http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/10/protest-works-just-look-at-the-proof.html
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Protest works. Just look at the proof
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/10/protest-works-just-look-at-the-proof.html>
Its astonishing to see how Americans have been conditioned to think
that political action and engagement is futile. Im old enough to have
witnessed the reverse, how activism in the 1960s produced significant
advances in civil rights blacks and women, and eventually led the US to
exit the Vietnam War.
Im reminded of this sense of despair almost daily in the comments
section. Whenever possible action steps come up, virtually without fail,
quite a few will argue that there is no point in making an effort, that
we as individuals are powerless.
I dont buy that as a stance, particularly because trained passivity is
a great, low cost way to hobble people who have been wronged. I
mistakenly relegated an article by Johann Hari in the Independent on
this topic to Links, and Richard Klines commentary on it made me
realize it deserved its own post, so I am remedying that error now.
As Kline observed:
The nut of the matter is this: you lose, you lose, you lose, you
lose, they give up. As someone who has protested, and studied the
process, its plain that one spends most of ones time begin
defeated. Thats painful, humiliating, and intimidating. One cant
expect typically, as in a battle, to get a clean shot at a clear
win. What you do with protest is just what Hari discusses, you
change the context, and that change moves the goalposts on your
opponent, grounds out the current in their machine. The nonviolent
resistance in Hungary in the 1860s (yes, thats in the 19th century)
is an excellent example. Communist rule in Russia and its
dependencies didnt fail because protestors won but because most
simply withdrew their cooperation to the point it suffocated.
Americans have cultural norms that work against trying to move the
political/social needle. Class and economic aspirations are one of them;
protestors are by definition malcontents, and thus presumed losers. Busy
successful people obviously have not reason to waste their time this
way, right? Another impediment is the weird American fixation with
optimism. Talk candidly about how stuffed up things are, and you can be
dismissed as being negative. Despite how much it is revered in pop
psychology and the how to succeed in business literature, optimism is
not necessarily a good trait for long, hard fought struggles. Those who
anticipate that success will come sooner than it does will find their
hopes dashed repeatedly. Some may be resilient enough to themselves up
and try again, but that isnt universal (being pessimistic and tenacious
is probably a better stance, but our culture does not breed for that).
From Johann Hari
<http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-protest-works-just-look-at-the-proof-2119310.html>:
There is a ripple of rage spreading across Britain. It is clearer
every day that the people of this country have been colossally
scammed. The bankers who crashed the economy are richer and fatter
than ever, on our cash. The Prime Minister who promised us before
the election were not talking about swingeing cuts just imposed
the worst cuts since the 1920s, condemning another million people to
the dole queue. Yet the rage is matched by a flailing sense of
impotence. We are furious, but we feel there is nothing we can do.
Theres a mood that we have been stitched up by forces more powerful
and devious than us, and all we can do is sit back and be shafted.
This mood is wrong. It doesnt have to be this way if enough of us
act to stop it. To explain how, I want to start with a small
scandal, a small response and a big lesson from history.
In my column last week, I mentioned in passing something remarkable
and almost unnoticed. For years now, Vodafone has been refusing to
pay billions of pounds of taxes to the British people that are
outstanding
.
Many people emailed me saying they were outraged that while they pay
their fair share for running the country, Vodafone doesnt pay
theirs. One of them named Thom Costello decided he wanted to
organize a protest, so he appealed on Twitter and this Wednesday
seventy enraged citizens shut down the flagship Vodafone store on
Oxford Street in protest. Vodafone wont pay as they go, said one
banner. Make Vodafone pay, not the poor, said another.
The reaction from members of the public who were handed leaflets
explaining the situation was startling. Again and again, people
said Im so glad somebody is doing this and there needs to be
much more of this. Lots of them stopped to talk about how
frightened they were about the cuts and for their own homes and
jobs. The protest became the third most discussed topic in the
country on Twitter, meaning millions of people now know about what
Vodafone and the government have done.
You might ask so what? What has been changed? To understand how
and why protest like this can work, you need some concrete and
proven examples from the past. Lets start with the most hopeless
and wildly idealistic cause and see how it won. The first ever
attempt to hold a Gay Pride rally in Trafalgar Square was in 1965.
Two dozen people turned up and they were mostly beaten by the
police and arrested. Gay people were imprisoned for having sex, and
even the most compassionate defense of gay people offered in public
life was that they should be pitied for being mentally ill.
