File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9803, message 53


Date: Tue, 3 Mar 1998 13:16:19 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Katha Pollitt: Hello, Columbus


Katha Pollit writes:
>	       Jon
>              Strange, a 22-year-old substitute teacher (who
>              was, let it be noted, properly dressed and
>              wearing a tie), asked a 64,000-dollar one: "Why
>              bomb Iraq when other countries have
>              committed similar violations?" He mentioned
>              Turkey, which bombs the Kurds; Saudi Arabia,
>              which tortures political and religious dissidents;
>              Indonesia, which has slaughtered hundreds of
>              thousands of East Timorese; Israel, which has
>              been censured by the United Nations for
>              bombing Lebanese civilians and brutalizing the
>              Palestinians; and he could have mentioned
>              many other nations as well.

He should have mentioned the United States!

>	       just when you
>              think the last raw bit of reality has been
>              plastic-wrapped and priced like a slice of
>              processed cheese food--just when, in other
>              words, you are about to consider getting
>              seriously depressed--something wonderful,
>              bizarre and totally unscripted happens.

>              An interesting clue to the willful media
>              misperception of widespread antiwar feeling
>              lies in the persistent suggestion that the town
>              meeting protesters were members of the
>              famously sectarian and pugnacious Spartacist
>              League. No one I spoke to from Columbus had
>              seen a single Spart. I asked peace activist Mark
>              Stansbery why he thought the press would say
>              such a thing. "Maybe because we were so
>              aggressive," he replied. "People don't expect that
>              of Ohioans."

The Pollitt article is a decent piece, but the protest was not as
spontaneous as she makes it out to be. Her emphasis on the 'unscriptedness'
of the disruption of the media event itself is misleading, in that the
disruption was *merely one moment* of our anti-war activities, on that day
as well as before + after that. (We have held three other public protests,
besides activist meetings.)

Moreover, this sort of protest doesn't erupt out of nowhere. In Columbus,
OH (as elsewhere), we have built an *on-going network* of people who more
or less share common or overlapping objectives, out of disparate groups of
people who do not necessarily subscribe to the same ideas. Without such a
network-building, it would have been impossible to turn out as many people
as we did with a very short notice.

It takes a lot of daily labor to keep such a network alive and to make it
grow. People like Mark Stansbery (and his father Rev. Leslie Stansbery)
have done that for years and decades. Mark says that he is not an activist;
he is an *organizer*. Activists come and go, working on given issues; on
the other hand,organizers build networks + institutions with a fundamental
goal of radical social transformation. Most of the work that Mark Stansbery
and his kind put in is totally invisible, even to leftist journalists like
Katha Pollitt. But we got to give organizers the recognition they deserve;
these people have paid their dues.

Yoshie Furuhashi





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