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“OUT NOW!” A Good/Bad Slogan?
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by Anne Winkler-Morey, WAMM
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The good news is that as the 2008 presidential campaign heats up, opposition to the war on Iraq is overwhelming. Everywhere Democratic candidates go, they meet crowds demanding “OUT NOW.” In red, blue, purple, and green regions, rural and urban communities, within virtually all racial groups, creeds, and economic classes, majorities oppose the war.
How will the U.S. government maintain legitimacy when the government clearly disregards the will of the people? The people must be distracted! And distracted they are. People have found an issue that rivals, even overwhelms the war as a social cause worthy of their time and passion.
Besides the war, what is inspiring the masses to sign a petition, lobby congress, write a letter, attend a meeting, or actually take the risk to stand in public with a protest sign? Health care? Education? Mortgage foreclosures? Global warming? Mass transit? Housing?
No, my friends, the masses have decided they can accept collapsing bridges and under-compensated victims of flood damage. Overflowing schoolrooms, over-inflated mortgages, overheated atmosphere, all these can be tolerated.
What raises the blood pressure here in Minnesota, among the heirs of Polish, German, Swedish, Finnish, Italian immigrants today, is ATM machines that ask “English or Spanish?” It’s José and Mohamed playing soccer, where Bobby and Jane should be playing baseball. It’s familia picnics in the park, Muslim prayer rooms, and Hmong communal gardens. It’s anytime other-than-English-speaking people dare to take space formerly filled by the Anglophonic.
Why, at this historical moment, did English speakers in this Ojibwe and Dakota land get the idea that they have a special right to always understand and be understood? The current self-righteous hate wave here in our state, and around the country, is part of a long xenophobic tradition. As the Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani said back in 1996, referring to 19th century Know-Nothings and the Chinese exclusionists, the periodic rise in anti-immigrant sentiment is a pattern in the United States.
The Chinese exclusion campaign was a response to a moment when the railway companies were squeezing farmers and workers in every part of the country. Instead of demanding fair wages for all workers they demanded an end to Chinese immigration. The Chinese, who were paid half the wages of white workers, became, overnight, the first “illegal immigrants,” and the non-Chinese workers and farmers still had to overcome bosses intent on breaking worker solidarity any way they could.
The problem for Giuliani today is that he is not eager to criminalize low-wage workers he knows are essential to keeping profits high and the cost of consumer goods low. Yet he wants to build support for a criminal war. He knows the anti-immigrant movement does dampen the peace movement, as those most squeezed by the wartime economy are susceptible to calls for scapegoating by blowhard media pundits like Lou Dobbs.
We who oppose the war have the inverse problem from Giuliani. How do we build a movement for social justice when those who will whisper “out (of Iraq) now” with us are simultaneously shouting “OUT NOW” to their immigrant neighbors?
When anti-immigrant sentiment emerges in white and black communities that are suffering the most from the wartime economy (communities with more than their share of loved ones in Iraq) and are struggling to cope with the physical and mental wounds of returning soldiers and to heal the hearts of those left behind—those communities where the schools are the most crowded, and decent jobs the hardest to find—that is when we know the corporate moguls are winning at that age-old divide and conquer game.
So what do we do? On the one hand we want to build a movement based on one goal we can all agree on: bring in the largest numbers. The immigrant rights movement is making the same calculations, concerned that if they talk about the war they will lose support. Hey, as a nominal member of both movements, I do both, that is, I hold my tongue all the time. But it occurs to me that the cost of not making the connections is that fascism grows.
If you’d like to participate in a speak-out on how the anti-immigration movement, racism, and the war are connected, let me know; winkl002@umn.edu (fifth figure is an “L”).
Anne Winkler-Morey has four jobs these days, including working for the Minnesota Immigrant Freedom Network, so she doesn’t have much time . . . but lots of ideas. |
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Word UP!
Most momentous changes in the history of humankind have come about unforeseen. They were not planned by experts. Nobody had anticipated the sudden fall of the Soviet Union, the French revolution, the end of slavery, the fall of the Roman Empire, the end of apartheid.
Women and men stood up for dignity, for freedom, for a more meaningful life, for a better world. There was no expert or super-hero, no futurologist and no powerful leader who planned these changes beforehand. It has been the product of people’s power.
Today, the world seems on the brink of catastrophe. All the red lights are on. Yet, in the invisible, there is hope. It has to do with the indomitable, unconquerable part of the human being, something that is bigger and stronger than himself or herself.
—Thierry Verhelst, a Belgian with NGO experience in various continents, was trained in legal anthropology. He was one of the coordinators of the “South-North Network Cultures and Development” where development strategies were critically questioned for their ethnocentric bias and their ignorance of spiritual issues. He is the author of No Life Without Roots and a Christian orthodox priest.
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© 2007 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete October 2007 Index - click here
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