In the cramped, downtown office of End the Arms Race, four floors above
Granville Street, a large black and white photograph dominates one wall.
It' s a stirring shot taken from the north approach of the Burrard
Street bridge as an estimated 100,000 people spill toward the camera.
Prominent in the front row of the crowd, holding a banner almost as wide
as the oncoming throng, are municipal politicians of the day: Mike
Harcourt, Darlene Marzari, Gordon Price and Libby Davies among others.
That April 1986 peace walk was one of the biggest in Vancouver's
history. It 's also an event that likely won't happen again. Fifteen
years after one out of every five Vancouverites marched on a spring
Saturday to stop the great powers from threatening the world with
nuclear extinction, it's hard to find five people in the same room
worried about war. April 2001 came and went without a peace walk.
According to Peter Coombes, national organizer for End the Arms Race,
attracting 100,000 people for a peace rally would be impossible today.
Sitting alone in the peace group's office, surrounded by stacks of
posters, leaflets and other piles of paper from various campaigns, he
adds simply, "And we don't need that."
Coombes is one of a growing number of peace activists who argue that the
movement is far from dead, although the message has changed.
In the past, activists concentrated on eliminating nuclear weapons in
order to broaden the movement's appeal. Now they argue that the
persistence of war is intimately connected to the production and sale of
weapons by huge international arms companies. War is good for business,
and happy arms businesses are good to politicians that provide them with
more sales by going to war.
The link between corporations and war is one a whole new generation of
anti-globalization activists is only too happy to expose.
Walking for peace in the 1980s was easy because Armageddon had seldom
looked so imminent. Tensions between NATO powers of the West and the
Soviet Bloc were high, and the fear of nuclear war was widespread.
"We have to look at the politics of the day," says Coombes.
"[U.S. president] Ronald Reagan was in power and he scared
people." Reagan ramped up the Cold War on the Western side, calling
the Soviet Union the "evil empire" and making jokes about
bombing Russia to a shocked national radio audience. Reagan had nukes
and seemed willing to use them.
Coombes, now a 38-year-old father of one, grew up in Cape Breton
terrified by the spectre of nuclear war. "I'd been conditioned.
When you're a little boy, having nightmares about nuclear weapons, it
gets ingrained in you." Coombes said he had a choice to either curl
up in a ball in despondency or to act and fight the threat.
Moving to Vancouver in 1986, he joined End the Arms Race-where he's now
one of two part-time staff members-and helped organize the annual Walk
for Peace, which had become the most popular in the country.
The walk was founded in 1982 by Vancouver and District Labour Council
executive Frank Kennedy, who, as a teenager, had seen family members and
neighbours from his small town north of Toronto sent off to fight in
World War II. Some didn't come back. Moving to B.C., he became active in
the labour movement and developed a growing awareness of peace issues.
By the early 1980s, he decided Vancouverites needed a public outlet to
express themselves without fear. "If you brought up the issue of
peace, you were immediately branded a commie," he remembers. Peace
activists, argues Kennedy, had to get out "enough people there to
show that this wasn't a communist uprising."
Kennedy, now 73, passed a motion through the labour council to call a
meeting of union, church and community groups on peace. End the Arms
Race emerged from that effort as a coalition of the participating
groups, and at its height included 200 to 300 peace-related
organizations from across B.C.
The 1982 walk drew between 35,000 to 40,000
people, a number Kennedy says was 10 times that of any previous effort.
By 1984, the walk reached the 100,000-mark for the first time.
Politicians who had previously ignored it clamoured to be part of the
crowd. Even conservative Social Credit MLAs joined the parade.
Kennedy remembers the thrill in 1984 when he realized how many people
had come to walk across the Burrard Street Bridge. "We were over in
Sunset Park, and the end [of the crowd] was still in Vanier Park where
we started. That was a good feeling for everybody. It helped the average
guy to jump in with his wife and family."
Labour and church groups supported the walk financially, and Coombes
says there was no shortage of volunteers. "All I had to do was call
them up and say, 'Organize the tents,' and it happened."
Experienced parade marshals were provided by labour groups and the
churches involved organized an ecumenical worship service before the
walk began.
But by the end of the 1980s, the Cold War had disappeared with the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the terror of nuclear war melted away.
In the '90s, the focus changed from nuclear annihilation and global
holocaust to money and jobs. "It's the economy, stupid" became
a catchphrase. Peace groups involved with End the Arms Race shut down as
activists from churches, labour unions and non-profits broke off to work
on causes involving economic development, poverty, unemployment and the
environment.
Attendance at peace walks dwindled. The 1990 Gulf War produced a
temporary surge in support, but by 1991, the year of the last walk, only
5,000 people came out. It was a respectable number by any standard, but
far from what had been achieved in 1986.
Funding for the annual walk dried up and the walk was cancelled. End the
Arms Race devolved from a coalition of many groups to a non-profit
society with 300 to 500 members.
Coombes says the peace movement spent the next few years trying to find
its focus. He, for one, grew uneasy about what the movement had
accomplished in the 1980s.
Had the world really become a safer place? Coombes says no.
The end of the Cold War hardly put a dent in the world's nuclear
stockpile. While some nuclear weapons have been decommissioned, the
American arsenal alone still numbers more than 7,000 warheads. And
Coombes says the manufacture of conventional weapons and their use in
wars around the globe has increased, with destructive conflicts
involving the West in Iraq and Yugoslavia among the most high profile.
The world had been promised a "peace dividend" at the end of
the Cold War. Instead, it got more war bonds.
Coombes argues that that's because "the war economy" remained
in control, with arms companies benefiting when the West indulges in
campaigns like the bombing of Yugoslavia. He says the connection between
profit and war goes a long way to explaining why the lavish parties
thrown in Washington, D.C. to celebrate NATO's 50th anniversary were
paid for by arms producers.
