Wanted: Who Killed the Antiwar Movement? -- Gabriele Zamparini

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here at The Cat's Dream.com http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog/2007/10/wanted-who-killed-anti-war-movement.htm
Found on Uruknet.info.

See, the thing that bothers me is that we are asking people to be inconsistent when we ask them to condemn only the occupation in Iraq, but not in Afghanistan and Palestine. Isn't much easier to ask people to condemn imperial occupations everywhere? Isn't this a "teaching moment"? Are some land- and resource-grabbing occupations good?

Or is it possible to clean out all the wounds of empire that are festering so close
to the surface now by flooding them clarity? It seems at least a failure of courage and may be, as Zamparini says, be a fatal mistake, when we don't even try.

Is this failure to explain consistently the reason we are finding it so difficult to dislodge people's illusions in the Democratic Party, the alternate face of imperial aspiration? Linda

"Even though the brainwashing for the war of aggression against Afghanistan worked very well, there was a very high and organized opposition in the US and in the UK for the coming war of aggression against Iraq. That opposition was much higher in the rest of the world and possibly for the first time in history, thanks also to the Internet, we experienced a real internationalist movement connected and mobilized against the World’s warlords. On 15 February 2003 millions of people took the streets of the world to denounce their opposition to the mass murderers’ plans; where the United Nations failed, the United Nations’ Peoples claimed their democratic sovereignty: DON’T ATTACK IRAQ – NOT IN OUR NAME.

"Four and half years later, the anti-war movement is just a shadow of itself while in Iraq the genocide of a whole People and the annihilation of the whole country is business as usual; the banality of evil in XXI Century flavour.

"What happened?

"Of course, everybody agrees with Howard Zinn, “there is no magical panacea, only persistence." But in these past few years the anti-war movement’s establishment has taken all the wrong decisions and the worst directions.

"In the US especially, the anti-war planners wanted to go mainstream.

"The oldest, most experienced and committed segments of the movements have been isolated because too “old fashioned” and not presentable to the “new friends”, the generous foundations linked to the Democratic Party. Socialism and Marx can’t really be welcomed at fundraising dinners and cocktail parties.

"In spite of the many anti-war planners’ claims that the Israel Lobby has no real power to influence the US government’s policies, that Lobby is so very powerful to influence even the anti-war movement from within. The Palestine issue needed to be downplayed and many Palestine’s supporters and campaigners have been marginalized.