Sorry for the lack of posts these past couple of days: Palau had to take a leave of absence to take care of some personal shit, which left me to feed and entertain three and a half cats all by myself. the half cat is the one which supposedly belongs to our next door neigbour but one, but who spents a lot of time being fed and watered by us. And one of those cats, pictured above is very demanding and very clever, gets bored easily and would’ve attempted to conquer the world already if it were not for the lack of opposable thumbs. she recently discovered the little people who live in the telly so now we can’t watch anything anymore without her trying to kill them.
What I would like to try today, and which may end in total embarassement, is to ask all you fine people who read this blog what they think happened back in 2003 that made the war on Iraq happen despite a majority of people worldwide being opposed to it. What should we have done differently, or was there nothing we could’ve done to stop it. If the latter, would it at least have been possible to stop the UK from participating, or was that never possible with Blair as prime minister?
Andy Newham of the Socialist Unity blog believes the war could’ve been stopped if the anti-war movement had concentrated on the day of the parliamentary vote as the trigger for direct action and on pressuring the MPs. He has a point, but what do you think?
Martin Wisse
March 4, 2008 at 6:09 amAs for myself, I think that the anti-war movement was very good at two things: 1) informing people about the realities of the coming war and the lies told to get us into it, something that the mainstream media significantly failed to do and 2) mobilising people for the big demos. What went wrong is that after the worldwide demonstrations, when it became clear the media was ignoring or belittling us and the US, UK and other governments who wanted this war had not been swayed, nobody knew what to do. It was as if the gap between mobilisation and real action was too big to cross for most people, including myself.
Palau
March 4, 2008 at 7:45 amThat actual physical point that it all went to shit was when there were 2 million of us converging on Parliament and the organisers chickened out on direct action.We could have taken Parliament non-violently by sheer force of numbers, and made them listen.
With so many law-abiding, reasonable, peaceful Mums and sisters and aunties and cousins there – and so many cameras -do we really think there’d’ve been another Peterloo if we had?
But no, we chickened out. We’ve only ourselves to blame.
Palau
March 4, 2008 at 8:07 amPS: Just to make you wish we really had stormed Parliament…