Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government →
the danger of “feel-good” protests →
they don’t accomplish much
Some 15,000 people in San Francisco have signed petitions to put a “groundbreaking” measure on the ballot that, following a long throat-clearing of “whereas”es complaining about the war in Iraq, would resolve
And so, yet again, the people of San Francisco put themselves on record as being very willing to sign a petition, cast a vote, or answer a poll claiming to disapprove of a war that they relentlessly fund.
They will even gather signatures to place before the voters a non-binding resolution that does nothing but register their disapproval and beg that the government “should” “investigat[e] means” to do something arguably concrete about it.
And yet again, they will mistake these gestures for actual opposition.
Why is the anti-war movement not having a greater effect?
Why does the war go on with no end in sight?
There are a number of reasons, not least the perfidy of the Dem establishment, but among the most important and least recognized reasons, I believe, is that we have a badly divided anti-war movement now.
And I am not talking about past squabbles on the Left…
…[T]here is another wing or perhaps wings of the drive to end the war.
These “wing(s)” are the traditional conservatives who often identify themselves as Republicans or Libertarians.
I have found that even peace activists working on the staff of organizations like Peace Action are blissfully unaware of this part of the antiwar sentiment.… The timid rejection of the war in The Nation, all too much under the sway of the Dems, pales by comparison with the cover headline of The American Conservative some months ago which blared: “We do not need an exit strategy.
We need an exit.”
Even more striking is the Libertarian opposition to the war to be found most notably in the online publication Antiwar.com, one of the best places to go on a daily basis to keep up with antiwar news and opinion.…
Lefties would do well to recognize that they share more with Libertarians than with the Democratic establishment.…
One may argue that the Libertarians, traditional Right and the Left do not need to come together, that each can fight against the war in its own way.
But this is not adequate for several reasons.
First, such separation is a set-up for a divide-and-conquer approach, at which the two War Parties are very adept.
The Republicans can appeal to the Libertarians and traditional conservatives to support them as a lesser evil; and the Democrats can appeal to the Left to support them as the lesser evil.
The net result is the dominance of the War Parties and the continuation of war, empire and the suppression of liberties embodied in the Patriot Act.
And this tactic has worked well for the War Parties who have alternated in the making of war and supervision of the empire while the anti-war forces are left without a real political home.
And without contact, each side is left with the stereotypes of the other, stereotypes that only reinforce their separation.
Second, at times the Left cannot reach people with an anti-war message, because of cultural factors or different philosophical outlooks.
But very often these same people can be reached by others, especially by the Libertarians.
I like hearing this sort of thing.
I think better cross-ideology alliance building would certainly help the anti-war and pro-civil-liberties movements.
But I think also that the anti-war left is suffering from a reliance on unproductive tactics.
So much of its energy goes into organizing large rallies and marches, for instance.
All of the marches and rallies since the start of the Iraq war have suffered from comparison with the huge worldwide demonstrations that took place when the war began.
Nowadays the pressure is not being put on the government and the war makers, but on the rally organizers and participants — will they be able to raise sufficient numbers of people to make the news, or will they fail and demonstrate that the energy in the anti-war movement is fading?
And even if they succeed, all that happens is a bunch of peaceniks gather together holding signs and listening to the same familiar rants.
Business as usual, in other words — everybody knows just how to react, the reporters can write it up in their sleep, and nobody at the Pentagon has to change their plans.
At least where I live, peace demonstrators aren’t really demonstrating much of anything.
It’s such a frequent and unremarkable thing for people to march around holding signs and chanting that it doesn’t register as much more than the equivalent of a Columbus Day parade or a farmer’s market.
People don’t ask themselves “what is so upsetting my fellow-citizens that they’re taking to the streets?”
They ask themselves, “protesters in the streets?
Is it a day that ends in ‘y’ again?
I wonder if traffic will be bad on the way home.”
What does it demonstrate when the anti-war movement gathers together, again and again, to listen to speeches telling them that their opinions are correct, and to perform some mass action that they know from repeated trial is wholly ineffective at meeting their stated goals?
I’ve volunteered in the VITA program on a couple of Saturday mornings this tax season.
, I have helped nine families take $15,253 back from the U.S. Treasury.
It’s a feather in my cap, Robin Hood style.
If you’d like to get involved, it’s not too late.
You can take an on-line training course from the IRS at http://www.irs.gov/app/vita/index.jsp.
The real trick may be trying to find a VITA site in your area — I don’t know of any central list of nationwide sites.
