On September 15, 2022, Peace Activists Hit the Streets from DC to San Francisco Urging Ceasefire in Ukraine
Harry Targ
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a massive invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainians responded and their response was fueled by billions of dollars of US and European military equipment and private armies. Thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have died, and millions of Ukrainians have fled the war. The leaders of Russia, the United States, and even Ukraine talk of the possible use of nuclear weapons. Negotiations between competing parties have broken down.
Sectors of the peace movement in the United States
have demanded that all sides participate in negotiations not war. Pacifists in
Ukraine, presumably a small minority, have urged an end to the fighting and
larger numbers of Russians have protested their country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Protestors on September 15 in the US rallied for all sides to stop sending more arms and fighting and begin serious negotiations to end the violence. For example, in Milwaukee “antiwar activists, including a county supervisor, took their peace flags and "Diplomacy, Not War" signs to the campus of conservative Marquette University, where they passed out hundreds of flyers with QR codes for students to email their Congress members for a ceasefire. Organizer Jim Carpenter, co-chair (with this author) of the foreign policy team of Progressive Democrats of America, told skeptics who want a fight to the last Ukrainian, ‘Are you more concerned about saving lives or saving territory’?" (Marcy Winograd, “Peace Activists Hit the Streets From DC to San Francisco Urging Ceasefire in Ukraine,” Common Dreams, September 20, 2022.
In the face of increased probabilities of nuclear war, the peace movement needs to build a worldwide movement of historic proportions, comparable or greater than mobilizations against the Iraq War in 2003. The task would be to stop the escalation of war in the Ukraine and its spread to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This will take grassroots organizing, building global solidarity, and mobilizing for peoples' power in the United Nations. This may be our last chance to build a peaceful and just world.
Particularly, mass mobilization could be animated by
the vision of vibrant international institutions that could represent the
"peoples’” interests. The United Nations, usually a reflection of the
distribution of power in the world, can be made to represent the people of the
world. Particularly, the UN General Assembly, where all nations have only one
vote, can be made viable as it was in the 1960s and 1970s when the U.S. and the
Soviet Union were competing for the "hearts and minds" of the newly
independent nations.
Also, the peace movement should direct its solidarity
to the Group of 77, the movement of non-aligned nations that seeks social and
economic development in a world at peace. During various periods in its
history, the Group of 77 has stood up against the forces of global capitalism.
The peace movement should stand with the Group of 77 today.
In the end, a metaphor of two
superpowers: the one including economic ruling classes, bureaucratic elites,
and generals in powerful countries and the other, opponents of war and economic
exploitation, the people, still make sense. The only hope for humankind is the
mobilization of peace movements, the second superpower, to demand an end to
war. And for the most part, while displaying solidarity with peace movements
everywhere, peace movements in individual countries must target the complicity
of their own nations in the making of war.
