Walk across the University of California at Berkeley’s main square, Sproul Plaza, on any of these warm and well-lit October afternoons and you are likely to encounter several hundred people busily denouncing the accumulated misdeeds of "Amerika." It’s worth stopping, if only to read the weirdly imaginative (and, as often as not, daringly irrelevant) placards being waved by many in the crowd. "We did not bomb Timothy McVeigh’s home country," read one placard at a rally held early last week. "Bomb the Terrorist Bases in Arlington and Langley," urged another. In Berkeley, this passes for wit.

Protest movements are a familiar part of Berkeley life and, just like all those that preceded it, this one has become routine. I’m almost grateful for the diversion. It’s midterm season and, aside from the tiny minority who keep themselves busy agitating against the war in Afghanistan, most students are finally settling into the new semester, preparing for exams while keeping an eye on the news. The protests lend a festival atmosphere to what would otherwise be just another anxious day on campus. If only it weren’t such an exceedingly stupid festival.

Since my first report on the new anti-war movement here at UC, Berkeley, the protests have continued non-stop. Aside from the usual Sproul Plaza gatherings, there have been rallies in downtown Berkeley and San Francisco. The new movement has also spawned a wave of teach-ins and pseudo-academic conferences at local universities and colleges (usually some variation or other on the theme "Understanding Islam"). And, if you look closely at the night sky, you can almost see the atmosphere disturbed by wave after wave of frantic email communications, all of them carrying the same subject heading: "End this Racist War Now!"

So far, I have attended perhaps five rallies. At each, I’m happy to report, the number of protesters has diminished. The first big rally of the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition (SWC) drew a crowd of around 2500. Since then, attendance at every rally has been half that of the one before. On October 8, perhaps 1000 showed up at Sproul Plaza to denounce the war. That evening, less than 500 crowded around the entrance to Berkeley’s subway for a march through downtown. And, on October 10, no more than 300 protesters collected in Sproul Plaza.

But the fact that their numbers are shrinking should not be misunderstood as a sign that the new anti-war movement is losing steam. Even as local enthusiasm for the movement dries up, the protesters are digging in for a long campaign. In the past week alone, the movement’s organizers have launched several petition drives aimed at rallying the faithful and attracting new recruits among the University’s many tenured radicals. Email lists and web sites have been set up to supply the rank and file with daily updates on the movement’s evolving strategy and fliers and posters advertising the movement’s aims are being printed by the thousands. There are also signs that the City of Berkeley is increasingly siding with the student movement: on the evening of Tuesday, October 17, the Berkeley City Council, with strong student support, voted to condemn the war in Afghanistan. The resolution, drafted by Dona Spring, the same councilwoman who last week characterized the US as "a terrorist" in an interview with the Daily Cal, will surely prove just the first step in an effort on the part of left wing legislators to gain political capital from the new anti-war movement.

As all this happens, a concerted effort is being made on the part of the movement’s organizers to gain media attention and thereby export the struggle to other campuses (aside from Berkeley, only UNC, Chapel Hill has witnessed regular, large-scale rallies against retaliation for September 11). The protesters are of course not happy with the lack of attention they’ve gotten so far. Many in fact seem to believe that they are the victims of a major media conspiracy to silence them. And yet if their cause has been "under-reported", as they maintain, the protesters have only themselves to blame. For the average reporter, I’d guess, it’s simply too difficult to know what to say about the new anti-war movement. While all of the protesters are agreed in opposing the war and blaming, to one degree or another, the United States for the terrorist attacks, their aims and alternatives are a confused muddle. By turns incoherent, paranoid, and irrelevant, the movement’s "message" amounts to precisely nothing. If the major media has said less about the movement than it might, this is something for which the protesters should be grateful, not unhappy.

At the protests I’ve attended, I’ve been lectured on so many things, it’s hard to keep track. These have included (but are not limited to) the UN conference on racism at Durban, the Palestinian conflict, the military-industrial complex, third world sweatshops, racial profiling, and the failure of the American government to fund chemotherapy for Afghani children. Every time, the message is the same: blowing up the World Trade Center was an expression, however inarticulate, of the legitimate grievances of oppressed peoples. Any attempt to punish those responsible, by this view, will only give those we oppress more good reasons for killing us. To avoid this, the protesters variously urge that we admit more immigrants, naturalize those who are here illegally, pay reparations for slavery, reinstate affirmative action at California’s state universities, devote the better part of our GNP to the economic development of the Third World, abandon the Israelis to destruction by their neighbors, and, of course, stop the war in Afghanistan.

The fact that none of their arguments succeed in addressing the matter at hand (what to do about September 11 and how to protect Americans from similar attacks in the future) doesn’t seem to much bother the protesters. Since their first commitments are political, not intellectual, it’s easy for them to carry on spouting nonsense. For them, the only problem is how to justify their movement to the rest of the country, that is, how to oppose the war without seeming to oppose Americans.

Over the past few weeks, the movement’s organizers have increasingly settled on two strategies for doing this. The first of these is to complain that the war against terrorism is leading to an unacceptable curtailment of civil liberties. With this argument, which has now gained the support of the ACLU, the protesters pretend to be good liberals, concerned that everyone’s rights are respected and that the government not intrude too much into the life of the ordinary citizen. The problem is, there has been no major curtailment of civil liberties. If anything, the Bush administration has so far shown a remarkable degree of level-headedness in its response to the attacks (a date, by the way, which the protesters now studiously avoid mentioning) and the more recent Anthrax scare. While it’s clear that this is a time for extraordinary measures, no one is about to suspend the Bill of Rights. But in their hysteria, the protesters act as if this has already been done.

