Quarter-million march against war

Demonstrators bring the streets of London to a standstill with a message of peace By James Cusick, Westminster Editor

It dwarfed anything seen in central London during the 1960s and rivalled the masses that gathered for last weekend's countryside protest. A quarter of a million people taking to the streets is difficult to ignore. Organisers of the anti-war march, which crowded the streets of London and swamped Hyde Park yesterday with one of the largest mass demonstrations seen anywhere in Europe, couldn't quite believe the size of the protest they had gathered. In its early stages, police were caught ill-prepared and had to divert the march into two routes to cope with the sheer scale of protest. En route to Hyde Park, the marchers covered the streets, stretching miles between the Embankment, along Whitehall, through Trafalgar Square, up Haymarket, along Piccadilly and into Hyde Park.

Banners, whistles, megaphones, chants, even a makeshift papier m‰chŽ tank complete with missiles and puppets of George W Bush and Tony Blair, alongside 'soldiers' in fatigues complete with dripping fake blood, tried to ensure the message was anti-war and not just anti-American.

Andrew Burgin, from the Stop the War coalition, accused Bush and Blair of using allegations regarding Saddam Hussein and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a cover for a war that was really about oil. Organisers had spent a week making placards at their Brick Lane headquarters in London. They needn't have bothered, however -- everyone, from all corners of Britain, brought their own.

No protest march would be complete without the Socialist Workers Party and this was no exception. Huge banners shouted 'No War for Oil' and 'Stop the War Machine'.

Alongside the issue of war with Iraq, many on the march voiced concern over the situation in the Middle East and Israel's continuing action against the Palestinians. 'Stop State Terrorism, Stop Sharon, the Child Killer,' stated banner after banner. Police and intelligence-gathering helicopters hovered over the demonstrators as the march snaked along some of central London's main streets.

There was gridlock for miles around and traffic was at a standstill. Guests who were staying in a plush Piccadilly five-star hotel were unable to get through to the main lobby of the hotel.

Near the head of the march, Mohammed Sarwar, Labour MP for Glasgow Govan, said over the noise of megaphones, whistles and chants: 'I'm here to join the many tens of thousands of people who are here to protest against this unjustifiable war. It has little to do with weapons of mass destruction. Bush wants to act alone and my fear is that Blair is supporting unconditionally.'

Sarwar said that the vast majority of Labour's rank-and-file activists did not support the war. 'Blair should listen to the people, not George Bush,' he said.

Banner after banner filed past police and bemused tourists. Protesters came from universities, teaching associations and unions such as Unison, the Transport and General, and other groups like the Muslim Association of Britain, the Socialist Alliance, and Musicians Against Nuclear War. Some Japanese monks in Buddhist clothing banged their peace drums.

Peace was called for but hatred was nevertheless evident. A small child, sitting on his father's shoulders, shouted through a small megaphone: 'Bush and Hitler are the same, the only difference is their name.' Other banners and chants referred to Bush and Blair as 'an axis of evil'. The words on one banner were aimed directly at the prime minister : 'Tony Blair be Fair, Iraqi Leos Are Murdered Every Day.'

The demonstrators were not all from Britain. Krista van Velzen, a 28-year-old Socialist Party MP from The Hague, wore a sandwich-board that read 'Dutch MPs Against The War'. She said: 'It's great that there are so many people from different backgrounds united under one slogan. I came to find out how people got this demonstration together because it's the right way forward. In my country, like here, most people are opposing any attacks on Iraq but the people representing them in parliament are not.'

Christian groups marched alongside Muslim groups . Thomas Chitseko, 16, a schoolboy from Harlow, Essex, carried a 'Quakers for Peace' placard. He said: 'The Quaker movement is anti-war; there were lots of Quaker conscientious objectors during the second world war .'

The wide range of ethnic groups was matched by variety in terms of age from children in pushchairs all the way up to pensioners .

Ken Fleet had travelled to London from Nottingham as part of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation group. Twelve other coaches left Nottingham early yesterday morning with supporters of this organisation. A veteran of protests in the 1970s and 1980s, Fleet was proud that his group was established by Lord Russell, one of the founders of CND and a leader of the Aldermaston anti-nuclear march in the 1960s. 'This is the same argument,' Fleet said, and predicted that if war with Iraq went ahead there would large-scale anti-war rallies throughout Europe's main capitals.

Less seasoned demonstrators also took to the streets. 'I've never demonstrated before,' said actor David Warner, 'and that shows just how important I think this issue is. I don't want to see Iraqi civilians killed or young people sent there to get killed.'

