Across the United States, “heads are rolling” at the top of some Ivy League universities amid a campus-wide crackdown on students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, shining a spotlight on the question of freedom of expression worldwide, said UN Special Rapporteur Irene Khan.
You have to realize this all just reads like someone who wants to “just ask questions” and meander about vague misgivings to downplay and discredit the protest right? You lead with focusing on messaging like you’re at an ad agency critiquing a professional campaign, divert to a well-worn excuse that protest movements don’t have clear goals, say that they do have clear goals, and then imply most of the protesters spending hours out there protesting somehow don’t know them.
Like maybe you are just earnestly working through these thoughts and feelings, but this is basically the exact same things people who are JAQing off because protest makes them uncomfortable would say.
To give you context in case you’ve never experienced it, my first protest was against the Iraq war. It was seemingly well organized by a some major groups with institutional knowledge about setting up protests. People were bussing in to DC and the marching route was pre-planned and organized with cops along with way just to be sure that people stuck to the roads that were blocked off and there wasn’t any confrontation with counter-protesters. And still, with all that structure, there were groups there protesting for marijuana legalization and communism and in-group sign wavers talking about Bush v. Gore. Trying to nitpick about “Palestine” or “Palestinians” or whether some people who are demanding divestment also calling for other more optimistic results is just misunderstanding how protests work.
This is a student protest. There isn’t a protest boss who can go around and approve the wording on signs. Individuals can rally and self-organize to kick out someone saying something egregious like “death to the Jews”, but this idea of “policing the messaging to keep it clear” is just not something you’re ever going to get from a protest that isn’t a single pre-existing activist organization with a hierarchy and top-down decision making.
There are no perfect protests, and people asking why they aren’t perfect are often trying to discredit them rather than out of sincere support for the protest goals. That might not be because they don’t approve of the goals themselves, just that they’re a secondary concern to a desire for order or political concerns or just plain not liking protest as a means of change.
All fair points, and I don’t disagree with any of them.
And yeah, I recognize my posts are rambly, but honestly, it’s mostly just me jotting down thoughts. I’m not trying to write a dissertation, I’m trying to engage in conversation.
I do think there’s levels to this though, right? Like, you list a bunch of other special interests that were at the Iraq protests that weren’t policed, but there are certainly viewpoints that would have been, right? Like, if someone showed up with a, I don’t know, a “just nuke’em, end the war, and get it over with” sign or something, that would have been policed, right?
Maybe not? Maybe anyone can join any protest for any reason? I tend to think there’s some level of extreme that the group would self police, but who knows.
That said, the sign in question wasn’t past that line by any stretch of the imagination. That wasn’t even really the point of my original post though. I was more asking about what the messaging actually is.
I did go on a tangent about messaging because the guy two up basically said (to grossly paraphrase) messaging clarity doesn’t matter, and I was just stating why I disagree. I did use the context of this protest though, so that’s on me. I don’t think this sign is out of line necessarily.
Ultimately my main point about messaging was that protests that don’t have well stated outcomes (e.g. get troops out of Iraq or stop investing in Israel) are doomed to failure, as the group you are protesting against has no viable mechanism to capitulate.
There’s probably a sub-point in there that if your stated goals are too fractured, it makes it impossible to capitulate as well?
Idk, I’m mostly just rambling again. I’m also not as invested in the conversation as I was three days ago.
We could have a whole dialog about which historical protests have led to meaningful change and which haven’t and what distinguished the former from the latter. I’m no expert in protest philosophy (obviously) but I’ve seen protests make a difference and fall completely flat, and I think it’d be an interesting study to find out why, and to what degree coherent goals and messaging are correlated to success.
But, as I say, I’m not as invested as I was 3 days ago, so I’m probably gonna just do something else instead. Hope life is treating you well, and you’ve got an exciting weekend planned! :)
In most mass protests there isn’t a source of authority that could decide who gets to be in the place the protest is. There’s organizers and speakers who can ask them to leave, but if the problematic attendees don’t just go along with that they don’t have any inherent authority to kick them out. That doesn’t mean saboteurs don’t get kicked out, but it’s more in the form of a bunch of people self-organizing to shout them down or put a human wall between them and the rest of the group. The student protesters have done this a few times when opponents try to infiltrate their ranks.
But it’s not something you pull together because someone’s sign isn’t well tuned or one of hundreds or thousands of voices is demanding Exxon Mobile be immediately shut down when the actual goal is ending fossil fuel subsidies. Partly because you don’t want to fracture a movement by kicking out your allies and partly because this is an entirely social endeavor organized among strangers and it’s hard to get that arranged if people aren’t instantly convinced it’s necessary.
Yeah, no, for sure on all counts. As before, I’d imagine it’d have to be pretty egregious to rise to the level of removal. Makes sense.