'Let there be PEACE NOT WAR. But God bless those that must fight and still those that try to survive the fight around them!' - Lela Jefferson

With vocal tracks by Saul Williams (link to artist's website provided at the bottom of this email), through http://www.notinournamemusic.com the Not in My Name Music project, a collaboration of artists are dedicated to forwarding a culture of resistance worldwide.

To help in this cause, the Not in My Name Music project is offering MP3s for FREE download now. The Not In My Name EP will soon be for sale worldwide, on Ninja Tune in Europe and world, Synchronic Records here in the US.

Listen/Download to the New Power Clique's very own Dj Brotha Finess's
submission for this project: http://www.newpowerclique...essmix.mp3

Click the link below to visit Saul Williams Official website: http://www.americanrecord...ulwilliams

Some background info on "Not In Our Name" before you decide you want to contribute anything to these people

Peace Kooks
By Michelle Goldberg
Salon.com | October 17, 2002


On Oct. 6, an antiwar movement seemed to have blossomed in New York. A
sea of people -- newspaper estimates ran from 10,000 to 20,000 --
filled Central Park's East Meadow to protest a possible U.S. invasion
of Iraq. And yes, there were the usual suspects, like the girl from the
Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade who donned a kaffiyeh and hurled
red-faced imprecations against capitalist tyranny.

But there were many more average people, the kind who don't usually
spend their sunny Sunday afternoons demonstrating against government
policy -- suburban middle-class families, Muslim women from Brooklyn
and Queens in headscarves and sneakers, wry upper West Side yuppies,
downtown hipsters, rabbis and angry grandmothers representing their
churches. They were matched by smaller demonstrations around the country,
in cities including San Francisco, Seattle, Austin and Chicago. And
along the meadow's perimeter, volunteers were coordinating rides to the
upcoming antiwar march in Washington on Oct. 26, with many people making
plans to attend. Momentum seemed to be building.

Yet Todd Gitlin, author of "The Sixties: Years of Hope and Days of Rage"
and former president of the '60s antiwar group Students for a Democratic
Society, fears the Oct. 26 protest will be "a gigantic ruination for
the antiwar movement."

That's because the politics of the group behind it, the International
Action Center, are anathema to most Americans -- including the vast
majority of people who oppose a U.S. war on Iraq. IAC opposes any
action against Saddam, including containment. "It is the position of the
International Action Center that Iraq, as part of its self-determination,
has the right to a military force sufficient to defend itself," says a
1999 statement. Its Web site is a cornucopia of empty lefty hyperbole
that boils down to the notion that, as Richard Becker, IAC's western
region co-director writes, "No one in the world ... has a worse human
rights record than the United States."

Its call for the "workers movement here in the heartland of
imperialism" to rise up is not a message that will stir great numbers of
Americans. Neither is the ideology of the group behind the Oct. 6 protest,
Not In Our Name, which was started and is being run by founders of a
New York-based radical activist group called Refuse & Resist, who are
closely tied to the Maoist-inspired Revolutionary Communist Party.

Yet as extreme as these groups are, they remain the two most prominent
ones organizing large-scale antiwar protests. Though they've been
cagey about the fanatical aspects of their agenda -- most of IAC's Iraq
organizing is done through a front group called ANSWER -- Gitlin says,
"the capacity of this movement to grow depends on what it has to say,"
and what these two groups have to say may alienate even people horrified
by Bush's war mongering.

The International Action Center and the Revolutionary Communist
Party aren't just extremists in the service of a good cause -- they're
cheerleaders for some of the most sinister regimes and insurgencies on the
planet. Once people realize this, it could easily discredit any nascent
antiwar movement, unless a more rational group moves to the forefront.

The IAC, which is particularly active on college campuses, was founded by
former attorney general-turned-radical anti-imperialist Ramsey Clark,
who, as Gitlin points out, is also a member of the International
Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic. It's a group that has close
links to the Workers World Party (IAC's spokesman, Brian Becker, also
churns out communiqués for the party's newspaper) and is a staunch
defender of North Korea. An IAC dispatch from Pyongyang reads: "The
army-first policy has guaranteed a strong, healthy, well-disciplined
fighting force despite several years of arduous conditions for the
people of socialist North Korea. It represents a sacrifice the people
are proud of, and their respect for those in uniform is unmistakable,
as is the élan of the fighting forces ... The land, factories, homes,
hotels, parks, schools, hospitals, offices, museums, buses, subways --
everything in [North Korea] belongs to the people as a whole."

