Thursday 20 March 2003

How Can You Protest?

John Pilger on what we can all do to fight this illegal and immoral attack on Iraq

When Bush and Blair begin their illegal and immoral attack on a country that offers us no threat, we all have a choice.

We can wring our hands and say there is nothing we can do in the face of such powerful piracy - or we can reclaim the democracy that has been so corrupted by an elected dictatorship (in Bush's case, unelected).

There is only one responsible way to achieve the second goal. The polite term is civil disobedience. The street term is rebellion.

In 1946, Justice Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership, said that the "very essence" of international justice "is that individuals have international duties which transcend national obligations of obedience imposed by the state".

The British government is about to commit a great criminal act. That is not rhetoric - it is true. Every tenet of international law makes that clear, not least the United Nations Charter itself. Indeed, the judges at Nuremberg were quite clear about what they considered the gravest of all war crimes: that of an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign territory.

In the face of this impending crime, the "international duty which transcend national obligations of obedience" now belongs to you, the millions of people who have understood the nature of the crime. Now, you have both the right and the duty to act.

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