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Issue No. 128 | 15 March 2002 |
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Why I'm Marching
Interview: The Wedge Buster History: Fighting for Peace Unions: Rattling the Gates International: Facing Retribution Technology: How Korean Workers Used The Web Industrial: Working Futures Review: Rumble, Young Man, Rumble Satire: GG Survival Doomed: Fox-Lew In Charge Of Rescue Bid Poetry: PSST
The Soapbox The Locker Room Week in Review
 Carr and the Fire FightersOn InequalityHarmony Day
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History Fighting for Peace
Was the first Palm Sunday parade a celebration or a protest? Whatever clerics may have decided, the popular imagination clearly attaches great significance to the protest viewpoint. Witness the vast numbers that have paraded at such events as the Palm Sunday peace marches (the 1985 one in Sydney had an estimated 170,000 people and the Corroboree 2000 walk across the Harbour Bridge in Sydney. Similar walks in other places at the same time attracted vast crowds. George Turner, a Presbyterian minister says that "Jesus was a very angry man as he went into Jerusalem that day so, in many ways, what happened on that Palm Sunday was indeed a protest march or a demonstration - a demonstration of anger that would, of course, ultimately bring him into conflict with the religious authorities of the day." http://www.ptbo.igs.net/~stpauls/sermons2001/protest.htm The nuclear disarmament rallies ran strongly for ten years in Australia, spurred initially by the posturing of the Reagan Administration. An international tradition of Easter Sunday peace demonstrations had grown up in western Europe, but the choice of Palm Sunday is unique to Australia. It remains a uniting force for people of diverse opinions and political creeds. The ALP was in power for most of this time in Australia, brought in by support of groups such as PND who had hopes for a more independent foreign policy from the ALP. By 1985 this hope had evaporated, and Bill Hayden's message as Foreign Minister to the Sydney rally in 1985 got a huge round of boos if I remember rightly. Protest marches have combined campaigns for Aboriginal rights and anti-nuclear elements. The campaign against the Jabiluka mine in the Northern Territory was the focus in 1999 for Palm Sunday rallies. Established Churches in Australia claim Palm Sunday as having developed special significance because it is the best example of ecumenical co-operation in Australia. A lot of meaning is invested in the day by lots of people. Unions have been involved in the anti-nuclear protests since the debate about uranium exports in the mid 1970s, and involved heavily in peace protests since the Vietnam War. As the ACTU policy says, Peace is Union Business. Key donors of time and resources have been the AMWU, the BWIU, FEDFA (now part of the CFMEU), NSW Teachers Federation and the PKIU (now part of the AMWU). The role of Bob Hawke as president of the ACTU in promoting uranium mining and exporting was important in galvanising opposition. The Victorian branch of the ALP in particular was very critical of Hawke in 1977. The union and peace movement campaigns gradually swung public opinion on the issue from strongly in favour to disapproval, according to Greg Adamson's summary articles in Green Left Weekly in 1999. The peace movement he saw as finally getting its act together in 1978, after years of activity on many fronts. Unions over the next few years, where they maintained opposition to uranium (despite ACTU support for existing contracts), used their strategic positions to disrupt transport of material through ports and on streets. Local governments also responded to public pressure. We saw lots of councils declaring Nuclear free Zones which made moving yellow cake to ports a difficult proposition. To have faith in the ALP after betrayals on the issue of contracts, changing their policy on mines in 1982 (the infamous policy to get Roxby Downs underway, on the spurious basis that it was a gold mine principally) was stretching it. The rise of the Nuclear Disarmament Party in the early eighties was a sign of disillusionment with the ALP at the time. They got a senator up in WA and almost got Peter Garrett elected in NSW. It was non sectarian initially (sectarianism amongst left groups led to its demise a few years later) The ongoing importance of the first Palm Sunday, when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem, which some of his disciples at least saw as part of a campaign against imperialism and war is seen in the comments of United Methodist Women who make the same links between Jesus' quest and the compassion needed today, after September 11 and other atrocities. "Jesus wept over Jerusalem. He wept over its impending wounds and attacks. His heart broke in compassion and tenderness, but Jesus did not stop there. His kindness is always interspersed with justice. He asked why Jerusalem did not know the things that make for peace. Tears of compassion led to a question of justice". As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran minister in Germany, who asked some justice questions before the onset of World War II, asked: "How does peace come about? Through a system of political treatises? Through the investment of international capital in different countries? Or through universal, peaceful rearmament in order to guarantee peace? Through none of these...for the single reason that all of them confuse peace with safety. There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. Peace is the great venture. It can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. Peace must be dared." (http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/terrorism/palm_sunday.html) As Jesse Jackson put it in 2000 at the Shadow Democrat Convention "Jesus led a march on Palm Sunday. He was a protestor. He is the author of the faith of many of us. There is power in protest when you stand up and fight back and resist with courage and character and conviction." http://www.shadowconventions.com/speeches/jacksonbspeech.htm Martin Luther King also used the symbolism of Palm Sunday in his protest against segregation in the US. In fact a Judge issued orders on Palm Sunday in 1963 to prevent King from protesting on that day in Birmingham. He was arrested and wrote what became know as his "Letter From Birmingham Jail", a big moment at a time of crisis for King and the movement around him. George W Bush has upped the rhetoric and threats of violence on at least seven countries around the world and thus on millions of people, in his "New War Fighting Plan". Our own federal administration supports Bush to the hilt, and screws down hard of the refugees and the poor of the world who seek to escape from some of the regimes who we claim to be opposed to. Manning Clark's comments for the No to Nuclear War booklet, published in 1991, seem prescient. "The end of the cold war may seem to some to remove the fear of a nuclear war. That hope is, I believe, ill-founded. The causes of war between nations and classes have not disappeared with the waning of the cold war. The unequal distribution of wealth, the increase in populations and grievances over past wrongs are still with us. Nuclear weapons are not the only threat to the survival of human beings on this planet. The passion and the high-mindedness dedicated to the campaign for nuclear disarmament should also be channeled into those areas of life which are sowing the seeds of future wars. Poverty can almost be as great a scourge as war. It lasts longer. We should now strive to help the wretched of the earth." See the booklet published by the Nuclear Disarmament Co-ordinating Committee, No to Nuclear War: a decade of Sydney's Palm Sunday Marches and Rallies (1991) for speeches given at these rallies by people such as Patrick White, Helen Clark (then a member of the Lange Labour Government in NZ that had just banned US ships carrying nuclear weapons), David Williamson and Robyn Williams.
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