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SPEECH AGAINST THE WAR, TRI-STATE MIDWEST RALLY FOR PEACE, SEPTEMBER 23, 2001
Professor Bob Nowlan
I want to begin by thanking every one of you for
coming here today, and also the organizers of this rally for all of their
hard work in putting everything together and getting the word out. Welcome,
and thanks.
All of us who seek justice, not vengeance, and
peace, not war, condemn the brutal attacks that resulted in the massacre
of thousands of people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Western Pennsylvania
this past September 11th. Speaking
personally, the events of that day horrified me, and left me deeply saddened.
I come from the Northeast, lived nine years in the State of New York, and
worked in New York City. I have spent a great deal of time in New York
City, and I honestly do love the place.
What's more, people I knew in Connecticut and New York lost their lives at
the World Trade Center.
Yet I strongly oppose President Bush's aggressive
military response to this tragedy. This response does not, in fact,
pay tribute to the lives, or deaths, of these thousands of men and women,
nor to the brave efforts of all those who sought to rescue and attend to the
wounds of the victims. I fear that this new war will ultimately lead
only to further devastation. It will not
protect working class American men and women from retaliation - or from
the danger of an escalation of violent assaults upon us; it will also kill
many innocent people who live outside of this country. Their lives
matter too, every bit the equal of our own; if we, as Americans, following
our government, treat their deaths, yet again, as mere "collateral damage,"
we only breed further and much greater enmity toward us.
I fear, in addition, that this new war will lead
to a severe curtailment of the legal and ethical commitment to civil liberties
and human rights that represents our nation's proudest achievement.
These civil liberties and human rights already suffer the results of steady
erosion, as they have been rendered increasingly hollow by government-led
assaults to support a "war on crime" conducted over the course of now at least
four presidential administrations. In addition, this nation already
restricts, even routinely denies, equal access to these civil liberties and
human rights to people who live in this country -- and whose hard work we
all depend upon and which greatly benefits all of us: we do so according to
differences in class, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and sexuality.
I fear that the racist backlash will worsen against
Muslims, against people of Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and South Central
Asian ethnicity, as well as against potentially anyone with brown skin --
a backlash which, tragically, is already well underway across the United States,
including here in Eau Claire. I fear that tolerance for dissent, for
constructive critique, including principled critique as solidarity
, and for the genuinely democratic exercise
of freedom, will all decline dramatically. In times of past American
wars, including the long American "Cold War" with the Soviet Union and its
allies, I many times encountered xenophobes and jingoists who declared "America
- love it or leave it," directing this slogan at those who questioned, challenged,
criticized, and protested what our government has done in our name.
I have always been deeply troubled by the implicit illogic here, as those
proclaiming "America - love it or leave it" seem in this response only to
show how much they ignore, reject, and disparage what this country supposedly
represents, at its best, and what our political leaders so often extol the
U.S. Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights
- as well, for that matter, the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights - as championing.
I fear that an enormous amount of resources that
urgently need to be devoted to social needs will instead be devoted to military
and intelligence budgets. The economic recession now upon us should
make abundantly clear how many Americans have already, long before September
11th, suffered considerable stress, duress,
and insecurity. Quality jobs, living wages, adequate and comprehensive
health care, affordable housing and utilities, opportunities for educational
advancement - all of these needs, and many more, confront vast numbers of
working class Americans every day, and in often already quite brutal ways.
A protracted and costly war will only make this situation much worse.
War, moreover, always wreaks havoc upon the natural environment, and we today
know all-too-well how foolhardy the pretense of indifference to ecological
disaster always inevitably turns out to be - certainly including when this
takes place in what some of us callously refer to as merely "
another part of the world."
No American citizen deserved to die in a terrorist
attack because of policies pursued by the U.S. government, nor as a result
of practices pursued by the national, multinational, and transnational capitalist
interests the U.S. government chiefly represents and serves. What's more,terrorist
attacks perpetrated by isolated, small minority networks, no matter how sophisticated
and adroit these may be, will always inevitably fail effectively to pressure
the richest and most powerful class of Americans - as well as their principal
administrative and executive allies and functionaries - to support any change
that threatens to eliminate the latter's privilege. Yet we, as so-called
"ordinary," "everyday" Americans, as working and middle class Americans,
as American citizens and civilians, and as Americans with good will and moral
conscience toward the rest of the world, do need
to understand why many people living outside of this country maintain deep
bitterness and indeed, yes, hatred for the United States of America, and
why the most embittered,desperate, and fanatical will resort to violent attacks
upon the United States, and Americans, not distinguishing among our government,
our major corporations, and the rest of us. We need to investigate,
understand, acknowledge, and work to transform the exploitative practices
our government has so often pursued and supported in the interest of superprofits
for oligopoly and monopoly capital, especially throughout the global South.
