February  2003 
Year 9    No.84

Breaking Barriers

Feb 15: Greatest show on earth

In a day of protest that the world has probably never seen, millions upon millions filled city streets around the globe denouncing the Bush administration’s call to war. From Buenos Aires to Helsinki to Paris to Los Angeles, throngs of citizens came out to join this global effort to turn the tide toward peace. At nearly a million people, London saw its largest protest ever, 1-2 million in Rome, Barcelona and Madrid, and hundreds of thousands  across the United States and the World. We reproduce below a report each from The Observer, London, and the anti-war portal http://www.unitedforpeace.org along with a few snippets to give our readers a feel of what could well be the beginning of the most momentous ever global peace initiative launched by ordinary people

(The Observer, London)
February 16th, 2003
Are there any more coming, then?’ There have been dafter questions, but not many. At 1.10 yesterday afternoon (February 15), Mike Wiseman from Newcastle upon Tyne placed his accordion carefully on the ground below Hyde Park’s gates and rubbed cold hands together. Two elderly women, hand in hand in furs, passed through, still humming the dying notes from his ‘Give Peace A Chance’. They were, had he known it, early, part of a tiny crowd straggling into Hyde Park before the march proper.

Half a mile away, round the corner in Piccadilly, the ground shook. An ocean, a perfect storm of people. Banners, a bobbing cherry-blossom of banners, covered every inch back to the Circus — and for miles beyond, south to the river, north to Euston.

Ahead of the marchers lay one remaining silent half–mile. The unprecedented turnout had shocked the organisers, shocked the marchers. And there at the end before them, high on top of the Wellington Arch, the four obsidian stallions and their vicious conquering chariot, the very Spirit of War, were stilled, rearing back — caught, and held, in the bare branches and bright chill of Piccadilly, London, on Saturday 15 February 2003.

Are there any more coming? Yes, Mike. Yes, I think there are some more coming.

It was the biggest public demonstration ever held in Britain, surpassing every one of the organisers’ wildest expectations and Tony Blair’s worst fears, and it will be remembered for the bleak bitterness of the day and the colourful warmth of feeling in the extraordinary crowds. Organisers claimed that more than 1.5 million had turned out; even the police agreed to 750,000 and rising.

By three o’clock in the afternoon they were still streaming out of Tube stations to join the end of the two routes, from Gower Street in the north and Embankment by the river. "Must be another march," grumbled the taxi driver, then, trying in vain to negotiate Tottenham Court Road. No, I said; it’s the same one, still going, and he turned his head in shock. "Bloody Jesus! Well, good luck to them I say." There were, of course, the usual suspects — CND, Socialist Workers’ Party, the anarchists. But even they looked shocked at the number of their fellow marchers: it is safe to say they had never experienced such a mass of humanity.

There were nuns. Toddlers. Women barristers. The Eton George Orwell Society. Archaeologists Against War. Walthamstow Catholic Church, the Swaffham Women’s Choir and Notts County Supporters Say Make Love Not War (And a Home Win against Bristol would be Nice). They won 2–0, by the way. One group of SWP stalwarts were joined, for the first march in any of their histories, by their mothers. There were country folk and lecturers, dentists and poulterers, a hairdresser from Cardiff and a poet from Cheltenham.

I called a friend at two o’clock, who was still making her ponderous way along the Embankment – "It’s not a march yet, more of record shuffle" — and she expressed delight at her first protest. "You wouldn’t believe it; there are girls here with good nails and really nice bags."

Cheer upon cheer went up. There were cheers as marchers were given updates about turnout elsewhere in the world — 90,000 in Glasgow, two million on the streets of Rome. There was a glorious cheer, at Piccadilly Circus, when the twin ribbons met, just before one o’clock.

The mood was astonishingly friendly. "Would you like a placard, sir?" Sir? The police laughed. One, stopping a marcher from going through a barricade in Trafalgar Square, told him it was a sterile area, only to be met with a hearty backslap. "Sterile area? Where did that one come from." "I know," shrugged the bobby, "Bollocks language, isn’t it?" And the talk was of politics, yes, but not just politics. There were not the detailed arguments we had had, even during the last peace march in November, over UN resolutions and future codicils. This march was not really about politics; it was about humanitarianism.

