October 27th -- protest the war in San Francisco

The October 27th protest against the war in Iraq is just around the corner. We're hoping for a good showing of people from UC Berkeley. The Campus Antiwar Network is sponsoring a student contingent and everyone is more than welcome to join us.

Protesting the war has in recent years been considered a little passe (partly because people feel they don't do anything and partly because people feel that they are a kind of ritualized political theater of the left). But it has always seemed to me that this conclusion was based on people's raised expectations about protesting the war Iraq, namely, that protests were ALL that it would take to stop the war.

Protests have never been sufficient to stop any war. In the 1960s, there were of course substantial demonstrations, but a) they were happening all over the country, and not just in a few places every 6 months and b) they were only part of the resistance to the war time effort (which included, domestically, draft-dodging, counter-recruitment, sit-ins, etc. and internationally, importantly included the successful military tactics of the Vietnamese NLF).

But protests are necessary. They not only give people a chance to see what the anti-war movement looks like, they get to see what it is that the antiwar movement wants. We get an opportunity to meet and talk to other activists who have their own experiences of organizing successes and failures and we get to learn from them. And perhaps most importantly, they can definitely be a boost for morale in some trying times.