The dotcom generation has married the anti-war movement and produced a troubled child with serious identity problems. One moment he's claiming that Godwin's law has been suspended for the duration of George Bush's presidency. The next, probably after watching "The West Wing", he's pining after some imaginary middle of the road Republican he can go out and have a beer with.
I am a street photographer and an amateur photojournalist. For the past 3.5 years I have been photographing the public square, architecture, street scenes, people in crowds, but above all the anti-war movement. From the large protests in the fall of 2002 and spring of 2003 to the massive immigration protests in 2006, I have witnessed the protest movement against the war in Iraq grow smaller and less militant. Over the time period of time, the progress of the war in Iraq has unfolded in a way to prove that it was the militant anti-war protesters, not the pompous talking heads in the media who were right all along.
When I'm not out in the streets taking photographs, I am probably at home in front of my computer reading about politics on the web. It is very easy to see where all of the militant energy of 2002 and 2003 has gone, right into the Democratic party. The Daily Kos, Atrios, Firedoglake, Talking Points Memo, there is a large, very sophisticated network of online magazines and weblogs (all of which raise large amounts of money) set up by young, mostly liberal Democratic Party loyalists. The dotcom generation has married the anti-war movement and produced a troubled child with serious identity problems. One moment he's claiming that Godwin's law has been suspended for the duration of George Bush's presidency. The next, probably after watching "The West Wing", he's pining after some imaginary middle of the road Republican he can go out and have a beer with.
Let's take one example. I realize, of course, that on the internet it's possible to find a quote to justify almost any position but bear with me until I put it into a larger context. This one is very typical. In 2002, the exposure of the massacre at Haditha (where US Marines seem to have done a very credible impression of the Waffen SS) would have led to vigils, rallies, civil disobedience, and just perhaps, when it became clear how genuinely evil the American occupation of Iraq is, mass resistence on the level of the protests that followed the massacre at Kent State. In 2006, it leads to a post on the Daily Kos.
"What I can't stand is my complicity in these deaths. I have gone to the occasional rally, wrote one letter to the editor two years after the fact. I am living proof, in some ways, of Scott Ritter's assertion that we really don't care about people in Iraq, or anywhere else, for that matter. We care about our creature comforts, about maintaining the most extravagant society ever seen in amazing abundance. I felt like setting my house on fire and standing out in the lawn telling people about Eman and her family as the flames billow up. It is really, really hard to go from grieving over this to believing that electing Democrats is the first step to fixing it. Somebody help me believe that it is."
But this man, who is understandably anguished about the culture of militarism and racism that has infested American culture since September 11th, doesn't burn his house down. He doesn't even go to one of those useless protests or vigils. Instead, he puts his faith in a career Marine officer, the conservative Catholic, anti-abortion congressman Jack Murtha. "The fact that Murtha is speaking straight from the gut gives me some hope that America will realize that there is a difference," he said. "Democrats really do care about people."
I don't want to bash Jack Murtha. Even though he originally voted for the war, he still at least partly redeemed himself by confirming the details about the Haditha massacre to prevent its cover up. And yet his opposition to the war in Iraq is based more on his desire to preserve the Marine Corps as an institution in the fact of a brutal occupation that's eroding its sense of discipline and esprit de corps, not on the idea that occupying a small third world country in order to steal its resources is wrong. This is a long way from Notinourname or the massive anti-war protests of February 15th, 2003 and it's 100 million miles away from the great anti-war protests that helped end the Vietnam war.
I know some people won't have a problem with this. They believe that conservative voices criticizing the war in Iraq are more likely to have an effect than Cindy Sheehan or Noam Chomsky. But Murtha's anti-abortion, mostly conservative outlook make him a strange man indeed to play the role of "savior from the Democratic party" to the left liberal grassroots of the Democratic party. By looking towards conservative, Democratic party establishment leaders to make their case, radicals voluntarily disarm themselves of the weapons they need to pressure these very Democrats to do the right thing in the face of the inevitable onslaught from the extreme right. And I would argue that it's also the reason why, even in the face of the clear evil of the American occupation of Iraq, there is no significant protest movement.
This flies against the conventional wisdom, which states that the reason for the lack of a mass protest movement is that there is no draft. During the war in Vietnam the majority of the American had a real stake in seeing it end, but the American casualties in Iraq, as bad as they are, are still limited to a volunteer army and to highly paid mercenaries and civilian contractors. There's certainly some truth to it. A draft would almost surely be met with protests (which would in turn be met with efficient, overwhelming police repression) but I think it's a misleading, and an intentionally misleading explanation. First of all, it doesn't take into account the fact that, at least in its initial stages, the protest movement against the Vietnam war was led by elite college students who were in no danger of ever having to serve in the military. Second, there was no draft on February 15th 2003, when the entire world came out to protest the possibility of an invasion. Why the change?
