Just As I Thought (30 page)

One day our friend and board member Dr. Otto Nathan
¹
said, “You know, there is the beginning of a war in Southeast Asia in a country, very small, called Vietnam. We are now in there with advisers—all kinds of soldiers. Soon—who knows?—we have to pay attention.”

We
did
pay attention a couple of weeks later by holding a meeting and discussion (not called a teach-in yet). Just an educational event at a local church, well attended—and then our slow work began as the war itself slowly gathered its political and military determination to slaughter a million Vietnamese as well as 58,000 Americans.

*   *   *

Now I will tell you something about the ways we organized against this war—how roughly 3,500 events were successfully hidden from other Americans and the world; how it was shaken by the terrible accumulating speed of the Gulf War. It’s as though the war itself was one of those smart weapons, tested in vicious electoral campaigns and used in this case to eliminate the peace movement and its national and historical accomplishment, the Vietnam Syndrome. At this moment of triumph, with 300 Americans and 100,000 Iraquis dead, the President announced that he had indeed extinguished the peace movement and ended the Vietnam Syndrome. Was the main purpose of the Gulf War to bathe the American conscience in blood so as to give it a taste for blood? Well, certainly that was one of its purposes.

The peace movement itself is a valuable old fact, unstable at its broadest constituency, rock-solid at its center. It lives, as many readers know—broad or narrow—in our rich, powerful, somewhat backward, secretly poor, racist, uncomfortably large democratic nation, the United States—which is also cranky and righteous. The elections every four years are considered the final responsibility of citizenship, though usually only about 50 percent of registered voters vote. That’s why it takes an awful lot of time and nerve for people to speak up. (That’s why a short war is best.) If, on a street corner while giving out flyers, you ask someone why they don’t speak up, they are apt to say they don’t need to, we’re already a democracy. Our two political parties, smiling proudly at one another, enable us to demand lots of pluralism in other countries.
²

Now, how should I describe how this war’s peace movement happened? There were already women and men innocently joyful about the end of the Cold War (me too), believing we’d come to that moment in our lifetimes when serious expensive internal problems could be addressed. The Panama invasion was a bad sign, but if you work in any oppositional movement you will be opposed vigorously. (This surprises some people.) We didn’t expect things to be easy, but we had added hope to the personality, if not the character, of our work. The continuing antiwar workers were doing the usual antimilitarism work—opposing the arms budget (much of it hidden in costs of old wars; hidden, too, in the Energy Department budget), fighting underground testing, conducting classes in nonviolence, anti-recruitment drives in high schools. And a boycott of war toys. It seemed clearer with each administration decision that President Bush and his warrior companions had drawn their first line in the sandbox in a tough school, and they hadn’t changed too much—in action or in boy language.

Environmental organizations were doing their important work globally and in village toxic dumps. The Central American networks were dealing with decades of exported U.S. repression and war. Feminist groups—radical, socialist, academic, or traditional—were facing the backlashes that often follow success—the anti-abortion moralities of the anti-sexual right as well as the wishful pronouncements of patriarchy that feminism was dead. Blacks and other people of color also hoped that the inner-city disasters of homelessness and poverty would be reversed somehow, although racism, as the most severe inherited illness of the United States, was continuing its nasty life. Gay groups struggled with discrimination and the grief of AIDS. Middle Eastern organizations suffered indifference and faced nearly everyone else’s ignorance … at a time when their role was about to become central.

I’ve told you all this to show that radical and social justice organizations had plenty to do. But the experience of Vietnam and the work of decades began to pay off. In general, most of the groups I’ve described saw their connections to one another—were in fact living those connections. Before the coalition (two in some places—three in Seattle, I’ve been told—at first anyway) there was a lot of overlapping. For instance, many women in Central American work were feminists. They listened to the radio and watched television and heard the drone and confidence of prowar male experts—even more tedious than some of their political brothers. It’s hard to believe that fifteen years ago people opposed to nuclear power and anti-nuclear-war activists didn’t understand that they had a common agenda. It took long discussions and a couple of years of political argument and mediation to bring them together. Environmentalists had to learn that war made an ecological mess. Oh? First resistance. Then surprise. Then connection.

*   *   *

On August 29, 1990, Jeff Patterson refused to join his unit; he sat down on the airstrip in Hawaii. He had enlisted in the Marine Corps straight out of high school in California—for the same reason most youngsters do: educational opportunities, maybe some adventure. His experience during deployments to Okinawa, South Korea, and the Philippines changed his outlook entirely. He said, “I have, as an artillery controller, directed cannons on Oahu, rained burning white phosphorus and tons of high explosives on the big island, and blasted away at the island of Kahoolawe … I can bend no further.” In the next few weeks, others were to join him.

On September 12, 1990, one of the first peace meetings in New York was held at Cooper Union. There were thousands of women and men—the auditorium was full; there were loudspeakers outside. The weather was fine and the plaza around Cooper Union packed with intent listeners. I have been living in white Vermont, and as a true New Yorker I became excited to see once again all the colors of the people of my city. And the numbers! A surprise really. Oh, I thought, this war will never happen.

At the literature table I looked at various flyers and petitions, particularly the flyer and petition issued by the coalition that had put this marvelous meeting together, with its twenty to thirty speakers. I thought it was all right—kind of jargony, but not too terrible. This huge meeting was what mattered.

Still, I did say to the young woman at the lit table: “How come you guys left out the fact that Iraq did go into Kuwait? How come?” She said, “That’s not really important.” “I know what you mean,” I said, “but it happens to be true.”

