No Way to Peace\Peace is the Way

—The First Six Months of the War Against Terrorism—

Howard J. Ehrlich
The Prejudice Institute
2743 Maryland Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21218
hjehrlich@aol.com

A prefatory note

In part one I examined the sociopolitical conditions enveloping the war in Afghanistan and the expanding war against terrorism during the first six months following 9-11. In that essay I reviewed the importance of oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Basin, the function of the military and the expansion of American bases in Central Asia . I examined the role of ethnocentrism and ethnoviolence and the issues of class and war. Finally, I looked at the news media, secrecy, and the consequences of the developing repressive legislation and state action.
In this essay, I build on that analysis addressing myself to a strategy for the peace movement.  My intent is not to supply a blueprint or even a catalog of tactics that activists can adapt or plug into. Rather, my intent is to sketch “strategic action sites” for a peace movement, a sketch that is based on social anarchist theory.

Peace is a Process

An anti-war movement is not by itself a movement towards peace. Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is a process, not an event. It is a mode of organizing and a way of life. War is an
event; it ends with a truce, a surrender, or a defeat. Protesting the war or such activities as the breach of disarmament treaties, the storage of nuclear and chemical weaponry, the use of
depleted uranium artillery, sowing land mines, or other forms of militarism amounts to treating symptoms. It will help in reducing or preventing much suffering and physical damage, but it does
not necessarily move us forward. In fact, the side effects of the “war against terrorism” have already weakened and will continue to weaken the fabric of American society long after the
mythical last shot is fired. Ending the war may be a precondition for peace, but it is not sufficient. Worse yet, the end of the war will likely see the end of most anti-war coalitions around the country. (The New Left and the war in Vietnam is a good example of this. Only a few organizations survived the signing of the peace treaty.)

An antiwar movement is an activist and oppositional movement. Its motive force is reformist: to stop the war. While its tactics may include civil disobedience and, occasionally,
direct action, antiwar coalitions are seldom directed at fundamental social changes. Large coalitions are often good at creating spectacles, rallies and demonstrations, and other transient forms of protest. They tend to be poor at recruiting since they have no organizational base.

People come and go to its activities, sometimes staying on but more often becoming isolated or burning out. Generally, they are “staffed” by career activists who are paid by some larger
organization to be politically involved, or by members of small revolutionary groups which may be coalition members, or otherwise by people whose socioeconomic status allows them the time to do movement work. They may be students, or declassed and marginal individuals, or persons
supported by others. Their common threads are, of course, their revulsion to the war, their humanitarianism, and their discretionary time.

Antiwar coalitions have no theory of society or social change. Their “membership” is typically mired in a liberal capitalism and sometimes a vaguely democratic socialism. To the extent that they do articulate a theory of change it is a fuzzy meliorism, that is, a belief that the world is getting better with the help of good people acting together. The major mechanism for this betterment is considered to be electoral politics. A small set of activists choose other forms of expression such as civil disobedience, although their objective remains the same. That is, they
seek to influence the legislative process.

The “mission statements” of coalitions are righteous, calling for an end to the war, aid to its victims, opposing political repression and ethnoviolence, and endorsing a vaguely articulated demand for social justice. Typically their demands are not only beyond their own power, but are
often beyond the intellectual grasp or imagination of those in power.

Finally, coalitions tend to endorse nonviolence in their tactics of protest, though not necessarily as a philosophical tenet of their mission statement. Given the philosophical ambiguity of
“violence” and “nonviolence,” as well as serious political disagreements about the meaning of “direct action” and “civil disobedience” and their relation to nonviolence, movement organizers often stretch for the lowest denominator in order to hold a coalition together. This obviously creates a basic tension in the organizing of protests.

