Prosthetic Conscience

Turning Around the Antiwar Movement

Marc D. Joffe wrote Turning around the Antiwar Movement on AntiWar.com.

I agree with a lot of what he says: the antiwar movement /is/ failing to achieve its goals. This is right on the money:

If you organize a vigil that is attended by a handful of people and is noticed by no one who can change the situation, you have made yourself feel better, but you haven’t meaningfully contributed to the prospects for peace. If you host a low-traffic Web site or post to a rarely visited blog that preaches only to the converted, you have also failed to move the dial.

On the other hand, I think his solution, bigger and better-planned versions of the same kind of events are also not likely to achieve success. Permitted marches, vigils, and similar demonstrations are such a standard part of the political landscape today that even when visible (and they are often made invisible by the corporate news media), they are unlikely to affect the opinions of either the public or the power elites, no matter how large they are. Different tactics are going to have to be developed, but I have no idea what those could be. They must be non-violent but non-ignorable; that’s a hard combination to create.

I’m basically in agreement with him about ANSWER and MoveOn, though ANSWER is not as important here in the east as it apparently is in the west. Here the problem is with UFPJ, which has a lot of the problems that Mr. Joffe points out with regard to MoveOn: excessive timidity, and excessive attachment to the Democratic Party.

I wrote a bit more than this, but I’ve cut it back… too much in the way of meandering thoughts on tactics without any really good suggestions.

[ Posted: 21:36] | [ Category: /politics] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]