Posted on 03/19/2005 5:03:49 PM PST by Constitution Day
Today we met in Fayetteville, NC to Freep a motley rabble of socialists, anarchists, Code Pink-os, and other throwbacks to the 60's! As usual, we were well outnumbered by their hordes of college students, aging hippies and other bused-in protestors, but we held our own as always.
Please post any reports and observations on this thread only.
Good for you - and welcome to NRA :-)
Cigars and Freeping go together. The DC Chapter has been using that deadly (for liberals) combination for years.
Welcome back to the common-sense forum and WATCH IT - those lefty sites will pollute your mind AND your hard drive...
That's the truth! My husband's security system wouldn't even let me open some of those sites.
My name is Raphael Zappala. I am the one that this post is about. I also understand why you would be a little confused by the statement "I've been anti-war and just a peace activist since I was in my mother's womb," but it was a misquote. What I had said is "I was at my first peace protest while I was in my mother's womb." So, hopefully that cleared up any confusion.
By the way, my position as a "food stamp advocate" is to help those in low-income get food stamps and further utilize the program. I enjoy helping people so my job only fits.
Thank you for your words of comfort...
You have FReepmail
By ANNE BLYTHE, Staff Writer
FAYETTEVILLE -- Raphael Zappala winces as he describes the April day nearly a year ago when he came home to find his dad in the doorway and his mom inside sobbing. A man in a military uniform heavily decorated with medals had knocked on the door at 7:02 p.m. His brother, Sherwood Baker, a 30-year-old Pennsylvania National Guard sergeant who had moved in with the family as a 13-month-old foster child, had been killed in Baghdad on April 26, the 720th fallen soldier in a war that started two years ago.
"I think about him every day," said Zappala, 26, a food stamp advocate in Philadelphia.
The fallen soldiers and those still on active duty in Iraq were on the minds of nearly 3,000 peace advocates Saturday as they gathered in this Army-base city to commemorate the second anniversary of the war and protest continued occupation of the oil-rich country.
Across the street from the larger gathering in Rowan Park, about 150 people protested the protesters. "I kind of resent the fact that they came here where the troops are based," said Thomas Atchison, 45, of Durham. "So we say, 'Hey, we stand up for the troops.' "
Passionate slogans were hoisted by both sides.
On one side of the street: "Our Country Was the Best. Is it Now?," "Bush's War is America's Shame," "Peace is Patriotic," and "The World Says No To War."
On the other side, counter-demonstrators used megaphones trained on the park to chant "Swim to Cuba" and "We Gave Peace a Chance. We got 9/11," or "You never marched against Saddam. You never marched against Osama."
John McCreary, 59, a Vietnam veteran and retired landscaper from Fayetteville, stood quietly next to the counter-protesters and shook his head when he saw the rows of flag-draped fake coffins that war protesters carried into the park.
"It makes me angry," McCreary said. "I think it's disrespectful to the troops, the way they gave their lives. But they have their freedom of speech. That's what America was built upon."
Tom Bergamine, assistant chief of the Fayetteville Police Department, said that despite the contrasting views, the city had been mostly peaceful. Only one arrest was reported.
"Everything's going real well," he said. "It's a bigger crowd than last year, but everything's been just fine."
Last year, nearly 1,000 war protesters gathered in Fayetteville on the first anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Barbara Clawson, 70, and Connie Hoyle, 72, traveled from their Burlington homes Saturday, in part for the camaraderie of others with like political minds and with the hope of sending a message to others in the world.
"As a Christian, I believe war is a religious issue," Clawson said. "I believe peacemaking is a value that Christianity has not been faithfully representing lately."
People came from near and far to take part in the events this weekend.
Shared grief, goals
David Potorti, a Cary resident and founding member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, drew loud cheers when he voiced his opposition to the war. His oldest brother, Jim, was killed when the World Trade Center towers collapsed 3 1/2 years ago. "I will not respond to terrorism by becoming a terrorist," he said.
