On September 15, the International ANSWER coalition is leading an anti-war demo in DC. Reading the comments on other diaries, it seems that many people are reluctant to attend because of ANSWER itself, their leadership style, and the politics of other potential attendees. Frankly I don't care for ANSWER -- (I had a Trotskyist phase about 3 years ago and it's done now.) But there is no excuse, moral or practical, to skip out on these events. And here's why:
Alright so ANSWER is a front group for a small band of weird ideologues. The Workers World Party is, well, a little out there. That said, ANSWER does a damn good job putting these things together. They've shown the ability to organize large-number events (ie. +100,000) in DC with impressive consistency. For the past six years or so, ANSWER has led the largest public demonstrations of discontent with the Bush administration in the nation's capital.
Someone in another diary commented that while he'd "gladly stand and be counted anti-war," he didn't "sign on to the rest of ANSWER's agenda" and therefore "refused to be counted with them." Unfortunately, there is no ANSWER-free demo with 75,000 people occurring on the next block down from Lafayette Park. It's either be in the streets that day or don't.
Who should we march with instead? United for Peace and Justice also does events, and they look like a more palatable organization for single-issue activists. However, those of you terrified of issue-confusion should note UFPJ's desire to show "the connections between the Iraq war and Washington’s overall empire building, the U.S. support of the illegal occupation of Palestinian land, racism, repression and injustice at home..." (UFPJ Steering Committee 12/12/2005.)
Who else is coming on September 15? Those radical, easily-marginalized nutcases from Gold Star Families for Peace, Veterans for Peace, the National Council of Arab Americans, any number of union locals...
Go to the damn demonstration.
Yes there will be teenagers in bandannas.
Yes people will blather about Mumia.
Yes the music will largely suck.
Yes someone will try to sell you a Maoist paper.
Yes at least one speaker will focus on Palestine.
Yes you may get a contact high if you play your cards right.
Yes there will be anarchist street theater.
Yes Ramsey Clark is a tool.
And most people there, I venture to say nearly all of them, have absolutely no relation to ANSWER, WWP, or anyone like that. And if you can get a larger gathering of people without ANSWER's organizational capacities, (for which they deserve credit,) do it. But don't sit at home watching the damn thing on C-Span bitching that you don't feel comfortable there.
Because you self-identified "normal" people are exactly the people who should attend. Every working-class-white-dude-for-peace, every clean-cut-grad-student-for-peace, every socially-conservative-black-church-grandma-for-peace, every other-socially-acceptable-stereotype-for-peace that comes to these things is one more person who the media will have a harder time marginalizing. (Rather than the kid they once interviewed in the Post who insisted his name, Jasper, be spelled with a small "j" as a way of "fighting the patriarchal hegemony.") Those of you who shudder when "jasper" is held up as the voice of the movement are exactly the people who should be showing up at these events.
This is not to guarantee that the press won't marginalize it anyway. It's not to guarantee that you won't hear something you disagree with from some speaker you find repugnant. It's hardly to guarantee some 1:1 correlation between marches and policy change. (Though, having worked on the Hill, I can tell you there's no correlation whatsoever between letter-writing and results and nobody's dismissed letter-writing out of hand.)
I had an argument with a friend of mine about attending events that force you to work with people carrying other causes. It went like this:
Mischa's friend: "Its true, you would be pissed if you had a demonstration planned against the white house or something and it got crashed by a bunch of PETA activists wearing bloody clothing and whining about baby seals."
Mischa: "Right well if you have 100 people against Bush and 10 show up whining about seals, it ruins it. But if you have 200,000 for Bush and 10 show up for seals, it doesn't matter quite so much now. And this is the contradiction: People who consider themselves too "responsible / respectable" etc to show up for the main cause, because the tangential causes make them squirm, they don't show, and then the press can pretend its only the fringes who believe in any of it. And so those respectable ppl, who agree on the key issues, contribute to the marginalization of their own beliefs. It doesn't help."
And to close I'd like to appeal to moral obligation.
As citizens in a democracy, we are obliged to take advantage of methods of protest not available everywhere. We are obliged in this to the futures of our descendants, to the memories of our ancestors, and to the global public opinion that we left-internationalist-types speak so highly of. (Bear in mind that large-scale street protest is the only form of resistance that the international community really sees - Le Monde doesn't front-page calls to Congressmen.)
Street demonstrations are visible. They are permanent, unremovable illustrations of defiance which, years afterwards, can belie the myth of "they all went along." There were large-scale demonstrations in Belgrade 1990 in support of the candidate running against Slobodan Milosevic. They didn't oust Milosevic from power at the time, they didn't prevent his actions in Bosnia or Kosovo, they didn't achieve anything by that standard.
However, after almost a decade of criminal brutality by a gangster-bandit regime, how should we judge the Serbian people? How should history judge them? The actions of the demonstrators suggest decency amidst brutality; resistance amidst coercion. Such responses illustrate for future generations of Serbs, future generations of Bosnians, future generations of Americans, French, and you can go on down the line, that not everyone stands silent when the values they cherish are challenged.
When our chidren and grandchildren read their history books in a decade or three and ask why nobody stood up to the Bush administration, it is simply not enough to say "well daddy voted against them," or "mommy called her Congressman." This is not dissent.
Imagine looking at this from the perspective of a citizen of an authoritarian regime, a regime in which political parties are banned, large numbers of people are executed for opposing the government, and opposition leaders are thrown in jail. Ask yourself whether that citizen would consider voting or letter-writing to be a morally adequate response to the increasingly criminal actions of the United States government.
Come to Washington in two weeks.
Swallow your distaste for ANSWER.
And if some jackoff from Fox comes up to you and asks whether you stand with some dogmatic lunatic up on stage, tell him:
"No sir, I don't. But I'm here because I stand with Vets for Peace; I stand with my union local; I stand with my church's opposition to the war; I stand with the first Amendment; and most of all I stand with 100% of this crowd left-right-and-center who want out of Iraq in my damn lifetime."
Peace.