On March 11, a small crowd gathered on Boston Common to demand an end to U.S. imperial aggression against Syria and Yemen. Protesters stood outside the Park Street “T” Station for one hour and held signs and Syrian and Palestinian flags, made speeches, led chants, and distributed pamphlets and newspapers to denounce and raise awareness of U.S. imperialist intervention in Syria and U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s
genocidal war on Yemen.
The protesters represented a number of organizations, including the Committee for Peace and Human Rights, the Boston Hands Off Syria Coalition, the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, the International Action Center, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER Coalition), Workers World Party, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Liberation News spoke with several of the protesters. Susan McLucas was there with the Committee for Peace and Human Rights, a group that formed in 1998 to protest the UN sanctions on Iraq, which were then killing an average of 200 Iraqi children per day; the group has held a vigil at Park Street on every Saturday since. This Saturday, she said, “We’re fighting against the attempted regime change that our government is doing. We don’t think there would be a war in Syria now if it weren’t for the U.S. supporting the ‘moderate rebels’ that a lot of Syrians we’ve talked to call ‘the terrorists.’”
She also denounced “the war in Yemen, [where the US has] been arming and supporting the Saudis bombing Yemen trying to get rid of the Houthi movement.” She was hopeful about the capacity of protests to press against wars at the level of national politics, recalling especially when former President Obama abandoned a proposed bombing campaign in Syria in the face of mass protests at the White House, throughout the country, and around the world, in 2013. She was even more encouraged by the recent surge of protests against the Trump administration, but with a qualifier: “The women’s march was just fantastic, but I wish there was more of a peace contingent in the big protests recently.”
John, a member of both the Committee for Peace and Human Rights and the Hands Off Syria Coalition, a group which organized in response to the suffering caused by the U.S. program of regime change in Syria, spoke specifically to the struggle against the hegemonic power of the U.S. media, which defines the public conversation around Syria and Yemen through its coverage and poses a “special challenge here in the United States.”
He warned: “Whenever you hear the media talking about a ‘regime,’ and they talk about ‘the Assad regime’ or ‘the Putin regime’ or any other ‘regime’…and they mention the name of a leader, that’s a diagnosis that the U.S. wants to destroy that country.”
The media which John implicated in U.S. hegemony was personified in “the talking heads [who] will convince you that these wars of aggression are a good thing because there’s a ‘regime’ that we need to change.” Despite the power of the media, he had faith in “the American people,” a “sleeping giant” which “actually stopped the bombing of Syria in 2013…[it] was not the peace movement that accomplished that, it was the people.”
Another protester, who identified only as a “veteran for peace,” brought an analysis to the demonstration that went beyond the issue of war. The crisis in Syria, he said, is “overlain by a global environmental catastrophe,” referring to the drought that preceded the war, in which “over a million people [in Syria] were driven off of their land and into the cities, causing a huge human crisis which then helped to explode the situation.”
Asked about the U.S. anti-war movement, he pinned his hopes for both domestic and international peace on “a movement which is large enough to actually change the political system, to literally change the system itself,” drawing particular attention to the U.S. government’s continued diversion of vast resources from the people into the military and security state.
The United States has long had imperial interests in Syria and in Yemen. As demonstrated most vividly in recent memory in the destruction of Libya and Iraq, such designs are geared to the dispossession and slaughter of the Syrian and Yemeni people, as well as to the deprivation of the people of the United States, where the debts incurred by imperial wars are used to justify cutbacks to already inadequately funded public programs which, for many, are the only buffer to the ravages of capitalism. As the open white nationalism of the Trump movement builds upon the racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic dog-whistling employed by both Democrats and Republicans to justify military spending in the “War on Terror”; as the Trump administration deploys US marines as direct combatants in the Syrian war around Manbij; and as U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes continue to claim the lives of Yemeni civilians, as they did last Friday, it is essential for movements of working class and oppressed people in the United States to stand in solidarity with sovereign nations around the world that are threatened by U.S. imperialism. We must demand of the United States government: Hands Off Syria! Hands Off Yemen!
