Peace Show promotes alternative to air show
Some protest, others make music, crafts
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Grant Segall, Plain Dealer Reporter
You don't have to be a pacifist to protest a war.
Veterans and immigrants joined the usual pacifists Monday at the Cleveland Peace Show, which is 5 years old and growing fast.
"We have Republicans, Democrats, independents, libertarians," said Mike Ludwig, who fought in Vietnam and is a member of Veterans for Peace. "But we do not subscribe to war unless we have a direct threat."
Veteran David Macko referred to a famous major general, the Marines' Smedley Butler, who once said we should fight only to defend our homes or the Bill of Rights. Added Macko, "Our own government is doing 100 times more harm to the Bill of Rights than Bin Laden or Hussein."
Shouting "No Justice! No Peace!" in Spanish, a group of immigrants from many countries marched from Public Square to join the Peace Show at Willard Park. The immigrants said that bills in Columbus and Washington, D.C., restricting their rights would deepen the divisions that lead to war.
"Social justice spreads across all peoples in all countries," said Farhad Sethna, an immigrant from Bangladesh and an immigration lawyer in Akron.
Two protesters linked the issues by wearing T-shirts with mug shots of White House leaders "Wanted for Illegally Crossing Borders."
One of the peace show's organizers estimated that 3,000 people attended during the six-hour event, about three times as much as last year. Participants said the increasingly unpopular Iraq War is raising interest in nonviolent alternatives.
This year's show was dedicated to Ione Biggs, a genteel, tireless activist from East Cleveland who died last December at 89.
The peace show, which several groups sponsor, is partly a protest of the Cleveland Air Show just down the hill. The latter began decades ago with civilian planes, but has increasingly featured military machines.
"We are going to create enough noise to drown out the weapons," Megan Wilson of Cleveland said above the din of fighter planes circling the sky.
Wilson was one of five war protesters arrested Sunday for allegedly making their case too close to a parked A-10 Thunderbolt attack plane at the air show.
The peace movement is notorious for internal divisions, and Monday's show followed suit. Organizers quarreled at length with a protester toting a sign that said, "FUGWB."
They said the sign made the show look scurrilous. The protester, who withheld his name, claimed the sign meant, "Free Us, George W. Bush."
There was nothing scurrilous about a display called "Eyes Wide Open Ohio." The traveling exhibit from the American Friends Service Committee contained a pair of boots for each of the 127 Ohioans on the committee's list of U.S. combatants killed in Iraq.
The exhibit also contains a pair of sandals, sneakers or other casual shoes for every 1,000 estimated Iraqi civilians killed in the war -- 100,000 by the Friends' count.
On a happier note, games, crafts and music promoted peace at the show. Abbey Cliffel, 8, of Lakewood, making a mobile of moons, said, "I hate when people fight. Everyone is hoping for peace."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: gsegall@plaind.com, 216-999-4187
© 2006 The Plain Dealer
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More From The Plain Dealer
Let's play dead
Air show? Come on, peace activists, show some imagination!
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Kevin O'Brien, Plain Dealer Columnist
The Peace Show was in town over the weekend. Pretty thrill ing stuff.
One of its organizers told a Plain Dealer reporter that 3,000 people attended the shindig over at Willard Park, but these folks tend to like their numbers big, so forgive my skepticism.
For instance, one of its organizers also mentioned that 100,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq since U.S. troops went in to remove Saddam Hussein. Even if by some chance he picked the correct nice, round figure out of the air -- and other sources say that's unlikely -- that means that after more than two years of all sorts of fighting in Iraq, the civilian body count would make Saddam snort in derision.
Heck, he knocked off 100,000 Kurds with one swat back in 1988. Human Rights Watch has documented 500,000 other Iraqi civilian executions over the course of his 24 years at the helm, and estimates that his war with Iran cost another 500,000 Iraqi civilian lives.
Let's face it: Next to Saddam, we're all pikers when it comes to offing innocents. You just can't argue with stats like that. All you can do is ignore them if you find them inconvenient.
But my favorite number out of the Peace Show turned out to be five. That's how many "peace activists" were arrested when they dropped by the war show over at Burke Lakefront Airport to protest the presence of military aircraft.
