Posted on 03/20/2006 5:25:16 AM PST by Quilla
The third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was marked over the weekend by a wave of protests around the world. Most of the marches in America were spearheaded by United for Peace and Justice, the nation’s largest anti-war coalition.
United for Peace and Justice is a large umbrella association of more than thirteen hundred local and national groups who have joined together to protest the immoral and disastrous Iraq War and oppose our government’s policy of permanent warfare and empire-building.
The organization’s recent press release tells us of a massive effort planned for the week of March 15 – 22 during which it planned to be coordinating local events ‘as part of a nationwide week of action to end the Iraq war.’ More than 500 events were planned in all 50 states.
Needless to say, United for Peace and Justice has been responsible for some of the most visible peace campaigns in recent memory. Its website boasts that since its inception in October 2002, it
has spurred hundreds of protests and rallies around the country and organized the two largest demonstrations against the Iraq war.
Despite the variety of causes its member groups ostensibly espouse, most of them are well known for their enmity toward America and her capitalist society. They are led by such anti-establishment outfits as the Communist Party USA, Anti-Capitalist Convergence, Socialist Party USA, Anti-Imperialist News Service, Black Radical Congress and Workers Party.
There is something suspicious in all this. Why have all these radicals flocked to the peace movement when peacefulness has never been in their nature? In fact, they habitually advocate aggression as part and parcel of their campaigns. Their past behavior makes it indeed difficult to accept their present activism at face value. Clearly, there must be something else that appeals to them in this cause.
Whatever it is, we can be absolutely certain that it is not the good of this society which they make no secret of loathing. After all, these are the same people whose stated objective is the overthrow of the American system, which, they charge, is unjust, corrupt and generally injurious to everything that is wholesome in life. Their mission statements make this starkly clear:
• ‘We seek an end to the oppressive and destructive capitalist system’ (Anti-Capitalist Convergence).
• ‘We aim at overthrowing the capitalist-imperialist system altogether. The American people have no choice but to oppose U.S. imperialism’ (Workers Party USA).
• ‘Socialism is our vision for America’s future. We believe that socialism is the best replacement for a capitalist system that has served its purpose’ (Communist Party USA).
• ‘We will fight to advance beyond capitalism, which has demonstrated its structural incapacity to address basic human needs’ (Black Radical Congress).
• ‘To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed’ (Democratic Socialists of America).
• The imperialist ruling clique has made the U.S. into the world’s number one rogue state. In order to completely get rid of imperialist wars, the people will have to get rid of the imperialist system (International League of People’s Struggle).
Such subversive hopes were for a long time doomed to frustration. The fact that America gave rise to the most prosperous society in history translated into electoral stability which consigned extreme groups to the fringes of her politics.
But then an event took place which gave them new hope. On September 11, 2001, a band of Islamic fanatics managed to shake America to her foundations. The nation convulsed with chaos and fear as the World Center Towers tumbled down and New York became engulfed in a cloud of dust.
The devastation was not confined to that fateful day, however, but continued to mount for many months afterwards. So did the doubt and uncertainty. The plunge in the stock market set the country on a downward slide into recession at great cost in wealth and jobs.
But the material loss was only part of the damage, for the hijackers also struck at the very foundation of our system. Our bedrock principles – freedom, openness, trust – were also singed by the flames of those exploding airplanes. Even before the rubble was cleared, we had to reconsider some of our cherished assumptions and alter the way we go about our lives. The inherent danger is impossible to overstate, because this directly endangers the survival of American society as we know it.
With one audacious act, then, nineteen Arabic hijackers managed to rock the United States beyond the wildest dreams of even the boldest domestic radicals. This gave them new hope, for they suddenly realized that the country is not as invulnerable as it seemed. In a flash, Islamist fundamentalists became their closest ally in the anti-establishment crusade.
Recognizing the danger, the Bush administration mounted a relentless response and within three years destroyed most of al-Qaeda’s original leadership. But realizing that terrorism is only the symptom of a larger problem, the administration turned its attention to the breeding grounds from which its springs – repressive Middle-Eastern regimes. As it did so, it made it clear that it will use all means at its disposal – including war – to achieve its objective.
It is not surprising that our domestic radicals should be unsettled by this tough approach, given that Islamism represents their best chance of disrupting American society. It is therefore only natural that they would do everything in their power to oppose the administration’s effort. Hence their improbable zeal for the anti-war movement.
