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For an issue that doesn't effect the Dutch. And yet they still showed up in solidarity, because they have principles, and understand that to live in a democratic country means taking responsibility for its politics and not just voting every 4-5 years.
Americans are being kidnapped, assassinated, and having entire departments shut down, and their turnout isn't much better than the Dutch outraged at what's happening another continent away.
I want them to learn that if they want change they need to do something, instead of giving every excuse under the sun as to why they couldn't show up as has been done in other threads.
This is a good start I guess, but it hasn't done anything to stop Trump and co yet. They need to pump those numbers up.
More people showed up for TACO's birthday bash on Saturday than at the Hague. By your logic, that means the Dutch care less about the genocide in Palestine than Americans care about celebrating Trump's birthday, and Americans basically don't care about that at all based on the numbers.
So what principles do the Dutch have again?
Edit: Important addendum I just saw in another post:
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/27600754
That's not how logic works. Jesus Christ. Absolute numbers aren't how you compare these things.
Of course the country with 340m people can get a bigger crowd than the one with 18m.
I know the American education system is underfunded but why over the last two days have I had to argue this point to so many of you?
The Dutch are standing up for others, they could go about their day as if nothing is happening and nothing meaningful would change in their lives. But they chose not to.
Americans are only standing up for themselves, so they don't lose their freedoms. The Dutch protest is therefore more impressive, even with it being a smaller turnout.
If 13m is the true number then that's a lot better! That's 3.86% of the population. Now keep it up! You still have a king as far as I can see, so why did you all go home on Sunday?
People are still being deported, people are still being snatched by masked men, the federal government is still breaking laws and doing what it wants, checks and balances be damned.
Keep the momentum going, depose these fascist fucks!
Absolute numbers absolutely do matter, because it becomes harder and harder to coordinate and handle the logistics involved the more people you have and the larger the area that you are coordinating across.
An estimated 2 million showed up in the city of Boston alone on Saturday, and these protests were coordinated across thousands of miles by ordinary people using social media and cellphones, not some sophisticated form of logistics network or something. Europeans don't understand the sheer scale of the US. Americans are standing up for immigrants at home and thousands of miles away being kidnapped. There were protests in small towns all across the country where they've never had more than a deputy sheriff drive through. It's closer to setting up simultaneous protests in London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, and the Hague than it is to setting up a protest in one city in a country that you can drive across in a single day. These protests made the top 5 of the largest protests in US history.
Europeans also don't truly understand the conditions of the US. The government has spent every day since the death of MLK making these kinds of protests as difficult to pull off as possible. People are desperate but not so desperate that they have nothing left to lose, making them more desperate to hold onto what they do have. The majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck without access to medical care that won't put them in massive debt or bankrupt them, or any other form of support network that Europeans take for granted. We're dependent on our employers for all of those things. We aren't even guaranteed the 2 weeks of vacation time that is considered the norm here. The average lifespan for an American has fallen for several years in a row now and is equal to the average lifespan of the worst county in the UK. An ambulance ride with no medical care expenses added on can cost you $600 after insurance. The average American has $300 or less in their bank account. Wealth disparity in the US today is higher than it was in France at the time of the French Revolution. We're a 3rd world nation in a Prada belt. A coat of shiny paint over a society and culture built to keep the masses in check.
You might as well criticize the Arab Spring protests for not drawing big enough crowds.
Every one of your complaints stem from Americans not marching in the past. If you want a better life, a better country, more equal distribution of wealth, march! All the excuses you give for people not marching are conditions brought about because your population doesn't generally march in the first place. As a culture, you're so individualised that you forget how to stand up for each other, until it's too late, and blood gets shed. None of us survive in a bubble alone, we all live in communities, we all rely on other people for various things. Unions work because alone we are weak, but together we're strong.
We don't take things like free healthcare for granted, it didn't magically manifest itself, it was fought for by our predecessors. By marching. The same conservative rich fucks that prevent you from having healthcare are consistently trying to remove it from us. We have regular industrial action, attempting to prevent them from taking it away from us.
Do the same.
We have bullshit anti-protest laws too, we still manage to enact change though.
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-alarming-crime-and-policing-bill-yet-another-assault-right-peacefully-protest
American democracy tends to be passive. You vote red or blue every now and then and that's it. The politicians handle the rest. In Europe there's more to democracy than just voting for your representative. Learn from us, claw your freedoms back. For starters, demand a real democracy where you can vote for more than just 2 choices.
The Arab Spring managed to enact change at least, No Kings hasn't achieved anything yet. I hope it will, but so far the fascists still run the country.
This is largely my point, but the more accurate description is that Americans were convinced that those things are bad and should be protested against rather than protested for.
You can't come in here and disparage more than 3 million people (now corrected in the final tally to 13 million people) in an organized protest across a country the size of Europe with that background of stomping down people's ability to protest because a country the size of a single one of our states organized 150,000 people to protest in one city in a country without all those barriers. It would be like me coming in here and saying that the UK doesn't care about the genocide because they had 0 people protesting in London during this protest, or complaining that Russians and the Chinese aren't protesting hard enough.
Historically, most major protest movements in the US since WW2 have come from college students, as they have the financial security to spend the time and energy of being activists while also being the youngest group usually to be politically active, but this is yet another area where the US has cracked down on protesting. Since the Vietnam War protests, the cost of college has risen something like 1,000x (not percent - one thousand times the cost) as a direct retaliation to the protests. Colleges across the US have been protesting the genocide in Palestine since it began and have seen massive police crackdowns including arrests, students being kicked out of college, police stealing or destroying students' property, and students in custody being denied access to life-saving medication.
The last time major change resulted from social upheaval in the US was when MLK was murdered and billions of dollars was burned to the ground in riots that shut down entire cities for a week, and the government has spent the 50+ years since convincing the population how that change was the result of very peaceful and polite protests that didn't inconvenience anyone. The Million Man March was a threat and a display of force that left white people all over the country shaking in fear in their suburbs, and today people think it was a jolly jaunt through the city like a Pride parade.
Let's make a comparison: the city of Boston, Massachusetts had an estimated 2 million protesters on Saturday. Massachusetts is just about half the size of the Netherlands, with a population of about 6.5 million people (compared to the roughly 18 million who live in the Netherlands). That's a protest roughly 1/3rd the size of the entire population of the state. Obviously, people were coming from all over the place (other states included, Boston is one of the major cities in the region), but that doesn't count all the protests that happened in small towns across the state and region as well. We know for a fact that these protests were larger than just about any other time in US history.
4-6 million isn't much better than 150,000? If we go by percentages of the population, it's more than 3 times higher. If we go by numbers of attendees, it's something like 30x higher. Also, remember that American college campuses have been protesting this since it began, often resulting in students getting expelled or deported. Sorry that's not good enough for you.
1.18 - 1.76% of Americans showed up to protest fascism in their own country.
0.82 - 1.09% of Dutch showed up to protest genocide thousands of miles away.
If you can't understand how there's a difference here, between standing up for yourself and standing up for others, I don't know what else to say.
Or just shut the fuck up because you're adding absolutely nothing of value and would find some other useless bullshit to complain about even if it was 20% of the country
There's the American spirit!
Emotion and bravado instead of rationality and decorum.
Now go outside and show Trump that same attitude.
If it was 20% we wouldn't be watching the country with the largest nuclear arsenal and the most military bases around the world descend into fascism.
This affects the world but only Americans can do something about it, the rest of us have to convince you to get off your arses and do it.