It’s been five years since the instantly-famous world trade protests in Seattle invented a new sort of activism. Angry confrontations with police dominated the pictures coming from the protests. The protest marked the coming-out party of the Independent Media movement, both both brought together and reported on the protests.
In the _Seattle Weekly_, Geov Parrish asks “Is This What Failure Looks Like?”:http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0447/041124_news_wtogeov.php:
bq. But it’s one thing to shut down a high-level meeting for a day; it’s quite another to get your priorities enacted as public policy. And so, in the half-decade since Seattle’s groundbreaking protests, anti-globalization and fair-trade organizers in the United States have struggled to find ways to not simply create debate but win.
I’ve always respect Geov, who’s been one of the rare pacifist organizers who’s acted as a bridge between the gray-haired oldline peace groups and the younger Seattle-style activists. So it’s kind of funny to see his thoughtful article described by Counterpunch this way. Read Charles Munson’s critique, “Seattle Weekly Trashes Anti-Globalization Movement”:http://www.counterpunch.org/munson11302004.html.
The WTO protests were a landmark and radicalized a lot of new activists. But despite being 99% peaceful, they never shook the image of the black-clad anarchist spoiled brats throwing bricks through windows. Although I had friends who donned the black hankerchiefs, the black bloc always reminded me of the loser high school kids who turn over dumpsters behind the 7 – 11; the high political rhetoric seemed secondary to the joy of being “bad.” It was look-at-me! activism, which is fun and occassionally useful, but not the stuff to create fundamental social change.
I participated in a few post-Seattle events: the anti World Bank protests in Washington DC and the Republican National Convention protests in my hometown of Philadelphia, serving as an Indymedia worker for both. I witnessed wonderful creativity, I marveled at the instant community of the Indymedia Centers, I was fasincated by the cell-phone/internet organizing.
But there was also this kind of nagging sense that we were trying to recreate the mythical “Seattle.” It was as if we were all derivative rock bands trying to jump on the bandwagon of a breakthrough success: the Nivana clones hoping to recatch the magic. It was hard to shake the feeling we were play acting ourselves sometimes.
It’s good to honestly reflect on the protests now. We need to see what worked and what didn’t. The fervor and organizing strategies changed activism and will continue to shape how we see social-change organizing. The world is better for what went down in Seattle five years ago, and so is North American polticial organizing. But let’s stop idolizing what happened there and let’s see what we can learn. For we’ve barely begun the work.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ united states
It’s Official: US Abuse at Gitmo
November 30, 2004
While the images of U.S. soliders torturing iraqi prisoners at Al Grahib Prison in Badgdad have been broadcast around the world, US officials have frequently reassured us that conditions at the U.S. detention camp in Guantamano Bay, Cuba, were acceptable and in accord with the Geneva Convention’s rules for treatment of prisoners. As proof the Pentagon and Bush Administration have frequently cited the fact that the International Red Cross regularly inspects prison conditions at Guantamano. They forgot to tell us what they’ve seen.
A confidential report prepared by the International Red Cross this summer found that conditions at Guantamano Bay were “tantamount to torture.” Strong words from a cautious international body. Because of the way the IRC works, its reports are not made available to the public but instead presented to the accused government, in the hope that they will correct their practices. In predicable fashion, the Bush Adminstration privately denied any wrongdoing and kept the IRC findings secret. In a display of incredible audacity it then defended itself _from other accusations of torture_ by citing the IRC’s presence at Guantanamo, conveniently omitting the IRC’s strongly-worded criticisms. Amazing really.
The IRC report is still secret. We only know of it second-hand, from a memo obtained by the _Times_ that quotes from some of its findings (“Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantanamo“http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/politics/30gitmo.html, Nov 29). What kind of stuff is going on there? The _Times_ recently interviewed British prisoners who had been detained in Afghanistan and iraq and sent to Guantanamo Bay. Here’s one story:
bq. One one regular procedure was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels.
It’s not needles under fingernails or electrodes to the privates, but it is indeed “tantamount to torture.” While it was hard to believe these prisoners’ stories when they were first published a few months ago, they become much more credible in light of the IRC conclusions.
We still don’t know about what’s happening in the camp. The Bush Administration has the power, not to mention the duty, to immediately release International Red Cross reports. But the United States has chosen to suppress the report. No torturing government has ever admitted to its actions. Saddam Hussein himself denied wrongdoing when _he_ ran the Al Grahib prison and used it for torture. We rely on bodies like the International Red Cross to keep us honest.