You’ll just have to Google around, or call your local United Way chapter or maybe your local IRS office.
My next VITA day is .
So I’ll miss the annual Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair and the protest-themed parade that is being held to mark the one-year anniversary of the protest-themed parade which was thrown on the one-year anniversary of the protest-themed parade that also failed to stop the Iraq War.
I recently went to a planning meeting of a local coalition that was hoping to bring the floundering local anti-war movement together to do something.
The “steering committee” itself was over a hundred members large, and still its members (scarred by previous encounters with the hammer-and-sickle crowd) nervously begged for the maximum of democratic inclusiveness.
All of these people, representing almost as many groups — labor unions, leftish and greenish third-parties, liberal peace advocates, would-be Mumia freers, and so forth — testing the limits of compromise and patience to try to come to agreement on the wording of a “Statement of Purpose” and to organize a “Mass Antiwar Conference/Rally” featuring:
Opening keynote speeches
A large assortment of workshops designed to include the broad range of groups and constituencies working against the war
A plenary opportunity to hear reports from the constituent workshops
A plenary session(s) where major decisions about the future of the coalition-in-formation and proposals for future activities would be democratically presented, debated and decided. These would include a proposed mass mobilization against the war.
A mass concluding rally with major speakers and popular antiwar political entertainment and music
Maybe I’m too impatient.
Maybe this is the sort of slow, deliberate, democratic decision-making that effective mass movements require.
To me it seems more like a bunch of well-meaning people putting in a bunch of time and effort to finally decide to all meet up and talk at each other some more in the shadow of “major speakers” and such at yet another failure rally.
The Dubya Squad went from recovering from the shock of to capitalizing on it by bringing the government and the media and the people on-board with their Iraq War agenda in .
, the anti-war movement is still holding massive meetings to draft statements of purpose and plan more meetings to consider proposals for some sort of “mass mobilization against the war”.
I’m for unengulfing that “individual dignity and power” myself.
More of these righteous rallies will not stop the war, no matter what sort of “popular antiwar political entertainment and music” is on the playbill.
The other day I imagined how much worse things would be here (and quite possibly in Iraq as well) if Kerry had won the election.
Half of the people now despairing over the war in Iraq and the U.S. torture policy would instead be making excuses to ignore it, while Kerry, true to his campaign promises, would keep blundering right along, nervously looking for opportunities to demonstrate the testicular fortitude-by-proxy of Democrats in power ties.
Even now, a sad percentage of the alleged opposition are wasting their energies on trying to depose Dubya via impeachment, as though it were in the least likely, as though it would be in the least useful.
Thanks to wood s lot for pointing me in the direction of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude.
Today was the protest at Bechtel headquarters in downtown San Francisco.
I reported about the planning meeting for those people who were organizing civil disobedience at the event, and I’ll give a report of how things went.
It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day in downtown San Francisco.
The main body of the protest had a few hundred people, demographically white tending to grey (the Grey Panthers and Raging Grannies were perhaps the largest organized contingents).
They gathered in “S.D. Bechtel Plaza,” a semi-public courtyard nestled between skyscraper office buildings.
Speakers recited a litany of complaints about Bechtel, which from the sounds of it seems to have been there collecting and handing out checks at just about all of the great government misdeeds of the last century or so.
There were musicians.
Keiji Tsuchiya spoke about his experience as a Hiroshima survivor.
People sang and chanted.
Someone wrote slogans on the ground in chalk, and a Mercedes logo in place of a peace sign.
People waved United Nations flags and signs with slogans like “Support Indigenous Rights” and “Mad Cowboy Disease.”
There was a big papier-mâché Gandhi holding a sign that read “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”
The front and back entrances to 50 Beale Street, where Bechtel’s headquarters is located, were blocked off by short metal fences which were guarded by security guards and San Francisco police, who were letting people in if they had appropriate pass cards.
There are additional entrances to the building, or so I was told, from a parking garage beneath the building and from 45 Fremont Street, which shares the same block.
Late into the morning, a group of about 25–30 of the protesters met off to the side to plan their civil disobedience action, with a few police officers milling about and sometimes eavesdropping.
Some of what the participants did in this meeting was the countdown-to-launch checklist: does everyone have a buddy and an affinity group? has everyone checked in with one of the legal observers? is everyone okay with the nonviolent action guidelines?
But some topics seemed to me to be things that should have been settled well ahead of time.
The group paused to consider whether or not they should have demands.