Cindy Sheehan, a member of Gold Star Families for Peace, traveled from California to honor her son, Casey Austin Sheehan, who was killed two weeks after he got to Iraq.
"I hate this war because it took my son," a teary Sheehan told the crowd. "But I'm happy you guys are here to end this thing."
Like other members of military families against the war, Sheehan said she attends the rallies and protests, in part, because of a sense of duty to her son. She had terse words for President Bush.
"If he believes in this march to democracy, why doesn't he march his daughters over there?" Sheehan said before leaving the stage.
Hugs awaited her.
Zappala was waiting nearby with outstretched arms.
"I've been anti-war and just a peace activist since I was in my mother's womb," he said. "I'm happy that people are here with the same beliefs. We're making a stand.
"If only we could be noticed, we'd be making a statement, and I have three words for people who say by doing this we're not supporting our troops: 'You don't understand.' "
A Trojan Jackass for the Anti-War Movement
By STAN GOFF
Fayetteville, North Carolina
"To mark the second anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq on March 19, various anti-war groups are planning to protest in Fayetteville, N.C., the home of Fort Bragg. It's not the protest, but the location that has some people upset.
"An organization representing veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan said demonstrators are 'wrong and insensitive' to take their complaints to Fort Bragg, because it blames the warriors for the war.
"'The decision makers are not at Fort Bragg, they are in Washington. Rallying against the war by marching at Fort Bragg is like protesting the cows if you don't like McDonalds,' said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Operation Truth."
-from "Anti-War Groups Protesting US Troops Instead of Decision-Makers," by Susan Jones, CNSNews.com, March 17, 2005
Everyone knows the story of the Trojan Horse. An act of friendship used to smuggle the enemy force inside your gates.
Actually, that's the dumbed down version.
The Greeks led the Trojans to believe that the great wooden horse was a Greek war offering to Athena, alleging it had been abandoned on the battlefield. The Greeks left a soldier behind, pretending he was now a non-combatant, to convince the Trojans that if they didn't carry the ligneous steed back into fortified Troy, the Trojans themselves would risk the wrath of the goddess Athena. It's a better story this way. Maybe it's a more apt metaphor, too, for what Paul Rieckhoff and "Operation Truth" are up to with the antiwar movement.
Paul Rieckhoff, a former first-looey in the Reserves who went to Iraq, has now found his political niche as a plant for the Democratic Party, using his outfit's non-profit status to give him plausible deniability. The NGO in question is Operation Truth, which has somehow managed to pass itself off as an antiwar group every since its inception while explicitly not taking a position against the war. It's a little like calling Camille Paglia a feminist or James Carville a leftist. Say it a couple of times in the press and its riveted together in the public consciousness. Feminist Camille Paglia... "from the left, James Carville." Basically, people can get away with any damn thing these days, or think they can. Not this, though.
Let me be frank. Operation Truth is a sham, and it's staff commandant is a jackass.
Just so no one tries to attribute my remarks to anyone or any organization or any campaign I might be in now, or any in the future, I say again... I am speaking for myself. I have a number of friends and colleagues who are a good deal more diplomatic than I am that can speak for their organizations. But after Reickhoff's creepy little attack on the Fayetteville, North Carolina antiwar action of March 19th , I can hold my tongue no longer on either Rieckhoff or the attempt by the operatives of liberal imperialism more generally to blunt the sharpening anti-imperial edge of the broad movement against the Mesopotamian misadventure.
Let me reiterate again that I am speaking for myself, personally, representing no organization... so no one like Rieckhoff can attribute anything I say to any of my allies in any current or campaign within the antiwar movement.
I'm speaking for myself as an unabashed leftist -- that's someone who opposes capitalism, in case this term is confusing. (James Carville is not a leftist. He is an obnoxious asshole, which is just one current within the Democratic Party... the Republicans have a lot of obnoxious assholes, too.) Leftism is part of the broad antiwar movement, openly so, and we argue openly for our position: that capitalism as a system, and not some moral or intellectual failure, causes these wars.