There are those who defend torture by appealing to our fears, many of which are indeed grounded in reality. We’re at war, the enemy insurgents are playing dirty, Osama bin Laden broke any sort of international conventions when he sent airliners into the World Trade Center. Very true. But the United States has a mission. I believe in the idealistic notion that we should be a beacon to the world. We should always strive for the moral high ground and invite the world community to join us. We haven’t been doing that lately. Yes it’s easier to follow the lead of someone like Saddam Hussein and just torture anyone we suspect of plotting against us. But do we really want him as our role model?
Torture Apologist Nominated as Attorney General?
November 10, 2004
President Four More Years, George W. himself, thinks the best pick for the nation’s top law-enforcement official should be a lawyer who advocated throwing away the Geneva Convention. The U.S. Attorney General nominee, Alberto Gonzales, working as a senior White House lawyer said in January of 2002 that the war against terrorism:
bq. “in my judgment renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/10/politics/10cnd-ashc.html
The man who would enforce U.S. laws thinks that the most important international law in human history should be chucked. In arguing that the law against torture of enemy soldiers was now irrelevant, Gonzales helped set the stage for the “Abu Ghraib prison atrocities”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact. Instead of being tried in international criminal courts as a war criminal, Gonzales is being promoted to a senior United States cabinet position. When liberty for all fails, destroy their cities: watch Falluja burn. When justice for all fails, torture the bastards: away with the Geneva Convention.
What? Forgotten what torture looks like? The folks at antiwar.com have a “collection of Abu Ghraib images”:http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444
Four More Years (Let’s Roll Up Our Sleeves)
November 3, 2004
President George W. Bush has been re-elected for four more years. The man who led the United States to “two wars in four years”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_antiwar.php and whose policies in Afghanistan and iraq continue to create chaos in both countries will get four more years to pursue his war of terrorism against the world. Americans will not sleep any safer but will dream ever more of conquering and killing enemies. We’ll continue to sow the seeds of wars for generations to come.
I was worried when Senator John Kerry unexpectedly picked up in the primaries to become the Democratic presidential candidate. In his patrician upbringing he was very much like President Bush, and they actually agreed on many of the big issues — war, gay marriage, stem cell research. But in his personality, style and temperament Kerry was too much like former Vice President Al Gore.
Yes, I know Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election and that his loss was declared by mysterious chads and a handful of senior citizen judges in Washington, D.C. But an election as close as that one should have been seen as a resounding loss, no matter what the Supreme Court verdict. As Vice President, Gore had helped lead the nation to one of its greatest economic recovers in our lifetimes. He was also clearly smarter in the President, more knowledgeable and farsighted, with more carefully articulated visions of the future. But he barely won the popular vote, making the electoral college vote close enough to be debated.
Kerry is intellectual and aloof in the same way that Gore was. And clearly there are a number of American voters who don’t want that. They want a candidate who can speak from the heart, who isn’t afraid to talk about faith. They also want a candidate who can talk in simple, morally unambiguous ways about war.
And what about war? Would a President Kerry have really pulled out troops sooner than President Bush will? Who knows: Democratic Presidents have pursued plenty of wars over the last century and when Kerry proclaimed he would hunt down and kill the enemy, he spoke as the only one of the four men on the major tickets who actually has hunted down and killed fellow humans in wartime.
We can make an educated guess that a Kerry-led America would leave iraq in better shape than a Bush-led America will. Kerry has the patience and the planning foresight to do the hard coalition-building work in iraq and in the world that is necessary if U.S. military power will translate to a real peace. But a Kerry plan for pacification and rebuilding of iraq could easily have followed the path that Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s did in Vietnam: an unending, constantly-escalating war.
Did Americans officially approve the country’s past two wars yesterday? It’s hard to conclude otherwise. Despite the lies of mass destruction and despite the “willful misleading of the American people”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000194.php that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks and “possessed weapons of mass destruction”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_weapons_of_mass_destruction_scandal.php, something over 50% of Americans thought the Bush/Cheney Presidency was worth keeping for another four years.
