> Even at the time it caused some of the largest anti war protests in history
I often see this mentioned and I don't really get it. What did people actually do besides voicing their concerns and cozily waiting for the next election cycle?
Oh wow, people understood that their country is waging a war on the other side of the planet, hooray! What did they do about it exactly? Look at Assange's sorry state.
At least Russians had balls to burn some military enlightenment offices.
Western protests (except French, French are cool) are basically fun festivities.
What makes me cringe is the fact that people pose as this is some kind of a virtue. C'mon, these people live in an environment where protests are not only unrestricted, they are endorsed to some degree as a vent-out method that allows people to feel good about themselves, and governments to continue their bloody business, so people can simply excuse themselves on the next election cycle, while profiting from the spoils of war.
Lots of people, perhaps. But not enough. Or not enough media coverage to reach enough people.
I was there marching in DC and even my close friends and family (in suburban DC) seemed to be unaware of the protests. I thought, surely, with 100,000 people protesting in the city, Black Bloc hanging from streetlights, speeches from celebrities, Jesse Jackson, a former Defense Secretary, etc., that it would pop up on the local news. I never heard about it.
I think that was the last time a media "ignore" could be really effective. Today videos would be shared online. I read in the papers that people demonstrated, but the numbers were downplayed in the reporting IMHO. Someone should dig up some photos and compare with news articles from that time.
The idea is that the representatives of yours only do things against your wishes when they don't know what you wish for or you are in too tiny a minority for them to care. So, you make it clear what you want (or don't want) and get lots of people on board, especially ones that can influence even more people, and that causes you to be heard by the representatives, and then they (well, at least some of them) change their agendas to align with whatever it is you want (or don't want).
At least that's how I understand the idea.
It obviously doesn't always work, and in some cases simply cannot work. It does work sometimes, to an acceptable degree, but often it doesn't.
It's like gambling. You win a bit and you start overestimating your chances to win more. Here, too - you petition local authorities to put a speed limit on a road near an elementary school, you "win", the speed limit is introduced, and now you think you can do the same to influence the massive, incredibly complex system of hundreds of millions of people, the machine that's steamrolling through geopolitics and history full-speed ahead. Of course you can't - that's work for decades, generations, thousands of leaders, millions of supporters. But, nobody wants to put their whole life behind what they want (or don't want), sacrificing their well-being for uncertain result 40 years down the line. Nobody wants to be a Stallman - he reads web pages by sending an email to home server which cURL-downloads the page and sends it back to him to read... in lynx. How many people are willing to go through so much inconvenience just to state a point? And do so for decades?
So, instead, people go protest a bit, virtue-signal their discontent (or support) on social media, get into heated discussions at family events - and then go on with their lives.
The basic premise is good: people don't change their views easily, so to make a change, you need to exchange people. It's good on a local scale, but it totally breaks above that level, in multiple well-researched scenarios, most of which happen to currently, and concurrently, play out almost everywhere. Normally, we'd have a war - a serious war with tens of millions of casualties - that would cut off the bloat and really reset (though leveling it would take some work, given all the bomb craters) the playing field. We don't, and won't, because of nukes. I honestly have no idea what's next - I just hope that I'll die before the more dystopian future arrives.
