War is not the Answer (Pulp Magazine, Pittsburgh)

War is not the Answer The upcoming Regional Antiwar Convergence may be the biggest protest Pittsburgh has seen in 30 years. In a round-table conversation, some local activists talk about dissent and street-level action INTERVIEW BY GEOFF KELLY All that one can say is that if we act as if peace were necessary and possible, we are more likely to achieve it than if we don't. Sir Michael Howard from Pulp (Pittsburgh) January 16, 2003
In his book The Invention of Peace, the British military historian Sir Michael Howard suggests that peace is much more complicated and high-maintenance than war -- which may be why it breaks down all the time. "Peace is not a natural state of society," he writes, "any more than war is a natural state of society. Conflict is what is endemic and, if you like, is natural. There is only going to be peace if those conflicts can be managed and subsumed. That is what peacemaking is really all about." Precisely how to manage and subsume conflict is a sticky problem, difficult in one's daily life, let alone on a global scale. The important thing, according to Howard, is simply to try. The antiwar movement in this country is a chimera because it is presented in the media incompletely, in fits and starts, viewed from a distance with misunderstanding and sometimes -- especially on the brink of war, when its counterpoint to what passes for prevailing opinion is most needed -- with mistrust. Only when tens of thousands of dissenters converge and take to the streets, as they did famously in Seattle in 1999 and last October in Washington, D.C., does the substance and scope of the country's activist community compel people to take notice. But, of course, activism on behalf of peace and social justice does not begin or end at mass demonstrations. "When people get to the street, it's almost always not the first option," says Tim Vining, executive director of Pittsburgh's Thomas Merton Center, an organization that tackles a wide array of social issues. "I mean, people think that we read the paper at the Merton Center and we say, 'Okay, let's go have a protest.' That's a lot of work."
Pulp (Pittsburgh) January 16 2003 PULPITATIONS In the basement of the Duncan and Porter House on Pittsburgh's North Side, veteran activist, anarchist and all-around iconoclast Vincent Scotti Eirene runs Blast Furnace Radio, a Web radio station that alternates between syndicated alternative news shows such as Pacifica radio's "Democracy Now!" and dusty but charming pop songs played on a Fisher-Price record player. At least once a day, Eirene says, the station plays Cheech and Chong's "Is Dave there?" skit. The coming weeks will be busy for Eirene; this weekend there is scheduled a massive antiwar march in Washington, D.C. The following weekend is the Pittsburgh Regional Antiwar Convergence, which organizers say will be the largest antiwar demonstration in Pittsburgh in at least 30 years. And in between, on Monday, January 20, Eirene is organizing a protest in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the corner of Forbes and Morewood in Oakland, in front of Carnegie Mellon University's Warner Hall. Like many private entities, CMU has not declared King's birthday a holiday. "Some at CMU have said that it is better to teach the children about the life of Martin Luther King than have folk sleep in," Eirene says. "I must remember to not have this person plan my itinerary for the Easter holiday." Eirene also believes that King would be appalled by CMU's military contracts. For more information on the Duncan and Porter House or the January 20 protest, or to listen to Blast Furnace radio, check out www.notowar.com. Geoff Kelly	Vining has been hard at work in recent months, along with dozens of activists from Pittsburgh's numerous progressive organizations, planning the Pittsburgh Regional Antiwar Convergence. Between January 24 and January 26, organizers expect thousands of dissenters to take to the streets in protest of the George W. Bush administration's escalation of military action against Iraq. Protesters are expected to gather from all directions; no doubt the January 18 antiwar march in Washington, D.C. will feed the ranks. The Convergence's organizers promise that it will be the largest antiwar protest Pittsburgh has seen in at least 30 years. Pulp invited a number of local activists to meet at the Thomas Merton Center's Bloomfield office for a round-table discussion on the nature of activism, the current climate for dissent and next weekend's Convergence. Taking part were Vining; Edith Bell, a board member at the Merton Center and a member of the Raging Grannies; veteran activist Vincent Scotti Eirene of the Duncan and Porter House; Saleh Waziruddin of Zi Activism, who was recently called one of 10 young Pittsburghers to watch by Pittsburgh magazine; Toni Bartone of the Pittsburgh Organizing Group, whose members are integral in planning the Convergence; and Maura Jacob and Claire Schoyer of Pittsburgh Association of Peacemakers and Proactive Youth, an organization linking high-school activists across the city. What follows is excerpted from that conversation, which touched on everything from organizing techniques, the nature of nonviolence in a violent world and the definition of "idiot savant." While we talked, Edith Bell made bandages for protesters who might be injured in confrontations with authorities during the Convergence. Does street-level action promote dialogue and compromise or does it polarize people, push them into extreme positions?   