Anti-War Activists Map Their Strategy (FR mention)

They have marched and chanted, hoping to use persuasion to prevent war. If that fails, though, activists are readying a more aggressive strategy of sit-ins and social disruptions, meant to restore peace in Iraq.

Protest sit-ins, especially at federal buildings, defense recruiting offices and military bases, have been mapped out for dozens of cities in the first day or two of any war, anti-war organizers say. Some also foresee widespread walkouts at schools and workplaces. A smaller number talk of blocking roads and bridges.

"Once war happens, there will be civil disobedience. It's bringing to a higher level what people have been doing," said coordinator Bal Pinguel at the American Friends Service Committee, an arm of the pacifist Quaker church.

The peace movement that has taken shape in the United States and around the world uses organizing technology - including the Internet and e-mail - that was not available the last time such large-scale domestic anti-war activism took place, in the Vietnam War era.

On Saturday, demonstrators gathered by the hundreds in cities across the nation, an increasingly common sight as the conflict looms closer. In Washington, police and organizers estimated between 4,000 and 10,000 demonstrators turned out in conjunction with International Women's Day; by late afternoon, 25 people were arrested on charges of crossing a police line in front of the White House.

The event was organized by the group CodePink, whose name protests the government's terror alert system. "The White House is definitely afraid of women in pink and the power of love," said CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans.

Once spearheaded largely by leftist students, hippies and draft-card burners, the peace movement is now taking on more support from the mainstream: labor unions, war veterans, middle-aged professionals, and teenagers born years after the last draft. Almost 100,000 backers have donated to Peace Action, one of the biggest anti-war groups, over the past six months, coordinators say.

Still, despite its broader reach, it is unclear if the highly decentralized peace movement can marshal protests that can disrupt the war effort or win public sympathy. Some peace activists themselves harbor doubts that they can prevent a war against Iraq.

"There's a good chance we won't be able to stop it," said Kate Pearson, a Chicago organizer at Not in Our Name.

In a counter effort, rallies to support President Bush and U.S. troops in a possible war also are being held across the country, and anger at the anti-war movement sometimes is apparent. Echoing a slogan from the 1960s, one placard at an Orlando, Fla., rally read: "America - Love It or Leave It."

Peace activists have mounted mass rallies in major cities reminiscent of the Vietnam era, but they have also held smaller community vigils and discussion groups, and traditional contact-your-congressmen drives.

In January and again in February, peace groups coordinated demonstrations in cities around the world. Hundreds of thousands of protesters unfurled signs and rallied in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, London, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, Cairo and other cities.

On Wednesday, thousands of students around the United States walked out of classes. Some Americans have taken quiet, personal actions too.

Anti-war members of the clergy have slipped into Iraq - without U.S. government permission mandated by American sanctions law - or visited European countries to lobby and pray with the local religious communities. Anti-war American doctors have gone to Iraq to evaluate the dangers that war poses for civilians there.

Picking up on domestic anxieties, some anti-war activists have argued that conflict might foster more terrorism that endangers American civilians on their own turf. "It's almost certainly going to guarantee not only more violence in the Middle East, but will almost guarantee another calamitous attack on U.S. soil," said Scott Lynch, a spokesman for Peace Action.

The White House has argued that disarming Iraq is part of its war on terrorism and will disrupt that government's links with terrorist groups.

The peace movement has also embraced a particularly influential contingent of supporters: veterans of the war with Iraq 12 years ago.

"Sept. 11 was nothing compared to the destruction that we visited on Iraq 12 years ago and even more so for what will probably happen this time," said Charles Sheehan-Miles, a decorated tank crewman in the 1991 Persian Gulf War who now wants peace.

President Bush has acknowledged the swelling protests, though they have not changed his mind.

After February's protests, he said he would not decide policy "based upon a focus group." At a White House news conference Thursday, he addressed protesters directly. "I recognize there are people who don't like war. I don't like war," Bush said. But he said Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein must be deposed to disarm Iraq and keep the United States safe, and that might only be accomplished with force.

For his part, Doug Dixon, an activist who has joined counter-demonstrations to back the drive toward war, shrugs off the peace movement as "pretty irrelevant." Dixon, a Houston-based member of the conservative grass-roots group Free Republic, believes the anti-war movement is encouraging Saddam Hussein.

Outside of Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M., on Saturday, about 250 people rallied in support of American troops and the Bush administration, while 50 anti-war protesters gathered across the street, police Capt. Sonny Leeper said.

