F le tre premesse del pacifista razionale

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/09/game_of_thrones.html

Pacifisti in piazza e contestazioni a corrente alternata

Le donne di Soros.
Alla manifestazione la nota femminista p*** Madonna.
Ma dove erano quando la Clinton bombardava per il mondo.
Sono quelle che volevano la guerra con la Russia.
Non c'è consapevolezza di classe...

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Mi sono sempre visto come un “un pacifista che non parteciperà mai ad una marcia per la pace”.

Il mio pacifismo forse deriva dalla mia ignoranza in politica estera: sembra che quanto più si sia competenti, tanto più si è interventisti.

La mia scarsa propensione a sfilare per le strade con la bandiera arcobaleno deriva… Non lo so bene, c’è qualcosa che mi disturba nelle manifestazioni piazzaiole, ma non so esattamente cosa.

Un indizio corposo me lo fornisce però la lettura dell’ultimo libro di Fabio Rojas: “Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11”.

Il 27 Gennaio 2007 le condizioni meteo erano ideali per manifestare. Il 7 Novembre 2006 il partito democratico americano aveva vinto le elezioni di midterm e una disapprovazione crescente travolgeva la politica estera del presidente in carica Geoge Bush.

Oltre centomila persone erano state riunite alla National Mall dalla  United for Peace and Justice, la più grande associazione pacifista del paese. Gli slogan erano i soliti: “il popolo non vuole la guerra”, oppure: “agisci ora per far tacere le armi”…

… speakers included elected officials from the Democratic Party… U.S. Representatives Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA); movement leaders, such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Medea Benjamin; and celebrities, such as Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, all of whom echoed the view that the 2006 elections were a mandate for peace… Lynn Woolsey exclaimed in her remarks, “We have an antidote to this insanity.… It is what you sent us to do last November…

A seguire la marcia,  l’evento del “Capitol Hill lobby day”…

… After receiving a day of basic lobbying training on Sunday, activists swarmed into House and Senate office buildings on Monday, January 29, ready to press their representatives to support a laundry list of pending resolutions and to join the congressional Out of Iraq Caucus…

Un programmino del genere si chiama inside/outside strategy.

Gli attivisti cercano di mantenere un piede in piazza e uno nelle stanze della politica. Si fa leva sui movimenti per indirizzare le policy governative.

Ma questa “doppia” azione colloca il movimento in una posizione ambigua, ne inquina la purezza per così dire. Il rischio è di minarne la causa.

Lynn Woolsey è stato sicuramente un politico (tradizionale) che ha cavalcato quelle manifestazioni, ecco il suo pensiero in sintesi…

… public spoke loudly [and] told Democrats, ‘we want you to be the majority because you will change that policy in Iraq and bring our troops home’…

Woosley ha lavorato a stretto contatto con gli organizzatori…

… For Woolsey and her allies, the elections, rally, and lobby day were the culmination of many years of hard work….

In Woosley cogliamo bene l’alleanza tra partito e manifestanti, le potenziali sinergie tra azione nei palazzi e azione fracassona nelle piazze. Ma come funziona questo intreccio tutt’altro trasparente?…

… leaders of a social movement identified an issue, framed it for political discourse, and helped to mobilize supporters from the rank and file of a political party. Leaders of a political party adopted the movement's issue and frames. They promised to address the issue if elected. Mobilization by the movement's supporters boosted the party's success in the election. After the election, party leaders worked together with movement activists to implement the movement's agenda…

Il movimento pacifista americano divenne di massa tra il 2001 e il 2006, sotto la presidenza Bush, poi uno stranissimo collasso (a politica estera invariata)…

… At exactly the time when antiwar voices were most well poised to exert pressure on Congress, movement leaders stopped sponsoring lobby days. The size of antiwar protests declined. From 2007 to 2009, the largest antiwar rallies shrank from hundreds of thousands of people to thousands, and then to only hundreds…

Il nuovo parlamento prese in considerazione senza esito le proposte di legge provenienti dai pacifiste….

… In 2008, the Democrats nominated an antiwar presidential candidate in U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL). But once Obama became president, his policies on war and national security resembled those of his Republican predecessor, President George W. Bush…

A questo punto, quando ormai la strada sembrava in discesa, il movimento, anziché tornare all’attacco, si dissolse. Un mistero per gli studiosi di scienze sociali…

… If elected… rather than intensify its efforts, the movement reduced them…

Una varietà di teorie cercano di spiegare il misterioso intreccio tra pacifisti e sinistra istituzionale…

… For example, Anthony Downs (1972) points to the importance of issue-attention cycles among the public. Albert Hirschman (1982) emphasizes temporal change in subjective assessments of benefits and costs of activism, which can lead to both engagement and burnout among activists. David Meyer (1990) stresses the opening and closing of political opportunities available to movements. Dennis Chong (1991) highlights the mass psychology of movements, particularly how policy successes can have a demobilizing function for movements (see also Bernstein 2005; Jenkins and Eckert 1986; McAdam 1982; Meyer 2008; Rupp and Taylor 1990; Tarrow 1993)…

Ma nessuna ci dice come mai quando la meta è a portata di mano si smobilita. Di solito lo si fa a vittoria ottenuta…

… The rising power of the Democratic Party may have convinced many antiwar activists that the war issue would be dealt with satisfactorily, even if they did not keep applying grassroots pressure through an organized social movement (in contrast to what many scholars predict; see, for example, Ganz 2009; McAdam 1982; Skocpol, Liazos, and Ganz 2006)… after 2006, it was no longer “necessary” to have an antiwar movement… Democratic Party was the antiwar movement…

La smobilitazione è cominciata nel bel mezzo dell’escalation bushiana, con la vittoria di midterm dei democratici, ben prima di vedere dei risultati concreti. Perché si è smesso di combattere? Perché Obama non è stato tenuto sotto pressione? Perché il movimento non è cresciuto in seguito al “surge” in Afghanistan?

