URGENT--Anti-War Protest Today

[Crossposted at DailyKos]

The anti-war movement has called a massive emergency protest today, March 17 (in addition to the hundreds of activities already scheduled), featuring new symbolism and direct action.

In solidarity with the Iraqi victims of this horrific occupation, we call on all who oppose the war to wear something green, the color of Islam, today.

And to demonstrate in the clearest possible terms our utter disgust with the repellent crimes of the Bush administration, we call on thousands of self-sacrificing volunteers, starting in the morning hours and continuing until after midnight, to vomit on the streets and sidewalks of our major urban centers. Copiously. Young people have much to offer here, drowning the myth of their apathy as they do.

Please check in with reports on your local initiatives...

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Racial Cleansing, Sundown Towns and White Supremacy

As part of an ongoing effort to call attention to the publication of The Cost of Privilege, a splendid contribution to the struggle in the US, I will be blogging a bunch, I hope, about white supremacy and white privilege in the next few weeks.

This post was triggered by an announcement of another new book, entitled Buried In The Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America by Eliot Jaspin. A dramatic excerpt from a plug for the book will give you the idea. Jaspin, who won a Pulitzer for use of computers in reporting for the Cox newspaper group, was visiting a small Arkansas town and found some horrific relics of slavery in the burg's little history museum:

I had been in the area for several days. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that, in all the time I had been there, I had not seen a single African-American. Yet here in front of me was proof that at one time blacks had lived here. Were they still here? If not, when had they left and why? I walked out of the museum with the questions nagging me.

Over the next few days as I drove to my different appointments, I kept searching for even one black face. Tourism was one of the pillars of the local economy and along the main roads were hotels, restaurants and concert halls for country music fans. The people shopping in the stores were white. The people behind the counters were white. The people working in the motels were white. I began checking the people in cars as they passed. All white.

On my last day, I finally asked the person I was interviewing if there were any blacks in the area. “Oh no,” she said, “The Klan keeps them out.”

Now this interested me, not least because of the present tense in this last quote--"keeps them out." I haven't read Jaspin's book, but comments I've seen indicate that it is very thorough and detailed, documenting the systematic driving of Black people out of large sections of this country by lynch terror. I hope to get a review copy, to see how it handles the situation now.

Many of these areas remain lily white to this day. In fact, when Jaspin completed five years of research by writing a 16 part series for the Cox group, their flagship paper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution wouldn't publish it. It laid bare the truth about places like suburban Forsyth County, the whitest in Georgia, whose racism the AJC had been prettying up for decades. The debate over the series was covered by Creative Loafing, Atlanta's alternative weekly.

Overall, though, my impression is that Eliot Jaspin concentrates on the period from the end of Reconstruction through the 20s when a massive wave of ethnic cleansing took place:

I made a list of four or five counties that seemed to be the most suspicious and went to the Library of Congress. By cross checking my list with the New York Times Index for the decade when each collapse occurred, I found the dates when there had been stories written about some of the counties. I mounted a microfilm reel and turned the crank. As I fiddled with the focus in the dark of the library’s microfilm room, a headline appeared: “ALL NEGROES DRIVEN FROM INDIANA TOWN.”

The seven-paragraph story was to the point. “Negroes began leaving this mining town early this afternoon, following the warning issued by white residents to be out of town by 7 o’clock to night...”

Jaspin, as many readers will recognize, is working on terrain others have also researched. The best known work on the topic is by a dude named James Loewen, whose Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong have gotten a lot of well-deserved play among progressives. A couple of years ago he wrote Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, about hundreds of towns, mainly Northern and Western, like Pekin, Illinois with actual signs at the town line reading "Nigger, Don't Let the Sun Set On You Here."

Loewen's superb website has a Sundown Towns section with some excerpts, interviews, practical research tips and, best of all, some modern day use of his research. Check out his denunciation of Honda's decision to build a new plant in Greensburg, Indiana, a town lovingly described by All Things Considered on National Public Radio as a place that "could be a movie set for an ideal American small town." Always providing that your ideal is white.

In 1906, Greensburg's white residents drove out most of its black population. By 1960, the entire county, which had boasted 164 African American residents in 1890, was down to just three, all female. In the 2000 census, Greensburg still had only two black or interracial households among 10,260 residents.

He concludes:

Surely Honda owes the nation -- and not just African Americans -- a statement telling why it chose Greensburg, despite (or because of?) Greensburg's racial past. Honda should also disclose how it plans to make its workforce look like America while locating in a town that for many decades kept out Afro-America.

