A poster who wished to remain anonymous recently forwarded the following reflections on anti-Gulf War actions in Vancouver in 2003. Similarities noted…

I hope to add to the critique of racism in the anti-war movement, (and the peace movement in general) with the following reports of small events that occurred during initial anti-Gulf War protests in Vancouver B.C.

In 2003, protests against the war in Iraq came right at the tail end of a province wide resistance against the election of the ‘Liberal’ Party to the provincial government, who promised sweeping conservative changes and cuts to government social programmes. Anarchists in B.C. had been deeply engaged in intervening in this popular movement for the previous year (from 2002).

In Vancouver, during the initial big waves of protest against the Gulf War all of the activist groups banded together to form “Stopwar.ca” At first, it seemed exciting to have every group in the whole city working together. But the organization quickly devolved and degenerated. It was very much a repeat of the failure of the Anti-Liberal movement in that it became dominated by union groups and their pre-existing systems of racism, sexism and ageism that made them not only irrelevant to the people most effected by the issues they were protesting, but they also became an actual hazard to building real resistance movements.

There were two fronts of systemic racism in anti-war organizing in Vancouver. The first, is the actual organization itself, which will need a much more in depth report that may get written in the near future. The second is what happened on the streets during the marches, which is what I will address here.

Stopwar.ca primarily organized mass legal permitted rallies and marches and some educational events. The marches and rallies themselves were boring and useless. This in and of itself would alienate people, particularly youth of colour who would come out to these things, and just find themselves bored to death. And then when anyone tried to do anything of even minor consequence, they were stifled, attacked, or abandoned by the Stopwar.ca coalition. This ensured that any direct action oriented organization would stay marginalized and rely on spontaneous outbursts.

While most of the anarchists were euro-americans, all of the following incidents significantly involved people of colour and native people being ill-treated by euro-american ‘peace police.

Some context:
The Vancouver Art Gallery is in the Centre of downtown. It used to be the Provincial Courthouse (Leonard Peltier was extradited from there). It is the rallying place for almost every protest in the city, due more to its huge lawn than any historical or political relevance.

The U.S. consulate in Vancouver is downtown about six floors up in a big glass office building. There is a small courtyard across the street known as the Peace Flame Park” During initial protests against the Gulf war, there was a peace camp’ there for a number of months.

‘Peace Police’
Stopwar.ca had its own marshals, but also there were always plenty of volunteers who would harass, physically attack, fink out, surround or otherwise try to impede anyone wearing masks or wearing black, or attempting any kind of direct action.

Some moments of conflict …

All day flag burning:
In the morning, folks tried to burn a flag in front of the U.S. consulate. A bunch of student protesters attacked the flag burners, yelling, “no violence” as they were beating the flag out of people’s hands and wrestling them to the ground. The flag burners escaped with the flag.

Behind the consulate, a guy drove by in a big fancy car with an American flag attached to his trunk. A person ripped the flag off the trunk and then the police stepped in to save the flag and there was a tugging match over it. The cop got the flag.

At the camp in the peace park, some people again pulled out flags to burn –Canadian and U.S. After being attacked and heckled by the crowd, they climbed up on a big pillar about 15 feet off the ground and finally were able to burn them. (note, flag burning is not even illegal in Canada)

At the end of one rally there was an open mic speak out. One woman got on the mic and started talking about how marching in the streets is not enough. If you are choosing non-violent resistance, you must understand it’s not about doing nothing, its about making serious self sacrifice to stop violence and injustice. She started talking about Quakers smashing up military jets and was booed off the stage.

Later, the nightly news showed the surreal scene with the news caster saying One person seemed to be advocating violence” as they showed footage of the woman saying, “They’re Quakers for Christ’s sake!”

Salad Days at the Consulate:
There had been a big rally and march that ended at the peace park behind the U.S. consulate. The big crowd had left and there was a handful of anarchists and Palestinians hanging around. People started throwing vegetables at the consulate building. Everyone was having a good time and joking about how something more than vegetables should be thrown. Suddenly, one of the huge windows in the building smashed. Everyone dispersed, except the peace camp people, one of whom was talking to police trying to identify the window breaker. One person was arrested attempting to inform the ‘peace police’ of his right to shut the fuck up.

