Yeah, humor me and tell me lies…

(This post will end with a music video, can you guess which one from the title?)

Some advice for the anti-war movement, thankfully, they won’t listen.

I seldom praise an actual journalist, but there is an excellently written article in the Minnesota Independent today by Chris Steller. The basic premise of the piece is that the Peace Activists can be largely broken down into 3 distinct philosophies of achieving change, and I want to discuss each in part. In reverse order of the way Chris discussed them, since the last is from our point of view the one that is most detrimental to the cause of victory.

The first is the group like the asshats in Olympia last week, and the guys who tried to shut down an arcade. This is the faction of the “Peace” movement that takes direct action. In Minnesota, as Chris tells it:

The bridge’s stalwarts embrace a predictability you won’t find in the actions of Leigh York and other young adults who locked themselves to the doors of military recruitment offices across the Twin Cities last month. It was yet another effort at steering United States policies in a more peaceful direction, but for this breed of antiwar activist practices a separate form of protest distinct from lobbying inside paneled government rooms or standing with signs on a bridge.

On a day they dubbed “Zero Recruitment Day,” activists affiliated with the Anti-War Committee put their bodies in the way of the work that normally takes place within recruitment offices. Some offices stayed shut for the day while at others police cut locks and arrested protesters, including York.

These morons are our best friends paradoxically. They look so ridiculous that most of America is repulsed, and they even piss off their own side. Look at Cindy Sheehan, that dingbat is such a fruitloop that she challenged Pelosi from the LEFT. Code Pink largely falls into this group, going so far as to piss off one of the most powerful allies that they had in Congress, Appropriations Chairman Dave Obey.

Honestly, knowing that Code Pink stands out in front of Walter Reed with signs that read “Maimed for a Lie!!” what do you think the average Virginian thinks of this delightful photograph:

The next group is your garden variety of protesting hippie. As Chris discusses them:

Clemens held a huge rainbow “Peace” flag that billowed into the bike lane on the upriver side of the bridge. He’s adamant that taking the message of peace to the streets is an effective way to reach decision-makers as high as Obama.

“He can always change. I mean, we’re hoping that with a learning curve, ultimately he’ll come to his senses,” Clemens says. “We need to push him in that direction.”

But no matter who hears them, Clemens and friends — including a fair number of elderly activists — will be there each week, in the dark days of winter and under blazing summer suns.

“It’s important to keep your voice out to create the political space so our politicians can do the right thing. I think a lot of times we assume that they politicians know what’s going on. But they really need people out in the streets to create the need for them to rethink their policies.”

I’m not much of a protestor. First off, I don’t really like confrontation as much as debate and dialogue. And second of all, contrary to the belief of Mr. Clemens, I just don’t really feel it ever does any good. Who is the target of these things? Is a politician going to change his mind because a bunch of people walk around with flags? Unlikely, certainly not any politicians I know. I think protests like this end up helping us as well. Just look at the video Jonn took from the ANSWER rally.

This doesn’t really sway anyone. If it were huge numbers of people it might do some good, but if you can marshal huge numbers of advocates, there are better ways of changing policy than marching through the streets.

The biggest drawback to protests is that they always turn into a circus. I honestly have no clue what the ANSWER rally was about. Was it anti-war? Was it anti-military? Was it against bailouts? Was it against Gitmo? Was it for Mumia? Apparently it was all those things and a bag of banana chips. Look at the “Gay Pride” protests. I’m largely agnostic on gay marriage, but when they have these ridiculous rallys where men in assless chaps fellate each other in the open (like Zombie has documented repeatedly) I am less amenable to the argument that they are just like us. In fact, I wonder just what in the hell is wrong with them. And your average Mom in Wichita probably doesn’t have all the good a response to it either.

But, there is one group that can have an effect, and at least one person in Minnesota gets that, although I think that this group is doomed for failure (thankfully.) Anyway, as Chris again tells us:

Demonstrating and taking direct action are age-old strategies for reform, but Minnesota’s organized effort at lobbying as a unified front of peace groups is new.

Rebecca Abbas helped launch a new lobbying coalition, Minnesota Peace Project, this year, at the suggestion of an aide to former U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad. For years, the Republican congressman’s office had sometimes been confounded by antiwar activist groups approaching peace issues from multiple angles.

Now Minnesota Peace Project brings together three groups — [groups discussed later] — in a unified, focused approach to lobbying the state’s congressional delegation not seen before from antiwar forces.

Each of Minnesota’s eight Congressional districts has a team dedicated to keeping up a conversation with its representative in Washington, D.C., seeking “a mutual understanding of each other’s perspective.”