My reaction here doesn't only include Operation Truth, but the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), and all the rest of these bombardier-liberal shills. I haven't gotten ugly with any of them in public in the past because they were still mixed in with us when the pre-2004-election antiwar efforts were homogenized within a movement that was not antiwar, but anti-Bush. And this is the first time they have very publicly attacked those of us who are organizing among military families, veterans, and GI's.
Just two weeks ago, Operation Truth's Rieckhoff launched a full frontal bullshit assault against that action in the press saying, "If you support the troops, don't protest them in their backyards -- especially not as they're sent to war or returning home."
Of course, the entire call-up for that event was painfully clear from the very beginning that this was not a protest "against troops," which is a red herring in any case, and the speaker line-up was ponderously heaped with the families of military members, veterans, and the surviving families of the war dead. Rieckhoff knew this, and he lied about the character of the demo anyway.
Anyone who cares to search Rieckhoff's Operation Truth website, by the way, hungry for a single statement opposing either the invasion or occupation of Iraq will go home with an empty stomach. That's because it is not an antiwar NGO. It is criticizing the conduct of the war and the actions of the Republican administration on veterans benefits in a way calculated to bewilder people into believing it is an ally of the antiwar movement.
So here's my message to Rieckhoff. We got your number. Go home to your imperial buddies.
The same goes for Eric Gustafson who heads up the Education for Peace in Iraq Coalition (EPIC), another vet mired in the issue-policy swamp of liberal pluralism. From their own news release in which they piled onto the campaign of lies directed at the Fayetteville action: "Founded in 1998 by human rights advocates, EPIC promotes peace, human rights, and democracy for the people of Iraq. Since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq two years ago this week, EPIC has advocated U.S. and international assistance for Iraqi-led nation-building and opposed the withdrawal of UN-sanctioned forces until Iraq is able to provide for its own security."
EPIC's website claims is "was" against the war, but now... here's the uniform mantra among these fronts... WE cannot "abandon" Iraq. The caps are intentional, and the claim is mendacious. Their opposition was not to invading and occupying Iraq, but to the way in which the neocons went about it... that is, without a resolution from the UN Security Council.
'Give me a Security Council resolution, and I'll release my masculine energy on those wogs in a cloudburst of 500-pound bombs!'
The other speciality of this "tendency" is to red-bait. So I might as well take that away right here. I'm as red as a baboon's ass and proud of it.
I don't have to put on a red hat, though, to talk about this WE business... this WE must not "abandon Iraq." Even my movement allies in the hardly-seditious North Carolina Council of Churches -- who co-sponsored the Fayetteville action -- know that support of ANY continuation of ANY imperial military occupation is NOT antiwar. If you support a military occupation, then you are supporting a war. Two plus two. This is not complicated.
Just for the record, Paul & Eric, the US military is not in Iraq to do a damned thing for the Iraqi people. What particular brand of cheap magical-mystery acid does someone take when he implies that Pizarro should be nominated to help the Incas with reconstruction? WE are the barbarians here!
This benevolent force you are arguing to leave in Iraq has been used to enforce attacks and sanctions that are slouching toward a body count of 2 million, microtoxified the entire environment with a radioactive condiment that produces babies born without brains, slaughtered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, trashed the social and economic infrastructure, imprisoned thousands of people in indiscriminate round-ups (including children, by the way), subjected detainees to sexual humiliation, beatings, rape, murder, and other methods of systematic torture, bombed whole neighborhoods, kicked in the doors of sleeping families and waved guns at their infants and grandmothers, surrounded a city (Fallujah, in case WE forgot), then blocked the exits against "military-aged males," who the US armed forces then exterminated, Warsaw-style, by the thousands. You know, Paul & Eric , that I could go on with this list for some time.
That's why the antiwar movement is going to reject your little containment mission for the liberal bourgeoisie (Oh my God, he used another one of those commie words!). It doesn't take a Red to see the White-Man's-Burden stamp across this box of goods you are selling. WE can't abandon the Iraqis, indeed!
