'War is hell for left-of-centre parties" Canadian rightwing journalist Mark Steyn crowed in the National Post. He was mocking Democrats for their opportunistic, cynical and overly complicated positions on Iraq before the last election. He doesn't know the half of it. The Dems' pained public performance has been just the most visible sign of deeper and more widespread ambivalence that has surfaced, as often as not, in connection with the growing peace movement. For anyone even modestly left of center, a peace movement — any peace movement — recalls Vietnam and the whole potent mythology surrounding the radicalism of the counterculture that grew up in opposition to it. Every call to oppose military excess is a call to live up to that legacy — or to explain in pained, self-flagellating detail why it isn't necessary.
The emblem of 1960s-style antiwar efforts, though, is the demonstration, and for that very reason the current crop of "gatherings" (the preferred term, I'm told) has become heavily contested — and not only from scoffers on the right. Only one day after the Jan. 18 worldwide antiwar protests, for example, the message board on InfoShop, an anarchist website, had been commandeered by grousers. Typical was this lament:
"Yah, I was at the Toronto 'protest' yesterday. … There was like 10,000-15,000 people there and there weren't even boring repetitive hey hey ho ho chants. … The crowd were a bunch of peaceniks and people with their kids. Mind you it was 10 below outside. It wasn't even like it was a purposefully peaceful protest, it wasn't anything, just a bunch of people trying not to get pneumonia."
The wonder might have been if the anarchists had approved of the protests, most of which were tightly controlled. Having cut their teeth on "direct action" and "creative resistance," anarchists inevitably find demonstrations organized by most other left-of-center factions "boring."
Closer to home, the Jan. 18 gathering outside MacDill Air Force Base featured a rift between the organizers, United Voices for Peace, which is a pacifistic, mostly mainstream group encompassing Greens and a number of faith groups such as the Society of Friends (Quakers) and others, and the more bellicose Uhuru-affiliated Florida Alliance for Peace and Social Justice (FAPSJ), who "oppose the initiation of violence but fervently reject the demand for passive benevolent resistance under all circumstances," according to a statement on their website.
Participants in the MacDill action were asked to honor a number of Principles of Unity so strenuously noncombative that the FAPSJ and a handful of other groups refused to participate. "We wanted a different kind of peace event that would appeal to a broader spectrum of people," says Christine O'Brien, United Voices for Peace principal who served as emcee for the gathering. "We wanted just this one event to be free of any angry rhetoric. We wanted a peaceful spirit and peaceful voices — and we got exactly what we wanted. It was lovely."
I agree. It was lovely. And I say that as someone who went to MacDill that day with decidedly mixed feelings.
In the fall of 1990, I marched through the streets of downtown Chicago to protest the Gulf War of Bush Sr., but until the Jan. 18 event at MacDill, I had yet to attend a rally in connection with the current crisis — in part because I've never really felt comfortable with sloganeering and sign waving, which are, after all, just sound bytes on poster board. What's worse, my limited experience with such things has taught me that they often attract megalomaniacs of the sort who stand on stage and bait police, daring them, with undisguised excitement, to crack a few heads.
It's not that I don't admire genuinely thoughtful dissidents. I do. But I'm more of the party of cognitive dissonance. Every proposition calls forth opposing arguments that have to be weighed and, if possible, dismissed. I agonize and perseverate and, worst of all, I tend to complicate.
As far as Iraq goes, though, I'm hardly alone. Some fairly reliable progressives have done more than a little handwringing in connection with the demonstrations against Bush's proposed war. The problem, you see, is that much of the impetus for the current peace movement came, by various tortuous routes, from the World Workers' Party (WWP) — a group widely derided by the democratic left as "Stalinists." The various byways of the sectarian left are, needless to say, too Byzantine to go into here (and nobody really understands all the distinctions except the members of the sects themselves, anyway), but the book on the WWP is basically this: They are blind to totalitarianism. In fact, they sometimes seem to almost revel in it. As The Nation's David Corn wrote in a now notorious LAWeekly article about the first large antiwar rally last October:
"In a telling sign of the organizers' priorities, the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the taxi driver/ radical journalist sentenced to death two decades ago for killing a policeman, drew greater attention than the idea that revived and unfettered weapons inspections should occur in Iraq before George W. Bush launches a war. Few of the dozens of speakers, if any, bothered suggesting a policy option regarding Saddam Hussein other than a simplistic leave-Iraq-alone."
