War and the Powerlessness of the Majority

Stephen Gowans writes:

The campaign in the United States to end the Vietnam War, [for example,] no matter how much it was said to have been inspired by the majority recognizing the immorality of US aggression, could rely on the participation, and at the very least, the sympathy, of large parts of the US population, because the war exacted an extraordinary personal cost for many Americans. The issue of millions upon millions of Southeast Asians being destroyed, while a motivating force for the most ardent activists, was of little moment for the majority against the loss of friends and family. To this day, oceans of tears are, every now and then, cried for the 55,000 Americans who lost their lives in Vietnam, but, in the United States and throughout the Western world, not a moment's recognition is given to the vastly greater number of mostly civilian Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians who were killed, for having the misfortune to live upon real estate the United States sought to dominate. In other words, the many can be galvanized to act to the extent their personal interests are directly threatened, but only then, and only where the cost is high. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, slaughtered abroad, while engendering campaigns of protest by a minority of activists, will be ignored by the majority. That the Nazi Holocaust happened, with little protest at the time, is, no matter how much Zionists would like to regard the event as inimitable and uniquely related to anti-Semitism, but a single (though particularly horrific) instance of a larger phenomenon: the majority impotently accepting massive injustice committed elsewhere with a shrug of the shoulders and the question: "What can I do about it?"

...the received wisdom holds that matters of state are best left in the hands of a small number of representatives, their appointees, and coteries of "experts," while education steers clear of promoting the idea that citizens should actively participate in the formulation of policy or the pressing of demands beyond the largely inconsequential act of casting a ballot for a representative every few years. Anything beyond this is regarded as a mildly disreputable activity to be engaged in by cranks and the constitutionally disaffected.

Yet, it is the efflorecense of robust democracy that holds out the greatest hope of severely attenuating the barbarity that has left at least one hundred million dead in the last century. "The stench of blood rises from the pages of history," remarked Joseph de Maistre. And until the majority takes control of the policy making elites claim as their exclusive domain, history will continue to be written in the blood of the powerless -- and acquiescent -- majority.