Rosebud #64
Hayden Oughta Know
If you haven’t made plans to go to the march in Washington this Saturday, January 27, you might want to think again. It’s going to be a big one; historical; necessary. The crew running the White House isn’t really like the Nazis, as their most radical critics often glibly say; they’re more like the Sopranos, thugs in ugly suits. Most Germans supported the Nazis. Most of us don’t even like these guys, but they just don’t give a f—. All they understand is force. And what could be more forceful than a crowd of a million-strong? The only thing they have to fear is Us.
It always amazes me when I hear people—usually people who have no real interest in changing anything—bemoan the “lack of activism today.” They need to get out of their cubicles more. The anti-war movement in this country is bigger, more organized, more unified and more passionate than it was at the same point during Vietnam.
There was no real opposition to Vietnam until several years in. Millions all over the world marched before this murderous Iraq fiasco even started. But “it did nothing,” some might say. Not true. Look at the Congress. Look at the change in the coverage of the Bush presidency. Look to Washington on Saturday.
In May of 2004, when I was reporting a story about the activism around the Republican National Convention in New York, I went to hear Tom Hayden speak at a Unitarian church on Long Island. He talked about the march planned for the convention. It turned out there were over 500,000 people there; it was the biggest march in New York City history. It took six hours for everyone to walk past Madison Square Garden. And yet the media will still tell you “there is no activism.” Apparently, there’s nothing new there.
Hayden said: “I think that what we’re going through now is the rise of another social movement, but I would call it evidence of things unseen. Most of you don’t feel you’re in the midst of a social movement, or do you? Most people I talk to act like they’re in a social movement; they’re giving out leaflets, they’re going to meetings, they’re reading the infinite number of books on George Bush that are being published, they’re listening to WBAI. They seem to be plugged in but they feel like they’re not part of a movement and they have this nostalgic feeling that there must have been a movement in the 60s.
“I remember the 60s as well as anybody in this room because I turned 20, 21 at the beginning of the 60s. I was there when it began; I was there when it ended. And what I remember at the beginning was the same feeling that everything around us was apathetic. And I remember during the times that we were getting arrested or going to jail we always felt that our parents were not with us, that the media despised us, that the middle of the road Americans were worthless and that we were alone and isolated on our journey, our little band of brothers and sisters. It did not feel like ‘the 60s’ until some time later when the 60s was invented as an explanation for what we went through, as we air-brushed it and eliminated all the apathy and all the bad trips and it became this icon of sentiment that we would bear for the rest of our lives. And I think that were in such a period now.
“And it may be that in 10 or 20 years we will look back on it and say, ‘Remember 2004? That was the turning point.’ I don’t know; but I would argue that these movements begin without the participants knowing that they’re in such a movement. They begin without a single historian or journalist predicting that there will be such a movement. These movements begin without television, without radio; they begin without publicity. They begin mysteriously. And I think that with Iraq and perhaps the larger issue of an American empire, a military and economic empire militarizing and globalizing itself, and the issue of global justice, sweat shops, the two billion people that are making a dollar a day around the world, we have a convergence of momentum we didn’t see in the 60s.
“A year ago [Feb, 2003] there was a huge demonstration in New York and Washington that the New York Times and public radio did not see. A hundred thousand people came out in the street and it was announced by the Times and NPR that the organizers were very discouraged because no one had turned up! And it was speculated that fear of the Washington sniper had kept the demonstrators home. This was madness. What are reporters for if they can’t count? Or can’t accurately describe what they see. A reporter should know there were approximately a hundred thousand people there. There’s something about the development of the mind of the reporter and the development of filters that makes them unable to see. It was a week later, after a lot of protests, that they reversed themselves and said there were a hundered thousand people there; but they never explained how they made this mistake.
“Similarly in [the 1999 WTO protests in] Seattle—it was huge, it was one of the most memorable experiences of my long life in street protest. It was not predicted beforehand; and it was described as an isolated spasm of some kind by a lot of lost upper-middle class kids who couldn’t be hippies anymore and were living in the woods and had accidentally descended on Seattle and met all these Teamsters who were obviously protectionist and narrow-minded; they kept saying that, but you know, since Seattle there have been like 20 Seattles. There has been the Cancun Seattle [2003] and Miami Seattle [2003] and Quebec City [2001] and on and on and on; but the media coverage seeks to minimize or miss it. Nobody said the week before Seattle in the New York Times, there’s gonna be a new movement for global justice exploding on the scene with the largest coalition of youth and labor in history and a whole city’s gonna be shut down and the trade ministers of the whole world are gonna be prevented from carrying out their secret business and everybody in America’s gonna wake up hearing about the WTO.
