OPINION & EDITORIAL
Take a stand by walking out
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Also by Guest Columnist:
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- Greek sexuality misconceptions unfair (December 6, 2007)
- Security fee shows UWPD's prejudice (December 6, 2007)
- Vote Democrat, vote equal LGBT rights (December 6, 2007)
- Free trade stagnates upward mobility (December 6, 2007)
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- Anti-war campaign yearning for action (October 25, 2006)
- Tread lightly, Berquam (September 24, 2007)
- Unleash the neutrality (October 11, 2007)
by Guest Columnist
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Today you ought to join the antiwar demonstration organized by the Campus Antiwar Network. To those who believe that protests don't matter, I ask why the student movement last time — during the Vietnam War — was an exception. Most cite the draft. "If today's young people faced the draft," the argument goes, "this war would grind to a halt because the impacts of the war would be felt so broadly."
There is no denying that opposition to the draft was an important component of the antiwar movement in the '60s. But more importantly, the antiwar movement gained its confidence from the civil rights movement. In the late 1960s, if you tried to argue that protest doesn't matter, you'd have been laughed off the isthmus and into the lake. A protest movement organized by society's most politically disenfranchised had smashed Jim Crow. Students today face fewer challenges (i.e., the Klan doesn't lynch us for doing what we do), yet lack the confidence to join the struggle as an entire generation of poor blacks did during the Civil Rights Movement.
When you've been selling a socialist newspaper on Library Mall twice a week for six years, you can tell when the political winds are changing direction. Not only has the number of UW students identifying as antiwar activists tripled over the past three months, but society-wide expectations for an end to the war have paralleled the spiraling crisis of the Republican Party.
Of course, raised expectations do not automatically translate into higher levels of struggle. But from the point of view of the Democrats in Congress, raised expectations present a problem. They can either meet those expectations (by cutting off funding for the war) or spend the coming months diminishing our expectations. (They hope we're happy with timetables for withdrawal and the like.) So why don't they just cut off the funding?
No matter what they say about "funding the troops," the real impact — like all war funding in the history of funding wars — is that troops are "supported" only in their capacity to be cannon fodder for those who seek to control the Middle East. More and more soldiers understand this and are turning against the war, and you can hear some of them at today's walkout. In a sense, veterans are ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to opposing the war. The neglected soldiers at Walter Reed didn't need The Washington Post to write a story about their plight to know they were being neglected.
The Iraqi people, the American soldiers in Iraq and the students at this campus have a common enemy. The people who are looting Iraq's oil resources are the same people who deny veterans mental health benefits and are the same people who refuse to fully subsidize university education. They purport to export freedom while they lock up 25 percent of the world's prison population. They purport to keep up safe, but as Socialist Worker pointed out last week, "lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year — the equivalent of six times the number of people who died in the September 11 attacks." Students face a miserable job market; just ask your friends who have recently graduated. How many jobs are they holding down just to pay rent? Is there money left over to afford health care?
I'm not talking about one political party or one ideology, but the entire class of political representatives in our government whose loyalty first and foremost is to projecting American power internationally. The International Socialist Organization will be walking out of our classes in support of the 10 demands made by the Campus Antiwar Network. Get the university out of the war; lend your voice to the antiwar movement, and maybe by the time you leave this university, there will no longer be such wasteful priorities. That depends on what we do today. Walk out.
Chris Dols (chrisdols@mac.com) is a senior majoring in civil engineering and a member of the International Socialist Organization.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 3:40am):
I'll be there. Fuck the war.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 4:13am):
For the record, the walkout is today at 1:00 on Library Mall. See everyone there!
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 5:39am):
hoo a walk out, what better way for students to "oppose" the war. Of course everyone will attend why because hell you get out of class and "opposition to the war" is just the excuse to party, stay home, get drunk, screw etc. Imagine if you had a "hey why don't we all go to class and maybe work on an alternative fuel source, hey why don't we all go to class and have a discussion on diplomatic solutions to end the war. Naw to hell with that we are lazy assed colled students lets just not attend class today. Now why would I a taxpayer, want to fully fund your education when all you are going to do is "skip class" like some high school freshman and therefore waste the very money used to fund your supposed education. At least when I "fund a war" I get bang for my buck. When I fund a college I get walk outs, protests, a load of pc crap and ANYTHING but an "educated" college graduate it would seem.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 5:41am):
wow imagine if the Soldiers fighting the war could just "walk out" anytime they disagreed with government policy. I would dare say most of you would be in "college" at least in the "US of A" if such where the case.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 5:43am):
The International Socialist Organization will be walking out of our classes in support of the 10 demands made by the Campus Antiwar Network.
Says all I need to know right there, the "international COMMUNIST Organization will be walking out.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 5:47am):
The Iraqi people, the American soldiers in Iraq and the students at this campus have a common enemy.
Anti-American Socialist bullsh*t???? Or would it be leftist liberal Stupidity??? Moronic protests by college students whom last I checked WEREN'T FIGHTING the war???? Democrats??? Inquiring minds want to know what common enemy???
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 5:49am):
The International Socialist Organization will be walking out of our classes in support of the 10 demands made by the Campus Antiwar Network.