The reduction in size and militancy of the protest movement as well as the deafening silence in the faith of the Haditha massacre do not have as their main reason the lack of a draft, the apathy or even racism of the American people, or simple fatigue. While all of these causes are part of the explanation why there is no mass movement against the continuing occupation, they do not take into account the most obvious, the criminalization of the public square, the demonization of large groups of the American people for opposing the war, and the lack of support for and outright hostility to the anti-war movement in the Democratic Party and in the mainstream media. From the Fall of 2002 onwards, I have witnessed antiwar protests harassed by the police, penned into steel cages. I've seen middle-aged women treated like criminals by the police who should have been protecting them. I've seen 2000 American citizens held without charge in the most liberal, cosmopolitan city in the United States. I've seen permits denied, police pens designed to limit their size, preemptive harassment against leading anti-war activists. Antiwar activists have been visited by the FBI, placed into terrorist databases, relentlessly demonized I the media, labeled "anti-semites", "moonbats", "traitors", told to leave the country and told that they were "giving aid and comfort to the enemy". In short, a large part of the reason why there is no mass anti-war movement in the United States today is that, unlike those of us on the left, the American government, the police, and the media elites have learned from the Vietnam War and the 1960s. They are no longer taken by surprise by protest or by civil disobedience. They know how to mock, obscure, and marginalize us. They are as skilled at repression as we are unskilled at breaking through it.
In other words, people are afraid, and they are afraid, not because they are being attacked by the extreme right, but because they are being attacked by the extreme right with the complicity of the Democratic Party and the "respectable" liberal, social democratic establishment. While an attack by an out and out fascist like Rush Limbaugh or Michelle Malkin would be considered a badge of honor if we knew that there were people in power willing to fight for us and honor us for participating in the democratic process, it's quite another thing when those "liberals" you look to for leadership not only remain silent in the fact of your demonization but actively participate in it. So let's look at the history of attacks on the anti Iraq war, not by the right, but by the "moderate" left.
Since the joint congressional resolution HJ RES. 114 on October 10th of 2002, where the Democrats joined with the Republicans to give Bush the authorization to invade Iraq and when Richard Gephardt joined Bush in the Rose Garden to state that "we stand together" there have been 3 large upsurges in the protest movement against Bush and the war in Iraq. The first took began on October 6th in Central Park and culminated in the historic worldwide protests on February 15th, 2003. The second centered on the Republican National Convention in New York City, when activists came from all over the United States to protest Bush's coronation and were met with brutal, pre-emptive police repression. And the third grew up around Cindy Sheehan's vigil in Crawford Texas and crested on September 24th in the huge International Answer protest in Washington.
At each point when the protest movement against the war in Iraq was about to gain traction, to have an effect, it was attacked by the Democrats and the "moderate" left. Each time it found itself demoralized and each time the attack benefited the elites of the Democratic Party at the expense of its grassroots.
Let's look at the first. In March of 2002, Not in Our Name was founded by a diverse coalition of activists and intellectuals. Their statement was eventually picked up by the Guardian and the group found itself with the support of people all over the world, including even "moderate" anti-war leaders like Leslie Cagan and members of the congressional black caucus like Barbara Lee. In October of 2002, just before the tragic vote to support the war, Notinourname staged a large rally in Central Park, probably the first time in American history there was a mass protest movement against a war before it even began. These protests got larger and more militant until they culminated in February 15th, when so many people took to the streets that the protest movement was labeled "the second superpower".
With the relentless drumbeat for war coming out of the Republican Party and from the right, it would have seemed logical for the Democrats and the moderate left to look to the protest movement for a source of support. But they did the opposite. Michelle Goldberg, the "liberal" journalist for Salon.com wrote a brutal attack piece on the anti-war protest movement called "Peace Kooks", which demonized, lied, manipulated language, made serious charges without offering proof and which was, of course, eventually republished by David Horowitz in FrontPage Magazine.
If Goldberg thought that by attacking the anti-war movement she was going to help the Democrats, she was wrong. They lost control of Congress that November.
In February, as people took to the streets all over the world, there was one city where the protest movement was met by the hostility of the local government, liberal Democratic, cosmopolitan New York City. Not only were the 200,000 protesters denied a permit to hold a march past the United Nations, they were met with thousands of police barricades, horses, a terror alert later acknowledged by Tom Ridge to have been raised for political reasons, and harassed and bullied until they decided the brutal cold was too much and drifted away. While New York City has a Republican Mayor, it's also an overwhelmingly Democratic town and the city council did little to counter Mike Bloomberg's decision to act as Bush's enforcer.
The major beneficiary of the attack and breakup of the initial stage of the anti-Iraq-war protest movement was the Democratic Party. Denied the opportunity to show their opposition to the war through protest and direct action, the same people who took to the streets in 2003 flooded into the Dean campaign and into the Democratic primaries. Instead of marching in the streets, people went to meetups. Instead of doing civil disobedience they clicked through advertisements on the Daily Kos and gave money to Dean or Kucinich. Dean, of course, turned out to have been a paper tiger, the recipient of a massive amount of media hype designed to build him up as the respectable alternative to International Answer and Notinourname. He collapsed even before the end of the first primary when the media and Democratic elites decided that he had done his job but that it was now time for him to step aside in favor of the pro-war, anti-gay stuffed shirt "war hero" John Kerry.