We need to know, for instance, what severe damage the U.S.-backed International
Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization have caused for economies,
societies, and cultures outside of the advanced capitalist, so-called "First
World." We need to join the movement for a democratic, people's globalization,
not capitalist globalization, for a globalization from below not from above,
for fair trade not free trade, for a world devoted to meeting human needs
and taking care of our natural world, as genuine stewards of this planet
Earth, not a world devoted, first or last, to meeting the needs of capitalist
profit expropriation, monetarization, and accumulation. Huge disparities
in ownership and control of social wealth, and in relatively viable opportunity
to survive, subsist, and flourish ravage this planet at the present time.
Committing ourselves, as Americans, to work toward the eradication of global
poverty and toward the realization of social justice, collective equality,
ecological sustainability, and human freedom, across the globe, represents
our best hope of eliminating the conditions which make possible and undermining
the forces which give rise to terrorist attacks on the United States - and
on American citizens. Working together in a genuine, mutually respectful
partnership with the nations of the world through the United Nations, following
the dictates of international law and taking advantage of the institutions
available for prosecuting the criminals responsible for the September 11
th attacks - before the World Court - represents the ethically
and politically responsible way to respond to this tragedy. Pursuing this
peaceful course and rejecting the call to indiscriminate and vicious war
represents the truly courageous way to act.
Thank you very much.
**********
Comments in Self-Critique, October 14 , 2001
This speech was prepared and delivered before the U.S. began its current military strikes in Afghanistan. In the rush to respond to the looming threat of a U.S.-led war without seeming in any way to condone the horrific loss of life caused by the September 11 air hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I, like a number of others on the U.S. left, argued for "justice, not vengeance" in seeking to organize and rally to "stop the war." I certainly maintain this commitment, yet now that the "hot phase" of the war is well underway in Afghanistan, and repeatedly threatens to extend beyond Afghanistan, struggling forward on behalf of this commitment (for peace and justice, for peace through justice) assumes a different meaning. In retrospect, I stand by everything I presented in my speech of September 23 except the last two lines. I critique my own readiness to propose that the World Court, and the United Nations, as presently organized -- that is, as presently dominated by U.S. imperialist interests -- could adequately pursue a course of genuine justice against Osama Bin Laden and the Al-Quaeda network without promoting considerable injustice versus many Afghans not involved in organized terrorist activity or part of the Taliban's ruling clique, versus many working class Americans at home and abroad, and versus potentially numerous others around the world. Yes, justice should be our goal, and yes we should oppose vengeance, yet we cannot trust that existing international institutions subject to the dominant influence of the U.S. government can or will actually work toward these ends, certainly not all by themselves, not, that is, without the pressure of a popular mass mobilization demanding, "from below," that those "at the top" act in these directions, and without us maintaining the power independently to monitor and carefully to scrutinize how they do in fact proceed. As an alternative to a U.S. "hot war" in Afghanistan, turning over the responsibility for dealing with the criminal attacks on September 11 to a genuinely international institution dedicated toward serving the interest of enforcing international law makes sense. Such an institution, however, should not be one that in fact operates as a front for the interests of multinational and transnational capital, where only the richest and most powerful nation-states maintain real authority. Moreover, as an adjunct to a hot war, a call for existing international institutions to administer "justice" against the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks allows the U.S. government and its military too easily to coopt the cause of "justice" while not coming to terms with -- or in any way accounting and providing redress for -- the massive injustice U.S. imperialism has caused, and continues to cause; this latter injustice continues to give rise to the virulent levels of resentment and hostility toward the United States, and Americans, that ultimately can result in terrorist actions directed against us. Building a global mass movement of popular resistance to war and injustice is the only way ultimately to insure the ends of peace and justice can be adequately secured. To explain my self-critique further, I will cite a recent statement from the International Socialist Organization on this issue:
Many people have an understandable urge to condemn the
senseless murder of thousands of innocent working-class
people–and to want to take steps to prevent such atrocities
from happening again. This urge has led many within the
movement to support broad calls for "justice" against the
perpetrators of the Sept. 11th attack. Many left-liberals have
begun calling explicitly for an international war crimes tribunal
or other use of existing "international law" to bring the
perpetrators to "justice."
