[antiwar-van] Re: [marxist] On the United Nations resolution: How to approach this war?

[Tom Siblo]

Dear Comrade Stainsby:

It is so clear as the writing on the wall what is going to happen and when.
As you probably know the ANSWER coalition is planning two days of
demonstrations and the organization of a mass National Peace Congress all in
the same weekend. This is also the same week the new Republican controlled
Congress is going to begin its first session.

I think we should all work hard and make this the biggest most massive
demonstration with the idea of  not going home but encircling the White
House and the Capital for a 24/7 demonstration. At the same time all the
week before in each major city we should be militantly demonstrating. In
each city Peace Action councils should be formed as the signatures are
presented to Bush and Congress with a mass rally on Martin Luther Kings
birthday at the Lincoln Memorial. Here we can give Bush who is not our
elected leader and the minority Republican Congress notice to stop the war
or hit the road.

Obviously at first mass arrests but new protesters coming in everyday. Shut
down the whole country and then they will get the message it is not the same
old nice people anymore and we are here to abolish war completely and disarm
them. Go to all the army, naval and air force bases and ask the soldiers to
join us.

I think you know what I am talking about. This would be much better than a
resolution, a petition and a quick run down and back to DC. When I go to
Washington DC I want to stay for a while and I would like everyone else who
wants to stop the war to join me.

I don't care who is organizing the event. If its the WWP then as long as
they want to stay and close the country down with us then all power to them.

I think the masses of people not only in the US in world would follow our
steps and do the same in their own countries including in Russia and China.

I think we are a world majority and we should not let them hold their war.
Make the peace save a tree!

Tom Siblo
----- Original Message -----
From: "Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby at tao.ca>
To: <con2-plan at resist.ca>; <mobglob-discuss at lists.resist.ca>;
<project-x at lists.resist.ca>; "Leninist International"
<leninist-international at lists.econ.utah.edu>; "Rad Green"
<rad-green at lists.econ.utah.edu>
Cc: <a-infos-en at ainfos.ca>; <a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu>;
<apc-discuss at lists.resist.ca>; <kominform2 at yahoogroups.com>;
<socialistbc at shaw.ca>; <antiwar-van at lists.resist.ca>;
<marxist at yahoogroups.com>; <redbadbear at yahoogroups.com>; "Adam Honsinger"
<the_editor57 at hotmail.com>
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2002 10:29 PM
Subject: [marxist] On the United Nations resolution: How to approach this
war?


Nov 8, 2002
On the United Nations resolution: How to approach this war?
Macdonald Stainsby

   How often have you been at a demonstration or an event and found yourself
being offered all manners of pamphlets? What is often the saddest thing is
the
people who put out their own, without any following, not even enough to
start a
little sect. Often, sadly, these people are too sectarian-minded to submit
to
the discipline of one of the little sects, and too unimpressive as people to
create one of their own to dominate. So, they play the game, in utter
isolation
and on the side of the mass movement, writing stern denunciations of all
those
who are actually doing anything, like try to organise a mass-movement. I met
one
of these characters, who shall remain nameless, at a function for the recent
(very impressive) Grassroots Women conference opposed to imperialist war. He
was
American, visiting Vancouver and he had written several different pamphlets,
all
adorned with his own little catchy name. Each pamphlet was given an entire
page
of slogans he personally wanted to get people carrying to rallies. When I
said
"hello", all of the pamphlets, one by one, were put into my hand. I kept
them.
One was very illustrative. Just because something comes sandwiched in
between
attacks on Workers World for petty bourgeois opportunism and the p.o. box to
correspond with him directly, doesn't mean it doesn't make a lot of sense.
And
"Infuse the anti-globalisation movement with anti-war content!" makes a lot
of
sense to me. Simply put, it is the Achilles Heel of the movement now that so
many of the new activists see the war as a separate issue. Almost to a human
being, the war is opposed. But not as part of the same agenda, but rather
something that corporate rule is doing that is also bad.

The surrender of the United Nations marks the final eclipsing of this into
what
is now, more clearly than ever before, the most dangerous dictatorship in
human
history. The American Empire single handedly, in a none-too-veiled
resolution,
has managed to garner the full submission of nearly every government,
everywhere
on the globe --to the absolute authority of the United States government.
The
American state has shredded all need for either international law or human
rights, so long as the enemy can be conjured as beneath human value, evil
incarnate. Once that is accomplished, mass murder begins. The hard part to
grasp
for this movement is that the same basic aims are being led out here, in
both
instances. That the inherent imperialist logic of removing the state from
the
economy leads to the increased use of its power in terms of murderous
coercion.
The ruling class need to get out of the way of the economy is the very same
logic that compels states to murder mass numbers of people. To put another
way,
perhaps it could be said that less is more.