The overarching problem of the peace movement —if not American politics—is the failure to move beyond what is to what could be. It is most of all a failure of imagination. But it is also indicative of an underlying fear of change, a fear that has now been exacerbated by the truly unexpected and complex events since 9-11. The Bush administration’s major propaganda
campaign about “homeland security” has added considerably to peoples’ fears. Any strategy has to be molded to the present social context. The war in Afghanistan was a popular war, and most people, including many who have been generally appalled by war, saw this as unavoidable if not “just.” Its acceptance is built upon the more sordid dimensions of American national character: authoritarianism, individualism, anti-intellectualism, patriarchy, and ethnocentrism. It has led to a closed-mindedness and level of political ignorance which makes organizing extraordinarily difficult and which weakens the fabric of democracy.

To be sure, these obstacles have been present over a long time, but now there is a new catalyst. The anxieties and stress engendered by the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,  the anthrax-contaminated mail, and the demonization of al Qaeda strengthened by the US Attorney General’s repeated warnings of an imminent terrorist attack, have spurred Americans to search for security.

They have done so in a worrisome way. In their search for reassurance and leadership, people have turned to the government and the President. The week before 9-11
Bush’s approval rating was 51%. Two weeks later it had soared to 90%. By the end of the year, 2001, support for the Afghani war and the approval ratings of the President remained at record
highs, although “confidence in the government” declined slightly. By the summer, 2002, Bush’s ratings had slipped to65% and Americans were beginning to express concern over the economic state of the union —corporate corruption scandals, layoffs, and increasing unemployment. The threatened preemptive war in Iraq elevated Bush’s ratings, although almost two out of five Americans indicated their preference for further diplomatic efforts a well as support from the U.N. (Gallup, September 18, 2002)

A look at public attitudes regarding civil liberties is instructive. The NPR/Kaiser/Kennedy School poll taken at the end of November, 2001 reported: “The vast majority of Americans are
willing to forgo some civil liberties to fight terrorism and they trust the government to do the right thing in carrying out the fight. However, Americans also hold strong beliefs in principle
about civil liberties. They want some checks on executive power, and they do not want to discriminate against any particular ethnic group.” (See the NPR website, npr.org) Two weeks later the New York Times/CBS poll reported similar findings (nytimes.org). In both surveys, however, there were substantial numbers of people who were not fully supportive of Bush administration policies. Opposing numbers ran from one-fourth to one-third of the people surveyed, with considerable variation across questions. This proportion, probably not
coincidentally, is roughly the same as the proportion as those who identify themselves as “ liberal.”

On the way to peace we have two simultaneous objectives. First, we need to increase the density of symbols of opposition. Through demonstrations and vigils, handouts and graffiti,
through independent media centers and infoshops, fundraisers and socials, through wearing buttons and talking it up, by civil disobedience and direct action—through every means in
redundance—we need to be able to display to people everywhere that there is a dedicated opposition to the present policies of war.

Second, we need to build a movement. If the same fifty to 100 people show up at every demonstration, if the local coalition isn’t increasing in size, then their actions are incomplete,
maybe even counterproductive. (Actually, it would be more desireable if the local coalition stayed the same size, but gave birth to additional peace groups.) The productivity of a
demonstration is in the day after. And any demonstration that hasn’t planned for follow-up activity risks being nothing more than a spectacle.

Building a movement means having an organization or network of groups that can accommodate, educate, nurture, and socialize new recruits. It means having an organizational
structure that embodies a participatory democracy and a nonalienating process. (Much has been written about this. See, for example, Brian Martin’s “Activists and Difficult People,” Social Anarchism, 2001, No. 30 and my own “Anarchism and Formal Organization” as well as the essays by Tom Knoche, Caroline Estes, and David Wieck all in Howard J. Ehrlich, ed.,
Reinventing Anarchy, Again, AK Press, 1996.)
The strategy for achieving these objectives derives from a social anarchist theory. It consists of five parts; and while its articulation may make it sound definitive and canonical, it is only a sketch.

