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know where they take these polls. And the media doesn't cover
it, so unless we go into the streets and make a big brouhaha,
the media is not going to cover our phone calls and the letters
we write in protest.
VINING: When people get to the street, it's almost always
not the first option. That happens when we see the system
not working. When we saw that the majority of Americans were
against this war, and when we had [Senator Arlen] Specter's
and [Senator Rick] Santorum's offices both tell us that every
single phone call except one in both offices was against this
war, and they went and voted for it anyway, people said, "They
don't care. The system's not working, they're not listening."
Then people go to street action. We don't get attention until
we're in the streets, so people think we've just started.
I think that's one of the difficulties, why we can be seen
as polarizing or we can be misinterpreted. Very few people
go right into the streets, and when they do, [the actions]
are generally very small. But when you see, like in October,
100,000 or 150,000 people in the streets in D.C., that's not
just people who said, "I've got nothing else to do."
JACOB: I'm very concerned how people in other countries perceive
us, that they think that we just follow our government into
whatever it is that they agree upon. Just as [Vining] said,
we called Arlen Specter and we called our representatives,
and they voted another way. Street action is an important
way of saying to other countries who seem to be, like, "Oh,
you have a free government, you vote for your representatives."
And I'm, like, "They represent us, but they don't vote
for us all the time, and I can't really pull them out of office
when I don't agree with them." I wanted to send a tape
to the BBC saying, "Help us. We don't agree." Just
to let other countries know how we stand. I don't want other
countries to see our government's actions as representing
our whole entire country.
BARTONE: It really helps to put a human face on dissent.
Any opinion that challenges the status quo can be perceived
as a scary thing. But, for example, if you find that your
next-door neighbor is protesting, you may begin to think that
it's not so far-fetched, that it's right in your backyard.
SCHOYER: It's saying that we're here, we're in Pittsburgh
and we're working. I think it's good for the activists, to
make them keep going, to realize that this is a big movement,
that they're actually doing something. That it does make a
difference, even if CNN doesn't cover it very well.
What is the climate for dissent nowadays? And how do today's
activists and street protesters differ from those who protested
previous wars?
VINING: I was in college during the Reagan years. I remember
never wanting to be called an activist, even as I was doing
activism. Somewhere it became a bad thing to protest. What
I'm seeing very recently -- last three years, probably since
Seattle -- is that among young people protest is not a bad
thing. There's a real culture now, especially among young
people, that it's okay to protest.
EIRENE: Back in the 1960s, anarchism was a dirty word. Most
people were Socialists and Marxists. Now, because of the nature
of anarchism, no one is waiting around for someone to take
the lead. You'll find out about something going on here, and
the Beehive Collective going on here, and you'll find out
about people organizing a little vigil here. There's no central
committee, and I think that that aspect of it is positive.
Also, never again will we sit around and try to figure out
what rhymes with "One, two, three, four."
JACOB: Sometimes kids get afraid of being put in categories.
A lot of people shy away from being called liberal.
BELL: I kind of marvel at the idea that being called a liberal
is putting you in a category. I remember only too well my
husband scoffing at being called liberal: "I'm a Communist,
not a liberal!"
JACOB: Among the high-school crowd, which is what we primarily
deal with, a lot of kids are certainly interested in [the
war], either for or against, oftentimes just because they
don't know a lot about it, even with it being prominent in
the news. They don't know all the issues; we weren't very
old at the time that the Gulf War was happening, so they don't
really know that history. It's an interesting process because
they'll sometimes form an opinion before they have a lot of
facts. So sometimes [activizing them] can be battle, but they
seem to be more open to it the more information you give them,
and the more opportunity you give them to learn more or to
do something. What interests them the most is not fliers and
letter-writing. It's more protesting and rallies and petitions
-- action, physical work.
BARTONE: That's probably true of the college crowd, too,
except people are occasionally openly hostile. Sometimes they're
very approachable as well, they just kind of feel a little
paralyzed by the way that society is. They feel a little bit
powerless, I think.
BELL: With the U.S.A. Patriot Act, people are getting concerned.