There is no WE. There is a THEY. I may as well explain this wild-eyed leftist claim. THEY are an imperial ruling class. THEY really do exist, and with about a month's dedicated research, it would be possible for a small staff to list them out with names and addresses... but then someone would accuse us of developing hit lists. Hmmm.
THEY operate very like a mafia, and THEY rely very much on their US state to keep things running smoothly, including sending out hirelings to kill their enemies and victims. The difference is that the hirelings, who are vast numbers of working class kids, have been convinced all their lives by a zillion-dollar-a-year Orwellian brainwashing apparatus to believe that killing for bankers and currency speculators and politicians is some noble cause.
THEY just sent hundreds of thousands of working class people in uniform to kill hundreds of thousands of unfashionable brown people in order to establish the redisposition of a post-Cold War imperial military into Southwest Asia. THEY have not for one milisecond considered, nor will THEY ever consider, the welfare of Iraqis except when it is politically and militarily expedient.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq will not be converted into a Botticelli painting.
THEY want to establish permanent military bases there, and every day that they stay there puts them one day closer to that... or more likely to some humiliating denouement like Vietnam, so we can ring up the carcass numbers in five figures with the only body count THEY keep -- American dead. Iraqis don't count, you see. So as long as we're playing the pronoun game, let me point out that YOU and the flabby Democratic Party bosses you ultimately work for when you attack us on actions like Fayetteville... YOU are arguing precisely what your correlatives did during the Vietnam occupation.
YOU and all the rest of the civil-societist gasbags in the alphabet soup of issue-policy NGO's are advising moderation in the face of a world that is already deeply in the grip of the very barbarism that Rosa Luxemburg warned us about. (She was red, too.) That's what YOU always do when big sections of the people start to look left. It's your nasty little job, and the latte fumes meandering up from your cups have always masked the smell of spilt blood... because what YOU are endorsing is nothing more nor less than the continuation of Wolfowitz's lethal Caligulan fantasy in Iraq to save capitalism from its own dirty, dangerous, and expensive messes.
In Fayetteville, where you would like to have shut us up, Cindy Sheehan tore open the tender wound of her grief for the hundredth time before a crowd, describing the moment when she learned that the child she pushed out of her own body no longer existed, that he had disappeared in a sustained moment of terror and pain during the Sadr rebellion, a rebellion incited gratuitously by the occupation authorities. She puts that grief on display again and again in the hope that others won't have to experience it, when she could stay home and let the wound heal. So I am not going to be diplomatic with Paul Rieckhoff and his ilk, when they misrepresent the action in Fayetteville as somehow being directed against those bewildered, economically caged-in workers in uniform we call "the troops."
Of course, class has been off their agenda for a long time. More and more of us already know who is served by trying to check the growing militancy within the antiwar movement, and we recognize the Kiplingesque racism that props up their flaccid argument that the Iraqis are uniquely unqualified to take control of their own destiny. It's not Iraq they are concerned with, after all, is it? They are worried, just like any Democratic Party boss or entrenched union bureaucrat that the left shift in the movement, where a lot of "ordinary" people now seek out and speak with known socialists, will eat into their careerist base. This has always been the motivation for cluster-bomb Democrats. Nothing freaks them out worse than school teachers and postal workers and janitors who are educating themselves on the deeper meaning of words like "imperialism."
It's this fear that motivates the cheap attack on the Fayetteville action, because when the resistance is carried into the dark heart of the imperial military itself a storm threat appears on the horizon, and not just for the war but for the bosses at home.
The left in this movement is not "against" the soldiers. Speaking for myself, I am on the soldier's side, not as a soldier, but as a human being. I encourage all soldiers to resist. I won't conceal the fact that my encouragement of that resistance is aimed at utterly gutting the capacity of that institution to continue operations in the charnel house they've made of Iraq. Because when the institution of the military can no longer occupy other nations and kill their people, then our sons and daughters will quit returning as torn flesh and pain in mobile burn units, wheelchairs, and body bags.