Unfortunately, some of the people behind Not In Our Name are as enthralled
with tyrants and terrorists as the IAC.

Not In Our Name actually has two distinct parts -- the Not In Our Name
Statement and the Not In Our Name Project. The statement is an antiwar
manifesto with more than 100 celebrity signatories, including Martin
Luther King III, actors Susan Sarandon and Danny Glover, novelists
Russell Banks and Barbara Kingsolver, playwright Tony Kushner, rabbi
and activist Michael Lerner and law professor Kimberly Crenshaw, that
was published as an ad in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. The
project is the activist arm, involved in putting together actions like
the Oct. 6 rally, and is being run by Mary Lou Greenberg, a founder of
Refuse & Resist and an official of the RCP.


The RCP's ideology isn't just harmless campus Marxism. It supports
Peru's maniacally brutal Shining Path ("Support the People's War
in Peru!" screams the RCP Web site), the communist guerrillas who
specialized in urban terrorism, and venerates the bloody insurgency in
Nepal and lauds the Maoist campaign to "liberate" Tibet. In an article for
WorkingForChange.com, Seattle Weekly journalist Geov Parrish writes about
Not in Our Name statement coordinator Clark Kissinger, whom he identifies
as a "core member" of the RCP, "I still have vivid memories of Kissinger
explaining calmly to me once why, when the RCP took over, it would be
necessary to shoot everyone who didn't agree with them." Kissinger is
also a founder of Refuse & Resist, whose members organized Not In Our
Name and who act as its spokespeople.

Of course, this is not at all evident in the Not In Our Name statement,
a beautifully written declaration of conscience whose sentiments would
be shared by a great many liberals. "Let it not be said that people
in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war
without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression," it begins,
calling on people to "resist the policies and overall political direction
that have emerged since Sept. 11, 2001, and which pose grave dangers to
the people of the world." Most of the people who signed it have nothing
whatsoever to do with Maoism or the RCP.

Kissinger, meanwhile, denies that Refuse & Resist is affiliated with the
RCP, and though he acknowledges he's a member of the party and a writer
for its newspaper, he says he has no idea who is currently running it.

Questions about the party's role anger him -- he calls such questions
a "throwback to the McCarthy period." As to Gitlin's suggestion that
associations with hardcore communism might discredit the antiwar movement,
Kissinger, who knew Gitlin in SDS, shoots back, "He's trying to find
reasons why he's moved so far to the right. When big social events happen,
some people step forward and rise to the challenge and other people run
along behind criticizing."

Kissinger also says that the statement was specifically kept separate from
the Not In Our Name Project so that signatories wouldn't be "endorsing
any particular actions."

Tony Kushner notes that money raised for the statement is used only
to buy ad space in newspapers -- none of it gets to Refuse & Resist,
much less the RCP. "Do I have problems with the RCP? Obviously I do,"
says Kushner. "I think it's silly. I have nothing but disgust for groups
like Shining Path. I think that the people I know who are members of
the RCP who have been involved in this organizing effort are incredibly
hardworking people who have in certain ways politics I disagree with and
in other ways are working towards building a popular movement to oppose
Bush's never-ending war."

But many people who signed the statement aren't even aware of the
connection between Refuse & Resist and the RCP. Russell Banks, who helped
draft it, says he didn't know that Refuse & Resist is affiliated with RCP,
"and I don't think that most people know that."

He says he's not particularly troubled by the RCP's role, pointing out
that liberals also worked with communists during the Spanish Civil War --
during a time when the latter posed a very real threat. "If you refuse to
associate politically with people on specific issues because you don't
agree with their whole program, you end up very lonely and harmless,"
he says, noting that he'd also be willing to march with Patrick Buchanan,
another opponent of the war in Iraq whose politics he fiercely disagrees
with.

