The Peace Movement:
Taking Stock
With funding for the Iraq war again before Congress and the Presidential campaign shifting to the main event, many people in the peace movement are trying to take stock of what we’ve accomplished in the last seven years. We’ve had successes — and setbacks. The context has changed. It seems a time to think about what we've learned and what we need to do to build a peace movement for the long haul.
What Is To be Done? Assessing The Antiwar Movement
Matthew Smucker spoke with nearly 100 grass-roots organizers and activists from across the country for the War Resisters League and summarized their thoughtful assessments of the movement. A sample: “Widespread opinion against the war does not equal a large-scale identification with a peace or antiwar movement. Some organizers even disputed the use of the term antiwar ‘movement,’ questioning whether we have a solid enough base of people taking collective action to even constitute a movement.”
Read more of this thoughtful, unsparing assessment here.
A Stalled U.S. Peace Movement?
Antiwar Activity Since 2001
Jan Adams from the WarTimes/Tiempo de Guerras staff responded to an invitation to talk about the peace movement at the Historians Against the War conference in Atlanta in April by laying out an opinionated chronology of peace activity. Originally published on her blog “Happening Here” in five parts, she asks whether we have “a stalled peace movement?” On the one hand we’ve won; a majority in the U.S. wants the Iraq war over. Yet at the same time, the powers-that-be seemed determined to carry the country into yet more wars and it is not clear whether any force other than material collapse can stop them. Adams’s essay begins here.
Part One: Trying to find the ground under our feet: 2001-2002
The attacks of 9/11 left the small contingent of progressive individuals and organizations in this country just as horrified and nearly as confused as everyone else. I remember watching the towers fall and thinking “some guys somewhere are seeing their ‘made for TV’ movie succeed beyond their wildest dreams — and everything I care about is in deep shit.” I imagine most “Historians against the war” felt similarly.
At first, the chief venue in which we tried to comprehend the new terrain and new tasks ahead of us was via a series of emailed “letters” that buzzed around the internet. Revenge was the order of the day in the public at large; anything but the most bellicose posture made the speaker suspect. These internet communications have mostly disappeared into the ether. I want to make sure that we capture some of the expressions from those times here.
Bill Quigley of Loyola Law School sent around “Ten Principles for Social Justice Organizing in A Time of Crisis.” These were good tips — I think they are still sound and worth reading. He concluded:
If our only response to the events of September 11 is to do what we did before that, but only harder, I think we will waste a lot of energy. We have to thoughtfully and humbly reconsider our strategies and develop some new ones. Otherwise we will just remain stuck.
This seems to me prescient.
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