Open Letter to the Anti-War Movement

What We’re Facing

After 9/11, the Bush regime launched an endless war
targeting first Afghanistan,
and then Iraq (with Iran and other
countries now in their sights), with a doctrine of “pre-emptive”
attacks.  The conduct of this war says
much about the character of this regime: systematic torture made legal, a
brutal occupation of chemical warfare, bombing of innocent people, and
blitzkrieg attacks on whole cities, all based on blatant lies.

While casting out on this “crusade on the
world,” US
society is being radically remade. 
Police state measures (like the Patriot Act or NSA spying) are made
permanent and legal, and dissent is increasingly suppressed; immigrants are
demonized, subject to round-ups and detention without due process, and even
hunted down by right-wing vigilantes; a narrow and hateful brand of Christian
fundamentalism increasingly determines government policy, with moves to ban
abortion and birth control, legal and extra-legal attacks on LGBT people; and
science itself is suppressed, with the outright denial of the very real threat
of global warming, and evolution brought under attack while the bible is
brought into public schools.

Taken as a whole, the Bush program constitutes a
fascist remaking of society and a permanent state of war.  While each of its crimes must be resisted and
stopped in their own right, there is an urgent need to confront the full scope
of this trajectory and mobilize people to reverse this whole direction.  After a year of things people thought could
never happen here ( from abortion being banned in South
Dakota, warrantless wiretapping made legal, to plans for nuking Iran ( the
recognition of this fascist remaking of society by much of the anti-war
movement is stubbornly absent.  While a
massive mobilization of opposition to the war is more important than ever right
now, going through the motions of protest as usual while the whole society is
being remade underneath our feet is to abandon our responsibility to the future
of humanity.

What Does Our Opposition Need to be Based On?

While UFPJ’s call for April 29th contains
an expanded list of demands beyond the war, the nature and danger of the
radical remaking of society going on before our eyes is starkly absent.  This is clearly illustrated by what has been
left out of this expanded list of demands. 
To take one example: despite the fact that one of the rally’s main
organizers is the National Organization for Women, the call for April 29th
fails to even mention the attacks on a woman’s right to choose.  These attacks are in fact pushing closer each
day to overturn Roe v. Wade entirely (with no intention of stopping
there).  The point here isn’t to add the
right to abortion (or other issues) to a laundry list of demands, but that we
must confront the full reality of what this regime is doing, or in the course
of focusing on ‘less controversial’ outrages, we will be swallowed up by the
coming onslaught.

Moreover, what’s disturbing about the failure to
include abortion in UFPJ’s demands for this demonstration is not only that it
is an urgent and necessary demand – which it is – but that the failure to
include this seems already to indicate a direction of tailoring and shaping
protest to the political terms being set by the Bush regime and the Democratic
Party leadership complicity and/or lack of opposition, or at least by the
dubious and dangerous proposition that the politics of mobilization and protest
should be determined by what’s deemed “elect-able politics” under the
current political order. To sacrifice the right to abortion based on some calculation
of political expediency will only take us further down the deadly path of
allowing new outrages to become the new normalcy without even an attempt to
stop them.  (In this respect, it worth
asking whether it would have been okay to stay silent about segregation because
it would alienate southern voters.)

Instead, it’s essential to base our opposition on the
understanding that, as the World Can’t Wait Call puts it, “That which you
will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn – or be forced – to
accept.”  If your aim is to really
address the situation, including if you see influencing the upcoming election
as an important part of that, you are far better off not adopting the terms of
these “official politics,” but instead basing your protest on facing
the full reality, bringing forward demands that reflect this, and getting all
of society to respond to your demands and program. Otherwise, we risk turning
demonstrations, no matter how large, not only into ritualized affairs, but
still worse into mobilizations that end up channeling people’s main energies
into an election that does not express their interests and desires. This leaves
people, in the end, demoralized, demobilized, and even pacified by having
adapted themselves to stifling political terms.

2004: What Did This Lead To?

Haven’t we seen this often enough already?  What happened in the 2004 election?  The massive opposition to Bush and the war,
which we saw manifested in powerful demonstrations in 2003, was funneled to
support for candidates like Kucinich and Dean (who claimed to be opposed to
Bush and the war), to the more “elect-able” candidate, Kerry, who
openly supported the war (and the Patriot Act, and most of Bush’s
program).  Millions were searching for a
way to stop this war, and poured their energy and resources into the
presidential elections, even traveling to different states and quitting their
jobs.  But despite the desire of the
people, the Democratic Party leadership ruled out any candidates who were even
critical of the war.  What people were
handed was a pro-war, pro-Patriot Act candidate, and an “official
politics” in which any real challenges to the Bush regime did not belong.

Not surprisingly, in a contest over who would be
“tough on terror,” Bush won (fairly or fraudulently).  This was a defeat in two ways: the Bush
regime stayed in power to further their program, and the massive opposition
(which manifested itself in hundreds of thousands protesting the Republican
National Convention just two months before the election) accepted the political
terms set by this regime and was left demoralized and demobilized.

What would be the consequences of seeing a protest
movement hemmed into these politics now ( and this regime pushing even further
down its truly extreme path?  This would
only make people accommodate to new outrages and feel powerless in the face of
a vicious onslaught.

2006: Where’s This Headed?

The stage is already being set for this to happen in
2006.  Candidates are being picked by the
Democratic leadership who go along with the war, oppose abortion, and support
new police state measures, all under the rubric of what they deem
“elect-able.”  When candidates
emerge who oppose the war and don’t hold back from a scathing critique of the
Bush administration, they are pressured to drop out of the race and lose their
funding (just look at what happened to Paul Hackett).  And as for Iraq,
what the Democratic leadership offers is not an end to the war, but “strategic redeployment” (moving many troops
to permanent military bases in the Middle East
and stepping up aerial assaults, thereby increasing civilian casualties).  And as plans for attacking Iran are being drawn up, Congress seems to be
playing a rerun ( despite widespread opposition, there are no prominent voices
among the Democrats speaking up against a war on Iran.  Russ Feingold’s resolution for censure went
nowhere because it was opposed by virtually everyone in his own Party.  And while support for impeachment increases
with each new outrage, no one in Congress is calling for it (Rep. Conyers’
attempt to get a special committee to investigate whether Bush committed
impeachable offenses, for instance, has gotten no where in Congress).