NOvember 2004: NO way! NO how! NO more! just NO! : Cleveland IMC (((i)))

NOvember 2004:
NO Way! NO How! NO More! Just NO!

Not in Our Name Project
Interim Steering Committee
October 29, 2004

"I come from Florida, where you and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'etat. We need to make sure it doesn't happen again." Words of Rep. Corrinne Brown (D-FL) speaking in
Congress on July 15, 2004. Her words were stricken from the Congressional Record.

There's a foul fascist wind blowing in the U.S.A.

Government officials and Republican Party operatives across the country prepare to deliver a victory to George W. Bush. Unleashed by the highest offices of the land to battle against "evil," Christian
fundamentalists and white supremacist self-appointed election monitors mobilize and guard against "voter fraud" by intimidating
Black and foreign-born voters across the country, checking ID's and videotaping people.

All this to ensure the enshrinement of the most hated U.S. president in recent history and the vicious agenda he spearheads. An agenda justified by LIES and enforced by naked power, where tens of
thousands of U.S. troops are sent to kill and be killed for U.S. empire. An agenda that calls dissent "treason," where legal rights
to trial, privacy and protection from profiling and surveillance are torn away under the "with us or against us" terms of a growing police state.

No matter how much Bush and his team like to hide from, distort and re-fashion the truth, no matter how many dirty tricks they pull, no matter how they try to intimidate or coerce, spin or distract, they
cannot change the fact that there are millions and millions of us in this country who know this whole direction is DEAD WRONG! The war is unjust!
The deaths are immoral! Any electoral "mandate" they claim for this direction is illegitimate!

We refuse to allow the world to be cast under the cold shadow of a "new Rome" or to accept a razor-wire police state at home. We refuse to accept the terms of an election where the continued occupation of
Iraq is not to be questioned and the Patriot Act should be enhanced or repaired. Our will to stop this course will not be stifled.

There are millions of us who THINK. Who don't want to be the cops of the world. Who refuse to go back to Jim Crow and a legal underclass - whether African American or Arab, Muslim and South Asian. Who
refuse to let the religious right control our private lives and make fundamentalist Christian morality the law of the land.

Not in Our Name embraces a wide spectrum of political views, including about the efficacy of voting. But all of us unite around the need for massive resistance in the streets and broadly throughout society. We agree that we must repudiate and STOP this course of war and repression, including efforts to steal the election and violate people's rights.

We call on everyone who hates this course and sees the danger - millions and millions across the country - to act with determination and firmness, to refuse to be silent or to acquiesce to terms that tell us we must support their "war on terror" for a hollow promise
of "safety." We must repudiate their plan and their logic, and stand with the people of the world - no matter who is elected and no matter what the empire-builders have in store. They are thinking and
acting outside the ballot box - so must we.

Because the stakes are so high and so much is at stake, we must act and organize in bold, creative ways that reach and unleash the millions who are not yet in motion. There needs to be a sea of resistance, where people connect and organize with each other and
the fascist-types know they don't have a free hand. A sea where opposition to this agenda, even the simple word "NO," is seen everywhere - on shirts, posters and stickers in home windows, offices and shops - emboldening people on our side and signaling
support for those under attack. And there must be determined manifestations in the streets beginning even before the final vote tally and growing each day as events intensify.

The future of humanity is what's being fought over - and we must not let the new Roman emperors have it! We must dare to change the course of history.

______________

The Pledge of Resistance

We believe that as people living
in the United States it is our
responsibility to resist the injustices
done by our government,
in our names

Not in our name
will you wage endless war
there can be no more deaths
no more transfusions
of blood for oil

Not in our name
will you invade countries
bomb civilians, kill more children
letting history take its course
over the graves of the nameless

Not in our name
will you erode the very freedoms
you have claimed to fight for

Not by our hands
will we supply weapons and funding
for the annihilation of families
on foreign soil

Not by our mouths
will we let fear silence us

Not by our hearts
will we allow whole peoples
or countries to be deemed evil

Not by our will
and Not in our name

We pledge resistance

We pledge alliance with those
who have come under attack
for voicing opposition to the war
or for their religion or ethnicity

We pledge to make common cause
with the people of the world
to bring about justice,
freedom and peace

Another world is possible
and we pledge to make it real.

Not In Our Name
http://www.notinourname.net
info@notinourname.net

Cleveland Indy Media Center