A notice on Cindy Sheehan's website, meetwithcindy.org, asks for donors who might be able to offer a camper, or an RV, or just money, for Sheehan's upcoming cross-country tour, scheduled to begin Wednesday in Crawford, Texas, and end in Washington at the big antiwar demonstration scheduled for September 24. At the end of the note, readers with something to offer are asked to "please call organizer Lisa Fithian."
Fithian is a legendary organizer who operates in the world of anti-globalism anarchists, antiwar protesters, and union activists; an advocate of aggressive "direct action" demonstrations, she protested the first Gulf war, played an important role in the violent shutdown of Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, was a key planner in protests at the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 2000 and 2004, and organized demonstrations at trade meetings in Washington, D.C., Prague, and Genoa.
An interesting way to make a buck, and Byron makes it sound like she is The Man when it comes to stirring things up, and that seems to be the image she cultivates:
"When people ask me, 'What do you do?' I say I create crisis, because crisis is that edge where change is possible."
Fithian is not exactly in line with the Wailing Mom image Sheehan has been trying to cultivate:
In an July 2001 interview with The International Socialist Review, Fithian — who told NRO she's been arrested "probably at least 30 times" — spoke of moving beyond the tradition of civil disobedience as practiced by Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.; her inspiration, she explained, was not so much those leaders as the anarchist movement in Spain in the late 19th and early 20th century. And that meant different ways of doing things. "Nonviolence is a strategy. Civil disobedience is a tactic," Fithian said. "Direct action is a strategy. Throwing rocks is a tactic."
"I guess my biggest thing is that as people who are trying to create a new world, I do believe we have to dismantle or transform the old order to do that," Fithian continued. "I just fundamentally don't believe it will ever serve our interests as it's currently constructed."
If this woman comes blowing into your town with Sheehan, better board up the doors and windows:
I have no issue with property destruction. I think sometimes it’s appropriate, sometimes it’s not. Again, I look at it strategically. Does this help us or does it hurt us? Does it help us achieve our goal, or does it not? We’re in a society where property is idolized, so a lot of people don’t get it yet that it doesn’t really matter. It’s just glass or products.
It’s exactly what we do in training. We try to help people understand that what’s violent to one is not violent to another. And what might be violent in one situation might not be violent in another situation. It’s very subjective.
The windows being broken in Seattle had absolutely nothing to do with whether we shut down the WTO or not. It didn’t add value in that sense.
Nothing like spending you life going from city to city trying to stir up a good ol riot! Quite a wagon you hitched yourself to Cindy.