Film director Ken Loach was also among the demonstrators. He said: 'We can't get involved in this war; we can't consider murdering another 100,000 Iraqis simply to pursue America's interest in oil and their dominance in the region.'

Although organisers would have preferred the unifying force of a single anti-war demonstration, the scale of the protest meant that other issues -- such as Palestine, world poverty and anti-capitalism -- fought for space and attention in the vast crowd that marched towards Hyde Park.

Khairi, 33, a student of Libyan origin from south London and a member of the Muslim Association of Britain, said: 'It's not just about war on Iraq; Israel is killing our brothers in Palestine too. If Britain are America are having a war on terror, why don't they stop Sharon ?'

For the various trade union members on the march, there was a unifying message. Jan Kowalczyk, 46, a psychiatric nurse from Salford and a Unison member, carried a banner for his local mental health union branch.

He said: 'There is a tradition of trade union support for anti-war protests. In the Falklands and the Gulf war our branch also had an anti-war position. As the reality of the war becomes closer, people are talking about it more at work. People don't want war -- they're working in a hospital and they think about the casualties and ask why are we attacking another country.'

Optimism and hope on such protests is usually there like adrenaline at a sporting event . But on this march, anger went alongside a harsh reality that war might be inevitable. Mohamed Abdurrazag, 37, a doctor from Libya now living in Dewsbury in Yorkshire, carried a Green Party placard saying 'People B4 Petrol'. He felt pessimistic about the effect the march would have.

Abdurrazag thought politicians would ignore everything -- even the quarter of a million-strong march. He said: 'There is mass opposition to the war in Britain, you can see it today, but I think the decision to go to war has already been taken. The UN is under the control of the United States so it won't make the right decision.'

At Hyde Park, when the marchers eventually reached the focus of the rally, some two hours behind what organisers predicted, those addressing the crowd included the former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and Ken Livingstone.

The mayor of London said: 'The largest march in 30 years -- bigger than the Countryside Alliance -- will have an electrifying effect on the Labour Party Conference and on those MPs opposed to war.'

Veteran politician Tony Benn told the crowd: 'Nothing can take the British people into a war they do not want or accept.' He added that it would be 'wholly immoral' for the US and Britain to attack Iraq.

Inevitably on any mass protest there were people who just turned up feeling they should say something, however unclear . The best expression of this came from one spectacled youth in a rainbow-coloured anorak. He carried a placard with the message 'Various People Against Bad Things'. His confusion was understandable. The United Nations has been troubled by the same confusion for months.

The Time Machine
A parody.

By Victor Davis Hanson, October 18, 2001

Newsflash! April 1, 1942

America Strikes Back!
Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle's Sixteen Bombers Take Off From Hornet to Bomb Tokyo!

ead the National News Roundup of American Reactions to the Marvelous Doolittle Raid!

ABC's Peter Jennings offered the following commentary from preliminary reports filtering in from Nationalist forces inside China.

It is not all clear to Americans tonight that Colonel Doolittle and his crews always enjoyed clear visual bombing over Tokyo. Clouds and antiaircraft firing — some of the surviving pilots are reporting to our Chinese sources — may have caused "weaving," made still worse by pilot panic or inattention. Yet all 16 crews, ABC News has been told, were under strict orders by Colonel Doolittle to drop their bomb loads despite clear and advanced warnings of inclement weather, resulting in significant but undisclosed collateral damage. Japanese sources tell ABC News that perhaps 50 civilians were killed and an undisclosed number of were wounded.

Whether Admiral King was aware of this "drop, don't verify" order — or, in fact, himself gave it — is something we are now investigating. Would it not be ironic that four months after we were surprised and suffered noncombatant deaths at Pearl Harbor, American warplanes in a similar fashion bombed unexpectedly and indiscriminately — resulting in a similar or even much greater loss of civilian life? Yet another — but perhaps not the last — of the ironies of this, America's most perplexing and in some sense paradoxical war.

Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, cautioned against seeing the raid in terms of moral retribution.

We must realize that one man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist. We construct Doolittle as a brave hero, but to the men and women he bombed he was a mere terrorist. There can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of this raid is the true one.

