What else? The American Revolution was also a series of classical nonviolent protests that preceded the war and which gained the idea of independence widespread support across the colonies - without which independence would have been impossible. (think the Boston Tea Party) This was absolutely crucial to the formation of the Union and the subsequent gaining of independence, and there are historians who believe that it was far more “revolutionary” than the war itself. e.g. John Adams wrote later, “The revolution was in the minds of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before the hostilities commenced.”
Without question, many great men of peace existed. You could add Arthur Griffith and many more. They still couldn’t stop the men who wanted to bring the reaction by means of force. I could have talked about union leaders like Larkin as well as an example of withdrawal of labour as a means of protest by didn’t really want to turn this into a ‘Irish’ debate. This can happen quite fast IME.
I accept that Ireland wasn’t India and lots of variables were different but Gandhi did manage on the whole to temper the men who wanted to hit back with force.
Willy Pearse, Padraig’s brother.
James Connolly. He was a dying man when they shot him tied to that chair.
I was looking more at non-violent protest as an effective tactic in countries like the U.S. today. I believe the concept has gotten so cliched that it is virtually useless for many of the things that it was used for 40 years ago. Almost no one pays attention to college student protesters and we tend to make fun of radical protesters of all stripes. Even big, high-profile protests like the Million Man March tend to get more mockery than anything else. My personal opinion is that all sign waving protesters look like uneducated peasants throwing themselves at the mercy of some virtual king.
It would be a better use of their time to put together some well thought out advertisements in print and get some of the best writers to submit letters to the editor to major newspapers and magazines all over. Then, try to exert much more direct influence over the people that can get things done instead of using wishy-washy, muddled techniques. I have to admit my gut reaction to any sign waving protest is to figure that the protesters don’t really understand what they are talking about or they are just reacting hysterically to propaganda from the other side.
A slight hijack-if you want to read a really good novel about the Easter Uprising, I reccomend 1916 by Morgan Llywelyn.
You’ve really said it well. In “marketing speak” non-violent protests used to be good publicity stunts, but now other forms of advertising are more effective. The trick in any uphill campaign is to spread your message without seeming like you have an agenda (a ridiculous paradox, I know, but that is the art of lying… I mean marketing). Seeing a bunch of picketers really does make you think, “ahh, stupid hippies. All they got is emotion and no sense.”
Indeed, I think past non-violent protest victories were never uphill battles. I don’t think non-violent protests were ever that effective on their own. India got its freedom about the same time as the other colonies, and civil rights and vietnam had a hell of a lot more going for it than picketers. If protests can do anything, it is provide a nucleation site for an issue. Other times, the people with an agenda with an agenda will be dismissed as having an agenda.
However, the worst thing you can do, from the pov of marketing, is infuriate your target audience. If you start being violent, or insulting or desicrational, they’ll close their ears and label you the problem. Very rarely will violence get you what you want. It’ll either be by accident (as with the Irish), by sheer victory in all-out war (as with the American Revolution), or by decades upon decades of unceasing terrorism (as with the Palestinians).
Lastly, there is a classification of protests that are between violence and non-violence. Such as strikes or boycotts. They are more effective than true non-violence (which I think also means non-interference), they inflict real damage to your opponent, while at the same time not branding you as a threat in the majority’s eyes. Dealing practical blows while at the same time holding the high-ground in public opinion. That is the sort of fighting that wins in all conflicts, issues, and wars.
Protests first show there is a problem. Then they show if the demonstration is large the imagnitudei. It does make people who are unaware of a problem face it. It makes the government aware that there are citizens who hate their actions and will protest them. So 1st step is education . When the police react,they show clearly that they are the arm of the powerful. They don’t work for the citizens.They are happy to do this by clubbing, macing, shocking and abusing the unarmed protesters. They always can claim someone threw a bottle.
Hope is that enough Americans will become outraged and demand invesigations and afterwards deal with the cause. When Johnson was photographed looking out the window of the Whitehouse at a sea of protestors ,it showed that it could impact.When peace marchers were beaten and killed in the south it showed to beople who didn’t know that the south had been using the police to hold down the blacks and that discrimination was rampant.
