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LOUD AND CLEAR, WE MUST SAY NO TO WAR!	Current rating: 0
by Paul Kotheimer Email: info (nospam) urbana.indymedia.org (unverified!) Phone: (217)344-8820 Address: 218 West Main St. Suite 110; Urbana, IL 61801	12 Sep 2001 Modified: 13 Sep 2001
...Loud and clear, we must say NO to war, and where better for our movement to say it than on the streets of Washington, DC, September 28-30, as planned?
On the evening of September 10th, oddly enough, I had been re-reading "The Diary of Anne Frank." The play tells of the Fascist crackdown on the Jews in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, and of its effect on the life of one 13-year-old diarist and on the lives of her family. The thoughts I had after reading the play were these: Crackdowns, worse than any I might be able to imagine, have been happening for centuries, and have been particularly fierce in the past 50 years. Violence breeds violence. There is a convoluted line of causality connecting the Holocaust, in which millions of Jews were victims, to the West Bank and Gaza today, in which a few leaders plus billions of dollars in war money make an apartheid state possible. One person can only begin to understand the systemic logic which governs such a line of causality. On the morning of the 11th, I woke up to the news, which by now billions of people worldwide have heard: The World Trade Center, a pair of 110-story skyscrapers, twin symbols of global economic power and U. S. centrality in that power--in which as many people work on an average Tuesday as live in my entire town--collapsed to the ground after having been struck by hijacked commercial airliners. A third hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon, the nerve-center of U. S. military might--another seemingly inexorable symbol of U.S. hegemony, patriarchy, murderous violence... Thousands of people, as a direct consequence of these actions, are dead today. I do not yet know how to grieve over this, except (numbly) to add September 11, 2001, New York City, to a list which I, as a news-reader and activist, keep somewhere in my brain. The list includes Oklahoma City, Baghdad, Tel Aviv, Grenada, Liberia, Kosovo, Viet Nam, Hiroshima, Dresden. My mental list includes, also, hundreds of thousands of isolated incedents of murder and terror which cannot claim a date "which will live in infamy." This mental list, as I inventory it, seems to extend to the horizon of my capacity to remember. Activists against global capital and U. S. violence here in the Midwest are aware of the imminent possibility of the escalation of violence worldwide, and especially of the convenient use of "counter-terrorism" as an excuse to usurp First Amendment freedoms, institute police state tactics in our civic centers, silence dissent in general and at every level, and drum up popular sentiment for full-scale worldwide war. The simple phrase, "Second Pearl Harbor," repeated often enough, is powerful propaganda, as it obscures what followed the first Pearl Harbor: a protracted war on every inhabited continent of the globe, two cities devastated in atomic bomb blasts, major European city-centers firebombed with conventional weapons, millions upon millions dead. Is this what anyone wanted? Is this what we will be told to want in the coming months? The movement for direct action against globalized capital, which took its quantum leap in Seattle in November-December 1999, spawning the Independent Media Center Movement, has moved along a steady upward trajectory, through Washington, DC, in April 2000, against the political party Convention meetings in Philly and DC last summer, back to Washington for S26, and then to Quebec City and Genoa this year. The sheer numbers and level of organization and skill among direct action demonstrators has increased geometrically during this past 20 months. The shout-out to oppose the IMF and World Bank in DC at the end of this month still stands. Top officials at the Bank and the IMF were quoted yesterday as saying that perhaps they would postpone or cancel their annual September meeting in Washington, in the aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers in Manhattan and the Pentagon in DC. Activists against global capital, however--regardless of changes in the date of the World Bank/IMF meetings--have momentum toward amassing in the capitol of capital on September 28-30. Fundraising, co-ordination of affinity groups, plans for creative direct action, travel and hospitality arrangements, trainings and workshops for medics and media producers are all in progress. The opportunity presents itself to demonstrate that the Work Machine (run by corporate capital worldwide and fuelled in large part by U.S. consumers), and the War Machine (operated in the interest of corporate capital worldwide and funded overwhelmingly by U.S. taxpayers) are ONE AND THE SAME MACHINE. Up until the morning of September 11th, thousands of small clusters of students, rank and file union workers, religious groups, environmental advocates, singers, puppeteers, Radical Cheerleaders and other activists for the globalization of justice have been planning to amass in Washington, DC, at the end of September 2001. I want to advocate strongly that we STAY OUR COURSE toward that action, adding to our cause the simple and powerful message: WE SAY NO TO WAR, unconditionally and unequivocally! I'll be here at the IMC audio workstation, doing home support for local participants who go to DC. I hope to be turning your phonecalls and uploaded audio into a radio-braodcast document of our movement for global justice and peace at this crucial time at the onset of the new century. The 20th Century was one of mechanized murder and misery. Let us organize ourselves so that the 21st century becomes one where the call for PEACE is loud and clear. Solidarity, Paul Kotheimer IMC Audio Geek and Writer

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Quick correction
by Paul Kotheimer (No verified email address)	Current rating: 0 13 Sep 2001
In paragraph 7 above, "the political party Convention meetings in Philly and DC last summer," should of course read, "the political party Convention meetings in Philly and Los Angeles last summer." --I guess I just had DC on my mind a lot while writing this article. pjk :)