‘Peaceful’ Anti-War Movements Are Bullshit

You want real peace? Fight for it

by ANDREW DOBBS

In the hours following U.S. president Donald Trump’s bellicose and hateful inaugural address, praise came from expected quarters. “We did it!” Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke said. He “couldn’t have asked for more” from the speech, Duke added.

The neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website called the inauguration “victory day.” “It’s actually happening,” the site breathed.

White nationalist ideologue Jared Taylor had VIP seating and expressed hope that “men close to [Trump] — Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller — who may have a clearer understanding of race,” will “see their influence grow” in the new administration.

The California and Southwest Division of the American Nazi Party — which appears to be just one dude who calls himself “Dan 88” — was more skeptical, but still optimistic. Trump “will backslide to a certain degree,” Dan commented, “but let’s hope it won’t be too much.”

Alongside these fascists, however, was a word of praise from a source that surprised many. Former Congressman, presidential candidate and self-identified UFO contactee Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat. “GREAT #inauguration speech! Donald Trump’s message of unity is critical at this moment,” the one-time icon of the pacifist left wrote on Facebook. “Let’s give him and ourselves a chance.”

In 2004, Kucinich ran for president from the fringes of the anti-war movement on a platform of immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, single-payer health care and instituting a federal “department of peace.”

He ran again in 2008 as the farthest-left candidate in the race, garnering so little support that he was ultimately excluded from televised debates and compelled to drop out after the Iowa and New Hampshire contests.

How, then, does such a left-wing figure end up with a political position indistinguishable from that of Nazis and Klansmen? What would make him praise the most reactionary president in U.S. history?

The answer has a lot to do with the way that fuzzy thinking degrades progressive movements. Indeed, few things have benefited reactionary politics as much as the muddling of radicalism with mysticism.

In truth, any message that tries to avoid the fundamental conflicts driving the global social and political order — or reduces them to “illusions” — is serving the dominant parties in these conflicts.

Kucinich and a variety of other “left” figures and tropes are vectors for this phenomenon, and they are some of Trump’s best hopes for defeating our resistance.

To understand Kucinich we have to remember the milieu that made him even briefly almost relevant — the anti-war movement. While U.S. warmaking has never really slowed down, its greater efficiency through remote drone killing has made it easy for those of us in the U.S. imperialist center to pretend like it isn’t happening.

The anti-war movement wasn’t universally progressive.

I remember, for example, the day in March 2003 that the United States invaded Iraq, we organized a flash mobilization next to the University of Texas in Austin that shut down a major road intersection.

At one point a prominent radical journalism professor, now notorious as a major anti-trans “feminist” thinker, asked me to help him keep an eye on two militia-movement guys that had come to show their support from a far-right, isolationist perspective.

Also there were friends I still organize with. One is an an anarchist now living in a nearby community as a sort of elder to young militants there. Later in 2003 he and I and another friend — now a Democratic Party activist and public policy professor — went to an Austin city council meeting to support a city resolution opposing the Patriot Act.

Also at that meeting on our side was a local cable access and radio personality I’d never heard of before, but who clearly had a fan base in town. He spoke for nearly 20 minutes about a variety of conspiracy theories proving that the Patriot Act was the first step in a globalist plot to kill us all.

The guy’s name was Alex Jones.

The point is that the very movement that gave rise to Kucinich and much of what we consider the left in our politics today was, at its origins, a scattered mess. There were lots of different reasons people were against the war, and the movement as a whole wasn’t rooted in any larger tendency or movement or social group — it was only about being against the war — and so it had no coherence or real values.

This is fertile ground for co-opting by reactionary forces.

There were, of course, definite anti-war tendencies. Ruling-class anti-war elements opposed specific conflicts or strategies because they believed that the wars undermined the national interests of the United States. Many of these folks were late to the game, much like the liberals who cheered on Pres. George W. Bush in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion only to realize, much later, that it was a disaster.

Other elements had the foresight to oppose the war even before it began, recognizing that it would drain resources and disrupt Western predominance over the Middle East. This position ultimately became formal U.S. policy, hence Pres. Barack Obama’s 2008 victory.

Like most ruling-class positions, however, this was not a stance with a substantial or deeply-rooted popular base. The broader middle-class position against the war was a moral one, a sense that the war was bad because it killed people.

Of course not all people are created equal, and racism and the blindness of the U.S. media to the suffering of the Iraqi and Afghan masses meant that this moral position became operative only when Americans soldiers started dying by the hundreds.

The switch to drone warfare meant that only Iraqis and Afghans — and Yemenis, Somalis, Pakistanis, etc. — died. Thus this tendency has withered away.

Finally, and in the distinct minority, were those folks who were aligned with oppressed classes in this country and around the world, and who opposed the war because it both killed tens of thousands of innocent people and because it represented an unjust expression of U.S. imperial power.

Because working folks in the United States and other oppressed people have no meaningful political institutions of their own, this tendency was mostly represented by left-wing groups that did both the lion’s share of the anti-war organizing and were essentially invisible in the larger debate over the war that Kucinich and others precipitated in 2004 and 2005.

All these boil down to two basic positions against the war — opposing its effects or opposing its causes. Many folks opposed both, but one position always dominated. The privileged elements of our society, those with power or resources, opposed the war for its effects — it hurt the national interest and it was morally wrong.

