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News :: Miscellaneous |
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New way of thinking: demos against |
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by damn fool
(No verified email address) |
22 Sep 2001
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Old ways of demonstrating are fast becoming obsolete, in my view. This is a commentary about new ways of challenging the alienated people who are forming and carrying out policies in our world. Part of it discusses an earlier post by Howard Zinn. |
Howard Zinn caught my attention a few pages back on this site when he began talking about our leaders (and implementers) having learned absolutely nothing from decades (and centuries) of the insanity called war.
I came up with an idea. Remember how everyone was transfixed with the imagery of war here when those planes smashed into the towers? What if we brought home a nonviolent theatre of that magnitude?
Everytime word comes, in coming months and weeks, of violent strikes upon "the terrorists" by our military, certain social conscience-ers could use chalk, fake blood, etc. to create a scene somewhere in the city--preferably in the "nicer" neighborhoods, but possibly also in areas which are near/at places known to us by the mainline media as "military targets".
And do human outlines of people fallen and *gone* by suspected bombs used.
Bring home the enormity of the war situation. "This is what war looks like."
Same with the possible lines of naive "patriots" wishing to sign up with the military. Gross them out about what war really is. Bring the situation home to them, and actively promote serious alternatives.
Zinn:
Then our political leaders came on television, and I was horrified and sickened again. They spoke of retaliation, of
vengeance, of punishment.
We are at war, they said. And I thought: they have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from the history of the twentieth
century, from a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of
violence met with violence in an unending cycle of stupidity.
We can all feel a terrible anger at whoever, in their insane idea that this would help their cause, killed thousands of
innocent people. But what do we do with that anger? Do we react with panic, strike out violently and blindly just to
show how tough we are? "We shall make no distinction," the President proclaimed, "between terrorists and countries
that harbor terrorists." Will we now bomb Afghanistan, and inevitably kill innocent people, because it is in the nature of
bombing to be indiscriminate, to "make no distinction"? Will we then be committing terrorism in order to "send a
message" to terrorists?
We have done that before. It is the old way of thinking, the old way of acting. It has never worked. Reagan bombed
Libya, and Bush made war on Iraq, and Clinton bombed Afghanistan and also a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, to
"send a message" to terrorists. And then comes this horror in New York and Washington. Isn't it clear by now that
sending a message to terrorists through violence doesn't work, only leads to more terrorism?
Haven't we learned anything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Car bombs planted by Palestinians bring air attacks and tanks by the Israeli government. That has been going on for
years. It doesn't work.
And innocent people die on both sides.
------
My comment:
I suspect that those being groomed into positions of policy making and higher echelon implementation of such policies aren't very in touch with the concept of innocent people dying, nor care. I wonder if a flood of pictures (downloaded from sites like www.rawa.org) all over their neighborhoods would mess with their mindsets.
Anyway, most of these people are quite alienated from the mass of innocent people to be killed next. What if we bused in some of these people they're alienated from and held picnics in local upscale parks, and invited the upscale college students?
This line of thinking is meant to inspire other lines of similar thinking. I've been up all night and I'm pretty exhausted now. A lot of fucking good reading on this site, including that guy with the 24 year psy-op experience encouraging challengers to KEEP ON!
Do spread these ideas around the indy sites, etc if you like any of it (I've been doing my share of assisting articles I find valuable).
Hey, check out the following article called "good peasant, bad peasant" and see if it has any relevancy to this for you:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6904/anarch1.html
Zinn:
Yes, it is an old way of thinking, and we need new ways. We need to think about the resentment all over the world felt
by people who have been the victims of American military action. In Vietnam, where we carried out terrorizing
bombing attacks, using napalm and cluster bombs,on peasant villages. In Latin America, where we supported dictators
and death squads in Chile and El Salvador and other countries. In Iraq, where a million people have died as a result of
our economic sanctions, And, perhaps most important for understanding the current situation, in the occupied territories
of the West Bank and Gaza, where a million and more Palestinians live under a cruel military occupation, while our
government supplies Israel with high-tech weapons.
We need to imagine that the awful scenes of death and suffering we are now witnessing on our television screens have
been going on in other parts of the world for a long time, and only now can we begin to know what people have gone
through, often as a result of our policies. We need to understand how some of those people will go beyond quiet
anger to acts of terrorism.
We need new ways of thinking.
(...)
We should take our example not from our military and political leaders shouting "retaliate" and "war" but from the doctors
and nurses and medical students and firemen and policemen who have been saving lives in the midst of mayhem,
whose first thoughts are not violence, but healing, not vengeance but compassion.
Howard Zinn is a columnist for The Progressive.
Published on Saturday, September 15, 2001 in The Progressive |
See also:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6904/anarch1.html
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