Delegitimize authority. The glue that holds society together is one part predictability —the belief that people and the world in its everyday operation are understandable and more or less
repetitive. Another part is the belief system that rationalizes the operation of the state as being just. The sense that justice will prevail, that this is a just society, is critical to the suppression of
revolutionary ideas. Bureaucracy is the organizational form for masking injustice; the mass media of education and entertainment are the primary forms for the idealization of the society as just; and the spectacle of caring leaders and the deserving rich puts a human face on breeches of
the predictable and the just. Institutional religion soothes the victims of injustice and deflects their needs through ritual and the pursuit of an afterlife.

These are our targets, that is, the authorities and representatives of these institutions of pacification. Their mission, in this war on terrorism, is to convince the public that the war is just, that the sacrifice of civil liberties is part of that pursuit of justice, and that we can trust them to do what is in our best interest. Our mission is to deflate their authority by convincing the public that they are neither honest, nor necessarily competent, and that their motivations are directed to the accumulation of wealth for the wealthy and power for the powerful. In all of our activities, we need to emphasize social injustice and the role of “legitimate” authorities in attempting to persuade us that the privileges of class and the power of elites are natural events.

Oppose capitalism. The alternatives to capitalism are not entirely clear, but the need for such is clear, and the call for changing the political economy has to be built into the peace movement.

Capitalism is defined by the private ownership and control of the means of production, a market structure to control that production, a system for the making of profits and for the distribution of those profits to the owners. As a political economic system, it requires the concentration of
power to protect itself and its markets. It requires, too, the constant expansion of its markets and its profits.

Capitalism protects itself through the cooptation of alternatives and through violence.  The battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda and the expansion of the war against terrorism, are in no small part a struggle for control of the oil and gas reserves around the Caspian Sea basin.  Oil is manifestly central in the pending war against Iraq. This battle for resources also entails a battle for the maintenance and expansion of US bases in Central Asia and the Middle East in order to protect the flow of oil and, certainly, to maintain military dominance. It is also a war, like all wars, that enriches the military and defense contractors as well as those who profit from the weapons trade.

An anticapitalist program for the peace movement is also an anti-militarist program. It would include: ending the arms trade, halting the new Star Wars program, agreeing to the elimination of nuclear weapons and chemical-biological weapons, the end to land mine production, and a halt to the design and manufacture of fighter planes, bombers, and warships.

Not the least an anticapitalist program would require the economic conversion of war industries to the production of more socially useful goods. Military spending creates fewer jobs than does civilian sector spending and impedes the development of liberatory technology.

Finally, the anticapitalist peace movement must have a clear economic program. This would include the building of alternative institutions such as food coops, infoshops, local exchange and trading systems, co-housing and communal housing arrangements. A peace movement must also be a movement for worker-community ownership and control.

This is clearly a central direction for a noncapitalist economics.
In calling for an anticapitalist opposition, peace activists clash with those building mass antiwar coalitions. Although many antiwar activists are themselves in opposition to a political
economy of capitalism, they argue that such a demand would be inappropriate in an antiwar coalition. Mass coalitions, they argue, are comprised of multitudinous interests but opposition to
“the system” is not salient. The argument is substantially correct. For most people, signing petitions, mobilizing the vote, lobbying, even participating in legal demonstrations is not conditioned on an opposition to the political economy. For them, capitalism is a given and its validity is not in question. Even those antiwar activists who may question its validity often dismiss the call for economic alternatives as utopian.

Recognizing this, peace workers have few choices—at least when it comes to contributing to mass demonstrations and other displays of opposition. We need to participate, assuming that the representations made by the antiwar organizers are not antithetical to ours. But our mission remains that of building a consciousness of the violence and exploitation built into capitalism and to put forward that message even within antiwar organizations. At the same time, and most importantly, we continue in our own movement building.

Greening the Movement. The peace movement needs to be Green. The resistance to illegitimate authority and the opposition to capitalism should be organized in an environmentalist
context.The war is devastating to farmland and waterways, and the ozone layer is being seriously threatened by the enormously harmful emissions of jet fighter planes. Under the cover of the
war, the Bush administration has launched a major assault against the environmental movement, domestically and internationally. Their goals are to enhance the short-term profits of the oil, gas, coal, and lumbering industries, while shielding them from increased costs of the protection of air
and water resources and the protection of animal and wilderness habitats.

