Challenges the customary political organizing strategy based on the difficulties and opportunities that the current situation provides.

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The traditional model for (left) political activism is that you go out with flyers, posters and so on to call for people to come to demonstrations in the streets. The goal is to get as many people as you can to demonstrate in a rally and/or march and/or picket line. Sometimes this includes civil disobedience, civil resistance, or other kinds of symbolic political acts. At some point, if you’re successful, these demonstrations become large enough that they force policy-makers to respond with policy-changes or perhaps some more radical outcome such as structural political change. Leaving out the international dimensions, this is essentially what happened in the 1960s.

The media play an important role in this process since their coverage of your demonstrations acts as a crucial transmitter of your message and elevates the action(s) into the public domain, thereby legitimizing it. Without media attention, even very large demonstrations in one or a few cities will pass unnoticed to the rest of the American people except for those who actually see the demonstration with their own eyes. Even then, if the media don’t cover your demonstration, the event in some ways “didn’t happen.” It’s like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest, but no one is there to see it.

It isn’t enough for an issue to be on the minds of a majority of people. It isn’t enough even for a majority of people to feel essentially the same way about an issue. For that issue to become a burning, insistent, public issue, it must be catapulted into the public discourse in the public arena of media and policy-makers. Otherwise, it remains a latent, widely felt sentiment without a focus and without policy-makers needing to do anything about it.

Policy-makers, it probably doesn’t need to be said, don’t reflect mass public sentiment. They do what they do based on who has the actual power – those with great wealth and influence. Policy-makers will only do otherwise when they are absolutely forced to. This doesn’t happen very often. On national issues it hardly occurs at all.

The Problem with Lobbying

This is an imperialist power after all. When it’s an issue as central as war and the interests of empire, then a change of course such as a troop withdrawal, or not launching a planned war such as on Iran, can only come about when the stability and legitimacy of the system itself are called into question. Policy-makers must be presented with a choice of either acceding to the demands of the people or risking much greater social upheaval, the consequences of which could turn out exceedingly badly for them.

There are some particular features to the present situation that need to be understood if we are to have a chance to win the battle to drive out the Bush Regime. These are features that are different in qualitative ways from what was the case previously. The nature of this we discuss in greater detail in Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney, especially in the Preface, Chapter Two, Five, Ten and Fourteen. But these are the highlights: the media, while never true watchdogs for the public interest, have become much more, qualitatively more, the stenographers to power than they have ever been in this country.

The Washington Post, the shining example from the Sixties of crusading journalism (or so the hype goes) that released the Pentagon Papers, and broke open the Watergate story that led to Nixon’s downfall, today continues to blast Joseph Wilson as a liar and opportunist, even with all that has come out about the White House’s role in punishing Wilson for daring to expose their lies about WMD in Iraq.

The mass media and Democratic Party continue to claim against all evidence and common decency that the Bush White House has committed no impeachable acts. They are repeating the same role that they played in the run-up to - and justification for - the Iraq invasion with respect to Iran.

While media work by our forces needs to be stepped up and improved – anything we accomplish in getting covered or ads we succeed in getting placed will make a real difference as our message is potent - we cannot rely on media playing the kind of role that it did in the Sixties. We cannot stake our chances for success on this happening.

When the 2000 and then the 2004 presidential elections were stolen and when the Military Commissions Act and the Warner Act were passed without the Democrats opposing these things and without their even filibustering the bills, a Rubicon was crossed. The verdict by the Democratic Party and the mass media was that the Bush Regime’s program was going to prevail, come hell or high water.

While the New York Times has editorialized here against the Bush/Cheney presidency, employing some of the strongest language they have probably ever used about anything, they have been absolutely unwilling to call for the one thing that will actually mean something: the impeachment, conviction, and removal from office of these war criminals. Those people in the impeachment movement who continue to spend all or most of their time lobbying still cling to a faith in the system that the preceding events should utterly shatter. They are, unfortunately, wasting their precious time when they could be devoting themselves to activities that would help.

The media are not neutral parties and the Democratic Party is one of the two imperialist parties of the most powerful imperialist country to ever stalk the earth. We have to find a way to overcome the very big obstacle that they present.

Materially Interfering With Their Policies and Bringing Forth a Competing, Legitimate Leadership

This is why a counter-force leadership needs to be built, popularized, and the social base for it built. "Declare It Now: Wear Orange Daily" is a vehicle for manifesting the mass sentiment against Bush and Cheney and for building that social base for a competing leadership to emerge. What we are doing isn’t just trying to bring sufficiently large forces into political protest and thereby get the powers that be to respond appropriately. Our rulers will not do what must be done unless and until they are facing a situation that threatens to get out of their control and that threatens the very continued existence of their legitimacy to rule and their actual rule. How do we do that?

We could have street demonstration after street demonstration – and we SHOULD because the rising tide of demonstrations is part and parcel of an evolving political dynamic in which more people are being drawn into active and increasingly visible resistance against the regime. But this will not in and of itself get us to the point where we need to get. The old model of having big demonstrations producing the results we want will not work by itself because the leading institutions of our society are arrayed against us and are determined to pursue this course. They are not pursuing this course because they are somehow unaware of what they are doing. They are very aware of what they are doing and they are doing so ruthlessly.

