<div>On 4/15/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <<a href="mailto:critical.montages@gmail.com">critical.montages@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Jerry wrote: "For those of us who wish to prevent atrocities, as planned or threatened by the Bush regime, the conclusion is the same in either case: organization against the atrocities, protest, education." What's the content of "education," though? A great disparity in American sentiments -- (now finally!) against the Iraq War but solidly behind the Iran sanctions -- indicates that education provided by anti-war activists, organizers, and intellectuals either have been off the mark or have not spread wide enough or have not sunk deep enough (in all likelihood all three at the same time, different currents of anti-war organizing committing different errors). </blockquote><div>  </div> </div>Yoshie, I have so say that I don't quite understand your point.  You seem to think that "education" is the same as what "liberals" want.  There have been huge protests against the war since the beginning.  Before the war I saw polls that said that 30% of the U.S. people opposed the war.  That is a critical mass and what we lacked was organization, institutions, and the spread of education.  My only response is the same, educate and organize.  Do I have to educate so many on this list who already know the problems?  I don't think so I will just quote Chomsky on East Timor, who said it better than I have said it.  "The U.S. government will do something positive—more accurately, it will stop doing something horribly negative—with regard to East Timor only if public pressure  raises the social costs of continuing to abet the massacre. "The strategy, then, for those who wish to change U.S. policy on East Timor is the same as for those who want to change U.S. policy more generally. U.S. elites respond not to moral persuasion but, instead, to a calculus of interests. When one wants to influence their choices, therefore, it is necessary to create conditions that change the calculus they confront. The only way to do that is to raise consciousness of true conditions and organize dissent that threatens things they hold dear. If pursuing or permitting genocidal activity in Timor strengthens elite positions and enriches their coffers, and if there is no offsetting cost to the behavior, it will continue. If popular activism threatens business as usual, if it threatens to grow, and not only address Timor, but the basic institutions behind events like these—that is a real and dangerous cost that elites very well understand. "So what does a morally concerned person do? Try to become knowledgeable, try to educate others, try to facilitate efforts to make dissent visible—whether financially, via donations to worthy projects and institutions, or with one's time and labors given to organizing. It is the same answer for Timor as for Kosovo as for the Gulf War as for Nicaragua as for Vietnam. It is the same answer for foreign policy pursuits as it is for trying to win strikes against corporations, reverse NAFTA, and preserve affirmative action (or win it in the first place). To impact elites it is necessary to raise social costs  so high that elites have no choice but to relent." With every single social movement, since I have been involved it has been the same. It was the same with the anti-Slavery movement, the workers movement, the civil rights movement.  In fact it was the same in ancient Athens and Rome. I have spent the last year or so researching a book on Roman and Athenian Law and often I have come across social movements against rulers and elites that sometimes won and sometimes lost.  The general form of these movements were people trying to educate themselves and convincing others.  There are reasons to be more pessimistic today than in the past.  For instance, humanity can easily destroy much of the world we live in.  But the methods of changing the world are basically the same for those of us who care. -- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture <a href="http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/">http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/</a> His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/">http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/</a> Notes, Quotes, Images - >From some of my reading and browsing <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/">http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/</a>