The U.S. Climate Action Report 2002, which seemed to have escaped White House censorship, is directly relevant to the peace movement. Writing in The Nation (July 8, 2002), Mark
Hertsgaard commented:

"The report’s biggest surprise was its admission that human activities, especially the burning of oil and other fossil fuels, are the primary cause of climate change....But the White house has resisted this conclusion. After all, if burning fossil fuels is to blame for global warming, it makes sense to burn less of them. To a lifelong oilman like Bush, who continues to rely on his former industry colleagues for campaign contributions as well as
senior staff, such a view is heresy."

It would also make sense not to be building pipelines across Afghanistan and the Stans, nor to be deploying military to protect them.

The peace movement needs to confront its identity with a social ecology and articulate a clear message regarding alternative energy, conservation, re-use recycling, and the stewardship of the environment. To avoid cooptation, it has to do so, by explicitly articulating the relationship of an ecologically conscious program with the destructive consequences of capitalism.

Neutralize violence. Americans are in denial about violence; the antiwar and the anti-globalization movements are ambivalent about it. Violence is an integral part of American culture. Violent crimes exist at a high level, and people are injured more severely today during crimes than in an earlier time. Violent behaviors are starting at an earlier age, and homicide is now the leading cause of death among adolescents. Family violence is the leading cause of injury to women, and the physical punishment of children within the family is pervasive. Violence is a mainstay of mainstream television. Random, retaliatory, and recreational violence have become major occurrences. Ethnoviolence victimizes one out four minorities annually. Being at war not
only increases the prevalence of violence in the society, but this war has added a xenophobia directed at persons of presumed middle-eastern appearance.

As we look at the level of approval of the war in Afghanistan and the willingness of four out five Americans to send troops to Iraq (Gallup poll, November 26-27), we need to gaze in our
cultural mirror. This is a violent society, and the density of symbols of violence and the commonplace of violent acts simply triggers the willingness to wage war.

The peace movement needs to be nonviolent in its tactics today. “Nonviolent action,” as Brian Martin says in the opening of his extraordinary book, “is the most promising method for moving
beyond capitalism to a more humane social and economic system” (Brian Martin, Nonviolence versus Capitalism. London: War Resisters International, 2001; available also at
<http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/01nvc/>).

Nonviolence certainly prefigures our own sketch of a good society and it maximizes our potential for recruiting people to our movement. Nonviolent activism does not guarantee safety from the violence of police and military, nor does it come with a guarantee of success. On the other hand, violence carries a
stronger likelihood of failure today, and is inconsistent with our goals.

David Cortwright, writing on the power of nonviolence in The Nation, February 18, 2002,
comments:

"The choice of nonviolence should not be left to chance. It must be integrated into every element of the global justice movement. It should be publically proclaimed as the
movement’s guiding principle and method. The legitimate search for assertive and disruptive methods can and should proceed, but this must not be confused with vandalism and violence. The most radical and effective forms of social action are those that heighten the contrast between the just demands of the global justice movement and the brutal actions of the police. Only by preserving nonviolent discipline can the movement occupy
and hold the moral high ground and win political support for necessary social change."

Counter Disinformation. The majority of Americans can not answer basic questions about the political economic system of the US. Moreover, they have been socialized not ask political
questions and, when they do, to ask the wrong questions. Extraordinary numbers believe in the existence of supernatural beings from gods to ghosts, and in the power of the stars to determine their lives. They have little awareness of world geography or of the oppressive consequences of
the major transnational capitalist institutions such as the World Bank. The identity of the IMF, NAFTA, or the G-7 are an alphabetic jumble. At a personal level, most fail to recognize the
cumulative privileges accorded those who are white, male, and Christian. It is on a solid base of ignorance and false information that the political elites can broadcast “disinformation.”

