“I was in Iraq in ’03, and what I saw there crushed me,” former U.S. Army sergeant Ash Woolson told thousands of people last Sunday afternoon from a makeshift stage at the edge of the security perimeter around Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center, where the NATO summit was being held.
As the international meeting was getting underway that day, thousands marched for peace through the city’s downtown. They were led by contingents of U.S. veterans like Woolson organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, 40 of whom eventually mounted the ad hoc stage, where they brought the symbolic and tangible purpose of the week’s protests into sharp focus by attempting to publicly return their service medals, including their Global War on Terror awards.
Just before Woolson lobbed his medals in the direction of the NATO gathering (the organizers had requested that an official accept them, but this was turned down), he added: “I don’t want us to suffer this again, and I don’t want our children to suffer this again, and so I’m giving these back!”
This was the largest organized medal return since April 1971, when more than 800 veterans deposited their medals on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to dramatically repudiate the Vietnam War. Like that event four decades ago, Sunday’s ceremony was moving and powerful. It crystallized in a clear but visceral way the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time it spelled out the critical importance of undertaking deliberate and potentially risky resistance for healing and nonviolent change.
This riveting event could well have become the indelible image of this week’s NATO protest. Even more importantly, it might have prompted a renewed national focus on the realities and costs of the last dozen years of war-making.
So far, neither has happened. Although there was some media coverage of the medal return ceremony (including a piece on local television and extensive reporting on Democracy Now!), it was largely overshadowed by the clash between police and protesters that took place almost immediately after the vets exited the stage. The march permit expired and most of the thousands of marchers drifted away, but a couple of hundred people stayed put in the streets. Hundreds of police in riot gear then flooded into the area. As an Associated Press story reports:
Some of the most enduring images of the event were likely to be from the end — when a small group of demonstrators clashed with a line of police who tried to keep them from the lakeside convention center where President Barack Obama was hosting the gathering. The protesters tried to move east toward McCormick Place, with some hurling sticks and bottles at police. Officers responded by swinging their batons. The two sides were locked in a standoff for nearly two hours, with police blocking the protesters’ path and the crowd refusing to leave. Some protesters had blood streaming down their faces.
This description conveys little of the ferocity of the tense confrontation that erupted after the permit expired and a huge police contingent swarmed into the space, intent on pushing people out of the intersection and keeping them from moving toward the convention center. News accounts and video clips from the scene show that the police tactics were hugely confrontational and aggressive; the police attacked and pummeled many protesters. At the same time, video clips show objects being hurled at police officers, including a police barricade, and protesters pushing police. Both sides were confrontational, as this raw video indicates.
My spouse Cynthia and I brought our two-year-old daughter Leah to this march. (The coalition website said that this event would be “family friendly,” and we took it at its word.) We were one block from the stage, but left a couple of minutes before the permit expired because Leah was getting hungry and thirsty; it had been a long, hot day. As we walked north, a long phalanx of police officers in riot gear were trotting single file toward the intersection, where only a few minutes later they would be swinging batons at marchers unwilling to budge. Some would be bloodied; others arrested.
There is no excuse for the actions of the police. At the same time, the lack of nonviolent discipline among the remaining protesters contributed to escalating this confrontation. The media frame on this story shifted almost immediately from “peaceful march” to “street fighting,” and the powerful action of the Iraq and Afghanistan vets was largely lost in the inundating shuffle.
Well before all of this, Suellen Semekoski and I were asked by Iraq Veterans Against the War to co-facilitate the nonviolent action training that would support the vets in preparing for their medal return. We were happy to do so, and on Saturday afternoon and evening we plunged into this process with them.
In our six hours together, we sensed the depth of hope that this public action was generating for them as individuals and as a community. Throughout the day the participants repeatedly stressed that nonviolence was going to be crucial to this event and that they were committed to maintaining this spirit. In addition, we were joined by three members of Afghans for Peace who were collaborating with IVAW on this event. They were also resolute about the importance of nonviolent discipline. The success of this action, they said, depended on it.
These survivors of war — U.S. veterans and Afghan peaceworkers — were creating a rare public space where they sought to call on the nation and the world to reflect deeply on the reality of this past, present and future destructiveness. They were very clear that nonviolent strategies, tactics and atmosphere would be vital to achieving this.
Unfortunately, there was little infrastructure in place to support that possibility. While many of us led numerous nonviolence trainings in the Chicago area in the run-up to the NATO mobilization, there were no agreed-upon nonviolence guidelines to serve as a foundation for nonviolent action. (The “Chicago Principles” did not serve this function.) Nor were there adequate numbers of peacekeepers prepared to intervene in order to maintain this nonviolent atmosphere. (In January, some of us had offered to train 500 peacekeepers, who would be equipped to respond to outbreaks of violence. This was based on the experience some of us had had in Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organization meeting, where 200 peacekeepers had been an inadequate number. We were told that the coalition was already training peace guides.)
There are many reasons such infrastructure was not in place, including a sensitivity to the now classic debate between nonviolence and diversity of tactics. Nevertheless, I suspect that we are at a crossroads as a movement for change and, at some point, we must make a difficult but important choice.
From my perspective, people power depends for its lifeblood on nonviolent discipline.