What we must not do is to fall back on some absurd notion of absolute and enduring values like truth, freedom, and democracy, but rather we can and should invoke the particular lived values that unite us and inform the institutions we cherish and wish to defend — which, of course, are neither absolute and enduring, or at least I don't think they are. Which is not to say that Chicago under the Japanese would not be necessarily a different place from what it is now, inasmuch as Japanese imperial lived values and cherished institutions could in theory by some sort of objective standard be different, as for example in my ability — or my children's at some future time — to make this statement freely.

Philip Wilcox Jr., former U.S. ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism in the Clinton administration, cautioned about initial American enthusiasm over a dramatic military effort that he described as little more than a catharsis for public outrage and demands for action.

Until this rash response, we were at a critical lull in a precious four months of reasoned sobriety, a sort of equilibrium where Pearl Harbor could be seen in terms as a response to our own prior indifference — or in fact hostility — to the legitimate aspirations of the Japanese people. But with Mr. Doolittle's theatrics we are entering a cycle of violence, where the root causes of this conflict will not be addressed by bombing in some sort of endless tit-for-tat. Such ill-planned strikes have never solved anything, but only encouraged yet another rejoinder. The U.S. must realize that, notwithstanding our great power, indeed because of it, we cannot dictate respect and cooperation. The bombing will make war overt, and we can only wonder about the effect of collateral damage on attitudes of those in the streets of Tokyo toward America. Bombing will not eliminate the ideology of Japanese militarism nor its often inchoate and diffuse operations. We must not commit the fallacy of treating past Japanese terrorism as pure evil in a vacuum.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson was interviewed at the Pan-Am terminal in JFK airport in New York. In the light of the unexpected and unannounced bombing, there was a great deal of confusion surrounding his planned peace trip to Tokyo. Jackson pleaded for "hands across the Pacific" to stop the "madness," and concluded:

Stop the guns and save our sons. Keep peace alive and don't let the planes dive. Don't be in fearo of the Zero or Emperor Hiro. Let our planes drop more for the poor, and make less of a mess. Now is a time not to Doo-little, but Doo-lots. Talk truth to power, and don't cower.

Oliver Stone , noted film producer, pointed out the significance of the prior Pearl Harbor raid:

We have failed completely to understand Pearl Harbor. That attack was pure chaos, and chaos is energy. All great changes have come from people or events that were initially misunderstood, and seemed frightening. But Doolittle? His bombing had none of the Japanese verve; it was redundant, silly, unimaginative, predictable, hardly chaotic at all — completely unspectacular.

Ted Koppel of ABC's Nightline questioned the purpose and method of the American attack:

Am I correct in saying that the B-25s could take off from the Hornet, but in fact could not land there on return? And did the attack in truth depart prematurely from what appears to be a single carrier, with only one other in reserve? And are not B-25s land-based bombers that are poorly suited for operations from the rolling deck of a carrier? I find all this difficult to accept — and we await clarification from Mr. Doolittle himself. Is our desire for revenge such — there seems to be very little effort at targeting key industries in Japan — that we in effect sent our airmen on what appears tantamount to a suicide raid? And did Colonel Doolittle really promise, as was reported, to crash his plane and crew into a target should his own bomber become disabled? And is either such proposed ramming or indiscriminate bombing now the official policy of the Roosevelt administration? And if so, why and on whose orders? Tonight the raid has clearly left more questions raised than answered.

Former national-security adviser Sandy Berger put the Doolittle Raid in a larger strategic perspective:

It is consistent with our own administration's past policy of reciprocal action, albeit with a sort of reckless escalation that brings with it the acknowledgment of greater risks and potential for destabilization in that most critical part of the world. Our relationship with the Japanese is sort of like that arcade game with the stick and the moles. Every time they pop up like they did at Pearl Harbor, we are going to knock them back down a little bit. After they get a little sore, they will know the rules of the game, and keep well within inside parameters that we can live with.

Susan Sontag, acclaimed novelist, called for Americans to write Congress:

Do we call this courage — itself a morally neutral idea? Whose courage — theirs or ours, the pilots or the bombed? Flags on houses? Burlesque and sexist art on the nose of bombers? A frenzied society that has abandoned self-reflection and given itself over to the logic of war? Is anyone in America listening? Is there a sane person left at this hour thinking of the children who were incinerated by this carpet bombing? These were not rose petals raining down upon the innocent of Japan, but rather postcards of American death. I cannot accept the moral equivalence of an attack on our soldiers at Pearl Harbor with a desperate lashing out against Tokyo. The blood of Japanese women and children is on our hands. Who is the real April Fool?

