From Peace Movement To Resistance ... It's Time
Harold Hark
16 April 2003

Mighty America just loves conquering pipsqueak nations. One of their greatest triumphs was the tiny island of Grenada in 1983. (That's right, most people have never heard of it and those who have don't know where it is.) President Ronald Reagan, the stoolie who squealed on fellow actors during the McCarthy era, flexed his puny muscles over that one. There have been many others, either from direct invasions or oblique destabilisation: Panama, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Libya ("Hey, we snuffed Khadafi's daughter. Thump yr chests, boys!"), Afghanistan, and now the biggest destruction of a hapless nation to date: Iraq. (For a complete list, see William Blum's War Quiz.)

With the invasion of Iraq, against the wishes of the United Nations and an aghast world, Imperial America has stepped across a bridge far too far.

World wide anti-war protests were unprecedented. Millions took to the streets in almost every country, including China. As usual, the voices of the many were dismissed by the ruling few. But for the first time in history, unconscionable rulers everywhere were met with resistance from their reliably dormant constituencies. Elites must have felt a frisson of concern, if not fear. With the notable exception of George W. Bush, whose genetic thickness is matched by a one-eyed lust for apocalypse, tyrants and usurpers would have been reminded that their power bases are only as invulnerable as the illusion of vulnerability accepted by their enslaved. Once the enslaved are pushed too far, things change.

The trouble is, people rarely make the effort. The peasants who revolted against Richard II practically begged him to chop off their heads for being such upstarts. They couldn't handle the responsibility of their actions. "Where to next?" gave them such a fright they quickly returned to the safety and the limits of serfdom. Smart tyrants give the hoi polloi just enough to make life bearable.

Time has marched on. We know more. Thanks to American imperial hubris under George W. Bush, the beginning of the end of the long dark ages of tyranny may be at hand. Humanity is waking up. With the Internet, we peasants now have an instantaneous, global voice. IndyMedia sites and their like are in cities everywhere; mobilisation is just a click of the mouse or an SMS (or MMS) away.

The peace movement, so powerful in the last month, does not now have a war to contend with (at least for the moment), but the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion will have ramifications for years to come. There will be no peace in the world until the blindly grasping fools of the Coalition of the Killing are brought down.

It will happen. It always has. Such regimes have shorter and shorter power spans. The present dynasty could be removed in just a little over one year, if Americans were to vote overwhelmingly against the Republicans. For this to happen, the Democrats must find somebody with credibility. (There is not enough time for minor parties to succeed. The Democrats are an impure lot, but not as morally gutted as the Republicans.) If this person is found, he or she must be protected as no one has ever been protected before, because the Republicans, or their associates, the Christian fundamentalists, will be hiring as many assassins as it takes.

Failing the legal ousting of the illegal Bush junta, and until that time, the peace movement must turn to a movement of relentless resistance.

Resistance must be non-violent for one simple reason. They have all the hardware, the weapons, the eavesdropping devices, the armed and trained manpower. As the tyrants consolidate their power, fresh from a cakewalk in Iraq, their tolerance for dissent will shorten to the squeeze of a patriotic trigger, followed by swift body removal, and presto: the same fate will be shared today that befell Argentinian and Chilean families who have endured the disappearance of their freedom fighting children for decades.

Instead, groups of us should be ready at every minute of the day to hound war loving, chicken hawk politicians wherever they appear in public, to shout obscenities at them, to give them the razzberry of humiliation, to hurl eggs and tomatoes, to almost-but-not-quite threaten their safety.

Above all, humiliate. The genetic garbage who have installed themselves in power in order to take from the people while giving little or nothing back, cannot stand to be humiliated. They are thick skinned to abuse, they thrive on it, but humiliation exposes them for what they are: empty vessels whose ghostlike souls are deserted landscapes blasted by the howling winds of inauthenticity.

Humiliate their families as well. Behind every tyrant is a hag from hell (or a mean little man) and the children of ill-gotten privilege.

The greenback must be dropped in favour of the euro. Anyone with enough money to travel should do so with euros. (It wasn't that long ago, pre-9/11, when most people had the cash to travel with an airline of their choice to a foreign country. No longer. Globalisation has robbed us of mobility.) If countries, particularly European countries, took up this revolutionary idea, the American Empire would fall in no time. But they will not move until there is enough resistance from the people.

The political process itself must be interfered with at every level. Jam their inboxes, set up permanent phone calls to their offices. An invisible war against the electronic infrastructure of tyranny can at least cause lots of infuriating downtime.

Some will go to jail or even be killed. The Bush junta and its adjutants (the Howard Government) will be no less primitive than a Pinochet or a Saddam in their crackdown on dissent. The legislation is already in order. With Homeland Security and the USA PATRIOT Act, Americans almost don't have a chance. Here in Australia, the Howard Government is determined to get similar legislation up.

But when parents start seeing their sons and daughters disappearing into steely green rooms of torture and beyond, into hastily dug graves for their democratic beliefs, these parents will not just sit back and take it. They will see the difference between being liberated through incineration and struggling for liberty against the incinerators.

These are only a few ideas. Others are far ahead of me. What is needed is a world wide mobilisation. Thousands of global cells operating via the internet to strike locally at any given moment. To stop such a movement, the tyrants will have to shut down the Internet itself. They will try, but they will not succeed. But if, somehow, they did succeed, the world would then be just that much closer to disintegration, a situation that would cause other demographics to themselves rise up.

Thanks to the invasion of Iraq, the peace--now resistance--movement is in a position to strike blow after blow until a terminal blow is struck against the bastards who have been strangling human evolution since the beginning of time.

¡No Pasaran!

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