In the weeks and months after 9/11, revolutionary socialists sought to build a mass movement against more bloodshed and war, and the Islamophobia used by our rulers to justify it. Unprecedented numbers of people took to the streets and packed out meeting halls as millions were radicalised against imperialism. Today, the left must not lose sight of mass politics.
Image: Two million protest against the invasion of Iraq in London, 15th February 2003.
Twenty years ago today, I was in the kitchen of a homeless shelter peeling potatoes. A staff member walked in and said, ‘go to the TV room and see what’s happening’. I watched the footage, endlessly replayed over and over all through that day, of planes crashing into the twin towers. It felt surreal, like a 1970s disaster movie, but I immediately knew it was a turning point.
Never in history had there been an attack like this on the United States. Though as Noam Chomsky put it, the only thing really unique was that it was the first time the guns were pointing the other way.
Chalmers Johnson, the American political scientist, would coin the phrase ‘Blowback’ to refer to US imperialism, particularly in regards to the Middle East, provoking a reaction that had now tragically led to the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans.
Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in New York a few blocks away would speak powerfully of suddenly having a vivid sense of what too many people in too many parts of the world experience.
I remember a sadness for the victims, but also fear. There would be war.
In 2001 I was in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Almost immediately after 9/11 we were in Cardiff City Centre with our newspaper with a front page of the twin towers and the headline, ‘Bitter Fruit of US Policy’. It was a hard argument to make at the time but we got some support – and detractors! I recall a woman coming up and saying, ‘I’ll buy a copy of your newspaper’ and then ripping it up in front of me and screaming in my face!
Many of the debates were around questions such as, ‘How would you bring Bin Laden to justice?’ and ‘How would you stop the terrorists?’
As anti-imperialists, we argued that war would lead to more terrorism and what was needed was a radical overhaul in Western foreign policy to drain the swamp of bitterness: The US should stop interfering in other people’s countries, we should end arms sales to dictatorships, support justice for the Palestinians. All would achieve better outcomes than war.
Some on the left said that it was inappropriate so soon to be making political points. But our rulers were already beating the war-drum, so we had to organise quickly to stop them. As a socialist you never dodge a hard argument.
Birth of a movement
A week after 9/11 around 100 people packed into a meeting in Splott launching Cardiff Stop the War Coalition to oppose bombing Afghanistan. There was a mix of the far left, Labour Left, Plaid, Greens, CND, anarchists, Christians, students and trade unionists.
Revolutionary socialists had initiated the meeting working with the late Labour Cllr Ray Davies, a veteran peace campaigner who chaired. Similar meetings were taking place elsewhere, including the UK launch of the top the War Coalition, on a minimal three-point platform:
1. Stop the War, originally Afghanistan, then Iraq and a whole cycle of wars.
2. Defend civil liberties, we anticipated an erosion of democratic freedoms
3. Oppose the racist backlash, we predicted war would increase racism and Islamophobia.
Some argued for additional demands and more explicit anti-imperialism. We argued the more demands, or conditions, for entering the room, the less people would come in and hear arguments against imperialism.
The minimal programme was also important in creating one united anti-war movement rather than splinter groups that might prove less than the sum of its parts.
At the first meeting there was also debate around the United Nations, with a few viewing the UN as a positive force for peace who we needed to demand our government engage with. Most of us thought the UN irrelevant, the US would use it as a fig-leaf to bomb if it could, or side-line it if not, we argued for a simple, ‘Stop the War’ message would have widest public appeal uniting the broadest movement.
Others felt our first public statement should focus mainly on just strongly condemning the atrocities of 9/11. Nobody supported the attacks obviously, but many felt we must be careful how we framed things. A few weeks later a visiting Colombian trade unionist whose community had been on the receiving end of US foreign policy would say, ‘Yes, 1 minute’s silence for the victims of terrorism in the US, but then 59 minutes silence for the victims of US terrorism all around the world!’ The history of violence in the world didn’t begin on September 11 2001.
Anti-war activism 20 years ago
Locally we held weekly city centre peace vigils. In those days there wasn’t social media, so we established ‘phone trees’ where one person would call up ten other people each of whom would call ten people. Alongside an email list we still had a physical mailing list. I would visit the campaign secretary at her home to stuff anti-war bulletins into envelopes and with other volunteers hand deliver them. We would flyposter, debate people on street stalls, and leaflet big workplaces and colleges. There is much to be said for this old school method of movement building that doesn’t just rely on Instagram posts, setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook event page.
At another meeting we decided to ‘cold-call’ at all local mosques to advertise our new anti-war group. I remember being volunteered to leaflet. As a socially awkward youth I rocked up with a wad of leaflets nervously handing them out after Friday prayers. The secretary of the mosque saw me, and after reading, called two people to help me dish them out.
One evening students and lecturers held an anti-war ‘teach-in’ at Cardiff University. We had a couple of decent sized marches. When Tony Blair visited the Welsh Assembly we did a sit-down protest, and a few of us got on the telly being carried off by the police.
The first national protest was in Brighton outside the Labour Party Conference. Originally this was to be an anti-globalisation demo but became an anti-war demo. My main memory is torrential rain. Before 9/11 there were plans to attempt some direct action blockading the conference but this was shelved as there were armed police due to the changed political situation. Two further national protests were held in London in 2001.
