Michael Hoover wrote:
>
> doesn't matter how many people attended, it really doesn't, lbosters
> carping about turnout is one indication that it doesn't matter, folks
> who are ostensibly on the same side make issue of such things when they
> are powerless, larger turnout is *better* than smaller turnout, but
> better is relative/situational/contextual, so 300,000 (or 150,000 or
> 450,000) would be prefereable to 30,000 (or 15,000 or 45,000), but the
> number the other day - whatever it was - will neither contribute to nor
> detract from existing anti-war sentiment (there ain't a movement at
> present)... mh
This seems important to me.
Let's start with the last point: there ain't a movement at present. This is related to the point I have made frequently for quite a few years: There ain't A Left at present. There are anti-war activists and local groups. There are local leftists and leftist groups. They don't jell, and even collectively they exercise no even partial hegemony over the rather large mass of u.s. residents who are in one way or another or to varying degrees sympathetic to the general principles that might unify and inspirit an anti-war movement or even A (resurgent) Left.
Such a resurgence has always in the past happened, to begin with, behind the backs of current local, regional, and national leadership. That's noting against those leaders -- it can't be otherwise because the stimuli that lead to resurgence can't be predicted. (Leaders of the left, incidentally, are _always_ self-nominated. Carpers at the margins complain about "self-elected" leaders, but there are no self-elected leaders, there never have been, there never will be. There _must_ be self-nominated leaders for otherwise there will be no leaders or movement at all.)
The big demos are a highly useful feedback to local organizers as to the political 'temperature' of the nation; they do _not_, except sometimes at the climax of a hugely growing movement, have any influence on the decision makers in Washington. The November 69 Moratorium perhaps stopped a nuclear war, but that was against the background, precisely, of over a decade of growing popular activity in the civil rights movement, in innumerable marginal movements, in urban riots, and in the anti-war movement itself. I don't remember how many we had in a March in Chicago in 1965 (66?) -- but I do know two things: (1) the importance of that march was wholly the impact it had on the marchers themselves and their subsequent activity; (2) without many such marches and rallies (some with only a few dozen participants) there would have been no '69 moratorium nor would the warmakers have paid any attention to it.
As a result of the New York March there will be a few dozen or a few hundred more determined local organizers. How many more we will never know, but that is the number, not the number in the streets Saturday, that really counts.
Carrol