A Personal Account of the Iraq Peace Forum at St. Mark's Church

The turn-out for the Iraq Peace Forum at St. Mark's Church last night was disappointingly modest.

Rahul Mahajan, author and anti-war activist, spoke first. The recent bloody assault on Fallujah, began Mahajan, is a preview of Bush's new gloves-off approach to the Iraq occupation. It is significant that the assault began only five days after the November re-election.

The figures of civilians (women and children Mahajan specified) killed in the assault are 1600 so far. But they are probably more since the US is doing everything it can to not let the numbers out. The most gruesome and cruel aspects of the assault, to my ears, was the US's insistence on shutting down local hospitals and ambulance services because the US considers them to be "propaganda centers" (they give out numbers of the civilian dead). Therefore, survivors of the assault were left to die in the streets.

A large majority of the city has fled and Mahajan claims that something like 500,000 people are in refugee camps. The occupation forces plan to register anyone re-entering the city and to immediately impound the young men into military service - essentially forced conscription (Mahajan pointed out that these ideas are being floated but have not yet been put into action).

But the essence of the speech was that the Bush administration's new "mandate" policy is to crush the opposition with extreme ruthlessness and brutality. It was what they were threatening to do in the initial invasion in 2003. Shock and Awe is now official policy and Mahajan sees nothing that tells him that the Bush administration will not escalate it's tactics.

The most bleak moment of the speech was when Mahajan said that brutality can be effective in putting down revolts. If it wasn't, it wouldn't have been used with such frequency throughout history.

The next speaker was Frances Fox Piven, professor and economic rights activist, who began by saying that Bush won the election by a majority. To this remark one woman in the audience gasped out "That's a lie!" Piven admitted that vote tampering was probably rampant but she said no more than any other election. Vote fraud has been a part of American history since the reconstruction and it's only because "we" (the left or perhaps progressive Democrats) worked on campaigns in 2000 and 2004 that we have been reawakened to this fact of American electoral reality.

Piven seemed split in her affinities. Freedoms and rights have been won in this country by movements, she said, and not through the Democratic Party, she said. Still, electoral politics must be reformed. Election day should be a national holiday. A real voting rights act must be passed. All very good ideas. Yet much of what Piven said sounded like it had been lifted from the progressive Democrat playbook. We need to reclaim the concept of values. Civil society is a moral value. Rights for workers and the poor to a decent living is a moral value. All true but it didn't do much to lift the gloom in the air that was left hanging after Mahajan's speech.

Then an interesting turn occurred. Rev. Frank Morales, whose official role is associate Pastor of St. Mark's Church, asked the audience to turn their chairs into a semi-circle to move the evening into a interactive event.

But before that occurred an activist named (I believe) Michael Shaker read a speech from a text he had prepared. The speech was blistering and was pointed indirectly at both Piven and Mahajan, CUNY and NYU professors respectively and both connected to large activist coalitions (Mahajan was or is involved in UFPJ ).

Shaker gave a number of examples in the recent past where large activist coalitions had called for mass demonstrations on the day before members of the Bush administration had either arrived in town or were due to be in the building. These demonstrations traded a police permit for the opportunity to confront power face to face.

Unspoken, in Shaker's speech, was the fact that under the current administration activists will be arrested even in symbolic demonstrations. If that is the case, why are the major coalitions not calling for direct actions at the exact time, place, and "space" (Shaker's word) of governmental power?

"It would have sent a message," said Shaker, "If Colin Powell had to be airlifted into the UN when he last visited instead of being escorted via limousine to the building with no sign of dissent."

Shaker's speech was received with approval by many people in the room but there were also yawns, shuffling, and the winding down of the event that he had to contend with. The camera people who had been there to record Mahajan and Piven were dismantling their cameras as he spoke. Shaker actually spoke up against the noise and asked them to dismantle after his speech. Shaker's request made clear to me and probably others in the room that these events are intensely hierarchical.

Piven and Mahajans' voices are empowered by academia which carries not only the stamp of intellectual approval but in the case of NYU the covert authority of real estate and even more covertly police protection. It doesn't mean that Piven and Mahajan are the enemy. On the contrary, they are a godsend. But this dynamic of hierarchy in the activist community needs to have light thrown on it because if it is allowed to operate uncritically it stifles the voices of the rest of us.

After Shaker's speech the chairs were rearranged and people were encouraged to offer their comments. Piven bolted after the second or third speaker took the microphone and a visual wave of the assembly followed her including Mahajan. Academia made flesh. To his credit Mahajan came back later to listen to the bitter end.

The individual comments began brilliantly. A number of No Police State regulars got up to speak and one activist offered an excellent set of ideas for actions including a national die-in for the inauguration (perhaps a little too late to set in motion). Other people who spoke included an ex-serviceman who talked about the distance between the style of the activists in the room and the people he knew in the Midwest who needed to have their eyes opened and how unbridgeable that gap seemed to him. Another speaker was a pastor from another neighborhood church who identified herself as a left evangelical Christian and spoke of how difficult it was to connect to other Christians who were locked in Bush's ideological paradigm. Many more people offered honest comments and substantive ideas until the lunatic fringe took over and I fled.

I did not mention the excellent contributions of World War III-Arts in Action’s political theater which opened the event and of Nana SOul whose lovely and powerful music raised the assembly up and out of its collective despair.

The emotional weight of the speeches and performances sank into me with more stealth than I had expected. It was difficult stuff to digest. But there was also great courage and cause for hope. The event was, to use Frank Morales' word, a "seed-bed" of spiritual and political action