He continues, "I'm not one of the usual suspects. This is not just a
movement of old hippie leftists from the '60s. It's a very different
kind of coalition. It crosses over into the younger generation, it
crosses over into moderate liberal Democrats as well. I'm delighted to
find myself on the same side as Ted Kennedy, and really, in some ways,
as the director of the CIA."

"There's lots I don't agree with Clark Kissinger on," Banks says. "I do
agree with him on this issue. He's waiting for the proletariat to rise
up. I don't think that's going to happen, but on this issue we certainly
can join hands."

Kushner concurs: "Withholding one's energy, one's name at a time of
terrible political crisis like this and being overly fastidious about
the company one keeps is also a way of being inactive."

Besides, some argue that it's always the zealots who are at the
forefront of a nascent movement -- they're the ones with the passion
to organize. "It happened in early years of anti-Vietnam war movement,"
says Banks. "It took a long time before the media came to realize that
opposition to the war was much more widespread than they imagined."

But Gitlin says the people behind Refuse & Resist and the IAC are more
emblematic of the radicals who destroyed the antiwar movement than
those who created it. "As war became less popular, so did the antiwar
movement," he says. "People saw the antiwar movement as a scrod of
would-be revolutionaries who wanted to tear up everything orderly and
promising about America, and they hated it. They didn't hate cops. They
didn't want to turn the country upside down. They wanted to end a horrible
war." He quotes John Lennon's line from the Beatles' "Revolution": "But
if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/ You ain't going to make it
with anyone anyhow." "Those people are trying to recruit more people to
their banner," Gitlin says. "Other people who have other politics should
be doing the equivalent, recruiting people to a banner that looks more
like the American banner and doesn't appear to be a slap at patriotism."

After all, most of the people who filled Central Park came because they're
scared of unleashing conflagrations across the globe -- not because they
hate U.S. imperialism. "I think it's going to lead to World War III,"
said Leslie Baxter, a Manhattan mother of two, at the time. "I don't
believe everyday Americans want this war to occur."

Another attendee, Eric Lazarus, a 41-year-old computer scientist, said
he was motivated by "respect for international law. We live reasonably
peacefully within the nation because we treat law seriously. The
obvious next step is that we need to treat international law extremely
seriously." Not quite a cry for worker revolution.

Which is, of course, what many speakers were calling for. "Strike! You
must strike! Stop the machinery of war by refusing to work!" shrieked
a self-described Wobbly. That's not to say there weren't plenty of sane
voices. Martin Sheen read part of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream"
speech, while Tim Robbins cautioned his fellow activists, "This is not
the chickens coming home to roost ... al-Qaida's actions have hurt this
burgeoning peace movement more than any other." But there was enough
lefty tired hyperbole -- activists insisting that the fate of the nation
is inextricable from that of jailed Indian activist Leonard Peltier,
or decrying the "global grab for a lockdown world of global capitalism"
-- to exasperate all but the most diehard in attendance.

On that day, the disconnection between the politics of the organizers
and the attendees didn't seem to matter much. Except when there was a
celebrity on, only a few hundred people stood before the speakers --
everyone else milled about on the grass, had picnics, talked to each
other, catching only fragments of the incendiary speeches. Still, Gitlin
says the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist rhetoric emanating from the
stage has already alienated some liberals who were ready to join a new
antiwar movement. He's gotten letters from several people who went to
the protest, "heard a bit of it and thought No, not only is this not my
crowd, this is not my tone. And they fled."

Which is unfortunate, because if the antiwar movement is serious about
trying to stop Bush's military juggernaut, it's going to need the silent
masses of people who want a secure peace, not a revolution. After all,
most Americans remain ambivalent about Bush's plans. A CBS/New York Times
poll taken in early October shows that while 67 percent of Americans
support a war to depose Saddam, the number drops to 54 percent if there
are to be "substantial U.S. military casualties," and to 49 percent if
the war would last "months or even years." This suggests that there's
a large potential constituency in America for a movement opposing the
war on the grounds that it would be costly, bloody and dangerous --
as opposed to simply immoral.