I did know what she meant, and I read their explanation a couple of weeks later. It insisted that if the American people were told about the invasion of Kuwait, they would “become confused.” It would “obfuscate” the basic facts and actions. Unfortunately, of course, the American people had already been told and continued to be told day and night about this pathetic little country of trillionaires, and so omitting facts became a lie and did get in the way of organizing people unaccustomed to being held to political lines. It was a stubbornness that hurt work in New York more than elsewhere, but people are used to that, and national—I should say local—organizing all around the country against the frighteningly speedy troop and propaganda buildup continued. Reports of their success vary according to the facts and the disposition of the reporter.

Two coalitions finally had to happen in New York. One was the Coalition to Stop Intervention in the Middle East, which, with its strong cadre of the Workers’ World Party, had organized the important New York September 12 meeting; the other became the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, with its base in traditional peace and anti-intervention groups. The division was real, a matter of substance, style—and at the same time there were organizations that had simply started to do their anti–Gulf War in one coalition or another—also, it depended on how much they were doing outside the big cities. An example would be Palestinian Aid in the coalition and Palestinian Solidarity in the campaign. The division came to a pointy head over the dates of the major Washington demonstration. The coalition had decided on the nineteenth before a common meeting with the campaign. Reasons for both dates were as good as they were bad. It was good to do it on Martin Luther King’s holiday weekend, because … Yes, I thought. It was bad to plan it for that weekend, because … Yes, I thought. In any event, the vote ran extremely high against the nineteenth.

In late December 1990, the campaign proposed a joint statement supporting both demonstrations. The coalition said no. Many people went to both. The coalition went ahead, had its demonstration on the nineteenth with good representation of people of color—blacks, Hispanics, many Middle Eastern Americans. In San Francisco there were about 150,000 demonstrators. The twenty-sixth brought out about 250,000 people in Washington. The tone and the style of these demonstrations were extraordinary. There were more hand-made, non-organizational signs as well as the big ballooning sky-hiding world hoisted above us all by Greenpeace. The Bread and Puppet marched with its huge puppets, its great music and stilt dancers, and its Vermont cadre of a couple of hundred B. and P. lovers and activist banner carriers. Some of the signs—culled from my head and
The Nation:
WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS; INVEST YOUR SON OR DAUGHTER; GEORGE BUSH IS HAVING A WARGASM; A KINDER GENTLER BLOODBATH; GIVE ESTROGEN A CHANCE; READ MY APOCALYPSE
.

These impressive demonstrations happened later, after the war had started but before the rage and drive of the air war and its murderous preemption of hope taught us to say the word “blitzkrieg” and understand where our civilian and military leaders had gone to school.

*   *   *

I want to say a little more about the opposition to the inevitable war before January 15, 1991. Interesting fact: 73 percent of American women were opposed to the war in the month before it started. Men were split down the middle.

The New York Times
printed a letter on August 22, 1990, from Alex Molnar, whose son, a twenty-one-year-old Marine, had been sent to Saudi Arabia. He concluded his letter (to President Bush): “And I’m afraid that as the pressure mounts, you will wager my son’s life in a gamble to save your political future…” The letter was reprinted many times and created a movement called the Military Families Support Network … which by early March 1991 had chapters in thirty-nine states. MFSN supported the use of economic sanctions, opposed massive deployment of U.S. forces and the entire military offensive. Their emphasis on the support of troops has put off a number of columnists. I myself feel that a slogan like “Support the Troops” has to include the words “by Bringing Them Home Now.”

Actually, in almost every demonstration I’ve been a part of or come upon in another city or town, those last words
were
there. There’s a kind of critiquing of the events and actions of that hard short period that is not criticism but more like an academic exercise made by people at their desks who are not out on the streets or engaged in the decision-making processes of any noncentralized organization.

Journeys, peace missions to Iraq or journeys of inquiry, have been a part of peace-movement activity from late summer/early autumn 1990, when they began organizing, into February 1991 and the war.

In mid-October a peace delegation organized by the Fellowship of Reconciliation spent two days in Jordan and a week in Iraq. The main purpose of this mission was to bring medicine to Amman and especially to Baghdad. David McReynolds, one of the members of the twenty-person team, returned and reported on the lives of children in Baghdad. I think of one scene he describes: fathers in a small Iraqi village holding their children up to the windows of the Americans’ bus. I did not see this report in our newspapers.

The Gulf Peace Team opened a peace camp on the border of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It remained there for ten days and thousands of sorties of the air war. It was evacuated on January 26, 1991, by the Iraqis. There were eighty-six witnesses living at the camp, many from other countries as well as the United States. They saw the beginning of the environmental destruction by our smart Air Force and the great suffering of the people. I read their reports in the left and pacifist press.

Later—in early February, during the war—Ramsey Clark and a group of well-known photographers and reporters went, including an American Iraqi with family there who was able to bring him into conversation with ordinary civilians and their experiences—beginning with the bombed road from Jordan into Iraq and the destruction of civilian vehicles—food-and-grain trucks. Also the markets, water stations, schools—all the targets, I guess, of our “stupid” bombs.

*   *   *

To return to prewar actions, statements … On November 14 the National Council of Churches at a conference in Portland, Oregon, condemned U.S. policy in the Gulf: “As Christians … we must witness against weak resignation to the illogical logic of militarism and war.” The National Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote to President Bush: “In this situation, moving beyond the deployment of military forces in an effort to deter Iraq’s aggression to the undertaking of offensive military action could well violate the criteria for a “just war,” especially the principles of proportionality and last resort.”

These strong leadership statements stood, but the churches themselves fell into an awful quietness as the war began. I am reminded here that it’s important to say that the religious fellowships, the Catholic and Jewish, the Protestant peace churches as well, did
not
retreat. What happened most to churches and congregations sincerely opposed to the war to begin with is what happened to representatives and senators who swore they’d never back down. The sight of a yellow ribbon unnerved them. They fell before it, just as tyrants and Satans had once fallen before the cross placed before their terrified eyes.