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April
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April 9,
2003
Contain
and Isolate
The New York Times and the Peace Movement
By SUSAN DAVIS
I'm a professor of communication, but I want to
admit something: I hate talking or writing about the media.
Also, I agree with what Jell-O Biafra said here on-campus at
the Universoty of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a few weeks ago:
that instead of deploring the sad state of the print and broadcast
media, we should BE the media. But I'm breaking my usual rule.
Today, I'll talk about the media. I want to take a recent
article from the New York Times and try to look at how the conventional
wisdom about the current antiwar movement is wrong --- about
97 percent wrong. The New York Times and its conventional wisdom
exemplify the attempt to redefine and contain the antiwar movement
in United States. I want to finish with some reasons why I think
it is very important to resist that containment.
These have been very sad and somber weeks.
Those of us in the antiwar movement knew that the war would
probably happen, and in the past days our dire predictions about
humanitarian catastrophes and civilian casualties are being confirmed.
We also have had our fears about an intensified public climate
of reaction and repression here at home reconfirmed. We worked
very hard, and many, many people worked their fingers to the
bone, so that this might not come to pass. It has come to pass,
and it is bitter. We also know with bitterness that the moment
is revolutionary -- probably as big a change in our world as
the explosion of the atom bomb in 1945. And it is increasingly
feeling out of control. We feel, whether we are activists or
not, that our children's future will be -- I was going to say
unrecognizable -- but perhaps I mean recognizable to us in some
very unpleasant ways, familiar from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s
as well as unfolding new horrors. So it is hard to be optimistic,
but I want to offer grounds for optimism and bravery and moving
forward.
One thing is clear in all the swirl of
war news around us: A very small group of unelected man and women
are making new rules for the world. These rules state that the
United States will use force and coercion and bribery to get
its way. It will make every effort to suspend our legal and
constitutional rights here at home, beginning with attacks on
the most vulnerable, to help make sure that it encounters only
minimal resistance to what can only be seen as a gigantically
risky global gamble. It's a very frightening moment, because
the Bush administration is willing to risk millions of human
lives, the world economy, the health of the environment and peaceful
future on some very shaky propositions. Obviously, they think
if they win this roll of the dice there's a great deal to be
gained in terms of global dominance. I've been thinking for
while that their strategic plan can be summed up as "this
just might work, so let's roll 'em!"
It's in this context that we need to
remember that the antiwar movement has done something, and become
something, remarkable. It has held that the tumbling dice. It's
an international movement that has made it impossible for many
otherwise supportive governments to join the coalition of the
"bribed and the bullied." It brought much of the world
to a halt on the day the bombing began, in huge demonstrations,
strikes, school walkouts and civil disobedience. It's also time
to recognize that the Bush administration has a great deal at
stake in containing and isolating the domestic influence the
antiwar movement.
So let's take a look at the New York
Times article. There it was, on Saturday March 29, below the
fold on the first page of section B., it was titled "Antiwar
Movement morphs from Wild -Eyed To Civil" by Kate Zernike
and Dean E. Murphy. This is not the worst article, not the best
article but it was a major piece of reporting, and one of the
few, by mainstream media that in general has frozen the antiwar
movement out of serious coverage until recently.
Here are five major points.
A first piece of conventional wisdom:
the antiwar movement failed, because it failed to stop the war.
Second point: the antiwar movement is
relatively recent, mobilized, at its earliest, after Sept. 11,
2001. Therefore, it is wider than it is deep.
A third pillar of wisdom: anti-war movements
are protest movements -- and limited to protest only. In the
politest formulations. Protest is an entitlement in a democracy,
as long as it doesn't threaten to change anything.
Fourth wisdom, encapsulated in the headline:
the antiwar movement was wild-eyed, has been mainstreamed. --
a threat to good manners has been contained, because a sensible
antiwar movement will try not to offend anyone. In order to
appeal to the majority, you must not offend anyone.
Fifth wisdom: the antiwar movement is
now being run from the top, down (big sigh of relief), once again
by responsible people. It's made up of mostly white peaceniks,
guided by large organizations with public relations consultants,
and it only connects tangentially with other so-called "interest
groups" like the religious, organized labor, and civil rights
groups.
Now, I think it's a great error to consider
the movement thus far a failure. We have done something remarkable.