Sounds about right the French were/are considered in large part a Socialist government. Seems they "walked out" of their country during WWII as well.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 5:52am):
wow I bet 32 students and professors at Va Tech which they could "walk out" of class today as well.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 5:56am):
Just imagine if the taxpayer money spent to fund colleges so you can "walk out of class" was used instead to "fund those Soldier's" health care at Walter Reed instead. There is a reason tax money is not used to fully fund education. This is an example of one of em. Yeah let's use the American tax dollar to fund a college student's right to walk out of class anytime they damned well please.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 7:02am):
@5:43,
The commie reference well is officially dry. Come back with something less anachronistic dated at least from the 1980s or later. Im equating your statement with Dr. Evil's "one millliiioooonnn dollars".
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 7:22am):
Except for ending slavery, fascism, nazism and communism -- war has never solved anything.
Some of these groups aren't anti-war, they're just on the other side.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 7:23am):
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
-- George Orwell
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 7:28am):
I suggest everyone sign up for the Texas Air National Guard, go AWOL, and snort coke all day. Maybe one day millions of people will call you "hero" and indiscriminately follow your every word.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 7:29am):
As much as I do not like the war, I think it is stupid to encourage people to walk out of their classes to support it. I am here to get my degrees. Are you here to get your degree(s)?
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 9:02am):
5 years of these same lame attempts to revive the vietnam war protest "spirit". Walkouts before the war, the pathetic "Books not bombs" a few years back, incredibly pathetic group of people living on library mall a few years ago, the protest in '05 that only accomplished the disruption of people trying to learn so they can actually move on in life...
Notice a theme? Nothing freaking changed. You are not important, nobody takes you seriously, figure it out.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 9:44am):
Protests alone won't stop the war. Be a war tax protester. Pay your federal income tax to your home state, to charities, buy a bicycle and ride it instead. The only way to stop the war machine is to stop feeding it. If you don't, then Bush will deep on killing with your tax dollars paying for the bullets and bombs.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 9:51am):
Walk out to oppose freedom for Iraqis. Put a dictator back in power. Say no to democracy in Iraq. Say no to providing security to Iraqi civilians. Say yes to Iranian influence. Say yes to al Qeada by walking out today.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 9:52am):
The only people who join the Socialist Organization are whiny college students who have never had a real job. Become an engineer, make $150k a year, and then tell me if you still believe in communism.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 10:09am):
"International Socialist Organization"?
The Soviet Comintern died over a decade ago. Your glorious revolution is dead. Get over it.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 10:16am):
You have to be pretty ignorant (and American) to think that communism equals socialism. There are various democratic socialist countries today that have relatively free markets and yes, engineers as well, who voted socialist. By George!
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 11:13am):
How much of this is motivated by a desire to end the war and how much by a desire to skip class?
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 12:31pm):
no thanks actually I think I will attend class today as a protest to the walk out. Maybe by getting an education I can one day stop a war instead of wasting the money spent on me by the people of Wisconsin to attend class by walking out of the classes.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 2:38pm):
This is just an augument that tuition should be at least doubled.
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 3:51pm):
I have always said that the university administrations are complicit in the attacks on civility and academic discourse on college campuses. Now the administration at Columbia University has confirmed my view. After months of deliberation they have given a slap on the wrist to the campus fascists -- in particular the International Socialist Organization -- for its thuggery and disregard for Columbia's rules in rushing the stage to shut down a scheduled campus speech by Minuteman Jim Gilchrist. The International Socialist Organization is a group of Marxist loonies who hate America and are deluded into thinking they can set up a dictatorship of the proletariat in this country, destroying its freedoms and making it vulnerable to the Islamo-fascists they admire. I have personally been the target of their violent attacks and disruptions on numerous occasions, including at the University of Texas where an associate professor named Dana Cloud who is a member of this crackpot group had to be hauled out by campus police so I could continue with my speech. Like the Columbia vigilantes, Cloud got off unscathed. Appeasement of foreign terrorists goes along with appeasement of domestic terrorists and their fascistic allies.
David Horowitz
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Columbia%20Coddles%20Campus%20Fascists2.html
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 3:54pm):
ISO views terrorism against U.S. targets and those of America's allies (most notably Israel) as the justified actions of desperate people who have been mistreated for too long by those nations. With regard to the 9/11 hijackers and Palestinian suicide bombers, for instance, ISO asserts, "They weren't born wanting to become suicide bombers. But their lifetimes of humiliation ... made them open to terrorism as a means to avenge their oppression."
Discover ISO's Network @
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6399
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 3:57pm):
... or just visit the ZombieTime Hall of Shame for a fuller expression of their vile sentiments.
http://www.zombietime.com/hall_of_shame/
Anonymous (April 18, 2007 @ 10:47pm):
"They weren't born wanting to become suicide bombers."
I know, they were trained and manipulated by ISO's brothers in arms.
ISO - They aren't anti-war, they're just on the other side.
Anonymous (April 19, 2007 @ 1:12am):
ISO is a joke. Haven't you crazies figured out your time here is done?
Evidence? College Dems owning your psycho left candidate in the city council elections.
ISO/CAN/SLAC crazies: move to moscow! The rational parts of campus (read: the other 99% of students) are sick of your BS.
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