learned a lot last night

Once in a random while I go on a research binge and devour all I can find about a topic. Last night the topic was the current state of war-protesting.

As some of you probably saw in mud_puppy's journal, we were looking into going down to DC for the 3/15 anti-war protest. Brandi got strange vibes from the organizers' site, so I fished suspects about it when I posted looking for ride and crash space and Brandi fished her LJ friends.

Turns out International ANSWER is the organization that I've read about elsewhere on LJ that has other political agendas they don't allude to in their (very successful) anti-war organizing. Cos pointed me to an excellent page of links documenting and critiquing them. Brandi and I found their politics so abysmal it outweighed our desire to join them protesting the war.

So, I went searching for a war protest we could attend conscionably (eg Mass Greens?). No luck. But I found a whole bunch of good material, the best of which I will now point you to.

pax.protest.net -- an aggregator of peace-action information. That particular link will take you to the protest calendar for the Northeastern US. Perhaps the most important event can't appear on the calendar however: there's a call spreading worldwide to walkout of whatever you're doing on the day that war breaks out and head for your nearest city center to protest. Brandi and I are making signs this week and stand ready to head to the Common. 3/17 could be the day.

Q&A on Anti-War organizing -- lays out the case against war and talks very candidly about the process and challenges of cultivating a broad-based anti-war movement in America. Articulates the difference that civil unrest made in our pullout from Vietnam and what difference it can make today. Specifically discusses the problems with working with extra-bias groups like International ANSWER (Question 8.)

Finding myself exceptionally impressed with that article, I went and read lots of other stuff on zmag.org. Lots of high-quality content!

3/9 interview with Noam Chomsky -- very pragmatic and informed commentary about what comes next in the Iraq saga.

Recap of February's world-wide protests -- which were on the same scale as the Vietnam War protests. Of course, those only got that big after we'd been at war in Vietnam for YEARS.

Widespread civil disobedience in Italy -- currently significantly hampering the mobilization of US military arsenals via the rail system. A good story of loosely-organized direct action working!

The occupation of Japan 1945-1952 -- and what it can tell us about an occupation if Iraq. (Summary: all the reasons it worked in Japan are reasons it wouldn't work in Iraq.) This is an excellent history lesson on the development of expansionism in Japan, their transition to surrender, and subsequent process of forging one of the most enlightened constitutions of any Democracy, not to mention one of the most anti-militant world powers. Did you know that the US "terror-bombed" 64 major Japanese cities and mostly destroyed Tokyo, for the purpose of destroying civilian morale, *before* dropping the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Israel/Palestine: How To End The War Of 1948 -- I knew the Israeli government was hawkish, but I hadn't realized how baldly anti-Palestine they are. Judging by what I've read here the Israeli military leadership is operating with an ethnic cleansing mindset. I also didn't know that a *majority* of Israeli Jews favor unilateral withdrawal from occupied territories and disarmament, and have since 1993. This author favors a two-state solution negotiated with an unoccupied Palestine.

I've asked my closest Jewish friends for their opinions on the factualness of the content of the above article.

UN General Assembly can demand immediate ceasefire and withdrawal -- there's a procedure called "Uniting for Peace" in the charter that operates independently of the Security Council and is not subject to veto. It has been used 10 times in the past -- usually at USA's initiative. For example in 1956 Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt when it nationalized the Suez canal. Eisenhower demanded they stop in the Security Council, and Britain and France vetoed. He appealed to an emergency session of the the General Assembly under this procedure and it passed. Britain and France withdrew within the week.

Things I notice about myself writing the last post

o My biggest criterion for any opinion I read about anything has come to be this: I want the writer to expound the virtues of opposing views and the difficulty reconciling them. I find "Pro-" and "Anti-" stances to be of little use -- they present only the subset of facts and considerations consitent with themselves. I accept as a fundamental premise seeing the humanity in all concerned with a matter, all the time. This has been strong in my thoughts at least since high school.

o As I went to work this morning I was thinking about where I could find the intersection between my current interest in war-protesting an my skills at making events happen. The thing is, I'm not a leader by style, my talents are more for fostering environments that facilitate people doing what they need to. When I thought those two thoughts, I immediately came up with this: get sawhorse, put a "No War In IRAQ" sign on it with room to spare, and stick it next to the compass rose in Davis Square to accumulate more signs. That's where all the 9/11 displays naturally congregated, and there were sawhorses-with-signs there for months afterwards. I imagine that the city or some random official might take it down, so I'd have to budget for putting a new one up again a few times. Anybody have suggestions for acquiring/making sawhorses cheaply? (I don't have the carpentry capacity myself.)

o I have a futurist perspective on all that is going on in the US right now. Mass media is still a relatively new phenomenon in our culture. We're not quite the novices that we were when there was mass terror in response to Wells' "War of the Worlds" radio broadcasts. But we haven't matured in our consumption of it nearly as rapidly as power elites have matured in their use of it to make themselves more powerful. This is why an increasingly-liberal, decreasingly-religous American populace is still ending up with religous conservative-biased leadership. It's probably also why a doveish Israeli populace keeps ending up with a hawkish government.

Fortunately, in the long view I can only imagine it's a transitional phase. The next generation of media consumers are getting used to more choice, to going out and finding the news they want to know about rather than taking whatever they're feeding at the 6 o'clock news. More groups will get better at making their versions of events heard and people will become more aware of other sides to the same stories.