Marching Against Imperialism

The whole world is marching

Saturday's protest on all seven continents is just the beginning of a war against empire-building

Friday, U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix delivered an unusually detailed, pointed, and stinging refutation of Colin Powell's error-filled diatribe the previous week. That was immediately followed by a stunning diplomatic rebuke of the Bush Administration's war plans, led by France and Germany and echoed by 12 of the 15 U.N. Security Council members.

That highly unusual public diplomatic spanking would never have happened without the overwhelming opposition to war by ordinary citizens in France, Germany, and across Europe. And as if to underscore the point, on the following day, Saturday, city streets and town squares overflowed on six continents. (Seven, if you count the small protest lodged at a scientific research station in Antarctica.)

American activists love to abuse the rhetorical device of the "International Day of Protest." On Saturday, February 15, 2003, for the first time in history, there actually was one.

Like New Years' Eve celebrations, time zone by time zone, protest circled the globe. Those protests were largest in precisely the countries where elected governments are defying public will by endorsing or helping the Bush Administration. In Europe, only Britain is an active military partner; only the right-wing governments in Spain and Italy have additionally pledged cooperation. The results: Up to two million rallied in Rome; in the streets of London, 1.5 million; 650,000 in Madrid; in Barcelona, Spain, a city of only 1.5 million, 1.3 million jammed Saturday's streets.

As we've been saying on these pages all along, this is not simply about a single event, although it will be catastrophic to the citizenry of Iraq, but a backlash to a much more insidious issue, that of empire building, and US hegemony. The story continues.....

In those countries, and here in the United States, it was clear from both media reports and interviews with ordinary citizens that far more than the lives of Iraqis were seen as being at stake. Repeatedly, the same theme emerged: it was not just war, but democracy itself that was being threatened.

International media reports emphasized what anti-war protests in the U.S. have also increasingly seen: that many protesters have never done this before. In the United States, many, in fact, are not from the "protest left" at all; the diversity of attendees is one of the most remarkable characteristics of these events, and far outstrips the ideological diversity (or openness to such diversity) of the entirely left-leaning organizers.

It hasn't mattered; Bush, and politicians who share his arrogance, have been the ones driving new recruits into the anti-war movement. Around the world, a generation was inspired by the dream of universal democracy that came with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. That has been followed, in many places rather quickly, by the sinking realization that the global corporate priorities which supplanted the Cold War have heralded less, not more, democracy.

More here..........

Time will tell. Those in power have been given a sign, and are on notice that "We The People" are angry. They ignore us at their own peril.

I'm reminded of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer two weeks and a day past, when The Weekly Standard's David Brooks said something to the effect that he would say this to the demonstrators: "Why are you doing this, can't you see that Saddam is a bad man, and has killed thousands of you?" The obvious answer to this query is that, yes whilst Saddam is a bad guy, and has killed thousands of us, so have the bombs dropped by the US, the sanctions over the past decade, and you've poisoned our environment with your depleted uranium warheads. Now you want us to accede to another war? We may be wrong, but who's established the high moral ground? Certainly not you, David. Nor have your friends at PNAC.

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