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CounterPunch
February
12, 2003
American Journal
"The Largest
Outcry in History";
Should Michael Lerner Speak?
Kucinich: It's A Go; Who's Howard Dean? Kansas Speaks: "Jah
is God!"
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
We're witnessing the largest outcry in history
against an imminent war with the imminent aggressors-- the US
and UK--so frightened of the outcry that they have been trying
to curb the demonstrations in New York and London.
The one in New York is scheduled for
February 15, with the gathering point as of this writing at noon
, 49th st and 1st Avenue. On Monday a federal court ruled in
favor of the NYPD, denying next Saturday's demonstrators the
right to march past the United Nations. Desmond Tutu told the
march's organizers in United For Peace and Justice that the ban
reminded him of the days of apartheid in South Africa. For updates,
check the UFPJ website or listen to WBAI radio. The UFPJ website
also has information about the various feeder marches that will
meet earlier and proceed to the main march. At time of writing,
the ban is being heard before the 2cnd Circuit Court of Appeals.
It will be a remarkable moment, a worldwide
demonstration for peace, perhaps the largest worldwide protest
in history or at least in modern times. One other major demonstration
in this country is planned for San Francisco but the date is
shifted to Sunday Feb 16.
There are demos round the world--more
than 306 cities--on all continents! There's even a demonstration
scheduled in Antarctica, outside the McMurdo Station there. As
to New York, the buzz is this is going to be a major amount of
people. Nobody is giving out numbers except to say it will build
on the success of the Jan 18 demonstration which the Washington
Post called the largest anti-war demo since the Vietnam period.
The London Daily Mirror several weeks ago forecast that there
would be ten million turning out worldwide for all these protests
The Gothamites on the streets Saturday
will include plenty that watched in horror as the World Trade
Center fell. Survivors and survivors' kin are playing a prominent
role. The anti-war sentiment continues to build here even as
the Big Apple is a prime target for further damage. Whatever
the stresses and strains within the movement about ANSWER, United
for Peace and Justice is organizing this one. Leslie Cagan and
other long-time hands are involved. Several hundred volunteers
made a huge literature outreach last weekend. There's lots of
labor involvement, youth, greens, war veterans.
After 9-11, there were pledges about
ensuring better cooperation between federal authorities and the
NYPD. That seems to be just what Bush and Bloomberg have had
in mind. In the negotiations between the city and UFPJ, after
an initial offer of a march permit (not for the route desired
by UFPJ) the march offer was taken off the table altogether and
now a federal judge has upheld that decision. The pressure on
NYPD may not have been so subtle. The Bush/Ashcroft operation
sent federal prosecutors to the court hearing and the feds filed
an amicus brief.
Another unsettling aspect is how the
city has been using pens--metal enclosures--to chop up demonstrations,
even relatively small ones. This tactic has made it very difficult
find friends, to feel that the assembled crowd has a collective
presence. Rather, it often feels as though the police want to
cage up people to demoralize and control. Here in the US, we
are unlikely to wake up one morning to find a coup. Instead,
we get the shredding of civil liberties in fits and starts, till
one fine day we wake up to find it's all gone.
Michael
Lerner: Should He Speak?
CounterPunch's inbox is suddenly clogged
with e-traffic about Michael Lerner being banned from speaking
at the San Francisco rally. We got one list of protesting signatories
studded with notables and miscreants, like Eric Alterman who
normally spends his time deriding the antiwar protests, just
like Marc Cooper, who clearly sees a "Let Lerner Speak"
campaign as a good way of smearing ANSWER and NION (Not in Our
Name).
My initial reaction was to say to Jeffrey
St Clair that any move to keep Lerner from pouring out his usual
freshets of idiocy is sound by definition, but on mature consideration
I counsel the organizers of the San Francisco rally to slot Lerner
in at some point in the proceedings
I'm quite prepared to believe that Lerner,
a relentless self-promoter, has managed to piss off everybody
with egocentric posturing and unity-wrecking maneuvers, and maybe
his plan from the start has been to engineer a situation in which
he can howl that Jew-haters have laid him low. But let the guy
speak anyway. Mostly people don't listen to speeches, and if
you suddenly hear Lerner's voice disturbing the harmony of the
great convergence, move into a drumming circle and blot the guy
out.
Every now and again Lerner writes to
CounterPunch asking for our support when he'd been attacked by
the neocons. Tikkun has published some good stuff such as reports
by Tanya Rinehart, one the best reporters and commentators in
Israel. He's a flake, but on Israel, considering the mostly awful
spectrum of opinion here, he's often been constructive. Look
at other American-Jewish publications and you'll see what I mean.
For a good exchange which excitingly
revealed Lerner's distinct limitations I refer you to his debate
with Salman abu-Sitta on the right of Palestinian return.
Lerner and Hillary Clinton had a thing
going for a brief moment, and then she, like so many others,
realized that having Lerner around the place was like having
a badly trained retriever, either jumping up and licking your
face or making a mess in the corner. It reminds me somehow of
Norman Podhoretz back in the days of Camelot, who conceived a
passion for Jackie Kennedy and came to believe that somehow,
against all the odds, she secretly reciprocated his yearning.