But there’s nothing to say a popular vote grants wisdom. In the next four years, those of us wanting an alternative will probably have many “teachable moments” to talk with our neighbors and friends about the deteriorating situation in iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe those of us whose “pacifism is informed by religious understandings”:www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000462.php can cross the intellectual divide some more and talk about how our faith gives us a simple, morally unambiguous way to argue against war. The country needs “strong pacifist voices”:http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php now more than ever. Let’s get talking.
ps: …and donating. Nonviolence.org is a nine years old peace resource guide and blog. It’s time it gets regular funding from its million annual readers. “Please give generously and help us expand this work”:http://www.nonviolence.org/support/. We have a lot to do in the next four years!
Vote for War (Or Else)
September 8, 2004
On Tuesday Vice President Dick Cheney told an Iowa audience that there would be more terrorism in the U.S. if he wasn’t re-elected Vice President:
bq. “It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice,” Mr. Cheney told a crowd of 350 people in Des Moines, “because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.”
His words underscore just how much the Bush/Cheney Administration have relied on the 9/11 terrorist attacks for their political legitimacy. Terror breeds terror and fear, anger and violence escalates in its wake. The wars in Afghanistan and iraq are shaping a new generation of America haters, as much because the post-war rebuilding has been so careless and self-serving to American economic interests. War-mongerers in one country support the war-mongerers in another by providing each another with targets and arguments. The cycle goes on.
GWB: “Ah, we did? I don’t think so.”
August 27, 2004
An “unintentionally hilarious interview of President George W. Bush”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/politics/campaign/27bush.html is excerpted in today’s New York Times_. One gem concerned global warming. Just a few days ago his secretaries of energy and commerce delivered a report to Congress saying that carbon dioxide emissions (cars, coal burning plants, etc.) really are causing global warming. Well yes, most of us have figured that out already but this is an Administration that’s runned and staffed by oil industry executives and they’ve insisted for years that the evidence isn’t clear. That they’re now admitting the cause of global warming is big and it should certainly auger a overhaul of U.S. energy policies. But when asked why the administration had changed its position on what causes global warming Bush responded “Ah, we did? I don’t think so.”
He also admitted that he had made a “miscalculation of what the conditions would be” in postwar iraq but said he wasn’t going to go “on the couch” to rethink his decision or his decision-making process. Uhh.., Mister President, maybe you should think about this before offering to serve another four years?
NVA: US Military Draft Probably Isn’t Coming Back
August 26, 2004
Rick Jahnkow argues in May’s _Nonviolent Activist_ that there’s a “Decreased Likelihood of Draft”:http://www.warresisters.org/nva0504‑3.htm. There are many aging pacifists that have become obsessed lately with the idea that compulsory military service might be returning to the United States. For example, I’ve watched the leader of one annual anti-draft workshop predict the draft’s imminent return year after year, in ever more excited terms and wondered what evidence this organizer has seen that I haven’t.
Jahnkow watches this issue as much as anyone in his work for the San Diego-based “Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft”:http://www.comdsd.org/ and he’s been watching the hype build as he’s become more skeptical:
bq. Warnings about an impending draft have been circulating on the Internet for months now. Some are tying a possible draft to the election and predicting with bold certainty that conscription will be introduced in 2005… The energy that�s been generated on this topic has been both amazing and, I have to confess, somewhat seductive to anti-draft organizations like the one for which I work.
Most of the people I’ve seen get excited by a possible return of the draft were in their teens back in the Vietnam War era. Their organizing sometimes seems almost nostalgic for the issues of their youth. They’re trying to save the current generation from having to go through the same trauma. But the older activists’ anti-draft work is often patronistic and self-congratulatory, for it doesn’t take into account the fact that younger Americans don’t need saving.
The bottom line truth is that the Pentagon simply couldn’t reinstate the draft. Jahnkow cites a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that found that 88 percent of people 18 – 29 oppose a return of the draft. There would be mass mayhem if the draft returned. While some young men would surely obey, a huge percentage would actively defy it. Even if only 10% dramatically refused, the system would break down. This is a generation raised in a post-punk culture and many of its members aggressively question authority. They were raised by parents who lived through the sixties and saw widespread lies and abuse of power, including the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The media mythology around sixties-era radicalism has kept us from realizing that there’s a baseline of everyday radicalism today that far overshadows much of what was going on thirty years ago. The Pentagon knows this better than the peace movement does.
