In the rush of organising the call for peace, we didn't have the time to set down any formal statements as to our thinking behind why the project was valuable or what we understood as its purpose, beyond what was immediately apparent from the call for peace and the statements as to what would be done with it. For anyone who's interested, the following three messages are an informal indication of what we thought we were up to!
A report to the social-movements mailing list, where the call for peace originated:
Over the last 24 hours or so, a team of us have been sending out press releases about the call for peace in the UK, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Italy and Spain. Obviously we don't really know yet how widely this has been picked up, but from new signatories it has at least been noticed on Indymedia if nowhere else!
In the press releases we presented the call as a public statement signed by 200 academics and activists from 28 countries (both figures have grown since), including MIT linguist and anarchist Noam Chomsky, feminist theorist Donna Haraway (author of the "Cyborg Manifesto" among other things), and veteran British peace activist Peter Cadogan (who was secretary of the Committee of 100).
As a petition these would have been trivial numbers, but we weren't trying to write a petition, and from the emails I've received I think most people were genuinely clear what they were signing. (Incidentally, the webpage currently has German and Italian translations; the French translation will be up shortly, and Spanish and Arabic translations are promised.)
At this point I think we've done half of what we set out to do, which was to lend whatever moral weight our academic and activist credentials offered us to the more general movement of opposition to the war. (Hopefully it's also something which people will find useful to cite in producing material listing informed opposition to the war etc.)
On a broader scale, I think the movement has had an effect, in particular in doing what the Italian left daily Il Manifesto calls "widening the pincers of uncertainty". The US administration and their close allies (like Britain) were I think taken somewhat aback in the weeks following Sept. 11th by the extent of dissent at home and among their allies abroad, and hopefully this awareness of the fragility of support for the war effort will have an effect in restraining the proponents of all-out and indefinite war.
The other half of what we hoped to do was make an early contribution to what may need to be a very long peace movement. Hopefully, given the relative "heaviness" of the statement, people who signed felt themselves making a more definite commitment - to stand out against the war, and to take appropriate action in that direction - and given the number of people who still seem confused or unable to act, this has its value. (As a sidenote, the statement has been circulating among activists in the Middle East; there are I think obvious reasons why people in that situation may be wary of attaching their name publicly to political statements.)
We also wanted to articulate a point of view which might be useful in the movement as it works its way towards developing an alternative "common sense" which is strong enough to stop the war. Certainly some of the feedback has been very appreciative of what we said and how we said it (though a couple of our famous names told us it was too long!) An activist from Yale mentioned that the peace movement there is considering basing statements on this, which is the kind of future incarnation we were hoping for for these ideas.
Obviously this is a very small contribution to what is a rapidly-growing movement, and the next steps for those of us who want to take action need to be in other directions, of which there are no shortage at present. But I thought it was worthwhile to let people who'd been involved or interested in this mini-project know that it was followed through, and that it did have some value, however small.
This has also been reflected in the number of people who've given very generously of their time and energy to help with this project. It's been a real joy to find so many strangers willing to help out at short notice, and an indication of the real potential of the peace movement that this can be done so rapidly.
Many thanks to Alex for getting the ball rolling; everyone on social-movements who helped produce the thing; Anna, Catriona, Jean-Yves, Mariachiara, Sebastian and Simon for help with translations; and Alex, Anna, Lee and Mariachiara for helping with the press releases!
Laurence
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In response to a signatory who wanted to know what we were going to do with the call for peace:
I'd like to add my name to the Call for Peace. You'll find my institutional affiliation below. Before I forward the url to friends and colleagues, however, I'd like to know to whom you are planning to send this petition, and when.
That's a very fair question! Basically the answer is that we haven't really conceived this as a petition. We started from the assumption that there are other people working on petitions on a totally different scale (a week or so back I heard that a U. of Chicago petition had reached over 600,000 people - at the moment we have around 300 names!), but that there were other useful things we could do:
- One was to use whatever moral weight our academic and activist credentials might carry in press releases, which went out in 6 countries (USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, Italy and Spain) and 3 languages on Monday last (Oct. 8th). Because signatures are still coming in, there is a feeling that we might consider another go further down the line, particularly if more "well-known names" sign (at present the best-known signatories are probably Noam Chomsky and Donna Haraway). That might take the form more of contacts with specific journalists interested in a short write-up or whatever. I hope we will also see other activist groups using the statement, and whatever authority our various signatures confer, in their material.
- The other, and to us equally important goal, was to help develop a movement capable of stopping this war by (a) giving people a chance to do something concrete, public and oppositional at an early stage; (b) contributing to serious conversations and discussions about the war when people asked friends, colleagues or fellow-activists to sign; and (c) making a contribution to the development of the kind of "alternative common sense" we felt would be needed for a radical but broad-based anti-war movement.