The Washington rally, Corn goes on to say, was a "pander fest for the hard left. … This was no accident, for the demonstration was essentially organized by the Workers World Party." The WWP, it should be noted, came into being as the result of a split within the international socialist community following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Whereas the USSR's aggression alienated many leftwing intellectuals, the WWP represents the legacy of those true believers who supported the invasion, and split from the more recalcitrant Socialist Workers Party as a result.
Aware, in all probability, of the limited attractiveness of adamant Stalinism to America's almost universally democratic left, the WWP's involvement in today's Peace Movement has come (albeit circuitously) under the aegis of a more generically radical group known as International ANSWER. ANSWER, as it is commonly called, is itself a front for the International Action Committee (IAC), a group formed by one-time attorney general for Lyndon Johnson, Ramsey Clark, whose own politics have become such a muddled amalgam of left and right that the most common word used to describe him is "mysterious."
An article published in The Shadow, an underground anarchist newspaper in New York, has been widely circulated on the Internet. Titled "The Mysterious Ramsey Clark: Stalinist Dupe or Ruling-Class Spook?" the article describes how Clark has "seemingly transformed from a shill for the most corrupt elements of the U.S. elites to a shill for any foreign despot who claims to oppose the U.S. elites." Although steeped in conspiracy speculations, the article is noteworthy for its examination of Clark's precarious position on the "Red-Brown" extremities of the political spectrum — a spot occupied by people whose trajectory has carried them so far to the left that they actually circle around to the far right. In recent years, Clark has served as legal counsel and/or advocate for, among others, far right cultist Lyndon LaRouche, former Yugoslav dictator and alleged war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, and Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Rwandan clergyman charged with massacring Tutsis in 1994. Salon.com ran a widely quoted article describing Clark as "a war criminal's best friend."
In all fairness, however, Clark is not without defenders. The Washington Post, for example, ran a piece just before Christmas called "The Crusader" in which The Nation publisher Victor Navasky, who is described as a longtime friend of Clark, is quoted as saying, "Ramsey is in the tradition of the great dissenters. … He's a romantic and an idealist. He really believes one person can make a difference." Others have argued that the growing spate of attacks on Clark are a form of red-baiting, a charge that, perhaps, soft-pedals Clark's odd entanglements with rightists, such as Lyndon LaRouche.
"It's one thing to oppose military intervention [in Iraq, which Clark has visited repeatedly]; it's another thing to provide credibility for someone like Hussein," Dr. Steven Mizrach, an adjunct professor at Florida International University, pacifist and sometime blogger, stated in an interview. "I know some people said similar things about Jane Fonda when she visited Hanoi during the Vietnam War, but Clark goes beyond what she did. He isn't just against U.S. intervention. He takes the other side. He lionizes them."
Very few local war protestors interviewed for this article were even aware of the criticism of Clark, and most shrugged it off — not glibly but pragmatically — stating that they were willing to set aside differences to focus on heading off a war with Iraq. While such a response might strike some as disingenuous, it's important to remember just how far removed ANSWER is from the local peace movement. Unlike the D.C. gathering, which featured IAC-affiliated speakers and ANSWER-branded banners and signs, the MacDill action was largely homegrown. In fact, according to Mark Kamleiter, a prominent Florida Green and the media liaison for United Voices for Peace, the event was motivated by ANSWER's call for a day of protest, but neither he nor any of the other organizers had any direct contact with anyone from ANSWER.
In truth, the bottom-up nature of the peace movement virtually assures that ANSWER's role will remain limited. The reason for this is simple: Whereas Old Left dinosaurs like the WWP, ANSWER's half-hidden patriarch, are notoriously fond of heavy-handed, top-down authority, this country's counterculture draws its inspiration from the original student movement's love of participatory democracy.
This distinction has been lost on rightwing critics eager to discredit the peace movement, and on people within the peace movement eager to discredit critics of ANSWER. And that's unfortunate because criticizing ANSWER is not the same as criticizing the antiwar movement generally.
David Bramer is a local writer living in Tampa.
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2003.