One token Indian too many:
One day there was a huge rally at the Art Gallery. Rose Henry (Snuneymuxw), a well known community activist living in Victoria wanted to speak at the rally. She had been tasked by some elders to speak about a project they were working on. She had approached the organizers but they told her no, they already had Splitting the Sky (Mohawk), so there was no time for her. A woman from NYM and Rose were standing by the stage, when one speaker finished, the NYMer walked up to the mic. And introduced Rose and she was able to say her piece.

Later, at the next Stopwar.ca meeting, the woman was berated and yelled at by the whole group because her actions were un-democratic and had cost Stopwar so much money in overtime because they had to pay for the equipment longer then they’d booked it for! The griping and lecturing was cut short because someone came into the room and informed everyone that the first bombs were being dropped on Iraq right then.

Families in the streets:
There was yet another big pointless stroll through the city against the war. The rally ended, as per usual, at the Art Gallery. A big group of people didn’t want to just stand on the lawn, so they were standing on the road blocking traffic. Cops started to try to move people, but they would not move and some people started sitting down. The Stopwar ‘peace police’ told everyone to get off the streets and they announced over the mic for people to get off the streets. The cops arrested one person. People kept sitting and standing in the street and then eventually decided to march to the police station were this guy was taken.

There was about 30-40 people on this march, including this family of about 6 and a few other people with kids. The family were very concerned about the war, the dad had a placard of a bomb dropping on Iraq and he said, “We have to do this because our people are being killed.” The break-off marched went around downtown for awhile then across this big viaduct that connects the east and west sides of downtown. Its about one mile long. Some people stayed on the side walks, while others blocked the street. The cops were trying to be intimidating but kept their distance behind the march. The whole viaduct was empty except for these kids running and laughing ahead of the march.

The march arrived at the police station and the guy was released. His friends had joined the break-off march. They were young students who had never been arrested and were quite intimidated by the whole thing, but were in good spirits. No one from Stopwar ever did any kind of support or follow-up.

Sexist, Racist, Middleclass People Against War:
While most of the antagonists in these incidents were not organizers, or even members of Stopwar.ca, the explicit anti-direct action attitudes of Stopwar created an atmosphere that gave these people license to behave in such an obtrusive manner.

In a sensible world, a huge, broad based coalition with tons of money and resources would use that as an opportunity to push the envelope even a tiny bit. But Stopwar.ca did just the opposite. The rationale for taking such a milquetoast approach to ‘ending the war in Iraq’ was that it wanted to engage as many people as possible, thus not alienate the mainstream. They created a ‘safe’ family oriented space. Similar to the ‘Smack A White Boy’ critique of ANSWER, this space was so safe, it protected its participants from being confronted with their own place in the social and economic conditions that perpetuate global capitalism. And further, actively prevented them from moving towards making even the most minimal of personal challenge or sacrifice to mount effective resistance against the war.

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The Food Program is a mutual-aid project where people themselves are organizing and distributing food in their own neighborhoods. This is not charity, we do not believe that change will happen this way. This is self-empowerment, where working class neo-colonies are feeding themselves, and organizing to feed themselves.

Since the first week of November, 2007, RAC has distibuted much needed grocieries to the needy workers of the area. Las week more than 200 people standing in line received food packages.

You can join us every Sunday at 1:30 PM. Meet at the SE Corner of Wilshire and Parkview in MacArthur Park.

RAC Mission Statement:

We feel that this system is killing our people by what the corporations feed us or don’t feed us. At the same time there is an abundance of healthy food that goes to waste. They would rather let food go to waste than allow the prices of food in the market to drop. Then they disconnect people (all indigenous and colonized people) from the land, which a free and independent people need to survive. They centralize power and resources in the hands of the few, this is how they keep oppressed people dependent on a white-supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist-imperialist system.

RAC’s Food Program is a way that we can work with supporters and other organizations to feed healthy food to our communities. We want people to connect with each other, to pick up and distribute the food amongst themselves. We will support, help connect people and to supply whatever resources we can. Through this process our goal is to connect our communities and to take them back. Our overall goal is to regain our necessary connection to the land. We need land to survive, and the land belongs to us, not the colonizer. We want to relearn how to live off the land and how to truly be self-sustainable.

We’re Still Here, We Never Left

Support our Food Program.

Help Pick Up Food.

Help Distribute Food in Your Neighborhood.

Donate to our Community Mutual-Aid Program.

Get Organized!

Take Back Our Communities and Take Back the Land!

All Power THROUGH the People!

