These are not peace rallies. These are HATE rallies.
Thought this was vaugely related ...
Protest: American as apple pie
Since 1815, wars have drawn demonstrators
By DANA TOFIG
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/news/0103/18bgpeace.html
As long as America has had wars, it has had people protesting war.
That tradition will continue this weekend. Tens of thousands of people will march on the Mall in Washington urging President Bush not to invade Iraq. Similar marches will be held in other cities. And on Monday in Atlanta, the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day march will focus on peace.
In some ways, the anti-war marches this weekend will be departures from the past. The crowds will have been gathered through the use of the Internet and e-mail. And unlike after-the-fact protests of the past, it will happen before a bomb has been dropped.
"You get all this upsurge in activity before there's any war or it's clear that there will ever be a war," said Lawrence Wittner, a history professor at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied the anti-war movement. "I think that's, in some ways, impressive."
In other ways, these protests share much with the past. Voices for peace have always been with us.
"Some of them are critical of all wars. Some of them are critical of specific wars," Wittner said. "There have always been people who have been critical of warfare."
The movement begins
In the 19th century, America fought repeatedly -- the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Indian Wars and the Spanish-American War. In response, a peace movement formed and grew.
Much of this early anti-war sentiment had roots in Christianity. In 1815, a devout Christian named David Low Dodge founded the first known formally organized U.S. peace group: the New York Peace Society. In 1828 the American Peace Society was formed, and America's anti-war movement was launched.
" 'Movement' is a big word for them. These were tiny little groups," said Charles Chatfield, author of "The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism." However, he said, these were among the first voices raised for peaceful international relations and world justice.
The Civil War saw riots by men who were subject to the draft, mostly Irish immigrants who felt they were being targeted for conscription. The most famous of these disturbances, in 1863 in New York, is depicted in Martin Scorsese's new movie, "Gangs of New York."
The peace movement surged again during the Spanish-American War, which protesters saw as an attempt to build an American empire. In this period, many voices for peace came from the upper class. But during World War I, the loudest voices of protest came from the working class.
The People's Council had its base in trade unions and the Socialist Party. It launched its anti-war campaign in May 1917, when 20,000 rallied at Madison Square Garden in New York.
As dissent grew, the government clamped down. Marches and gatherings were broken up by National Guardsmen, and protesters were tossed in jail for "treason" or "sedition." Notable among them was Socialist politician Eugene V. Debs, a member of the People's Council. In 1918, Debs spoke out near a prison in Canton, Ohio, where some socialist leaders were jailed. He proclaimed:
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose -- especially their lives."
Debs was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and served time in the Atlanta Federal Prison. From his cell, he ran for president and received nearly 1 million votes.
"For many," Wittner said, "it showed just how fanatically the government would work to crush anti-war sentiment."
WWII and the Cold War
After World War I, "the war to end all wars," many Americans bristled at the idea of another deadly campaign. Isolationists such as aviator Charles Lindbergh urged the nation to stay out of other people's battles.
But after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, drawing the United States into World War II, Americans were solidly behind the war. Some men registered as conscientious objectors, but the anti-war movement was quiet during the war on fascism.
When the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, a new concern arose: nuclear war. The newly formed Progressive Party, led by former Vice President Henry Wallace, called for negotiating with the Soviet Union and strengthening the United Nations. Well-known people aligned themselves with the left-leaning party, including W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson.
Eventually, however, widespread fear of the Soviet Union led most Americans to support the government's Cold War programs.
Yet some long-lasting anti-war groups formed in the 1950s. For instance, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, or SANE, is heavily involved in today's anti-war movement under the name Peace Action.
Vietnam, Persian Gulf
The United States had been building troop strength in Vietnam since the late 1950s, but the mass anti-war movement didn't ignite until 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson announced the bombing of North Vietnam.
In April 1965, Students for a Democratic Society held its first march on Washington; the event attracted 20,000 people. For the next six years there were protests nearly every spring and fall, and men began turning in -- or burning -- their draft card.
As the movement grew, it grew fractious. Some peace demonstrations turned violent and -- thanks to the media-- the movement became linked with hippies, drugs and fringe movements, said Mel Small, a professor of history at Wayne State University in Detroit and author of "Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Struggle for America's Hearts and Minds."
But the anti-war movement gained steam when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke out against the war during a sermon at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church.
"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government," King said on April 30, 1967.
The Vietnam era is known for its photogenic mass protests, including a march on the Pentagon in October 1967. But one of the most powerful demonstrations was much quieter and more dispersed.
On Oct. 15, 1969, as many as 2 million people took part in the "moratorium." In 200 cities nationwide, people put aside their work and took to the streets, peacefully urging President Richard Nixon to get out of Vietnam as soon as possible. Many of the protesters wore neckties, flouting the notion that the movement was solely made up of denizens of the counterculture.
"NBC ran 10 solid minutes [of the moratorium] without narration -- from Boston to San Francisco," said Small. "It was a tremendous demonstration."
More large-scale protests erupted after the 1970 bombing of Cambodia and the killing of four student protesters at Kent State University.
After Vietnam, concerns about nuclear war brought back SANE and led to the formation of "no-nukes" groups across the country.
"This movement was definitely the largest anti-military . . . movement in American history," said Wittner, who is writing a book on the nuclear protests. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out at no-nukes rallies across America and around the world.
In 1991, there were some protests prior to the Persian Gulf War. But once the war started, patriotism reigned. Wittner said there is frequently a surge of patriotism when a war starts, but the longer a conflict lasts, the more dissent grows.
The first war with Iraq was over so quickly and bloodlessly for the United States that the anti-war movement never got any traction. But that may not be the case with a second war in Iraq, if it takes longer than the first one.
"Opposition will continue to grow until war is declared," Wittner said. "It may fall off. But after that, as the consequences come home, I think opposition will grow once more."
-- Contributing: Nisa Asokan