Such a constituency hasn't made itself heard yet, though. Four days
after the protest -- and after five people staged a sit-in in Hillary
Clinton's office while dozens chanted outside -- both of New York's
senators supported a resolution granting George Bush broad authority to
wage war in Iraq. Clinton's explanation -- that she was voting to give
Bush power to wage unilateral war in the hope that "bipartisan support
for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely,
and therefore, war less likely " -- made her vote look like a nakedly
political calculation.

Clearly organizers still have much to do to convince politicians that
opposition to war with Iraq is more than a fringe phenomenon.

"I don't know that anything is really going to stop [the war]," says
Jeremy Pikser, a Hollywood screenwriter ("Bullworth") who helped draft
the Not In Our Name statement. "It would take masses of people really
turning out. Instead of 40 people [protesting] outside Hillary Clinton's
office, if there had been 15,000 she might have changed her vote."

Many groups continue to pop up, opposing a strike on Iraq -- and
without the taint of the extreme fringe. Several prominent groups have
taken out full-page ads in major newspapers to voice their fears about
Bush's policies. While the Not In Our Name statement has received a
lot of attention, more surprising, and perhaps more convincing, was the
Sept. 26 ad taken out by 33 international relations scholars, leaders in
their fields, who argued that "War With Iraq Is Not In America's National
Interest." On Monday, the group Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities
took out an ad whose signers included Dee Hock, the founder of Visa
International, and Frank A. Butler, the retired president of Eastman
(Kodak) Gelantine Corp. Its wording was harsh: "They're Selling War.
We're Not Buying."

But these aren't groups the average concerned citizen can join. And
finding one that offers an alternative to the hard left will be
complicated. "It's much easier to promote a bumper sticker than
complexity," Gitlin acknowledges. Besides, he says, "the liberals
are disorganized and lack confidence. They're opposed to the war but
genuinely frightened of weapons of mass destruction. I think we should
go through the Security Council. I'm not inclined to go to a rally that
seems to oversimplify."

Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal Tikkun magazine, signed the
Not In Our Name statement, but agrees that a serious movement can't be
built on its organizers' ideology. "Any antiwar movement that's going to
be successful is going to have to acknowledge the evil in Saddam Hussein
and the legitimate fears people have about his misuse of weapons of war,"
he says. "Otherwise you're going to have just the lunatic fringe, people
who hate America so much that they are unable to communicate with rest
of the American population. That antiwar movement would be a sideshow."

As a step toward articulating that vision, Gitlin suggests a return
to an original tool of the '60s activists -- the teach-in. "In recent
years people have come to call a teach-in what is essentially a rally,"
he says. "The original teach-ins were predicated on a divergence of
opinions. It wasn't just a matter of soapbox orating. The State Department
was challenged to send people to debates, and they did. Defenders of the
war were invited in. They weren't marginal left-wing operations." Instead
of just regurgitating lefty boilerplate, he says, campus groups should
be engaged in a serious discussion that includes people who may fear
war -- but also fear the threat of Saddam. "Let the 'no blood for oil'
people make their cases and let the realists make their case," he says.

The Central Park rally drew this kind of diverse crowd, which included
Dennis Lockwood, a 57-year-old systems designer from Connecticut who works
in "conservative corporate America." Lockwood's argument isn't radical --
he believes that Bush's plan to attack Iraq is an "irrational" response
to Sept. 11 and that America should be "setting an example of rational
action." Similarly, most of the thousands and thousands of people likely
to flock to D.C. at the end of the month aren't going because they endorse
the agenda of the International Action Center. They're going because they
believe Bush is making the world a more dangerous place than it has to be.

Yet that simple point may be considerably overwhelmed at the Oct. 26
rally, just as it was in Central Park. That is, unless ordinary people
can make themselves heard above the din of revolutionaries blind to all
evil that doesn't emanate from here.



Michelle Goldberg is a staff writer for Salon based in New York.

Here here.

Enough knee-jerk reactions based on some percieved guilt.
Everyday more Iraqi's are celebrating their liberation from a brutal and horific regime.