Most thought they should, and the one dissenter was willing to go along with it.
They settled on a demand to speak to the C.E.O. of Bechtel.
But as far as I could tell, they never reached consensus on what they would speak to him about if their demand were met, and they made no attempt to, say, call up and make an appointment with him or send him a letter (or even determine if he was in the building).
The demand seemed to have been chosen as an afterthought, and with the expectation that it would not be met.
It would have been hard for the participants to give this aspect of their action the attention it deserved.
Traffic noise made discussion difficult, and it really was a last-minute sort of meeting.
But this impresses on me the importance of planning and deliberation in such civil disobedience actions.
If you’re going to make a demand, it should be one that could conceivably be met, you should have a plan for what happens if it is met, and you should ask politely for the demand to be met before just launching into civil disobedience.
If instead you’re just using civil disobedience as a weapon of disruption, go ahead, but then don’t feel like you have to confuse matters by coming up with a token demand.
Last-minute demands aside (and I don’t know if the protesters ever actually presented their demand to anyone), the real purpose of the civil disobedience action was “to shut down Bechtel” — which is to say, more honestly, to temporarily inconvenience the people working at its corporate headquarters.
Of course there are always a number of unstated goals of civil disobedience actions like this one as well — to radicalize participants and onlookers, to impress people with the depth of the protesters’ commitment, to feel like you’re doing something important and risky that is a threat to The System, to give the media something to use as a hook for their coverage as a way of encouraging them to cover the protest, etc.
To these various ends, the participants split up into a handful of groups — the largest blockading the barriers around the front doors of the building, a smaller group trying to secure half of the back-door barriers, and another small group blockading the entrance to the parking garage.
The main body of the protest began to circle the block, following a contingent of drummers and shouting chants like “Bechtel!
Bechtel!
Hey Hey!
How many kids did you kill today?” and “Bechtel: War Profiteer — shut it down!”
One man handed me a flier from the 9-11 Truth Alliance advertising a lecture about The Report from Iron Mountain.
I’m a connoisseur of hoaxes, and I’ve seen this clever old modest proposal trotted out by conspiracy theorists in the right-wing patriot movement and by Islamic revolutionaries.
This is the first time I’ve seen it at a leftie rally, although the hoax originated on the peacenik left.
What goes around comes around, I suppose.
The blockading began around , but the police seemed to be in no hurry to make arrests, and in fact the blockade was fairly porous.
At times, employees simply pushed through the passively-resisting blockaders at the front of the building, or just jumped over the barricades.
And the number of protesters blocking the back entrance was never really sufficient to actually prevent people from coming and going, so they were reduced to lying down on the paths and making employees step over them.
Many employees adopted strangely sheep-like behavior, though.
They’d see one entrance blocked and then just give up and start standing around and complaining, or getting on their cell phones to explain to someone or other.
I walked back and forth between the various entrances and at all times (except for about 15–20 minutes which I’ll get to later) there were employees coming and going — and for the most part, you could see this from either side of the building through its mostly transparent ground floor.
I suspect many of the employees were just using the excuse to extend their lunch hours.
Some people were angry about being blocked.
One man in particular, a short, overweight, balding fellow in a tight, harshly-colored striped polo shirt, was a heart attack waiting for a good time to happen.
He shoved through the barriers and the protesters trying to blockade them, yelling all the while, then tore at protest signs as he stomped down the street, only to stop and yell at the security guards and police for allowing this insult to his day to take place.
Another woman complained that she didn’t even work for Bechtel, but for some UCSF project trying to find a way to alleviate osteoporosis.
And in fact 50 Beale Street is home to not just Bechtel’s headquarters, but also other tenants, some quite benign, like the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies.
The protesting crowd wasn’t very sympathetic to her complaints, and while she was pleading the case of the osteoporosis sufferers, she was shouted down angrily by someone who accused her, without any evidence, of being complicit in Bechtel’s worst crimes.
Most of the police were just milling about, calmly, occasionally speaking into the radios clipped to their chests, but one cop at the back door is playing off the big, loud, no-nonsense, black woman stereotype for effect.
“This is not your day!”
she shouts, and tells the blockaders to move this way or that.
“I’m in a bad mood today; you do not want to be on my bad side.”
The police at the back door are for the most part very successful at keeping a path open for people to enter and leave the building.
However, their focus necessarily shifts back and forth between two goals: Keeping the paths open so employees can come-and-go, and keeping the paths restricted so that only employees can get in.