Oh, but WE can not abandon Iraq! Hearing this from Rieckhoff who has never claimed to oppose the war has created the controversy it has partly because many in the antiwar movement, including the alternative media, feted this barn weasel. They thought that his noisy entreaties for better body armor and more Prozac for PTSD were "progressive" for the same reason people voted for that Boston Basset hound, John Kerry. They believe the war is about George W. Bush instead of capitalism.
One pampered, intellectually challenged, legacy admission to the White House does not explain the direct line that can be drawn between an airplane flying into a skyscraper and a kid that will kill for a pair of shoes. It doesn't explain the straight line from Abu Ghraib to Pelican Bay. It doesn't explain the connection between Ken Lay and My Lai, between the battering of a wife in Cleveland and the sexual torture of a prisoner in Afghanistan, or between a flood victim in Princeville, North Carolina, and a tsunami victim in Aceh. But there are connections, and they become clearer to people the longer they stay in the antiwar movement, because they want answers. The drivel about staying the course is unsatisfactory. People can see Luxemburg's prediction of barbarism right in front of them. It's here, and this WE finds it unacceptable for future generations.
Take your big wooden jackass home and leave us to be on our way. We taking that left turn ahead in the road.
And to the soldiers... resist!
U.S. Rallies Mark Iraq Anniversary, Reflect Anti-War Groups' Growth, Challenges
Abid Aslam
OneWorld US
Mon., Mar. 21, 2005
WASHINGTON, D.C., Mar 21 (OneWorld) - Tens of thousands of protesters rallied in cities and towns across America over the weekend to mark the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and to demand that U.S. troops stationed there be brought home.
The protests on the anniversary Saturday as well as on Sunday reflected the U.S. anti-war movement's growing diversity. But they also highlighted the challenges of sustaining growth in new areas like suburban America and maintaining unity of purpose as the movement grapples with issues that elude consensus.
President George W. Bush, in a weekend radio address, said the war was launched ''to disarm a brutal regime, free its people, and defend the world'' and had inspired ''democratic reformers from Beirut to Tehran.''
''Today, women can vote in Afghanistan, Palestinians are breaking the old patterns of violence, and hundreds of thousands of Lebanese are rising up to demand their sovereignty and democratic rights,'' Bush said.
Others seemed unconvinced.
Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against The War, and Gold Star Families for Peace, whose members have lost relatives in Iraq, rallied the local community and supporters from around the country in Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to Fort Bragg and the Army's 82nd Airborne Division.
''More than 50 people from our community are dead. Our government continues to kill Americans and Iraqis alike in a war based on lies,'' said Fayetteville organizer Lou Plummer. ''Too many in Fayetteville, across the country, and in Iraq have suffered from a war that should never have happened.''
Plummer said the rally was meant to support U.S. troops by demanding that Washington bring them home now, take care of them, and ''end the policies that allowed this illegal and immoral war to happen in the first place.''
In New York, thousands gathered in Central Park and across historically black and working class neighborhoods throughout the city. Police arrested some three dozen activists, including some who lay down alongside flag-draped cardboard coffins near the landmark armed forces recruiting station at Times Square.
In Chicago, thousands marched on the city center's Federal Plaza. More than 1,000 people turned out in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and organizers there said their ranks were filled with people who had soured to the war, once supporting it but now regarding it as unjustified.
In all, more than 800 events were scheduled in 600-plus towns including San Francisco; Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky; Cottage Grove, Oregon; and in front of the New Mexico National Guard Armory in Albuquerque.
Scores of community groups, military families, and veterans' groups organized events alongside national coalitions including ANSWER (or Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), United for Peace and Justice, and Troops Out Now.
Overseas, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in a number of countries including some that have sent troops to support the U.S.-led invasion or occupation. These included Australia, Britain, Italy, and Japan.
U.S. anti-war groups have made alliances with black, immigrant, faith-based, and business groups in major metropolitan areas and smaller towns across the country. Two years ago, in the run up to and immediately after the invasion, the San Francisco crowds that produced some of the country's angriest protests included suit-clad executives. News photographs at the time showed police dragging away a handcuffed former president of the Pacific Exchange stock market. And in New York this past weekend, black groups led the marches that had top billing.
