reunion gone terribly wrong.”

Crunkadelic, "After the Love Has Gone: SomeThoughts on Radical Community After the Election"

“…there are those of us that would have rather seen Romney in the house. Imagine if he took away women's rights, then many people would surely rise up in opposition, bc it effected them directly. Unfortunately since americans don't YET feel the extent of the austerity measures, and haven't YET experienced a drone strike, killing one of their children - so it's super easy for them to ignore the daily horrors done by US (over the past several decades, but significantly advanced by Oboma!), for many in the world...”

the person writing this is too young to remember Reagan, but not to remember GW Bush

It makes me incredibly sad and angry to hear a spectacularly talented and hard-working young activist say she feels shamed and silenced by the people who are supposed to be fighting for a better world.  Isn’t shaming and silencing what we have Rush Limbaugh for?

Let’s get one thing clear: in my lifetime, people have not risen up because we had woman-hating budget-slashing right-wing presidents.  The only significant rising in my adult life came under a Democratic president – Obama, one year ago, remember?  It wasn’t a fluke.  It was because, as Frances Piven and Lorraine Minnite pointed out in The Nation a few weeks back, for a social movement to flourish, people have to feel that there’s a chance they’re going to be listened to.  In 2002-3, we had an enormous outpouring of antiwar energy, millions in the streets, tens of thousands doing civil disobedience.  Bush/Chaney made it clear that they did not care, were not listening, were never going to listen, and the movement fizzled quickly.

For whatever it’s worth, Obama and other politicians heard the Occupy movement.  It changed the conversation, suddenly 99% was on everyone’s lips.  Obama turned around on the Keystone XL Pipeline because of the thousands brought to Washington by 350.org and other environmental groups.  He changed his position again, yes, but that doesn’t negate the accomplishment.  He signed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals one day after a group of immigrant kids sat in in his campaign headquarters.  Coincidence?  No.  He didn’t do it because he’s a nice guy, he did it because he needed the Latino vote.  Great, that’s what pressure politics is about.

People waste way way way too much time arguing over whether Obama is the most progressive president since FDR or more right-wing than Reagan.  It doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t even make sense.  As many people have reminded us over the last four years, FDR did not get elected as a progressive; he got elected as a deficit hawk, and became progressive to avoid socialism.

Who’s in the White House is not nearly as important as who’s in the streets.

If your goal is to be right about Obama, or about liberals, then congratulations.  You are.  You can go home and say Mission Accomplished.  But if you want to make change, you actually have to work at it, and you have to do it with a belief that change is possible.  As a magic teacher of mine used to say, if you can’t believe it’s possible, pretend you can.

In the next two months, Obama and the congressional leadership are going to make decisions – in the name of avoiding the “fiscal cliff” – that will have long-term important effects on the lives of millions of seniors, students, workers, on the environment, on transportation, on everything.  Left to their own devices, they will definitely make decisions that will hurt.  If everyone who attended an Occupy march last year hits the road immediately with “No Cuts - Tax the Rich” signs, banners, guerrilla ads, paid-for ads, letters, petitions, lawn signs, window signs, you name it, the leaders may still make terrible decisions.  Or they might make less terrible ones.  Only one way to find out and that’s to stop snarking and start organizing.