2008 Woodie Awards
Our colleagues at Cornell release their latest issue.
From the YDN:
In actuality, the meeting was attended by a politically diverse body eager to hear from and engage the nation’s top diplomat, even if some disagreed with him. While audience participation by clapping and hissing is part of the Yale Political Union’s tradition — in keeping with a long tradition of parliamentary debate — we maintain respect for all speakers and appreciate the opportunity to hear all views. Student reaction to Ambassador Bolton’s visit was no different in this respect.
My emphasis. So let’s not chastise the Yale students.
Actually, Eric, with MJ giving mention to the student pie-throwers, I wouldn’t be surprised if the “reflexively liberal” Yaleies make it this year.
My colleagues simply prove my point, which I made about Bill Rehnquist a couple of weeks ago: Americans place far too much respect on the act of public service, and have almost no regard or interest for what our public servants actually do in office. At that rate, I’d suppose they’d want us to listen ‘respectfully’ if a racist like Jesse Helms or a criminal incompetent like Michael Brown (not my colleague here, but instead the former FEMA head) came to Princeton to speak. As Matt noted,
Rehnquist is a perfect example of the general principle that if you live long enough, and acquire enough power, everyone will treat you with a great deal of respect whether you deserve it or not.
You can say virtually the same thing about John Bolton. Those Yale students deserve a Mother Jones mention.
I think Asheesh brings up a lot of very interesting points in his post, not the least of which is his discussion of Gandhi and King.
What Gandhi advocated, party based on his understanding of Thoreau, was the principle of satyagraha. The genius of the satyagraha strategy is that it was neither passive, despite the fact that some people incorrectly translated it as “passive resistance,” nor was it violent and intolerant. To Gandhi, and his “student” Martin Luther King, the frequently presented choice of passivity or violent confrontation was a false dichotomy.
This is because Satyagraha was the forceful public display of an individual or individuals taking the moral high ground. Only by refusing to sacrifice unjust means in order to achieve an just end (Gandhi himself framed the principle in these terms), did Gandhi feel he had the power and the right to transform society.
What Gandhi realized, and what I hope other progressives realize, is that in order for us to remake society to better fit our ideals, we have to become those ideals. In other words, if we want a society of tolerance and openness we must become forcefully tolerant ourselves. Drowning out speakers, no matter how immoral and offensive they are, is not consistent with this philosophy of protest.
If Gandhi had attended a speech by someone with as distasteful a record as Bolton’s is, he would not have tried to scream or bang in order to drown such a person out. But that does not mean he would have been passive.
I have no interest in picking an intellectual fight with Asheesh, but I think his recent post deserves a response.
I hope as much as I can hope anything that what happened at Yale never happens at Princeton. The idea that liberals and progressives should shut down the voices of others seems contrary to the very notion of these great philosophies. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t protest to our very heart’s content (in an appropriate manner) when we feel that someone has committed an injustice. But it does mean that we need to be respectful of views that differ from ours, even if they are offensive and harmful.
Progressives and liberals should spend their time fighting intolerance(religious, intelectual or otherwise)- not spreading it.
For the first time in a decade, protestors (a humble number of us from Princeton among them) descended on the White House and surrounded it in what is beyond doubt the largest mass action since the invasion of Iraq, and possibly the largest protest since the anti-Vietnam War era.
The central protest in Washington was supplemented by simultaneous protests in Los Angeles/San Francisco/San Diego (>15,000), Seattle (>5000), London (>10,000), Florence, Copenhagen, Rome, Paris, Seoul, Helsinki, Madrid and numerous other towns and cities worldwide. Because the National Park Service has stopped estimating the size of demonstrations in Washington since the invasion of Iraq, the numbers are inexact. Protest organizers count 300,000, the police counts 150,000. 200,000 sounds like a reasonable estimate to me – I had not seen a mass of that size since the October 5th Revolution in Serbia in 2000.
Our presence was not an ignorable exhibit of left-wing fanatics, nor was it a product of “one side” of the degraded system of US party politics. It was a splendid demonstration of the overwhelming opposition to and majority disapproval of Bush’s occupation of Iraq. 59% of Americans believe sending troops into Iraq was a “mistake,” 63% are for immediate partial or full withdrawal, 65% believe we are “spending too much” for the war, while a record 67% disapprove of Bush’s “handling” of Iraq. With this, we may say that roughly 2000 people were represented by each single attendant of the rally (accepting the underestimate of 100,000 protests) on the simple slogan “End the War in Iraq, Bring the Troops Home.”
Polls make one things perfectly clear: the demonstrators represented a vast majority of Americans, as well as world opinion.
Asheesh had some important concerns about the protest, and I would like to respond to some of them. One concern is that the protestors lacked the “moral authority” to demonstrate as they did. Another is the “disturbing anti-Semitic tone” of the ANSWER coalition, the other major organizer with United for Peace and Justice, as well as its advocacy of “Kim Jong Il’s style of communism” around the world. And yet another was that the protest was not “creative” enough to match our very own Frist Filibuster. More broadly, I think these comments apply not only to the DC Protest last weekend, but to the Counterinaugural last November, and the upcoming November 2 mobilization against the war.
Firstly, the ‘moral authority’ to protest the illegal and immoral actions of a government is not only every citizen’s right– it’s her duty. Reserving the right to dissent to a single group with “moral authority” (especially if chosen arbitrarily) is profoundly undemocratic, and should not be tolerated. Similarly, the accusation of “anti-Semitism” is misplaced. Perfectly legitimate issues - US aid to Israeli Defense Forces, the construction of the illegal ‘security’ wall, the right of return for Palestinian refugees and checkpoints and roadblocks - are deemed close to “anti-Semitism” in tone, discrediting those bringing them up. Similarly, criticism of Bush’s ventures in the Middle East or his negligent incompetence in New Orleans is deemed “anti-American” in tone. As a Jewish lady from the Middle East Task Force remarked to me at the protest, “I’m sick of these neo-cons telling me that working for peace in Palestine is ‘anti-Semitic.’”
