-
I still don't understand why the national anti-war coalitions aren't listening to points being made by people like Yoshie. Why aren't they busing people to towns in the Midwest for national mobilizations?
[WS:] That is easy. Because it is an uphill battle, assured defeat and loss of resources. Anyone who thinks that it is possible to undo the small town mentality that took the life to form with a propaganda blitz should think twice.
For one thing, small-towners generally do no like outsiders coming to their towns and cause "trouble." It does not matter how those issues fall on a political spectrum in big cities or Washington, all that matter is that they are not local issues. Small-towners do not like to be used as pawns in some outsider's game. They already feel that they have been such pawns in the hands of big business, big government, big politics and what not all their lives. They do not want any more of that, especially outside agitators telling them what to do and think. It is insulting their dignity.
Being determines consciousness. Individual consciousness is shaped by social conditions surrounding individuals. Look at social conditions in small towns: relative isolation from the "rest of the world," a relatively narrow range of conventional roles and expectations available to individuals, a relatively narrow range of economic opportunities, a relatively rigid social structure, the relatively high level of social integration and the conformity it creates, the relative lack of anonymity, the heavy exposure to religious and patriotic propaganda unbalanced by any 'outside' influence, the lack of cultural variety and limited access to cultural resources, the relatively low social status vis a vis outsiders. Such conditions (aptly dubbed rural idiocy* by the Old Man) produce consciousness that emphasizes conformity to conventional norms, social roles, and expectations, including conventional opportunities for personal advancement, group solidarity and loyalty which easily translate into patriotism and ethnocentrism, distrust toward outsiders, and futility of dissents.
Anyone who thinks that such consciousness formed throughout the life time by social and material conditions can be undone by a few outside agitators is simply unrealistic. It is much easier to take a person out of a Podunk, than taking a Podunk out of a person. This is why the powers that be can count on a steady supply of cannon fodder from such places, and why moral appeals by outside agitators will generally fall on deaf ears there. This is true not just of the US, but virtually any other place in the world.
Changing that requires much more than moral appeals and PR campaigns, it requires taking the Podunk mentality out of a person, first by taking a person out of the Podunk, and second by integrating that person into a new social structure creating a new consciousness. Industrial capitalism did that, socialism did that, the military has been doing that. The agitators will never do that.
Wojtek
*) "The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West." _Communist Manifesto_ ,chapter 1.