Berkeley peace movement coverage in SFweekly

A few excerpts:


- On one side are those who think the anti-war movement should embrace the tenets of anti-capitalism, as evinced by the 1999 protests in Seattle of the World Trade Organization. The stunning success of Seattle, a golden moment when Turtles marched with Teamsters and petty party differences were brushed aside for the sake of a greater cause, owed much to surprise and serendipity; no one -- not those comprising the semispontaneous union of environmentalists, labor leaders, communists, socialists, and anarchists who were protesting, nor the police who responded -- understood the moment's power until it was past. Of course, preventing delegates from reaching conference rooms is a relatively modest goal -- and one all participating leftists could agree on.



- Vietnam, of course, saw the full flowering of the anti-war movement -- although not at first. Only when televisions began beaming Southeast Asian firefights into American living rooms, and as the alternative press formed to document pro-peace sentiment ignored by the mainstream media, did opposition explode nationwide to a conflict that had been dragging on, officially, since Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964.

Opposition to the Persian Gulf War formed much more quickly, but the conflict's short duration -- just six weeks of bombing and a four-day ground assault -- didn't give the movement much time to gather steam. As in Vietnam, however, college students weighed in with large-scale demonstrations and organizing efforts.

Blooming faster than even the Persian Gulf War protests, the pro-peace response to Sept. 11 began before President Bush publicly spoke the word "war" in connection with the attacks. With the World Trade Center towers still smoldering, leftist groups began organizing peace demonstrations in anticipation of a war; in San Francisco, 10,000 people converged on Dolores Park for a rally on Sept. 29, more than a week before bombing in Afghanistan commenced. When the bombs did start falling, the anti-war movement surged slightly; but it sagged as soon as the bombing raids decreased and the Taliban fled.

That initial anti-war response was fueled in large part by established protest groups like the International Socialist Organization -- a major sponsor of the Dolores Park rally -- that could draw quickly on their members to whip up publicity, speakers, and large crowds for demonstrations. Accordingly, campus leftists also wanted to quickly shift gears and concentrate on the budding anti-war effort; indeed, the first meeting of the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, which drew 250 people, had been scheduled as an anti-globalization meeting until organizers changed the topic after Sept. 11. And since that first meeting, the coalition has tried hard to ensure the UC Berkeley campus lives up to its reputation as the school for anti-war activism.



- With Bush's approval rating still soaring and most Americans standing firmly behind the war, activists know they face a daunting task in changing the mainstream's mind- set. But for the past two months, as the world has watched and waited for the next target in the Bush administration's war on terrorism, the Berkeley coalition -- like many of its brethren nationwide -- has focused less on changing public attitudes and more on its own internal problems.

Because of the left's general distrust of hierarchy and authority, many component groups have been allowed a say in the direction of the anti-war coalition. But endless discussions about whether the socialist and anti-war movements are one and the same don't put marchers on the streets or newsletters in pedestrians' hands. Infighting has becoming increasingly nasty, personal, and routine, with groups within the coalition accusing each other of manipulating the agenda for their own gain. The International Socialist Organization in particular has come under fire at Berkeley and nationwide for its organizing methods, with many activists accusing the ISO of using the anti-war movement as little more than a recruiting tool.

Some activists say the internal discussion is healthy, a frustrating, necessary, and typical phase in building any cohesive large-scale movement, especially one that seeks to replicate, for the first time on a nationwide scale, the cross-ideological alliances of Seattle. They also point out that the current anti- war movement has responded much more quickly and capably than similar efforts during the Vietnam and Persian Gulf War eras.

Others, however, express surprise and disgust that, while American bombs are still falling in Afghanistan, the anti-war movement seems in danger of morphing into a discussion group for foreign policy wonks of the extreme left. "If the ISO wants to hijack the movement, fine. As long as the movement is effective," says Christopher Cantor, a graduate student at Berkeley and active member of the coalition. "I've heard plenty of incriminating friend-of-a-friend stories, and if they're true, I really think there's a problem. But no one addresses it head-on, because they don't want to seem like they're red-baiting or attacking anyone. So the issue of why we're disorganized is tabled, and the fact that we're disorganized definitely serves the interest of someone who wants to co-opt the movement.

"The first step is realizing we have a problem, and we haven't even done that."


Berkeley students admitted that the rush to organize had caused some glitches in the proceedings and preparations, but insisted that ISO members, although certainly involved in planning and logistics, had not whipped up the conference as a thinly disguised recruiting fair.

Nevertheless, the Internet was afire for the next month. Activist after activist weighed in on the collapse of the three conferences, with Berkeley getting an extra-hot helping of flame because of its stature in the anti-war annals. One angry poster to the San Francisco Indymedia site (http://sf. indymedia.org) wrote: "I just got back from the conference in Berkeley. It was one of the most awful organizing experiences in my life. ... A lot of our campus groups are controlled by the ISO, and we are still struggling with how we can make the groups grow and flourish when the leadership is very tight and has a very narrow agenda."


- The newness of the movement is also the cause of the capitalist/anti-capitalist split, Shingavi argues. "You've got a range of political opinions that overlap and force themselves onto each other, but if you're opposed to what U.S. military intervention does, you should be in the movement. It may cause a split. Maybe that's what it will take. Maybe we need splits in the movement before we realize what it is.


- As the executive director of the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute and an adjunct professor at San Francisco State University who teaches a course on U.S. peace law, Ann Fagan Ginger has spoken to anti-war groups at most of the major colleges in the Bay Area. She calls the Berkeley coalition's internal disagreements "some of the narrowest I've seen." She's also developed an analogy to explain the infighting that threatens to tear the coalition, such as it is, apart.

"It's like a semicolon," she says. "The most important mission, which is the need to stop the U.S. actions in Afghanistan, comes before the semicolon. People can continue to work on other things they were doing -- race discrimination, stopping the death penalty -- but that has to come after the semicolon. It's all connected, it's all one sentence, but you have to learn to make the purpose of every meeting what comes before the semicolon -- you can't do both in the same room. You can't bring about peace if you can't learn to respect other people's basic thrusts."



- Aside from a few honks of support from passing cars and the odd pedestrian who takes a flier and actually reads it, the public mood is best summed up by an elderly woman who remarks to no one in particular, "This is the anti-war movement?"

"We're not going to block an intersection or anything," says Cantor, as he watches his fellow protesters heft signs that read, "Killing innocent people is the problem, not the solution." "We're not a direct-action movement yet. We don't have the numbers to do that, and it would be counterproductive. We're seen as a lunatic fringe as it is. Why add to that?"

As if reinforcing Cantor's point, the protesters on the corner, goaded into boisterousness by the arrival of a local television news crew, begin shouting, "One, two, three, four, we don't want your racist war! Five, six, seven, eight, stop the violence, stop the hate!" Cantor, his tall frame still swathed in the somber dark suit he wore to portray Attorney General John Ashcroft in skits staged throughout the day at local coffeehouses, groans when he hears the chant go up. "I told them not to do that," he says, the sheaf of anti-war newsletters going limp in his hand. "Nobody listens to me."

They should. A week later, in one of the coffeehouses where Cantor as Ashcroft pretended to detain a Muslim-American student, he expounds on his frustrations with the movement he's spent the semester trying to build.

"I'm not happy with it," he says, his dark eyes studying the half-empty mug of tea he's been sipping to ward off yet another gray, frigid Berkeley afternoon. "It often seems we're less liberated than the society we're trying to liberate. Why are the chants the same as when we bombed Iraq? We're just regurgitating the same crap we always regurgitate.

"This time was supposed to be different."