Months have gone into the preparation for the joint peace march and assorted protests in the national capital this coming weekend. It will in all likelihood be the first highly visible popular statement against our new national agenda of unbounded war--unbounded, unaccountable, unwinnable, and above reproach. A few bold people like Reps. Cynthia McKinney and Dennis Kucinich have spoken out, but the vast majority of elected officials and media figures have remained shamefully submissive to all the wild and criminal impulses of our history's most notoriously illegitimate administration.
Our nation has declared war on all people. We've utterly rejected international law and our own Constitution. And to seal our madness once and for all, we've resurrected nuclear war. All for an unelected war criminal known to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Enron.
That, in my understanding, is what A20 is about. We have redefined ourselves a warrior nation, we have leveled the world's most pathetic country and are searching restlessly for more and more countries to attack. It's time to call a halt to it. We need to take responsibility for our country and its actions. We do not want to be warlords. We do not want to be a nation in love with revenge.
Now, in the last weeks, a new crisis has arisen, and all eyes are on Palestine. The new assault on the occupied territories is horrible. I've been reading the Indymedia updates and it's hard to take. This war, if nothing else, is already the subject of a national furor, and with luck it will swell our numbers in Washington.
But our indignation over the crimes against the Palestinians must not lead us to forget the frenzy of war crimes we've seen in the last six months. Our own army has been on a rampage against innocents, too. To narrow what was to be a March for Peace, a call to end the terrorist "war on terrorism," down to a protest against Israeli atrocities and nothing else--that would be a sad mistake. I see the beginnings of it around; a lot of references to going to DC in solidarity with Palestine. And in some cases, such as this press release from International A.N.S.W.E.R., the entire march is explicitly characterized as a "mass demonstration for Palestine" and nothing else. This has the dangerous potential of subverting a huge, long-planned demonstration--for the benefit of an issue that (serious though it be) is only a facet of a the vast story of our new, warlike world. It misses the point.
One of the crucial purposes--and one of the thrilling potentials--of this protest is to be visible. Really visible, impossible for the mainstream press to ignore. All our numbers, all our voices, all our assembled dignity and resolve--in the press, and thereby in the eyes of most of our sleeping citizens, all this will buy us about enough time to make one short, simple statement. That's all the people will really remember.
Seattle is a legend for us, but the message most of America remembers now is "broken window." Now, we know the press will try to demean us that way, and we have to speak louder to get our message through. But if in our loudest moment, after all this, the message we transmit is "free Palestine," then we forget the rest of the world, and the rest of our barbaric crusade. We'll have missed the point of the march.
So yes, march for Palestine. It affects us all, and as usual, there is blood on our hands as well as those of Israel. But don't march only for Palestine. March for peace everywhere. March to end our liars' war.
Remember that Bush has promised us a war without end! We need a new peace movement, and our peace must be broader, and deeper, and more lasting than his war. We need a peace without end. We need to tell our government, and our neighbors, to lay down our mad war. All of it.
4/17/2002