EIRENE: I think the street stuff is absolutely important because it's making the invisible dissent visible. It also breaks up the false unanimity, the illusion that somehow everyone is going along with this. If it alienates people -- well, it's sort of like in a romantic relationship: Things have to fall apart before they can come together. BELL: If it wouldn't have been for the street protests during the Viet Nam era, that war would have gone on and on and on. That helped to turn it. And right now, you see all these polls that have been taken -- 70 percent of the people are with the president? When you talk to people, nobody is. I don't
know where they take these polls. And the media doesn't cover it, so unless we go into the streets and make a big brouhaha, the media is not going to cover our phone calls and the letters we write in protest. VINING: When people get to the street, it's almost always not the first option. That happens when we see the system not working. When we saw that the majority of Americans were against this war, and when we had [Senator Arlen] Specter's and [Senator Rick] Santorum's offices both tell us that every single phone call except one in both offices was against this war, and they went and voted for it anyway, people said, "They don't care. The system's not working, they're not listening." Then people go to street action. We don't get attention until we're in the streets, so people think we've just started. I think that's one of the difficulties, why we can be seen as polarizing or we can be misinterpreted. Very few people go right into the streets, and when they do, [the actions] are generally very small. But when you see, like in October, 100,000 or 150,000 people in the streets in D.C., that's not just people who said, "I've got nothing else to do." JACOB: I'm very concerned how people in other countries perceive us, that they think that we just follow our government into whatever it is that they agree upon. Just as [Vining] said, we called Arlen Specter and we called our representatives, and they voted another way. Street action is an important way of saying to other countries who seem to be, like, "Oh, you have a free government, you vote for your representatives." And I'm, like, "They represent us, but they don't vote for us all the time, and I can't really pull them out of office when I don't agree with them." I wanted to send a tape to the BBC saying, "Help us. We don't agree." Just to let other countries know how we stand. I don't want other countries to see our government's actions as representing our whole entire country. BARTONE: It really helps to put a human face on dissent. Any opinion that challenges the status quo can be perceived as a scary thing. But, for example, if you find that your next-door neighbor is protesting, you may begin to think that it's not so far-fetched, that it's right in your backyard. SCHOYER: It's saying that we're here, we're in Pittsburgh and we're working. I think it's good for the activists, to make them keep going, to realize that this is a big movement, that they're actually doing something. That it does make a difference, even if CNN doesn't cover it very well. What is the climate for dissent nowadays? And how do today's activists and street protesters differ from those who protested previous wars? VINING: I was in college during the Reagan years. I remember never wanting to be called an activist, even as I was doing activism. Somewhere it became a bad thing to protest. What I'm seeing very recently -- last three years, probably since Seattle -- is that among young people protest is not a bad thing. There's a real culture now, especially among young people, that it's okay to protest. EIRENE: Back in the 1960s, anarchism was a dirty word. Most people were Socialists and Marxists. Now, because of the nature of anarchism, no one is waiting around for someone to take the lead. You'll find out about something going on here, and the Beehive Collective going on here, and you'll find out about people organizing a little vigil here. There's no central committee, and I think that that aspect of it is positive. Also, never again will we sit around and try to figure out what rhymes with "One, two, three, four." JACOB: Sometimes kids get afraid of being put in categories. A lot of people shy away from being called liberal. BELL: I kind of marvel at the idea that being called a liberal is putting you in a category. I remember only too well my husband scoffing at being called liberal: "I'm a Communist, not a liberal!" JACOB: Among the high-school crowd, which is what we primarily deal with, a lot of kids are certainly interested in [the war], either for or against, oftentimes just because they don't know a lot about it, even with it being prominent in the news. They don't know all the issues; we weren't very old at the time that the Gulf War was happening, so they don't really know that history. It's an interesting process because they'll sometimes form an opinion before they have a lot of facts. So sometimes [activizing them] can be battle, but they seem to be more