why do hunger strikes work? or if they don’t, why do people do it? it seems to me the tactic is based on the assumption that the target of the strike would care. why should they? if they weren’t the target and the purpose was to serve as a martyr, wouldn’t a dead one be less of a trouble than a live one?
The target of the strike might not care, but the public may.
Why would the public care that people are starving themselves on purpose? I can see it as a vehicle for getting publicity for your cause, but speaking out would do just as well.
I think it’s caused by the same weird martyr complex that spurred those monks that flogged themselves. Some people just don’t think they’re doing anything right unless they torture themselves for a cause. In other words, it’s not about the effects on other people, it’s personal.
Maybe getting publicity from the public gets you the attention, and maybe in the hopes that someone more sympathetic would sympathize with you and support your cause. It’s more of playing with human conscience.
Yeah, Gandhi was such an attention whore.
OP: Same reason monks immolated themselves during Nam. It attracts attention they otherwise wouldn’t have. Some guy saying “I opposed this and here is why” would get no media attention. Some guy burning/starving himself to death is more likely (but not assured) or getting a journalist to pay attention. Some do it through making others suffer (Munich 72, Aldo Moro, 9-11), others do it through making themselves suffer. The latter tends to create more sympathy.
Sorry for double post: " or getting a journalist to pay attention"
or=of
and someone who has been starving herself for the past ten years lingers on public consciousness longer than someone who starved herself to death ten years ago.
i cannot help but sympathise with someone with so little voice that such a choice in life is an option. however, there is a certain cognitive dissonance with the image of overly strict parents bearing down on their wayward child three days into her hunger strike, force feeding her through her nose ten years since. something just doesn’t sit right.