Twelfth Tuesday Topic
Assuming you had access to relatively limitless resources, what do you think would be the ideal event to protest the Iraq War?
Describe in detail how you would plan, recruit for, and conduct the event.
Labels: Tuesday Topics
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Information and updates about the latest effort against the Iraq War.
04 June 2007
Assuming you had access to relatively limitless resources, what do you think would be the ideal event to protest the Iraq War?
Describe in detail how you would plan, recruit for, and conduct the event.
4 Comments:
The time for protests, demonstrations, and rallies is over. The only thing that will help end the war here in the United States is non-violent direct action. Iraq Veterans Against the War is calling on its supporters to help end the war through the following means:
1. Strikes
2. Blockades
3. Counter-recruitment
4. Supporting G.I. resistance
-Adam Kokesh
I think the ideal event would be a riot or some organized act of civil disobedience. As has been pointed out in an earlier Tuesday Topic on the One Million Blogs for Peace blog, traditionally, anti-war movements are not taken seriously until they get more militant that the current one is. On March 17th, ANSWER organizers and speakers came out with a strong message of war opposition, advocating acts of civil disobedience including intentional failure to pay taxes, and rioting including campus seizures and the forcing off campus of military recruitment officers, as well another act proposed by Cindy Sheehan: declaring independence from the federal government on the Fourth of July. Since that time, what of these have manifested? We have seen the development of small and relatively unknown websites dedicated to the tax evasion tenet. We have seen a handful of temporary occupations of Congresspeople who indicated they would not cut off war funding. And that's about it. Other manifestations since then have included Congress's giving in to every war policy demand of the president, the forfeiture of protest by the famed Cindy Sheehan, and a general inaction by the peace "movement." We have seen more discussion of next year's candidates for president than of resisting or ending the war! It seems the would-be peace movement is bottling up all its hopes for ending the war in the next election. But most of the candidates do not oppose the occupation of Iraq in and of itself; the Democrats broadly simply want to "Transition the Mission" and reduce active combat, while continuing to ensure that American oil companies prosper from Iraq's vast resources at the expense of the national sovereignty. As pointed out in an entry on my blog, the Bush Administration has already laid out plans for a decades-long (at least), ongoing occupation of Iraq, and Congress is already working to provide him the funds to carry it out through the end of his term. Can we trust the public officials responsible for getting us into the war in the first place and who continue to engage in deceptive tactics like this that make the public think they favor peace to end the war? And how many more thousands or even tens or hundreds of thousands of lives will be lost in the interim, even if that is the case? No, we cannot wait around, counting on people with massive investment in the oil industry to cut their own investments off.
The time has come for us in the supposed peace movement to start getting serious about ending this war! The exact meeting place doesn't matter, as long as it is accessible. But the anti-war movement (and particularly the socialist branch) needs to start demonstrating some militancy. Perhaps holding a planned riot or a simultaneous series of campus seizure and/or seizures of the buildings of the military industrial complex would get the media's attention and spread the word that, as the expression goes, We're Not Gonna Take It! Perhaps an organized burning of tax forms similar to the organized burning of draft cards during the Vietnam era would be another motion that would get national attention. A general strike and boycott of companies determined to be profiting from the war. Recruitment for these events could be circulated relatively cheaply by e-mail and/or through emphasized headlines on anti-war web sites like One Million Blogs for Peace and its affiliated blogs. Advertising could and should be used where the funds are available. Planning might occur by way of Online chats regularly scheduled and mutually agreed upon by a wide range of anti-war organizations. Organizing for these chats could be conducted via the mass posting of the suggestion on anti-war blogs and message boards. An organized building seizure or tax form burning even might take place in a fashion that intentionally, symbolically borrows from the anti-Vietnam War events that were similar. If you are afraid of things getting violent, you might recall the plight the Iraqis and our troops are facing every day, all the time.
I would come up with a curriculum which teaches empathy for the "other," like in a social studies class or something. I would try to have my kids imagine what it would be like to be an Iraqi. Perhaps, they can do a creative writing piece on living under the occupation and maybe tie it to the subject at hand. Perhaps if they were studying Alexander, they could write about being a Tyrian living in the besieged city. Of course, it would get me canned, but it might be well worth looking into. It would explain that history is written by the winners, that those who fall under the boot of the oppressor are regulated to the dustbins of history.
One of the textbooks used in California, A Message of Ancient Days has a serious deficit when it comes to the forgotten peoples of history, such as women, slaves, and the marginalized. The history of the "losers" of history must be told, such as it is told in Zinn's history book.
I haven't been on lately, because I have been so busy with my job at the school with all the standardized testing going on, but I'll try to be better.
Even if the war in Iraq were to end tomorrow, the world will simply have one war after another, as it always has. Usually numerous wars at the same time, endlessly.
To see a different approach to ending ALL wars forever, see
TheWarNoMoreBook.net site and its linked blog site.
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