Covering Dissent Re: B-52 Bombers, a Long Time Ago...

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Thu Jan 3 21:01:51 PST 2002


Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> As even the largest anti-war mobilizations only
> involved a minority of Americans, it makes sense, given the character
> of media coverage, that "the message" -- beyond No! -- never reached
> those who only saw them on TV, read about them in newspapers, etc.
>

This is the premise one begins with in organizing resistance to any state policy. The message in written form will NEVER get out to any large number of people. That is why the endless maunderings on this and other lists concerning "how to reach people" are so incredibly amateurish: they simply won't realize that their wonderful rhetoric might as well be muttered into their pillow at night.

Demonstrations alert people to the fact that resistance exists.

They enhance the morale of the demonstrators.

In the process of planning and recruiting for the demonstrations the demonstrators educate themselves (and reach those who already more or less agree with them but don't realize it or are too isolated to dare express it).

And then people TALK -- get it, strictly oral, small groups of two or three or four -- and that enlarges and gives depth to the movement. And not only do the demonstrations get larger (and probably more militant*)but there is a growing core of people who have become educated within the activity to a higher level of consciousness, and this fact itself begans to scare those in power. (And the discipline, militancy, and size of the demonstrations is to some extent an index to the growth and sophistication of this core.)

And this is all based on saying NO and creating a visible center of attraction. More than NO has to occur INSIDE the movement.

Max and Nathan and Doug and Dennis R and all the others who worry about "attracting" people and "not preaching to the choir" will in fact spend their whole lives writing only for people who already agree with them. It is only by consciously focusing on those who (more or less) already agree that one will ever even begin to reach, indirectly, those who don't yet agree.

The people (whether one sees them as working class or multitude) don't sit in classrooms and don't read more than the first three paragraphs of newspaper articles. They never learn of the existence of those who want to "reach them" except through personal contact with activists. It is the activists the actual organizing reaches, or rather, the activists who don't know yet they are activists.

Carrol

*Note to those who were too focused on the militncy of the "Anti-globalization" demonstrations. The demonstrations have to _become_ more militant. Those demonstrations in Seattle and Genoa and Quebec in themsellves were absolutely nothing. And by raising the level of miltancy too high to begin with they made more difficult the essential task of consistently raising the level. The crucial thing is not to stop a given meeting of the enemy but to raise the the political level of those involved in the organizing -- and to remember that those who help recruit locally are almost more important than those who go to the demonstrations. Those who go are important only if they come back home primed to build slowly for the next level.



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