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Comment by dj_gitmo | Hacker News Reader

American here, and I am involved with the US anti-war movement. I really wish we could get 5% involved with the movement, but people don't get interested unless it starts affecting them or their family. To this day, the most active members of the US anti-war movement are baby boomers because they were being drafted to fight in Vietnam. The US ended the draft after Vietnam.

The sanctions in Russia could build resistance to the war in Russia, but they could also backfire if the Western governments do not set reasonable criteria for removing the sanctions. So far they have not indicated how to end sanctions.

If Western governments will only remove sanctions if Putin is thrown out, than I fear that there is little chance the war will end soon. The Syrian sanctions will never end without regime change so the sanctions are purely punitive.

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There's always this catch-22 with participation. People in America don't think it affects them, so they don't participate. Same thing happened in Russia though. And then suddenly it did. Americans statistically don't vote issues, they vote tribe - straight ticket Democrat or Republican or whatever. The tribal aspect in the U.S. routinely bites us in the butt, even aside from the problem of a democracy where a minority is winning more national elections than the majority due to the Senate and Electoral College.

I suggest folks re-read about the Cold War. A good short one with the basics is The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (there's many, many other topics in that series). Why? Because the Cold War is a direct result of diverging histories, needs, ideologies between the U.S. and USSR's methods of imposing their view on the vulnerable world. That's probably going to start happening again with Russia as a lesser influence than it was in the first Cold War, and China as a bigger influence in the next one.

I really wish the U.S. would do more to give the rest of the world more power and responsibility for solving these problems in the U.N. The super powers need to be held accountable too if we are to avoid proxy wars. The super powers won't engage in direct conflict because the risk of nuclear escalation is too high. The problem remains with proxy wars.

What's your answer to people who proclaim things like: a) Ukraine has a right to self-determination, b) Putin has moral agency, c) NATO is necessary to protect states that wish to turn away from Russia, d) What about the wishes of Ukrainians?

In the context of the US antiwar movement? Most leftists, even those that have deep mutual disagreements with each other, have long held that NATO expansionism is harmful. But I've been seeing a lot non-leftists use points a-d) to argue that the leftists are wrong. Have you seen this and how would you resolve this?

My own answer has been that NATO is kind of like a road system. Stop building so much and polluting our forests and lands. But if there's an avalanche, it is ethical to use the road to evacuate people. But I still feel I don't understand it fully and I'm not sure what ought to happen or what ought to have happened between NATO versus any country in a situation like Ukraine's.

Agree completely. May I ask, how big is your anti-war tent? For example, in my experience the most anti-war people are anarchists (sometimes disambiguated to anarcho-socialists) and anarcho-capitalists. However only a small percentage of each group is willing to join with the other for an issue. Are you? Are you part of an organization like this?

> May I ask, how big is your anti-war tent? For example, in my experience the most anti-war people are anarchists (sometimes disambiguated to anarcho-socialists) and anarcho-capitalists.

I came in through left-wing organizing and I've worked with a few groups. Some are officially non-ideological except for being anti-war (but if I had to place them I'd say liberal-left) like Peace Action https://www.peaceaction.org/. They have a lot of members form the Vietnam era Peace movement.

Other visible contributors to the anti-war movement are socialist orgs like DSA and ANSWER Coalition. DSA has a bigger base, but ANSWER really tends to be ahead on organizing street events. Then there are various solidarity groups for countries like El Salvador or Palestine. The Latin American solidarity groups from the Dirty Wars of the 1980s still exist.

These left leaning groups would never work with right-wing groups, and for what it's worth you almost never see right-wing groups try to seriously organize anti-war, or at least they way they organize/lobby is very different.

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