Eventually, at some cocktail party he cornered her and pressed
his suit. She gazed at him as though he was a centipede on her
sleeve, and said icily, "Why, Mr Podhoretz, just who do
you think you are?" Not long thereafter the jilted Poddy
began his long trek to the right.
Kucinich
To Run; Who's Howard Dean?
Dennis Kucinich has definitely decided
to run for the Democratic nomination, or so he's confided to
a close Friend of CounterPunch last week. He is forming his exploratory
committee and predicts he will win the Iowa caucus. Our Friend
asked him how he proposed to deal with his opposition to abortion,
a stance that is anathema to many in the pwog crowd who would
otherwise be cheering Dennis on. He waved a dismissive hand,
as if to say "No Prob". Hmm.
Meanwhile we detect ripples of pwog support
for Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, also seeking
the Democratic nomination. Now, we remember a time not so long
past when progressives in Vermont were decrying Gov Dean as a
man who undercut a drive for true universal health insurance
with a more limited program. The turning point came when Dean
came out strongly in favor of civil union marriages for gays,
at a time when gays in Vermont feared a right-wing onslaught
so savage that they would be compelled to flee down Interstate
91 south into western Massachusetts and the comparative safety
of Northampton, heaviest concentration of lesbians east of the
Rockies.
The gays have remembered Dean fondly
ever since and now Dean has established quite a corner in gay
funding across the country. On the other side, he's fallen into
bad company with unsavory organizers in South Carolina. In some
ways he seems like a reprise on another governor from a small,
poor state, many years ago, Jimmy Carter. JC was a peanut broker
and Dean is a doctor (hailing from plush origins as part of the
Dean that's hyphenated with Witter). Carter was the herald of
neo-liberalism. Maybe now that we've gone the full cycle from
the first boastful rationales for dereg of the late Seventies
to their consummation in the orgies of thievery 20 years later,
it's time for candidates with even minimal progressive pretensions
to find decent left economists to help them reformulate the radical
economic agenda, but that seems more Kucinich's province. But
no doubt we'll be hearing Dean boast about all he's done to feed
and care for the poor in Vermont.
Kucinich opposes abortion. Dean does
not shrink from the idea of killing people. He supports the death
penalty for child and cop murder, coming to that position in
1998 just when Gov Ryan of Illinois was on the march towards
his epoch-making onslaughts on Illinois' death machine. I assume
Dean was contemplating his run for the nomination and felt he
had to go with some form of Death Penalty Lite, to keep the cop
and kindred hang 'em high lobbies off his ass. But Dean's logic
has expansionism built into it. Why stop with the tot-slayers?
Doesn't a guy who bludgeons an old lady to death similarly deserve
to die? Now which governor was it that flew home to Arkansas
from New Hampshire in the midst of a fraught primary to sign
a death warrant? Dean would be able to walk home and sign such
a piece of paper.
All things considered, for the time being
we'll stand with the guy who's against the war, for choice and
against the death penalty. Mr Al Sharpton, please rise!
Jah,
or Jam?
Driving along I-70 a few weeks ago I
saw a sign in western Kansas for Wilson, billed as "the
Czech capital of Kansas". Out of the corner of my eye I
saw something on the sign about sausages, so I pulled off, hoping
for some souvenir of Bohemian charcuterie. I found Mrs Shiro
in her textile boutique, who had promoted Wilson as Czech center,
and she sent me to Wilson Family Foods, which sold me good bratwurst,
landjaeger and smoked bacon which I cooked further along 1-70
in my motel.
I inspected the war memorial, counting
94 deceased vets from World War One, with 3 killed in action;
132 vets from World War 2, with 15 KIA; 10 from the Korean war,
with just one KIA; 4 from the Vietnam war, with two KIA. Then
I looked back up the main street and saw in the mid-distance
a big building and in front of it a sign, AM LEGION STEAK FEED
and on the next line JAH IS GOD. This seemed pretty multicultural
for western Kansas, and I walked a bit closer. Sure enough, it
said JAM IS GOD, no doubt a proud reference to Czech cherry jam.
A bit later, driving out of town, I went right past the sign
and it said, matter of factly, JAN 18 600. Out of such epigraphic
misreadings whole histories of nonsense have been written.
Yesterday's
Features
Douglas Valentine
An
Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King
Wayne Madsen
In
Material Breach of the Constitution
Bush's War on the Soul of America
Mahir Ali
The Dupes
of War: Blessed are the Peacemakers
Gordon Solberg
We Want Our Country Back
Wayne Saunders
Inside
Bush's Brain: a Pathology of Fear and Lies
Joshua Ruebner
An
Iron Triangle:
Raytheon-Israel-Congress
John Troyer
An
80s Flashback: Of Shuttles and Air Raids
Lee Waters
Inside the Bush White House
"Armageddon is Long Overdue!"
Website of the Day
Electronic
Iraq
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February 8
/ 9, 2003
Bill Christison
The
US Gameplan for Iraq
Intelligence Officers for
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Memo to Bush on Iraq
Olive Lowell
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Michael Neumann
Nonviolence: Its Histories and
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A Thousand Professors
David Krieger
On the Brink of War
Muqtedar Khan
The Logic of the Hawks
Anthony Gancarski
Pakistan on the Brink?
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Anis Shivani
A Post-Liberal Theory of Consciousness for the Starbucks Habitué
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Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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