Word: antiwar
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Nothing slows down a mass movement like nuance. Many protest groups realized that the hunger for antiwar sentiment subsided the moment that U.S. troops were put in peril. "The mood changes," says Claire Gorfinkel, who co-chairs Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, a Pasadena, Calif., coalition with a 1,000-member mailing list. At rallies and marches, Gorfinkel says, passersby are less willing to flash peace signs and honk car horns. "My hunch is that there will be a reassessment on a broad scale throughout society for a period of time, a pendulum swing, if you will...
...Bush Administration to avoid war. Today's message is "Support U.S. troops. Bring them home," says Ty Moore, 25, an organizer with a student coalition against war in Iraq. Groups now must walk the delicate line between protest and patriotism. They need to find a way to be antiwar without being perceived as anti--U.S. troops, and every new decision poses a threat to ideological unity. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, for instance, has conceded that it failed to stop the war and has shifted its campaign toward ensuring minimal Iraqi casualties. This doesn't jibe with the view...
...international antiwar movement does not have the problems of division and delicacy that confront groups in the U.S. In Berlin, Paris and Cairo, protesters are united by pacifism and anti-Americanism. The war has only reaffirmed their views and intensified their fervor, and protests in Europe and the Middle East are likely to endure well into any possible American occupation of Iraq...
Disagreements within the U.S. antiwar movement aren't just over ideology but method. Swarming protests--like the San Francisco shutdown and the 200,000-person march that closed streets in New York City on Saturday--continued over the weekend, sometimes to the clucking disapproval of more focused dissenters. "If I actually had 10,000 people who would listen to what I said," Clark notes, "I would certainly do things differently than the way they turned out in San Francisco. The job of a civil resister is to provoke a response. Vomiting on the streets--it's very creative...
What the hydra of the dissent movement needs most desperately is a single head. But with all the Democratic presidential candidates (except Howard Dean and Al Sharpton) backing the war, political leaders are hard to come by, as are mentors from the intellectual left. "People in the antiwar movement are making a giant, historic mistake," says Paul Berman, left-leaning author of Terror and Liberalism. "The argument for the war is one of solidarity with the oppressed. These ought to be the principles of the left. The people in the antiwar movement have fallen into confusion. They should be protesting...