At the meetings people are worried -- what can they do to
us? My concern is that if we don't do something now, if we
don't act now and just let this Patriot Act intimidate us,
then in little while we won't be able to do anything anymore.
I lived in Nazi Germany and I know what it's like when, slowly,
you can do nothing.
There's been a lot of mythmaking attached to the Viet Nam
era protests. How does that peace movement compare to today's?
EIRENE: It's interesting, because [that movement] really
came out of nowhere. One minute we were watching Dick Van
Dyke, and the next minute Abbie Hoffman was on TV saying that
we should shoot our parents. My dad and I were watching that
at the same time and he told me not to get any ideas.
And so we see where things have really flipped...we can see
now that probably the biggest obstacle to peace is my generation.
After Viet Nam was over, and our butts were no longer on the
line, for 25 years the Vietnamese were ground into the earth,
and my generation did not come to their aid. So, in 1995,
when the sanctions were lifted off of Viet Nam, they were
willing to take Nike -- it takes three months working in Viet
Nam to buy a pair of Nike shoes made at the factory you're
working in -- and all the oil companies, too. One of the most
untapped resources in the world of oil is in Southeast Asia.
My concern is that we create within ourselves an urgency
that's going to give us consistency. When the Iraqi war was
over, everybody went away, and here these people were living
under sanctions. They cut [the Iraqis] off from the whole
world and had them drinking water that was like it was out
of the Monongahela. I don't know how you do that, in terms
of instilling commitment. But I'm not concerned with the peace
movement. I'm concerned with the cultures and nations and
countries and people we're destroying. If my generation had
taken one or two years to investigate what Viet Nam was like
in the postwar era, they would have never accepted the Nike
factories that so many of the students now are protesting.
If all of us had been working on this since 1991, there would
be no Iraqi war.
We can't even imagine the type of poverty that people have
to live in because of the aftermath of war. The best that
we can hope for as activists in times like this is to interact
with newly interested people and to get some kind of depth
of commitment. Because Americans, they always -- if someone
steps on their foot, they move it. This type of crisis orientation,
you know...
JACOB: Viet Nam really showed that there has to be a commitment
in multiple fields. You can't look at just one side of an
issue and assume that you've won.
BARTONE: There is almost a feeling among my generation that
we kind of don't know what we're doing. Sure, we have all
the lore of the '60s to go by, but it's also so much different,
with the Patriot Act and legislation like that.
EIRENE: Today there is a really miraculous dynamic of a nonviolent
way of life, and that's where students nowadays are way ahead
of the game, in terms of animal rights and being a vegan.
And the whole puppetista thing -- in the 1960s it was just
like a dream that anything could ever be like that, and now
it's the norm. We see a lot of creativity. In Seattle, when
the police literally took the signs away from people, they
didn't know what to do. So they started writing things on
their arms and on their shirts.
WAZIRUDDIN: Some journalists have this cartoon image of the
'60s. They think that the late '60s was the height of activism,
when really the early '60s was when they were doing the work
of getting people organized. They have this cartoon image
from the late '60s that people going wild on campus is where
social change comes from. Looking for that cartoon image and
not finding it, and not really looking at what is there, they
say, "Oh, there's no activism here," because there
are no clowns. There is a lot of misunderstanding from journalists
who aren't activists and haven't done some of the work, or
even looked at some of the work, so they don't know what they
should be covering or could be covering. I've had media people
call and say, "Oh, they're anarchists. How can they be
nonviolent? Don't they break windows? Isn't that what anarchists
do?" That's really ignoring the whole history of anarchism.
That's not even doing the basic reading.
What do you think of the media's treatment of the peace movement?
EIRENE: The media is a trap. I would go to demonstrations
where everybody was getting along, we were really kicking
ass, they were chaining themselves to buildings and everybody
was upset. Then people would look at the nightly news and
the newspaper and say, "We got no coverage."
In the '60s they used to say, "If it's not on film,
it hasn't happened." That's really unfortunate. Of course
it happened. To somehow say that this virtual reality is the
only reality...I would judge things by how this affects all
the sick and dying Iraqi children. How is what I'm doing affecting
that. As opposed to becoming a clown -- and there's nothing
wrong with clowns -- so that the media covers your story.
