[Marxism] Disjunction between antiwar sentiment and size of protest

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis:

Last time I posted to Marxmail from Comcast I got the endless sentence 
effect. Could you please cut and paste the below post so that it appears 
readably the first time around? Thanks, David

----

There have been two gigantic demonstrations or waves of demonstrations 
in the last five years. One was the series of antiwar demonstrations 
that culminated in February 15th around the world. The second was the 
series of demonstrations organized against the Sensenbrenner bill on 
immigration rights that wound up with a demonstration of more than one 
million, possibly 2 million in Los Angeles and historically gigantic 
marches in other centers of Hispanic population in the US.

One feature of both these demonstrations jumps out: they were seen as a 
part of actual real political life by the masses.  Masses of people 
marched as a response to immediate threats; to go from No War to War, 
and to go from shitty immigration law to absolutely catastrophic 
immigration law. In both cases, they were repsonding to what they viewed 
as mainstream leadership. Joaquin has recalled the national character of 
the immigration marches in detail, but it was equally true of Feb 15th 
that mainstream sectors, including for instance newspapers like the 
Portland Oregonian, backed the march or at least publicized it, in the 
case of the Oregonian with a front page above-the-fold article a couple 
days before the march.

Both these demonstrations also exhibited another feature: they built on 
prior, smaller but nevertheless amazingly large demonstrations. In 
Seattle, October 6 was 10,000 people; October 26 was similar; the Martin 
Luther King Celebration Committee's annual march on MLK Day took on an 
official antiwar stance and slogan and drew 15,000 in the rain, about 
3-5 times its usual size.

People felt, really felt, that they could influence the course of world 
events with their puny bodies, and they did. The Sensenbrenner bill went 
away. True, immigrants have suffered abysmally from the depredations of 
the US government in the wake of the pro-immigration demonstrations, but 
the government has to this day been enable to solve the immigration 
question to their satisfaction and is resorting to ad-hoc administrative 
measures. Bad as this is, and it is very bad,  at least the undocumented 
among us have not been felonized across the board.

In the case of Feb 15th, rather than slowing down the war, the demo 
actually accelerated it. That happened, in my view, because the 
government felt compelled to answer the worldwide upsurge in antiwar 
sentiment with the fact of an actual war on the ground. The US was 
forced, FORCED, to invade Iraq from one direction only, the south, 
because it failed to get permission from Turkey for an entire armored 
division to pass through that country on its way to northern Iraq. Those 
soldiers would up floating around the Mediterranean Ocean while Iraq was 
being invaded, and had to wait several months to get into line to drive 
into Iraq through Kuwait. I argue therefore that the existence of a 
nearly independent Kurdistan today is a function of the HASTE of the 
beginning of the war. In general, up until the moment of the invasion, 
the US was in fact losing the propaganda battle for the war, in large 
part because the ever-increasing size of the demonstrations emboldened 
people into thinking they could actually stop it altogether.

In addition to that, people may remember that the promised Shock and Awe 
month-long bombing of Iraq to soften it up (destroy it) did not happen. 
Instead, ground forces essentially led the invasion with NO Shock and 
Awe. I believe the reason for this is that the US needed troops on the 
ground and therefore IN HARM'S WAY to silence the protests. A month of 
no-danger bombing of Iraq from the sky would have even further enraged 
the aroused world and the US government decided to invade immediately to 
change the nature of the discussion to focus on "Our Valiant Fighters" 
rather than have the world's tv screen fill up with pictures of 
bombed-out Iraq. This led to the ill-prepared taking of Baghdad, the 
US's inability to defend what it had seized, the failure to deploy 
military police, and jump-started the insurgency as the Iraqi's joy at 
getting rid of Saddam turned to ashes along with 5,000 years of their 
cultural heritage.

In a way, my comments are a fleshing-out of Carrol Cox's points. None of 
the leaderships of the antiwar demonstrations before the beginning of 
the Iraq War did more than provide a platform that was appropriated by 
the gigantic sentiment against the war among the people that demanded a 
form of expression. That is why the actual political content of the 
various demonstrations, whether led by NION (RCP), ANSWER (WWP) of 
UFPJ(DP/CP) had nothing to do with the size of the response of the 
populace, although each of the groups decided, hilariously, that the 
turnouts validated their approach, and that everyone else was a traitor 
to communism or liberalism, as they case may be.

What is interesting, however, is that the pressure of the masses did 
force unity among the groups. Feb 15th, so far as I know, was endorsed 
and built by every group. It was a very fragile unity, one that did not 
survive the beginning of the war.

All this had made me wonder if perhaps, during the Vietnam War, is was 
the movement that straightened out the SWP's politics and not the other 
way round. Did the SWP BRING good politics to the antiwar movement, or 
did the antiwar movement IMPOSE good politics on the SWP? Having been a 
mere student and counter-cultural guy at the time, I have no data to 
back up an opinion one way or the other. But I wonder.

David McDonald

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