No one should be deceived about their real objective, which is not peace, but the protection of those who have the ability to destabilize the United States by terrorist subversion. By organizing large-scale protests, they try to weaken the government’s resolve to defend the system they themselves seek to undermine. The peace crusade – backed by nearly all of this country’s radical groups – is nothing more than a deliberate attempt to pursue their anti-American agenda under a veil of moral righteousness. This behavior is not unexpected, given that by virtue of their shared goal militant Islamists and this country’s radicals are operational allies.
We saw clear evidence of this in the pre-election message of Usama bin Laden which sounded almost like a rehash of Fahrenheit 9/11, the anti-war documentary by Michael Moore. So obvious was the resemblance that Moore taunted the President in an open letter posted on his website:
Hey, did you get the feeling that he had a bootleg of my movie? Are there DVD players in those caves in Afghanistan?
It is highly instructive that the man whose life’s mission is America’s destruction used the arguments of one of America’s loudest anti-war voices as the basis for his diatribe. But rather than feeling ashamed of this sordid rapport, Michael Moore was proud of it.
How have we arrived at this absurd situation? How is it that one of America’s most visible war opponents and the world’s most dangerous terrorist find themselves in such thorough agreement? Why do they both denounce the man who has been working so conscientiously to keep America from another terrorist inferno? And why is Michael Moore the more venomous of the two in his censure of Bush? How could have he become the propagandist for an apocalyptic psychopath who inflicted such a grievous injury on Moore’s own country? And how can Moore boast about providing talking points to the man who has cold-bloodedly murdered more than three thousand of his fellow citizens and would kill countless more if only he could?
The fact that the two espouse different ideologies does not stand in the way of this grotesque alliance born out of a shared hatred of America. All that matters at the moment is that in order to implement their respective visions the present establishment must be toppled first.
Moore’s movies and books make it clear that he is a radical socialist whose views are as extreme as those of the groups quoted above. His personal quest is fuelled by an all-consuming loathing of America’s capitalistic society which he dreams of bringing down. This is what makes bin Laden such a convenient ally. No one has expressed this truth better than bin Laden himself when he said:
The interests of Muslims and the interests of the socialists coincide in the war against the crusaders.
On 9/11 bin Laden and his cohorts showed an ability to destabilize the United States, which is why Moore and his friends at United for Peace and Justice are so intent on protecting them. The peace movement is their attempt to shackle those who want to fight back.
In the very country he seeks to obliterate, bin Laden has allies who share his views about its alleged wickedness. In one of his missives he told us:
You are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind. The U.S. government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical.
Michael Moore could not agree more. After all, this is precisely what he has been telling us for the last five years, and nowhere has he said it more forcefully than in Fahrenheit 9/11. Is it any surprise, then, that bin Laden is such a fan?
It is understandable why many well-meaning citizens are worried about the course of this war, but they should carefully consider the manner in which they express their concerns. Above all, they should not fall for ploys of domestic radicals who seek to subvert America by limiting the government’s ability to fight the enemy whose consuming goal is our destruction.
It is sad, when this war doesn't even generate enough interest to get the anti-war people moving.
It's ironic that the people who say this, are the same people who want the government to be more like Big Brother.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1209454/posts
Vets refuse to forgive Kerry for antiwar acts
In the spring of 1992, he wrote a story about Clinton's conscience - wrestling about the draft while at Oxford. Theses stories by Talbott were big lies. Clinton rewarded Talbott by making him the number two person at the State Department. Sidney Blumenthal - The top White House spin master is a long time friend of the Clintons. Blumenthal is a former member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Look here, from From “Mutiny Does Not Happen Lightly: The Literature of the American Resistance to the Vietnam War”
The game of the rich has caught up to Pig America. The Vietnamese have kicked ass out of U.S. occupational troops. More and more G.I.’s will no longer listen to Pig Nixon’s orders and are turning their guns around on the real enemy. The Provisional Revolutionary Government in Vietnam (Viet Cong) has led the Vietnamese people to complete victory.
–Roxboro School SDS- Cleveland Heights – June 4, 1972
Recently many articles have appeared in the movement press expounding the virtues of deserting and going AWOL. “Come to Canada and be a man.” “Soldiers are pigs,” “To remain in the imperialist U.S. Army rather than leaving is comparable to being a Nazi.” Last year there were, by Pentagon counts,, 250,000 AWOL’s and over 53,000 deserters. This has not made much of a dent in the fighting strength of the U.S.Army. That dent has clearly come from the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people under the leadership of the NLF and the Provisional Revolutionary Government.