Alla base c’è una duplice identificazione dei capi…

… we inquire into the dual identifications that many political actors had with the Democratic Party and the antiwar movement… We argue that when the Democrats were out of office and the Republicans were in power, these intersecting identities promoted synergy between the party and the movement… More generally, we argue that social movement mobilization is driven to a significant degree by the dynamic interrelationship between social movements and political parties. We posit that the direct identification of political actors (such as grassroots activists, nonprofit organizations, and members of Congress) with political parties and social movements is a critical (though, not the only) factor that drives both mobilization success and failure…

L’identificazione nel partito sembra dominare su quella movimentista…

… Partisan identities are consistently reinforced by periodic elections in a way that movement identities are not, a tendency that often makes partisans an advantaged subgroup within movements and movement activists a disadvantaged subgroup within parties…

Non appena il partito riguadagna ruoli di governo l’identità dei militanti con il piede in due scarpe si sposta…

… Rather than staying focused on their position on a single issue – such as their opposition to war – many partisans gave greater attention to other callings from the Democratic Party. As a result, many Democratic activists and war opponents withdrew from the antiwar movement as they felt less threatened by the Bush administration and shifted their attention to other party priorities, such as health care…

Una volta rientrati nel partito ci si “defocalizza” e la pace diventa un obiettivo tra i tanti.

Il declino del movimento non è un consapevole “rompete le righe” che viene dai leader ma una moltitudine di decisioni individuali che puntano su obiettivi diversi…

… antiwar movement itself ultimately suffered organizationally from its ties to the Democratic Party… relationship between political parties and the mobilization of social movements is linked to the identities of individual political actors… the interplay of partisan and movement identities can provide an account for the dynamics of social movement…

Si profila allora una teoria generale…

… We argue that the consequences of intersecting movement-party identities can be observed not only in the case of the antiwar movement, but also in movements as diverse as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, both of which exhibited fluctuating overlap between movement supporters and party supporters…

La dinamica non si riscontra solo per il movimento pacifista…

… after the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, the threat perceived by conservative activists upon Obama's election quickly translated into Tea Party protests in 2009… Tea Party rallies dissipated once the Republican Party regained control of the U.S. House…

La polarizzazione favorisce questa altalena: le cause nobili sono un buon pretesto per colpire il nemico soprattutto quando il nemico è il diavolo in terra.

I volti a capo del movimento sono bene o male sempre gli stessi dal tempo del Vietnam…

… Antiwar protests after 9/11 were organized by many of the same individuals and organizations that had been active in peace struggles from the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s through the confrontations with Iraq in the 1990s (Woehrle, Coy, and Maney 2008)… People opposed war for a mix of reasons, such as concerns about the potential geopolitical implications of U.S. military intervention, general opposition to the policies of the Bush administration, and religiously motivated pacifism…

Di solito, inoltre, l’impegno pacifista è fallimentare, sfidare la sicurezza nazionale risulta altamente problematico, le facilitazioni governative sono minime. Spesso la manifestazione si riduce ad una semplice kermesse. Ma questo non è l’aspetto più interessante…

… Rather than focusing on the policy success or failure of a movement, this book tells the story of the interaction between political parties and social movements in a social space that we call the party in the street…

Per chi è a caccia di dati la cosa migliore consiste nel pedinare singoli individui…

… Exit poll data reveal that politicians in the Democratic Party benefited during electoral contests from the support of antiwar constituencies… However, when we look at the evolution of actual war policies from the Bush to the Obama administrations, we find more continuity than change. The Obama administration shifted emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan, but these shifts were still only a slight redirection of the trajectory set forth by the Bush administration…

La mancata reazione alla continuità delle politiche estere è l’oggetto dell’indagine: ma chi è “il boia che molla” per primo?…

… The findings show that antiwar activists with identities linked to the Democratic Party tended to depart from the antiwar movement earlier than did activists without Democratic identities… although Democratic Party members generally held an antiwar point of view, their mobilization for the antiwar cause usually assumed a lower priority than mobilization on many other issues, such as health care…

L’identificazione con il partito (ora vincente) fa premio sull’impegno nel movimento, cosicché si dice “arrivederci alla prossima” e ci si concentra sull’ Obamacare, la nuova priorità…

… We find that organizations with Democratic identifications gained more central positions within the network of antiwar organizations as the Democratic Party rose to power, but then tended to lose those positions once Obama became president… three organizations that illustrate the contours of our account: United for Peace and Justice, MoveOn, and Black Is Back…

E i politici che hanno cavalcato il movimento?…

…  Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), James McGovern (D-MA), John Murtha (D-PA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), and Maxine Waters (D-CA) worked closely with antiwar lobbyists… we show how their efforts rose and fell with the fortunes of the Democratic Party…Once Barack Obama became president, the antiwar movement within Congress almost vanished…

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Bè, devo dire che adesso è più chiaro anche a me stesso perché non parteciperò mai ad una marcia per la pace.

Un pacifista puo' onorare i caduti di Nassiriya?

Un pacifista puo' onorare i caduti di Nassiriya? - Riccardo Mariani:



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Falchi o colombe?

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