BY CHRIS ATKINSON & JESS MELVIN
There could have been few places as full of pro-war fever in the last few months as the USA. Nevertheless, a vibrant and passionate movement opposed the war on Iraq. US anti-war student activist DANI BARLEY will be a guest speaker at the July 12-14 Resistance national conference. Green Left Weekly spoke to her about anti-war activity in the belly of the beast.
What’s it like to be a student in President Bush’s USA?
When you come out of high school, you’re really faced with two choices. If, like most young Americans, you can’t afford US$50,000 to get a degree, you have few options.
The easiest is to join the army, let them pay for your education and accept that you might be called up for active service. But if, like a lot of students, participating in the slaughter of innocent people in other countries doesn’t appeal to you, then you have a challenge ahead.
This challenge is real. When you turn 17, all students sit a mandatory test. This determines which part of the military you’re best suited to. I tested as a marine!
Schools have to turn over details such as your phone number and address. The military will then ring you and post stuff to your house to try and get you to sign up. This causes a lot of resentment, especially when this goes hand-in-hand with things like getting suspended for wearing an anti-war T-shirt, which happened recently.
So, how have students dealt with this?
On a lot a campuses, it’s been pretty hard. This time last year at Wayne State University, a major campus in Detroit, where I was living, there was no political organising going on — it was completely inactive. But the war on Iraq changed this.
On March 5, 200 students downed pens, walked out and protested against the war. All this with five inches of snow on the ground, below freezing temperature, and during exams! In the US if you don’t sit your exams you fail. So 200 people failed.
Students in solidarity with the protest wore black armbands to show their opposition to the war. We passed out 400 black armbands in one hour that morning.
What was the effect of 9/11?
It was almost impossible to convince people to protest the war on Afghanistan. We had to work out how we were going to deal with the overt racism which was stirred up by the government. It was pretty hard when everyone was going around saying “the towel-heads did it”.
But a year later, September 2002, a lot of people didn’t buy this overt racism. People didn’t accept the connection between 9/11 and Bush’s “War on Terrorism”. What did Iraq have to do with the twin-tower attack?!
All sorts of people started to organise for peace. For example, in Detroit, Soccer Moms for Peace was formed.
Then a protest was called for October 26. A lot of young people started organising contingents for it.
I think it just started to click for people. I’d wear anti-war badges and people would come up to me and say “I need to talk to you!”. On October 26, 100,000 people protested in Washington DC alone.
The press couldn’t ignore what was happening. The protests were empowering and strengthened people’s resolve to do more.
When the nationwide March 5 student strike was called, people came on board in a big way. 500 campuses pledged they would organise people to strike on March 5 around the country.
All sorts of things were organised: on-campus sit-ins, protest rallies and marches; teach-ins; and big city-wide protests. Across the US, 40,000 to 50,000 students took part, with huge protests in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York City.
It took people out of their bubble.
What happened after this?
Unfortunately it wasn’t like in Australia. There were no ongoing student strikes. After March 5, there wasn’t any follow-up action, there was a huge upsurge in the movement but no one said, “Hey, this is what we should do next”.
I think that the experience of the anti-war movement in the US gave a whole lot of people the confidence in their collective power to stand up to the might of the US empire both at home and abroad.
And with more US wars likely, we have to convince people that we can win a world without war and racism. We can be like a pin to the bubble. People’s eyes have been opened to the real US agenda and things are not going to go back to normal.
[Dani Barley is a member of the US organisation Solidarity. For more information about the Resistance Conference, visit <http://www.resistance.org.au>.]
From Green Left Weekly, June 18, 2003.
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