–New York Regional SDS distributed at Boston University - Feb. 22, 1969
Students for a Democratic Society = SDS
>>>No one has expressed this truth better than bin Laden himself when he said: The interests of Muslims and the interests of the socialists coincide in the war against the crusaders.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1596644/posts
The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terror-Remembering the founding father of the Palestinian movement
All we are saaaaying...is give peace a chance....
The Peace Movement
By David Horowitz 1991
GULF WAR I : President George H. W. Bush
You see them every hour at the top of the local news with their signs of "No Blood for Oil" and their chants of "Hey, hey, ho, ho, George Bush has got to go." You watch their apologists, like aging New Leftist and TV pundit Todd Gitlin, squirm uncomfortably at their reckless passion in declaring America the enemy while failing to condemn the global outlaw Saddam Hussein. You observe in mounting wonder as they descend on Washington to hear their balding Sixties heroes-Jesse Jackson, Daniel Ellsberg, Ron Kovic- call for capitulation on the battlefield and the impeachment of the president.
The troops in these demonstrations are dressed for battle in the old Movement issue (jeans and down jackets, lettered t-shirts, even tie-dyes); the familiar targets are steady in their sights: "big oil," the "Pentagon war machine," and "American imperialism." As always, they claim to be sheep in wolves clothing-despite the war paint, just pilgrims for peace. To disarm their critics, they volunteer their past "mistakes," like spitting on U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam. Simultaneous with their present denunciations of U.S. "death squads" in Iraq, they maintain their heartfelt concern for the very soldiers who have volunteered to carry out the mission and whose morale they continue to undermine.
Is the glaring contradiction between the belligerence and malice they project and their claims to good intentions the result of mere pig-headedness? An inability to communicate? Or is it the failure of their political camouflage to conceal the real motives that inform their passion? As a former partisan of similar movements, I never-in 25 years of political activism-marched in a demonstration that did not have primary agendas just beneath its pacifist surface that were militant, Marxist, and anti-American. The "Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East" (which staged the January 19 march on Washington) is but another cynical attempt by the now discredited left to jump-start the revolutionary engines that have recently stalled.
Do I exaggerate? Can the current mobilization be so readily dismissed as an occasion for America-bashing by the unrepentant left? Consider the view of an unimpeachable source, a faithful keeper of the radical flame. Here is an excerpt from Alexander Cockburn's column in the December 31,1990, Nation, commenting on the organizers of the Washington march:
I wish people would stop writing to [suggest] that today leftists of principle should espouse the cause of Iraq and eschew criticism of Saddam Hussein. This is Marxism-Leninism-Bonkerism of a sort much savored by the Workers World Party, which seems to be the animating force behind the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East, decorated by Ramsey Clark.
Most people will not have heard of the Workers World Party, which, according to Cockburn, is the organization that has put together this new "anti-war" coalition. But I remember them from the Sixties as the only Trotskyist splinter to endorse the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Thus, the spearhead of this season's "anti-war" demonstrations is a Marxist-Leninist party that defined itself by supporting the bloody invasion that took the lives of 30,000 Hungarians whose only crime was to want their national independence and freedom.
The anti-war coalition favored by Cockburn was the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, which held its demonstration a week later on January 26 and was portrayed by the media as the "liberal" peace contingent. But this turned out to be a distinction without a difference. Jesse Jackson, for example, addressed both demonstrations. The "liberal" coalition was organized by the pathetic remnants of the American Communist Party and its fellow travelers and fronts, like the U.S. Peace Council. Its official coordinator was Leslie Cagan, a veteran New Leftist, and-like the organizations that made up the coalition-pro-Castro, pro-Sandinista, pro-FMLN, pro-PLO, and anti-American.
And it is the same story for the rank and file across the country. As a warm-up to the Washington demonstrations, activists held "teach-ins" from coast to coast, including one at Los Angeles' Fairfax High School featuring Clark, Ellsberg, Kovic, and Jackson. Attended by 1,500 people, the affair was described by the press as the largest "anti-war" demonstration until then. Its official spokesman, Achmed Nassef, told reporters that he had joined the Coalition through the Palestine Solidarity Committee. In other words, the official spokesman for the "peace" coalition was drawn from one of the only groups in the world supporting Saddam's rape of Kuwait.