Now look, I am a lobbyist, so I do have some knowledge of this topic. When you want something, you don’t walk in and demand EXACTLY what you want from a politician. It simply doesn’t work that way. I support the GWOT, and I lobby on that issue. I don’t go into an anti-war politician’s office and say “Support the war, send more troops, let us win.” It simply will result in a fight that will solidify their position, and make me persona non grata. You tailor your message to the politician you are meeting with. Instead, try this:

I understand you oppose the war, and I empathize with your position that it was begun on faulty intelligence. All I would ask is two things,
1) go and look at the situation there now; the situation on the ground. Talk to the troops and see what it looks like today, fighting about the start of the war isn’t going to help us.
2) give the troops the resources they need so that more of America’s finest don’t come home wounded or dead. They need your support. You might not support the war, but I know you want only the best for our service-members, so PLEASE don’t block their funds.

And from the anti-war position, walking into John Kline’s office (Republican Congressman from Minnesota, former Army Colonel) and demanding a full pull out immediately isn’t going to get you many invites back into the office.

Listen Colonel, I understand you only want the best for America and the troops. So do we. We disagree on what that means, but we hope you will listen to us. We want to know when our sons and daughters are coming home, and we want some degree of certainty that this war will end. We want metrics by which we can agree to end the occupation and return Iraq (or Afghanistan) back to the native populace. War is not the answer and never has been. We want some assurances that we will seek a political result, because as great a job as our military has done, they can’t win this on their own.

Look, I’m not a rocket scientist, but I do know that political fights are not won straight out, they are fought over the inches in between. It is all incremental. You don’t approach a Republican and tell him to turn against the war, because that is suicide. But, you appeal to him in a way that allows him to come to your side, even if just a little bit. Maybe it is getting him to approve benchmarks, or maybe vote against a certain military appropriations package. But to demand he immediately repudiate his former positions is seldom a winning gambit.

Now, thankfully for the good guys, the Anti-war activists ain’t all that bright. How do I know that? Well, the 3 groups that Ms. Abbas is seeking to band together are “Veterans for Peace, Women Against Military Madness and the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers.”

Our faithful readers know all about the Geriatrics Against the Military Veterans for Peace. They might be able to behave for a few moments at a time, but they will invariably resort back to acting like asshats. Like Roy learned when he shoved his head in a large carnivorous cat’s mouth, you can’t change what you are. And these morons will eventually bring this coalition to an untimely end.

Thankfully, Women Against Military Madness is no less insane a group.

WAMM is hundreds of women and men empowered to make social change through volunteer activism!

WAMM has around 2100 member households, most of which are in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area. We are consciously a local justice and peace organization, living our feminist principals by using a non-hierarchical organizational structure. WAMM is governed by a Steering Committee of volunteer activists who use consensus decision making. We program from the grassroots — allowing activists to form committees and act on issues based on their own passions.

Yeah, I don’t think I even need to tell you how well that one will work. It reminds me of the morons at Columbia that were screaming about “consensus” decision making as the cops were dragging them off.

And then we have:

The Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers was conceived in 1995 by members of the United Nations Association of Minnesota. They, along with members of many of the organizations now its charter members, worked together to develop the purpose, goals, structure and modus operandi for the organization.

Specifically, they seem to have 10 platforms, The Primacy of Justice, A World Based on Law Rather than Force, Disarmament and Conflict Resolution, Support for the U.N. System, A Healthy Ecosystem, Unity in Diversity, Providing for Future Generations, Fundamental Human Rights, Responsibility and Accountability, and The Education of Children.

I find their platform pretty thin, but to each their own. It’s sort of the Unicorns and Gumdrop Mountain wing of the peace groups I suppose. I mean, supporting the UN in theory is fine, but if you can point to some success the UN has had, please do so for me, because I have yet to see it. Although, the UN did supply me with an awesome shower unit thing in Bosnia that was much appreciated, I fail to see much they have done constructively, and the various scandals, waste of money, and offences against indigenous peoples from the sex trade of UN employees and theft of property seem to me to be the enduring legacy of that body.

So anyway, my point is this, Ms Abbas is on the right path, something that can’t be said for 99% of the Peace movement. She has a model that if it could be followed might lead to some successes. My guess is though that she’ll go out of her mind in a few weeks when her various partners start wandering off the reservation and going right back to the same crap that it usually does.

And, since I have been ending a lot of my opinion pieces of late with music videos, I give you Blues Traveller:

Category: Politics