There are better ways to protest climate change than spray painting Stonehenge [with easily removed corn starch] | Just Stop Oil activists could take a page from the civil rights movement, experts say
There are better ways to protest climate change than spray painting Stonehenge [with easily removed corn starch] | Just Stop Oil activists could take a page from the civil rights movement, experts say
Just Stop Oil activists could take a page from the civil rights movement, experts say.
100,000 people marched through London at the weekend at the Restore Nature Now March, and there was virtually no news coverage of it. Yet 2 people spray corn starch on a monument and it's front page news globally.
It's a dilemma.
It'll take something like a big march ending at an airport, and a few people vandalizing a private jet.
They made the news because they remind people who hate them of why they hate them. Not because anyone had a wakeup call. They increased the ambient hate.
Otoh, the Washington Post and their "experts" didn't think any of those civil rights movement direct actions they're celebrating now were reasonable at the time either 🤡
Pretty sure all the newspapers and media at the time were talking about how the civil rights activists were horrible people
MLK was considered a terrorist for a while.
You also had the black Panthers arming and educating full communities to fight back.
That doesn't mean that this style of protest is effective; the evidence we have right now suggests that while it makes the news, it doesn't do much more than that.
It starts conversations
It gives me an 'in' when my conservative reactionary friends-by-circumstances bring it up to dunk on them with their alternative-facts and I get to correct them with reality-facts. It's slow, but it works. No-ones mind was changed overnight about anything.
The news represents the views of the powerful. We won't get on the news, except as villains. The only hope we have is to exist loudly together so people know we're around. They can talk to us directly. That's what marches are about. That's why you hold lots of them.
But it historically is super effective... Basically the only thing that's effective.
There is no one universally right way to do activism. We need a diversity of tactics.
There is no one universally right way to do activism.
There are, however, many ways that are demonstrably wrong.
If you're acting in a way that gives rise to credible speculation that you're secretly funded by Big Oil, maybe it's worth considering the possibility that you're a counterproductive cosplaying fool.
We need a diversity of tactics.
Running unarmed at a machine-gun nest is a tactic. But a diversity of tactics is only a good thing when those tactics actually work.
There’s news articles claiming MLK was secretly funded by the USSR to bring disorder to the US, and it was considered credible at that time by the majority of the white population. The point isn’t people’s reactions, when the civil rights act passed the majority of America thought MLK was a terrible person harming America. The point is to create enough disruption that the people with the power to do so are forced to take action or risk outright collapse of the social order.
Remember there is an actual intelligent force you are against, so they are working on making your effective tactics ineffective. In that case, how do you know if a tactic "works"?
A: you try a bunch of stuff AKA a diversity of tactics.
The boycott makes a innocent sufferer of the bus company. Had the company defiled city and state laws its franchise would have been canceled. The quarrel of the Negroes is with the law. It is wrong to hold the company hostage.
-The Montgomery Advertiser, Montgomery Alabama, Dec 8, 1955
The white man's economic artillery is far superior, better emplaced, and commanded by more experienced gunners.
Second, the white man holds all the offices of government machinery. There will be white rule for as far as the eye can see.
Are these not the facts of life?
Let us be specific, concrete. What is the cost is the bus boycott to the Negro community? Does any Negro leader doubt that the resistance to the registration of Negro voting has been increased? Is economic punishment of the bus company - an innocent hostage to the laws and customs of Alabama - worth the price of a block to the orderly registration of Negro voters?
-The Montgomery Advertiser, Montgomery Alabama, Dec 13, 1955
What I'm trying to say here is, fuck off Washington Post with your "why don't you protest the way I want, quietly in the corner" bullshit.
They could also blow up oil pipelines and actually hurt the industries, but that's apparently going too far. There is no "right way" to protest because the government barely tolerates even "legal" protests, and loves forcing them to places where nobody can even notice them.
Let them do their thing. Nobody's getting injured and the fact that it's in the news and people are discussing it means that it's working. And remember, they could be doing much worse things and choose not to.
Maybe experts should tell oil companies to fuck right off, then there's be no need to protest against oil companies
That happened in the late 1970s. The oil companies fired them and hired the tobacco-cancer denial machine instead.
The target audience for a protest isn't the oil executives; it's the politicians and the public.
Link: Paywalled. Experts? Dubious.
A page from the civil rights era:
Chicago Tribune 1966
They could also read The Monkey Wrench Gang and start taking direct action against the real perpetrators and their assets rather than random soft targets.
I'll note that the protagonists in that book only targeted things, and not people.
"Just stop Oil" are paid for by the oil industry to make all kinds of environmentalists look bad. Change my mind.
You're still talking about them. Q.E.D.