I know it doesn't quite fit, but I can't resist posting this on occasion...
Posted on 04/14/2008 1:44:00 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
What comes to mind when you think of the United States peace movement? Cindy Sheehan? Code Pink? Berkeley? Those are all important players in the current U.S. movement for peace in Iraq, and their brave and tireless contributions should be commended. But many others around the country have also been voicing their desire for true peace and justice since before the war on Iraq began.
And not all of them are white.
One such grouping, which I have had the privilege to be part of these past five years, is the Strength in Unity contingent. Made of people and organizations of color in the San Francisco Bay Area, we came together in 2002 to march and protest against the war.
Why would people and organizations of color feel the need to march together in a separate contingent at the antiwar demonstrations? The quick answer is: because there’s Strength in Unity! Our shared histories and voices merit a specific safe space that only we can define together. Many of us come from refugee and immigrant communities that have experienced the brunt of U.S. military intervention and occupation. Many of us have ancestral roots that can be traced back to U.S. slavery and indigenous genocide and displacement. Like Iraqi women, children, and men, many of our peoples know too well what the rape, torture, murder, bombs, chemical weapons, and invasion and control of U.S. forces look like.
Take my story: I am Vietnamese American. Less than 40 years ago the U.S. tried to bomb my people back to the Stone Age, as U.S. General Curtis LeMay declared, for standing up for Viet Nam’s sovereignty and resisting U.S. occupation and influence. My working-class mother – a single parent – is a refugee from this U.S. war on Viet Nam and has worked in a factory here in the States for nearly 30 years making no more than 12 dollars an hour. It wasn’t until I was 24 years old that my mother spoke of the consequences of war, describing how she had to suck an orange peel to stay alive coming to the States.
When I recently learned that four million Iraqis have been uprooted since the war began, I immediately thought of my refugee mother and the suffering and trauma she endured from the U.S. war not long ago. It is from these kinds of real memories of U.S. war and terror that we come together in Strength in Unity. It is from ongoing struggles we experience living in the States that we also unite as people and communities of color for immigrant rights, affordable housing, better schools, free healthcare, and fair employment. We connect the issues we face here to the war in Iraq knowing it is out of this world for the U.S. to spend trillions of dollars on an illegal war while 37 million Americans live in poverty and over 47 million live without health insurance. In the wise rhymes of Tupac Shakur: “They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor.” This on top of unjust deportations, raids, and detentions that many families in our communities have suffered through since 9/11.
So here we are, marking the fifth anniversary of the war. Like the wider peace movement, Strength in Unity has experienced its own ebbs and flows. At the height of the ANSWER-sponsored demonstrations in 2003 and 2004 more than a thousand of us marched together, led by the beat of Korean drummers and the music of Loco Bloco. This year our contingent was about 300 people strong, much smaller than prior marches, but a microcosm of our dire state of affairs where people don’t feel it makes a difference to march. I empathize with this feeling because those in power have proven that they will act in arrogance and with total disregard of what most Americans desire. But, there’s a real spirited and contagious energy when our contingent is out in the street stomping feet, pumping fists, and chanting songs. Organized by Bayan USA and the International League of People’s Struggle, our contingent this year included more than ten Bay Area youth and community organizations representing Arab community members, Asian and Pacific Islander youth, no and low-wage workers of color, Filipino students, Latina women, children and youth, and white allies. Some women from the community group Mujeres Unidas y Activas brought along their young children.
A young Latina mother pushed her 18-month-old daughter in a stroller while her young son, no more than six years old, followed nearby. They walked the entire 2.5 miles of the march. Seeing this helped me realize how critical it is for us people of color to continue to march and voice our opposition to the war, especially now when no clear signs of better days are near.
While I came to the fifth anniversary of the war to march for peace in Iraq and for its peoples, I left understanding that it’s not just about them. It’s about us – people of color – marching for our mothers, our fathers, our brothers, our sisters, our children, our ancestors. We march to remind ourselves that we are still sane, that we haven’t lost all hope for humanity.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tony V. Nguyen (tvnguyen@afsc.org) is the Asian and Pacific American community program coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee (afsc.org) in Oakland. A member of VietUnity (vietunity.org), a progressive Vietnamese community group, Nguyen helped organize Strength in Unity contingents with the Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition Against War (apicaw.com) from 2002 to 2007.
sucking an orange peel kept his mom alive. If I could do that, $12/ hr would make me feel like a millionaire.
Stupid, traitorous, left wing lunatics who haven't a clue what's really going on in this world, who don't see who and what the enemies of this nation, our liberty and freedom are, and through their ignorance are the enemy of this nation, it's liberty and freedom as well.
They empower the enemy through their actions, encouraging them to continue their acts of terrorism, encourage them to kill innocent women and children, encourage them to kill more of our troops whose mission to liberate from the grips of a mass murdering tyrant and re establish law and order liberty and freedom to another part of the world, and defend it from the enemy while it regains their independence.
