No War!! Worldwide Demonstrations Show that People of the World are Opposed to U.S. Administration

February 15, 2003

Today millions of people throughout the world demonstrated against the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq. In London alone, organizers estimated that 1.5 million people rallied downtown, led by London mayor Ken Livingstone. The New York Times reported that organizers estimated 400,000 demonstrators in New York City, so it is safe to assume that at least a million persons appeared there in spite of a Federal Judge's ruling that no marching could take place. Over a million persons demonstrated throughout Spain. 35,000-40,000 demonstrated in Bern, Switzerland. The stogy Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung estimated the demonstrations in Berlin to number half a million.

It is highly significant that for the first time anti-war demonstrations have arisen in advance, rather than after the beginning of hostilities. It took literally years for the population of the United States to mobilize against the Vietnam War. Noam Chomsky, one of the earliest protesters, once recounted how he would speak to only three or four persons in a sizeable hall. Nobody was interested. It's all different now.

One can thus conclude that things are improving. The American people no longer trust their president and his cabinet to run the country's business without questioning. There is a healthy mistrust of the mass media. Citizens are getting as much news from the web sites of foreign newspapers as from our own, and the picture painted in the foreign press differs tremendously from the one here. Reporters like Robert Fisk in The Independent and George Monbiot in The Guardian, who are equally harsh in their criticism of Tony Blair or "Dubya," play a role in shaping public opinion in Britain that no critic of the administration in the U.S. could hope to match. Now they are read here and put their American colleges to shame with their honest and forthright reporting..

The Jackson Demonstration

I stood with the local demonstrators on County Line Road this morning watching the reaction of passersby. The demonstrators represented a cross-section of white Jackson, at least one of them having participated in anti-Vietnam demonstrations in the sixties in Washington, D.C. Some of the demonstrators were making an informal count of the number of friendly and unfriendly gestures of motorists, and were surprised to find that the favorable (anti-war) gestures outnumbered the disapproving gestures by a three-to-one margin. Surprisingly, some extremely obscene gestures came from well-dressed white women driving SUVs. They must have just paid a visit to the local gas station.

Tom Lowe