Tons of protests going on everywhere against Israel, but not a single government has changed their stance
They do alot more then bitching about something on social media and expecting that to change anything…
Both are “bitching”. Both are raising awareness. Both don’t seem to be changing/doing anything.
Almost like peaceful protesting doesn’t always work.
In our small town - just a few thousand people, in an extremely red area of an extremely red state: there is a lady that stands on a corner of the main street though town (1 of 10 intersections). She wears her mask with a Gaza flag pattern and holds a Gaza flag with a small poster board that says like “Free Gaza” or something.
I support her right to protest, but I’m not sure that it’s doing anything or what her goal even is. No idea what her protest is designed to do other than virtue signal.
On the other hand I spend time in February making sure my kids and friends/family on social media see images of civil rights protests - brave people attending school or sitting at a lunch counter.
I think protests can work and can change things, but context and strategy matter a lot.
Sometimes.
You mention the specific example of Israel which is literally the most complicated conflict in the entire world. Most people are already aware that it is happening, all the arguments on both sides of that are very well known, there is not really anything novel that can still be said about it. So protests about it (on any side) are not going to have a lot of effect.
Protest toppled a couple of leaders during the Arab spring. Even with Israel, Biden has started sanctioning West bank settlers and sends veiled threats about respecting life. It is not much, but without protests, we wouldn’t even see that.
Some protests in the Arab Spring even caused civil wars, at least one of which is still ongoing to this day.
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Better than staying inside and not doing shit. It shows community activism.
Depends who’s protesting and what’s the support for the protests among general population. The problem with most of the protests you see is that the people that do the protesting are the same people that oppose the government. So yeah, no government is going to react to protests done by people that don’t vote for it, no matter how big. If the actual people that got the government elected protest or support the protest then they listen. Of course most of the time people know what they are voting and the government is doing exactly what it promised so they will not protest.
That’s a great question. What I would say is the wheels of justice turn painfully slowly.
I am sure Antony Blinken is well aware of domestic concerns over the wellbeing of Gazans, the unfortunate reality is any big decision against or at Israel will come with negative consequences.
The path of least resistance might be allowing the Israeli’s to squeeze out their own leader democratically. Is that the best way? Well, probably? Not always?
A pacifist may look to the Vietnam War, Libya or Iran and say action was injustice, an activist might look at the Rwandan Genocide and say pacifism was injustice. Diplomacy has to do it’s thing.
Sometimes. It depends on a lot of factors. Protests can convince people to change their mind, it has happened in the past and does happen on some situations these days as well. Protests can also have negative effects as well, considering things like where, when, and how a protest is carried out can either change people’s minds or entrench them even more in their own opinion.
At the end of the day, the outcome of a protest is just as unpredictable as what a person will do in ten years. Or even the next hour, really.
Hmmm, ig it works if people in charge are actually someone who are willing to accept their mistakes and change their minds, which does not seem to be the case for the situation in question
Protests rarely have a fast rate of changing political situations. Take a look at the suffragette movement. There is also a big difference of success between peaceful and violent protests.
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Depends. A protest that happens for a grand total of a single day will do jack shit. A protest that lasts several days usually tends to get some results. If the end result is a piece of shit, an organized front will start protesting again.
The thing about protests is that they have, more than bring attention to something, is annoy and/or threaten the powerful. If you ever see a protest where the police is protecting the people, that shit is most definitely defending oppression (happened a lot in Brazil in the last 10 or so years). You know how strikes are almost always shown as utterly villainous, something done by “freeloaders” who “don’t want to work”, by corporate media? That’s because it’s annoying the powerful, the protest is working and the powerful are fighting back behind the scenes.
Protests that “don’t bother anyone” are bound to be forgotten like a tiktok video. That’s a real problem, because sometimes a lot of innocent bystanders also get annoyed, like in the case of strikes. A strike of bus drivers will fuck up a LOT of workers, and possibly hurt them much more than any powerful figure, so it’s super easy to turn public opinion go against them.
That’s the problem of society, the majority of people don’t have power, so the only way they can be heard is by joining up for a common purpose. Powerful people can make one or two calls to fight back against a mass of protesters.
with or without guns?
Yes, mobilization is a strong message to government in democracy. It says we do not like the direction, we are going and we will vote you out or cause more disruption. In my town we mobilized in front of our MP’s office due to the partial privatization of medcial aid. Our MP ended up changing his vote and siding against his party, as it was the will of the people. Participation in democracy is a powerful tool.
Absolutely protests change the world.
Both the women’s suffrage movement and the civil rights movement in the US were significantly fueled by protests. It takes more than protests, but protests can play an important part.
Notably, these movements had effective protests because they actually tried to force a change with their matches. The civil rights movement marching through Selma was to a registration office, because they were being denied the right to vote, and they were effectively saying “go ahead, tell us all no, all at once.”
Suffragettes not only demonstrated but worked together to convince their husbands to embrace the movement, and even that only happened because Wilson had a stroke and his wife effectively ran the office while he recovered.
Modern protests are skipping the most important step. They’re obstructing, being seen, but not actually trying to accomplish anything specific. Or if they are, their objective with each protest is so obscured by the media as to be rendered moot. What good did blocking traffic for half an hour do, other than to sour people to your cause?
Every time a person is killed by a cop, fucking get 500 people to go to the police station responsible and have every single person demand the footage of the killing. One after another. Inundate then with requests, clog up their operation, get fucking arrested if you have to.
Protesting alone doesn’t accomplish anything, unless you protest with some teeth.
This is an incorrect and rosy generalisation of the suffragette and many protest movements in general. Protest movements are inherently messy and disorganised. The suffragette movement itself was infamous for infighting, because they couldn’t decide whether they were only fighting for voting rights for women, or equality in general such as 8 hour work days for women.
It took more than 50 years later for these workplace equality ideas to become more mainstream as second wave feminism in the 1970s. Even then, the second wave feminists were prone to infighting, due to feminists not agreeing on what a woman should be, usually by excluding lesbians and trans women.
If you think modern protests are too disruptive and only work to sour people to your cause, remember that suffragettes literally committed arson, improvised bombings and attempted assassinations. The extreme violence was met with immense public backlash, to the point they were painted by the media as literal terrorists.
Feminism - Suffrage, Equality, Activism | Britannica - https://www.britannica.com/topic/feminism/The-suffrage-movement
Building off this, people have to look at more than just the protests. “Radicals” shape the Overton Window, think Malcom X.
In a world where nobody protests and nobody is participating in radical activism, nothing changes. In a world where there are protests but still no radical activism, there is usually no change, though the media and capitalists will feign care and “listen to the issues”. When the protesters become the moderates, the ruling class finally cedes some power to stop social revolution.
In a world where there are only radical activists, no moderate protesters or passive bystanders, there would be social revolution, monumental change. This has happened before, and it’s why the ruling class concedes changes as the overton window becomes more radical.
To a lot of people this looks like “protests work!” but it’s not the protests primarily, it’s the threat of social revolution, led by the radicals and supported by the new moderate position of protesting against the status quo.
Nope.
The world is fucked.
Only thing that could possibly turn the tides would be a massive return to the guillotine.
