We demand a people’s agenda

January 7, 2010

The world lost one of its greatest champions of justice with the passing of Dennis Brutus on December 24.

In one man's life, we can trace the history of the struggle for a better world, from the fight to end apartheid in South Africa to racism in America; from the struggle for global justice to the organizing to end horrific wars; in the battle for civil rights for each individual to the Herculean attempt to halt the impending climate disaster faced by all of humanity.

I was fortunate enough to meet and talk with Dennis at an antiwar conference in Burlington, Vt., a few years back. I then had the good fortune to follow that up with a march alongside him in protest to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was struck by how engaged he was with the day-to-day struggles of ordinary activists to change the world.

He had a way of making you feel that you really mattered in the struggle for a better world. He was adamant that each individual has a role to play, and Dennis was never above spending his time talking with anyone and everyone who came up to him. I will always be grateful for those brief but rich encounters. He was kind and passionate at the same time. He will remain an inspiration to the countless individuals who struggle for a just world.

My first encounter with Dennis was on a crisp autumn day in Burlington, Vt., in October 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks and, two weeks before that, the international conference on racism in Durban, South Africa.

The hysteria of war was in the air. Fortunately for me and more than 1,000 other people packed into the Ira Allen Chapel in Burlington, that day in October was also filled with voices of sanity, voices of peace and voices of justice. After historian Howard Zinn gave a rousing speech to the rapt crowd, Dennis took the stage to speak against war and connect the antiwar fight to the global justice struggle that preceded it. Zinn's speech was published in the International Socialist Review. Here, we publish Dennis' speech.
--Erik Wallenberg

IT'S A great privilege to be here and to be following a great leader, thinker and adviser. We've all benefited from his wisdom, so it's great privilege for me to follow him. I must say that there is an even greater privilege to have such a wonderfully large and interested and enthusiastic audience, and I thank you all for being here.

The good news, in addition, is that this is happening all over the U.S. There are churches, trade unions, student groups and peace groups all over this country, holding rallies, meetings and teach-ins. And on Sundays, like today in Plattsburgh, N.Y., where I've just come from on the ferry, they are holding candlelight vigils. They are saying no to war! We want a world of peace and justice. We are opposed to this bombing. It is not being done in our name.

The movement is growing all the time in other countries as well. I was in Durban, South Africa, recently for the world conference on racism, and I'm going to say a couple of things about that, which relate to subsequent events, including the terrorist action in New York, and take it from there for a minute or two to look at the larger picture. For those of you who followed events in Durban, I will do a quick recap of what was most important for me.

Dennis Brutus

You may remember that prior to the Durban World Conference, six months before, there had been a meeting in Geneva to write the agenda for Durban. Two things came up in Geneva--the U.S. said that if the issue of slavery or the issue of reparations is on the agenda, we will not permit it, and Israel followed by saying that if the question of the Palestinians and their right to a homeland came up, they would oppose its inclusion on the agenda.

So we knew that this was going to happen in Durban. The debate began immediately after Geneva, and I expect you all know the outcome. There were over 100 countries who said we cannot allow two countries to dictate to the rest of the world what should be on the agenda. So the rest of the countries resolved to go ahead and discuss these issues in spite of opposition from the U.S. and Israel. And as you know, both the U.S. and Israel walked out of the conference at some point.

The other point that I want to make--to me, particularly important in the light of global developments as a whole--is that what was demonstrated in Durban at the world conference was that the notion that any one or two countries could dictate to the rest of the world is no longer acceptable, is no longer applicable, and it will not be permitted in the future. But to understand Durban, we do have to go a lot further back. As a matter of fact, we have to go back about two-and-a-half years or so, because what happened in Durban was simply a consequence of a sequence of events that began in Seattle.

I will dare to say that many students were in Seattle in November 1999 when we said to the WTO: You think you are coming here to write an agenda for the whole world--well, you're wrong. We're going to shut you down. And what's more, we did shut them down! We shut them down! There was no WTO Millennial round in Seattle. They came there--the corporations and the politicians--and said they can write an agenda for the whole world, a corporate global agenda for the millennium. We sent them home. There was no corporate global agenda from Seattle.

Seattle, as you know, was followed by Davos, which was followed by Washington, which was followed by Prague, which was followed by Quebec City, where many people from this area were involved. After that came Genoa, where the police were issued with live ammunition, so we knew what they were up to. Then after Genoa came Durban.

The message is the same--that across the world, people are saying we do not accept this corporate global agenda that you are writing for us. We demand a people's agenda--an agenda coming from the grassroots, which puts people before profits, and that is our movement.


SO IT is in that context that I ask you to understand what happened in New York on September 11, and also what is happening across this country and across the world, where people are saying no to war and yes to a new kind of world with new values--and particularly values which put people before profits.

Let's look at that for a moment, because it seems to me that we truly are in a situation of crisis. Sadly, the forces for repression, the murderers, have increased a hundredfold on the one hand, even as at the same time, all over the world, the forces for peace and justice are increasing. And so we're in this crisis situation of a massive concentration of powers for war and powers for peace.

Earlier this morning, I was on a panel with Howard Zinn, where he talked about the possibility that maybe, just maybe, what we are seeing is the end of this notion of any superpower in the world that is trying to dominate the entire world. Maybe we've reached the point now where we are being challenged in that way.

Of course, the problem has been enormously confronted since September 11--confronted in a truly terrifying way. It's become much more complex what we have to confront. If in Seattle in 1999 we, confronted and challenged a global corporate agenda, we now are facing that global corporate agenda, but in addition a global militaristic agenda and the expansion of military power. I don't have time to expound on that now, so I offer you just two considerations.

One, the U.S. has more military forces in more parts of the world then it has ever had in the history of the U.S. It now has bases in Islamic counties where it was unable to have bases before. It has bases in former Soviet republics like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan--countries where it was unable to have military bases before.

So we have the corporate global agenda and the extension of corporate power, but we also have this military agenda, which says we can go anywhere, we can be based anywhere, and we can attack people anywhere once we call them terrorists and we don't even have to define how the term is used. We face that reality in a world where the U.S. itself has such a record of terrorism, in so many parts of the world, either by itself or through its satellites and agencies, from Mobutu in the Congo to Marcos in the Philippines and all the other places in the world.

So instead of a reduction of terrorism in our time, we are likely to see an increase in terrorism. People who were bombed, who are angry, who see their children destroyed before their eyes, will in desperation react and be determined to take revenge. We are not going to stop terrorism by acts of terrorism. We are not going to stop violence by acts of violence, but instead, we will generate spirals of ever-increasing violence in response to violence.

I'm someone who came out of prison with Nelson Mandela in South Africa, where I served time on Robben Island, breaking rocks in the rock-breaking section. I'm someone who had the privilege of being kept in the prison where once long ago in the same cell Mahatma Gandhi had been jailed in Johannesburg. I'm someone who worked with students in this country in a successful campaign to get the monies of the U.S. out of the apartheid economy. We were part of that great struggle; we had 150 universities in this country that voted to divest and take their money out of apartheid. They took out $3 billion and helped to bring down the apartheid economy.

Now in our time, we move from the challenge of South African national apartheid into an era of global apartheid, where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. This is the challenge that we face today. We face it at the corporate level, we face it at the military level, and we face it wherever we go. We face it wherever we want a world with peace for all. We say no to war! No to war! No to war! No to war!

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