Sol it educates the public about a problem and shows who enforces it. When the protesters start to be from all walks of life then it can win. When the famous and powerful started to assist the demonstrations they got traction.
Except that hardly ever actually works.
Protests worked for civil rights, and they worked to an extent against the Vietnam war. But what else have the worked for?
It is my contention that marching and holding a sign are usually counterproductive, or at best a waste of time. Why not spend that time writing a newsletter, arguing on message boards, or lobbying politicians, or forming a pressure group?
The comparison of protesting to advertising is directly on point. Is that really the best use of your advertising dollar, to have your volunteers mill around the streets for a day? What if they did something productive with that time instead of hanging out with each other?
The IMF/World Bank protests a few years ago were not totally successful, but they nevertheless did an incredible job at raising public awareness of an obscure and abstract issue. The resulting discussion was relatively short-lived, but I think it was far more than would have been realized through other means available to the protesters, and I think it had some lasting effect on policy and the continuing discussion on globalization.
A woman who belonged to the Washington, DC, church I attended a couple of years ago actually spoke to to the church about how she had begun working at the IMF as a young, starry-eyed idealist, and how the protests and resulting public awareness eventually caused her and many of her colleagues to re-examine the actual effects of their work. She still worked at the IMF, but seemed hardly idealistic about it and recognized the need for serious rethinking and restructuring within the organization.
Lots of people may have seen the protesters as just ignorant hippies (and lots of them undoubtedly were), but they still got their message across.
As for ads and letters to the editor, effective ads are incredibly expensive, and of all the ads I tune out on a daily basis, none get tuned out more by me than political action ads. I assume that the ads are one-sided and untrustworthy, even if I’m otherwise inclined to agree with them. Letters to the editor aren’t much better, and few people read them.
Protests, OTOH, get covered in the news, which I do try to pay attention to. Even if I don’t trust the protesters, I trust NPR or the newspapers to tell me at least the basics of what the protest is about from a neutral and discerning POV.
Sorry, that was a response to Shagnasty’s last post. I meant to quote it.
Really? I think you’re vastly overstating the case. I lived around Washington D.C. in the period when the ‘demonstrations’ were most frequent, and the only coherent message I received from the demonstrations was “The WTO is evil, free Mumia, and play hackysack.”
I think the WTO protests were actually a miserable failure in raising awareness because the protestors did a very poor job of actually communicating what their message was. I think that’s a function of two things: first, that their message was complex, and therefore not easy to relegate to slogans on a sign (very different from “Civil Rights Now!” or “Out of 'Nam Now!”); and secondly, in order to gather a larger mass (because the size of protest is directly proportional to how seriously it gets taken), additional messages had to be added to attract more groups.
I think non-violent protests made themselves irrelevant through two major actions. First, the massive non-violent protests against the First Gulf War. Thousands of people gathering to beat drums and chant slogans decrying how useless and disgusting war was, followed by an extremely successfull and amazingly bloodless war, helped place in the American mind the idea that just because there’s a large non-violent protest doesn’t mean there’s any sense to it. Second, the jumbled WTO protests of the '90’s, with giant puppets of people that Americans didn’t recognize, people shouting to have Mumia freed or pot legalized or Cuban sanctions listed or any number of far-out causes, and all gathered for a purpose not well explained on TV or in newspapers by any of the representatives, finished coloring non-violent protests as being the fodder of wackos who didn’t understand reality.
And unfortunately, any non-violent protest in America these days has to try to shake off that legacy, which makes it a much less effective form of political advertising than it used to be.
Yeah, screw protesting. Things get done with lobying. In our representative democracy, screw the democracy, hound the representatives. Sure works for Christians, doesn’t it?
See Post #4 where protests combine with other methods did make the difference occasionally.
Even if policy does not change,the fact that protests are going on can make some people aware of problem that they were not aware existed. When they occur I would imagine some people looked up on the imternets to see what it was about. Education and awareness step one.
I would say absolutely for the most part. The NRA is a good example. In an alternate universe, the NRA would be a group of despondent gun owners that travelled the country holding protests and vigils to keep their right to own guns secure. Of course, that would do little good partly because the opposition could easily run over such scattered demonstrations.