Another work I have only just discovered is a self-published work by Monica Davis entitled Land, Legacy and Lynching: Building the Future in Black America--she also refers to it as Lynching for Profit. The teaser she posted on the order form for her book at LuLu.com suggests she been actively involved in the ongoing struggle to defend the remaining Black-owned farmland in this country. Her thumbnail description reflects a materialist approach emphasizing what Marx called "primitive accumulation," i.e. piracy, as a key motive for this ethnic cleansing:

A century ago, the segregated South had a deep secret--black farmers owned the majority of farmland in the region. Then came the 1910 Census results along with an organized effort to drive black farmers off the land. Through lynching and intimidation, and predatory use of federal farm loan programs, hundreds of thousands of black farmers, 90% of African-American farmers, were driven from the land through a 60 year orgy of lynching, murder, intimidation and theft. Many found refuge in factory towns and became middle class through factory work, especially in the auto industry. Others gathered in segregated ghettos in the nation's urban hell holes and continue to fuel the nation's prisons.

This is more than a little reminiscent of the work done by pioneering feminist historians on the role of appropriation in the great European witch scares.

I hope to continue to blog about this theme in an upcoming post, talking about what all this means today--for the fight against white privilege and white supremacy, for the struggle for reparations for the Black Nation, and for the all the battles of people of color in the belly of the beast. Don't let that keep you from commenting now though.

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Don't-Miss Gigs! Rovics And Callahan & Moore Tour, Plus O'Neil DJ Set

For the next eleven days, folks on the East Coast have a chance to catch one hell of a double bill of political music. On a hit and run anti-war tour, Mat Callahan and Yvonne Moore will be joining David Rovics for six public shows (not counting the one at Boston's Berklee School of Music, where you need some kind of fucking all-access pass to get in--I hope they're getting paid well, the sellouts).

"Who?", I hear you mumble. Okay, short course:

Mat Callahan was in the duet Prairie Fire, kinda the house band of the RU/RCP through the mid-'70s. Their album Prairie Fire (and I've got a handful of them to this day, still sealed) was a killer. Mat went on to form The Looters, a key band in the Bay Area World Beat scene of the early '80s. He writes great for two voices, and I doubt he's ever had a better singing partner than Yvonne. I'm hoping he does "Come On, Virgie"--one of the best strike songs in the English language--but not counting on it.

David Rovics is of a newer vintage--he turns forty next month--and an older school--he's spent the last decade and a half traveling the US and foreign parts with a guitar and an ever-growing collection of original tunes. He performs at picket lines, rallies, sit-ins, riots, anywhere people are in struggle, and on occasion at clubs, in living rooms and wherever he can make a buck. Almost everything David has ever recorded can be downloaded free at his website, but show him some love and throw a couple bucks his way. I'm hoping he does the original version of "Glory and Fame"--with the verse denouncing the restoration of capitalism in the USSR--but not counting on it.

If you are in the vicinity and not in traction, do not miss:

Saturday, March 10
Vox Pop
1022 Cortelyou Road
Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY
Lars Din opening all the way from Gainesville, Florida!
Contact Sander

Sunday, March 11
Wrench in the Works
861 Main St.
Willimantic, CT
doors open at 7 pm
Contact Chris

Thursday, March 15, 7:30 pm
Edge of the Woods
379 Whalley Avenue, 2nd floor
New Haven, CT
Contact Paula

Friday, March 16
House concert
Dunkirk, MD
Contact Russell

Saturday, March 17, 7 pm
Fleming Center
1426 9th St. NW
Washington, DC
Behind the Brian MacKenzie infoshop
In addition to David and Mat & Yvonne will be Spoonboy
Contact Wade

Sunday, March 18
40th Street Stage
Norfolk, VA
Contact Star

And for easier-to-please music lovers in the New York metropolitan area, I have been given reliable information about another date. Dennis O'Neil, who can't sing, can't play, can't clap his damn hands four times in a row with the same interval between, but does have a pretty decent record collection, will be DJing at Teddy's Bar & Grill in Williamsburg on Thursday, March 22. If enough folks show up (and order), this could turn into a twice a month gig!

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Internet Women's Day!

It's a sad irony that International Women's Day has been observed pretty widely around the globe for decades, save in the US, even though the holiday was inspired by a March 8, 1908 mass walkout by women garment workers in NYC.

IWD enjoyed a US revival in the 1970s when both the women's movement born in the late '60s and various left groups, especially in the New Communist Movement, took it up fairly seriously (and fairly separately). Unfortunate developments, let's call them, in both movements meant it faded again before it could really take root.

There is a funny and heartening spontaneous IWD revival going on now, thanks to the magic of the Internet. I saw a half-dozen significant stories today on various aspects of women's oppression and on significant women's struggles.

More important, though, is the simple fact that today has been declared Blog Against Sexism Day (a/k/a Blog For Gender Liberation Day), and this highlights how much discussion of gender, of oppression and of resistance there is in the blogosphere. I'm going to climb right out on a limb here and say that the expanding net of feminist blogs (some of which might reject that particular term) resembles more than anything else I can recall the upsurge of women's consciouness-raising groups in the late '60s-early '70s.