And so the same people who had been pulled into the Democratic Party swallowed their pride and decided to support Kerry, who, in spite of his own uninspiring personal characteristics, received an unprecedented amount of grassroots support and fund raising. In response to the upsurge in support for gay marriage all through 2004, Kerry responded by declaring himself an alter boy and gay baiting Dick Cheney's daughter during the presidential debates. In response to the support of the anti-war followers of Howard Dean, he ran as a "war hero", saluted us at the Democratic convention, rolled over and played dead in the face of the swiftboat attacks, and conceded the election even before the issue of the fraudulent voting in Ohio was over. Needless to say, he failed to spend all the money the massive grassroots upsurge had funneled into his campaign. Worst of all, he squandered the massive outpouring of anti-Bush protesters who came to New York City during the Republican National Convention.
What more did the Democratic Party need? They had a massive outpouring of people determined to protest their opponents and yet they never acknowledged them. Those 500,000 people who came to New York over Labor Day weekend in 2004 would have marched on Swift Boat headquarters and ripped it to the ground, stone by stone, board by board, and yet Kerry never mentioned them. What's more, liberal columnists like Michelle Goldberg and Eric Alterman pleaded with the protesters not to march. Leslie Cagan and the respectable peace bureaucrats at United for Peace and Justice responded to Mike Bloomberg's denial of a permit to hold a rally in Central Park with all the lethargy of John Kerry responding to people who attacked his military record and personal integrity. Ominous predictions by the Daily News and other local press about the "anarchists" who were coming to tear up the city failed to materialize. But this didn't stop Ray Kelly, who sent the NYPD out into the streets to round up close to 2000 American citizens, who were held without charge for days in an abandoned pier along the Hudson.
Needless to say, Kerry lost and the war went on.
The final upsurge against the war in Iraq began in the summer of 2005 with Cindy Sheehan's vigil against George Bush at Crawford. While Sheehan did have largely leftist views on the war in Iraq, she was no red flag waiving communist. What's more, she and most of the protesters around here had children or had lost children in Iraq, and had successfully channeled the anti-war movement into a more conservative form of expression. The issue now wasn't internationalism or American imperialism or solidarity with the Iraqi people but was almost exclusively centered on American casualties. As opposed to the attacks on the anti-war movement in 2003 and 2004, the moderate left and liberals in the media leapt to Sheehan's defense in the face of the inevitable "swiftboating" she got from the extreme right. Frank Rich, Bob Herbert, Maureen Dowd, most of the big liberal democratic bloggers, the entire liberal establishment came roaring out of their kennels like ferocious attack dogs bearing their fangs and tugging against their chains. The attacks on Sheehan from the right were beaten back and a year after the demoralizing reelection of George Bush, the anti-war movement once again was able to bring enough people to Washington to surround the White House, flood the streets near the Washington monument, and spill out onto the surrounding blocks.
But if the liberal elite in the media was willing to defend Cindy Sheehan against the extreme right, no democratic politician was willing to be seen in public with her. The democrats evacuated Washington the weekend of September 24th with efficiency Ray Nagin could have used during hurricane Katrina. In spite of honorable exceptions like Cynthia McKinney and Maxine Waters, no democratic politician, not even those who were willing to declare their opposition to the war in Iraq were willing to speak. And when International Answer, in their usual style, took over the speakers platform for hours, preventing the march from proceeding on time with their endless laundry list of speakers, those liberals who were appalled at the attacks on Cindy Sheehan but who were unwilling to come out directly against the war found their opening and they pounced. Jon Stewart mocked the rally on The Daily Show. Liberal Democratic bloggers either ignored it altogether or attacked it head on. There was no place for radicals on stage, they howled in outrage as they wrote long articles micromanaging the very anti-war protest they had chosen not to participate in. How can you ask Democratic politicians to be seen onstage with extremists from International Answer they howled in outrage (an outrage, of course, which was nowhere in evidence when Howard Dean appeared on the 700 Club and declared that marriage should be between a man and a woman)?
The third upsurge against the war in Iraq was over and the war in Iraq went on.
The result of this relentless demonization of the anti-war movement, the criminalization of the public square and the endless attempts by the Democrats to appease that mythical swing voter in the Midwest is a party controlled, not by their most skillful and aggressive members like Russ Feingold or Murtha but by an elite of pollsters, consultants, timid professionals whose main interest lies not in acting like an opposition party or in governing but in keeping their jobs. It's led to a civic culture so degraded that the American people can sit by as their civil liberties are stripped away and their country is dishonored by the spectacle of innocent civilians being massacred in Iraq with no response in the streets of New York or Washington. It's led to the amazing spectacle of a president getting everything he wants, even as his poll numbers continue to decline. And afraid of genuine mass protest and resistance we sit in front of our computers in fear and loneliness pouring out our rage into the faux public square of the Internet waiting for the next savior from the Democratic party. .