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By Urs Cipolat and Peter Crail
"Peace is the only battle worth waging."
The peace demonstrations that took place across the United States over the past year have often been compared to the anti-war protests of the 1960s and 1970s. News sources of all types, local, national, and international, have commented on the similarities between then and now. In March of this year, for instance, the Associated Press reported that "Peace activists have mounted mass rallies in major cities reminiscent of the Vietnam era ... ." The report further referred to a broad range of other ongoing peace activities, including community vigils, discussion groups, and traditional contact-your-congressmen drives.
This article addresses two questions. First, whether we are indeed witnessing the reawakening of the American peace movement; and second, whether the "new" peace movement is likely to become a social force as powerful as the anti-Vietnam/anti-establishment movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
While the authors of this article agree that the U.S. peace movement indeed is experiencing a renaissance, they caution that the significance of the revival should not be assessed in isolation, but rather in the broader context of a number of recent policy changes. These changes encompass, most notably, the current U.S. administration's unilateral and nationalistic approach to the use of force in international affairs.
The authors argue that it is precisely this resurgence of U.S. war activism, broadly supported by American conservatives (the political right), that has triggered a noticeable revival of U.S. peace activism among American liberals (the political left). Contending that the two movements are closely interrelated and - depending on the amount of support they each enjoy or lack - mutually reinforcing or annihilating, the authors reach the paradoxical conclusion that the "new" American peace movement can only gain in strength so long as the U.S. war machinery is growing stronger. The very moment that machinery loses momentum, the new U.S. peace movement will follow.
The thoughts of two very different thinkers, Issac Newton and Friedrich Nietzsche, may be used to help explain the inevitable interdependence between U.S. militarism and the U.S. peace movement.
In 1687, Isaac Newton published Book I of his famous Principia, which contained what later became known as Newton's three laws of motion. The third law of motion stated that to every action, there is always an opposed and equal reaction. Motion, Newton argued, is the effect of force, and though he could not explain the origin of force, he concluded that still many of its effects could be measured, notably that "action equals reaction."
Roughly two hundred years later, Friedrich Nietzsche tried to develop a theory that would, as Newton's laws of motion did for the world of things, explain the occurrence of and interrelationship between forces in the world of thought.
His philosophical reflections led Nietzsche to conclude that any distinction between visible and non-visible (or, as he called it, material and immaterial) world was artificial and wrong; that there was in fact only one world; and that in that one world, "all is force." This assumption, however, did not lead him to conclude that Newton's laws of motion would therefore also apply to the realm of the non-visible or immaterial. On the contrary, Nietzsche ended up refuting Newtonian mechanics, branding it insufficient to provide a serious explanation for the course of world events. "Mechanism," he writes in his notebook, "must count for us as an imperfect and only provisional hypothesis."
According to Nietzsche, the basic problem with Newtonian mechanics is not the assumption that forces always come in pairs, but rather the belief that they always have a beginning and an end. The belief in a final state, Nietzsche suspects, emerges from Christian theology rather than scientific scrutiny. "The world," Nietzsche affirms again in his notebooks, contains "an enormity of force, without beginning, without end ... ." This endless force, he continues, consists of "a determinate quantity of force," which in turn contains "a sea of forces storming and flooding within itself, eternally changing itself ..., driving out of the simplest into the most manifold ..., and then again returning home from the fullest to the simple, out of the play of contradictions back to the pleasure of harmony... . "
Whether Nietzsche's or Newton's explanation of the interrelation of forces is more accurate can be left open here. May others struggle with this question. The purpose of the above theoretical excursus was simply to identify elements within the vast realm of theoretical thought that could help us understand whether and why the American peace movement is currently on the raise, and how long this trend will last. And as the following reflections will illustrate, both Newtonian mechanics and Nietzschean philosophy indeed provide us with useful analytical tools to explain the renaissance of U.S. peace activism and that fact that it is intimately related to the ongoing U.S. war activism.