The similarities are most striking in the close linkage of the personal and the political, in the detailed analysis of how easily-overlooked cultural phenomena reinforce the system of male supremacy and heteronormativity, in the lively debates over sexual practices and styles of dressing, in the extension of solidarity in the form of advice and compassion, in the excitement of young folks discovering a whole new way to understand the world, and in the discussion of what it will take to build a better one.

Mind you, I don't want to be 100% smiley face here. Some similarities with the consciousness-raising period of the women's movement are less happy--the occasional tendency of new converts to slam the door on newbies or those less certain about everything, the privileging of the more self-assured and articulate (too often a product of class privilege) and, no one will be surprised to hear, the too-frequent appearance of that old devil, white chauvinism.

There are, of course, several huge differences between this blogospheric development and what went on thirty years ago. Those writing today start from a whole different place and set of assumptions, ground won by their foremothers and elders. And they do it in a period which is grimmer, less optimistic and less full of society-wide ferment and excitement.

The most important difference, though, is that the blogosphere is not a women-only or particularly "safe" space. Anyone can read blogs and on many of them, anyone can post comments. A lot of guys feel perfectly entitled to do so. Some are what are known in blogspeak as "trolls"-- assholes who show up to pick a fight, often with a misleading nom du blog. Others are more interested in celebrating, in some detail, just how non-sexist they are.

Combined with the general anonymity of the Internet, this means that it tends to be much harder to build sustaining relationships based on trust than it is when you are in regular face to face contact with a group of people. Even a close-up and personal process is no insurance that participants won't end up feeling screwed over, but to face the rigors of feminist blogging over any period of time would seem to require some real ego strength.

I've blathered on long enough. If you haven't spent any time in the feminist blogosphere, your Blogging Against Sexism Day assignment is to go get your toes wet. Here are a few sites, varied in prominence, in philosophy and in range of concerns, to start at. And I emphasize start at, because many blogs have a list of recommended links that will take you to the People's Republic of Serendip in a couple of clicks. Oh, yeah, read the damn comments, too. that's half the experience.

The Primary Contradiction

Pandagon

Trash Talks Back

Pam's House Blend

Den of the Biting Beaver


If you go exploring, why not come back and comment on what you find.

[I had it all planned out to blog this today, got way behind and figured "anh, can't do everything," and was shamed back into action by the short and sweet IWD post at It's No Accident. Check it out.]

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Why No Recent Posts Here?

I've got an awful lot on my plate, and only one chopstick.

Succinct, hunh? I think I made it up myself, though I may just have forgotten who I stole it from. Sure describes how a lot of us feel these days though.

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Oy! FotM Succumbs to Celebrity Worship

Shameful, I know, but Fire on the Mountain feels that this discovery (lifted wholesale from the sometimes downright hysterical Eatliver.com image aggregating website ) deserves further circulation, even though it hints at non-materialist concepts like reincarnation...






















(h/t Paul Gallagher, on the invaluable Leftist Trainspotters list)

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The Iraq Moratorium: It's Time

You are reading an argument that the next step for the anti-war/anti-occupation movement is the establishment of a one-day-a-month Iraq Moratorium. This idea is loosely based on the hugely effective Vietnam Moratorium of 1969, with elements borrowed from more recent movements like the Nuclear Freeze and the immigrant uprising of last spring.

This post will review very briefly why the situation today calls for an Iraq Moratorium, and then sketch out five components of such a moratorium, which should provide a clearer idea of what's being proposed here. It’ll close with a few remarks (all pretty obvious) about the critical role of the Internet in such an undertaking.

Where We’re At

By the end of March, the anti-war movement will be at an awkward juncture. We will be coming off a varied batch of actions around the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq--the Fayetteville,NC protest by vets and military families, the hundreds of regional and local actions called by United For Peace & Justice, International ANSWER’s march on the Pentagon. Congress will have debated and passed some version of Bush’s $93 billion “emergency appropriation,” which many activists have focussed on forcing Congress to block. (The best case scenario, and none too likely looking at the moment, is that it passes with enough of John Murtha’s conditions in place to ensure that the occupation will have to start gradually winding down.) There is nothing major on the horizon afterwards.

At the same time, the movement has seen the rise of new forms of collective action and network building, like the “Appeal for Redress,” the seizures of Congressional offices with the Occupation Project at the core, and the call by students at UC Santa Barbara for a February 15 student strike, which was taken up at a score of campuses.

Finally, the whiteout of the growing anti-war movement in the national media shows no sign of abating. The diary that triggered this one, two nights ago, was on the current wave of Congressional office occupations. Plenty of comments came from people who didn’t know it was happening at all, and that’s here at Daily Kos, a crew that tracks Congress with an intensity rarely found in the broader US population.