Our actions need to do two things: 1) materially as well as symbolically interfere with and block their means for prosecuting their policies, and in particular, their ability to carry forward their wars on Iraq and Afghanistan as well as their ongoing practice of torture and rendition, and 2) spread the visible resistance to their policies by the increasingly widespread display of orange throughout the society, especially on people's bodies and on buildings such as churches.

Regarding this first point: as Sixties' Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio famously put it on December 2, 1964 on the steps of UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

The ongoing prosecution of this immoral and unjust war means the government must continue to recruit fresh, young, naive bodies into their imperialist army. They were already having major difficulties with recruitment before the anti-recruitment center protests escalated, most of all and first in Berkeley last month. The political targeting of their recruitment centers sent the right wing into paroxysms of fury. Hundreds of especially high school youth came out and exposed the reactionary nature of these loathsome forces:

"Rape, Murder, Torture, War,

That's What They're Recruiting For!"

Actions directed at shutting down the literally and symbolically vital military recruitment centers are extremely important. They are today's equivalent to the Vietnam Era draft protests.

As someone put it on March 15, seeing and then joining the activists trying to shut down the Tacoma Military Recruitment Center at a mall, “Give me a bandana. They have their flag to unite them; we have orange to unite us.” Orange is the color that prisoners of war being tortured by our government are forced to wear. The mass sentiment against the Bush regime, for it to matter, must be made manifest in everyday life. The opportunity for people no matter what their status, age, or circumstances to show their feelings and to shift the political zeitgeist has never been so needed - nor so potent.

A different political atmosphere must – and can - be created on the level of everyday life everywhere. If we succeed in this then the mass media's brown out/black out of the anti-war, anti-torture, pro-impeachment movement will be pierced with the brilliant spectacle of orange blooming everywhere you look. You won't have to hear about the opposition to the Bush regime via mass media. You will see it everywhere you go.

Governments need two things to rule: legitimacy and coercion. Of these two, the bottom line is their coercion; it’s their argument of last resort, but if they lose their legitimacy, their use of coercion will not protect them for long because they would have to use coercion on a scale that would spell their doom in a country with a tradition unlike that of a banana republic. The middle class wouldn’t stand for it.

This government and its policies are widely disliked by the American people. Among tens of millions at least they are despised. Their continued rule depends on riding out this next period without being exposed as being illegitimate and being isolated. The rest of the leadership class is carrying out a sleight of hand trick hoping that we will go along with their promises to do something about the terrible crimes committed by our government LATER, as they abjectly and unconscionably fail to do something about these crimes NOW.

You don’t fight against monstrous crimes later. You fight them now. You don’t claim that you don’t have the votes. Votes have nothing to do with it. If you’re a US Senator, you filibuster if necessary.

This society’s leading institutions are rupturing with the past and radically reconfiguring norms – abolishing due process, legalizing indefinite detention for citizens and non-citizens alike, practicing torture as policy, carrying out warrantless surveillance over all of us, invading countries that do not threaten us and carrying out mass murder, declaring that the executive branch is not accountable to any other branch of government, to the law, or to the people, openly flouting the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, endangering the very viability of the planet by censoring science and denying global warming. Given this, it remains the people’s duty to resist and do whatever is necessary to stop this. It is up to us.

The existing political leadership class and the mass media are complicit in towering crimes and refuse to fight relentlessly and without compromise against these horrid criminals in the White House. Bush and Cheney et al are openly justifying torture and reaction across the board of the worst kind - nooses, misogyny, know-nothing, anti-science, religious fundamentalism and so on. Their actions - and that of the Democratic Party leadership and a compliant media - are so monstrous that they are - all of them - profoundly vulnerable to exposure.

In a room that has been darkened for a long time and in which our eyes have become accustomed to the dark, even a tiny and dim light switched on will stand out brightly. So, too, the actions of even a few brave and moral individuals will stand out in sharp and dramatic contrast to the moral darkness that our rulers are perpetrating. Even very ordinary people can play an exceptional role in times such as these. Sgt. Camilo Mejia, sentenced in 2004 to one year in prison for refusing to assist the military in Iraq said: 

“I am only a regular person that got tired of being afraid to follow his own conscience. For far too long I allowed others to direct my actions even when I knew that they were wrong....”

Individuals who step forward in this way can in turn spark many others. Why? Because the existing, customary leadership has created a vacuum of moral leadership. This government is extremely unpopular, but the mass sentiment against it awaits open and meaningful expression. How can this sentiment be uncorked? It depends upon the courage and determination of those who will step forward into this leadership gap and declare: "Follow me, follow my example, resist, wear orange and let's take on these murderers!"

The adversaries we face are extremely vulnerable because they are all-around bankrupt. They have no leg to stand on - no facts, no logic, and no moral reason to safeguard them from the people's righteous wrath.

Let future generations not ask what we were thinking, why we looked the other way, how we could have failed so ignominiously to act, when actions were desperately called for.

Let the winds blow. Let the waters rush forward. Let justice, so long delayed, be done.

Submitter: Dennis Loo

Submitters Website: http://dennisloo.com

Submitters Bio:
Cal Poly Pomona Sociology Professor. Author of "Globalization and the Demolition of Society," co-editor/author (with Peter Phillips) of "Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney." National Steering Committee Member of the World Can't Wait.