"We're starting to see more 'support the flag' people at these things," Leeper said. "They're starting to gain in numbers. ... It seems like they're getting more organized."

The AFSC was formed in 1917 by a group of 14 socialist Quakers to aid draft resisters. AFSC has been penetrated and used by Communists since the early 1920s when it sent Jessica Smith, who later married Soviet spies Harold Ware and John Abt(since the 1950s CPUSA general counsel and a member of the CPUSA Political Committee) to the Soviet Union to determine famine relief needs in Russia exacerbated by civil war and the collectivization of farmland.

Since the 1960s, the AFSC has supported revolutionary terrorist groups such as the Vietcong, Palestine Liberation Organization(PLO), and the Central American Castroite groups. The theory behind AFSC's support of terrorist "national liberation movements" was outlined by Jim Bristol in a pamphlet published by AFSC in 1972 and continuously reprinted entitled "Non-violence: Not First for Export." Because AFSC's leadership role in organizing not only support for terrorist revolutionary groups, but in the past campaign to disarm America initiated through the USSR's covert action apparatus for political warfare, a closer look at AFSC's justification of violence is appropriate.

In the AFSC pamphlet, Bristol presents the totalitarian revolutionary goal in the most glowing terms as a utopia:

"a human society where the worth of the individual will be recognized and each person treated with respect....Land reform measures will be enacted....Education will be provided for every member of the society;....There will be employment for all. Discrimination because of race, colour or creed will end. Universal medical care will be provided." [If this all sounds strangely familiar, don't feel alone, these are all planks from the Communist Manifesto].

AFSC's pamphlet asserts that the United States and other Free World countries are guilty of a bizarre "terrorism" which it calls the "violence of the status quo" and irrationally defines this in the broadest possible terms not only as every possible social ill, but also personal or social discomfort. In the words of the pamphlet, this "violence of the status quo" is:

"the agony of millions who in varying degrees suffer hunger, poverty, ill-health, lack of education, non-acceptance by their fellow men. It is compounded of slights and insults, of rampant injustice, of exploitation, of police brutality, of a thousand indignities from dawn to dusk and through the night."

AFSC's pamphlet excuses terrorism in the following terms:

"terrorism...repeatedly...is used to signify violent action on the part of oppressed peoples in Asia, Africa, Latin America or within the black ghettos of America, as they take up the weapons of violence in a desperate effort to wrest for themselves the freedom and justice denied them by the systems that presently control their lives. "before we deplore terrorism, it is essential for us to recognize whose ‘terrorism’ came first....It is easy to recognize the violence of the revolutionary when he strikes out against the inequities and cruelties of the established order. What millions of middle-class and other non-poor fail to realize is that they are themselves accomplices each day in meeting[sic] out inhuman, all-pervading violence upon their fellows."

After this justification of the concept of class warfare, which makes "permissible" terrorist attacks on civilians since they are part of the "oppressive class," the AFSC pamphlet says that U.S. activists should not concern themselves with what sort of violent tactics revolutionaries utilize to achieve their ends. Instead, they should work to disarm the United States and for economic warfare against the U.S.’s "oppressive" allies. In its words:

"Instead of trying to devise non-violent strategy and tactics for revolutionaries in other lands, we will bend every effort to defuse militarism in our own land and to secure the withdrawal of American economic investment in oppressive regimes in other parts of the world."

The AFSC pamphlet concludes with a call for revolution in the United States, saying:

"Revolution then is needed first and foremost in the United States, thoroughgoing revolution, not a mild palliative."

The director of the AFSC’s Disarmament Program resurrected in the mid-1970s as a complement to the international disarmament campaign was Terry Provance, a World Peace Council(Soviet-controlled) activist and founding member of the U.S. Peace Council. Accompanied by two foreign Communist WPC activists, Nico Schouten, leader of the Netherlands "Ban the Neutron Bomb" organization, and East German Peace Council head Walter Rumpel, Provance addressed a Mobilization for Survival rally at the U.S. Capitol in October, 1979.

AFSC operates a lobbying arm, the Friends Committee on National Legislation(FCNL). Its focus and energies play a key role in developing strategy for pressure on Congress against the U.S. defense budget, and particularly against development or deployment of new weapons systems.

Another AFSC project, the National Action/Research on the Military/Intelligence Complex(NARMIC), served as the AFSC’s "intelligence-gathering arm." NARMIC works closely with the Institute for Policy Studies(IPS), the North American Congress on Latin America(NACLA), a pro-Cuba research group, and other anti-defense and armament research organizations.

Biographical Sketches of the Left

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.