Not really a political question. I was doing my annual Ramadan migration and so was not monitoring the news as closely as I might have.
Did the demonstrations against President Bush fizzle? Were crowds as large as expected?
I did read the papers on the plane, they seemed to indicate the demonstrators reflected a minority opinion in the UK.
Scotland Yard estimated the size of the crowd at between 90,000 and 110,000 which is the biggest weekday demonstration in Britain in history. There were other smaller demonstrations in other towns and cities around the country.
With regard to opinions in the UK, there was a poll before asking whether people welcomed Bush’s visit or were against it which came out something like 43% in favour, 36% against. So, if it’s a minority, it’s a very sizable one. I’m not sure how valid that question is, though. I was on the demo, but would have answered that I welcomed the visit, how else would I be able to demonstrate against him!
The one thing that has come out of the visit is that it was a complete waste of time from the UK’s point of view. Bush has spent four days cossetted behind bullet proof glass, talking to people that he could have spoke to on the phone, at great expense to the British taxpayer. There has been no progress at all on the issues that we were told would be addressed with him - British prisonners at Gunatanamo, steel tarrifs, etc.
Excellent point, I didn’t know that!
Realistically, as I said in the other thread about this, they couldn’t possibly have “succeeded”, in that it was a bunch of people from another country protesting him. It’s not like he was suddenly going to pack up and leave because John Q. Briton thought he should, or that the situation in Iraq was going to become wonderful because people sang and chanted in the streets.
By that barometer nobody would ever bother to protest about anything. Protests can have an effect, but it is almost never immediate, and nor did anyone who was on the demo expect it to be.
I’ve always thought that protesting was a “feel-good” measure at best. It allows people to say that they are against something without actually doing anything about it.
Now, as for me, if I decided that something were worth doing, I’d get up and do it, rather than have a huge coffe table discussion about it.
So, when have protests ever really changed the world? The March on Washington? Nope. Other than a great speech from King, it didn’t matter, any more than any other march on Washington has mattered. How about the 1968 DNC in Chicago? Nope. It got some people creamed and didn’t even cost the mayor his job. Do strikes count? How about PATCO? That went over well, didn’t it? And we all know how Tienanmen Square went down.
Protesting doesn’t work unless it is accompanied by action, either at the ballot box or on the battlefield. I don’t see any revolutions formenting, so all that’s left is Election 2004. Then we’ll see how effective the protests have been.
Airman:
The protests in Eastern Europe in the late 80s were successful beyond anyone’s dreams. I will especially never forget the throngs of people in Czechoslovakia peacefully ringing key chains for days until the government collapsed. IIRC, though, it was literally a majority of the peolpe in Prague who were protesting. Almost everyone.
So it was the protests, and not the withdrawal of support from the Soviet Union, that caused the fall of the Czechoslovakian government?
If only Hungary had known that rattling keychains would have collapsed a government back in 1956.
I guess to clarify, one needs to ask “what was the purpose of the demonstration?” I’m sure some of the demonstrators wanted Bush out of the UK, or Iraq, or to sign up to Kyoto, or end steel tariffs, but I’d imagine the vast majority just wanted to let Blair and Bush know that their policy WRT Iraq is disapproved of by a significant proportion of the UK population. In that case, it’s a matter of perception: the size of the demo might indicate success on those terms, but if it’s ignored utterly by Blair, it might be deemed a failure.
And though it’s a tangent that I don’t think necessarily relevant (though I believe the Poll Tax riots played a part in dislodging Thatcher), if Airman Doors wants more recent examples of “Velvet revolutions”, he only has to look to the ousting of Milosevic, and today’s ousting of Eduard Shevardnadze.
Or the Impeachment with Extreme Prejudice of the unspeakably vile Nicolae Ceucuescu of Rumania.
So demonstrations don’t work ?. Just turn on you television and see what is happening right now in Georgia where the president has just resigned . This was after days of popular demonstrations over a “fixed” election. People power does work sometimes.
Now that was my kind of ‘protest’. We just left Constanta a few days before that little event…
Hmmm…
Heh, I was 14 at the time. Cut short our Christmas vacation, those contemptable rabble-rousers did…
Christmas in Transylvania. How lovely.
And for all of those it is my contention that the “protestors” actually did something instead of sitting down and singing. You don’t think that Shevardnaze would have resigned had they not put him in a position where he had to fear for his life, do you?
The kind of demonstration that happeed in London this week accomplished nothing. Why? Because they didn’t storm Parliament, unlike what happened in Georgia.
I still say that nothing changes because of peaceful protests, except during elections, when your vote can be used as a form of protest.
From a US viewer’s point-of-view I’d say the protests in London failed miserably to generate any significant news coverage over here…thanks mainly to a certain ‘King of Pop’ in handcuffs dominating the cable news channels.
Damn! He’s right! To the barricades, Straight Dope People’s Revolutionary Front (Trotskyist)!
I’d say that was a little rougher than velvet… hessian perhaps?
Stephe96, yeah, Mikey’s arrest for alleged kiddy-fiddling was badly timed - suspiciously badly timed. :dubious: You don’t suppose it was a conspiracy?
(
for the hard of humour).
It was both. Without the protests, the government wouldn’t have fallen. Just weeks before the protests, the pundits were predicting that the Czech government would hold out against reform. It was one of the most oppressive governments in the Eastern Block.
Wrong. You are implicitly assuming that if all protests don’t succeed, then none do. It did not work in Hungary in '56, but it sure as hell did in Czechoslovakia in '89. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember, but the massive protests in Prague were a sight to see 2-3 nights in a row. One of the most powerful events I ever witnessed.