How the Post-9/11 Antiwar Movement Was Erased From History

[eridani]

The only war in history to have had opposition on all 7 continents--even Antarctica--before it started.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/02/03/how-post-911-antiwar-movement-was-erased-history

when millions of people across this country and the planet turned out in an antiwar moment unique in history? It was aimed at stopping a conflict that had yet to begin. Those demonstrators, myself included, were trying to put pressure on the administration of George W. Bush not to do what its top officials so visibly, desperately wanted to do: invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, garrison it for decades to come, and turn that country into an American gas station. None of us were seers. We didn’t fully grasp what that invasion would set off, nor did we imagine a future terror caliphate in Iraq and Syria, but we did know that, if it was launched, some set of disasters was guaranteed; we knew beyond a doubt that this would not end well.

We had an analysis of the disaster to come and you could glimpse it on the handmade signs we carried to those vast demonstrations (some of which I recorded at the time): “Remember when presidents were smart and bombs were dumb?”; “Contain Saddam -- and Bush”; “Use our might to persuade, not invade”; “How did USA's oil get under Iraq's sand?”; “Pre-emptive war is terrorism"; “We don’t buy it, liberate Florida”; and so on. We felt in our bones that it was no business of Washington’s to decide what Iraq should be by force of arms and that American imperial desires in the Greater Middle East were suspect indeed. And we turned out to make that point so impressively that, on the front page of the New York Times, journalist Patrick Tyler referred to us as the planet’s second superpower. (“The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_15,_2003,_anti-war_protests

[roscoeroscoe]

1. Sad

No money in peace

[RoccoR5955]

2. I marched in many of those protests

Not a peep on the mainstream media for most of them. And now they erase it from history.
It should be an addendum to Zinn's People's History of the United States.

[kentuck]

3. I remember it well.

"In Colorado Springs, 4,000 protesters were dispersed with pepper spray, tear gas, stun guns and batons. 34 were arrested on failure to disperse and other charges[20] and at least two protesters had to have hospital treatment.[59]"

==========

But, if we listen to the media, everyone in the nation was united by Dim Son's war lies...

[Odin2005]

4. It went down the memory hole as soon as Obama was elected.

Apparently imperialism is OK when a Dem does it.

[Lurks Often]

5. Congrats, you just won the thread

Not that too many will acknowledge you are right

[Odin2005]

7. Party over principles makes me gag.

[Lurks Often]

8. Agreed, sometimes the hypocrisy gets rather deep here

[Odin2005]

9. I suspect this plays a part in the complicity towards US warmongerin in the Mid-East:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/new-atheism-old-empire/

[Fumesucker]

6. It is ever the same...

The War Prayer
by Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory with stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.

It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

[Solly Mack]

10. K&R