Nonviolent action is more effective than violent action — including the kind of heated scrum that took place in Chicago this past Sunday — because it keeps us on message (focused on the issue, rather than the tired tit-for-tat narrative), it is more likely to alert, educate and mobilize the population (the lynchpin of successful movements), and it communicates a vision of the kind of society we want (veterans creating the space of transformative healing and social change rather than the push-comes-to-shove dynamics of retaliatory violence).
If these things are true, then we must engage in nonviolent struggle with those for whom nonviolent struggle is dispensable. The challenges our world is facing are too grim to move forward without the strength and effectiveness of disciplined nonviolent people power. There are lessons everywhere — even from what went down in Chicago on Sunday.
Thanks for your efforts, Ken & Suellen.
I read the Chicago Principles (sic) in February and told a friend working with CANG8 that I could never sign on to such a document. I asked friends at Voices for Creative Nonviolence in Chicago if they were ever consulted or asked to sign this document, and was sad and glad to hear their answer, “No and No”
After building itself on the “diversity of tactics” foundation, the last sentence begins:
“Any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement” – Sorry! This is crap process: assert a controversial position and then demand people shut up about it if they disagree or even have a critique.
The latest issue of Against the Current has a fine essay by Kevin Laird, A Diversion We Don’t Need, about sidestepping this pointless and damaging debate about “diversity of tactics” at
http://solidarity-us.org/site/node/3584
Personally,i would strongly agree with the idea that nonviolent direct action is the way to proceed. i too was at the medal ceremony and was deeply moved by the veterans who took the stage.
But i would disagree with the characterization of the end of the march. i was on the front line at the intersection. The police closed off all exits except one, which quickly got jammed with people unable to move. Police lining the street refused to budge, hemming people in. i witnessed the cops pushing back the crowd even though there was nowhere to move. And, yes, some people refused to budge. And yes, the response of some was to throw things, tensions rose, people were angry and responded. There was confrontation.
In reading a piece glorifying the CPD, the Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said, “Our job was to clear that intersection and that is what we did.” But whether or not plastic water bottles were thrown at the police, they were pushing people back to clear the intersection- the great majority of whom were completely nonviolent. People stood and braced themselves as the cops pushed them back, and down, and hit them with clubs. The mere act of people bracing themselves against the cops was described by McCarthy as an “assault against my officers,” which in his (and apparently the mainstream media’s) eyes, justifies assaulting unarmed demonstrators. This will always be the case, no matter the degree of non-violence the demonstrators exhibit.
On this point i would disagree with Ken. The crowd at the end of the march was disciplined, the great majority were there to non-violently resist the police and they did. As the marches against the Iraq war (where millions around the globe marched on the eve of war) prove, it is going to take more than marches to change anything in this entrenched corporatocracy. i applaud all those who participated in Chicago and look forward to the upcoming conventions. i’ll see you in the streets.
I dropped out of the march on May 20th, because of the black bloc. There were CPD on both sides of the march, walking single file. The police were not threatening to me, and would smile and talk to me. I teased them about forgetting their signs.
I believe they did this to make sure the black bloc did not break off and go down a side street.
The black bloc was scary. They did not smile or talk with me. I felt I was being used as a human shield between them and the police. I did not make it to the final rally. I see from the video that the ones confronting police were part of the black bloc.
I really feel that all rallies and marches that are part of the anti-war or Occupy movement need to state NO BLACK BLOC CLOTHING OR BLACK BLOC TACTICS ARE WELCOME HERE.
And then put that on every flyer and every permit applied for. Publicize it.
“diversity of tactics” does not include changing the nature of a march or rally to fit your own agenda. The black bloc should hold their own damn rallies and marches and do their own thing and stop using other people’s actions for their own ends. They remind me of the protesters of Westboro Baptist Church (they show up at funerals to spread their anti-gay messages) – they are both USING other people’s events. Only I cannot tell what the black bloc’s message is – especially in Chicago. Are they really anti-war and anti-NATO? Or do they just want to have a testosterone filled rumble and break some windows and damage property?
Another point is that the FBI is infiltrating the black bloc, not the regular protesters.
Thank you Ken for your very thoughtful and thorough description of the events on May 20. As one of the members of the Protest Chaplains who marched inside the march, I too saw the escalation of violence at the end of the march but also know from hosting a young woman from the Occupy Wallstreet Movement that the police had been aggressive all week almost itching for a fight as witnessed by the unnecessary police around my home church of Wellington UCC.
I appreciate your comments and questions about diversity of tactics versus nonviolence. This is an issue that clearly needs more attention. And I think the organizers of the Peace guides would be the first to tell you that they needed more people. Not sure what happened in the communication there. I do wish to report or fold into your report that two of our Protest Chaplains were beaten up around 5:00 PPM. Both were wearing black—one was a priest with a collar on. They saw first hand the way the police pushed and came after people. As a Protest Chaplain over at the Wellness Center I saw kids bloodied from being beaten with batons including one young man who held his broken off teeth in his water bottle.
As important as it is for us to work towards creating and maintaining nonviolent actions, as you taught us we should also expect violence. What would have happened if everyone had just sat down?—would they have picked people off one by one to be arrested? Would they have pepper sprayed everyone? Would they just start clubbing everyone for the world to see? Do people have the right to stay in the streets after the permit is over is another question too.
Again thank you for your article.