Posted on 02/25/2003 5:54:48 AM PST by veronica
Two rules of thumb for protest rallies: Always claim a crowd 200,000 or so larger than any reasonable estimate and always insist your demonstrators are all ordinary middle-class folk.
The sponsors of New York's Feb. 15 anti-war rally claimed a crowd of 375,000 to 500,000, but it was surely far less. The Washington Post said "at least 100,000." The police commissioner thought it was about 100,000. By Manhattan standards, this is not a big number. When Paul Simon sang in Central Park, 750,000 people came.
Maybe a million or so Americans turned out nationally to protest the war, compared with 6million who showed up over the weekend to watch Ben Affleck in "Daredevil" and 50 million who went to church Sunday. For such small numbers, the "peace" movement got a publicity bonanza. Whatever the numbers, the demonstrations were depicted in the media as so significant - taken with the larger and heavily anti-American rallies in Europe - that President Bush had better pay attention and change course.
One newspaper headline said "Anti-War Protesters Fail to Sway Bush on Plans for Iraq." Gosh, how stubborn can he be? Comments by news anchors and letters to the editor expressed surprise Bush failed to alter course when he learned that .5% of Americans had taken to the streets for a couple of hours.
The media also fulfilled the organizers' deepest hopes by depicting the protest as a festival of soccer moms. Success depended on this because of the presence of Stalinists, Leninists and Maoists among the key organizers.
The sponsor of the New York rally was the umbrella group United for Peace and Justice, which can be described as the crazy far left on its best behavior. It comes on as moderate enough to attract the churches and groups such as Greenpeace. Its real function may be to deflect attention from the real power in the anti-war movement, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, which doesn't bother to look moderate. ANSWER is a front group for the hard-left International Action Center, which is a front group for the Workers World Party, an old-line Stalinist group with legendary organizing skills.
The hottest debate on the far-far-left is whether weapons inspections in Iraq should go on forever or whether they are illegitimate acts of war that must stop at once. The latter notion is favored by ANSWER and Ramsey Clark, the addled former attorney general who defends Serb ex-dictator Slobodan Milosevic, says the U.S. has already launched genocide in Iraq and argues that Jesus Christ was a terrorist.
If anti-war demonstrations were being organized by a tobacco company or the Augusta National Golf Club, the liberal establishment would erupt in screams of protest. No screaming now, though. These sponsors are just off-the-wall loonies and Stalinist front groups.
Coverage of Feb. 15 gave us conventional soccer-mom reporting, focused on ordinary Americans, preferably Republicans, veterans and people who had never marched before. The media and organizers' Web sites featured photos of kids and "give-peace-a-chance" demonstrators.
But if you poke around the Internet, you can turn up different messages at the New York rally: the ritual scorn for "Amerika," "Queer Resistance for Palestine," hammer-and-sickle flags, pictures of Che Guevara and the predictable images of President Bush as Adolf Hitler.
Many anti-war people understand the problem of relying so heavily on the Stalinists. They say little, but they wonder whether the soccer moms will crowd out the Stalinists or whether the dangerous hard left is taking over the "peace" movement entirely.
Good question.
Billions stayed home.
Nuff said.
"The protests in Europe (including London - supposed bulwark of support for the war movement) were clear evidence that war is NOT seen as an immediate requirement by a large number of people."
War is NOT seen as an immediate requirement by a large number of people because they have not yet been a target. Polls, including internal polls conducted by the WH, show what the American people are really thinking. Don't know about Europe, but the liberal San Francisco Chronicle was able to show that the SF 200,000 turnout was really only 65,000.
link:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/850283/posts
bump.
I don't understand why anyone would want to be a communist.
Good question.
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