-Revolutionary Autonomous Communities (RAC)

Mission Statement:

Who we are. What we believe. What we fight for.

We are a revolutionary federation of community councils & liberated spaces based in oppressed communities made up by oppressed people of color. We are a horizontal organization building self-sustainability and creating the structure, strategy, and program for change through direct participatory forms of organizing and a decision-making process based on consensus. We stand against all forms of oppression: imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, fascism, heterosexism/homophobia/transphobia and the domination of human over human & human over all living things including mother earth. We believe and we fight for autonomy, self determination, self organization & the self defense of our communities.

Our strategy includes outreach and education, community programs, empowerment, support, training and mutual aid, so people can build self reliance & gain the skills, resources and the experience to liberate themselves. In striving for liberation, we work to decolonize our minds by embracing our indigenous roots and practices.

Revolution comes from the people not a vanguard party; it is an individual and collective process where we destroy the system while we create change within ourselves and the world. The best way to show our solidarity to the people of the world is to bring the war home, and to bring down amerikkkan imperialism while we struggle to build internationalism & intercommunalism.

We fight for freedom and won’t settle for less!

All power to the people!

rac@riseup.net

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ColorofChange has a new petition on post-Katrina police murders. It reads:

In the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, White vigilantes hunted down Black men who entered Algiers Point and even tried to expel their Black neighbors. Louisiana’s broken law enforcement agencies have refused to investigate these crimes.

Tell Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, and the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the racist shootings, and to demand accountability from Louisiana’s dysfunctional criminal justice system.

Sign it here.

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By Herman Bell, December 2008

When imprisoned, and placed in an isolation unit, at some point you begin to live inside yourself, assessing and measuring how you are doing against the moment-to-moment, day-to-day challenges that you are confronted by to gage how well you are getting on. Even though we may spend countless years in prison, little if anything ever changes there. This might sound contradictory: in our minds we can become inured to the harshest conditions as a natural survival instinct; however in reality, they remain just as agonizing. How we deal with them, process them, interact with them in our mind largely determines the change we perceive around us and inside ourselves.

Isolation bears two recognizable features: one is introspection, the other is torture. It brings out the worst in us and the best in us; regardless, we must somehow still make it through the day. And in the course of that day, and every day, we must fight our demons, real and imagined. The real ones are plain enough to see. They turn the keys. (But not all the turn-keys are bad, just most of them. I like to think that the decent ones were well brought up by their parents; and that the bad ones, perhaps, didn’t receive all they thought they should from their parents and others, and therefore will always feel the world owe them something and that meantime they can do whatever they want. Controlling for greed and ideology — how else do we explain the pathology of man’s inhumanity to man?)

Isolation means you are cut off from the rest of the world, save for the occasional life-line that finds its way to you in the form of a visit, a letter, and the occasional headline on a discarded newspaper that you might glimpse as you pass it by. Your world is greatly reduced. Fresh air, sunlight, food, keeping your body and clothes clean — the things you once took for granted — take on new importance in your life.

Under these reduced circumstances, you become so sucked into yourself that an hour feels like a day has gone by, a day feels like a week, and a week like a month. You lose a sense of time; you no longer care whether it’s day or night; you hallucinate; you hyperventilate. You know your scene has to change, nothing lasts forever. Your survival instincts keep you holding on. And suddenly the unexpected melodic sound of jangling keys break through the cocoon that time and isolation had woven around you. Then you wonder had all that been a dream.

Isolation transposes our reality; physical torture shapes it. Physical torture is a ravening beast that has slipped its bounds from Hell to feast upon the soul of humanity. It’s the Big Bad Wolf threatening the Three Little Pigs. It’s the Boogeyman lurking in the woods we heard so much about, coming to get us. It’s our worst nightmare rattling a locked door, straining mightily to get at us. It’s Abu-Ghraib; it’s Guantanamo; it’s the CIA’s Extraordinary Rendition; it’s the screams of prisoners in U.S. police stations. It’s the cries of the torn, the battered, the tormented victims of this ravenous beast that rears its ugly head to feast on pried fingernails; electrically charred genitalia, ear lobes, and human breasts; chased down with a liter of water-boarding, stress-positions, extremes of hot and cold temperatures; and garnished with absolute silence and jarring noise. All done to preserve an antiquated political and economic system that deprives the many of their needs and serves the few in their greed. Outrage against this social practice should know no bounds; how can we not fight to end it?! Let us send the beast and its minions back to where they belong.

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