It’s not the only nostalgic protesting this generation is engaging in these days and I’ve compared revived organizing around “phone war tax resistance”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000230.php to “recycling dead horses.” I agree with Rick that today’s teens and twenty-somethings have real issues which we need to address. He says it so well:
bq. The latter point leads me to the second reason why I have some negative feelings about the current concern over the draft: Much of the anxiety is coming from people who are ignoring the more pressing problem of aggressive military recruiting, which, among other things, disproportionately affects non-affluent youths and people of color. In essence, there has been a draft for these individuals�a poverty draft�and yet it has drawn relatively little attention from antiwar activists. There is a race and class bias reflected in this that needs to be seriously considered and addressed by the general peace movement.
“Here’s the link to his article again”:http://www.warresisters.org/nva0504‑3.htm
h4. Related:
* Last November we published a provocative article by pacifist Johann Christoph Arnold arguing that “A Military Draft Would be Good for Us”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000231.php and a personal response piece I wrote about how the “pressures of a military draft”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000231.php can force an eighteen year old to really think hard about issues of war and peace.
* Nonviolence.org has guide to issues of “military conscription and conscientious objection”:http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/conscience.php. We also watch issues of the “peace movement”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_peace_movement.php, and tend to highlight generational issues a lot.
* The Urban Legend debunkers at Snopes.com have tracked and researched the “draft fear emails going around”:http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/draft.asp. They don’t think a draft is coming back and any time soon, citing many sources.
Images of Patriotism and the Swift Boat Controversy
August 23, 2004
The U.S. election campaign has many ironies, none perhaps as strange as the fights over the candidates’ war records. The current President George W. Bush got out of active duty in Vietnam by using the influence of his politically powerful family. While soldiers killed and died on the Mekong Delta, he goofed off on an Alabama airfield. Most of the central figures of his Administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney also avoided fighting in Vietnam.
Not that I can blame them exactly. If you don’t believe in fighting, then why not use any influence and loophole you can? It’s more courageous to stand up publicly and stand in solidarity with those conscientious objectors who don’t share your political connections. But if you’re both antiwar and a coward, hey, loopholes are great. Bush was one less American teenager shooting up Vietnam villages and for that we commend him.
Ah, but of course George W. Bush doesn’t claim to be either antiwar or a coward. Two and a half decades later, he snookered American into a war on false pretences. Nowadays he uses every photo-op he can to look strong and patriotic. Like most scions of aristocratic dynasties throughout history, he displays the worst kind of policial cowardice: he is a leader who believes only in sending other people’s kids to war.
Contrast this with his Democratic Party rival John Kerry. He was also the son of a politically-connected family. He could have pulled some strings and ended up in Alabama. But he chose to fight in Vietnam. He was wounded in battle, received metals and came back a certified war hero. Have fought he saw both the eternal horrors of war and the particular horrors of the Vietnam War. It was only after he came back that he used his political connections. He used them to puncture the myths of the Vietnam War and in so doing became a prominent antiwar activist.
Not that his antiwar activities make him a pacifist, then or now. As President I’m sure he’d turn to military solutions that we here at Nonviolence.org would condemn. But we be assured that when he orders a war, he’d be thinking of the kids that America would be sending out to die and he’d be thinking of the foreign victims whose lives would inevitably be taken in conflict.
Despite the stark contrast of these Presidential biographies, the peculiar logic of American politics is painting the military dodger as a hero and the certified war hero as a coward. The latter campaign is being led by a shadowy group called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Today’s Guardian has an excellent article on the “Texas Republicans funding the Swift Boat controversy”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1288272,00.html. The New York Times also delves the “outright fabrications of the Swift Boat TV ads”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/politics/campaign/20swift.html?ex=1094018686&ei=1&en=691b4b0e81b8387f. A lot of Bush’s buddies and long-time Republican Party apparatchiks are behind this and its lies are transparent and easy to uncover. It’s a good primer on dirty politics 2004 style.
One of the big questions about this election is whether the American voters will believe more in image or substance. It goes beyond politics, really, to culture and to a consumerism that promises that with the right clothes and affected attitude, you can simply buy yourself a new identity. President Bush put on a flight jacket and landed a jet on an aircraft carrier a mile off the California beach. He was the very picture of a war hero and strong patriot. Is a photo all it takes anymore?