Lenin Nolly/Sipa USA via AP Images
On Saturday, anti-war protesters marched from the White House to the Trump International Hotel.
The world is shuddering at the crescendo of Washington’s war drums since the assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani. Journalists and pundits in the mainstream media have “uncritically and recklessly” echoed the Trump administration’s justifications for war, according to Media Matters, the news-monitoring organization. But people across the United States have rejected the battle cries, launching mass pro-peace protests in more than 70 cities and highlighting the interconnectedness of war, climate change, labor, and racism. In the heart of Washington, D.C., more than 1,000 people took to the streets demanding peace and justice.
“No war but class war!” chanted the protesters on Saturday as they marched from the White House to the Trump International Hotel—that is, from the executive branch to one of the most corrupt expressions of the president’s private interests. Demonstrators flooded Pennsylvania Avenue as police officers cordoned off side streets with police cruisers, blue and red lights blinking silently. For demonstrators, the route signified a rejection of the close alignment between government and private corporations, as exemplified by the “revolving door” between the arms industry and elected officials.
“Our interests as workers … are to keep peace, to not go into imperialist wars where the only people who profit are the elites,” Nicole Roussell, an organizer with the anti-war and -racism ANSWER Coalition, told me outside the Trump Hotel.
The day after Soleimani was killed, arms companies like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman saw surging stock prices, and crude oil prices increased by more than 4 percent. The activists I spoke to emphasized that American war is a working-class issue: While the ruling class profits off wars, it is the poor who fight—and die—in them. Over the 2018 election cycle, the arms industry gave more than $24 million to politicians and political parties, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and fossil fuel corporations furnished over $28 million to politicians alone.
Shadi Alhusary, a member of the D.C.-based aid group Food Not Bombs, told me the anti-war movement must connect to other struggles for justice. “It’s time to rebuild,” he said, adding that conditions may be just right for the anti-war movement to become resurgent. “Popular movements have grown in the last ten years in a way that they haven’t in the last 40, and it’s a really pivotal moment in American global history.”
At the demonstration, protesters highlighted that the U.S. military is a massive contributor to the climate crisis, which disproportionately affects countries in the global South, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Before the march began, activist and actor Jane Fonda spoke to the crowd on this phenomenon at a rally outside the White House.
“The Pentagon is the biggest institutional user of fossil fuels in the world,” Fonda said. “We can’t anymore lose lives and kill people and ruin the environment because of oil and fossil fuels.”
As protesters streamed down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Trump Hotel, a young man skateboarded past the crowd in the opposite direction, smiling as he cheered in support of the demonstration. Outside the hotel 30 minutes later, I found him smack in the middle of the protest. Why had he come back?
“It’s just amazing. I didn’t know about this. I was skating down the street and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, there are people trying to do something about this,’” Diante Hill told me. “‘There are people saying something.’”
It was his first anti-war protest, and he said he would “definitely” attend more. “People can make change. We’re the ones who are making history,” Hill said. “People are tired of the way things are and they want to see something better.”