Some of the liberals initiating these calls are soft supporters
of U.S. imperialism. Richard Falk, writing in last week’s issue
of The Nation, wrote, for example,
"And so we are led to the pivotal questions: What kind of war?
What kind of response? It is, above all, a war without military
solutions…Such an assessment does not question the
propriety of the effort to identify and punish the perpetrators
and to cut their links to government power. In our criticism of
the current war fever being nurtured by an unholy alliance of
government and media we should not forget that the attacks
were massive crimes against humanity in a technical and legal
sense, and those involved in carrying them out should be
punished to the fullest extent. Acknowledging this legitimate
right of response is by no means equivalent to an
endorsement of unlimited force. Indeed, an overreaction may
be what the terrorists were seeking to provoke so as to
mobilize popular resentment against the United States on a
global scale."
Couched in liberal hand-wringing, Falk 1) intimates that some
form of U.S. military response could be justified; 2) disregards
the bloody role of U.S state-sponsored terrorism, whose
"crimes against humanity" far exceed anything the
perpetrators of Sept. 11th could ever dream of; 3) ignores the
role of the U.S. in determining who is and is not "punished" for
crimes against humanity, through international legal bodies or
war; 4) fails to acknowledge why U.S. foreign policy might itself
engender resentment toward the U.S. on a global scale. Most
importantly, Falk’s reasoning opens the door to support for
the war. Thus, the new October 15th issue of The Nation
editorializes,
"We support an all-out but carefully targeted effort to
neutralize identified terrorist networks. This may
involve a limited military response, like attacks on
terrorist bases, but primarily it should rely on
nonmilitary means as exchanges of intelligence among
nations, coordinated investigations by law-enforcement
agencies in affected countries and pressures on
financial institutions and governments to cooperate in
cutting off terrorist group funding."
The call for "justice" is emanating also from more left-wing
circles. Global justice activist Kevin Danaher (co-founder of
Global Exchange) wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post
that argued for defining the Sept. 11th attack as a "crime
against humanity" rather than an "act of war." In lieu of going
to war, Danaher argues,
"The perpetrators of the recent attacks can be
apprehended and brought to justice without killing
innocent civilians if we have the support of the world’s
governments. If America were to engage the world in
setting up an effective international criminal court
system, the support from other nations would be so
strong it would be impossible for any country to shelter
the perpetrators of mass violence."
This viewpoint, of course, leaves out the possibility that the
U.S. could wage war AND bring the alleged perpetrators of the
September 11 attacks to trial before an international court (as
was the case with Slobodan Milosevic following the NATO war
against Serbia). The U.S. will do so if it believes it is in its own
interests. And like Falk, in this article Danaher does not
question the U.S.’ right to administer "justice," despite the
bloody record of U.S. imperialism (although he has
elsewhere).
While socialists must stand firm against these sorts of calls for
"justice," we must make a distinction between those
arguments put forward by seasoned activists and those
coming from those who are politically inexperienced. Many
people who support the call for "justice" and invoking
"international law" do so because they do not yet have an
understanding of the role of U.S. imperialism. It is the job of
socialists to win them to this understanding, patiently. This
means emphasizing: 1) the far-greater atrocities committed
by U.S. imperialism–and the economic and social inequality it
upholds; and 2) of the role of U.S. imperialism in selectively
applying international law–so that the U.S. and its allies are
never held accountable for their own state-sponsored
terrorism. Most importantly, socialists must win people to an
understanding that the only way to end terrorism on the part
of those who are oppressed by U.S. foreign policy is to end the
ability of U.S. imperialism to dominate and oppress people
the world over. Any so-called solution which does not make
fighting U.S. imperialism its foremost priority is therefore
doomed to failure. (
http://www.internationalsocialist.org/nowar.shtml
;
Last Accessed: October 13, 2001)
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