Anti-war Left is AWOL on Syria
Our buddy, Rick Moran and Buzzfeed have noticed the absence of throngs of ill-clad hippies in the streets around the White House in regards to the impending Syria “punishment”. I remember that the communists were protesting the war in Afghanistan before the dust had cleared at the twin towers and the Pentagon. But now, the silence is deafening. Some of the odoriferous hippies blame the economy;
“I don’t think me or Medea or anyone else should be defensive about that,” Martin said. “We don’t push a button and get hundreds of thousands of people in the streets.”
Martin blamed the anemic response among peace groups to Syria on the economy, noting that all nonprofits are struggling — not just protest groups.
Plus, Martin said, the energy on the left has been focused on drones and civil liberties, which “doesn’t rise to the level of an obviously unjust war where hundreds of thousands of people are being killed because of a belligerent president.”
But others arrived at the same conclusion many of us reached more than a decade ago – the anti-war left is partisan;
“The Democrats are missing in action because of course the president is a Democrat,” said David Swanson, a longtime antiwar activist and author of War Is a Lie and When the World Outlawed War, who works with Roots Action, a progressive nonprofit. “That’s the biggest factor, I think. What’s tamping down the activism is partisanship.”
“This started in 2007 when it was time to focus on electing a Democratic president and the Democrats forgot about the wars,” Swanson said. “We’ve been struggling ever since to get back to where we were in 2006.”
Our buddy, John Bruhns arrived at that conclusion back in 2008 when he left VoteVets and the United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) when he discovered for himself that the movement was just cover for the Democrats.
Meanwhile the shrieking harpies of Code Pink have been relegated to moderating online petitions;
“Those of us still working on this have been mobilizing,” Benjamin said. “The online protests are proliferating. There’s petitions to Obama, there’s calls for Congress to get involved — so many groups from Code Pink to Win Without War to Just Foreign Policy — all have put out calls saying no war in Syria.”
But mostly, the movement has been left for dead even by those who were once leading figures in it.
“What antiwar movement?” former Congressman Dennis Kucinich asked when called for comment on Wednesday.
Category: Antiwar crowd, Code Pink
Hmmm…. if there isn’t a parade involved, and there’s no one left to letter slogans on cardboard signs and mount them on sticks, who will protest the war?
What if they gave a war protest and nobody came?
As much as I loath him, I at least give Kucinich credit for being honest and consistent in his anti-war stance. The code pinkers, UFPJ, and other demonrat front groups? No so much…
I smell something here….I am pretty sure what I smell is the pungent aroma of hypocrisy…which doesn’t surprise me at all.
When you are a member of a morally bankrupt ideology your hypocrisy tends to be as obvious as Keith Olbermann’s inability to be honest.
If this were a republican administration all you would be hearing day in and day out would be questions about the legitimacy of a government that is constantly beating the drums of war, instead…crickets.
No surprise, absolutely as predicted.
They were never anti-war protesters, they were anti-Bush protesters.
OMG! NOT PETITIONS!!!!!! ARGH!!!! RUN FOR THE HILLS!!! IT’S A PETITION DRIVE!!!!!
21Zulu: bingo. ‘Nuff said.
They were never anti-war protesters, they were anti-Bush protesters.
Someone get a trauma team in here. A nail has been hit right on the head.
21Zulu wins the internet.
sounds about par for the course. johnson and JFK got us into the war in vietnam, yet it was the hippies and libtards that protested the right as war mongers when it was handed to nixon. we will get into a long drawn out war in syria, and when a right wing president refuses to accept defeat, he will be a war monger and the left will blame him for the failures they started
The are silent because they do not want to interfere with government handouts, benefits and grant money.
The are silent because they do not want to interfere or damage their continuation of government handouts, benefits and grant money.
Obama (and his administration) are narcissists that have long memories.
What 21Z said.
Like this really surprises me. The antiwar left did a great deal of damage with their destructive protest at the 1968 democratic convention. A mistake they do not want to repeat.
Since something like 91% of Americans are against intervention in Syria, that makes us ALL anti-war, especially those that would be called upon to put themselves in danger. There’s a huge outcry against it, but people like Obama, McCain, and Graham can’t hear past their own political agendas.
Now we have Russian warships on their way to the Mediterranean and Glenn Beck predicting WWIII if we continue on this path.
This is INSANE.
The fools can’t have protests because of the economy?? That may actually be the funniest utterance ever made by a stinking, filthy hippy. What, have they run out of money to bribe folks with donuts and alcohol, and to print the cute little signs they pass out to school children and bums?
(For those who do not know – this is the crowd who notoriously uses school buses to load up kids and shelter inhabitants to bring to protests as their throngs of thousands. Or maybe dozens. Yes, those would be public school buses being driven by public employees.)
One of the symptoms of Lunacy is inconsistent response to stimuli. Our war, bad. Their war, Good. Two wars with the same enemy yet two inconsistent responses. That’s crazy by any definition.
Smitty: to be fair, LBJ did get some flack from anti-war protesters too. Not as much as he deserved – but he did catch some. JFK, not really.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t apparent just how much LBJ had lied to get us into Vietnam so deep there was no good way out until very late in his term. So it was his successor (Nixon) that got the brunt of the anti-war protests.