Disinformation, as the media analyst Neil Postman put it, is fragmented, misleading, irrelevant, and often shallow information “that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads away from knowing.” If you listen closely to the press
conferences of Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, you will hear a master of disinformation. Both he and the President frequently create the illusion of meaning. So the Secretary told
assembled reporters and the country that bin Laden was either alive or dead, in Afghanistan or somewhere else. The following day, Bush at his press conference announced in all seriousness
that bin Laden “is on the run, if he’s running at all” (December 27, 2001). Despite these absurd tautologies, none of the journalists commented or questioned the speakers.

We need to counter disinformation in two ways. One is to educate ourselves. A peace movement has to have a program of internal education. Of course its major function is to help its
membership in learning such things as the history of nonviolence, theories of revolution, or the pitfalls of workers’ control. But it has another significant function. It can counter any elitist
tendencies that might develop as consequence of the difference in knowledge and experience that might prevail in the group.
Educational outreach has to encompass all forms and media. Movement educators have to be aware that the social context of teaching and learning is critical, that not everyone knows how to
be a student, and that there are class and cultural differences in learning styles. However we do it and in whatever context, countering disinformation is difficult work.

Reinvent Anarchy. It is at first necessary to suspend popular stereotypes and newsmedia warnings which conflate the philosophy and practice of anarchism with violence and chaos.

Anarchist ideas have likely been around whenever people have protested against injustice and oppression. In fact the historian Peter Marshall, traces the appearance of organized anarchist
ideas to the Taoists of sixth century China. (See his Demanding the Impossible. London: Fontana Press, 1993.) The guiding principles of contemporary anarchist philosophy include the rejection of all forms of domination and the acceptance of both human autonomy and the idea of community. It supports the ultimate replacement of the nation-state with a network of voluntary associations as well as providing egalitarian options for the more authoritarian institutions of modern society. As in any political movement, there are those anarchists who are retreatists, but most anarchists are urbanites favoring decentralized, ecologically balanced small-scale, self-
governing communities utilizing liberatory (as opposed to centralizing) technologies.

The anarchist moment exists within antiwar coalitions particularly with regard to decision-making and group process. There are five components of that process: diffusing the concentration of power within the group; maximizing individual participation; decision-making by consensus or other hierarchical process; deflating elitism—sexism, racism, ageism and all other forms of
authoritarianism; and a program of education.

Anarchists share much in common with Marxists and Liberals with regard to a critique of this war and the institutions of society. One serious point of departure, and that which is central to a peace movement and absent from the antiwar movements, is the utopianism in anarchist thought.

The antiwar movement calls for an end to the barbarism; the anarchist movement calls for the beginning of a new society.
Building a movement requires, particularly, that there be attainable goals. The peace movement needs to have a sketch of a peaceable society. Without it, it is just an oppositional movement with no necessary life beyond its points of opposition. A sketch is a sketch. We cannot at this time connect the dots, but we must have a sense of direction. We need to ask ourselves what a good society would look like. What would it take to move from here to there?

There is, of course, a next step—a leap. And here we separate many, certainly the utopians from the “realists.” It is a step from sketch to performance. Is what we are doing now leading us
to a good society? Do we have the courage and the imagination to act as if we were engaged in an “experiment in the future?” These are the questions which will guide us on the way to peace.

Coda

There are many in the antiwar movement longing for short term victories. In fact, most community organizing manuals coach organizers to set their sights on short-term, winnable
goals. Unfortunately, at the level of national policies there are not many such objectives. The result is often a focus on protest as the goal. This transformation of means to ends is inherently
self-destructive.

In radical antiwar circles, A. J. Muste’s aphorism “There is no way to peace, peace is the way” stands almost as a Zen Koan. (It exists in different guises in many philosophical statements, and
is the inspiration for the title of this paper.) While it may appear also to confuse means and ends, it is more profound. Its central meaning is simple: the means to change must prefigure the
changes themselves. Without a conscious effort at building a movement, exposing the toxicity of authoritarianism, capitalism, and violence, and generating the patterns of a good society, we will simply recapitulate the past having learned nothing from history.

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