• @sigmaklimgrindset
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    4027 days ago

    It’s really fucking weird to see the disconnect between the powers that be and regular people regarding Israel/Gaza.

    I can’t really think of anything in my lifetime that had the same disconnect. Was the invasion of Afghanistan/Iraq this protested? Vietnam maybe?

    • @SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
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      1326 days ago

      The gulf war under Bush Junior saw millions of people marching regularly for months. I shot over 800 hours of video of those marches myself, in Detroit and Windsor.

      • @sigmaklimgrindset
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        226 days ago

        I assume you mean under Bush Sr? The only Gulf war googling got me was the one in 1991, and that’s a bit before my time. That’s really cool that you have footage of the protests, are they available anywhere to view at all?

        • Well some people called it the Iraq War but it was the same war started by his daddy so we just called it Gulf War 2.0. It still lingers, mission was not accomplished.

          I don’t have any of the footage sadly. The documentary never got made. I don’t think anyone has used the footage, probably sitting in a university archive somewhere.

          However there were regular marches of notable size in both Windsor and Detroit, which were loosely coordinated with the millions marching elsewhere around the world. People showed a fair bit of opposition.

          I think some of that energy segued into the Occupy movement too.

          • @sigmaklimgrindset
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            126 days ago

            Interesting, thanks so much for your reply! I’ll have to dig more into this as my knowledge of the politics of Desert Storm is quite shallow as a non-American.

    • @some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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      826 days ago

      Iraq was sorta, but that was also playing on the damaged psyches of people who had been attacked in a way never thought possible. It was obviously lies and a lot of us could see it from the start. But we were told to luv it err leave it by people who don’t know the meaning of “free speech.” I wasn’t around for Vietnam, but the difference there was that people were being drafted to go and die.

      So this is the first mass movement of the sort where Americans don’t directly have skin in the game, other than Apartheid. And I don’t think that was anywhere on the scale of these other three, but I was a little kid and will defer to those who have more perspective on the matter.

      • @sigmaklimgrindset
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        426 days ago

        Yeah, what you say about Iraq makes sense, but I don’t remember mentions of extreme violence against specifically young protesters like we’re seeing with the university encampments. I was also very young at the time, so I was definitely being sheltered from a lot of it.

        That’s why the comparisons to Vietnam sticks out more in my head, because that’s probably the only other time historically I have been taught that there has been pointed aggression toward the younger generation about anti-war protesting.

        But my perception may also be skewed because it is my peer group that is being targeted. Quite a few of my friends may or will have police records because they were at pro-Palestine protests and were unlucky enough to get caught by the police, and we still don’t know how it’ll impact them in the future.