I realize that the words “Peace On Earth” don’t have the same ring to them this year. I know “peace” seems a million miles away sometimes these days, but we have to envision a time when there will be peace again. It will obviously take years to undo what has been done at this point to our international relations, but we have to try.
So with all that in mind, here’s the most frightening thing I’ve seen in the news all week.
It looks like the North Koreans may have taken some of that ‘Axis of Evil’ stuff the Shrub has been babbling about a bit personally after all.
It just goes to show that if you treat someone like an enemy for long enough, they will become one.
North Korea Warns the U.S. to Negotiate or Risk ‘Catastrophe’
By Howard French for the NY Times.

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100 Arrested in U.S. Anti-War Protests
By Allen G. Breed for the Associated Press (Associated Press writers Jessica Brice in Sacramento; Mike Robinson in Chicago; Carol Ann Riha in Des Moines; Danny Freedman in Washington; Michael Virtanen in Albany; Karen Matthews in New York; and Elizabeth Zuckerman in Providence contributed to this report.)

About half of the 200 protesters demonstrating outside the U.S. mission to the United Nations in New York were arrested for disorderly conduct, including clergy members. Across the country in Sacramento, Calif., nine were taken into custody for blocking the entrance to a federal courthouse…
In the nation’s capital, about 300 protesters, many with gray hair, staged a march to a park near the White House. Flanked by police, John Steinbach, 56, of Manassas, Va., an organizer of the Gray Panthers, was pushing the wheelchair of his 97-year-old wife, Louise Franklin-Ramirez, who he said had been protesting since 1917…
Earlier in Washington, several people were arrested after converging on two military recruiting stations chanting, “Hell no, we won’t go,” and plastering windows with red tape.
Students at the University of Michigan set up a makeshift graveyard on a major walkway through the Ann Arbor campus, using cardboard headstones that read “Iraqi child” and “Iraqi man.” About 100 students and faculty at Brown University in Providence, R.I., marched with signs and staged a “die-in” in front of the city’s federal building.

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CANESI (Canadian Network to End Sanctions On Iraq) has organized a number of rally’s for this weekend in 14 cities across Canada: Halifax/Dartmouth, Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Midlland, Toronto, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Penticton, Grand Forks, Vancouver and Victoria.
Note: Pay close attention to the dates listed for each city, because some are happening on Saturday, November 16 and others on Sunday, November 17th. (Thanks, Cory.)

Bill Moyers has writes about his experience as Press Secretary to Lyndon Johnson during the beginning of the Vietnam War and the inevitable cost of the War on Iraq to the innocents on both sides.
The Costs Of War

Our Secretary of Defense has a plaque on his desk that says, “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.” I don’t think so.
To launch an armada against Hussein’s own hostages, a people who have not fired a shot at us in anger, seems a crude and poor alternative to shrewd, disciplined diplomacy.
Don’t get me wrong. Vietnam didn’t make me a dove; it made me read the Constitution. That’s all. Government’s first obligation is to defend its citizens. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says it’s permissible for a great nation to go hunting for Hussein by killing the people he holds hostage, his own people, who have no choice in the matter, who have done us no harm.
Unprovoked, the noble sport of war becomes the murder of the innocent.

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This headline was going to be: “Anti-War Rally In Boston Gets Usual Lack of Media Coverage,” but I didn’t want to emphasize the negative…
Luckily, Steve Garfield has put together a movie of the event.

A Hundred Thousand March — Media Censors?
Which also includes a great reprint of John Perry Barlow’s account of the day.
(Thanks, Kevin)

When we finally got up to Market Street around noon, the march had already launched toward the Civic Center. Market was dense with humanity as far as I could see in that direction. We counted several different cross-sections of the moving populace, and the parade seemed to be about 20 people across. Assuming that each phalanx of 20 moved though per second, this would be about 72,000 people per hour. The march continued unabated for at least 2 and a half hours. If our calculations are even a little accurate, this would be over a hundred fifty thousand people who had gathered to protest a war that has barely begun.
I remember the first anti-war protest I ever attended. It was in the fall of 1965 and it took place on Boston Commons. I’d be surprised if there were more than a hundred people there, though they included, as I recall, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. It was not until after Kent State, five years later, that I saw anything like the assembly of protesters I witnessed yesterday.

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