Because of these goals, we've tried to avoid "junk-mailing" strangers, and encouraged people who've asked us about it to send the call for peace to people they know or to lists etc. where they are known, on the basis that this is more likely to seem "real" at a personal level, to produce actual conversations, and to get people thinking about content than something which arrives more or less anonymously. As far as I can tell from the emails I'm getting, this is the kind of thing that's happening, at least some of the time!
I should perhaps also say that the list of signatories is constantly "public" in the sense that it is available on the Web at http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/call/signatories.html. We do try to make it clear, both in the email and the Web versions of the document, that signatures are public (unlike most petitions). I do also do my best to check signatures by replying to the authors, including the Web link to the overall "call for peace" pages in the email.
Probably if we'd had more time to think about it we could have done a better job in this area altogether, but the whole thing took over a dozen people in at least half a dozen countries to produce, and we put it together over probably less than a week in total, so it certainly hasn't been perfect in its organisation! People do on the whole seem to have appreciated the text, though, which is heartening.
Laurence
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In response to criticism forwarded by the author from a critical geography mailing list:
Paul was good enough to forward me a copy of his comments on the call for peace which I'm involved with. Perhaps I've come in on the middle of a conversation, but I find the arguments a bit peculiar.
Paul objects to the peace movement, but doesn't tell us (at least in this message) what the alternative to a peace movement is (assuming that Paul shares our sense that the current war should be stopped?) He says "there are many possibilities for action", but apparently the peace movement has taken up none of them, which is surprising considering its actual variety on the ground.
I've dealt with Paul's specific comments below, but wanted to comment on one general premise, which is that his arguments seem to assume a very odd model of movement organisation. In practice, Paul's major objection seems to be that our document is not sufficiently radical, not sufficiently hard-line.
But in the real world, most people are not sufficiently radical or hard-line. People are radicalised, as most practicing activists know, by taking part in movements. Very often they start from extremely simple premises, such as "two wrongs don't make a right", or "it's wrong to kill". As time goes on, they often develop more radical and wider-ranging analyses.
In writing our document, we were attempting to achieve two things, in some tension with each other.
One was to write a document which would encourage people who had already thought to some extent about the issues to move beyond a "lowest-common-denominator" position. That our document now stands out rather less than it did when we were writing it, in mid-September, is an indication of the development of a peace movement, and the development within and around that movement of the kind of oppositional analysis we were hoping to contribute to.
The other was to write a document which would be acceptable to activists with a wide range of political perspectives and academics with a wide range of theoretical positions. This kind of thing is an important part of the process of building a movement, which does not exclude the existence of more "exclusive" positions within that movement, but recognises that there is a need for a "movement common sense" which enables people to find common ground with each other.
We therefore chose to leave out, both in the drafting and the editing stages, positions which proved not to be capable of gaining agreement even among the couple of hundred social movement activists and academics on the mailing list where it was produced. People familiar with cooperation in non-hierarchical circumstances may perhaps recognise the problem.
Some specific comments:
> > But if a bunch of people are getting together and saying 'no', then I want my voice to be added.
> They are not saying 'no', they are saying yes to 90% of the values behind the United States. That is the problem. They are calling for peace, that's all, and in a way which is morally offensive.
I'm not sure I understand what "90% of the values behind the United States" means. Perhaps it means US government policy, in which case it's hard to explain the various Marxists, anarchists and feminists who signed the call for peace (including that notorious American nationalist Noam Chomsky). Beyond this I'd find it unwise to comment, since so many of our USian friends and comrades want to argue that "the real America" is an ideal which is in no way represented by those who claim to speak for them.
> Laurence Cox is according to the website the organiser, and I assume he is the author, possibly with Anna Mazzoldi who hosts it at her website.
I think the website says fairly explicitly that the initiative comes from the social-movements academic / activist mailing list, which from what I know of crit-geog-forum has some similarities with it. A fellow activist on the list asked me to put together a document for the list based on the list's own discussions; I drafted a document, list members made various suggestions and alterations, and we incorporated those which were consensual. A range of activists and academics in different countries have produced, or are working on, translations.
> For me the issue is the failure of the intellectual response. No-one on this list has provided any alternative to this type of peace petition, or the peace movement.
Although it is true that many people grasp this document as a petition (ie something to be presented to powerful elites in the hope of getting a reading), I think the website makes it fairly clear that it is not this (which is being done far more effectively elsewhere). Our purpose was to start people thinking, taking sides and taking action, as well as to offer some public opposition to the war with some "expert" authority.
Leaving ourselves aside, though, I find it hard to imagine what might be an alternative to a peace movement as a way of stopping a war. (Waiting until the US administration is satisfied that enough people in enough countries have died? Private lobbying to convince them that they are making a mistake? Casting hexes?) Again, perhaps Paul has made this clear in other messages, in which case I, and probably many other activists, would like to know what it is we should be doing.