Finally, also inappropriate is the conflation of ANSWER’s broader ‘communist’ agenda with the greater part of the demonstrators’ agenda. ANSWER was not even close to being the main motivation for protesters. ANSWER’s agenda did not receive any more attention at book stands, the speaker stage, the concert, or the flyers/literature being passed around than dozens of other antiwar groups. ANSWER did not get any mainstream media coverage for its agenda other than the common slogan “US Out of Iraq – Bring the Troops Home Now.” In short, ANSWER was irrelevant. To identify the antiwar movement with - or to denounce its manifestations because of - this one group is damaging to any kind of democratic struggle in the US.
To be perfectly clear: there is a speck of truth in the criticism outlined above. There was indeed some Maoist literature being offered, as there was conceivably an ‘anti-Semitic’ slur somewhere(though I personally witnessed none). There were self-labeled “Communists,” as there were classical conservatives, liberal democrats, laissez-faire capitalists, state socialists, left and right libertarians, revolutionaries, reformists and almost every other imaginable species of American political creatures. There was narrow-mindedness and misdirection, as there was conspiracy talk and outright idiocy.
But there was also something else – something that has long disappeared from the American political culture and is being resurrected by the antiwar movement – the spirit of solidarity. Like the demonstrations prior to the invasion of 2003, the protest has yet again shown the tremendous political and ideological diversity of the antiwar movement, and has dispelled the White House-mainstream media image of a narrow antiwar spectrum, plagued by confusion and disunity, undeserving of attention. Alabama’s ‘Grannies For Peace’ joined Veterans Against the War in chanting “Hell No, We Won’t Go”; Republicans For the Impeachment of Bush rubbed shoulders with Queers for Racial and Economic Justice, while the Radical Cheerleaders shared their love of dancing with gray-haired gentlemen in suits with the Sociologists Against Borders. The antiwar majority has asserted itself as diverse and united, not giving a toss about ANSWER’s “communist” agenda. The sole focus is an end to the brutal war in Iraq.
As far as creativity goes, a praiseworthy quality of the protest was the focus on education and awareness. Organizers made considerable efforts to ensure that protestors leave DC with flyers, literature, and resources to get involved in various issues, not only through activism but through art. The political concerns that have mobilized people to attend, diverse as they are, were not only tolerated, but respected and associated in new ways. The Washington Post remarked, quite superficially, that “[m]any of the speakers also charged Mr. Bush with squandering resources that could have been used to aid people affected by the two hurricanes that slammed into the Gulf Coast” (9/25/05). More importantly, speakers explored the connections between IMF/World Bank policy and Western involvement in the Middle East, between the insanity of US nuclear armament and the so-called ‘war on terror,’ between racism and military recruitment on American campuses, between the prison system and public subsidy of the Pentagon, between poverty and the national health care disaster, between occupation in Israel and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so on. The connection between the Bush administration’s criminal negligence and incompetence in the aftermath of Katrina and the occupation of Iraq is but one in a series of links made at the protest. Furthermore, the channels of communicating political messages were perhaps the most creative and artistic of all the recent mass protests – people were invited to learn and participate in dances, an 11-hour concert, workshops, poetry jams, etc. I’m afraid not even the Frist Filibuster reached such a level of creativity.
Above all, the momentum of the protest is priceless – active resistance to the war is becoming more and more serious, making the marginalized majority heard. Cindy Sheehan was arrested along with a dozen others for sitting in front of the White House. Already two days later, a dozen peace activists were arrested at the Pentagon for carrying “signs that said, ‘War is terrorism,’ ‘War is terrorism with a bigger budget,’ and pictures of the victims, both the U.S. soldiers and the Iraqi civilians.” One of them reports that they’ve been “so effective in shutting down the Pentagon for, I’d say, more than an hour.” Further acts of civil disobedience are expected on November 2nd across the country, when the ‘The World Can’t Wait’ mobilization against the war is scheduled.
Ellie Wiesel recently asked “Where is hope?” Last weekend, it was in the streets of Washington.
I explain at CampusProgress.org.
Unlike most liberals, I find Tom Friedman’s writing oppressively trite and ridiculously overrated. But this is a good column because it rightly articulates why we need big, massive government and lots of central planning. If there’s one lesson to be learned from Katrina, it’s that the conservative mantra that people should help themselves and that it’s not the government’s responsibility to provide for people is both stupid and dangerous:
And then there are the president’s standard lines: “It’s not the government’s money; it’s your money,” and, “One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government.” Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: “It’s not the government’s hurricane - it’s your hurricane.”
Right. We need big government for all the reasons the Prospect articulated back in May: government is often more efficient than the private sector, government is perhaps the crucial engine of economic growth, and government programs provide a level of social and economic stability that private counterparts cannot.
In a twisted way, the Katrina disaster shows why all of this is true. What, one wonders, would have happened if we had a program of universal health insurance in this country- perhaps modeled off of Jacob Hacker’s Medicare Plus proposal- that helped all those victims of the hurricane whose livelihoods were destroyed? I would bet a large amount of money that things would be better off. What if we had a more efficient federal disaster relief infrastructure? You wonder about these things.
On Monday, YAF’s Roger Custer published his list of “he top ten most outrageous and ridiculous campus outrages from the 2004-2005 academic year” over at Human Events. Earlier today, I posted my list of ten real campus outrages at CampusProgress.org.
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