{"id":1362,"date":"2013-09-01T23:09:15","date_gmt":"2013-09-02T03:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/?p=1362"},"modified":"2013-09-06T18:05:16","modified_gmt":"2013-09-06T22:05:16","slug":"the-u-s-antiwar-left-mobilizes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/?p=1362","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. “Antiwar Left” Mobilizes!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I caught this item on Buzzfeed last week,<\/a> about the near-total silence from the antiwar “movement” about President Sparkle Pony’s desire to intervene militarily in Syria. Almost all the quotes from organizers and activists are full of weak rationalizing about fundraising and contorted tap-dancing around the fact that most of the people who filled the streets in the early ’00s were just pissed-off Democrats who promptly put away their signs and banners and went home when the ’08 Presidential freak circus kicked off, leaving those of us who really cared about ending militarism — no matter which wing of the Party was doing the bombing, murdering and torturing — high and dry.<\/p>\n

The most gobsmacking quote in the whole article — the quote which inspired this cartoon — comes from our old pal, Code Pink founder Medea “Media” Benjamin:<\/p>\n

“Those of us still working on this have been mobilizing. The online protests are proliferating. There’s petitions to Obama, there’s calls for Congress to get involved — so many groups from Code Pink to Win Without War to Just Foreign Policy — all have put out calls saying no war in Syria.”<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dear god, what a great, steamy slab of thumbsucking. This makes me want to just bang my head on the desk. Medea Benjamin thinks we’re going to have an effect on policy by “protesting” on the Internet, sending petitions (which will be promptly ignored) to President Sparkle Pony, and beseeching a bunch of greedy-assed sociopathic politicians to act against their own interests. You’d think Medea Benjamin, of all people, would understand that real movements are built — and real change brought about — by real, live, honest-to-god, in-person “street heat”, not by sitting on one’s pasty ass in front of a computer, signing useless Internet petitions, bitching on Farcebook, and remaining essentially invisible to the public and the media.<\/p>\n

Christ, I need a drink… or perhaps several drinks. Actually, on second thought — screw the drinks, just give me some friggin’ heroin.<\/p>\n

11×12 inch medium-res grayscale .jpg image, <\/a>504kb.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I caught this item on Buzzfeed last week, about the near-total silence from the antiwar “movement” about President Sparkle Pony’s desire to intervene militarily in Syria. Almost all the quotes from organizers and activists are full of weak rationalizing about fundraising and contorted tap-dancing around the fact that most of the people who filled the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,158,9],"tags":[524,526,525,527,252,522],"class_list":["post-1362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east","category-obamarama","category-war-and-peace","tag-activism","tag-clicktivism","tag-code-pink","tag-facebook","tag-moveon","tag-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1362"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1365,"href":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362\/revisions\/1365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sinkers.org\/stage\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}