Peace

Neither smart nor filled with answers, I humble myself here by thinking aloud about antiwar strategy. I also want to clearly state some of starting points. My first departure point may reduce my readership by half!  It is that masses of people—self-organizing networks and communities—mostly acting independently of the parties remain among the most decisive forces for ending and preventing wars. Yes, masses of people, not well-positioned elites, not savvy strategists, not self-sacrificing organizers, but ordinary folks reacting to their sense of what's right and wrong remain the bellwether.

Writing as someone who has helped organize events that featured Cindy Sheehan, I want to support her declaration concerning the Democratic Party’s relationship to the antiwar project. I also want to extend my sympathy to and express my solidarity with Cindy Sheehan and the tens of thousands of grassroots organizers who are the fabric of the antiwar movement. In reviewing the first wave of responses to the “Resignation Statement” (RS), I have come to ask more questions about the state of our movement.

On the same day that Mass Global Action joined with nearly 50 other protestors, from the Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition, to protest Henry Kissinger and his troupe of war criminals at the Kennedy Library in Boston, we learnt of the death of Slobodon Milosovic. While the death of the Balkan Butcher leaves us cold, we can't help notice the curious symmetry by which the powerful cheat justice. If death was Milosovic's escape, it is the hipocrisy and indifference to international law of the US political establishment that allows Kissinger, Haig, and Clark to go untried for their crimes.

Amidst the indicments, failed nominations, body counts and tropical depressions, there is little reason from optimism, let alone gloating on the part of the progressive movement. Even in moral defeat, in the normally harsh glare of negative public opinion, the right-wing flaps on... Witness the suspension of Davis Bacon in NOLA, the issuing of vouchers for use at private schools, new initiatives to undermine foreign governments (Iran & Syria), etc. Even with the Bush Administration's failure to provide the necessary resources to strengthening international public health systems, it seems poised to revive the politics of fear with the Avian Flu threat. The surest index of right-wing success and resilience in the face of moral failure, though, is the corporate bottom line.

This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful; it is not aimed at presidents or prime ministers; it was aimed at ordinary working class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christians, Hindu and Jew, young and old, indiscriminate attempt at slaughter irrespective of any considerations, of age, of class, of religion, whatever, that isn't an ideology, it isn't even a perverted faith, it's just indiscriminate attempt at mass murder…

London Mayor Ken Livingston, 7/7/05