Diversity has brought dilemmas, however. While a broad spectrum of organizations came together to protest the rising death toll in Iraq--currently estimated by human rights groups at 100,000 Iraqis and tallied by U.S. news organizations at 1,519 or more Americans--the larger movement stands at a crossroads.
Individual groups have taken divergent positions on Iraqi resistance to the U.S.-led occupation, for example, and on when and on what terms to demand that American troops be withdrawn.
In meetings that have spilled over into online exchanges at Web sites such as Indymedia.org and in open letters and public gatherings, campaigners at United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and from the International Action Center and ANSWER have fallen out over whether to support the Iraqi resistance. Many UFPJ member organizations strongly reject any such support.
Likewise, activists eager to shield U.S. troops from harm are grappling over the content of a good exit strategy. Would simply withdrawing the 150,000-odd American soldiers in Iraq leave a thoroughly destabilized country even more vulnerable to sectarian extremists who have harnessed religious zeal to ensure a steady supply of recruits? Would it come across as a victory for the violent tactics of, and clear the way for more killings of civilian and repression of Iraqi women by such groups?
So intense has some of the debate been that the New York affiliate of Indymedia, a loose collaborative of community activists and chroniclers, asked in a recent headline, ''has the broad-based local anti-war movement reached its breaking point?''
Additionally, organizers are finding it difficult to make inroads in suburbia after enjoying success in making common cause with urban communities that long have sent their children into the armed forces to escape inner city poverty and garner skills and money for future education and employment.
Few groups have resources and experience to work with widely dispersed populations of relatively affluent Americans. They complain of insufficient support from the Democratic Party, which remains split over the occupation and U.S. withdrawal. Groups that once provided an online hub for organizing drives--chiefly, MoveOn.org--appear to have moved on, embracing fights to preserve Social Security and oppose Bush's nominees for the federal courts.
In the long run, the anti-war movement is unlikely to influence Congress or the White House without support from Republicans, veteran political organizers and analysts said. That support would be easier to garner, they added, if protesters could win allies in key suburban districts.
Anti-war groups will have their next opportunity to test the movement's durability and coalition-building strategies later this month. Troops Out Now and other groups said they plan to launch on Mar. 31 a campaign to oppose pressures on the Bush administration to institute an involuntary draft to reinforce the military's ranks.
Some Republicans and a few Democrats have come out in support of a draft, urged by groups and think tanks close to defense circles concerned that traditional recruitment efforts have begun to fall short of their targets and thus imperil the armed forces' preparedness to fight two wars at a time. Bush and some senior administration officials have said they oppose a draft.
Fog of War
By Dick J. Reavis, AlterNet. Posted March 21, 2005.
Thousands convene in North Carolina to focus the peace movement's gaze on Iraq war veterans, bereaved families, active-duty soldiers and their kin.
Fayetteville, N.C. – home to Fort Bragg, the Green Berets, and the 82nd Airborne Division – seems as good a place as any "to bring a self-sustaining GI anti-war movement into being."
At least that was the goal of North Carolina Peace and Justice Coalition organizer Chuck Fager for Saturday's anti-war demonstration in Fayetteville.
The Fayetteville demonstration, more like an Americana July 4th picnic than any Days of Rage, was as placid and serene as the weather that day, temperatures in the low 60s, dry, cloudy skies. No one keened or got red in the face, nobody clashed with the fascists, and policemen's boots didn't lose their spit-shines. The protestors were clad in loose-fitting, informal garb, jeans, cotton windbreakers and sweatshirts, athletics shoes and baseball caps. More than 90 percent of them were white – "middle-class hippies" of all ages, one participant quipped.
The North Carolina Peace and Justice Coalition had called the Fayetteville action to place Iraq war veterans, bereaved families, active-duty soldiers and their kin in the center of the antiwar crusade. Sponsors included Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Quaker House, Military Families Speak Out, Bring Them Home Now, Fayetteville Peace with Justice, N.C. Council of Churches, and United for Peace and Justice.