Back in our universe, the NRA is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington. They occupy a small skyscraper in Virginia and have a team of analysts and others hitting politicians and the media day in and day out. Whether you agree with them or not, you have to admit that they are very effective at what they do. The have their own magazines, powerful lobbyists, honorary memberships for people that give them certain amounts of money and everything else.
That is a big contrast to non-violent demonstrations. They hit the media and the power base effectively.
They are very well funded.That makes it possible to do that. When you are wealthy you call it lobbying. When you are underfunded it is a protest.
Clearly the WTO protests did have an effect - most people are now aware that segments of the world population are deeply opposed to its policies. Prior to that it was possible to say in general conversation that globalization and free trade were largely “embraced.” The protests also draw media scrutiny to the WTO which may or may not have had a restraining effect on the meetings.
So the protests scored a few points. They probably didn’t change any policies significantly, but it was because this population had no realistic way of influencing trade policy that they chose this route. Which is precisely the scenario where you turn to nonviolent protests. When normal channels are ineffective. So yes, lobbying is great, but in a lobbying (bribing) war some people are always going to win (corporations) and some people are always going to lose.
As for your personal reaction to particular tactics - that’s like saying you’re sick of seeing geico commercials therefore advertising doesn’t work. Obviously the tactics of war, politics, advertising and protest all have to adapt as people get used to your old tactics or your opponents learn to counter them. Using the same ones repeatedly is going to earn you diminishing returns. And it takes skill and acumen to wage any of them effectively. But even leaders of violent movements routinely incorporate nonviolent tactics into their strategies because when done well they can be extremely effective.
Well, protesting is a form of lobbying. It’s getting a bunch of people together, and saying, in effect, “Look at us, we’re numerous, and we care enough about this issue to march/strike/boycott/whatever form the protest takes.”
This is why, to be effective, protests don’t take place on their own. They combine with other forms of lobbying/negotiation.
In the early years of the anti war movement of the sixties people were quite clear on the issue of non-violence, versus violence. Some chose each path. Usually there were leaders of both factions who spoke to demonstrators before the main action of the demonstration, urging that each group distance itself from the other, so that non lawbreaking was seen to be volitional by specific individuals, and would not be used by authority as an excuse to assign riot status to an entire demonstration. Those who chose to break the law were further encouraged to divide according to the desire to be arrested, or to escape arrest. Most of the lawbreaking was of a nonviolent nature, though, this being a peace movement and all.
The major point of failure in demonstrations comes just after you reach really effective numbers. When half a million people start repeating “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” and the image goes out over the television to the world, the fact is, people do listen. Politicians are not likely to fail to realize that a large number of that half million are likely to vote, if not this year, soon. Unfortunately, once you have the numbers, you loose your dedication to your premise. Someone starts saying free the Indians, or abolish taxes, or . . . well, you get the idea. The term “politically incorrect” was originally used in the movement to describe the phenomenon. It was an error of political tactics to let multiple messages dilute the point of the demonstration.
Selma Alabama, and in fact one cop, and his dog really launched the effective force of the civil rights movement. When you see a dog attack an unarmed woman for being black, and no other reason, and you are told that it is in the name of your constituted authorities and the preservation of the status quo that it is being done, some of you are going to find that unacceptable. You might not like black people, but you have trouble liking the cop.
When the authorities over react and kill demonstrators, or innocent bystanders in defense of civilized government, like they did at Kent State, or against the civil rights workers, or the unionization movement many people who opposed the demonstrators will change their minds. Real peaceful protest means being willing to be one of the slain, but not one of the killers. If Gandhi had been killed before the world noticed him, he would have lost. (And so would we.) But with the whole world watching, it changes. Yes, peaceful protest against an entrenched dictator with a loyal military does not work well within the borders. It can work, even then, if the world is forced to face its hypocrisy in buying from the same dictator to drive their SUVs.
Tris
The mass peaceful demos in Eastern Europe before the collapse of communism; if not the cause of the collapse itself certainly helped speed its demise.