Oprah Winfrey, syndicated talk-show host, pleaded to the American people not to adopt the politics of hate:

America needs to know exactly WHO Mr. Doolittle was bombing and WHY. Does anyone in this country UNDERSTAND Bushido? Do you realize it has everything to do with family and tradition, and very LITTLE to do with war? Do we understand that our Japanese brothers and sisters in Tokyo are just like us — that there is a Red Cross in Japan, yes, and a Boy Scouts as well as Little Leagues? Is there anyone in our book club that has not read some haiku?

Christopher Hitchens, columnist and noted social critic, sounded a rare note of support:

We are in a war with evil. This was a very symbolic and much-needed raid in the first real offensive against fascist aggression in the Pacific. And we should congratulate these brave American pilots for risking their lives to stop the sort of wide scale Japanese butchery of the innocent that has been going on in Asia for years. Bravo, Colonel Doolittle.

Contacted at Columbia University, Edward Said, analyzed the larger cultural forces propelling what he called the "Doolittle dialectic."

The raid only clarifies what many of us have suspected about the American intent in this so-called war — a sort of surrogate and quite desperate defense of European colonialism and nineteenth-century hegemony. Are we, in fact, with this act of aerial piracy not proxies for French and British imperialism? Among many Western colonialists there is a deep and abiding — may I say fear and hatred? — of what they have construed the Other into as the "Oriental." If we are to continue to lash out like some wounded predator when we take a blow — to some, no doubt, well warranted and much needed — we should not be surprised in the following days to see a coalescence of sorts throughout the Asian World. People of color in Manila, Nanking, and Seoul will not be cheering this desperate act of misplaced braggadocio; indeed, they may well seek an alternative construction of resistance, a Co-Prosperity Sphere of sorts to facilitate solidarity against Western economic exploitation and now military aggression.

Gerry Spence, celebrated trial lawyer and best-selling author, warned of unforeseen legal ramifications to come:

In theory, as much as it might disturb Americans, this act makes Mr. Doolittle legally culpable in a number of most unfortunate but fascinating ways. An indictment, a preliminary hearing, a disinterested jury, and a judge from a neutral country — yes, indeed, all this is necessary if we are going to accept the principle of equal justice. There will be a need for prudent and experienced American jurists-perhaps compensated by League of Nations Funds — to step up to the international docket of justice. I can envision a World Court at which the Japanese pilots at Pearl Harbor and those who followed Doolittle will equally stand trial as perpetrators of death from the air. Of course, there must be culpability as well in the civil sense. And the families of the 50 killed by Doolittle have a perfect, a legal right, through proper legal representation, to press their wrongful death suits in American courts.

Former President Clinton, speaking at a corporate retreat, offered an immediate statement of unqualified support:

It is absolutely critical — and I want to focus on this point like a beam of light — that we back the president. There was no other moral choice for Americans. We must not ask whether we struck too soon, whether there were Japanese envoys on the way to America at the time the order was given, whether the causes of this war were in part due to this administration's earlier inattention to the region, whether there was a chance at creating a neutral zone in the Pacific that respected the legitimate aspirations of the Japanese people, whether four months of reflection after Pearl Harbor rashly gave way to fury, whether…

Jerry Falwell, president of Liberty Baptist College, sought to place the raid in a very complex and nuanced religious context:

Aren't bombs to be expected for a society that rejected God? After all, Japan turned its back on God long ago when they killed and expelled our courageous Christian missionaries. Perhaps Colonel Doolittle's bombs will do what God's typhoons and earthquakes have not. I just pray to God for the Japanese people now to wake up and accept Biblical scripture.

Dick Morris, former political adviser to President Clinton, analyzed the domestic ramifications of the raid:

This was in fact a brilliant stroke! — and a harbinger of things to come. President Roosevelt knew, as few others have grasped, the psychological and political effects of planes silhouetted against Mt. Fuji. Think of those visuals! I can envision — and here I am quite willing to be considered a lunatic prophet — subsequent raids, perhaps in less than three years, in which literally thousands of newly crafted gigantic multi-engine bombers — now perhaps already on the drawing boards, B-22s, 27s, 29s or such — torch Japanese cities with deadly new incendiary explosives.

And there's more. Once the "Doolittle Factor" comes into play, there may well be some terrible weapons on the horizon that will unleash the power of the cosmos — all of it posing huge political risks for any president bold enough to play a wild card from a full deck.

When told of the largely negative American reactions, a bewildered Colonel Doolittle purportedly was terse in his reply to his critics:

My God! What planet are these nuts from?

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