After the protesters drew a crowd of about 50 people who presumably didn't share their disdain for things military, since they'd each paid $10 or $20 for the privilege of mingling with aviators and their hardware, the police thought it prudent to get them out of there before they turned into disturbing-the-peace activists. (They did manage to stage the all-important die-in, so it does go in the books as an official protest.)
So they made a statement. A few of them got their names in the paper. The First Amendment is alive and well, as are the protesters. Nobody with his head on straight went to jail. The Air Force personnel who fly and maintain the A-10 they "died" in front of managed to keep their lunch down. It's all good.
I took a look back in The Plain Dealer archives to see what kind of coverage the Peace Show got when it started, back in 2001. Couldn't find a syllable.
Of course, there wasn't much shooting going on in Iraq back then. Just a lot of uneasiness about no-fly zones and some concern passed along to the Bush administration from the Clinton administration -- that's right, the Clinton administration -- about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam's toy box. Stuff like Sarin gas, which had accounted for some of those 100,000 Kurds.
When you're done there, go lie down in front of the Key Tower and the Terminal Tower. They're not as tall as the World Trade Center was, but they're the tallest Cleveland has to offer.
After that, walk to the Coast Guard station down toward the end of East Ninth Street and hit the dirt there. No, it's not the Pentagon, but we're talking symbolism here.
Finish off your day back at Willard Park, where you can lie down one last time, close your eyes and picture your mortal remains smoldering in a field in Pennsylvania.
On the way home, buy yourself a flag -- an American one -- and hang it out.
Resist the urge to burn it this time.
O'Brien is The Plain Dealer's deputy editorial director.
To reach Kevin O'Brien: kobrien@plaind.com, 216-999-4146
Letters to the Editor in response to O'Brien's Editorial:
Peace Show deserved praise
Columnist's missiles were unfounded, unfair and unamusing
Sunday, September 10, 2006
I’d like to offer Kevin O’Brien a dollar, so he can buy himself a clue. It’s obvious that he doesn’t have one, after reading his vicious screed about the Cleveland Peace Show (“Let’s play dead,” Wednesday).
Clearly, O’Brien was not one of those who visited Willard Park on Labor Day. Otherwise, he would have learned about the principles of nonviolent civil disobedience — as practiced by Henry David Thoreau and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — as a way to address a government headed in the wrong direction, about the courage involved in taking such risks, and how our attitude toward the five Catholic Workers arrested last Sunday should be one of gratitude rather than ridicule.
O’Brien raises the specter of 9/11 like a good neocon should, hoping to stir the passions of his war-mongering readers while belittling those he disagrees with.
Yet how quickly conservatives forget the words of Theodore Roosevelt, one of our greatest presidents: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president . . . is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” In retrospect, O’Brien’s words seem far more unpatriotic than our statement that “real angels don’t drop bombs.”
Timothy D. Smith Cleveland Heights
Smith is a volunteer coordinator for Cleveland Peace Action.
Kevin O’Brien charges that an organizer might have picked “out of thin air” the number of 100,000 to quantify the number of Iraqis killed since the start of that illegal war. The figure was listed on a sign next to a pile of civilian shoes contained in an exhibit called “Eyes Wide Open Ohio” sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, which also includes one pair of combat boots for each of the 127 Ohioans who, to date, have been killed in Iraq since 2003.
Neither figure was made up, but came from reputable sources. In the case of Iraqis, a peer-reviewed study conducted by scientists at John Hopkins University School of Public Health and published in the prestigious medical journal, the Lancet, cited 100,000 as the number of Iraqi casualties as of October 2004. Of course, the number is much higher now.
O’Brien asserts that even if true, 100,000 Iraqi deaths from the U.S.-initiated war is lower than the atrocities of Saddam Hussein against his own people. How just is this war when the moral benchmark of U.S. actions are the atrocities of Saddam?
Greg Coleridge Akron
Coleridge is program director of the American Friends Service Committee, Northeast Ohio office.
One can only assume that Kevin O’Brien is going out of his way to provoke reaction.
It is difficult to imagine that someone could rise to the level of deputy editorial director of The Plain Dealer and be unaware of the following facts: Donald Rumsfeld met with and offered U.S. support to Saddam Hussein after Saddam had used poison gas on the Kurds.
