ANTIWAR MOVEMENT

Protest Matters

AT THE same time that UFPJ has been focusing on Congress and away from mass protest, there has also developed a sense among some activists that protests don’t matter. The idea is that we protested and it hasn’t worked, and that something else is needed.

There are two problems with this position. The first is that it is based on the idea that mass legal street protests are sufficient to end the war, whereas in reality they are no more than an important component of building an effective antiwar movement. The Vietnam War was ended by three interrelated struggles: the GI resistance (which led to the breakdown of the army in Vietnam); the Vietnamese resistance (another contributing factor to the breakdown of the army); and the mass protests, which took a myriad of forms, at home.

The second problem is that mass protests haven’t yet come close to the scale of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War. Measured against the movement to stop the U.S. war on Vietnam, the antiwar movement today is still in its infancy, in terms of both size and militancy.

Take the Vietnam Moratorium Days in 1969. On October 15, some 10 million people took part in local actions from coast to coast. In large cities, there were rallies of tens of thousands; on campuses, students wore peace armbands; and in a number of smaller towns, people read names of the war dead. A month later on November 15, Washington, D.C., was the site of the largest demonstration in U.S. history to that point—with somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000 antiwar protesters jammed around the Washington Monument for speeches that lasted throughout the day.

By early 1970, the level of protest climbed even higher in response to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, which sparked a student strike. In all, some 8 million students participated in the strikes; in May alone, some 1,350 colleges were affected.
In 2007, public opinion against the war on Iraq may run even higher than sentiment against the Vietnam War did in 1970—certainly George Bush’s approval rating is lower than Richard Nixon’s that year. Even without a big GI movement or the impact of a civil rights and Black Power struggle, Black enlistment has dropped from 41,185 in 2000 to 17,399 in 2005. The Boston Globe article that cited these numbers quoted one Black youth who said, “Why would we go over there and help them [Iraqis], when [the U.S. government] can’t help us over here?” He was referring to the Bush administration’s failure to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. This is encouraging considering the absence of high-profile protests like those of 1970.

But the tide of antiwar public opinion is having less direct impact on government policy today because that sentiment does not have a mass, organized expression. The problem isn’t that mass protests don’t work, but that today’s antiwar movement hasn’t risen to the challenge of mobilizing antiwar sentiment into mass protests.