Without a photo from the air, like this, http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/10/1653683.php and a grid that is then extrapolated, it's all guesswork based on adding up how many came on the Kim Il Sung Bus Co. and such. Whatever, it was in D.C. it certainly wasn't 100K like the e-mail from ANSWER and IAC said. When that was posted on leftist_trainspotters at yahoggroups.com last night, even the Euro-Maoists and Hoxhaiites hooted, "The Becker Brothers are crazy! Who do they think they're fooling?"
As for Carrol's neo-Stalinoid splittist BS, his logic right out of some dusty pamphlet of the CPUSA like, "Trotskyite Fifth Column In the Labor Movement, " by George Morris or, "Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution In Disguise, " by M.J. Olgin, the WWP when they supported tanks in '56 in Budapest, '68 in Prague and '89 in Beijing, AGAINST communist and socialist workers and students, were being OBJECTIVELY anti-communist. There once was a New Left against such retrograde 'tudes of the Carrolists of the movement. There needs to be another one.
The marches after the the US Army invaded have been smaller by a factor of at least 2, when given the trendlines/balance of ideological forces as reflected in polling data, letters to the editor and elite ruling class disquiet in fora like the CFR and op-eds in the NYT and such, we should be getting bigger. The only new forces of any significance are the MFSO and Bring Them Home Now military families, for which folks like Stan Goff deserve alot of credit, not the sheeit he gets on marxmail. When I think of bringing my left-liberal Unitarian sister with her 60's draft dodging boyfriend who was active w/ the anti-nuclear movement in the 70's or my liberal Democrat Mom who voted for Camejo, to a IAC/ANSWER/WWP demo in L.A., and then think of all the 'splaining I'd have to do about the speeches from the stage and the newspapers we'd be handed, when I'm already regarded as the smart kid one inch from having the politics of Mark Rudd in '68, I think, aw just rent a good video like, "Hearts and Minds, ", or the "The Battle of Chile, " instead.
-- Michael Pugliese