Endless War. Hundreds of Thousands of Dead Iraqis. Torture. Surveillance. Civil Rights and Habeas Corpus: Gone. Executive Privilege: No Accountability.

Join us on 9/11/07

GENERAL STRIKE

No Work. No School. No Shopping. Hit the streets.

Thus reads the call, which was issued around the first of August, with no recognized leaders, and neither big organizations, parties nor unions, backing it up. Judging from the buzz, it still seems that in the United States of America, during September 11, 2007, six years after the 9/11 attack, a sort of General Strike is going to take place. Among the many issues addressed are corporate manipulation, a call for impeachment of Bush, an urge to bring the troops home from Iraq as soon as possible or at least not enter into war with Iran and doubts about the official version of the 9/11 attacks.

The action was called from a small web page (Strike 9/11), and the idea expanded in a viral way throughout the internet, both in dozens (hundreds?) of private weblogs and in several social networks, including facebook, myspace, digg, indybay and indymedia.

The date itself raised a lot of heated discussion because of its emotional content. Judging from the comments on many sites, the very idea of going on strike (instead of, say, demonstrating) to show political dissent is quite alien to many Americans: at least in facebook, there is a lot of "you just want an excuse to take a day off". Others, in contrast, show an intense support for the idea, I have read several comments in the lines of "I have been waiting for something like this for ages" or "I have been advocating this since last year". Among those who want to take part, some think it won't change anything, and others see it as a step forward in the antiwar sentiment, drawing parallels to Vietnam.

As it stands now, it looks like there will be a couple of big demonstrations, in New York and Washington, D.C., smaller ones in other cities, and probably a very minor slow down effect in production and consumption from the actual strike. As there are other related events planned for the following days, it might help build some kind of coalesced movement, who knows? Some think it could help bringing a martial law, specially if some of the protests end up with violence (and one could hardly be surprised by this, counting with the classical policeman-disguised-as-black-block). I think if fear of repression is a reason for not doing a pacific protest, things are really bad, and not only for Americans.

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