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It’s
Just Not That Simple
We
first saw them on a side street, standing clustered with their
signs, looking for all the world like another feeder march
waiting to join the seething mass of humanity on Seventh Avenue.
Then, audaciously, a bunch of them were in among us, something
I’ve rarely seen a counterprotesting group do. Their signs
were big, professional, and sarcastic as all get-out. “Saddam
only killed his own people—it’s none of our business,” read
one. “Communism only killed 100 million people. Let’s give
it a second chance,” read another. Their arguments were wildly
simplistic, ignored lots of facts (let’s see—how many other
leaders we still fund kill their own people? And aren’t we
now already putting Baathists back in power?) and deliberately
twisted the true intentions of the vast majority of the protesters
present. There was a tiny handful of them compared to the
hundreds of thousands of people there to protest Bush. Counterprotesters
are to be expected. So why did they creep me out in a way
that antis (to use protestor slang from all sides of the aisle)
usually don’t?
The Protest Warriors (a tightly organized and committed group
who started by infiltrating the big antiwar protests in San
Francisco) are a little different than the counterprotesters
one is used to seeing. Rather than just presenting their own
rhetoric—like either the proud families of soldiers or the
evangelical wackos down the road who seemed to think the marchers
were going to hell for wanting a different president—they
were directly attacking the anti-Bush march, and not on a
knee-jerk, hippies-go-home level. They were putting forth
intellectual (though simplistic, partial, and flawed) attacks
on some of the weakest and most questionable rhetoric that
does float around in the antiwar and anti-Bush movement. Responding
to a wrongheaded war with only “Give peace a chance” does
invite signs like “Other than ending slavery, Nazism, Fascism,
and Communism, war hasn’t accomplished anything!” (Never mind
that war didn’t end communism, even where it did end.)
This is where avoiding complexity in the name of soundbites
and internal unity comes back to bite the left.
There is only one simple thing that can be said about issues
like war, dictators, foreign policy, political and economic
theories, democracy, and trying to push the world at large
toward more respect for human rights. None of it is simple.
Anyone who says otherwise is immediately suspect, whether
you agree with their final conclusion or not.
Granted, mass protests are not the best place for hashing
out the subtleties of how to support the indigenous middle
class and resistance movements like those that carried out
the Velvet Revolution, balancing various economic, diplomatic,
and strategic approaches, empowering women, providing alternative
education opportunites to schools run by extremists, limiting
arms sales, and truly committing ourselves to studying, learning,
and practicing nonviolent conflict resolution. They are a
place for turning out in numbers to be counted—in this case
to show opposition to the direction that a few people’s very,
very oversimplified notion of the world is leading us.
On the other hand, that doesn’t exempt us from being thoughtful
about what we do say at mass rallies, and being aware of the
company we keep.
One example is International ANSWER. Using an incredible organizing
prowess and basic, inoffensive messages on the signs they
hand out, ANSWER has become one of the largest and most visible
voices of the antiwar movement. But its leaders, originally
mostly representatives of the Workers World Party, also refuse
to acknowledge that there was any problem with Saddam Hussein’s
regime (which they manage to construe as socialist, because
he nationalized oil), are apologists for Slobodan Milosevic,
won’t hear a bad word against Castro or North Korea, and are
absolutely inflexible on the issue of Israel and Palestine,
going to the length of refusing to have one of the most moderate,
level-headed voices on this most complex of issues, Rabbi
Michael Lerner, speak at one of their protests because he
won’t rule out supporting a bi-state solution in which Palestinians
give up their right to return.
They clearly have the right to their opinion, and the right
to express it on the streets with the rest of us. Disagreement
and debate are healthy. But when the rest of the antiwar movement
lets such simplistic nonsense go unchallenged, then groups
like the Protest Warriors and others can go on about the “communist”
groups funding the left from behind the scenes, and not be
as off base as we’d like them to be. (Not to mention that
when groups calling themselves socialists start apologizing
for Stalin, they smear a long history of workers’ rights victories
and valuable contributions to our society made by people committed
to an economic theory of communism, as opposed to totalitarian
regimes that were also nominally “Communist.”) We can be against
the economic blockade of Cuba, and even recognize its successes
in literacy and health care, without denying that Castro jails
political dissidents, which is clearly a bad thing. The world
is complicated.
This is not actually about communism, though, nor about the
couple dozen sectarian communist groups that wander these
protests. This is about needing to guard against protest soundbite
mentality just like we do against prime-time TV soundbites.
This is about needing to practice offering and explaining
positive alternatives, needing to not pretend that bringing
our troops home will actually restore peace and sovereignty
to Iraq by itself. We don’t have a monopoly on clever slogans;
we don’t have a monopoly on righteous political outrage. Where
we can take the high ground is offering answers that don’t
pretend the world is a simple place.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
maxel-lute@metroland.net
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Columns
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