Eventually they slip up.
They manage to corral the blockaders enough to open up a path, but it’s too much path for the people who are checking identification, and someone else slips through.
It’s Lacy MacAuley.
She’s the one whom I mentioned as having said that two people shut down Bechtel for 45 minutes one day just by showing up and asking to speak to the boss (I may have misheard her; she’s reported elsewhere that it was more like eight people).
Now she’s in the lobby, and the cops notice their screw-up, and 50 Beale Street really shuts down.
Standard procedure, apparently.
Until the protester can be hog-tied and hauled off, nobody goes in or out.
What the blockaders were initially unable to successfully accomplish, the building’s own security does.
As far as I can tell, she is an espontánea — she saw an opening and took the initiative, without this being an agreed-upon part of the civil disobedience action, although she was one of the original participants.
It is bold and successful in a way that the regular blockade is not.
For 15–20 minutes the doors are locked, while the police call in reinforcements to haul off MacAuley, who has gone limp by the elevators.
As she is loaded into the police van, a bullhorn from the crowd leads a call-and-response chant of “Tell me what a police state looks like” — “This is what a police state looks like!”
We should be so lucky as to get a police state that looks this way.
By or so, as the protest is winding down, Lacy has been the only arrest.
Correction: there were six other arrests earlier in the day of blockaders of the front doors of the 45 Fremont building that I didn’t witness or know about.
In the aftermath, my impression is that the civil disobedience part of the action was not very successful in its major and more important goals.
It was largely unsuccessful in making more than a token inconvenience to the working day at Bechtel, certainly in proportion to the number of protesters and prepared disobedients involved.
And it did so at the cost of collateral damage to non-Bechtel employees in the area, some of whom were not just inconvenienced but were treated with inappropriate disrespect.
As Lacy MacAuley showed, the 50 Beale Street standard procedure for dealing with lone protesters inside is far more effective in blockading the building than is the efforts of dozens of blockaders outside.
People who want to blockade the building would be better off just showing up in the lobby some day and pulling a banner out of their briefcase than they would be by coordinating their actions with a big protest and linking arms outside.
A handful of people, entering the building on the pretense of having business at the UCSF or Blue Shield offices, and then entering the lobby one after the other as each one in turn gets arrested or thrown out, would shut down the building far more effectively than was done .
I posted my review of the civil disobedience action at Bechtel to San Francisco’s Indymedia site.
The response to my admittedly gruff but sincere criticism has been to accuse me of being a “racist” who sounds “like some kind of pig, infiltraitor, disrupter”, who is “part of the problem” and whose criticism “hurts our movement.”
In addition, I have been informed that the people who took part in the action consider it to have been a grand success (where success is presumably being defined as something other than meeting the stated objectives).
Apparently, my contribution to Indymedia was at the top of the results of Google News searches for things like “Bechtel Protest”.
It’s not too surprising that there weren’t any other news accounts of the protest to compete with it, but my article wasn’t really meant as a news report on the protest as a whole so much as an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness and technique of the civil disobedience action in particular, so that we can learn from our experiences.
In any case, the fact that my report became by default the report about the protest, at least at first, combined with the fact that it was sharply critical of aspects of the civil disobedience action (and assessed it a failure), brought down a bit of a firestorm.
That, and the fact that I completely missed the arrests of six other blockaders in front of the 45 Fremont building, which called the accuracy of my account into question.
And, I shouldn’t kid myself: I was being curmudgeonly and impatient with the many flaws I’ve seen in protests like this one, and I expressed this in the way I wrote about it.
But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: you try to stop a war with the peace movement you have, not the peace movement you wish you had.
My criticism was meant constructively.
The anti-militarist movement is getting its ass kicked over and over again by swaggering hawks and war profiteers, and part of the reason is that it keeps making the same mistakes and doing the same ineffective actions over and over again.
We desperately need to honestly and critically evaluate our actions to improve their effectiveness — giving up on actions that have become habitual but that do no good, and putting more energy into improving actions that actually disrupt the war machine.
There’s a place for congratulatory press-releases and rah-rah encouragement, but there’s also a real need to go beyond that and be honest with ourselves about our actual impact.
This is not the special olympics.
We’ve got no time to hand out medals for participating or to announce that today everyone’s a winner.
If we turn against people who won’t just applaud and congratulate every action, calling them infiltrators or accusing them of working for the opposition, we will fail to learn from our mistakes, we will continue to hit our heads against the wall while the militarists continue to make their wars with impunity, and we will drive away from the movement the very people who could help make it more effective.