The apparent logic of the United Nations member states is most likely, for
some:
to save the United Nations as a body that has authority, use that authority
to
do whatever the US wants. In other words, destroy its independence to save
it.

Meanwhile, it needs to be noted that those people who have been beckoning
for
sometime to have the anti-globalisation movement move towards being led by
the
trade union bureaucrats who have opposed making a systemic analysis. This
has,
in large part, happened here in Vancouver and apparently in lesser degrees,
across the country. These forces are more respectable, and yet many of them
have
been most alarmed not at the prospect of murdering more Iraqis, not at the
prospect of doing so from a virtual standstill and for _NO_ legitimate
reason,
by any law. Now that the United Nations has completely crumbled and the
world
has, in fact, become far more dangerous (as there isn't even a minor amount
of
independence in even rhetoric from the UN members), will many of the UN
people
start to curtail their attempts to stop the war?

Let us hope not. However, if one is to judge by things like the content of
online polls and badly circulated petitions, let alone sentiments among the
halls of academe, this will actually pacify some of the would-be pacifists.
We
must hope and agitate against any such nonsense. There is going to be a war.
It
was much better for the world when the UN wasn't party to this imperialist
conquering quest. Then, at least, the naked imperial ambitions of the world
couldn't be lost to the population.

Well, we see that sort of leadership emerging in the face of the threatened
war.
We have much to hope for, in many ways. The existence of an anti-war
movement
before a war is indeed as unprecedented as has been noted by many. This
should
be celebrated. However, in the anti-war movement, has there been a
discussion of
what is needed to stop the war, to impede their ability to manoeuvre over
there
through disruption here? Well, if the argument is that people aren't at that
stage, then we must damn well get them there. There is simply no other body
to
appeal to. Today, we witnessed the utter death of the UN. Russia, France and
China voted for a resolution that will bring war. Of this, there is no
doubt,
the new inspectors' version of the Rambouillet agreement that disguises a
declaration of war as a bargaining point.

Witness from the text:

- UNMOVIC and the IAEA shall have unrestricted rights of entry into and out
of
Iraq, the right to free, unrestricted, and immediate movement to and from
inspection sites, and the right to inspect any sites and buildings,
including
immediate, unimpeded, unconditional, and unrestricted access to Presidential
Sites equal to that at other sites, notwithstanding the provisions of
resolution
1154 (1998);


Even these points alone, (http://www.un.int/usa/sres-iraq.htm) never mind
the
rest of the resolution are impossible to respond to. Iraq is sitting around
simply waiting for this war, and to accept anything at this point would mean
moving the goalposts. The government and the people know it is coming, there
is
but one hope on the horizon, however small, and that must be us.

Two things have been lost to the sectors of the population who considered
themselves a part of the anti-globalisation movement in North America. One,
initiative and two: creativity. In order that people might be able to not
get
lost, in order to actually slow down the machines of war like our movement
has
impeded the machinery of assaults on the population through trade deals.
Radical
civil disobedience, along the lines described most notably by Arundhati Roy
recently.

  We can and must start amassing our forces to block military recrutiment
centres, to find other means of using our bodies to disrupt the everyday
running
of the military. We must be ready to be called treasonous, or traitors.
Because
we will be, whatever we think of the flag.

Our understanding of the relations between the current phase of the WarT
being
pursued by Bush needs to deepen.

And finally, we do have a role for the essentially social-democratic TUB's
and
NGO's. We have to co-ordinate a movement that has, as it's guideline, the
demand
for a referendum on these matters. The reason that the American
administration
recently suggested it would be a good thing if Gerhard Shroeder "stepped
down"
was simply _the global ruling class does not allow popular discussion of the
war_. Having won his recent election on a plank of no war will be the end of
Shroeders career, ultimately.

My belief is that the global dictatorship cannot allow these things to ever
go
to referendum. It is something that many social democrats do believe, so let
them make this call and (however inadvertently) expose the anti-democratic
and
unresponsive nature of imperialist-globalisation society. That, it seems to
me,
should be the call of the pre-war movement. When the war hits, all bets are
off.
We must shut them down. We don't want to stop trade meetings anymore, we
want to
shut down their bloody machinery.

The entire world has only one place to turn. It's here, North America. What
are
we going to do with all that responsibility? Let us, as Ché Guevara so
eloquently put it, "be realistic, demand the impossible". Or, in the words
of a
single isolated member of the Judean People's Front put it: Infuse the
anti-globalisation movement with anti-war content. Or, as I might say, let's
jam
up the works and make the running of this system impossible. Now.

-------------------------------------------
Macdonald Stainsby
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
--
In the contradiction lies the hope.
                                     --Bertholt Brecht



"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and
dirt."
--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

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