Antiwar roundup

First, the action we did around Ehren Watada's first day in court went quite well, considering the intense cold. We managed to stay out for about 45 minutes and got about 40 people to stop long enough to sign the petition, and hopefully several hundred more people at least have a vague idea about who this guy is. I posted a couple of pictures I took above; I know there are better ones out there somewhere. There was a short but decent piece in the Daily Targum about it.

We've got plenty coming up; Janis Karpinski is speaking at Rutgers on Tuesday, there will be a rally Thursday to do with the events at Santa Barbara, Columbia and so on, and then of course gearing up for March 20th.

I went to a meeting in Newark Tuesday night of what is now called The Coalition for Peace and Justice (more explanation in a previous post). Most of the big decisions had been made in advance, mainly by POP. The main items are an indoor rally on March 24th, days of action April 4th-7th leading up to the anniversary of the assassination of MLK, a big march "for Justice, Jobs, Equality, and Peace" in Newark on the anniversary of The March On Washington on August 25th, and a followup "People's Peace Conference" in January, also in Newark.

I've made a point a few times about the discussion process not being very open in this milieu; there has not really been much of an opening for people to have much input into the process. I do not think this is intentional (the POP organizers have been very forthcoming when asked for specific information, for example) but it is a problem. There was what seemed to me to be an extremely tentative attempt by the Coalition for Peace Action to shift the center of gravity a little ways away from POP by proposing that the conference be held in Trenton, but they dropped it before it even came close to coming to a vote. We'll see how things develop.

Ehren Watada action at Rutgers tomorrow

There is going to be a quickie action at Rutgers tomorrow to call attention to the beginning of Lt. Ehren Watada's court-martial for refusing deployment to Iraq. Here is the centerpiece of it, which we just spent the afternoon painting:



I still need to build a stand for it. Grr.

Antiwar panel at Rutgers

On Tuesday night the Central Jersey Coalition Againt Endless War and Rutgers Againt the War In the interest of disclosure, I should mention that I worked on organizing this event. held what I thought was a quite interesting panel about withdrawal from Iraq, with about 120 people in attendance by my count. The Daily Targum did a decent piece on it.

The first speaker, Charlotte Bunch, really hit the nail on the head when she said that the United States needs to take responsibility without taking control. The US armed both sides during the Iran-Iraq war and spent years destroying the country's infrastructure with years of bombing and sanctions even before Bush Jr. came on the scene. I think this is a very good point - we owe the Iraqis a lot for all the damage we've done to their country over the last 25 years or so, but as long as the US ruling class uses that as an excuse to try and run Iraq we will keep making it worse. Dennis O'Neill, one of the other speakers, made a similar point about the "Pottery barn rule" (you break it, you buy it) argument; we're talking about a bull in a china shop Dennis was there as a representative of Bring Them Home Now. - you worry about getting the bull out first, because as long as it's there it's going to keep breaking things.

Patrick Resta, an army medic who was called up from the reserves and sent to Iraq, gave some good examples of what that all means; rather than try to reproduce it from my notes, I'll refer you to an interview with him.

The weak point of the panel, unsurprisingly for me, was Professor Stephen Eric Bronner. It was at least better than the last time I heard him speak on the subject (I think he was the first person I heard the "pottery barn theory" from, and he called the audience bad Marxists to boot). He now says that US troops should get out now, and that the prospects for democracy in Iraq are worse than before the war; but he kept saying that the problem is that "we" are losing influence in the middle east, that "we" need to use soft power, that this, that, and the other thing is "our fault", or even "your fault" - the last being one of a string of verbal tricks he invariable pulls in an attempt to remind everyone in the audience how much smarter he is than them.

Ellen Whitt, one of the main organizers of the event, made what I thought was an excellent response to that from the floor, the gist being that just because the US government has gotten itself into trouble, that's not necessarily trouble for us. You would think a self-styled Marxist intellectual like Bronner would have had a greater appreciation of that.

Someone who most definitely does is Dennis O'Neill. He said, I think quite correctly, that the ruling class can't afford to stay in Iraq and it can't afford to leave, which makes this a crucial moment for the rest of us to make up their minds for them. That's why I hope (as I'm sure Dennis does) to see you all in Washington tomorrow, where we can take the next step towards making that happen

New statewide peace coalition?

I started writing this at a "People's Peace Conference" hosted by the The People's Organization for Progress (POP) is a North Jersey based civil rights/black power group. Larry Hamm is it's chairman and spokesperson. People's Organization for Progress in Newark today. The conference activities themselves were not terribly impressive, but it was a good crowd, about 150-200 people, and I made some contacts and got a chance to catch up with a lot of folks. Half of it at the very least was the usual suspects, of course, although as often it's very pleasant to see how many people that is, and there were some groups that wouldn't necessarily have been in the same room. There were quite a lot of folks from the NAACP (although it seems like part of the price for that was having to sit through their interminable speeches at the plenaries; There was a really astonishing amount of flattery of Larry Hamm, although I do have to admit that he's a fantastic speaker).

I - and a lot of other folks - found out by carefully examining the conference packets that the conference was intended to launch a statewide peace coalition. This wasn't mentioned until about 5 hours into the program, and I still don't know how it's going to work. New Jersey being what it is, there is only so much for a statewide antiwar organization to do, but it is potentially quite useful, especially if it can attract people who haven't been involved (and clearly POP would like to do this, in particular with Black folks from Newark and the surroundings).

In order to do this, though, the group is going to need to find things to do, and it's not terribly clear what that's going to be, or how that's going to be figured out. In particular we'll have to see what role the various There were a couple of state legislators present, including Sharpe James, the mayor of Newark until a few months ago, with whom POP had a relationship I don't know too much about. small-time democratic politicians and hangers-on at the conference are going to play. There was an enormous list of resolutions passed, but it's not too clear which of them are going to be acted on, let alone how.

The kernel of the problem with this is that with all of the speeches from the from the platform there was hardly any time to discuss anything, even in the workshops. Some people also privately expressed reservations about how committed POP actually is to antiwar work. I can only hope this improves in the continuations committee; we'll see.

I also had a chance to introduce a friend of mine who joined the The Young Socialists (YS) is the youth wing of the Socialist Workers' Party, sometimes called the "Barnes Cult". Young Socialists not too long ago to Tom Bias from Labor Standard, who quit the SWP in 1978 and has quite a lot of (very compelling) things to say about how right he was to do that, and how the SWP has been MIA in the anti-war movement. My YS friend was encouraging me to come to an event with Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters in NYC on the 28th, which I may do out of pure morbid interest. It still surprises me a bit just how many ex-SWP members are around and still seriously involved in the movement; there were at least six here today, and that's just the ones I've met. Most of them were pushed out in the seventies and eighties when Barnes was consolidating his position; when you think about that, and about what they were back in the day it's a real shame what he did to that group.