open to it the more information you give them, and the more opportunity you give them to learn more or to do something. What interests them the most is not fliers and letter-writing. It's more protesting and rallies and petitions -- action, physical work. BARTONE: That's probably true of the college crowd, too, except people are occasionally openly hostile. Sometimes they're very approachable as well, they just kind of feel a little paralyzed by the way that society is. They feel a little bit powerless, I think. BELL: With the U.S.A. Patriot Act, people are getting concerned. At the meetings people are worried -- what can they do to us? My concern is that if we don't do something now, if we don't act now and just let this Patriot Act intimidate us, then in little while we won't be able to do anything anymore. I lived in Nazi Germany and I know what it's like when, slowly, you can do nothing. There's been a lot of mythmaking attached to the Viet Nam era protests. How does that peace movement compare to today's? EIRENE: It's interesting, because [that movement] really came out of nowhere. One minute we were watching Dick Van Dyke, and the next minute Abbie Hoffman was on TV saying that we should shoot our parents. My dad and I were watching that at the same time and he told me not to get any ideas. And so we see where things have really flipped...we can see now that probably the biggest obstacle to peace is my generation. After Viet Nam was over, and our butts were no longer on the line, for 25 years the Vietnamese were ground into the earth, and my generation did not come to their aid. So, in 1995, when the sanctions were lifted off of Viet Nam, they were willing to take Nike -- it takes three months working in Viet Nam to buy a pair of Nike shoes made at the factory you're working in -- and all the oil companies, too. One of the most untapped resources in the world of oil is in Southeast Asia. My concern is that we create within ourselves an urgency that's going to give us consistency. When the Iraqi war was over, everybody went away, and here these people were living under sanctions. They cut [the Iraqis] off from the whole world and had them drinking water that was like it was out of the Monongahela. I don't know how you do that, in terms of instilling commitment. But I'm not concerned with the peace movement. I'm concerned with the cultures and nations and countries and people we're destroying. If my generation had taken one or two years to investigate what Viet Nam was like in the postwar era, they would have never accepted the Nike factories that so many of the students now are protesting. If all of us had been working on this since 1991, there would be no Iraqi war. We can't even imagine the type of poverty that people have to live in because of the aftermath of war. The best that we can hope for as activists in times like this is to interact with newly interested people and to get some kind of depth of commitment. Because Americans, they always -- if someone steps on their foot, they move it. This type of crisis orientation, you know... JACOB: Viet Nam really showed that there has to be a commitment in multiple fields. You can't look at just one side of an issue and assume that you've won. BARTONE: There is almost a feeling among my generation that we kind of don't know what we're doing. Sure, we have all the lore of the '60s to go by, but it's also so much different, with the Patriot Act and legislation like that. EIRENE: Today there is a really miraculous dynamic of a nonviolent way of life, and that's where students nowadays are way ahead of the game, in terms of animal rights and being a vegan. And the whole puppetista thing -- in the 1960s it was just like a dream that anything could ever be like that, and now it's the norm. We see a lot of creativity. In Seattle, when the police literally took the signs away from people, they didn't know what to do. So they started writing things on their arms and on their shirts. WAZIRUDDIN: Some journalists have this cartoon image of the '60s. They think that the late '60s was the height of activism, when really the early '60s was when they were doing the work of getting people organized. They have this cartoon image from the late '60s that people going wild on campus is where social change comes from. Looking for that cartoon image and not finding it, and not really looking at what is there, they say, "Oh, there's no activism here," because there are no clowns. There is a lot of misunderstanding from journalists who aren't activists and haven't done some of the work, or even looked at some of the work, so they don't know what they should be covering or could be covering. I've had media people call and say, "Oh, they're anarchists. How can they be nonviolent? Don't they break windows? Isn't that what anarchists do?" That's really ignoring the whole history of anarchism. That's not even doing the basic reading. What do you think of the media's treatment of the peace movement? EIRENE: The media is a trap. I would go to demonstrations where everybody was getting along, we were really kicking ass, they were chaining themselves to buildings and everybody was upset. Then people would look at the nightly news and the newspaper and say, "We got no coverage." In the '60s they used to say, "If it's not on film, it hasn't