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Subject: [ANSWER]: Unite to Fight the Warmakers
Date: Sun, 02 Feb 2003 19:50:02 -0500
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (A.N.S.W.E.R.)
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
UNITE TO FIGHT THE WARMAKERS
Unable to contend with the historic and constitutional right of the people to control their own government and the direction of their country, the Bush Administration has now launched an assault on the anti-war movement. As the clock ticks down and the administration rushes to wage war against Iraq, it is starting another war here at home against the people of the United States.
On January 18 half a million people marched in Washington, D.C. in a true democratic expression of their opposition to an illegal and immoral war of aggression being driven by a tiny few who hold the reigns of military and economic might. Another 200,000 marched in San Francisco. Around the world people in over 35 countries held solidarity demonstrations. Now we are all mobilizing for the February 15/16 mass actions against the war that have been initiated by the European peace movement. The people of conscience who are taking to the streets represent the sentiments of so many millions more. This is a powerful rejection of the Bush administration's attempt to drag us all into war and global conflagration.
On January 28, ten days after the historic January 18 march, the Free Congress Foundation, the Center for Security Policy and other ultra-right wing members of the U.S. political establishment, including former officials of the Heritage Foundation and the Reagan administration, began promoting the creation of a new version of the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate not only the organizers but the demonstrators themselves who came to Washington to protest Bush's march to war.
On January 30, the New York Daily News published the Bush administration's latest smear -- a purportedly leaked intelligence report from his Homeland Security department claiming that "Iraqi spies" came to the U.S. from Canada to carry out the anti-war demonstrations.
This first act for Bush's Homeland Security department -- which had officially opened a mere six days earlier -- speaks volumes about what Bush's view of "homeland security" is: using the power of the government to lie, to discredit, to disrupt and to try to shut down the opposition of the people of the U.S. to his program of violent domination and empire.
The Center for Security Policy is a group funded by arms manufacturers and big business who are being given the U.S. taxpayer's money looted from programs that would otherwise fund education, healthcare and jobs in America. The Free Congress Foundation is a haven for extremists so out of step with social justice that they pay staff members who have written that we in the U.S. might be better off if the confederacy had won the civil war, who advocate that the racist Trent Lott should have remained in his leadership position, who push anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and who spoke at a neo-Nazi conference last summer. These groups both work with and are received by the Bush Administration.
We call on all people of conscience to rally together and defend our movement for justice and peace. The red-baiting and demonization of certain leading anti-war organizations has one purpose -- to weaken the whole peace movement.
PURPOSE OF RED-BAITING: TO STOP COLLECTIVE ACTION AND SILENCE DISSENT
These efforts are the apex of a repugnant red-baiting campaign against the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition because of its role as a principal organizer of the mass grassroots movement of opposition to war throughout the United States. It is not only A.N.S.W.E.R. that is the target of these attacks. The Not In Our Name Project (NION) and others who have been organizing for peace have also been subject to virulent red-baiting.
The point of the associational red-baiting and smear campaign is to warn all of us who are coming out into the streets, many who have found public voice for the first time and are empowered by the strength of their actions, that what we think we experienced is tainted, that we are dupes of some hidden hand and should go back inside. These are the identical mechanisms that were used by the government to try to destroy the labor movement of the thirties and forties and the civil rights and anti-war movements of the fifties, sixties and seventies. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was labeled a "communist sympathizer.")
All of us who have been involved with the Coalition have been subjected to an intensive associational red-baiting attack that emanates from pro-war supporters. It often gets carried by others who claim to be from the progressive community but who unfortunately are more focused on engaging in sectarian factionalization than, on the eve of war, stopping a needless slaughter. Fortunately, the thousands of people organizing around the country to stop this war drive have been rejecting these efforts, as is evidenced from the success of the mobilizations and the outpouring of support received by A.N.S.W.E.R. at the grassroots level.
Extract from Email circulated by:
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
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http://www.VoteNoWar.org
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