Nassef also explained that the coalition itself had grown out of groups that had been organized to oppose U.S. intervention in Central America-that is to say, of groups that proclaimed themselves "anti-war" when it came to the struggle of Nicaraguans against the Sandinista dictatorship but pro-war when it came to the struggle of Communist guerrillas against an elected democracy in neighboring El Salvador. One of the headliners of the Fairfax High "teach-in" was Blase Bonpane, a defrocked priest who (like all the other speakers over 50) had for three decades supported every Communist guerrilla war in the world. Bonpane even authored a book with the Orwellian title Guerrillas for Peace.
In addition to Achmed Nassef's Palestine Solidarity Committee, the "anti-war" coalition sponsoring the teach-in included the Association of Palestinians for Return and the Committee for a Democratic Palestine-support groups for the PLO's terrorist war against the state of Israel. This led a reporter for The Jewish Journal to ask Bonpane whether the gathering was anti-Israel. "Why would someone say the gathering is anti-Israel?" Bonpane replied. "Because we're anti-war? We think that nothing would be worse for Israel than a war in the Middle East. We're horrified that some voices in Israel could be calling for this war." (At a Santa Cruz teach-in two months earlier, coalition members were even less careful in concealing their true animus, carrying signs that read "Zionism Kills" and "Palestinian Blood.")
These hypocrisies reminded me of the last time the left tried to launch an anti-war crusade, which was when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. It was then called a "Stop the War" movement, and its purpose was not to stop the Soviet invasion but to oppose President Jimmy Carter's call for a resumption of the military draft, which he felt might be necessary to counter the Soviet aggression. This should be remembered every time the current peace left hypocritically criticizes the present volunteer military as "undemocratic," since it was the opposition of the left to a military draft during the Vietnam War and after that led to the creation of a volunteer Army in the first place. Of course, what the left really wanted-and what the left still wants-is that the United States should have no army at all and should therefore be vulnerable to its Marxist enemies and their Marxist friends.
The Eighties left, which opposed America's stand against Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, was no more "anti-war" than the present left is. It was-like all the lefts that have sprung up since the Sixties-anti-American. As the Soviet legions poured into Afghanistan in 1980, leftist Congressman Ron Dellums (now the leader of the "antiwar" caucus in Congress) told the thousand cheering Berkeley students who had gathered for a "Stop the War" demonstration:
From my vantage point, as your Representative, [I believe] we are at an incredibly dangerous moment. Washington, D.C., is a very evil place...While [the White House] professes to see the arc of crises in Southwest Asia as the Balkan tinderbox of World War III, well Ron Dellums sees the only arc of crises being the one that runs between the basement of the west wing of the White House and the war room of the Pentagon.
America is the source of the world's crises and problems. This is the cardinal axiom of the left. It was also, of course, the animating principle of the father of contemporary "anti-war" movements-the one that led to the victory in Indochina of Pol Pot and the Vietcong. In the words of a Santa Cruz student, active in the coalition:
Obviously, this current anti-war movement takes inspiration from its Vietnam predecessor. Siphoned through 20 years of anti-Vietnam sentiments, my generation enters its movement more cynically than our counterparts of the Sixties....
More cynically, indeed. For what did those "anti-Vietnam sentiments" accomplish, judged by the passage of those 20 years? A Communist-sponsored genocide in Indochina that extinguished nearly 2 million lives and obliterated a national culture. A decade and a half of Communist oppression in South Vietnam that killed more than a half million civilians, created nearly 1.5 million refugees (unprecedented in Vietnam's 1,000-year history of foreign and domestic tyrannies), and made Communist Vietnam one of the poorest, most repressive, and-let us not forget-militaristic states on the face of the earth.
This is the real agenda of today's anti-war radicals: to reprise the Vietnam experience of the Sixties in the Nineties. In fact, they can hardly wait to repeat it. "Right now our movement is not as big as Vietnam was...," one student organizer breathlessly told a campus recruit, "[but] I think that as soon as a shooting war starts this will be even bigger than Vietnam." Bigger than Vietnam. This is what every radical for 30 years has dreamed of: an occasion that will trigger an explosion of the left bigger than the Sixties itself.
And what is this left? It is no longer a left that pledges its allegiance to Soviet power and worships at the altar of the Soviet state-though it was that. It is no longer a left that justifies Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe as a revolutionary beachhead of "peoples' democracies"-though it was that. It is no longer a left that celebrates Chinese Communism as a new dawn in humanity's long march into the socialist future or Cuba's gulag as a beacon of Latin America's coming liberation-though it was (and for some may still be) that.
