Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW) was an organization that coordinated nonviolent direct action-based opposition activities to the 2003 invasion of Iraq in the San Francisco Bay Area. The organization was founded in October 2002 following an overnight sit-in and morning blockade at the San Francisco Federal Building following the U.S. Congress's authorization of the use of force against Iraq. Operating primarily through the use of affinity groups and a spokescouncil, it coordinated a mass effort by 5,000 to 20,000 people to disrupt business in the financial district of downtown San Francisco following the beginning of the war in March 2003. The organization persisted through 2004, coordinating a variety of local protests against corporations with ties to the war effort and sending hundreds of activists to protests in Cancun, Miami and New York.
The March 2003 San Francisco actions were the culmination of twenty years of urban direct action organizing. Beginning with the War Chest Tours of the early 1980s and continuing through the 1991 Gulf War and other occasions, direct activists developed the blockading and disruptive tactics that were used by thousands of protesters in opposition to the 2003 war on Iraq. The 1980s protests are documented with photos and narratives at DirectAction.org.
On Jan. 6, 2008, Direct Action to Stop the War was reconvened, with the goal of organizing several direct actions in the San Francisco Bay Area to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.
Famous quotes containing the words direct, action, stop and/or war:
“Pleasure is the rock which most young people split upon; they launch out with crowded sails in quest of it, but without a compass to direct their course, or reason sufficient to steer the vessel; for want of which, pain and shame, instead of pleasure, are the returns of their voyage.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.”
—Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
“The day people stop looking out for themselves first will be the end of the world.”
—Chinese proverb.
“We had won. Pimps got out of their polished cars and walked the streets of San Francisco only a little uneasy at the unusual exercise. Gamblers, ignoring their sensitive fingers, shook hands with shoeshine boys.... Beauticians spoke to the shipyard workers, who in turn spoke to the easy ladies.... I thought if war did not include killing, I’d like to see one every year. Something like a festival.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)