We have built an international movement that has made it much
harder than it might have been for the Bush administration to
act militarily. We built a prewar, anti-war movement before
the local and national media took very much notice at all. And
this was in spite of insistent mass media celebration -- on CNN,
MSNBC, Fox News, to name only television -- that for fully six
months made war seem inevitable. It is true that the attack
on Iraq had been planned long before Sept. 11, 2001, but it was
never inevitable. Popular pressure from below delayed and delayed
the attack, forced more and more spin-doctoring and manufactured
evidence, and brow -beating and arm-twisting. As a result, the
shifting and specious arguments for the war became more and more
implausible, and the war's real, if mixed rationale became more
naked. The international antiwar resistance and mobilizations
gave voice to skepticism and sentiment that already existed,
and it fanned those sentiments. It may very well have held back,
and may still hold back, a further push into Iran.
The lack of cooperation from Turkey is
an example. So are the resignations of labor MPs and cabinet
ministers in Great Britain. The premier of Indonesia, the largest
Muslim country in the world, told George W. Bush that this adventure
was a very, very bad idea, and George W. Bush had to listen.
There are many more examples, all of them unprecedented, and
largely unrecognized by the official voices that we have almost
always to listen to.
Second: that the antiwar movement emerged
in the last year, or at most two. It is true that following
September 11, 2001, peace activists and citizens began to meet
to discuss what might happen, and then to think through what
it war in Afghanistan might mean in terms of future U.S. policies,
and the prospects for peace. Teach-ins, panels at universities,
began immediately following September 11, and vigils as well.
These were reinvigorated in the last year.
But there's been a long continuity of
activism to draw on in the last decade, again largely under the
radar of the mainstream media. The networks of independent media
and Internet activism that the antiwar movement draws on grew
out of the anti-globalization movements that became visible in
Seattle. But they also drew on the knowledge and activism of
the Anti-Nafta campaigns of the early 1990s, the movement for
redress for the veterans of the first Gulf War, the American
victims of which may number as many as 100,000 sick men, the
anti sweatshop movement, the living wage movement. These movements
-- and future historians will have to argue about the size and
connections have educated a generation of young people
about the United States' political and economic relationship
to the world.. The last time this happened was with the Central
American solidarity movement in the 1980s. And then there are
the efforts of pacifists like Voices in the Wilderness -- which
have been part of a movement protesting the sanctions on Iraq
for years. It's notable in the New York Times recent coverage
of piece demonstrations that the name of Voices in the Wilderness
cannot be mentioned. It's because they're pacifist radicalism
is deep and continuous. A base was there to draw on, and it
usually spoke from deeply moral positions, rather than strategic
or tactical positions..
Third -point --- and really my most important
point. Conventional wisdom would like the antiwar movement to
be just protest, just disagreement, safely cordoned off. It's
not just protest as important as visible dissent is. One of the
big successes of the antiwar movement is that it has been able
to influence the media -- in the face of unrelenting propaganda
blitzes from the official sources, in the face of an enormous
effort to make the war seem inevitable.
How has it done this? Certainly the
Internet has been important -- but without all the networks laid
down, there would be nothing so powerfully informational to
put on the Internet except for the same old stories. The Internet
has absolutely been key, but so have the hundreds, maybe thousands
of small groups meeting around the country to talk about the
war and its meaning for the future of United States. Talking
about it, sharing information about it, digesting the news, and
especially digesting the news from foreign press which gives
a much different perspective than the U.S. press. In that way
antiwar groups have been the media.
But also by writing position papers,
flyering, cracking open the editorial pages of the local conglomerate
chain media -- forcing the local paper to cover them at the same
time that they are working hard to produce real local media --
organizing and faithfully attending demonstrations -- these local
activists have made the antiwar position news.
They also worked hard to make the connections
clear between the war and terrorism at home, with its repressive
apparatus embodied in the USA Patriot act, and the assault on
Iraq. Taking up the space both physical, with demonstrations,
and informational with letter writing and editorial writing,
the antiwar movement has become a movement for re-democratization
of American society.
The fact that all over the country and
here in Urbana we've been responded to by a corporate sponsored
pro war campaign, orchestrated by radio station chains like clear
channel and sponsored by Coca-Cola, , means that we really forced
ourselves into the picture. This is serious business.