The world’s threatened people and their allies opposed the war for its causes. That is, Imperial America’s drive for global domination and its relentless demand for resources. Setting aside the minority — if ultimately victorious — ruling-class position, the mass anti-war movement was an alliance between an idealist sense that war was evil and a materialist sense that the ruling order posed an unsustainable threat to the whole world.

We can trace this alliance back to the anti-war movements of the 1960s, in the conflation between the hippie movement and the fight against the Vietnam War. Contemporary popular depictions of the era emphasize the Flower Power elements, the pacifists and spiritual idealists, less so the revolutionaries waving Viet Cong flags. The powers-that-be rewrote history to mystify the anti-war movement so that folks won’t remember how we almost won.

At the core of this mystical narrative are the concepts of “love” and “peace” as idealistic political categories. Kucinich wanted that department of peace, remember. His latest political platform was a conference organized by New Age guru Marianne Williamson that promised to “present ideas and facilitate actions that lead us as a nation from a consciousness of fear to a consciousness of love.”

These terms sound great, but as political categories they are the basis for a way of thinking that suppresses historic resistance movements in favor of woo woo reactionary thought.

“Peace” in this sense doesn’t mean authentic peace, which can only come about by resolving the very real conflicts at the heart of human civilization today — a resolution that will likely be reached only through combat. It means a hippie-fied “peace” that claims these conflicts are just illusions obscuring the truth of an idealized “brotherhood of humanity” or other expressions of global, supernatural oneness.

Like all religious concepts, it pretends that things it doesn’t like just don’t exist.

This “peace” is then used to limit all political activity so that anything conflictual or aggressive is not peaceful and therefore not progressive. This is true even if the combat or aggression is meant to defeat the instigators of the real conflicts in our society.

This limit is called “love,” and all tactics must “love” the opposition by accommodating them and minimizing any real impact against them. “Loving” tactics start by protecting the status quo and resigning themselves to performance art or self-congratulation.

Fuck that.

In the end, movements bound by the concepts of “peace” and “love” — spiritualized, idealist, pacifistic and hippie-dippy campaigns like the ones that supported Kucinich for president in 2004 and 2008 — protect war-making and make it more likely. These concepts have now been extended into the current fight against Trump, which works to his long-term advantage.

Exhibit A is the insipid slogan “Love Trumps Hate.” Liberals have appealed to this platitude when opposing disruptive protest tactics or when explaining why neo-Nazis and their ilk have to be respected — ”love” means restraining yourself in confronting them.

Physical attacks on fascists or disruptive tactics are not forms of “peaceful protest,” and only protests that meet the standard of “peace” are legitimate. That means assuming that we are all on the same side after all, and thus minimizing the harm done to our class allies. Peaceful protest means protesting the way the people you are protesting want you to.

The major media then follow along by treating non-”peaceful” or non-”loving” demonstrations — i.e., “violent” protests — as problematic even when they hurt no one, while celebrating authority-approved tactics even when they accomplish nothing.

Hence the cheerful regard they have for the “peaceful” marches with police approval and the ominous tones with which nonviolent disruptive tactics are greeted — Black Lives Matters demonstrators blocking freeways, for example.

Actions that presume that everybody could get along if they wanted to are acceptable. Anything that acknowledges the basic differences of interests between the ruling class and the oppressed is dangerous.

Kucinich has made “peace” his watchword — he’s holding up the peace sign in his Facebook photo — and thus he celebrates the “unity” that Trump expressed. He signaled his commitment to this unity, this peace, this basic coincidence of interests by outlining all the things he liked about Trump’s inaugural address.

He and a bunch of other liberals hurried to demonstrate their commitment to that delusion of unity by offering to “give Trump a chance” and to argue that Trump’s success would mean success for everybody else, too.

The big problem with this, of course, is that Trump very clearly knows which side he serves and used the chance they gave him to effectively end environmental regulation at the federal level, trap millions of Muslims trying to travel to or from the United States and to blow up the Iran nuclear deal, among many other immediate acts of reactionary terror against authentic peace or human dignity.

He used it to strike blows for the oligarchic financial elite against their real and acknowledged enemy — all other humans and life on Earth.

But there is good news, which is that the hippie position is probably less popular now than at any point in recent decades. Millions of people have awakened in hostility to the notion that we can all work it out without first defeating the elements most threatening to our freedom.

People are even celebrating the beautiful and violent assault of a neo-Nazi on film — Richard Spencer getting punched in his dumb fucking face. They are delivering a terrific and much-needed backlash at any attempt to “work with” this illegitimate nightmare regime.

They are choosing resistance over mystical silence.

This is good and necessary because all signs indicate that we are going to need a new anti-war movement very soon. Trump’s first military action as president followed upon his campaign promise to target the family members of combatants — a barbaric war crime — and demonstrates a cavalier attitude toward service members’ lives.

Add to that his saber-rattling at China and Iran, the placement of a warlusting fascist on the National Security Council, his otherwise paranoid and hawkish national security team and his fundamental disregard for human dignity and you have a formula for wars that will make even Bush and Obama blanch.

When that day comes, we won’t have the luxury of turning away allies in the fight against those crimes. The suppression of the historic movements against our own imperialism made sure of that. But we need to remember the way that mysticism like Kucinich’s opened the door to new warmongers, and the way that fuzzy-headed politics put him in league with fascists.

Fighting for peace doesn’t require unity. It requires … defiance.

Writing is hard. Money is short. Support this reporter. Follow Defiant on Facebook and Twitter.