"I’m not political, not at all. I don’t even watch the news," said Alvina Desir, queuing on the Embankment for the start of the march at noon. "I’ve never been on a march in my life and never had any intention. But something’s happened recently, to me and so many friends — we just know there’s something going wrong in this country. No one’s being consulted, and it’s starting to feel worrying — more worrying than the scare–mongering we’ve been getting about the terrorist threat. I simply don’t see how war can be the answer and I don’t know anyone who does. And, apart from anything else, as a black woman in London, it feels dangerous to spread racial tension after all that’s been done."

A Cheshire fireman nearby said: "They will take notice of a protest like this. Our MPs, and Blair himself , were voted in by ordinary people like those here today. Blair is clever enough not to ignore this."

Linda Homan, sitting on bench at 9.30 in the morning, watching a bright and dancing Thames, had come down early from Cambridge and was wondering at that stage whether many would turn up. Palettes of placards lay strewn along the Embankment, waiting. A trolley was pushed past filled with flags and whistles; there were more police — then, way back then — than marchers. "I’ve never felt strongly enough about anything before. But this is so different; I would have let myself down by not coming and I think this will be something to remember."

For Linda, like so many along these streets, it was her first march. Twelve–year–old Charlotte Wright, who came up by train from Guildford, Surrey, on her own. "My parents aren’t very happy about this but I think it’s important. Bombing people isn’t the right way to sort a problem out." Jenny Mould, 36, a teacher from Devon. "I drove up last night. It took seven hours but it was definitely worth it; the government should, it must, listen to the people, otherwise what’s the point in democracy?"

Retired solicitor Thomas Elliot from Basildon, Essex, a virgin marcher at 73, said: "I remember the war and the effect the bombing had on London. War should only be used when absolutely necessary." Andrew Miller, 33, from New Zealand, whose feeling, echoed by all around, was that "all the different groups that are marching today show the world that the West is not the enemy, that British people do not hate Islam and Arabs and the coming together of people is the greatest way forward." Lesley Taylor, a constitutional law lecturer who’s lived across here for 29 years, holding a forlorn placard reading "American against the war." Why only one? "I don’t know any other Americans here".

In the Eighties here I saw a lot of anti–American resentment, and now it’s back. I accept that the perception of George W. Bush has something to do with this, but still... these are the same people the thinking middle–classes, who were so shocked and honestly sympathetic after September 11: how can they turn so nasty so quickly?

"Because America is making your Prime Minister go against the huge majority of the British people. And that won’t be forgiven. Look about you. That’s what this is about; not fierce party politics but a simple feeling that democracy, British democracy, has been forgotten."

Chris Wall, a Nottingham mother who had brought down eight children with her: "They talk about it at school and that’s a good thing. Children need to be aware of what’s happening in the world. And this is, of course, a peaceful protest." It remained so all day, despite the numbers; by five o’clock police were reporting only three arrests.

In Hyde Park itself, a long line of purple silk lay on the grass, facing Mecca, and Muslims took off their shoes to pray. Beside it, artist Nicola Green had set up her Laughing Booth, and was encouraging people in to, obviously, start laughing, on their own, and be recorded; it was, she says, the most disarming of all weapons. The sky above the nearby stage grew dark, and the park grew even more astonishingly full.

Charles Kennedy won loud applause for stating that "The report from Hans Blix gives no moral case for war on Iraq"; George Galloway won both applause and laughter for suggesting a new slogan: "Don’t attack Chirac". Mo Mowlam warned: "We will lose this war. It will be the best recruiting campaign for terrorists that there could be. They will hate us even more."

Will yesterday, astonishing yesterday, change anything? The facts are undeniable. Perception is all.

If you look more carefully, in fact, at the warlike Wellington statue, a new tale emerges. The driver of the chariot is a boy. The reins are slack. The horses are not rearing with anger, but pulling up in mid-charge. Behind, the fierce, all-powerful figure is not the Spirit of War but the angel of peace, carrying an olive branch.

_______________

By Starhawk
February 19th, 2003

The weekend of February 15 and 16 marks an historic, global up rising for peace. The number of marches is uncounted:  the number of marchers estimated in the range of ten million.  There were marches and vigils and protests in national capitals and small towns, in the heartlands of middle America and in small Pacific islands, in the freezing cold of Alberta and in the heat of an Australian summer.

