The war on Gaza & strategy for the movement

 

Many who are watching will already know Chris Hedges. Chris covered the first Persian Gulf War in the 1990s for The New York Times, where he refused to participate in the military pool system that restricted the movement of and reporting by journalists. 

In 2003, Chris gave a commencement speech at the graduation ceremony for Rockford College in which he criticized the then ongoing American imperialist invasion of Iraq. His microphone was shut off three minutes after he began speaking. Chris had to end the commencement speech short because of the disruptions, which included an additional microphone cut, foghorns, and chants of "God Bless America."

Clearly, we are in a completely different period - student antiwar protest movement. In fact, when Chris was speaking on the megaphone at the campus antiwar protest at Princeton University last month, when the campus police and administration prevented Chris from speaking, the students chanted “ let him speak, let him speak!” 

Chris has long spoken out against the two warmongering parties in the United States, the Democrats and Republicans, and called for a new party for working people. In the 2008 United States presidential campaign, Chris was a speechwriter for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. Chris also supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein against the Democrat’s and Wall Street’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 election.

We need to continue building the momentum of the campus anti-war movement with a nationally coordinated mass protest at the DNC in Chicago in August, and by sharing lessons from campus unions that have passed resolutions and strike authorizations in solidarity with the student protests and against police repression. We also need the rank and file of the labor movement to put forward resolutions to rescind their union’s endorsements of Biden. Campus unions should provide a lead to the antiwar movement by calling for a one-day nation-wide strike and walk-out against the war. This is what it will take to end the war- shutting down the profits of the capitalists.