Five Aspects of the Proposed Iraq Moratorium

ONE. The Iraq Moratorium is built on a foundation of linking, of concentrating and of making more visible the already existing forms of protest and forces demanding an end to the occupation. On any given day in this country there are scores of significant activities--talks given, fasts undertaken, vigils continued, rallies organized, elected officials pressured, articles written--and by and large it’s treated by the mainstream media (MSM) as not worth mentioning.

This is the heart of the approach which gave the first Vietnam Moratorium on October 15, 1969 such a huge impact--have everyone possible do something on the same day (say, the first Friday of every month) and wherever possible have that something interrupt the normal “War? What war?” flow of everyday life in as many places as possible throughout the country.

Two. The Iraq Moratorium should promote activities with the lowest possible threshold of entry to expand the reach of the movement to the tens of millions who have come to oppose the war but never taken an active step to end it. One unifying thread could be the one utilized so effectively in the October 15, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium--black armbands (and ribbons, and streamers for car antennas). Another could be locally or nationally prepared post cards addressed to Congresscritters. Clog their damn mailboxes like they’ve never been clogged before.

The internal organizing slogan I’d suggest for the campaign to build a moratorium is “Down and Out.” Push the center of activity down to the most local level practical--to neighborhoods and communities. Push ourselves to do more outreach at that level--look to models like MoveOn.org’s living room movie showings.

Three. The Iraq Moratorium will have to be a new initiative, combining limited but intense central coordination with viral organizing at the grassroots. New--the Moratorium won’t take off if it is seen as the project of any existing organization, even one as broad as UFPJ. Perhaps some respected outfit like US Labor Against the War could initiate it. (USLAW put out the first call, soon taken up by UFPJ, NOW, Operation PUSH and other broad forces, for last Spring’s moblization in NYC.)

Central--A small crew has to keep on top of things, to use diplomacy to get participation from as wide a range of forces as possible (and restrain sectarian outbursts), to wage a centralized media campaign and to provide resources to those who need it. Viral--This idea won’t become a reality because somebody tells people to do it. It will spread because it is in keeping with the tenor of the times and people’s desire to do something to end the war. Leaving planning of the actual Moratorium Day activities to folks at the most local level practical is an important road to breaking the limits many activists have come up against.

FOUR. The Iraq Moratorium will seek to impinge on the normal business of society in order to highlight the costs of the occupation, both in Iraq and here, and to force the war to end. This formal moratorium aspect will initially be concentrated on campuses (which is why a May starting date is very important). A general strike to end the war would be nice, but it won’t happening this spring. Calling a consumer boycott--without some analysis that tells us we can affect sales (generally, or of some commodity like gasoline) to the point where it would clearly show up as more than normal business fluctuations or statistical noise--would likewise set us up for MSM declarations that we failed.

That does not mean it will be limited to college strikes and high school blowouts. The moratorium should adapt tactics like those of the AIDS movement’s Day Without Art, which had a giant impact in its first few years, or the solidarity shutdowns by small businesses during last Spring’s immigrant uprising.

5. The Iraq Moratorium will carry a simple message: end the occupation pronto and bring the troops home. That will be the effective message because that’s what unites the majority of people who oppose the war. Any slogans suggested by the central organizers should reflect this, but there’s no way that a project like this can enforce slogan discipline (or, for that matter, tactical uniformity)--nor should it. The most important thing is the breadth and depth of participation, period.

The Netroots and the Internet

Obviously there’s much more I could write to flesh out this proposal. Just as obviously, these ideas will benefit immeasurably from readers giving them a thorough look-over and offering criticisms, comments and suggestions. That’s the first valuable role that the Internet can play, but it is certainly not the only one. Ideas for novel tactics will be needed; so will short reports on past or ongoing campaigns that might hold lessons for this proposal.

If this is taken up, the Internet will be a central force in mobilizing people, and not just the usual suspects. An example--many here are also deeply into one or another music scene. Would it not be possible to issue a call that on Moratorium day (or better still all during the week leading up to it), bands add to their set at every performance one of three covers--”Give Peace A Chance” or Edwin Star’s “War” or, say, “Traveling Soldier”? If a central website were maintained, pledges and gig reports could plug participants and encourage others to get on board.

This points to the next obvious need--a central website, changed daily, with reports on local planning and mobilizing for the Iraq Moratorium, links to news coverage it does get, tools like model leaflets, and most importantly, the capacity to take in and turn around 24 hour coverage in various media on the day of the Iraq Moratorium itself.

And of course folks here may have access to other crucial resources--media contacts, anti-war donors, celebs who might want a piece of this, etc.

But for now, what this proposal needs most is your thoughts and suggestions.

So holler, y’all!

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