Palestinians and Israelis marched together in Tel Aviv:  in the U.S. everyone from Republicans to socialists to anarcho–punks shared the streets.  And most of these hundreds of events took place with, apparently, fairly minimal governmental repression.

New York was an exception.
New York, the largest city in the country that presumably shines as a beacon of global democracy, refused to grant the organizers of the protest a permit for a march.  Only a stationary rally was allowed.  

The denial of the march was only one feature in a campaign of harrassment, that included the circulation of a rumor on the day before the rally that the event had been cancelled, a Code Orange terrorist alert that stationed military guards in the subways armed with automatic rifles, the denial of permission to rent portable toilets for the masses expected at the rally, the mysterious rerouting of subways and buses on the morning of the rally, the cut–off of the phones in the United for Peace and Justice office during the rally, and a repressive, heavy–handed and sometimes brutal police presence that penned the official rally behind barricades and prevented thousands from even getting there.

New York has the largest police force in the world:  forty thousand strong. When they decide to control public space, they have enormous resources with which to do so, and generally succeed. But not last Saturday.

On Saturday something like sixty different feeder marches started from various points in the city to march to the rally.  Many of them intended to stay within the law by marching on the sidewalk—an activity that does not require a permit.  Some took the streets.Taking the streets was, technically, an act of civil disobedience, a conscious breaking of a law that is unjust or unfairly applied.  In this case, many of us felt that the law preventing us from marching as a unified whole was violating our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and assembly.  And that if we did not defend our public and political space at this crucial moment, that space would rapidly be taken away.

The Performing Arts March and the Labor March were able to take the streets and march to the rally without incident.  The police simply stood back and let them go.

The students were not so favored.  I was with the students’ contingent that gathered at Union Square around ten in the morning.  A march from New York University joined up with us, and together we headed out on Fourteenth Street, on the sidewalk until Sixth Avenue, when we swarmed out into the street.

We marched triumphantly up the avenue, in a fast–paced, exuberant mass that was impossible to slow down, though some of us were trying in order to keep the whole crowd of several thousand together.
   Around Twenty–first street, the police met us with a line  of cops that stretched across the road.  We were ordered to get back on the sidewalk or face arrest.  The police were being provocative, pushing and shoving us with their nightsticks, and the students were doing an admirable job of restraining themselves from fighting back.  Instead, they turned a corner, swarmed onto a side street, ducked through a parking lot at a dead run and came out onto another street.   Some of the march was left behind, but it formed another column to go snake-marching through the side streets.

We met up again on Fifth Avenue, but then got pushed onto Twenty—third Street and trapped by a line of cops in front and back. I saw one young man pushed to the ground with five cops kneeling on him, twisting his arms behind his back to cuff him.  

The street was crowded with masses of students, and the police decided to run a line of horses through in order to split the crowd and push people back onto the sidewalks.  The horses, some of which seemed under only very shaky control, trotted through the crowd, and then the cops announced that they were only going to let people out in small groups, about fifty at a time.  Our group got split—half of us were squeezed out and the other half prevented from leaving.  The cops forced the groups that left to move on, in order to prevent us massing together again.

Our small contingent marched up to the Main Library, on Forty–second Street, where we met up with some of the lost members of our group, and continued up toward the Rally Zone.  The police had barricades on all the streets leading east through the Fifties at Lexington Avenue.  People were not being allowed to go through to join the rally.

Many people were upset and angry, but overall the mood was creative and determined.  Our group went into a Dunkins’ Donuts to pee—and discovered we could simply exit through the side door onto the street behind the barricade.

We went on to Third Street, which was packed with masses of people who were simply holding their own rally in the street.  There were performers up on kiosks doing skits in giant masks, radical cheerleaders dressed in pajamas with pillows shouting "Nuclear War—that’s not right!  Bush and Saddam should have a pillow fight!"  Groups clustered around radios to hear bits of the rally, danced or chanted or simply paced up and down, enjoying the scene.  

The crowd was diverse, with a good representation of many different races and classes and ages.  I saw young students and gray–haired veterans of the peace marches of the sixties, punks and hippies and ordinary citizens, ragged street people and one elegantly dressed woman in a fur coat carrying a sign that said "Justice for Palestine."