“And after Seattle it became, how can we minimize and contain this? How can we talk only about the anarchists, how can we come up with explanations for how it is a one-time event? And so on; but you notice with Iraq and global justice, there’s only so far you can go manipulating the images in the American mind. The WTO is real, it is not an advertisement. The WTO has been de-railed by Cancun. The descendants of NAFTA like the FTAA have been put on hold after Miami. Latin America is exploding with resistance to these free-trade zones that leave people poorer and poorer and leave the environment more devastated. For Iraq is really about the privatization of the business and resources in Iraq. So you have in Iraq and in Latin America this growing presence of the Pentagon and corporations globalizing and militarizing at the same time; but there is a growing resistance.
“We are paying the price [for Iraq]; we are the people who have to pick up the bills. Iraq is going to cost 70, 80 billion this year. What the Republicans are trying to do in Iraq is create unlimited war without a tax increase…backed up with tribunals where there’s no records, there’s no appeals. It’s madness. It’s an attempt to impose a new framework of rules that amount to an empire, a kind of sandbox for investors and the private sector while eliminating the protections that have only come about through costly and painful social struggles for justice.
“You have a real basic choice which comes down to promoting an empire because of fear or promoting a democracy because of fear of empire. It’s stark, it’s a sharp turn in the road, it’s an attempt to end what was accomplished in the 60s and 30s and go back to a free-market fundamentalism protected by military force, that’s what’s at stake…
“Other things have happened that can only be explained as the stirrings of a movement. There were over a million people, mainly women, marching for women’s rights and health care in Washington three weeks ago [April, 2004]. This year there were a million people who sent messages outraged at the FCC hearings about the monopolization of the media. Amy Goodman and others are on the road drawing mass audiences for Pacifica. The whole explosion of independent media is a phenomenon we have not seen since the independent press in the 60s. The phenomenon of MoveOn. They’re everywhere. No one predicted it beforehand. So where are we? There is a danger of Bush 2. I’m reminded of what John Mitchell said when he was attorney general, he said ‘We are going to move this country so far to the right you won’t even recognize it.’ He never got his chance, he went to jail; but even if Bush is re-elected, his administration will be resisted by an even larger movement than now in this country and around the world.
“The only thing to worry about with absolute candor and anxiety is if there was another 911, it would expedite the movement of the country so far to the right that we wouldn’t be able to stop it…”
And on that note, please check out www.911truth.org, www.scholarsfortruth.org, www.911blogger.com, the films Loose Change, 911 Press For Truth, 911 Mysteries, and The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin.
If you haven’t made plans to go to the march in Washington this Saturday, January 27, you might want to think again. It’s going to be a big one; historical; necessary. The crew running the White House isn’t really like the Nazis, as their most radical critics often glibly say; they’re more like the Sopranos, thugs in ugly suits. Most Germans supported the Nazis. Most of us don’t even like these guys, but they just don’t give a f—. All they understand is force. And what could be more forceful than a crowd of a million-strong? The only thing they have to fear is Us.
It always amazes me when I hear people—usually people who have no real interest in changing anything—bemoan the “lack of activism today.” They need to get out of their cubicles more. The anti-war movement in this country is bigger, more organized, more unified and more passionate than it was at the same point during Vietnam.
There was no real opposition to Vietnam until several years in. Millions all over the world marched before this murderous Iraq fiasco even started. But “it did nothing,” some might say. Not true. Look at the Congress. Look at the change in the coverage of the Bush presidency. Look to Washington on Saturday.
In May of 2004, when I was reporting a story about the activism around the Republican National Convention in New York, I went to hear Tom Hayden speak at a Unitarian church on Long Island. He talked about the march planned for the convention. It turned out there were over 500,000 people there; it was the biggest march in New York City history. It took six hours for everyone to walk past Madison Square Garden. And yet the media will still tell you “there is no activism.” Apparently, there’s nothing new there.
Hayden said: “I think that what we’re going through now is the rise of another social movement, but I would call it evidence of things unseen. Most of you don’t feel you’re in the midst of a social movement, or do you? Most people I talk to act like they’re in a social movement; they’re giving out leaflets, they’re going to meetings, they’re reading the infinite number of books on George Bush that are being published, they’re listening to WBAI. They seem to be plugged in but they feel like they’re not part of a movement and they have this nostalgic feeling that there must have been a movement in the 60s.
“I remember the 60s as well as anybody in this room because I turned 20, 21 at the beginning of the 60s. I was there when it began; I was there when it ended. And what I remember at the beginning was the same feeling that everything around us was apathetic. And I remember during the times that we were getting arrested or going to jail we always felt that our parents were not with us, that the media despised us, that the middle of the road Americans were worthless and that we were alone and isolated on our journey, our little band of brothers and sisters. It did not feel like ‘the 60s’ until some time later when the 60s was invented as an explanation for what we went through, as we air-brushed it and eliminated all the apathy and all the bad trips and it became this icon of sentiment that we would bear for the rest of our lives. And I think that were in such a period now.
