By Stanley Rogouski, 6/4/06
I am a street photographer and an amateur
photojournalist. For the past 3.5 years I have been photographing the public
square, architecture, street scenes, people in crowds, but above all the
anti-war movement. From the large protests in the fall of 2002 and spring of
2003 to the massive immigration protests in 2006, I have witnessed the protest
movement against the war in Iraq grow smaller and less militant. Over the time
period of time, the progress of the war in Iraq has unfolded in a way to prove
that it was the militant anti-war protesters, not the pompous talking heads in
the media who were right all along.
When I’m not out in the streets taking photographs, I
am probably at home in front of my computer reading about politics on the web.
It is very easy to see where all of the militant energy of 2002 and 2003 has
gone, right into the Democratic party. The Daily Kos, Atrios, Firedoglake,
Talking Points Memo, there is a large, very sophisticated network of online
magazines and weblogs (all of which raise large amounts of money) set up by
young, mostly liberal Democratic Party loyalists. The dotcom generation has
married the anti-war movement and produced a troubled child with serious
identity problems. One moment he’s claiming that Godwin’s law has been
suspended for the duration of George Bush’s presidency. The next, probably
after watching ‘The West Wing’, he’s pining after some imaginary middle of the
road Republican he can go out and have a beer with.
Let’s take one example. I realize, of course, that on
the internet it’s possible to find a quote to justify almost any position but
bear with me until I put it into a larger context. This one is very typical. In
2002, the exposure of the massacre at Haditha (where US Marines seem to have
done a very credible impression of the Waffen SS) would have led to vigils,
rallies, civil disobedience, and just perhaps, when it became clear how
genuinely evil the American occupation of Iraq is, mass resistence on the level
of the protests that followed the massacre at Kent State. In 2006, it leads to
a post on the Daily Kos.
“What I can’t stand is my complicity in these
deaths. I have gone to the occasional
rally, wrote one letter to the editor two years after the fact. I am living proof, in some ways, of Scott
Ritter’s assertion that we really don’t care about people in Iraq, or anywhere
else, for that matter. We care about
our creature comforts, about maintaining the most extravagant society ever seen
in amazing abundance. I felt like
setting my house on fire and standing out in the lawn telling people about Eman
and her family as the flames billow up.
It is really, really hard to go from grieving over this to believing
that electing Democrats is the first step to fixing it. Somebody help me believe that it is.’
But this man, who is understandably anguished about
the culture of militarism and racism that has infested American culture since
September 11th, doesn’t burn his house down. He doesn’t even go to
one of those useless protests or vigils. Instead, he puts his faith in a career
Marine officer, the conservative Catholic, anti-abortion congressman John
Murtha. ‘The fact that Murtha is speaking straight from the gut gives me some
hope that America will realize that there is a difference,’ he said. ‘Democrats
really do care about people.’
I don’t want to bash John Murtha. Even though he
originally voted for the war, he still at least partly redeemed himself by
confirming the details about the Haditha massacre to prevent its cover up. And
yet his opposition to the war in Iraq is based more on his desire to preserve
the Marine Corps as an institution in the fact of a brutal occupation that’s
eroding its sense of discipline and esprit de corps, not on the idea that occupying
a small third world country in order to steal its resources is wrong. This is a long way from Notinourname or the
massive anti-war protests of February 15th, 2003 and it’s 100
million miles away from the great anti-war protests that helped end the Vietnam
war.
I know some people won’t have a problem with this.
They believe that conservative voices criticizing the war in Iraq are more
likely to have an effect than Cindy Sheehan or Noam Chomsky. But Murtha’s
anti-abortion, mostly conservative outlook make him a strange man indeed to
play the role of ‘savior from the Democratic party’ to the left liberal
grassroots of the Democratic party. By looking towards conservative, Democratic
party establishment leaders to make their case, radicals voluntarily disarm
themselves of the weapons they need to pressure these very Democrats to do the
right thing in the face of the inevitable onslaught from the extreme right. And
I would argue that it’s also the reason why, even in the face of the clear evil
of the American occupation of Iraq, there is no significant protest movement.