We went on to Times Square, where an unpermitted convergence had been called, and drummed and chanted on a corner as the police rapidly erected barricades, squeezed the crowd together, and refused to let people in or out.  We eventually moved out, encountering people furious with the cops’ heavy–handed tactics. One young woman was sobbing into her cell phone in a panic because she was separated from her mother and couldn’t get back across the lines, and outraged because the police had pushed her.  We soothed her, and helped her find her mother.  Later that night, we narrowly missed getting arrested with a group of about two hundred who were simply marching on the sidewalk as people had been doing, legally, all day—and were trapped and surrounded by the cops and not let go.  Overall around three hundred and fifty people were arrested—most simply trying to get to the legal rally.

If the police had issued a permit, had given the organizers a rally space in Central Park as they originally requested, had allowed and supported a legal march, people would simply have gathered and marched, as they did in hundreds of cities around the world, and not required horse patrols or riot squads.  One official march, and a big rally in an open park, with no streets to be blocked or potential targets for vandalism, would have been easier and cheaper to control.

Instead, the police set up a situation guaranteed to arouse frustration and anger among a crowd so huge that no amount of force could have controlled it had it turned aggressive.  In one area a few people did push through barricades and a fight resulted.  Had that happened all along the lines, we would have seen a street battle that would have rivaled the storming of the Bastille.

And if violence had broken out, it wouldn’t have come from militants or anarchists or principled believers in armed struggles of liberation, all of whom agreed that this was a moment for a peaceful protest.  It would have most likely come from a few ordinary people pushed one foot too far who simply lost their tempers and lashed out.  The police were extremely lucky.  Had the crowd rioted, all their barricades and gear and horse brigades couldn’t have stopped it.

No one wanted that to happen—not the organizers and not any of the political groups involved.   For those of us who advocate non–violence, who fondly believe we can train people to stay calm under provocation and who exhort people to peaceful forms of protest, it’s important to understand that the crowd’s restraint didn’t come from any commonly held guidelines or philosophy.  It was too huge and diverse to have one.  Nor did it come from exhortations from the stage or from leadership—most of the crowd never got near enough to the stage to hear anything.

In the face of truly uncalled–for police harrassment, ordinary people kept their cool.  The cops kept control, truthfully, only because people let them.

Some of that compliance came from fear—the police do have clubs, pepper spray, big horses and weapons.  They can also draw on the full power of the state to punish anyone who challenges them.

But rage and frustration can overcome fear and caution.  The protest remained peaceful because the crowd itself wanted to protest for peace peacefully, and because people tacitly agreed to respect the authority of the police and not challenge that control.  

That tacit agreement rests on the people’s belief that in some way the authority in question is legitimate.  In a democracy, legitimate authority stems from the people, not simply from possession of the might and means to apply brute force.    A small elite might gain control of the weapons, the money, the police and the military, but the more it resorts to brute force to keep control, the more it loses legitimacy.  I saw that happen, over and over again, on the streets of New York.  Every person denied access to a legal rally, every person shoved or bullied lost a bit of that belief.

Belief in the legitimacy of the authorities is the etheric glue that holds the social system together.  
That glue can dissolve.  In New York, it held, barely, but next time it might not.

The authorities don’t much fear the mere expression of dissent.  And they don’t truly fear small factions engaging in more extreme acts that marginalize and isolate them.

But they would be wise to fear the loss of their own legitimacy in the eyes of the masses.  The Bush administration was not elected, and its authority has been shaky from the beginning, propped up only by the shock and fear unleashed by the attacks of September 11.

What may finally constrain the warmongers is simply the possibility that the people will become ungovernable if the government continues to disregard our will.  If, against such huge opposition, the Bush administration goes ahead with its aggressive, pre–emptive war, they will destroy the legitimacy they depend on for control. and unleash the kind of social unrest that makes governments fall.

Dirty tricks, disinformation, repression and fear could not keep people from taking the streets of New York.  In the face of injustice and enormous provocation, people responded with restraint, with passion and joy, and discovered our collective power.  And that’s what happened in New York.

The challenge before us now is to nurture, consolidate, and decide how we will use that power:  to stop the war, to address the huge economic, ecological and social problems the war distracts us from, and to gain the reality, not the just the myth, of democracy.

(Starhawk is an activist, organiser, and author of Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising and eight other books on feminism, politics and earth-based spirituality.  She works with the RANT trainer’s collective, http://www.rantcollective.org that offers training and support for mobilisations around global justice and peace issues).