"If you want to know whether there's going to be another social revolution in America, look at Berkeley first," says Robert Pickus, President of the World Without War Council (www.wwwc.org). With more than five decades of peace activism in his bones, the 79 year old Pickus is an actual fossil of the American peace movement. It was in 1969 that he founded his organization in Berkeley, to protest against the Vietnam War. "But we were different from all other peace organizations," Pickus declares proudly. "We were the first group to call for an end to all political violence as a means of international conflict resolution. Hence our name, World Without War Council."
New peace organizations such as the Council, which shot up like mushrooms in the second half of the 1960s and quickly spread from America's West to its East, contributed substantially to the effectiveness of the legendary anti-Vietnam war movement. However, the foundation for the mass demonstrations and anti-establishment protests that went on well into the 1970s was prepared by another, earlier social movement that had its origins equally in Berkeley: the Free Speech movement.
When student activists in 1964 returned to the renowned University of California at Berkeley after a summer of protests against racial discrimination in the American South, the University administration prohibited them to pursue their political activities on campus grounds. A confrontation ensued, which culminated in the birth of the Free Speech movement, unprecedented student protests, and mass arrests of hundreds of students - the largest such arrests in U.S. history up to that time.
"It all really started in Berkeley," Pickus says, with a broad smile and gleaming eyes. Within a few months only, the Berkeley Free Speech movement evolved into a broad-based protest wave capturing America's, if not the world's, imagination. Thousands of people took to the streets, demonstrating against a rapidly increasing range of policy issues, such as the Vietnam war, U.S. imperialism, racial and gender discrimination, political violence and oppression in general. The anti-government, anti-establishment, and anti-war rallies often started spontaneously on the UC Berkeley campus, from where the horde of dissatisfied walked down Telegraph Avenue towards Oakland, where some of the participants were looking for trouble. Riots with the police were not unusual.
What followed is known as one of the most explosive periods in modern history: the wild sixties. Other revolutionary social forces such as the Hippies, the Black Panthers, and later the gays and lesbians appeared on the political scene and began organizing their constituents. Via Oakland, San Francisco, and other major U.S. cities, the spark that was ignited by a small group of Berkeley students in 1964 thus became a rampant wildfire, going around the world.
Still today, walking on Telegraph Avenue reminds the visitor of Berkeley's glorious-notorious past. The street remains a gathering place for anarchists and alternatives. Colorful tie-dye T-shirts and other hippie artifacts are sold by street vendors, and the employees of Blondies', a popular pizza place, proudly display their retro motto across their chest: Make pizza, not war!
In his famous 1971 song, John Lennon dreams of humanity "...living life in peace." Certainly, universal peace is most desirable, especially from the perspective of today's war-torn world. There can be little doubt that most humans would be better off in a peaceful environment. One group of people, however, would be among the losers: the peace activists themselves. If Lennon's utopia were achieved one day, the peace movement organizers would all be out of work.
That an all too peaceful world threatens the very existence of the peace movement became gradually apparent in the decades following the Berkeley revolution. At first, peace groups in America lost power and influence due to the emergence of competing social causes that caught the attention of the left, on the one hand, and due to America's growing general disillusionment with and disinterest in politics, on the other. It was the end of the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., however, that gave the American peace movement the coup de grâce.
According to a study undertaken at East Carolina University, a good third of the U.S. peace organizations that operated in 1988 had ceased to be active by 1992. Many of the remaining peace groups were struggling. The World Without War Council, for instance, went from five nationwide offices, a fulltime staff of 10 and countless volunteers in 1975 down to two offices, two fulltime staff, and only occasional volunteers in 1995. "Our funding source, which consisted largely of private donations, was drying out," observes Pickus. "Now that our country was pulling back from most war theaters, American peace lovers became more reluctant to invest in peace groups. Their prime goal always was - and continues to be - to stop the U.S. from doing wrong. Stopping a civil war somewhere in Africa is a different story."
