Iraq isn’t “Arabic for Vietnam.” Would you please stop saying that?
Published by Sabotabby June 14th, 2007 in Imperialism for Dummies, Soapbox, War HUH! What is it good for?I recently read Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air, which is an incredibly detailed account of the post-1968 new Communist movement in the U.S. It’s a rich and fascinating book, worth reading even if you don’t identify as a Communist; it’s a key piece of history that tends to be left out in discussions of the 1960s protest movement, which is amazing when you consider that tens of thousands of people belonged to Leninist and Maoist organizations before those groups dwindled into the weird, ineffectual sectarian cliques we see today.
After I read it, the friend who’d loaned it to me asked why there’s not currently that same sort of groundswell of revolutionary fervor. Popular opinion in both the U.S. and Canada seems to largely be against the war on Iraq and the Bush administration. (To a lesser degree, Canadians are generally unhappy with our role in Afghanistan and the Harper government, but we tend to be far more passive about demanding change, as much as we might complain.) We went through the obvious ones: The draft during the Vietnam war spurred otherwise apolitical young people to resistance, the concentration of the corporate media has deeply brainwashed the working class to vote against its own interests, and the left, for its part, has no grassroots base.
The prevailing mythology of the 1960s left is that mass protests stopped the Vietnam war. It isn’t true, though it’s in some ways a useful bedtime story to tell young activists. “Yes,” we say. “You have a voice. You can make a difference.” It’s this desire to see history repeat itself—or rather, a fictionalized version of itself—that has been incredibly destructive to the budding anti-war movement today. The left remembers its own history as a sea of tie-dyed hippies flashing peace signs and apes the form rather than the content. Rather than study the American protest movement as an outgrowth from particular conditions of the time, it becomes the end rather than the means; imitate it, and the war will end. It’s magical thinking, but tempting, as it eliminates the sort of prolonged and difficult political work that Elbaum describes in his book.
Accordingly, we have people running around with t-shirts and placards that read, “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam” (or the less-popular but no less tiresome “[Star of David = Swastika]“). Problematic, because an equal sign in politics is evidence of sloppy thinking, because it’s an easily debunked statement, and because it skirts the very sort of analysis that the left needs to make in order to be effective. We need to ask ourselves why one unjustified, illegal, and unpopular war is not like the other.
I don’t agree at all with the solution that Matt Taibbi proposes in The American Left’s Silly Victim Complex, which is that we should put away the giant puppets and start acting like responsible citizens, but he hits the nail on the head when it comes to identifying some of the problems:
Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal – the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender, ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells him to shut the fuck up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there? Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that he should leave his fucking stilts at home.
The 2007 anti-war movement, as far as I can tell, is a mishmash of single-issue activists, fringe ideologues, 9-11 conspiracy theorists, and college students nostalgic for the “Good Sixties” half of the Good Sixties/Bad Sixties construction. I hate to say that the solution to this is actually, well, prolonged and difficult political work (as Wilde put it, “the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings”), but it is. It’s about understanding history rather than trying to copy it, and placing the Iraq war within its broader political and economic context. Doing so won’t end the war (an American military defeat will), but it might very well prevent the next one.
I’m not buying this at all. As far as I can tell, the anti-war friends I know and have met through these grueling years of war all understand what the fuck is going on. We don’t need to put anything into its “broader political and economic context” and we definitely don’t need further analysis.
Do we need better organization? Hell yes.
Part of the problem of creating a broader net to attract a larger groundswell that can’t be ignored or marginalized is that, um, history is hard for a lot of people. And as we dumb ourselves down further and further it becomes increasingly harder to find common starting points to open up dialogue with people. After all, how can you begin to have a conversation with someone about the differences between Iraq and Vietnam if the person you’re talking to doesn’t even remember what the fuck we were doing over there in the first place? It’s like you’re speaking two different languages sometimes.
As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have time to be a history teacher. And neither should any of you. If I can get one of the 28-percenters to join our side by using simple, yet historically inaccurate, symbols and words I will gladly do it. I don’t give a shit if, deep down, he has no idea what the fuck is going on. I just want this goddamn thing ended.
What i don’t like about the anti-war movement today is that it’s too nice. I can’t complain too much because I haven’t exactly done my fair share against war if anything at all. Nevertheless, if the guy on the stilts used his frustrated ambitions of going to clown school to cause real disruption rather than just put on a show, I would have said good for him. But he didn’t.
Along the same lines of the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity, I would also add another thing that’s been over stretched is that its wrong to impose anything on anybody. So the anti-war movement is a lot of “let’s talk about this” and not much action besides “well let me tell you what I think.” Carrying banners without really shoving them into people’s face will miss the point completely.
Last summer during the protests against the war on Lebanon a friend said about one of the organised street protests, in an angry tone, “Why would they make a protest during work hours? Don’t they know people have jobs?” But he is missing the reason for a mass protest is exactly to disrupt the regular flow of the system, its not just about speaking out. Change takes work. Without the work, it’s merely an outlet for complaints and grievances.
Wow, this was refreshing. I get so fed up with the common liberal sentiment of “if only we protested a little harder, we could end the war just like we did in the 60’s!” When pressed on what role they think the Iraqi resistance should play, they generally retreat to “violence is not the answer!”, although this situation is certainly different than the NLF in Vietnam. I generally find it very racist, it’s an idea that Iraqi people aren’t powerful enough to speak and act for themselves. I’m constantly flabbergasted when people take the position that Iraqis should not fight back against an OCCUPYING FOREIGN MILITARY IN VIOLATION OF UN LAW WHO IS ROBBING THEM OF THEIR RESOURCES. (so much so that I need to use the word flabbergasted)
A little while back I went to a presentation by union organizers from Iraq, and they’ve made their demands fairly clear. End of the occupation, by any means necessary. They’re appealing to the new parliament right now, which I have my doubts about, but I think it’s certainly worth supporting. But they certainly have to delusions about relying on the US government to leave for any moral reasons. They know the language the bosses understand. Which is why the oil workers went on strike the other week. For them, this is not an ethnic conflict, cultural conflict, religious conflict, or even really a political conflict. It’s an economic conflict, and workers are suffering much more now than they ever were under Saddam.
It seems like groups in the 60’s were fairly open about their political identifications, but today you have rabidly sectarian groups like Worker’s World and RCP organizing these large anti-war coalitions, then completely ignoring working class issues and appealing to bourgeois morality. I would imagine that people in Iraq, or any other country effected by US imperialism, don’t care too much about whether we’re “nice people” or if we stand for peace, justice, love, freedom, equality, or whatever slogan looks nice. Personally, what I care about is if they’re standing on the picket line. I also would imagine that when I talk about democracy I’m talking about something very different than others who talk about restoring American democracy.
I actually went down to the March 17th march on the Pentagon, and there was one speaker who stood out that actually made some sense, and he said “our clever signs, our passionate speeches, and our large crowds alone will not end this war. Symbolic protest will never catalyze the masses sitting on the fence … only our tangible resistance will reach our paralyzed nation. Our mouths can still speak passionately, and our signs can still be stinging, but our bodies must be obstructions to business as usual.”
Now, I liked what this guy had to say. But it led me to wonder “this would be such a huge effort… why not add capitalism to the list of things to end?” This suggestion, however, might upset many in the anti-war movement. But I think it’s long overdue for us to figure out who our friends really are…