Protesting for fun and profit
Asymmetrical Information
From the desk of Jane Galt:
The anti-war protesters are here in London today. As my readers no doubt know, I take a pretty dim view of protests; their general message is that special interests and/or people with green hair are against whatever it is they're protesting, which is not exactly an effective means of garnering support for the cause. I enjoyed my protest years immensely: what's not to like about being young, idealistic, and taking over a major thoroughfare for amateur theatrics on a sunny afternoon? But looking back, I'd guess that we were more likely to shove waverers away from our cause than towards it; the types of moderates we needed to reach generally have bad reactions to young people in funny clothes shouting at them.
The London protests are interesting because you don't get nearly so many people marching under the Communist flag in the publicity-conscious United States; more than half the protesters I saw were communists, socialists, or anarchists (the rest were almost all muslims).
The message of the protest doesn't seem to make much sense. I mean, I get the Bush is a terrorist stuff, but the main thing they were all doing is calling for the troops to come home. Now, even if you think the Iraq war was an awful idea and Bush is a terrorist for killing all those Iraqis . . . well, all those Iraqis you care about seem to want to have the US stay for the time being. Plus now they've got a government that can tell the US & UK to leave. If Bush & Blair refuse, that will be a good time for a protest. But right now, if the goal is minimising dead Iraqis, coalition troops are the answer, not the problem.
Of course, if there had been libertarians out there saying (more pithily), "we don't care about the Iraqis, we don't want any more of our troops dead, bring them home now!", I would disagree, but I would grant the coherence of the message. But none of the protesters were saying that. Their message was "Bush and Blair are terrorists for killing all those Iraqis, so bring the troops home so that a civil war can kill a lot more!" Huh?
Posted by Jane Galt
janegalt.net |
