Written By : Donald Douglas

Actually, no.

See, “The Myth of the Struggling Antiwar Movement.”

The old-fashioned understanding of the “antiwar” movement hardly explains the left’s anti-everything protest agenda nowadays. But wouldn’t you know it, the folks at Politico played right into the sweaty palms of America’s domestic enemies with its whitewash of a report: “Anti-war groups battle for survival” (at Memeorandum). As longtime readers of this blog will recall, the hardline anti-American cadres are on the front lines of virtually every leftist protest rally in recent years. From the Stalinist backlash against Prop 8 supporters in 2008, to the Phoenix anti-SB 1070 march last May, the ANSWER Coalition and an assorted bunch of ragtag anarchists, reconquistas, 9/11 truthers, and gay rights ayatollahs have been at the forefront of the barricades. And of course we’ll continue to have antiwar protests on every anniversary of our continued deployments, in March and October, for example, to mark the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve covered some of the recent protests in Los Angeles, and it’s always the same: An antiwar industry with nothing new to say. For background, be sure to read “The Politics of Peace: What’s Behind the Anti-War Movement?” And especially this:

The irony of the modern “peace” movement is that it has very little to do with peace — either as a moral concept or as a political ideal. Peace is a tactical ideal for movement organizers: it serves as political leverage against U.S. policymakers, and it is an ideological response to the perceived failures of American society. The leaders of anti-war groups are modern-day Leninists. As Lenin used Russian war-weariness in 1917 to overthrow the Czar, so American street revolutionaries use reactions to the war on Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein as a way to foment radical political change at home … Their aim is a “struggle” against “oppression” and “imperialism,” code words in the lexicon of revolutionary socialism. Not In Our Name (NION), a satellite of the Revolutionary Communist Party, decries the War on Terror as a Bush Administration ploy: “We will not stop until all of us are free from your bloodthirsty domination.”

More pictures at American Power.

0