So I couldn’t get a copy of the Sunday edition of the New York Times yesterday – which nearly ruined my weekend.
[Justine: “You failed to mention that your way of getting the paper yesterday morning was to stay in bed and hope that your girlfriend was going to find one in her non-white-yuppie neighborhood.”]
Scanning through the San Francisco Chronicle, the article about the peace march in San Francisco listed a turnout of 40,000 – fairly big. But then the article lists the turnout in other cities round the world – 8000 in Berlin and 300 in Tokyo. Now these numbers would technically constitute a disaster for protest organizers – two countries, the only ones listed being coincidentally ones that the US has been to war against, could only muster a handful of protesters. So why mention these two cities? There were other marches this weekend – three times as many people protested in Sweden as in Japan and the US has never been to war with Sweden. Still, this omission is no big deal – 1000 people in Stockholm, so what.
In Sweden as in Berlin and Tokyo, winter is setting in and it’s hardly the marching season – freezing cold weather is traditionally a very effective way to dampen civil activism. Looking back a few weeks to the last days of summer and the picture is very different. At the beginning of October 1.5 million people took to the streets in Italy to protest war and in the same month, in London, 150,00 people attended one march. And these figures are conservative, they are the police figures which tend to be lower than the organizers’ estimates which are often more than double.
I don’t believe in conspiracies, so this is no gripe at a hidden agenda, just a quibble with poor journalism that serves neither portion of the political spectrum.