This flies against the conventional wisdom, which
states that the reason for the lack of a mass protest movement is that there is
no draft. During the war in Vietnam the majority of the American had a real
stake in seeing it end, but the American casualties in Iraq, as bad as they
are, are still limited to a volunteer army and to highly paid mercenaries and
civilian contractors. There’s certainly some truth to it. A draft would almost
surely be met with protests (which would in turn be met with efficient,
overwhelming police repression) but I think it’s a misleading, and an
intentionally misleading explanation. First of all, it doesn’t take into
account the fact that, at least in its initial stages, the protest movement
against the Vietnam war was led by elite college students who were in no danger
of ever having to serve in the military. Second, there was no draft on February
15th 2003, when the entire world came out to protest the possibility
of an invasion. Why the change?
The reduction in size and militancy of the protest
movement as well as the deafening silence in the faith of the Haditha massacre
do not have as their main reason the lack of a draft, the apathy or even racism
of the American people, or simple fatigue. While all of these causes are part
of the explanation why there is no mass movement against the continuing
occupation, they do not take into account the most obvious, the criminalization
of the public square, the demonization of large groups of the American people
for opposing the war, and the lack of support for and outright hostility to the
anti-war movement in the Democratic Party and in the mainstream media. From the
Fall of 2002 onwards, I have witnessed antiwar protests harassed by the police,
penned into steel cages. I’ve seen middle-aged women treated like criminals by
the police who should have been protecting them. I’ve seen 2000 American
citizens held without charge in the most liberal, cosmopolitan city in the United
States. I’ve seen permits denied, police pens designed to limit their size,
preemptive harassment against leading anti-war activists. Antiwar activists
have been visited by the FBI, placed into terrorist databases, relentlessly
demonized I the media, labeled ‘anti-semites’, ‘moonbats’, ‘traitors’, told to
leave the country and told that they were ‘giving aid and comfort to the
enemy’. In short, a large part of the reason why there is no mass anti-war
movement in the United States today is that, unlike those of us on the left,
the American government, the police, and the media elites have learned from the
Vietnam War and the 1960s. They are no longer taken by surprise by protest or
by civil disobedience. They know how to mock, obscure, and marginalize us. They
are as skilled at repression as we are unskilled at breaking through it.
In other words, people are afraid, and they are
afraid, not because they are being attacked by the extreme right, but because
they are being attacked by the extreme right with the complicity of the
Democratic Party and the ‘respectable’ liberal, social democratic
establishment. While an attack by an out and out fascist like Rush Limbaugh or
Michelle Malkin would be considered a badge of honor if we knew that there were
people in power willing to fight for us and honor us for participating in the
democratic process, it’s quite another thing when those ‘liberals’ you look to
for leadership not only remain silent in the fact of your demonization but
actively participate in it. So let’s look at the history of attacks on the anti
Iraq war, not by the right, but by the ‘moderate’ left.
Since the joint congressional resolution HJ RES. 114
on October 10th of 2002, where the Democrats joined with the
Republicans to give Bush the authorization to invade Iraq and when Richard
Gephardt joined Bush in the Rose Garden to state that ‘we stand together’ there
have been 3 large upsurges in the protest movement against Bush and the war in
Iraq. The first took began on October 6th in Central Park and
culminated in the historic worldwide protests on February 15th,
2003. The second centered on the Republican National Convention in New York
City, when activists came from all over the United States to protest Bush’s
coronation and were met with brutal, pre-emptive police repression. And the
third grew up around Cindy Sheehan’s vigil in Crawford Texas and crested on
September 24th in the huge International Answer protest in
Washington.
At each point when the protest movement against the
war in Iraq was about to gain traction, to have an effect, it was attacked by
the Democrats and the ‘moderate’ left. Each time it found itself demoralized
and each time the attack benefited the elites of the Democratic Party at the
expense of its grassroots.