“And it may be that in 10 or 20 years we will look back on it and say, ‘Remember 2004? That was the turning point.’ I don’t know; but I would argue that these movements begin without the participants knowing that they’re in such a movement. They begin without a single historian or journalist predicting that there will be such a movement. These movements begin without television, without radio; they begin without publicity. They begin mysteriously. And I think that with Iraq and perhaps the larger issue of an American empire, a military and economic empire militarizing and globalizing itself, and the issue of global justice, sweat shops, the two billion people that are making a dollar a day around the world, we have a convergence of momentum we didn’t see in the 60s.
“A year ago [Feb, 2003] there was a huge demonstration in New York and Washington that the New York Times and public radio did not see. A hundred thousand people came out in the street and it was announced by the Times and NPR that the organizers were very discouraged because no one had turned up! And it was speculated that fear of the Washington sniper had kept the demonstrators home. This was madness. What are reporters for if they can’t count? Or can’t accurately describe what they see. A reporter should know there were approximately a hundred thousand people there. There’s something about the development of the mind of the reporter and the development of filters that makes them unable to see. It was a week later, after a lot of protests, that they reversed themselves and said there were a hundered thousand people there; but they never explained how they made this mistake.
“Similarly in [the 1999 WTO protests in] Seattle—it was huge, it was one of the most memorable experiences of my long life in street protest. It was not predicted beforehand; and it was described as an isolated spasm of some kind by a lot of lost upper-middle class kids who couldn’t be hippies anymore and were living in the woods and had accidentally descended on Seattle and met all these Teamsters who were obviously protectionist and narrow-minded; they kept saying that, but you know, since Seattle there have been like 20 Seattles. There has been the Cancun Seattle [2003] and Miami Seattle [2003] and Quebec City [2001] and on and on and on; but the media coverage seeks to minimize or miss it. Nobody said the week before Seattle in the New York Times, there’s gonna be a new movement for global justice exploding on the scene with the largest coalition of youth and labor in history and a whole city’s gonna be shut down and the trade ministers of the whole world are gonna be prevented from carrying out their secret business and everybody in America’s gonna wake up hearing about the WTO.
“And after Seattle it became, how can we minimize and contain this? How can we talk only about the anarchists, how can we come up with explanations for how it is a one-time event? And so on; but you notice with Iraq and global justice, there’s only so far you can go manipulating the images in the American mind. The WTO is real, it is not an advertisement. The WTO has been de-railed by Cancun. The descendants of NAFTA like the FTAA have been put on hold after Miami. Latin America is exploding with resistance to these free-trade zones that leave people poorer and poorer and leave the environment more devastated. For Iraq is really about the privatization of the business and resources in Iraq. So you have in Iraq and in Latin America this growing presence of the Pentagon and corporations globalizing and militarizing at the same time; but there is a growing resistance.
“We are paying the price [for Iraq]; we are the people who have to pick up the bills. Iraq is going to cost 70, 80 billion this year. What the Republicans are trying to do in Iraq is create unlimited war without a tax increase…backed up with tribunals where there’s no records, there’s no appeals. It’s madness. It’s an attempt to impose a new framework of rules that amount to an empire, a kind of sandbox for investors and the private sector while eliminating the protections that have only come about through costly and painful social struggles for justice.
“You have a real basic choice which comes down to promoting an empire because of fear or promoting a democracy because of fear of empire. It’s stark, it’s a sharp turn in the road, it’s an attempt to end what was accomplished in the 60s and 30s and go back to a free-market fundamentalism protected by military force, that’s what’s at stake…
“Other things have happened that can only be explained as the stirrings of a movement. There were over a million people, mainly women, marching for women’s rights and health care in Washington three weeks ago [April, 2004]. This year there were a million people who sent messages outraged at the FCC hearings about the monopolization of the media. Amy Goodman and others are on the road drawing mass audiences for Pacifica. The whole explosion of independent media is a phenomenon we have not seen since the independent press in the 60s. The phenomenon of MoveOn. They’re everywhere. No one predicted it beforehand. So where are we? There is a danger of Bush 2. I’m reminded of what John Mitchell said when he was attorney general, he said ‘We are going to move this country so far to the right you won’t even recognize it.’ He never got his chance, he went to jail; but even if Bush is re-elected, his administration will be resisted by an even larger movement than now in this country and around the world.
“The only thing to worry about with absolute candor and anxiety is if there was another 911, it would expedite the movement of the country so far to the right that we wouldn’t be able to stop it…”
And on that note, please check out www.911truth.org, www.scholarsfortruth.org, www.911blogger.com, the films Loose Change, 911 Press For Truth, 911 Mysteries, and The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin.
posted by NancyJo at 11:30 PM
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