Unfortunately, the concept of the war economy is harder to grasp for a
general audience with widely divergent political views. According to
Coombes, the peace movement deliberately dumbed down its complex
analysis in the 1980s to focus exclusively on ridding the world of
nuclear weapons-a goal that everyone, from Marxist-Leninists to Socred
MLAs, could agree upon.
Coombes thinks that strategy of a simple message
failed the ultimate goal of peace. "We tried so hard in the 1980s
to depoliticize nuclear weapons. But it was a mistake because they're so
political."
Not everyone agrees. Kennedy points out the great peace walks and
rallies of the '80s were a worldwide phenomenon, with millions
participating in events across Europe, including in the Soviet Union. He
believes governments listened to the crowds, and backed away from
nuclear confrontation. "The peace movement was successful then at
doing what it did. It had to have had an impact. It was millions of
people worldwide."
These days, however, the movement is facing a new challenge: the
Americans' proposed "national missile defence" program, or
NMD. The U.S. is expected to ask Canada to support NMD, which has been
widely attacked by critics as a throwback to Cold War-era thinking. The
program, in which ground and orbital weapons would theoretically shoot
down ballistic nuclear missiles before they arrived, is an update of
Reagan's Star Wars proposal, which never really got off the drawing
boards despite billions in spending.
More importantly, it's viewed by the Russians and Chinese as an
offensive weapon. Some observers predict implementing the missile
program will restore international tension to dangerous Cold War levels,
turning the clock back to 1986.
What should peace activists do about it? While Kennedy would like to see
a revival of the peace walk, he concedes End the Arms Race doesn't have
the money to stage one. Coombes, however, says that even if resources
were available, they would be better used to join the growing grassroots
campaign against economic globalization, spearheaded by activists who
thronged to join street protests and "people's summits" in
Quebec City, Vancouver and Seattle. The movement has a role to play, he
says, as the non-violent conscience of the anti-globalization forces,
helping connect anger against globalization with the goal of preventing
the "militarization of Canada."
"Now it's about democracy," says Coombes, who held a teach-in
on peace at the WTO people's summit in Seattle in 1999 (End the Arms
Race has held similar workshops for local activists). "I think the
whole reason youth are turning to civil disobedience is because they
don't believe we live in a democracy."
The idea of integrating activism is shared by older and younger
activists alike. Hugh Dempster, 73, got involved in End the Arms Race
through the Anglican Church, and remembers many church debates in which
members argued the issue of peace and disarmament was none of the
church's business. Dempster says that view is discounted today.
"It's a matter of right and wrong. It's now accepted that it's
something the church should be involved in."
Dempster says he sees young people becoming engaged in social and
political issues, and drawing the connections between them. "That's
the kind of activist world I see taking shape now. Peace will be in
there as one of the components."
Young activists agree. "It's not just single-issue activism
anymore," says Lyndsay Poaps, the 22-year-old co-director of Check
Your Head.
Poaps and other young people formed Check Your Head three years ago to
give youth a voice not found in mainstream activist organizations.
Central to its goal is encouraging young people to think critically
about social and political problems, then to act upon them. Practising
what they preach, Poaps and others from Vancouver joined the protests in
Quebec City last month.
Poaps says Check Your Head collaborates with groups like End the Arms
Race when their interests converge. "I'm concerned about nuclear
proliferation," she says, enumerating a list of war-related
problems. "But it's not my only concern."
What Poaps does advocate-regardless of the issue-is focused action by
people who understand the consequences, which is why she argues that
large, mainstream rallies are politically ineffective. A child when the
peace walks were at their height, Poaps says the experience "must
have been amazing. But what do you do when people get bored of
marching?"
Poaps suggests participants and organizers weren't prepared to go to the
next level by undertaking civil disobedience through acts like sitdowns
and blockades, although she concedes the large number of people involved
might have worked against them. "How do you train that number of
people?"
Poaps argues that true activism is a life-long process of education and
action. She applauds the International Physicians for the Prevention of
Nuclear War's recent Bombs Away campaign, a youth-driven effort to draw
more young people into the aging ranks of the peace movement. The people
behind its cool ads and web page had a "totally awesome
vision," she says. But as a member of one of the campaign's early
focus groups, she wonders if it will have a permanent influence, keeping
younger people intrigued and involved in peace issues.
"This is long-term generational change. It's not going to happen in
five years."
A corps of focused, trained and young activists is a force that Coombes
says the peace movement can take advantage of. Politicians from NATO
countries are planning a meeting in Ottawa in October, and End the Arms
Race plans to crash the meeting to protest NATO policies. "And I
can guarantee, if we can organize anything, we'll have thousands of
young people out there."
But while Coombes and others advocate merging their effort with the
greater anti-globalization effort, groups like End the Arms Race will
maintain their distinct identity and work. One of its latest projects is
lobbying the federal government to reject the missile defence
program-organizers have printed and distributed 30,000 postcards for
citizens to send to the prime minister decrying potential Canadian
involvement.
Dempster says the core activists of the peace movement will stay abreast
of the latest issues involving war and peace, so when the mainstream
media again discovers an issue like the U.S. missile defence program,
"We'll have people with something to say, and some analysis on
it."
And what will the activists be saying? In the '80s, the peace movement's
principal message was No Nukes.
In 2001, the message might be similar to the refrain heard increasingly
among activists from a broad range of causes: Peace? It's about
democracy, stupid.
Peter Coombes, National Organizer, End the Arms Race
Suite 405 - 825 Granville Street, Vancouver BC V6Z 1K9 Canada
604/ 687-3223
fax 604/ 687-3277
ear@peacewire.org
http://www.peacewire.org
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