Let’s look at the first. In March of 2002, Not in Our
Name was founded by a diverse coalition of activists and intellectuals. Their
statement was eventually picked up by the Guardian and the group found itself
with the support of people all over the world, including even ‘moderate’
anti-war leaders like Leslie Cagan and members of the congressional black
caucus like Barbara Lee. In October of 2002, just before the tragic vote to
support the war, Notinourname staged a large rally in Central Park, probably
the first time in American history there was a mass protest movement against a
war before it even began. These protests got larger and more militant until
they culminated in February 15th, when so many people took to the
streets that the protest movement was labeled ‘the second superpower’.
With the relentless drumbeat for war coming out of
the Republican Party and from the right, it would have seemed logical for the
Democrats and the moderate left to look to the protest movement for a source of
support. But they did the opposite. Michelle Goldberg, the ‘liberal’ journalist
for Salon.com wrote a brutal attack piece on the anti-war protest movement
called ‘Peace Kooks’, which demonized, lied, manipulated language, made serious
charges without offering proof and which was, of course, eventually republished
by David Horowitz in FrontPage Magazine.
If Goldberg thought that by attacking the anti-war
movement she was going to help the Democrats, she was wrong. They lost control
of Congress that November.
In February, as people took to the streets all over
the world, there was one city where the protest movement was met by the
hostility of the local government, liberal Democratic, cosmopolitan New York
City. Not only were the 200,000 protesters denied a permit to hold a march past
the United Nations, they were met with thousands of police barricades, horses,
a terror alert later acknowledged by Tom Ridge to have been raised for
political reasons, and harassed and bullied until they decided the brutal cold
was too much and drifted away. While New York City has a Republican Mayor, it’s
also an overwhelmingly Democratic town and the city council did little to
counter Mike Bloomberg’s decision to act as Bush’s enforcer.
The major beneficiary of the attack and breakup of
the initial stage of the anti-Iraq-war protest movement was the Democratic
Party. Denied the opportunity to show their opposition to the war through
protest and direct action, the same people who took to the streets in 2003
flooded into the Dean campaign and into the Democratic primaries. Instead of
marching in the streets, people went to meetups. Instead of doing civil
disobedience they clicked through advertisements on the Daily Kos and gave
money to Dean or Kucinich. Dean, of course, turned out to have been a paper
tiger, the recipient of a massive amount of media hype designed to build him up
as the respectable alternative to International Answer and Notinourname. He
collapsed even before the end of the first primary when the media and
Democratic elites decided that he had done his job but that it was now time for
him to step aside in favor of the pro-war, anti-gay stuffed shirt ‘war hero’
John Kerry.
And so the same people who had been pulled into the
Democratic Party swallowed their pride and decided to support Kerry, who, in
spite of his own uninspiring personal characteristics, received an
unprecedented amount of grassroots support and fund raising. In response to the
upsurge in support for gay marriage all through 2004, Kerry responded by
declaring himself an alter boy and gay baiting Dick Cheney’s daughter during
the presidential debates. In response to the support of the anti-war followers
of Howard Dean, he ran as a ‘war hero’, saluted us at the Democratic
convention, rolled over and played dead in the face of the swiftboat attacks,
and conceded the election even before the issue of the fraudulent voting in
Ohio was over. Needless to say, he failed to spend all the money the massive
grassroots upsurge had funneled into his campaign. Worst of all, he squandered
the massive outpouring of anti-Bush protesters who came to New York City during
the Republican National Convention.