These aren't "peace activists" simply exercising their right of free speech, they are dangerous criminals abusing those rights in order to weaken the resolve and destroy this country.
They belong in prison.
Is it possible to be more self absorbed and narcissistic than this? Why do leftists think that the entire universe somehow emanates from their own world view and personal experience?
When the USA liberates a country, they do not bomb, rape pillage, murder, torture or use chemical weapons. They free people who are being bombed, raped, murdered, tortured, have chemical weapons used on them.
Obviously this guy is a disgruntled NVA still mad he got his ass kicked.
That we let his mother in after her son, defending a tyrant, killed our soldiers, and most likely wandered around the Vietnam country side exterminating entire cultures and South Vietnamese who dared fight for their liberty.
May he step on some unexploded ordinance.
After we kick him back to his stone age country that is.
Yet his lazy ass is so wrapped up in self victimhood that he can't see his own good fortune to have just been born in this society. To hell with him.
I am growing increasingly intolerant of these people, who don't realize Freedom isnt Free and that Personal Responsibility, not a gov't guarantee is the true meaning of being Free and Self Determinate.
“Why would people and organizations of color feel the need to march together in a separate contingent at the antiwar demonstrations? The quick answer is: because there’s Strength in Unity!”
The illogic in that statement is really quite breathtaking. If there is strength in unity, why are they marching as a SEPARATE contingent?
The suspicious amongst us might think that it is because they are more proud of their ethnicity than they are of their asserted objective.
Is it possible to be more self absorbed and narcissistic than this? Why do leftists think that the entire universe somehow emanates from their own world view and personal experience?
Because in their warped and twisted minds, (evident by their warped and twisted views) they think 300 seriously mentally damaged people are "most Americans".
I also see in his warped and twisted mind that he things "people of multiple colors are all from places the big bad USA "invaded" (including the USA itself, we invaded ourselves) but white people are all one group- evil American capitalists.
The CIA should find this guy and lock him up in a padded room for public safety.
The author uses the term “of color” six times in the article, and “white” twice. That’s discrimination.
5 years late they march because they are fantatic, ignorant, bigots far too arrogantly self regarding to bother to learn a single fact about Iraq.
"peoples' is a word that is peculiar to the extreme left - communists, in particular. As soon as I saw this, I knew this writer was a Marxist, with a good chance that he is a Maoist. After looking at his short biography, this was confirmed. The American Friends Service Committee was very active during the Vietnam war subverting our military.
I know it doesn't quite fit, but I can't resist posting this on occasion...
> The author uses the term “of color” six times in the article, and “white” twice. That’s discrimination.
He should perhaps be sent back to a “place of color”, like maybe Iran, ChiCom or Somalia. He’d feel at home then: no pesky “people of white” to bother him.
"I am Vietnamese American. Less than 40 years ago the U.S. tried to bomb my people back to the Stone Age . . ."
Yet his lazy ass is so wrapped up in self victimhood that he can't see his own good fortune to have just been born in this society. To hell with him.
This is the first time I've read such a thing written by the child of a Vietnamese refugee. Usually, what the Vietnamese and their children say about our war in Vietnam is quite, quite different.
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a non-profit organization, was established by an Act of Congress to build a memorial in Washington, DC to commemorate the more than 100 million victims of communism; to honor those who successfully resisted communist tyranny; to educate current and future generations about communism's crimes against humanity; and to pay tribute to those who helped win the Cold War.
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is eternally indebted to those individuals and organizations that gave so generously over the past years. Their generosity has enabled the creation of an enduring monument to the more than one-hundred million victims of communism worldwide. In grateful recognition we have listed their names below.
Take a look at the number of Vietnamese names which appear under the Supporters section of the website. I wonder what they would have to say to this silly child?
I know its not the norm. In the mid to late 80's I actually supervised migrant farm workers, while I was in college.
There were alot of Vietnamese and Laotians, they were employed year round they just moved from farm to farm. The leader of the group was a man named Dorn, he had spent 6 months in the jungle to escape and ride a boat here. Those people loved this country, their kids loved it they had made a real life here. I think thats why this guy has so ticked me off this morning.
A damn shame he doesn't know what he has.
Just so. It really leaps right out at you.
When these “protesters” speak of peace, it is usually the peace of the ignorant of which they speak. Their hearts and minds are so foul, that they can ignore cruelty, torture and murder and somehow rationalize it as peace.
This is the peace of Stalin and the peace of Mao. Tibetans are now experiencing this peace. These same individuals, for the most part, are the same ones who would protest for a free Tibet and not see the conflict in their protesting against the war in Iraq. For them, peace can only come about by fashioning paper-mache heads in the likeness of Bush or an equally nefarious leader. Likewise, carrying around posters with inane Marxist scribblings, lies and half-truths or participating in a dialogue or performance in a coffee shop, just bursting at the seams with pretentiousness, will also bring about peace.
When the mentality, ideology and vision of such people are examined by any who are sane, it becomes evident that they are not so much about peace as they are the hatred and destruction of America.
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