When I was young I hated hippies. Now that I’m older I hate old, burnt out hippies. They may not be making much noise now, but unlike old soldiers they don’t fade away. They’ll be back.
What 21Z said, and they’ve probably gotten even fatter & lazier from the past years of B. Hussein 0bama handouts to boot!
Smitty, the protests against the Vietnam war ramped up in 1967 and increased even more after the Tet offensive in 1968. Images of things like a Vietnamese cop shooting a VC prisoner in the head, a Buddhist nun setting herself on fire, and a Buddhist priest doing the same, didn’t help.
Kennedy died before he could do much more than send advisors and a few hundred specops troops to Vietnam to train the south Vietnamese how to engage in clandestine operations.
by the time the Democratic National Convention rolled around in 1968 in Chicago, antiwar protests were in full swing. The protesters outside the convention at the International Amphitheater weren’t just hippies, they were also Yippies, much more radical than just hippies.
That was 45 years ago. I got to watch that stuff on TV. I thought it was strange. I also thought they were dirty and lazy and chicken. It was the same year Martin Luther King was assassinated. A lot of stuff happened back then.
However, there is little to no comparison between Lyndon Johnson and bodaprez. LBJ served in the Navy during WWII, among other things.
The only thing bodaprez has ever served is himself.
Ex-PH2: yes, much happened of note in 1968.
Watching the POTUS on TV on 31 March 1968 – followed by Memphis, 4 April 1968 – followed a month later by LA and 5 June 1968.
Yeah, I kinda remember that year.
Well, this is an update: there are some protests going on in London over any UK action in Syria, and there is one going on now (5:45PM) downtown in Chicago. But I did not see any hippies appearing in the Chicago protest, which is small and it is being connected to the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s march on Washington DC (August 1963).
So there are some protests, but it’s a different crowd, not the shrieking idiots like the CPs.
What if the held an anti-war protest, and nobody came?
I should have read the comments before posting. Of course, Ex-PH2 was already on it.
Completely off topic, I am working on a new project. Not a song parody, but a story. What was the name Wickre’s protégé that got busted on that voyeurism rap in Arlington?
I guess it’s possible that some of the antiwar protestors might have been anti-war instead of anti-Republican, but any protests now would be racist becasue First Black President.
And as far as I can tell, an accusation of racism trumps everything else in these people’s ideology.
Where’s Medea, holding up her sign saying “No blood for Dates” or “No Blood for Sand”. That’s about all that Syria has left to export. This has to be a compelling argument for Code Stink and the rest of the left.
Actually, the so-called anti-war effort has always been a front for communism. In earlier days, the majority of both parties were anti-communism, but now – not so much, at least among our betters in DC.
Pretty sick of the whole first black prez BS. Bam didn’t get significant exposure to black community until Chicago in mid 80’s…Bam was an “R” instead of a “D”, he would be mocked as an “oreo”. At least both Clinton & Carter grew up along side southern blacks. Why no MSM scrutiny of Bam’s inner circle (golf buddies) being mostly white? He enjoys a decidely white hobby (golf), vacays in Hawaii & Martha’s Vineyard…not really a black mecca, and his cabinet isn’t exactly overflowing w/ blacks…Sh*t getting real old.
#27 tells it like is. Some of us here didn’t just look these anti-war crews over with a magnifying glass, we raked ’em with a very fine tooth comb, tossed in several peeks under the microscope and learned who funds them and, who they run and sit with. FYI- The anti-war protests began in over in Europe sponsored in part by the KGB, pride of the USSR and CPUSA after it was honed there, brought to the States.
All the card carrying commies here in the States (Yes, talking about you Medea & Jody), thousands of radicalized college students and phony Winter Soldier vet’s like our old pal Bill”ASSASSIN” Perry and his butt buddies got on-board like it was the midnight train to Georgia.
Oh yea. Forgot my original point was, all these anti-war crews have morphed in to the Occupy movement AND, almost got their shit wasted in Egypt by the very ass clowns they want to be in control. But then, Medea ran to the Egyptian Army, ran hell, she was more like a cat on a hot tin roof headed their way, wringing her dainty lil CODEPinko hands and their asses barely saved from some dreadful things she was there helping to start in the nick of time…Don’t say it ain’t so, Suzie. I got screen caps of the assisting websites, blogs and groups. GOOGLE wasn’t your pal that day, missy. Heh.
Say no to war! Unless a Democrat is President:
http://www.protestwarrior.com/new_signs.php?sign=14
Communists within anti Iraq War protests:
Communist literature at an anti war demonstration stand:
http://www.protestwarrior.com/gallery.php?group=lefties&pic=7
Marxist-Humanism Philosophy and Revolution.
http://www.protestwarrior.com/gallery.php?group=lefties&pic=8
“Fight for Socialism”:
http://www.protestwarrior.com/gallery.php?group=lefties&pic=10
“Workers, Soldiers, and Students fight for communism”:
http://www.protestwarrior.com/gallery.php?group=lefties&pic=17
Revolution Books:
http://www.protestwarrior.com/gallery.php?group=lefties&pic=21
Maybe they never made it back when they went down range to act as human shields against the drone strikes. We can only hope.
@31 HackStone, don’t get my hopes up.
I was in Florida when the recount happened. It was a preview of the “anti-war” movement, deranged and unhinged.
Only Republican wars are bad or something…