Two main reasons contributed to the erosion of U.S. peace groups after the fall of the Berlin Wall. First, there were fewer and fewer armed conflicts with U.S. involvement. Whenever such conflicts took place, as was the case in 1991 with the U.S. led U.N. intervention against Iraq, in 1993 with the U.S. supported U.N. intervention in Somalia, in 1994 with the U.N. authorized U.S. intervention in Haiti, or throughout the mid- and late 1990s with the U.S. led NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia, the underlying cause was peace itself.
The shift in the 1990s of American wars being fought multilaterally and in the name of peace presented many peace activists with a paralyzing dilemma. As a result, the peace movement suffered further fragmentation into various schools of thought, reaching from those categorically rejecting any act of violence to those distinguishing between just and unjust wars. Robert Pickus, the former die-hard pacifist and Vietnam War conscientious objector, suddenly found himself in the latter group. "Someone has to bring order to the world. Let America do it - if need be through military force."
By the end of the 1990s, most liberals, traditionally inclined to support peace causes, appeared to think like Pickus. U.N. involvement, relatively low casualties, humanitarian rationales, and the absence of a general draft provided them with little reason to challenge the new paradigm of U.S. foreign policy. As long as the U.S. interventions were addressing a serious emergency, occurring in a multilateral setting, and promoting democracy and human rights, the left broadly supported them.
Liberal opposition to humanitarian intervention in general, and U.S. involvement in particular, thus became marginal, largely limited to philosophical pacifists and leftist fringe groups such as the International Action Center (www.iacenter.org), an organization represented by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Interestingly, these groups on the far left found themselves in the odd company of many conservative groups that - though not opposed to warfare per se - objected U.S. interventionism and the idea of the U.S. becoming the "globo-cop." According to their isolationist ideology, nation-building in the Balkans and human rights interventions in Africa simply weren't in the U.S. national interest.
A second important factor contributing to the decline of the U.S. peace movement was the emergence of new causes receiving increased attention of liberal America once the Cold War was over. The fight against AIDS and other infectious diseases was among them, as were campaigns to protect the environment, strengthen the U.N., abolish landmines, and create an international criminal court. The most popular of the new causes, however, was the anti-globalization frenzy, which focused on a great number of issues, including child labor, sweatshops, genetically modified crops, corporate conspiracies, unfair trade and the exploitation of the South, and targeted international institutions such as the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank.
With the anti-war movement strongly decimated, much of the organizational talent and revolutionary temperament of the young American left went straight into the anti-globalization movement. Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.com) was among the first groups to tap into the growing pool of liberals interested in global affairs. Co-founded by Green Party Vice Presidential Candidate, Medea Benjamin, Global Exchange quickly became one of the leading U.S. grassroots campaigns drumming the new "social justice" rather then the old "no more war" beat. Selling itself as an "international human rights organization dedicated to promoting political, social and environmental justice globally," Global Exchange grew from a three people team in 1988 to forty staff members and a budget of five million dollars in 2003. Over the past decade, the group made international headlines on various occasions, notably with anti-Nike/sweatshops and anti-Starbucks/unfair coffee trade campaigns.
Facing strong competition for bucks, hearts and minds from new organizations such as Global Exchange, older peace groups active in the 1990s had but one choice if they wanted to survive: reinventing themselves.
For the World Without War Council, this meant moving the focus away from its core theme, that is, opposing the use of force as a means to solve international differences. Instead, it began concentrating on peace education. "World peace starts right here at home," became Pickus's new slogan. "How can America lead the world toward peace if it cannot keep peace within its own population?"
That population indeed was quickly changing its face, leading to growing concerns about homegrown racial and ethnic tensions. Increasing numbers of immigrants from Asia and Latin America were challenging the traditional predominance of white Americans. Data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau indicated that while the nation's white (non-Hispanic) population was expected to drop from 76 percent in 1990 to 56 percent in 2040, the Hispanic population was expected to grow from 9 percent to 22 percent over the same period. And with its white population close to falling below the 50 percent mark already in 2000, California was leading the national trend toward a truly diverse hotch-potch society.
