Something remarkable happened last weekend. From Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Portland to Montreal, Damascus, and Tokyo, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets Jan. 18 to protest a potential escalation of the American war against Iraq. There are many issues on which these demonstrators would likely disagree. All were emphatic on one point: Not in their name would an American war be waged.

Mainstream media have traditionally done a poor job of acknowledging this nation's rich history of antiwar dissent. Coverage of last weekend's events was no exception.

Those worldwide protests may have constituted the single largest antiwar demonstration in history. In Washington, as many as 500,000 protesters rallied outside the Capitol, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Huge numbers of people also turned out on the West Coast. Media estimated that anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 people were present in San Francisco, with 20,000 in downtown Portland. In Canada, tens of thousands marched in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Halifax. Tens of thousands more protested in France, Japan, Pakistan, Britain, Sweden, Syria, Belgium, Egypt, Lebanon, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Yet the size of the protests was hardly the only thing that made them unique. Over 35 years ago, when the contemporary antiwar movement was first emerging as a truly mass phenomenon, many protesters naively assumed that the U.S. government simply didn't understand the realities of the national liberation struggles it was opposing in Indochina. It was only years later, after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, that the true American motives in the region were understood.

No such naiveté afflicts today's movement. As H. Bruce Franklin, the distinguished author of numerous works on the American war in Vietnam, recently observed, "Last weekend's unprecedented demonstrations in the United States and around the world go beyond the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in size and also, I believe, in consciousness. It is now commonplace knowledge that our government and its foreign policy are controlled by multinational corporations, and this consciousness was widely shared only in the very late stages of the movement against the Vietnam War. Of course no sensible person could possibly believe that the aim of war in Iraq is the welfare of the people of that country." Today, Franklin continued, "our government's motives are blatantly clear. Hence the apt slogan, 'No blood for oil.' "

This may help explain the current antiwar movement's scale even before the commencement of major hostilities. It was only after years of U.S. support for the attempted French recolonization of Indochina and the introduction of American "advisers" fighting in Vietnam that, in 1965, tens of thousands of people started marching in Berkeley, New York and Washington. That hundreds of thousands of people are already physically registering their opposition is astounding.

A new chapter in the annals of antiwar dissent is being written, and thousands of Minnesotans are assuming their place in it. This unfolding history deserves the media's attention.

Scott Laderman, a doctoral candidate in American Studies and a MacArthur Scholar at the University of Minnesota, is an opinion columnist for the Minnesota Daily.

© Copyright 2003 Star Tribune

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