travisstoliker.com

On March 23, 2002 an organization was founded called Not In Our Name (NION) to make a statement of conscious against the United States governments actions following the attack on September 11th. NION’s statement of conscious included:

We believe that as people living
in the United States it is our
responsibility to resist the injustices
done by our government,
in our names.
Not in our name
will you wage endless war.
Another world is possible
and we pledge to make it real.

This statement was published as a full page advertisement in several nationally recognized publications including the New York Times. The background of the advertisement was an impressive list of signatories that agreed with the statement. Among the names are Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, John Cusack, Spike Lee, Jim McDermott, U.S. representative Cynthia McKinney, U.S. representative David McReynolds, Gloria Steinem, Oliver Stone, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Cornel West, Howard Zinn… and many more including myself.* Thousands of people signed this statement opposing a U.S. war of aggression against Iraq before July 17, 2002.

On February 15, 2003 a coordinated peace protest was held in 800 cities around the world to oppose the imminent invasion of Iraq. BBC News reported that between six to ten million people took part in the protest. Protests were held in cities all over the globe. In Lansing, 3,000 of us joined together to march from Beaumont Tower to the Capital.

Now we are several years into the war, most people agree that the invasion was a failure predicated on distortions of truth.

I hear often in this political season that we should forget the reasons we went to war and only focus on “where we are now”. I say, Bullshit! It is irresponsible for us to ignore the lessons of history. “Moving on and getting over it” might be a satisfactory remedy for a relationship, but it is not an acceptable reaction to a complete failure of policy that resulted in the death of thousands of people.

The people who participated in NION and Feb2003, were correct.
The people that supported war, were wrong.

We can only hope to learn from our actions.

“LET IT NOT BE SAID that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression……

LET US NOT ALLOW the watching world today to despair of our silence and our failure to act. Instead, let the world hear our pledge: we will resist the machinery of war and repression and rally others to do everything possible to stop it.”