MBy David Jack Norton
VALLADOLID, Spain 
adrid’s streets throbbed with throngs of marchers Saturday evening, intent on changing their government’s support for U.S. policy against Iraq. In cities around Spain and around the world, millions of people took to the street in demonstrations larger than many have seen in a generation. London, Rome, Berlin and Madrid appear to have hosted the largest demonstrations but even small pueblos here in Spain turned out a couple hundred people to stomp around in front of local town halls. The world is getting tired of eating cake à la Bush.
I took a bus to Madrid on Saturday morning to join the march that, technically, began at 6 p.m. Why I felt compelled to join this march is not a particularly unique story. Like many, I find President George W. Bush’s reasons for going to war unpersuasive and resent my government for acting in a way unresponsive to both common sense and citizens’ input. In contrast to most Spanish cities, my city of Valladolid did not hold a march Saturday. Thus, a quick trip to Madrid seemed a far more satisfying alternative than sending off yet another batch of e-mails to the White House ([email protected]).
Why Spain, specifically, pulsed with protests on Saturday perhaps deserves greater explanation. In the U.N. Security Council, Spain is one of only three countries supporting the U.S. move to war. China, France, Germany, Syria and Russia currently oppose military action while Angola, Cameron, Chile, Guinea, Mexico and Pakistan have expressed significant reservations about U.S. policy. With due respect to Bulgarian political influence, Spain and, more important, England remain the only politically important U.S. allies. The pair provides political cover for the United States to hide behind when accused of acting unilaterally. Many suspect without the United Kingdom and Spain’s support in the Security Council, Bush and his hawkish buddies would be hard pressed to wage a war against Iraq without seriously damaging, if not destroying, political capital with the rest of the world. The English know this and took to the streets in scarily large numbers. So did the Spanish.
This brings me back to Madrid; at 5 o’clock, I strolled several blocks from a bar near the Prado, Spain’s premier art museum, to the staging area, on the western side of the Prado. Several of the national papers had published staging instructions and a route map for the march in their morning edition Saturday papers. The route ran up an enormous thoroughfare the width of five downtown Hennepin Avenues, and then narrowed by half to flow into Madrid’s geographic center, Puerta del Sol, a narrow but quarter-mile open plaza. I had visited Puerta del Sol earlier in the day and seen risers set up to hold a variety of entertainment celebrities (Pedro Almodovar was scheduled to speak) set behind a modest stage. The march itself measured approximately a mile, depending on where you started. Of course, no one actually made it more than a quarter mile.
Though I arrived at five, people were already starting to make their way up the march route, partially to stay warm. Every major political party (save Spain’s ruling party) had printed multi-color flags with party logos or antiwar messages and distributed them liberally among the crowds. Organizers of every political stripe also worked the developing masses, passing out large stickers for jackets with the march’s theme “No a la Guerra” – literally, “No to the war.”
Party paraphernalia aside, the march’s most colorful banners and posters were homemade. One family, with far too much time on their hands, had photoshopped Bush and Blair’s faces onto bodies posed in compromising positions and made up songs to accompany the pictures (think a politically liberal Flanders family from “The Simpsons”). A group that linked the U.S. support of Israel to the U.S. desire for war carried a one hundred-foot Palestinian flag. Several people carried signs with some variation of “Bush = Hitler?” in bold letters under a picture of the former Nazi leader. By far the most numerous, however, were rhetorically less controversial antiwar posters and banners, such as “Paz sí, guerra no,” “Paz,” or “No War for Oil.”
Of the signage, two themes impressed me. The first was the marked absence of blatantly anti-American sentiments among the marchers. To be sure, there existed an underlying malaise about the United States’ blundering bellicosity, but it largely manifested itself in very specific statements against war or Bush, not against the United States. Perhaps I had conjured an anti-American paranoia, or perhaps Spaniards empathize more quickly because their president, Jose Maria Aznar, backs Bush’s plans. Whatever the case, participants stayed fairly on-message.
Perhaps the most moving sentiment came from a second theme expressed by the marchers: not with our silence, not in our name (“no con nuestro silencio, no en nuestro nombre”). Despite clear opposition to dropping bombs on Iraq, the crowd expressed a certain degree of fatalism, or rather faith in Bush, Blair and Aznar’s commitments to war. At the same time, these declarations reclaimed a political discussion that has been too long dominated by diplomats playing games of moral and martial chess. The world gave voice to the antiwar movement Saturday in a way that even France’s foreign minister, Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin, the eloquent spokesman for countries opposing war, has been unable to.
In Madrid, those voices came from an impressively diverse group of participants. Babies as young as one year old bounced in strollers or in the arms of their parents with little “No a la Guerra” stickers dominating their tiny hats. Students, donned in makeshift protest T-shirts over their jackets, led rowdy chants that frequently involved bouncing up and down. Perhaps most remarkably, retired people bounced right along with their grandchildren’s generation, singing the words “No a la Guerra” to a variety of traditional Spanish tunes. In a tribute to the wide age range of the crowd, I saw as many canes as I did nose rings.
The elderly also lent both a sense of order (shoving your grandmother is a no-no, regardless of your political vigor) and gravitas to the march. Many in Spain still remember the civil war of 1936-39 and a majority recalls living under the dictator Francisco Franco. Spaniards do not lightly condone policies that further subject the Iraqi people to Hussein’s tyranny, nor do they engage in an esoteric moral calculus when considering war. For the elderly especially, dictatorship and war intimately shaped their lives. Perhaps the most powerful image of the march was an elderly woman, bent with the obvious effects of osteoporosis, wielding a cane in one hand and a “No a la Guerra” sign in the other.
Around 5:45 p.m., one of the loudspeakers announced the entire march route had completely filled with people: The march had become a demonstration at least a mile long and at least 800,000 people strong. Imagine the entire population of Minneapolis and St. Paul surging forward along Hennepin Avenue from Joe’s Garage to the river. I inched forward from 5 p.m. until 7:30 p.m., perhaps covering 300 meters, before pushing my way free to a metro stop that whisked me away to the bus station for my return to Valladolid. I might never again participate in such an overawing demonstration for peace. Unless British, Spanish and U.S. leaders are politically deaf and blind, I won’t need to.
David Jack Norton is a University graduate studying in Valladolid, Spain. Send letters to the editor to