Could such a diverse group of people continue to co-exist peacefully? What will happen to traditional American values such as separation of power, democracy, and human rights in a this 280 million society that will absorb an additional 120 million immigrants over the next 40 years, to the extent that every 8th American will be foreign-born and foreign-educated by 2040? What will happen to the dream of world peace if America is becoming another Bosnia?
It was with this set of new questions that the visionary and innovative Pickus went touring the halls of power in Sacramento and Washington during the Clinton years. Combined with interventions vis-à-vis educators and immigration officials, his efforts soon began bearing fruits. Jointly, the federal and state governments in the late 1990s engaged in a multi-million dollar effort geared toward a better integration of newcomers into U.S. society. One of the key components of the new educational program, which found broad support across party-lines, was called "ESL/civics." ESL/civics aimed at teaching immigrants English as a Second Language while at the same time exposing them to the fundamental concepts of American democracy. It was in this area that Pickus and the World Without War Council, now supported through taxpayer money in the form of educational grants, continued to work for peace by developing educational materials and organizing teacher seminars.
The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), another legendary U.S. peace organization, also underwent a remarkable transition in the 1990s. Originally founded in 1957 to mobilize grassroots opposition to the nuclear arms race, the SANE leadership consisting of Norman Cousins, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Sanford Gottlieb and others, continuously worked for other related peace causes. Following their mission statement "to develop public support for a boldly conceived and executed policy which will lead mankind away from war and toward peace and justice," SANE during the 1960s and early 1970s organized popular anti-war campaigns. Counting tens of thousands of Americans to its following, and supported by prominent spokespeople such as Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell and Erich Fromm, SANE at one time even called for the removal of President Johnson.
With the Cold War cooling off in the 1980s, SANE put a new emphasis on educating the general public about the enormous economic costs of weaponry, wars and militarization. However, despite considerable efforts to maintain its large membership base, notably through joint projects with celebrities, SANE's popularity began to dwindle. Its 1987 merger with Randall Forsberg's Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign (FREEZE), another disarmament and anti-war organization, wasn't able to halt the general downward trend experienced by the entire peace movement. In 1993, SANE/FREEZE eventually decided to change its name to Peace Action (www.peace-action.org). Its new profile allowed the organization to address a broader range of peace issues without alienating particular member segments. Accordingly, Peace Action became involved in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty campaign, the anti-landmines campaign, and the campaign against the NATO bombings in Kosovo. None of these campaigns, however, were able to turn things around. Peace Action's decline continued. But then came the election of Republican President George W. Bush, and the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.
At first, neither the fact that he "stole" the election nor his categorical rejection of multilateral treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol, the Biological Weapons Convention Protocol, the Statute of the International Criminal Court, or the ABM Treaty really seemed to preoccupy the mainstream American liberal. Sure, the new unilateralist trends were regrettable, but what else can one expect from a Republican President? Even the tragic events of September 11 did not noticeably spur the left's opposition to Bush's policies. On the contrary, they appeared to unite America' left and right behind the President. In early October when the U.S. began its operation in Afghanistan, over 90 percent of Americans supported the war. In November, another national poll found 77 percent of Americans to be in favor of the military intervention including the use of ground troops. The resolution authorizing President Bush to use military force against Afghanistan passed 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House of Representatives. The sole dissenting vote came from Democrat Barbara Lee, Berkeley's Representative in the House.
Lee's lonely opposition to Bush's war plans provoked much anger and critique. Large parts of the grieving nation were unable to understand her vote's underlying rationale - that war may not be the most effective way to fight terrorism. The city of Berkeley, however, stood by its Congresswoman. After the fighting in Afghanistan began on October 7, Berkeley's City Council passed a resolution calling for an immediate halt of the U.S. led bombing. Once again, Berkeley thus became the cradle of what later became a powerful anti-war movement.
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