This week's New Yorker (March 17 issue) has an interesting column on 1) how many of us are deeply conflicted about going to war on Iraq, and 2) how this administration's Utter Certainty that they are Doing the Right Thing has caused a lot of harm, even before the shooting starts (and it seems inevitable that it will start.)
--> www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030317ta_talk_hertzberg
And in today's Chronicle, a report that anarchists will be joining tomorrow's peace march. Oh joy. "'I don't encourage the violence at all, but the breakaway protests are about changing the way things are going,' said Steve Comstock, a 21-year-old Santa Cruz resident who was arrested after participating in the last splinter march." Er, how, exactly?
I'm not saying there isn't a place for civil disobedience — but this ain't no civil rights movement sit-in we're talking about. It's one thing to say, "If we can't all have access to our shared institutions, than NOBODY gets access." It's another thing to say, "Destroy the system!" without even proposing an alternative.
That's not peace, it's not a solution, and it's not even a coherent message. I want no part of it.
"Anarchists to take part in S.F. march; They say they're demonstrating against evils of capitalism"
--> sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/03/14/BA66439.DTL
From the New Yorker article
Both among those who, on balance, support the coming war and among those who, on balance, oppose it are a great many who hold their views in fear and trembling, haunted by the suspicion that the other side might be right after all. In the American “homeland,” the anxiety that this crisis is provoking is physical (a dread that, for obvious reasons, is perhaps stronger in New York and Washington than elsewhere), but it is also intellectual. The divisions are profound, and the most agonizing are not between people but within them. The phenomenon is visible in the tabular abstractions of opinion surveys. According to one fairly typical recent poll, conducted for the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, only a bare majority of the public favors the United Nations’ authorizing an invasion as opposed to a "strengthened inspection process." But much larger—and therefore substantially overlapping—majorities, usually in the seventy-per-cent range, say that they are convinced by the mutually exclusive arguments of both sides. They agree that the United States should not invade Iraq without the approval of the United Nations, and also that the U.N.’s disapproval must not be allowed to stand in the way; that Iraqi intransigence is such that the United States now has no choice but to invade, and also that strengthened inspections are preferable to invasion; that an invasion should begin soon, because Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction will otherwise only become stronger, and also that an invasion should not begin at all, because it would provoke Saddam to use those weapons. When people have no idea of the consequences of a given course of action or inaction, they don’t know which way to turn—or they turn both ways.
