Dan Fishback: Intelligent opposition to war

Preparing for my last semester at Penn, I've been getting awfully (and appropriately) sentimental. I've been taking stock, pre-emptively missing all the benefits of this college environment -- ethernet, the Magic Carpet food truck, weekly access to 30,000 readers... But perhaps most importantly, I pre-emptively miss an anti-war community that is not run by communists. It's so annoying that such a statement, even to me, sounds viscerally McCarthy-istic. But I swear to you -- it's not. I reserve my right as a sane leftist to believe that communism is an outrageously stupid idea. I reserve my right to wish they'd just lay off and let the anti-war movement reflect the views of the majority of its members. I reserve my right to attack communists with communistic language: Let this be the people's movement! At the moment, it's not. The major organizing body for large anti-war protest is International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), which is a front for the International Action Center, which is a front for the Workers World Party, which is a tiny Leninist group that supports the governments of North Korea and China. The figurehead of International A.N.S.W.E.R., former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, is currently defense counsel for Serbian mass murderer Slobodan Milosevic, and has defended ex-Nazi concentration camp guards. This is the man more or less in charge of our peace movement? The leadership of communists and idiots in the anti-war movement makes difficult the already-sticky task of mobilizing masses of people around nuanced positions that reflect political reality. At the moment, the positions of the anti-war community mostly beg more questions. Granted, an invasion of Iraq would probably increase the risk of terrorist attacks exponentially, but how should we handle the existence of chemical weapons if U.N. inspectors find them or if Iraqi behavior makes abundantly clear that they are hiding them? After all, Saddam Hussein has been making gestures of affection toward fundamentalist Islam, suggesting that weapons trading between Iraq and al Qaeda is not as unlikely as it seemed last year. So how do we address the security concerns capitalized upon by the war hawks on the right? How do we proactively craft an agenda of global peace without focusing exclusively on the trespasses of our own government? It's all right to form a movement out of such questions but only if such a movement is committed to answering them intelligently. Such answers seem unlikely when the forces behind the movement are primarily committed to a strict Marxist ideology which casts capitalists (i.e. the U.S. and Israeli governments) as the only real evil, ignoring the villains less evidently bourgeois in this globalized world -- men like Saddam, bin Laden, Arafat or Kim Jong Il, himself a Communist hero. So far, most of my experiences organizing against the war have been cozily isolated from this kind of thinking. Although we're sometimes perceived as radical, the anti-war community at Penn is actually quite moderate and certainly to the right of the major coalitions, let alone groups from other universities. Last November, at the student protest outside of City Hall, we heard several speakers from area schools. One boy never got more articulate than "Fuck this fucking war." Our own representative, however, gave a marvelous speech about the crucial place of the moderate in an anti-war movement. That assertion of inclusivity seemed like an appropriate theme, coming from the Penn speaker. The anti-war community at Penn spans a range of ideologies, all committed to promoting sane foreign policy and protesting unnecessary violence. This openness will be necessary in the coming months, as our country plunges unprepared into a foolish war. When this folly becomes more apparent, more people will get involved, and I trust that the movement at Penn will remain sane and steadfast. I, however, will graduate and will find myself actually having to argue that North Korea's use of nuclear weapons to extort foreign aid is indicative of the failure of Stalinism -- to people who don't even think Stalinism has failed yet. I will miss this place. For once, I am proud of my conservative university. "Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah for the Red and Blue!" Good old Penn -- where even the radicals aren't too radical. Dan Fishback is a senior American Identities major from Olney, Md.

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