John Bizwas wrote:
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> 3. Carrol's position is strong on some grounds, which he has already defended. It is, however, weak on how demands OUT NOW can be translated into political and social reality in the US. We might as well be screaming OUT NOW at the top of a mountain right now.
I agree. To a great extent, of course, it depends on how durable the Iraqi resistance is. It was not, after all, the anti-war movement that was _primarily_ responsible for getting the u.s. out of Vietnam; it was the capacity of the Vietnamese peasantry to endure and fight back. And except in the context formed by the black liberation movement, the anti-war movement might not have amounted to much. That context severely limited the repressive power of the state.
But the resistance _did_ count for something; we probably prevented the u.s. from using nuclear weapons or from expanding the war to China. And part at least of the threat we presented was that of continuing radicalization of further sectors of the population. We can present that threat again -- perhaps (!). Part of what is frightening to policy makers about even 10s of thousands (let alone hundreds of thousands) of demonstrators in Washington is that each one of those demonstrators represents group conversations and other forms of outreach going on in the locales those demonstrators come from. And those conversations include (just for instance) discussion of how the local anti-war group can lend its weight to the local struggle for a living wage ordinance. And so on.
And even screaming Out Now from a fairly lonely street corner is a start. :-)
Carrol