About 90 protestors marched to Georgia Tech from Piedmont Park on Saturday in a show of opposition to possible war with Iran.
The Atlanta march was among more than 150 scheduled mobilizations in cities across the country to rally against going to war amid recent tensions in the Mideast.
“Every dollar spent (on war) is a dollar not spent (in the U.S.) on education, on health care, on childcare and on social programs,” said Claudia Andrade of the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition, an antiwar group and one of the march organizers.
Other organizations that helped organized the Atlanta march included Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition, American Friends Service Committee – South Region, Atlanta Friends Meeting, Georgia Detention Watch, International Action Center, #OutNowCoalition, KSUnited, Metro Atlanta Democratic Socialists of America and Housing Justice League.
Organizers said in a news release that they were joining with protesters in other cities because the Trump administration was "rapidly escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iran."
“We are still living in the aftermath of the war in Iraq — which not only saw the deaths of almost a million Iraqis, 4,500 US troops, and set off an endless ‘War on Terror’ — but also represented one of the largest transfers of wealth in Human history,” organizers said. “We simply can’t afford not to act.”
The march’s journey to the Georgia Tech Research Institute was done on purpose, officials said. They said the institute has received millions of dollars to research and improve the technologies of war.
The nonprofit institute's website says its efforts deal with "national security, economic development, and overall human betterment."
“We live in a global economy. Wars are no longer winnable … when our economies are so intimately linked,” said Tim Franzen, program director for the Atlanta Economic Justice Program for the American Friends Service Committee. “Wars would create instability. We also can’t afford to live in a world where nuclear annihilation is a possibility.”
More than 100 people turned out at a rally on a Saturday three weeks earlier in Atlanta to protest America's involvement in the Middle East and what they feared as the potential for war in the fallout over the Trump administration's drone strike that killed Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani.
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