The media likes crowds, they like big stuff. I swear that
a lot of people just walked away from the anti-sanctions stuff
with Iraq because we weren't getting any coverage. We would
go to [CMU's] Software Engineering Institute every year on
the anniversary of when we bombed the civilian shelter [in
Baghdad during the Gulf War], February 12, and it was getting
really sad in terms of people showing up.
BELL: You have this big demonstration in Washington, and
a small group of people is throwing paint or whatever, and
that gets covered. Or a fight breaks out among half a dozen
people. But they don't cover the thousands who march peacefully.
That's frustrating, because it gives the wrong impression.
They don't like peaceful demonstrations. That's too boring.
EIRENE: That's why it was exciting when people were being
shot in the face with hockey puck bullets -- not little rubber
bullets -- in Seattle in 1999. The media didn't report it,
so the Indy Media people went to the media in Seattle and
said, "Here's video." Then they had to report it.
We've entered a whole new era of becoming the media, making
our own media. I was at the 2000 Republican National Convention
and I walked into this room with 75 computers in it. It was
the Indy Media site, with a Web site, a newspaper, a Web radio
station and even a TV station uploading to a satellite. This
is a lot different than getting on a bus, getting off, protesting
for a few hours and back. The depth of that makes me very
hopeful.
What little violence occurs at these protests does draw attention
to the cause. How do you define nonviolent resistance? Where
is the line?
BELL: As long as you don't hurt other people.
VINING: First of all, we're not just talking about nonviolence
in the abstract. We're talking about nonviolent resistance
to violence. I think we have to keep that in mind. People
look to us as this peace movement and pull us out of the culture
we live in. What is a nonviolent response to resisting and
trying to stop a violent act? Right now we want to stop children
and maybe millions of people from being killed in the Middle
East. So the question is, how do we take action to stop that
in a way that's nonviolent?
WAZIRUDDIN: There's a difference between militancy and violence.
Militancy is about people saying, "Something bad is happening
that's part of my life, I don't have control over my life,
and I shouldn't just sit around, I should do something about
it." It's about people in society deciding they won't
take something anymore and getting control over their political
and economic life. That doesn't mean violence. It means that
they're active. It means they're going to the source of the
problem and changing it directly. It doesn't mean they're
using force to hurt people to get there. A sit-in or an occupation
of a factory by workers is militant but it's not violent.
It doesn't have to be violent.
BELL: Some wise person once said, "Evil happens when
a lot of good people don't do anything."
VINING: And disruptive isn't violent. We often intend to
disrupt things, for the system not to function for a day --
whether it's because we fill the jail cells, or because we
tie up the fax machines. That's not violent. We're saying
that the system is not working, and it's causing violence,
and we're trying to disrupt that. What I don't want to see
is nonviolence ever meaning passive. Because to me that is
actually violent; if I allow someone to wreak devastation
in this world by my silence, I think I am almost violent in
my passivity.
That's the same argument put forward by anti-abortion activist
James Kopp when he explained why he shot and killed Dr. Bernard
Slepian in Amherst, New York.
VINING: That same justification is used to justify war sometimes.
I would say, in terms of the demonstration, that a nonviolent
resistance is one that does not cause harm, that does not
directly lead to the escalation of harm to other human beings
-- or animals, or life.
BARTONE: An entire movement can't come to an agreement on
what is violent or nonviolent either. There are people who
feel that breaking a corporate window is nonviolent; there
are people who would totally disagree. But the two have the
same end goal. People need to use their own best judgment.
EIRENE: My main concern is people who keep me up talking
until two or three in the morning about revolutionary violence,
and the glorification and romanticizing of the Weather Underground
and Ted Kaczynski. Of course, my friends who were talking
about revolutionary violence in the '60s are now selling antiques.
The Pittsburgh Regional Antiwar Convergence takes place January
24-26, and will include marches in Oakland and the South Side,
along with countless other attractions. For a detailed calendar,
check in with the Pittsburgh Organizing Group (www.organizepittsburgh.org)
or the Thomas Merton Center (www.thomasmertoncenter.org).
For updates on the action that weekend, your best bet is the
Pittsburgh Independent Media Center (www.indypgh.com).
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