I recall getting into Trafalgar Square as Tariq Ali declared, “We are fighting against a fundamentalism. It is the mother of all fundamentalisms. It has a name. Let us use that name. It is called US imperialism!” The protest felt more like an open-air teach-in as arguments were hammered out.
Muslims join the movement
During that march, in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as the sun set, tens of thousands poured into the square and the Muslim call to prayer was heard from the stage. Thousands of believers broke their fast at the protest – with dates and bottles of water handed out to everybody. It was important that organisers made space for that to happen.
The SWP, who were a significant force in the movement, argued Muslim involvement and combating Islamophobia were crucial, and they were proactive in reaching out to communities. This helped avoid a disastrous situation like France where much of the left sided with state Islamophobia, even supporting the racist headscarf ban. Muslims, particularly Muslim women, would be at the forefront of anti-war organising in Britain.
Hundreds of thousands of British Muslims were politicised by the anti-war movement in an unprecedented eruption into British politics. The anti-war movement, by uniting Muslims and non-Muslims, created a powerful anti-racist movement. During this summer’s large pro-Palestinian marches many people more recently politicised were astounded at the size and energy of the Muslim turn out, what they perhaps didn’t realise is that the foundation was laid twenty years ago in alliances we forged.
Afghanistan
The 2001 argument for bombing Afghanistan sounds farcical today: To bring Bin Laden to justice – he was killed later, in another country. To defeat the Taliban – now back in power. To liberate Afghan women – by bombing them.
The real reasons for war were different. At the time many saw the bombing as erasing the humiliation of 9/11 with a violent display of US power. Some suggested bombing-Afghanistan-for-oil-pipelines as a secondary reason. Mostly Afghanistan was just a dry run before the main dish which was always Iraq’s oil. US politicians figured going from 9/11 straight into Iraq would be too big a leap to sell to the public, so Afghanistan was to soften up public opinion for Iraq.
Co-founder of Stop the War Coalition, John Rees, has written about a neo-conservative think tank, the Project for the New American Century – which included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, all later key figures in the Bush administration.
In the run up to 9/11 these Neo-Cons put forward a very simple proposition: At the end of World War II, the US was the leading economy in the world, now our economy is in decline and we face being overtaken by China, Russia or Europe, but we have something that our rivals lack, the biggest army, navy and air-force: Military power could be used to buttress economic power and make sure America remained top dog in the global economy. 9/11 gave them the excuse needed to move into action.
I am curious to know if Kevin Brennan, Julie Morgan and Alun Michael, who as Cardiff MPs in 2001 supported what became a 20-year war to replace the Taliban with the Taliban ,now regret their political choices, and what message they have for the families of 457 British soldiers who died?
Politicians who gunned for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan must be asked this question, because if we don’t learn from history, we will repeat it and be led into more devastating wars.
The legacy of the 9/11 forever wars are failed states, hundreds of thousands of dead, increased racism, a spread of terrorism, and a more dangerous world. Brown University, Costs of War report suggests that the US-led post 9/11 wars may have even displaced almost 60 million people, exceeding those displaced by every war since 1900 except World War 2.
The legacy of resistance
The anti-war movement was a real university for young people, as I then was. That’s where I graduated in politics, history, economics, sociology, religious studies and international relations. When our leaders talked about ‘rogue states’ we quickly speed-read our history books so we could prove that the United States was no.1 of rogue states. There was a time when hardened activists could reel off, at the drop of a hat, a long list, with time and place, dot and comma, of almost every democratic government overthrown, war crime committed, brutal regime armed and funded by the West. When the media asked us about terrorism, we would ask what about ‘state terrorism’? When they talked about Muslim extremists, we would ask about Western extremist governments.
Even local public anti war meetings were huge, bigger than anything since. We could get 250 in for an all-day teach-in on Imperialism and the Middle East or 300 to hear the leader of the Federation of Iraqi Oil Workers speak about the struggle against the US/UK occupation’s attempt to privatise his country’s oil.
1000 turned up to listen to former Guantanamo prisoners and guards, a three-day student occupation began with a video link-up with Palestinian students, whose university had just been bombed, and ended with the university divesting from arms companies supplying Israel.
Through the method of how we built the movement we were able to communicate very radical anti-system ideas to a broad audience, and bringing diverse constituencies into one big tent was exciting.
It’s fashionable now to just dismiss the anti-war movement with a simple, “two million people marched from A to B in the biggest protest of all time, and war happened anyway.”
I always thought that what would be needed was mass strike action and mutiny in the armed forces. Some of that happened, but not enough. So, two train drivers in Scotland refused to transport munitions. On the day the bombs started dropping on Baghdad, there were people across the UK who walked out of work, and a significant wave of school student strikes. Military Families Against The War was launched by parents whose sons died fighting in Iraq.
Often this crude dismissal forgets important lessons in movement building. The global anti-war protests on 15 February 2003 when millions marched in over 600 cities, the largest protest event in history, were extraordinary. It’s a tragedy that in the second decade of a global economic crisis, the global left still hasn’t been able to coordinate a similar wave of international mass action to demand the global rich pay for the crisis.
We must ensure that the radical left does not forget how to do mass politics, and warn against becoming comfortable being a subculture, playing to the gallery, lacking the confidence that we could ever move millions of people – with all their contradictions, confused ideas, and nonsense – into action against the system.
