Freedom Socialist Vol. 29, No. 2 April-May 2008

SOAPBOX

Anti-war déjàvu

by Linda Averill

Linda Averill

Something is terribly wrong when it’s easy to go about life without daily, in-your-face reminders that the U.S. is waging war. News about Iraq is buried on back pages. Brain-damaged U.S. soldiers are kept out of sight at understaffed military hospitals. Five years, billions of dollars, uncountable lives lost, a troop surge — and no mass protest.

In 2003, hundreds of thousands marched in the U.S. to stop the war. Since then, anti-war sentiment has become majority opinion. So where are all the demonstrations?

Opponents of the war are wrestling with this question. One of the biggest problems is that the major anti-war organizations are more interested in “owning” the movement than building it.

This problem also plagued the peace groups of the 1980s. Back then, President Carter revived draft registration and escalated U.S. intervention in Central AmeriBut the Vietnam War had recently ended. The idea of another aggression sparked outrage. People said, Hell no!

Coalitions sprang up overnight. Protesters hit the streets. Draft registration resistance was born. And then, the movement stumbled. The ferment subsided.

So here we are again, trying to stop another bloody, costly war, and rehashing old debates. A multi- or single-issue movement? Democratic or dictatorial? An upsurge resolved to dismantle the U.S. war machine for good, or yet another limited mobilization to be repeated with each new conflict?

One of the two largest anti-war groups today, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), pushes a single-issue call on Democrats to defund the Iraq war. UFPJ leaders think they will attract broader numbers by narrowing their focus. These liberals are terrified of “going too far” — of pointing to the system that causes war and taking it on.

In the ’80s, similar debates raged in the ComAgainst Registration and the Draft (CARD), a joint effort of the Socialist Workers Party, the pro-capitalist Libertarian Party, and liberal pacifists. One big question was whether the issue of sexism had a place on the anti-draft agenda.

As a passionate young feminist participant, I thought the answer was obvious. Sexism and war are bound up together. Women’s exclusion from the draft, for example, is used to justify discrimination in other areas of life. And women were among the movement’s best leaders. Why drive them away by labeling their fight as “divisive”? But that’s just what CARD did, and the group predictably folded.

UFPJ is repeating the same mistakes now. It deems questions like Palestine and the relationship of Pentagon spending to poverty at home as too radical or tangential to take up. But in tidying its agenda, UFPJ is dumping overboard issues that are crucial to Arabs, Muslims, people of color, women — people who suffer war’s consequences most deeply and whose involvement can make or break the movement.

Are peace forces going to connect the dots? Or stay anti-war lite, and dumb down the movement to appeal to a backward conception of the “broad masses”?

For a while, the most prominent other anti-war group, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), had a better, more inclusive program than UFPJ. In recent months, though, it seems to have been downsized.

Unfortunately, though, ANSWER never picked up the support its politics could have drawn because of its sectarian and undemocratic methods of operation, which include barring other radicals from anti-war speaking slots. Who wants to join a group where you do all the work and get no voice? Normally, one gets paid for that. It’s called a job.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a splitoff from Workers World Party (WWP), is the driving force in ANSWER. In the ’80s, WWP helped to kill the budding anti-war movement with its maneuvers in People’s Antiwar Mobilization (PAM). I remember watching PAM organizers methodically eliminate every other left tendency, including the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women, from the supposed coalition. They launched political attacks, stacked meetings, kept the podium free of speakers who didn’t toe their line. People who weren’t thrown out, dropped out.

Today, ANSWER acts the same way.

But, people, let’s take hope. No tyrant lasts forever, not even petty movement tyrants recycled from era to era. Fresh winds always blow, and they’re gusting today in places like the campaign against port militarization, the longshore workers’ call for a one-day work stoppage against the war, and GI resistance.

Make the anti-war movement your movement. Insist on participation in decision-making. Find the people who want to work with others and who welcome a diversity of voices. Start your own group!

We can learn from the past. We can put muscle in our anti-war effort by building an inclusive, democratic movement. Let’s make it a solemn fifth-anniversary pledge.