Turnout for the festival in Fayetteville, a town of 120,000, may have been the largest in any American locale. While London and Istanbul staged six-figure rallies, according to the mainstream media, San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C. probably failed to top turnout in a Southern town less than a tenth their size.
And not even the North Carolina rally, by the standards it set for itself, was an unqualified triumph. Only 13 buses arrived from out of town, four times as many as in 2004, a fifth of what this year's organizers hoped to bring.
The numbers may be forever in dispute, but reports from the MSM are anything but encouraging. Four thousand marched out of Hollywood, the Los Angeles Times noted, and "several thousand" took to the streets in New York and San Francisco, their dailies said. But across the board, The New York Times pointed out, anti-war actions were "nowhere as big as those in February 2003."
Fayetteville's count, like all the others, is a bit rubbery, and subject to crunching. The Associated Press put turnout at 3,000; its organizers claimed 1,800 more. By my own estimate, 4,200 people were gathered at the protest at its peak, about 2:00 p.m. Saturday.
What Democracy Looks Like
The anti-war crowd formed in a downtown parking lot before noon, buses disgorging pilgrims from afar, contingents forming beneath banners and signs. Lead by a woman blowing a bagpipe – as if in a military parade – about 1,200 marchers, led by some 200 soldiers, ex-servicemen and kin, strolled some20 minutes over gently sloping residential streets to the north side of Rowan Park.
From the park's pavilion, a ten-foot banner bearing the slogan of the event – Support the Troops for Real! Bring Them Home Now! – beckoned in a gentle wind.
Sheriff's deputies at two entry points conducted airport-style security checks, metal-detecting wands in hand. The procedure was congestive – some participants stood in line for nearly an hour, waiting to pass – inspiring a chant that has become a litany from shore to American shore:
"This what democracy looks like!" the protestors intoned, pointing at their own ranks.
"This is what a police state looks like!" turning towards the police.
"This is what democracy looks like in a police state," one of them observed.
But after a few minutes passed, almost nobody complained about the security screening, because on the north side of the scene, along the rim of the park, stood a hundred counter-demonstrators: "Fry Mumia," their T-shirts harrumphed, "Caution: Red Diaper Doper Babies in the Park," a big pasteboard sign proclaimed.
North Carolina is a Republican, gunplay state, and perhaps that's why dozens of deputies, plus cops on horseback, stood by.
A cadre of seasoned regional activists – one of whom, graybearded Quaker Chuck Fager, has been agitating since the days of the Selma voting rights march – had spent six months making national appeals and local arrangements to build the protests. As the marchers passed through the security screens, early counts were low.
But a couple of hundred peace advocates were already lounging on the greens, as late-comers arrived by the score. By the time that music groups and speakers began addressing the assembly, about 1 p.m., the crowd had doubled its size – and it didn't quit building for an hour after that.
Commerce and Coffins
Americans, complain as they may, are never, ever, alone. Commerce accompanies us from conception to the far side of the Golden Gates. By the time that the marchers arrived, politically correct vendors had laid merchandise atop 40 tables on the east side of the speaker's kiosk. Merchants at this Green-Beret-city bazaar brought with them pins and buttons of 900 designs, and probably more books than escaped the looting and fires at libraries in Iraq.
Most of the merchants represented pastel peace groups and mild-mannered petition societies, but Trotsky's disciples – of a half-dozen stripes – brought tables too, laden with literature that scientifically proves that pacifists, peace Democrats and former comrades from the adjoining Trotsky table have all taken part in the Revolution Betrayed.
At a table in the middle of the money-and-mailing-list exchanges stood two Seventh-Day Adventists, collecting signatures for a petition against Sunday closing laws.
On the west side of the grass-lined bowl, just across a tiny creek that courses in front of the speaker's pavilion, vinyl doors were opened and shut on 19 portable outhouses, a number sufficient to prevent the formation lines. But the rally's half-dozen "poppers," or food-and-drink stands, weren't up to speed: demonstrators stood 20 minutes in line for plates of curry and hastily-steamed hotdogs.
