Fog of War

Fayetteville, N.C. – home to Fort Bragg, the Green Berets, and the 82nd Airborne Division – seems as good a place as any "to bring a self-sustaining GI anti-war movement into being."

At least that was the goal of North Carolina Peace and Justice Coalition organizer Chuck Fager for Saturday's anti-war demonstration in Fayetteville.

The Fayetteville demonstration, more like an Americana July 4th picnic than any Days of Rage, was as placid and serene as the weather that day, temperatures in the low 60s, dry, cloudy skies. No one keened or got red in the face, nobody clashed with the fascists, and policemen's boots didn't lose their spit-shines. The protestors were clad in loose-fitting, informal garb, jeans, cotton windbreakers and sweatshirts, athletics shoes and baseball caps. More than 90 percent of them were white – "middle-class hippies" of all ages, one participant quipped.

The North Carolina Peace and Justice Coalition had called the Fayetteville action to place Iraq war veterans, bereaved families, active-duty soldiers and their kin in the center of the antiwar crusade. Sponsors included Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Quaker House, Military Families Speak Out, Bring Them Home Now, Fayetteville Peace with Justice, N.C. Council of Churches, and United for Peace and Justice.

Turnout for the festival in Fayetteville, a town of 120,000, may have been the largest in any American locale. While London and Istanbul staged six-figure rallies, according to the mainstream media, San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C. probably failed to top turnout in a Southern town less than a tenth their size.

And not even the North Carolina rally, by the standards it set for itself, was an unqualified triumph. Only 13 buses arrived from out of town, four times as many as in 2004, a fifth of what this year's organizers hoped to bring.

The numbers may be forever in dispute, but reports from the MSM are anything but encouraging. Four thousand marched out of Hollywood, the Los Angeles Times noted, and "several thousand" took to the streets in New York and San Francisco, their dailies said. But across the board, The New York Times pointed out, anti-war actions were "nowhere as big as those in February 2003."

Fayetteville's count, like all the others, is a bit rubbery, and subject to crunching. The Associated Press put turnout at 3,000; its organizers claimed 1,800 more. By my own estimate, 4,200 people were gathered at the protest at its peak, about 2:00 p.m. Saturday.

What Democracy Looks Like

The anti-war crowd formed in a downtown parking lot before noon, buses disgorging pilgrims from afar, contingents forming beneath banners and signs. Lead by a woman blowing a bagpipe – as if in a military parade – about 1,200 marchers, led by some 200 soldiers, ex-servicemen and kin, strolled some20 minutes over gently sloping residential streets to the north side of Rowan Park.

From the park's pavilion, a ten-foot banner bearing the slogan of the event – Support the Troops for Real! Bring Them Home Now! – beckoned in a gentle wind.

Sheriff's deputies at two entry points conducted airport-style security checks, metal-detecting wands in hand. The procedure was congestive – some participants stood in line for nearly an hour, waiting to pass – inspiring a chant that has become a litany from shore to American shore:

"This what democracy looks like!" the protestors intoned, pointing at their own ranks.

"This is what a police state looks like!" turning towards the police.

"This is what democracy looks like in a police state," one of them observed.

But after a few minutes passed, almost nobody complained about the security screening, because on the north side of the scene, along the rim of the park, stood a hundred counter-demonstrators: "Fry Mumia," their T-shirts harrumphed, "Caution: Red Diaper Doper Babies in the Park," a big pasteboard sign proclaimed.