WASHINGTON — Bettina Aptheker remembers standing outside the Berkeley Co-Op back in 1966, clipboard in hand, offering a petition against the war in Vietnam. If she stood there all day, recalls the activist who now teaches feminist history at UC Santa Cruz, she could get three dozen signatures -- maybe.
These days, those opposing war in Iraq have the Internet. Eli Pariser, the 22-year-old international director for MoveOn.org in New York, says his group can gather 8,000 signatures in an hour, or an average of two a second. Spawned as an e-mail effort to get Congress to "move on" from the impeachment trial of President Clinton, the Web site has morphed into a grass-roots antiwar powerhouse claiming 750,000 members -- an increase of 100,000 in the last month alone.
As organizers prepare for Saturday's antiwar rallies in New York and throughout Europe, Vietnam-era peace activists and scholars who have studied pacifist influences on U.S. history marvel at how quickly the movement has galvanized its supporters to take to the streets. It took three years of ground combat in Vietnam, often televised, before activists could rally 250,000 in mass antiwar rallies in 1968. Saturday's organizers in New York hope to double that number -- against a war that has not yet begun.
But with a majority of Americans supportive of war against Iraq -- although the numbers drop if conflict comes without U.N. support or with heavy U.S. casualties -- the battle for hearts and minds is very much a contest for the mainstream. Marshaling the middle class against a war in time to prevent it is all but impossible, scholars say.
"No major peace movement in modern American history has stopped a war," said Melvin Small, a historian at Wayne State University in Detroit and author of "Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America's Hearts and Minds." But "they did affect the trajectory of war."
The current antiwar movement has not only assigned itself the historically unprecedented goal of stopping war in Iraq before it starts, but it has also signaled a willingness to stay in the streets for any U.S. mission involving the invasion of foreign countries in the name of fighting terrorism. Fear of terrorist attacks propels many Americans to support a war in Iraq, but activists believe their greatest argument is that war will only increase the risk.