As they stood in line, the participants gazed southwards up the hillside, at 100 mock caskets draped in flags. Dozens of black umbrellas, resting on the ground, were strewn across the eastern incline, their surfaces inscribed at previous protests with the names and ranks of the war dead. Children daubed flower motifs and adults lettered slogans on new umbrellas, just to pass the time. The supervisors of this project, called Parasols for Peace, supplied brushes and colors. "We are doing this to provide a free and cheap way of breaking the silence in this time of fear," one of them told me.
Peace At Last?
"President Bush did not comment on the protests, which seemed unlikely to have any significant effect on national policy or on the glacial movement of public opinion" The New York Times opined at the end of the day
About 1 p.m. the procession of speakers got underway. Among those who addressed the crowd were the stars of Fager's burgeoning submovement, among them pacifist Camilo Mejia, only two days earlier out of an Army brig, retired Green Beret Sgt. Stan Goff, and Cindy Sheehan, the sparkplug in a group called Gold Star Families for Peace. Sheehan wore a white T-shirt stenciled with a photo of a soldier in uniform, her son, Casey, killed last year in Iraq.
But it was the content of the speeches – some of them, lively, and a couple, powered with pathos – that exemplified the anti-war movement's key challenge, not only in Fayetteville, but from coast to coast.
In Rowan Park, and in many locales elsewhere, organization democracy precluded inspiration. The rally's organizers drew a list of nearly 30 speakers, practically one for every group in the Coalition's fold. Apparently guided by a principle that might be called One Organization, One Speech, the rally's steering committee limited addresses to three minutes each. Admirably, most of those who stepped up to the microphone stayed within their allotted time.
But not even a Jefferson, a Frederick Douglas or Karl Marx can convey a life-changing message, nor present any significant analysis, in a 90-second span. Perhaps for brevity's sake, almost all of the speakers drew from a well-worn repertoire of ten:
1. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction;
2. Terrorists didn't take harbor there;
3. Most of the world disapproved of the invasion, and still does;
4. 1,500 American soldiers have died in combat
5. American troops were sent to war in ignorance, with insufficient tools;
6. Many can't know when, or if, they're coming home;
7. American weapons have killed as many as 100,00 civilians;
8. The war is a luxury that our nation call ill afford;
9. The "War on Terror" has put American civil liberties in peril;
10. George W. Bush is unfit for the presidency.
It's all like a game of Texas Sweat: players draw distinct hands, arrange their cards into suits, and with individual styles and rhetorical flourishes, stake their hopes and livelihoods. But as Saturday's national turnouts demonstrate, the house of Bush deals us hand after losing hand.
It may be that you can't fight city hall, that rulers have been hoisting and crucifying their subjects since the days of Spartacus, and always will. But our pose, or posture, and even our performance at the table could be improved – or at least that's the message from North Carolina's leading leftist sage.
Michael Hardt, an English professor at Duke University, is co-author with Italian Antonio Negri of two recent tomes on globalization and the perspectives of protest. Though he did not attend the Fayetteville action – he was on a plane in return from France – Hardt claims to know why the demonstrations were not bigger and better, everywhere.
"When movements grow is when they propose the agenda for change," he declares. "One of the effects of the war on terror is that all we are doing is reacting. The anti-war movement has become a failure because it has conceded the terrain of issues to the pro-war people."
Hardt's general argument is that oppositionists should struggle to implement their unredacted dreams, for a full vision of the lives they want to live, not for a list reforms, bargain items underlined in red.
The strategy is unlikely to provide any immediate aid to the antiwar and oppositionist camps: sedation, denial and adherence to routine, are after all, early stages in coping with any setback. It will probably be weeks before most activists recover from the thinning of their ranks on March 20.
To return to a stage of growth, Hart argues, the movement will have to recall what it was that it hoped to gain by closing ranks to challenge Bush's adventurism is the first place.
Was it only a preemption of war, or peace once the invasion came? Or was that, as the slogan went, that Another World Is Possible – and that we wanted to live there today?
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