What more did the Democratic Party need? They had a
massive outpouring of people determined to protest their opponents and yet they
never acknowledged them. Those 500,000 people who came to New York over Labor
Day weekend in 2004 would have marched on Swift Boat headquarters and ripped it
to the ground, stone by stone, board by board, and yet Kerry never mentioned
them. What’s more, liberal columnists like Michelle Goldberg and Eric Alterman
pleaded with the protesters not to march. Leslie Cagan and the respectable
peace bureaucrats at United for Peace and Justice responded to Mike Bloomberg’s
denial of a permit to hold a rally in Central Park with all the lethargy of
John Kerry responding to people who attacked his military record and personal
integrity. Ominous predictions by the Daily News and other local press about
the ‘anarchists’ who were coming to tear up the city failed to materialize. But
this didn’t stop Ray Kelly, who sent the NYPD out into the streets to round up
close to 2000 American citizens, who were held without charge for days in an abandoned
pier along the Hudson.
Needless to say, Kerry lost and the war went on.
The final upsurge against the war in Iraq began in
the summer of 2005 with Cindy Sheehan’s vigil against George Bush at Crawford.
While Sheehan did have largely leftist views on the war in Iraq, she was no red
flag waiving communist. What’s more, she and most of the protesters around here
had children or had lost children in Iraq, and had successfully channeled the
anti-war movement into a more conservative form of expression. The issue now
wasn’t internationalism or American imperialism or solidarity with the Iraqi
people but was almost exclusively centered on American casualties. As opposed
to the attacks on the anti-war movement in 2003 and 2004, the moderate left and
liberals in the media leapt to Sheehan’s defense in the face of the inevitable
‘swiftboating’ she got from the extreme right. Frank Rich, Bob Herbert, Maureen
Dowd, most of the big liberal democratic bloggers, the entire liberal
establishment came roaring out of their kennels like ferocious attack dogs
bearing their fangs and tugging against their chains. The attacks on Sheehan
from the right were beaten back and a year after the demoralizing reelection of
George Bush, the anti-war movement once again was able to bring enough people
to Washington to surround the White House, flood the streets near the
Washington monument, and spill out onto the surrounding blocks.
But if the liberal elite in the media was willing to
defend Cindy Sheehan against the extreme right, no democratic politician was
willing to be seen in public with her. The democrats evacuated Washington the
weekend of September 24th with efficiency Ray Nagin could have used
during hurricane Katrina. In spite of honorable exceptions like Cynthia
McKinney and Maxine Waters, no democratic politician, not even those who were
willing to declare their opposition to the war in Iraq were willing to speak.
And when International Answer, in their usual style, took over the speakers
platform for hours, preventing the march from proceeding on time with their
endless laundry list of speakers, those liberals who were appalled at the
attacks on Cindy Sheehan but who were unwilling to come out directly against
the war found their opening and they pounced. Jon Stewart mocked the rally on
The Daily Show. Liberal Democratic bloggers either ignored it altogether or
attacked it head on. There was no place for radicals on stage, they howled in
outrage as they wrote long articles micromanaging the very anti-war protest
they had chosen not to participate in. How can you ask Democratic politicians
to be seen onstage with extremists from International Answer they howled in
outrage (an outrage, of course, which was nowhere in evidence when Howard Dean
appeared on the 700 Club and declared that marriage should be between a man and
a woman)?
The third upsurge against the war in Iraq was over
and the war in Iraq went on.
The result of this relentless demonization of the
anti-war movement, the criminalization of the public square and the endless
attempts by the Democrats to appease that mythical swing voter in the Midwest
is a party controlled, not by their most skillful and aggressive members like
Russ Feingold or Murtha but by an elite of pollsters, consultants, timid
professionals whose main interest lies not in acting like an opposition party
or in governing but in keeping their jobs. It’s led to a civic culture so
degraded that the American people can sit by as their civil liberties are
stripped away and their country is dishonored by the spectacle of innocent
civilians being massacred in Iraq with no response in the streets of New York
or Washington. It’s led to the amazing spectacle of a president getting
everything he wants, even as his poll numbers continue to decline. And afraid
of genuine mass protest and resistance we sit in front of our computers in fear
and loneliness pouring out our rage into the faux public square of the Internet
waiting for the next savior from the Democratic party. .