how come when we had tens of millions of people peacefully protesting the war.....

...and the bush admin, we couldn't get the chimp to come on tv and talk about stepping down? what were we doing wrong?

our demonstrations were carefully controlled weekend strolls, theirs are general strikes.

....while there were some constant vigils, our protests were largely short. we needed to fill the DC streets and stay put.

n/t

stayed on the approved routes, and generally were way the hell too nice. Mass, nonvilent civil disobedience was what was needed - Egypt and Tunisia, MLK and Ghandi before them have shown us the way.

...wasn't on our side.

and counting.

we were pissed off, but we didn't have the desperation that the egyptians have. we won't home to our big screen TVs and SUVs and crap every night.

I had a job, and rent to pay. Never owned an SUV.

Were you at those protests? Why did you go home?

...I was generalizing and talking about joe 6-pack, not about you or me.

I went to every protest in Austin and Houston when I lived in those places.....I went home for the same reasons as you. Like I said, we were not as desperate as the egyptians.

Oh and also, how many deaths are you willing to take?

....do you think bushco would have budged?

We're mounting a death toll every day from lack of healthcare in this country, and our 'betters' aren't doing a damn thing.

these would not be.

Alas Americans are NOT hungry or desperate enough.. so far we are doing navel grazing. Go ahead, ask your neighbors, do an informal poll... how many of them actually know there is a small revolution afoot.

have all been useless, then why this thread?

And the protests are going nonstop.

Over 10,000,000 people would need to show up in D.C. and the protests would have to be continuous in order to destabilize the government.

...but we were decentralized and our protests weren't long lasting enough.

god, I hate hate hate revisionist history.

It makes me laugh.

protesting the war back then. Nostalgia and self-deception are a poisonous combination.

tens of millions ... HEH
sorri .. but heh

i live in costa rica now.

no military here.

http://www.answercoalition.org/sf/index.html

They're doing it in San Francisco, anyway.

right after I read the thread about the MSM reporting that only 250,000 showed up in Cairo. Seems like the bullshit flows from both sides.

Tens of millions overstates it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_15,_2003_anti-war_protest

The fatal flaw of the anti-war protests was a lot of people seemed to think that going to a demonstration was going to stop the invasion. There needed to be the kind of old-school, massive, sustained direct action if we had really wanted to throw sand in the cogs of the machine.

Those protestors didn't want the war, but they were not interested in Bush stepping down or in changing the government itself to a different form.

barrage of propaganda, the numbers were turned around. Colin Powell did his part, too, using his (wholly undeserved) good reputation to back the lies.

It was a worldwide protest. If we'd had tens of millions marching on the White House, that would be a different story. Probably a story filled with teargas and rubber bullets.

That was the Global Day of Protest, which had been promoted in activist circles around the globe for weeks leading up to the protest day. This is officially recorded by Guiness as the largest anti war rally in all of human history, and involved around 3-10 million people (depending on the numbers you believe).

In the United States, protests took place in about 225 cities and towns. Even using the self-reported head counts of the organizers themselves, total turnout nationwide was somewhere around 1 million people. That's 1/300th of the U.S. population.

The protests themselves were innefectual anyway. Not only did the protesters all go home at the end of the day, but they pulled permits and protested in exactly the way the government ordered them to. When the city of New York told protesters that they could protest in place, but could not march, they dutifully obeyed. When they were told to clear the streets, they cleared the streets.

Americans protest, but we don't DEFY. That's the difference. When the governments of Egypt and Tunisia told their people to go home, the people refused. When they threatened them with arrest, the protesters ignored them. When the governments started shooting, the protests simply swelled in size and ferocity. The people would not be dissuaded from their goals.

Americans don't do this. We keep our protests on the sidewalks, confined to the routes and free speech zones approved by the government, and dutifully obey every order the PTB give us. While protesters elsewhere in the world hurl rocks and firebombs, and charge police barricades, we play with giant puppets and get sidetracked with Mumia whine-fests. I attended a planning meeting for an anti-war protest in the SF Bay Area in 2005(?), and the biggest concern for the organizers at the meeting was whether they would have enough PORTA POTTIES to comply with their permit. Seriously.

Americans are sheep.

Permits. When I look back on it I laugh.

Chained myself across a road with a bunch of other people. We had to endure direct threats from angry loggers ("We can dump your hippie bodies in parts of these woods where nobody will find them"), police brutality (pepper spray administered into the eyes of nonviolent protesters), and threats of long prison terms. We had no permits, and were flat-out breaking the law.

I was only 16 at the time.

The Redwood Summer protests had a fire that was completely missing from the Iraq War protests. They weren't a social gathering, or a "chance to vent frustration", or a "symbol to the world that we don't all agree". The Redwood Summer protests were an open rebellion and wide scale series of civil disobedience actions that were designed to FORCE the government and corporations to stop doing what they were doing. We didn't just let them know that we disagreed, we got in their way and STOPPED them. AND WE WON. The Hole is now a park, and is protected forever. The logging industry has been chased out of the NorCal redwood groves. We had an actual, immediate impact because we walked in there and said "screw the law, we're ending this". People had been ineffectually protesting this logging for DECADES without impact, but one summer of direct action ended it forever.

That fire, and that willingness to do whatever it took to accomplish our goals, was completely missing from the anti-war movement this time around. It was all light and no heat.

I went home after that first planning meeting and didn't bother with them again. If you're asking permission, you're not protesting.

I remember that very well. Amazing direct action that got results. Thank you for participating in that. :applause:

"That fire, and that willingness to do whatever it took to accomplish our goals, was completely missing from the anti-war movement this time around. It was all light and no heat."

Agreed. Tere was such a puch to keep everything utterly civilized, no not give the media anything to focus on thatwould make the movement look "bad" Hell, even here on DU there were folks complaining that many of the protestors looked too much like old hippies or weren't clean looking enough, even suggestions that the men should be wearing suits. Sorry, but fuck that! :puke:

The only time we made real news here in SF was the day the war Iraq war started and we shut down traffic in the center of the City. If we had done that from the very beginning, done massive civil disobedience every fucking day of the week for as long as it took, things may -- MAY - have turned out a bit different.

I am looking to the Egypt protests for inspiration for our own future.

It seemed to be a distraction from the main objective.

correctly.

There weren't millions but their were thousands. Our 'liberal' media has barely covered any of the anti-war protests I've seen/been in. Ever.

I also agree most people really did support going to war. I mean if people won't stand up against it in any way, they they're really behind it, I mean that's what their taxes are buying.

majority of americans, including all those democrats in the house and senate seem to love the idea of constant war. They were rubber stamping just about everything the military was up to, and still are, at this very minute.
10's of millions? I think what you really mean is "a small circle of friends."
dc

never tens of millions in the street.

Everyone goes back home when it gets dark and resumes normal programming......