Imagine if you had stood in Trafalgar Square that day and told those
two dozen brave men and women: Forty-five years from now, they will
stop the traffic in Central London for a Gay Pride parade on this
very spot, and it will be attended by hundreds of thousands of
people. There will be married gay couples, and representatives of
every political party, and openly gay soldiers and government
ministers and huge numbers of straight supporters and it will be
the homophobes who are regarded as freaks. It would have seemed
like a preposterous statement of science fiction. But it happened.
It happened in one lifetime. Why? Not because the people in power
spontaneously realized that millennia of persecuting gay people had
been wrong, but because determined ordinary citizens banded together
and demanded justice.
If that cause can be achieved, through persistent democratic
pressure, anything can. But lets look at a group of protesters who
thought they had failed. The protests within the United States
against the Vietnam War couldnt prevent it killing three million
Vietnamese and 80,000 Americans. But even in the years it was
failing, it was achieving more than the protestors could possibly
have known. In 1966, the specialists at the Pentagon went to US
President Lyndon Johnson a thug prone to threatening to crush
entire elected governments with a plan to end the Vietnam War:
nuke the country. They proved, using their computer modeling, that
a nuclear attack would save lives.
It was a plan that might well have appealed to him. But Johnson
pointed out the window, towards the hoardes of protesters, and said:
I have one more problem for your computer. Will you feed into it
how long it will take 500,000 angry Americans to climb the White
House wall out there and lynch their President? He knew that there
would be a cost in protest and democratic revolt that made that
cruelty too great. In 1970, the same plan was presented to Richard
Nixon and we now know from the declassified documents that the
biggest protests ever against the war made him decide he couldnt do
it. Those protesters went home from those protests believing they
had failed but they had succeeded in preventing a nuclear war.
They thought they were impotent, just as so many of us do but they
really had power beyond their dreams to stop a nightmare.
Protest raises the political price for governments making bad
decisions. It stopped LBJ and Nixon making the most catastrophic
decision of all. The same principle can apply to the Conservative
desire to kneecap the welfare state while handing out massive
baubles to their rich friends. The next time George Osborne has to
decide whether to cancel the tax bill of a super-rich corporation
and make us all pick up the tab, he will know there is a price.
People will find out, and they will be angry. The more protests
there are, the higher the price. If enough of us demand it, we can
make the rich pay their share for the running of our country, rather
than the poor and the middle to name just one urgent cause that
deserves protest.
And protest can have an invisible ripple-effect that lasts for
generations. A small group of women from Iowa lost their sons early
in the Vietnam war, and they decided to set up an organization of
mothers opposing the assault on the country. They called a protest
of all mothers of serving soldiers outside the White House and six
turned up in the snow. Even though later in the war they became
nationally important voices, they always remembered that protest as
an embarrassment and a humiliation.
Until, that is, one day in the 1990s, one of them read the
autobiography of Benjamin Spock, the much-loved and trusted
celebrity doctor, who was the Oprah of his day. When he came out
against the war in 1968, it was a major turning point in American
public opinion. And he explained why he did it. One day, he had been
called to a meeting at the White House to be told how well the war
in Vietnam was going, and he saw six women standing in the snow with
placards, alone, chanting. It troubled his conscience and his dreams
for years. If these women were brave enough to protest, he asked
himself, why arent I? It was because of them that he could
eventually find the courage to take his stand and that in turn
changed the minds of millions, and ended the war sooner. An event
that they thought was a humiliation actually turned the course of
history.
You dont know what the amazing ripple-effect of your protest will
be but wouldnt Britain be a better place if it replaced the
ripple of impotent anger so many of us are feeling? Yes, you can sit
back and let yourself be ripped off by the bankers and the
corporations and their political lackeys if you want. But its an
indulgent fiction to believe that is all you can do. You can act in
your own self-defence. As Margaret Mead, the great democratic
campaigner, said: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful
people could change the world. Indeed, its the only thing that ever
has.
--
It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really
one party representing four percent of the people. - Gore Vidal
Never Never NEVER reward adolescents nor politicians for bad behavior
just because they can point to someone else whose behavior is even worse
than their own - you will either raise felons or put them in office. - me
/Gore Vidal/ - "there's only one /party/ in America today, with /two/
wings,the /conservative/ wing, known as Democrats, and the /reactionary/
wing, known as Republicans."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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