Collapse of the Peace Movement, Part I

20 years ago, the Feb. 15, 2003 global protests shook the world and the establishment. The "peace movement" never tried that again, instead incorporating itself into the Democratic Party. So it died.

“Globalization” has become a dirty word because people are rightfully very mistrustful of the corporate globalization of the sort favored by the World Economic Forum. But there’s another kind of globalization, from below.

There was a manifestation of that on Feb. 15, 2003. Millions of people around the world protested against the then-impending invasion of Iraq.

But, there were tragedies: That protest would have done far more if it took place earlier — especially before the Congressional vote “authorizing” the invasion of Iraq in the autumn of 2002. (There were of course other non-global protests in the autumn of 2002.)

And the “peace movement” didn’t build on those protests even though they were seen by all as incredibly powerful. The New York Times in their aftermath called world public opinion, as manifested in the global peace protests “the Second Superpower” — the only force on Earth capable of challenging the power of the US Empire.

Obviously the political establishment, Big Media, and Big Tech have attempted to manipulate global public opinion.

But the “movement” threw its power away as well.

And it wasn’t really a surprise. The “leadership” of the US antiwar movement at the time, United for Peace and Justice, was initially actually opposed to the quasi global protests they would later receive credit for.

UFPJ in the years following, instead of trying to seriously build global alliances, did the following: They had protests in DC in the late summer or early autumn of 2004, 2006 and 2008.

That is, focusing on hatred of Bush rather than love of humanity, they effectively turned the great antiwar movement into an appendage of an appendage of the Democratic Party.

Imagine if instead, protests were coordinated with people in Arab and Muslim countries. To make the quasi global Feb. 15 protests (which were in large part in “the West”) truly global. That didn’t happen, so you ended up with the triumph of the martyrs in Iraq. And you also had silly protests in the Mideast against pathetic Danish cartoons.

It’s sometimes said that Obama betrayed the peace movement. No. The peace movement betrayed its principles and that led to the worst possible Obama. This helped ensure that there would be no accountability for the Iraq invasion, and the mechanisms of Empire would continue past the GW Bush administration.

This hate-centric outlook would be accelerated with Trump with the added irony that he posed as antiwar himself, so many progressive-liberals had the effect of rehabilitating lots of Bushites and eventually becoming, as we see now, not just a tacit instrument of Empire, but overtly pro-NATO and pro-war.

A mechanic in Ohio probably has more in common with a worker in Syria than with the ruling elite in Washington, D.C.

The Internet, which promised to be a World Wide Web has largely been swallowed by Big Tech in conjunction with the US government. Part of this means that a remarkable part of communication remains locked into a national context. Movements have done too little to try to overcome this.

Indeed, movements now have largely become manifestations of Big Media. The Arab uprisings were largely driven by Gulf media like Al Jazeera and Al Arabia, with disastrous results. People protest BLM largely because it has been consecrated as acceptable by CNN. Moreover, protest movements, like BLM, that confine themselves to a nationalist framework are primed to, again, be used to enable Empire.

So the lack of a meaningful transparent global media structure, what WikiLeaks or The Real News could have been, is a significant part of the problem.

Information is key. Movements without independent thought result in people protesting Trump for all the wrong reasons and becoming at best pawns for the US establishment.

Upcoming: Realignment — how the left and right can join together more that most realize.