The real infiltrators will be the ones cheering the loudest when the movement does ineffective or self-destructive things.
Yesterday I got an email from “Peace Action West” announcing a “historic call” that will “mobilize the majority of Americans who are opposed to this war.”
It’s something called the Iraq Moratorium and it’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen in a long time.
The theory of the Iraq Moratorium is that you will “[j]oin with actors, celebrities, writers, trade union leaders, Iraq veterans, Gold Star Families, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans” who want U.S. troops out of Iraq — “on , and every third Friday thereafter” to do “something to stop the war.”
What something, exactly?
“What you do is up to you or to the group of people you are working with.
Labor unions in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere have called on their members to wear armbands and hold lunch hour rallies.”
The Iraq Moratorium web site recommends the following actions:
Wear and distribute black ribbons and armbands
Buy no gas on Moratorium days
Pressure politicians and the media
Hold vigils, pickets, rallies, and teach-ins
Hold special religious services
Coordinate events in music, art, and culture
Host film showings, talks, and educational events
Organize student actions: Teach-ins, school closings, etc.
(This isn’t radical enough for some of the participants, who have advocated something they call “Non-Violent Action,” — “proposed in the spirit of Ghandi [sic]” — to wit:
“On the third Friday of each month, designated as Moratorium Day, organize all Peace supporters across the country to drive exactly 10 miles below the posted speed limit on whatever road they are driving, whenever they drive, for the entire day.”)
In this way, because “the political process is moving glacially at best,” we can finally “force the media and the politicians to recognize just how angry and how massive anti-war sentiment in this country has grown.”
The Iraq Moratorium crowd is the political activism equivalent of the people who recommend prayer and crystals to patients with malignant tumors.
Shun them, run from them, do not turn around until they are far from sight.
Last weekend there was a big anti-tax protest in Washington, with other, smaller TEA parties held here and there across the country.
I’ve been keeping one eye on this TEA Party phenomenon, but so far I haven’t seen much worth reporting here.
These protesters seem largely content to complain about taxes, and largely unwilling to entertain resisting them except in hypothetical tricorner hat fantasies.
I get the feeling that a lot of them are looking for a leader to tell them what to do.
But the sorts of leaders they’re looking to for their rhetoric and ideas, the Glen Becks and Michelle Malkins and Rush Limbaughs and such, are by and large cowards for whom having a bunch of people complaining about the things they tell them to complain about is good enough.
No way are they going to go out on a limb and begin resisting, though they may try to goad others into it if they don’t have to commit themselves.
But there are some possibly-encouraging signs.
A group calling itself the “Three Percenters” were passing out a leaflet at the protest urging the participants to buckle down and stop whining at Uncle Sam — kind of a right-wing counterpart to Cindy Sheehan’s advice to the peace movement I shared earlier in the week.
Some excerpts from the leaflet:
The original Boston Tea Party was a calculated act of law-breaking designed to send the British Empire a message it could not fail to comprehend.
Making long-winded speeches, thumping impassioned chests and denouncing a government made up of people who have already written you off as unimportant, impotent, and no threat to their plans is a waste of time, energy, and oxygen.
Both political parties have conspired through malice or incompetence to bring us to this state, yet still people look in vain to the system of party politics for salvation.
The Founders were not so stupid as to place all their hopes on a corrupt system.
When the accepted channels of politics and remonstrance failed, they burned the King’s tax stamps, dumped his tea, broke the windows of his tax collectors with rocks and bricks, smuggled forbidden goods, defied “his royal majesty” in hundreds of other ways, and dared him to do anything about it.
Liberty is not free, nor is it without risk.
All these tactics are still available to us today.
Any inventive mind could think of many more effective means of getting across the idea that we insist upon our liberty in this modern era.
It is not necessary to collect a crowd to do them, either.
Defiance in action can be expressed individually in many ingenious ways.
Then there’s this article on “What’s the Point of Demonstrating?” from The Independent Institute’s Beacon Blog.
The article itself isn’t all that interesting, but look at the comments!
Lots of people nibbling at the edges of tax resistance, trying out the arguments in its favor, showing every symptom of being resisters-to-be.
So this may be a situation where all it takes is the right seed, some catalyst, and with surprising speed some new form of conservative tax resistance will begin to develop in parallel to the long-standing and largely left-oriented war tax resistance movement.