happened." That's really unfortunate. Of course it happened. To somehow say that this virtual reality is the only reality...I would judge things by how this affects all the sick and dying Iraqi children. How is what I'm doing affecting that. As opposed to becoming a clown -- and there's nothing wrong with clowns -- so that the media covers your story. The media likes crowds, they like big stuff. I swear that a lot of people just walked away from the anti-sanctions stuff with Iraq because we weren't getting any coverage. We would go to [CMU's] Software Engineering Institute every year on the anniversary of when we bombed the civilian shelter [in Baghdad during the Gulf War], February 12, and it was getting really sad in terms of people showing up. BELL: You have this big demonstration in Washington, and a small group of people is throwing paint or whatever, and that gets covered. Or a fight breaks out among half a dozen people. But they don't cover the thousands who march peacefully. That's frustrating, because it gives the wrong impression. They don't like peaceful demonstrations. That's too boring. EIRENE: That's why it was exciting when people were being shot in the face with hockey puck bullets -- not little rubber bullets -- in Seattle in 1999. The media didn't report it, so the Indy Media people went to the media in Seattle and said, "Here's video." Then they had to report it. We've entered a whole new era of becoming the media, making our own media. I was at the 2000 Republican National Convention and I walked into this room with 75 computers in it. It was the Indy Media site, with a Web site, a newspaper, a Web radio station and even a TV station uploading to a satellite. This is a lot different than getting on a bus, getting off, protesting for a few hours and back. The depth of that makes me very hopeful. What little violence occurs at these protests does draw attention to the cause. How do you define nonviolent resistance? Where is the line? BELL: As long as you don't hurt other people. VINING: First of all, we're not just talking about nonviolence in the abstract. We're talking about nonviolent resistance to violence. I think we have to keep that in mind. People look to us as this peace movement and pull us out of the culture we live in. What is a nonviolent response to resisting and trying to stop a violent act? Right now we want to stop children and maybe millions of people from being killed in the Middle East. So the question is, how do we take action to stop that in a way that's nonviolent? WAZIRUDDIN: There's a difference between militancy and violence. Militancy is about people saying, "Something bad is happening that's part of my life, I don't have control over my life, and I shouldn't just sit around, I should do something about it." It's about people in society deciding they won't take something anymore and getting control over their political and economic life. That doesn't mean violence. It means that they're active. It means they're going to the source of the problem and changing it directly. It doesn't mean they're using force to hurt people to get there. A sit-in or an occupation of a factory by workers is militant but it's not violent. It doesn't have to be violent. BELL: Some wise person once said, "Evil happens when a lot of good people don't do anything." VINING: And disruptive isn't violent. We often intend to disrupt things, for the system not to function for a day -- whether it's because we fill the jail cells, or because we tie up the fax machines. That's not violent. We're saying that the system is not working, and it's causing violence, and we're trying to disrupt that. What I don't want to see is nonviolence ever meaning passive. Because to me that is actually violent; if I allow someone to wreak devastation in this world by my silence, I think I am almost violent in my passivity. That's the same argument put forward by anti-abortion activist James Kopp when he explained why he shot and killed Dr. Bernard Slepian in Amherst, New York. VINING: That same justification is used to justify war sometimes. I would say, in terms of the demonstration, that a nonviolent resistance is one that does not cause harm, that does not directly lead to the escalation of harm to other human beings -- or animals, or life. BARTONE: An entire movement can't come to an agreement on what is violent or nonviolent either. There are people who feel that breaking a corporate window is nonviolent; there are people who would totally disagree. But the two have the same end goal. People need to use their own best judgment. EIRENE: My main concern is people who keep me up talking until two or three in the morning about revolutionary violence, and the glorification and romanticizing of the Weather Underground and Ted Kaczynski. Of course, my friends who were talking about revolutionary violence in the '60s are now selling antiques. The Pittsburgh Regional Antiwar Convergence takes place January 24-26, and will include marches in Oakland and the South Side, along with countless other attractions. For a detailed calendar, check in with the Pittsburgh Organizing Group (www.organizepittsburgh.org) or the Thomas Merton Center (www.thomasmertoncenter.org). For updates on the action that weekend, your best bet is the Pittsburgh Independent Media Center (www.indypgh.com).