The World Says No to War, Feb 15th and Resistance
-- Ahilan Kadirgamar
“We also draw on the many examples of resistance and conscience
from the past of the United States: from those who fought slavery
with rebellions and the underground railroad, to those who defied
the Vietnam war by refusing orders, resisting the draft, and standing
in solidarity with resisters.
Let us not allow the watching world today to despair of our silence
and our failure to act. Instead, let the world hear our pledge:
we will resist the machinery of war and repression and rally others
to do everything possible to stop it.”
(From the Not In Our Name Statement Of Conscience – www.nion.us)
Recorded the biggest event in human history, the millions who
came out all over the world to protest the war on February 15th
have catalyzed hopes for a rejuvenated internationalism. In a
post-1989 historical moment the scale of the turn-out in over
600 cities around the globe, has been embraced by the Left as
raising the specter of a new global movement of political resistance.
Clearly the current peace movement has captured the imagination
of millions in ways that have gotten even the staid New York Times
locating the current political pulse in a history of revolution
and revolt, relating it vaguely even to 1848. It was a day not
only of internationalist solidarity, but also a changing historical
moment of a new found momentum in confronting US imperialism after
the drawbacks suffered by peoples’ resistance on September 11th
2001. How can such momentum be sustained? Will this new movement
deepen its resistance to include the multitude of struggles against
the empire?
While the anti-war movement found Feb 15th to be an inspiring
turning point, history can be deceitful. International mobilization
and solidarity have proven capable of rapidly turning the tables
on the very ideological backbone that helped maintain US hegemony,
namely the corporatized mass media. The media, particularly in
the US has been twisting and turning, and where necessary blatantly
distorting events in support of the empire. The ideological coup
came out of mass networking and mobilization by a variety of anti-war
networks, making use of all forms of communicative mediums from
flyers, posters, community radio, to the internet. Feb 15th, became
the moment when the State and its apparatuses had to take resistance
seriously, the masses awesome presence forced mass media to cover
it one way or the other. However, the danger of such sudden momentum
is that it can lead to naïve optimism. The political Right,
while a bit shaken, is quite capable of changing its strategies,
to accommodate these new conditions and to again find its strong
footing. Perhaps that is how the anti-war movement mobilized against
the Gulf war and the war on Afghanistan fizzled out in the past.
It is in that context that the depth of this movement of resistance
is important. The genius of Feb 15th was its ability to bring
out a broad array of forces from the entire political spectrum.
It was even able to manipulate and appropriate the politics of
certain segments of the right. Some came for their radical leftist
politics, others for their pacifism and others yet to save the
UN from subordination to the US. Deepening the movement of resistance
would require a strong resistance against state repression. This
is all the more tricky as some state’s around the world have aligned
with the masses in opposing the war on Iraq. Such a shift in thinking
by these states might be for reasons very different from their
peoples, and the states’ contradictions with their peoples are
varied and very much alive. In Canada, Homes not Bombs has used
the larger context of the war on Iraq to oppose the role of the
military in Canada - to intensify a nonviolent campaign for demilitarization
begun in 1979.
Resistance then should not be limited to confronting the bare
knuckles of the State, but also its many manifestations and related
oppressive structures. Such a deepening has been triggered by
segments in the anti-war movement taking up issues of class, gender,
race, environment and the range of struggles supported by the
masses that came out on Feb 15th. Raising such issues inside the
movement may seem divisive, and should be done with care. The
movement is at the crossroads and it needs to take this significant
step. Furthermore, such a transformation of the anti-war movement
requires forums to nurture the conversations and debates necessary
to enrich the movement. It is such a transformed resistance that
can strengthen and solidify the links in the anti-war networks.
Groups like Labor Against the War in New York (NYCLAW), launched
in the aftermath of Sept 11th, 2001 were working against the tides,
as the captains of organized labor such as AFL-CIO took on a pro-war
stance on Afghanistan and a more ambivalent stance on Iraq. Through
their participation in the movement, NYCLAW has not only brought
out issues of class and labor into the movement, but also created
a forum for sections of labor to join the anti-war movement. Finally,
if the momentum gained on Feb 15th is to be sustained, if the
US’s agenda for endless war is to be crushed, then the immediacy
of opposing war has to be linked to a resistance with a vision
- Another World is Possible!
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