A DRESSED-UP PIG IS STILL A PIG

Give Peace a Chance (Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone, 10/06/05)

Is the anti-war movement too fractured to be effective?

The "anti-war movement" can't be effective because of its ideology:

But the machinery behind the anti-war movement did not emerge from the experience of soldiers in Iraq -- it was a direct outgrowth of the anti-globalization movement that put together the protests that rocked Seattle in 1999. Indeed, the first anti-war street action of the Bush era -- organized by ANSWER after the 9/11 attacks -- was merely an anti-World Bank demonstration that was repurposed at the last minute as a war protest.

Such anti-capitalist activists -- think of them as the fractious and the furious -- seek to achieve through a social movement what they have been unable to accomplish through electoral politics: to restrain the exercise of American power. Leaders of UFPJ used the march as a platform for its thesis that "war, the IMF and the World Bank are all tools of empire, used by elites toward the same destructive end of corporate domination." ANSWER, which is reviled for its radicalism even within anti-war circles, takes that position and turns it up to eleven. Bill Hackwell, a national organizer for the group, insists that Iraq's only crime was "that they were just a little bit independent." Israel, he asserts, "acts on behalf of the United States as a garrison state in the Middle East against the Arab people of the region." He even raises the bat-shit theory that the U.S. government blew up the levees in New Orleans to drive out the poor.

When it comes to the peace movement, ANSWER is not some fringe organization frothing on the sidelines. The group secured the permits for the march on Washington and paid for the stage. It was also the sole organizer of concurrent protests in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle that drew tens of thousands. But the group uses the marches to promote its wild-eyed agenda, championing "the resistance" in Iraq, Venezuela and Cuba and defending the dictatorial regimes of North Korea and Iran. At the September rally, its litany of demands included "U.S. out of the Philippines!"

[snip]

The open question facing the peace movement is whether it can check its ideology at the curb and build an alliance with religious, corporate and, yes, even Republican leaders. "The potential growth of the movement is obvious," says Gitlin, who teaches mass communications at Columbia University. "But the movement can still box itself in. You can imagine a situation in which the war is leaking popularity but the anti-war movement is demonized....

Who needs to demonize their ideology? Whether it's "check[ed] at the curb" or not, their anti-Americanism pretty much demonizes itself.