> There are two possible explanations for that. Either they have simply failed, or more reasonably, they do not want to provide an alternative - becasue they do support the peace movemnent in the present crisis.
I find this very puzzling. "The peace movement", in any relevant sense, has only come into existence after September 11th, within "the present crisis". Of course NGOs and SMOs (social movement organisations) have played an important role in keeping skills and ideas alive since the last major mobilisations, but what makes a movement a movement is the presence and activity of large numbers of people.
The movement that I am familiar with, here on the ground in Dublin and more generally around the world via the Internet and media, is anything other than in a crisis: it is being born, it is starting to get organised, and starting to think what to do. We see our role as helping with that process, not offering managerial directions to some already-existing body which can be swung from A (failed intellectual response) to B (the correct line?)
> It is a indeed a personal criticism of most members of this list, to say that they have failed to present an intellectual response to the assertive self-confidence of George Bush, Tony Blair and Francis Fukuyama. It is meant as a personal criticism. They, unlike most people, claim to be engaged in developing such alternatives. The peace movement against the Afghan war is definitely not such a comprehensive alternative, and certainly the Cox-Mazzoldi petition is not.
This is correct, and we have never claimed that it was. The call for peace ends, you may remember, with a series of calls on ourselves and each other to get active and start building an effective movement. That a peace movement is not in itself a total revolution is I think fairly obvious. It may, however, contribute to saving some lives. In the longer term, a little history may suggest that slogans like "Peace, land, bread!" have on occasion had far-reaching social consequences.
> I mentioned some of the general defects of the petition earlier. There are other points which I did not mention then, such as the ethics of terrorism and violence. The petition opens by distancing itself from the WTC and Pentagon attacks "We are horrified and appalled by the atrocities of September 11th, for which no justification is possible..."
> But why is no justification possible? Is it because the victims were American? Why is it possible to justify the bombing of Germany in World War II - which the authors presumably find justifiable?
Speaking only for myself, I share the widespread view that the deliberate bombing of civilians was not justifiable (a view which was so generally felt in the aftermath of WWII that "Bomber" Harris was excluded from the general awarding of honours). I gather that the laws of war also exclude the deliberate targetting of civilians. This is not an abstract point of view: my father-in-law, as a young child in Italy, was subjected to the consistent blanket bombing of a strategically irrelevant seaside resort to which he had been evacuated.
> And which "atrocities" do the authors mean - the attack on the Pentagon, or the blockade of Iraq which was organised from there on September 11th, as on other days? Why do the authors not refer to the wars fought by democracies, or to colonialism, as an 'atrocity'? Why do the authors not call the free market an 'atrocity'?
Because in this wonderful world we live in there operate what can be described as "ideologies". The most powerful institutions producing these ideologies have been engaged since September 11th to convince ordinary people that there is a necessary link between the widespread revulsion at the WTC attack and support for the bombing of Afghanistan and whatever else our leaders take it into their heads to do.
Conversely, we are told (and anyone engaged in arguing against the war in public has to deal with this again and again) that to oppose the war is somehow to condone or approve of the WTC attack. (Again, those with a sense of history will remember similar arguments from other times and places).
In real-world communication, we need to speak to other people. We need to recognise their reaction, and show that to feel as they do does not necessarily mean that they have to support the war. Is this very hard to understand? In working-class community development we call this "starting from where people are at", contrasted with starting from where we might wish people were....
(Incidentally, if you read the text carefully you will note that we do indeed say that western leaders have committed massive crimes in the rest of the world: "they have supported dictatorships, armed fundamentalists, supported military coups, and stood by while thousands and hundreds of thousands have died". We go on to note that warfare against civilians is a form of terrorism.)
> I could go through the whole petition, to point out these biases, but I am probably writing this for its supporters anyway. The point is, that there are apparently no supporters for an alternative.
All serious anti-war activists that I know - anarchists, feminists, ecologists, democrats, Marxists, Christians and "ordinary people" - are doing three things. They are making their opposition to the war known, developing arguments to justify their opposition and argue with those who support war, and exploring what forms of concrete action are appropriate and useful to take. I'm not sure that I understand what the problem is.
> It is not at all difficult to 'do something' in the present war, there are enough possibilities for action. That is why I suggested an alternative to the Cox-Mazzoldi petition, and that still seems a good idea.
Let a thousand flowers bloom!
It might be worth noting though that to date something less than 300 people have signed this apparently hideous document (although they can lay claim to a significant amount of activist experience and academic expertise between them), while several tens of thousands of military personnel are currently engaged in trying to kill people. Perhaps these energies might be more usefully directed in trying to deal with this latter problem?
Laurence Cox
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Read the full text in English
To sign the call for peace, go to this page
The full list of signatories is available here
An overview of who has signed to date can be found here
Back to main "Call for peace" page