When they’re not pretending to worry about civil liberties, the protesters are playing the race card. Anyone who has spent time on American campuses in the past decade will recognize this strategy. In essence, it consists of accusing your opponent of racism and hoping that his shocked silence will make the charge stick. In the present instance, however, the race card makes even less sense than usual. It was, after all, the terrorists who attacked us, not the other way around. What’s more, the protesters seem to have forgotten that those they so conveniently lump together as "brown people" also died in the September 11th attacks, that many "brown people" serve in the American armed forces, and that millions of "brown people" elsewhere in the world have equally good reasons for hating Osama bin Laden and his cronies. If anyone deserves the charge of "racism", it is the Taliban and its supporters in the mid-east, not us. For them, the present conflict isn’t between a small group of terrorists and the United States -- it’s a conflict between Islamic civilization and the entire culture of the West, a culture to which the protesters themselves belong and from which they benefit in obvious ways (how long do you suppose an anti-war movement would survive in Afghanistan?). By characterizing American retaliation for September 11 as "racist", the protesters are thus in some measure playing the terrorists’ game, converting what should be understood as a conflict between the United States and those who, for whatever reason, seek to do it harm, into a global culture war.

The protesters, however, are blinded to these realities by their hysterical, monomaniacal obsession with domestic cultural politics. As Chris Mooney remarked, writing from Washington for the American Prospect: "The protesters seem to have conflated isolated instances of hate crimes against Arab and Muslim Americans with the Bush administration’s ‘War on Terrorism’ -- this despite the fact that Bush has repeatedly denounced such violence and emphasized that we should not think of our current conflict as one between Islam and the ‘West’." No matter. For the evangelists of the new anti-war movement, the campaign in Afghanistan isn’t really about terrorism at all. It’s about evil white Europeans settling scores with "brown people" the world over, a category in which they generously include, not only Osama bin Laden, but Third World sweat shop workers, Wen Ho Lee, and Mumia Abu Jamal. Here, too, one suspects the protesters of an obscene fantasy to suffer what they so pointlessly condemn.

In the end, all of this is nothing more than a cynical attempt on the part of the protesters to graft the new anti-war movement onto the familiar politics of post-colonial, post-civil-rights resentment. That their grievances have no basis in reality doesn’t bother them in the least -- these people lost touch with reality years ago. Walking across campus last Friday, I came across a line of black clad figures with faces painted white to resemble human skulls. Each of them had a card hanging from their chest. The cards read, in order: "racism," "murder," "rape," "imperialism," "xenophobia." After three weeks of protests, even the grossest non sequitor has come to acquire an eerie logic. I immediately understood that the procession of death’s heads were there to protest the war that they, too, are convinced that, as one speaker last week put it, "the war has a nameless, faceless brown person as its target ... there’s a nameless, faceless brown enemy at home and abroad."

These are sentiments which have been repeated time and again at the rallies I’ve attended. On a Columbus Day (or, as the locals call it, "Indigenous People’s Day") rally here at Berkeley, a young Latino man informed the crowd that "the first terrorist attack was not September 11th, the first terrorist attack was when Christopher Columbus arrived in America." Two days later, a prominent member of the Berkeley chapter of La Raza ("The Race") -- a radical Latino lobby which has somehow managed in the past few years to masquerade as a legitimate political presence in Washington and Sacramento -- returned to the theme: "indigenous people have been oppressed for 500 years ... we are all now standing on stolen indigenous people’s land." The same day, a shy young Asian woman haltingly explained to us that American history is one long parade of "rape, murder, bombs, napalm, racism and xenophobic ignorance." In the confused minds of these protesters, America’s sin is original, total and enduring. Enough of this talk and one begins to seriously wonder whether, for them, America deserves to exist at all.

Confronted with such allies, the mainstream American Left is understandably beginning to wonder what it’s been doing wrong all these years. As Andrew Sullivan, senior editor of the New Republic, recently wrote, "In one atrocity, Osama bin Laden may have accomplished what a generation of conservative writers have failed to do: convince mainstream liberals of the illogic and nihilism of the powerful postmodern left." Closer to home, John Mecklin of the SF Weekly has drawn much the same conclusion with regards to the Berkeley protests. In a brilliant send up of the new anti-war movement, Mecklin presents his readers with a bogus "Homeland Security Agency" (HSA) report. The report, full of humorous but fundamentally accurate characterizations of the local radical scene, concludes with the recommendation, "leak HSA report to the press... idea-marketplace efficient at nonsense-shredding."

Respectable opinion on the Left, in short -- just as much as its counter-part on the Right -- recognizes that business as usual is not an option after September 11. As no less a figure than Christopher Hitchens wrote in a recent article for The Nation, "why not pay attention to what the cassettes and incantations of Al Qaeda actually demand: a holy war in which there are no civilians on the other side, only infidels, and a society of total aridity in which any concept of culture or the future has been eradicated?" By ignoring these inconvenient facts, those who subscribe to the aims of the new anti-war movement reveal their true colors. Unable to see current events except through the lens of domestic cultural politics, they choose, in the face of all reason, to nurse their absurd grievances.

We are right to abandon the new anti-war movement. A month of rallies has convinced me that the protesters are not interested in good reasons; that nothing you could tell them would persuade them to change their minds (if September 11th doesn't justify retaliation, what does?). But when your opponent rejects reason, reasoning with him becomes counter-productive.

And yet dismissing the protesters is easier than it sounds. On the one hand, the noises produced by the new anti-war movement are too absurd, too ill-informed and reactive, to be taken seriously. On the other hand, these noises are indicative of the deeper and more sinister fractures which have come to characterize American society over the past generation and are, to that extent, too serious to be ignored. "The war isn’t just outside this country," one of the protesters remarked last week, repeating a theme dear to the new anti-war movement, "the war is in this country, too." For once, they may be right.