More wisdom from the New York Times:
the movement has become mainstream. It has broken with International
Answer and its sectarian original organizers (who were not the
movement's original organizers, let's make the distinction, but
were organizers of mass demonstrations). The problem according
to the Times -- and certainly the leaders of Win Without War
-- was that the antiwar movement connected the impending attack
on Iraq with supposedly unrelated domestic issues like the death
penalty, the case of Mumia Abu Jamal and racism, and other international
crises, such as the war underway in Palestine. In other words,
the smaller, more radical and less generously funded antiwar
groups insisted on connecting state violence, government authoritarianism,
and the Israeli war on the Palestinians, racism at home and abroad,
with the assault on Iraq.
But more importantly, the rest of the
world sees these issues as connected --- they see the war on
Iraq as a racist war, they continuously point out its connections
to the United States support for Israel, they see the connection
between barbaric practices at home, such as the death penalty,
and barbaric histories abroad.
This is what the pro-war party means
when it since the peace movement is "anti-American":
it means it is willing to consider the war in light of the broader
picture of American relations abroad, many of which have been
moral outrages. It is infuriating to many in the so-called
mainstream that the heart of the antiwar movement of recognizes
Arab rage over the nuclear arming of Israel and U.S. support
for its policies toward Palestine. I think it is infuriating
to the so-called political mainstream that American pacifists
acknowledge and want to speak about about the Israeli peace movement,
and fears among the Israeli people aroused by this war. In
the past, these were words that could not be spoken, and thoughts
that could not be thought. But should not the antiwar movement
in United States continue to make these connections? Undoubtedly
given its origins and the work it has already done, it will make
them, and perhaps pay the cost of being "mainstream."
Or perhaps the mainstream has moved just
a little bit, just a little bit -- and perhaps the antiwar
movement has moved it. It is just possible that mobilization
against this particular, latest war is causing cracks in the
American consciousness of foreign policy. It's very hard work,
but some of the antiwar activists I know have simply refused
to be intimidated by charges of anti-Semitism. That simple refusal,
so hard, so painful, is so important. And so offensive.
Fifth point -- that -- big sigh of relief
-- it's being run from the top-down by responsible people. They
are using corporate style public relations techniques to keep
everybody on message. The New York Times writes: "protest
has become routine. It is no longer seen as an assault on the
country's values." Groups like the Sierra Club now find
they can take an antiwar position. Well, that's a relief. Just
a few months ago the Sierra Club was trying to expel local chapters
for taking public antiwar positions. But this can happen because
of the formulation linking antiwar sentiment to patriotism.
Responsible people support the troops -- they may be antiwar
but they support the troops. Peace is patriotic. Carl Pope is
patriotic
While the patriotism of pacifists has
always been an argument, it really got wheeled out in the big
demonstrations after Christmas, and as groups like Win without
War, and Moveon.org, which the New York Times especially approves
of, stepped to the forefront to help organize the enormous national
demonstrations of January and February and March. These were
very useful and very threatening demonstrations. But in Win
without War's formulations, and I think arguably MoveOn.org's
approach, the United States policy towards Iraq before the war
was fundamentally acceptable. That's a problem. Groups like
Voices in the Wilderness have worked for years to undermine the
acceptability of so-called containment, which Jeff Gunsel of
Voices points out, is really just another word for sanctions
-- but sanctions were becoming politically unacceptable. If
you look today at Moveon.org's call for letters to the editor
about the management of postwar Iraq there isn't a single critical
connection made -- the argument is simply back to the status
quo of European nations managing what will be Middle Eastern
occupied territory.
Let me just wind up by saying that there
should be some limits on how responsible we want to be. There
should be some limits, given the scale of mass death, the violation
of the Nuremberg and Geneva conventions by our own country, the
scale of impoverishment of an already brutalized country -- there
should be some limits on how polite we want to be about this.
If "peace is patriotic" and "support the troops"
mean we will back off from these questions of illegality and
atrocity ---- illegality and atrocities that are transparent
to hundreds of millions of people around the world, then I strongly
argue that we continue to have bad manners.
For after all, if we support the troops,
do we really want our young men and women to have to say they
were "just following orders" as they move from one
theater of war to what I am pretty certain will be the next?
Susan Davis
teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She is
the author of Spectacular Nature.
She can be reached at sgdavis@uiuc.edu
Yesterday's
Features
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell's Shame
John
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David
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Tom
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The Mantra of the Troops: Support
or Treason?
Adam
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Vijay
Prashad
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Tom
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Mickey
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Makes Me Sic (Sic): Copy Editing
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