Saturday's antiwar demos

Antiwar rallies in Washington and other cities around the country are sponsored this weekend by United for Peace and International ANSWER.  I would encourage everyone who is so inclined to attend.  I probably won't be there myself because I'm still hobbling around from a broken leg.  But it's a very important event, a major chance for people to make a statement against Bush's Iraq War.

San Francisco being, well, San Francisco, there are several events going on in town this weekend besides the demonstration/march: Busy weekend on tap, if you can get there: Protest, blues fest, love and leather to pack the street San Francisco Chronicle 09/23/05).  And, yes, they do mean leather:

It looks like it's going to be one of those classic San Francisco weekends: a leather and fetish fair, a blues festival, an anti-war protest, a love parade -- and, of course, headache-inducing traffic.

In what organizers say will be an "only in San Francisco" weekend jammed with seven major events, residents and visitors are being advised to take public transportation, walk or ride bicycles. In other words, do anything but drive.

Aside from the usual Indian summer weather that attracts Bay Area residents to the city's landmarks, several major outdoor activities are lined up for this weekend. Hundreds of thousands of people -- extra people -- are expected to participate. They will let it all hang out in leather, protest the war in Iraq and dance in the streets.

Throngs will converge on the city Saturday for four events: the Love Parade and Celebration, the anti-war demonstration, the 33rd annual San Francisco Blues Festival and a night concert at SBC Park featuring the popular band Green Day.

In a speech in San Francisco several years ago about this time of year, Molly Ivins joked that it was nice to be in the Bay Area during "Native American summer."  Some people in the audience didn't realize she was making a joke.

So, in San Francisco, the antiwar march is likely to have the most stodgy-looking crowd of all the major events going on.

But in their never-ending attempt to discredit the antiwar movement, war fans are bitching and moaning about International ANSWER, which has leftwing ideas (gasp! choke!) on other issues than the Iraq War.  This news article gives a decent summary of coalition politics in organizing this march: War protests make for strange bedfellows by Joe Garofoli San Francisco Chronicle 09/23/05.

Criticisms of activists' associations are rooted in a fundamental red and blue political divide: Liberal-led demonstrations often are filled with supporters advocating a variety of causes in an effort to show how the issues are interrelated. That's why International ANSWER insisted on ground rules for Saturday's demonstration allowing signage linking the Iraq war to "the colonial occupation of Palestine, the occupation of Haiti and other anti-imperialist positions."

United for Peace will focus its signage solely on the war.

Conservatives insist that by participating in such a demonstration, marchers endorse the views of those next to them.

"People should be careful of the company they keep in these marches," said Kristinn Taylor, an organizer with FreeRepublic.com. "The question I always ask is, 'If the Klu Klux Klan led an anti-war demonstration, would you march in it?' "

Well, let's see.  On the one hand, you have International ANSWER, which promotes some dogmatic lefty ideas but whose entire reputation is built on its sponsorship of demonstrations against the Iraq War: a war that most of the world (with good reason!) considers a violation of international law; a war that was based on claims of "weapons of mass destruction" that were completely nonexistent; a war that has badly damaged American security and reduced American influence in the world; a war that has been a godsend (or, more precisely, a Bush-send) to jihadist recruitment.

On the other hand, we have the Ku Klux Klan, a name that has been used by a number of organizations and sects, all of which share in common a white supremacist ideology, a hatred of democracy, and an advocacy (and sometimes practice) of terrorism, torture and murder against blacks, Catholics and others who segregationists might dislike.  A group that was an integral part of the overthrow of democratic governments throughout the South by force and violence and fraud during the 1870s.

Is this Freeper criticizing International ANSWER?  Or trying to sanitize the Ku Klux Klan?

I was surprised in the prewar days to see some liberals like Eric Alterman fretting about the impurity of the antiwar coalition of those days.  It always struck me as silly, though any activist movement is going to have its sectarian splits for various reasons.

But if people are serious about stopping the war, it's silly to worry about whether other people in a crowd of thousands or hundreds of thousands of demonstrators might have political opinions that differ from theirs on some subject or the other.  If you need that kind of ideology purity and consistency, join the Moonies or the Church of Scientology.

The marches on Saturday are marches against the Iraq War.  Everyone except the drooling-at-the-mouth ideologues of the right will understand the turnout as being a statement against the Iraq War, period.  And maybe a few liberals whose politics are too pure to actually help accomplish anything in the real world.

I would add that, even though the article above talks about ground rules for signs, in a large demonstration, as a practical matter it isn't possible to enforce 100% conformity on the signs people carry.  So if some people show up with signs that say "Free Mars!", the organizers probably aren't going to try to kick them out of the march.