It is a left that has been disoriented by the repudiation of its socialist paradise by hundreds of millions of former inhabitants. But it is also a left that has not for a single moment put down its weapons in the permanent war it has been waging, since 1917, against the capitalist societies of the democratic West and, in particular, of the United States. Earlier this year, Daniel Singer-The Nation's authority on Eastern Europe-lectured leftists as to how they should react to the rejection of socialism by East Europeans liberating themselves from the Soviet yoke: "Our problem is not to convince the Eastern Europeans that they can change regimes by Fabian [socialist] methods....Our duty, rather, is to go to the heart of the matter and to the fortress of advanced capitalism....In other words, our task is to spread the conviction that a radical change of society in all its aspects is on our own historical agenda."
In other words, damn the disasters our crusades have created in the East, full speed ahead with our plans to destroy the capitalist democracies of the West. The enemy is within. Or, as Time columnist and Democratic Socialists of America chair Barbara Ehrenreich put it: "As a responsible radical, I believe our first responsibility is toward the evil close to home, and stopping that. In any event, I'm more worried in the long run about the belligerence of George Bush than of Saddam Hussein" (Tikkun, January 1991).
We see this destructive left active today in America's universities, striving to discredit the very culture that created American democracy, attempting to smear America's heritage as the imperialist, patriarchal, racist construct of "dead white European males." And we see it in the streets, mobilized to oppose America's own right of self-determination and self-defense in an ongoing, relentless assault on America's military and intelligence communities that it maliciously portrays as the tentacles of a sinister "national security state."
In sum, what the left has become-now that its fantasy of a socialist future has been exploded all over the world-is this: a nihilistic force whose goal is to deconstruct and dismantle America as a democracy and as a nation.
Revolution is a form of total war. The radical left sees itself-has always seen itself-as part of an international revolutionary army. The archenemy of this international army is today, as it has been for the last 45 years, the United States. Thus, The Nation, which is the most respected organ of the radical left, defined the terms of the current battle over the Persian Gulf in a front-page editorial called "Choose Peace" in these words:
The choice in the Persian Gulf conflict has never been between sanctions and force. It is between peace and war, between life and death. The party of death, which prefers self-descriptions that cover its thirst for conquest with appeals to the great tradition of just wars and lesser evils, has since August 2 seen sanctions as a kind of ritualistic fore-play to the violent penetration of an entire region of the globe. President Bush manipulated the various United Nations sanctions votes as he sent Secretary of State Baker to bribe and buy a favorable "use of force" resolution, putting a specious international gloss on his deadly designs for war. (December 2, 1990)
America is the "party of death"-this is the moral calculus of the radical left. George Bush's America-not Saddam Hussein's Iraq-is the power with the "deadly designs for war"-this is what radicals mean when they preach about peace.
Cindy should blame the French and German shirkers for making the "Coalition of the Willing" do all the work.
They are not anti-war, and they are not for peace. They just believe that we are fighting for the wrong side. Same in Vietnam, same today.
Yea I know
When the Cold War ended and the Wall came down one would have expected joy to reign and parties to commence in the West. That did not happen because there was no joy in Timesville. The American and Old European lefties were actually angered that they looked so foolish. They continued their socialist ways as if nothing had happened. Truth be told they were always more comfortable in the company of Commies than Conservatives.
Thanks for the ping! Weren't we just talking about this the other day? ;-)
Yuppers. hence the ping.
::actually I was just singing to you::
:)
Yes, I heard your singing voice, or at least....someone's singing voice! :-)
I heard my dogs howling too :P
""who is behind the Anti-War Left""
I still to this day contend that the Wall did not come down without the help of the Soviets. It was realized that it was easier for them to promote global communism using politics and useful idiots rather than the military. In the process the old communists got rich off the capitalist system using the Russian mafia to steal from the people then they stole from the mafia. In addition, they sold off all that Russian hardware for hard currency.
Land grabs are no longer practical. They will do this without firing a shot.
Quite correct. The times are becoming much more dangerous. 'Pod.
Most of the anti-war marches and rallies over the weekend were very poorly attended.
This is the same group that posted that they would "Storm the White House!", first on March 15 and postponed until...today! I'll be looking at FR very closely today to see if they are getting hauled away in irons at some point.
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