Amir Amirani’s film, We Are Many, which takes its title from British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1832 “The Masque of Anarchy,” chronicles global demonstrations in 2003 against the then-impending Iraq War. Although it was made in 2014, the documentary is seeing the light of day now because, according to its publicist: “The film has never had a proper release, so it is not technically a re-release. It did a one week qualifying run [for Academy Award consideration] in [Los Angeles], but never opened beyond that.”
As we experience another wave of mass protests today, We Are Many remains inspiring and relevant.
Given the current surge in Black Lives Matter and anti-Trump protests, We Are Many is more timely than ever. Amir Amirani’s 110-minute nonfiction production focuses on February 15, 2003, when millions of people in 789 cities in seventy-two countries took to the streets to oppose the looming attack on Iraq. The filmmakers call this international outpouring “the largest demonstration in human history.” They reveal “the never-before-told story” about this unprecedented planetary mass mobilization and how “the movement created by a small band of activists changed the world.”
Amirani, who has shot documentaries for BBC and PBS, artfully intercuts a well-spoken cast of commentators with the abundant existing archival footage and news clips that recorded the lead up to the Iraq War, opposition to it, and the aftermath of this mass resistance.
The film’s prominent American talking heads include civil rights icon the Reverend Jesse Jackson, author Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, the late anti-Vietnam War legend Tom Hayden, CodePink’s Medea Benjamin, Born on the Fourth of July author and Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, philosopher Noam Chomsky, director Robert Greenwald, and actor/activist Danny Glover.
The overseas opposition speakers include English Oscar-winner Mark Rylance, longtime British Labour Party Member of Parliament and chairman of the Stop the War Coalition Tony Benn, ex-Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, musician Brian Eno, espionage novelist John le Carré, Egyptian journalist and member of the Revolutionary Socialists Hossam el-Hamalawy, and Sweden’s Dr. Hans Blix, who headed the United Nations’ weapons inspection team.
Prime Minister Tony Blair and most of his cabinet of warmongers declined to face Amirani’s camera, but Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short, who resigned from Blair’s cabinet to oppose the invasion of Iraq, does appear. President George W. Bush and Blair are shown spewing endless lies about Saddam’s supposed “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” with Blair warning ominously that Iraq could launch a WMD attack within forty-five minutes.
Secretary of State Colin Powell lies to the United Nations Security Council about Saddam’s chemical warfare capability—despite the fact that the United Nations’ inspection team kept coming up empty handed in the search for Iraq’s alleged WMD stockpiles. Powell’s Oscar-caliber performance came to be widely regarded as a “stain” on his record—bloodstain might be more like it.
We Are Many includes glorious scenes of masses of ordinary folks marching and rallying against the then-threatened waging of unprovoked war against an Iraq that wasn’t WMD-armed and had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks.
The globetrotting film follows the mobilizations of February 15, 2003, starting in the South Pacific in New Zealand and Australia, where amateur activists (not trained Greenpeace or antifa cadre types) heroically ascend Sydney’s Opera House, painting “No War” on the white, sail-shaped structure in large red letters (earning prison time and fines for their bold efforts). Even Antarctica gets into the act, with seventy people forming themselves into a giant peace symbol on the ice near the South Pole’s McMurdo Station (resulting in a scientist’s expulsion).
Like gladiators for peace, marchers pass the Roman Coliseum and, according to the film, up to five million people demonstrate in Spain, making it the largest single protest in Spanish history. As the Iranian-born Amirani grew up in England and attended Cambridge, his documentary is London- and New York-centric. Reportedly 1.5 million Brits express their opposition to the war, and hours later, throngs also filled Manhattan to register their displeasure.
The film depicts the widespread optimism following these massive outpourings for peace, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, whose leaders spearheaded the calls for war, accompanied by the drumbeat of disinformation pounded by a bellicose press, from Fox News to The New York Times and Fleet Street. The mood gives rise to hope that elected leaders will have no choice but to heed their people. So when Bush and Blair launched the “shock and awe” bombing only about a month after the largest one-day protest in human history, the antiwar movement reels.
We Are Many does more than merely chronicle that historic day of dissent—it puts the campaign and cause into historical context. As the Iraq blitz begins, while the will of the people is ignored, activists wonder whether or not they actually live in democracies after all.
The film goes on to argue that, by 2010, the Middle East’s limited 2003 demonstrations paved the way for the Arab Spring (especially at Cairo’s Tahrir Square, toppling pro-U.S. puppet Hosni Mubarak) and put pressure on Cameron’s U.K. government to vote against escalating military intervention in Syria in 2015. Across the pond in Washington, President Barack Obama asked Congress to vote on authorizing intervention, which it did not do.
During these scenes, future Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry—who had both cravenly voted for the Iraq Resolution authorizing military force in October 2002 while they were in the Senate—appear. So does the singularly heroic Medea Benjamin, who sounds like an avenging wraith, disrupting Congressional hearings, and later assailing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a function, screaming at the top of her lungs that he’s a “WAR CRIMINAL!!!” who should be “arrested.”
In another well-edited, evocative scene at a U.S. demo, Iraq War veterans toss their military medals away. While their decorations are thrown, the film cuts to shock and awe explosions in Iraq. As we experience another wave of mass protests today, We Are Many remains inspiring and relevant. Contemporary organizers fighting against police brutality, and the policies of Donald Trump and others, have much to learn from the 2003 activists who mobilized globally for peace on a day that shook the entire world.
This not-to-be-missed documentary premieres on International Peace Day, September 21, at 5 p.m. PST and 8 p.m. EST, followed by a panel conversation. We Are Many opens in virtual theaters on September 25.