Most importantly, I would like to point out that someone can fly an American flag and support the ideals our country stands for without supporting an ill-conceived war. I know, because I had a flag flying outside my house before Sept. 11, and I continue to fly the flag today.
Paul Kopp Cleveland Heights
Though I harbor no resentment toward him, as one of the five nonviolent protestors arrested at the Cleveland National Air Show, I believe Kevin O’Brien’s attack on us was unwarranted. We are neither naive nor disrespectful, but we are conscientious objectors.
We object to killing. We object to killing in the name of capitalism, we object to killing in the name of communism, and we object to killing in the name of religion and terrorism. We object to being forced to register for war, and we object to being forced to participate in the preparations for war. We object to killing innocent civilians, and we object to killing soldiers. We object to nuclear weapons, and we object to conventional weapons.
When war comes, many of us will perform peaceful alternative service. Many of us will go to jail rather than compromise deeply held beliefs.
Our direct, nonviolent action of civil disobedience at the air show was done peacefully, openly and in a civil manner. We were praying for peace through nonviolence in a public forum. We love our country — and all countries, all peoples. We are Catholic Christians, not flag-burning anarchists.
Tim Musser Cleveland
Kevin O'Brien makes a lot of sense. Let's play dead. We should ignore the fact that most of the casualties from our bombs are noncombatants - even children. Let's just brush it off as "collateral damage."
After all, didn't Saddam kill people, too?
Michael Coughlin, Cleveland
While I believe the current war in Iraq is not in our country's best interest, I would never disparage or ridicule the brave men and women in our armed forces. They have left their homes and families, voluntarily placing themselves in harm's way in the service of freedom. The freedom they serve also allows their fellow citizens the right to peacefully protest the Iraq war.
Kevin O'Brien ridiculed and mocked these protesters with insulting arrogance. Whether serving in the armed forces or protesting for peace, we are all entitled to be treated with respect. This column fell well below the standard of dignity we need to expect of each other.
Gerald Skoch, Rocky River
On Labor Day, with other members of Veterans for Peace, I staffed a VFP table at the Peace Show at Willard Park. As we visited with attendees, the Blue Angels flew overhead in a breathtaking display of ability and a crushing level of noise. The display simultaneously evoked in me the pride of the little girl who had believed so intensely in the righteousness of U.S. military power and the sorrow of the mature woman who, as a young nurse, had seen the effects of that power. I covered my ears, bent my head, and prayed for all victims of war.
The local chapter of Veterans for Peace is newly established. We represent veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam and subsequent wars. Our message, born of our experiences, is simple. We know, as Shakespeare did, that once unleashed, the "dogs of war" cannot be controlled. We know that violence always leads to more violence: The seeds of one war can be found in the one before it and deposited for the next. We know, as Dwight Eisenhower did, that every penny spent on war is taken from someone in this country who needs it. We know that patriotism is love of our country, its Constitution and its promise, not blind flag-waving and sloganeering.
We know that the full burden of war is carried by those who fight it and those who are caught in it. The soldiers we tell to kill in our names will carry a memory of what they have done long after we have forgotten it. Finally, we know that war is an answer to nothing.
Mary Reynolds Powell
Shaker Heights
Powell was a captain in the Army Nurse Corps, serving in Vietnam from 1970-71.
The struggle to awaken all of our consciences to the im morality of war is the contemporary equivalent of the struggle of abolitionists against slavery.
The Romans had the Colosseum, in which they brutalized people and animals as entertainment. Just as we recognize the inhumanity of the Romans' activities, one day others will wonder how we in Cleveland thought it entertaining to watch the combat maneuvers of machines typically used for dropping cluster bombs, depleted uranium and fumigating the crops of subsistence farmers. It will be especially puzzling, since using cluster bombs or depleted uranium is a war crime, and aerial spraying is harmful to human health and the environment.
As it says in the Bible, "If we do these things in the green wood, what will happen in the dry?" Nonviolence is the only path away from the dry and to sustainable peace.
Maria A. Smith, Cleveland
© 2006 The Plain Dealer
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