From time to time (most recently here) I ramble on about how activism and demonstrations, done stupidly, can backfire and do more harm than good to the cause. Today we have an example of what a backfire looks like. (And, yes, I understand the backfire is way out of proportion to the alleged act that triggered it; this is pretty much always true.)
Brigid Schulte reports for the Washington Post:
As war protesters marched toward Arlington Memorial Bridge en route to the Pentagon yesterday, they were flanked by long lines of military veterans and others who stood in solidarity with U.S. troops and the Bush administration’s cause in Iraq. Many booed loudly as the protesters passed, turned their backs to them or yelled, “If you don’t like America, get out!”
Several thousand vets, some of whom came by bus from New Jersey, car caravans from California or flights from Seattle or Michigan, lined the route from the bridge and down 23rd Street, waving signs such as “War There Or War Here.” Their lines snaked around the corner and down several blocks of Constitution Avenue in what organizers called the largest gathering of pro-administration counter-demonstrators since the war began four years ago.
The vets turned both sides of Constitution into a bitter, charged gantlet for the war protesters. “Jihadists!” some vets screamed. “You’re brain-dead!” Others chanted, “Workers World traitors must hang!” — a reference to the Communist newspaper. Some broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner” as war protesters sought to hand out pamphlets.
Most of us might agree that these counter-demonstrators overdosed on Kool-Aid sometime back. The counter-demonstration was organized by one of those astroturf organizations that pretends to be independent but is really an auxiliary of the Republican Party. But note this:
At a Jan. 27 antiwar rally, some protesters spray-painted the pavement on a Capitol terrace. Others crowned the Lone Sailor statue at the Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue with a pink tiara that had “Women for Peace” written across it.
Word of those incidents ricocheted around the Internet.
“That was the real catalyst, right there,” said Navy veteran Larry Bailey. “They showed they were willing to desecrate something that’s sacred to the American soul.”
Well before 7 a.m., hundreds of people milled about near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in an effort to, they said, “occupy the ground” and keep any disrespectful war protesters away.
“This is sacred ground to us,” said Rick De Marco, 62, a Vietnam veteran from Cleveland.
It’s sacred ground to me, too, and to a lot of liberals and antiwar activists. I hate to think that anyone on our side planned to vandalize it. If anyone has any direct knowledge of any antiwar group threatening to deface the Vietnam Memorial, please up. I suspect any threats to the Vietnam memorial were fabricated by the Right, but I don’t know. (Also note below that leftie blogger BlondeSense is skeptical the spray-painting actually happened.)
I find this fascinating:
Within days of the spray-painting, people were using he Web to organize, making it their mission to protect the monuments, support the troops and accept nothing less than victory in Iraq.
Gathering of Eagles, the group that organized the protest, was so worried about threats to the monuments that it hired private security to guard the Wall, said Harry Riley, 69, a retired Army colonel from Florida. Other vets patrolled the area through the night and early morning, he said.
By early morning, the National Park Service had installed two metal detectors and carefully controlled entry along the path leading to the Wall. Blue-helmeted riot police were stationed along the length of the Wall. For a time, a handful of vets paraded back and forth with American flags waving in the stiff, cold breeze.
This has “stunt” written all over it. Where were these alleged threats coming from? Did someone in the White House arrange for riot police to make the threat more credible?
But this is how backfires happen. I saw it time and time again during the Vietnam years. Some small number of protesters would do something stupid, such as vandalism or waving a North Vietnamese flag during a protest march. Then the Nixon Administration would use the incident to discredit the entire antiwar movement and stir up public anger against it. Thus, Nixon used the antiwar movement to deflect much public criticism of his handling of the war. Although the Vietnam War was unpopular, large chunks of the American public hated the antiwar movement even more.
Nixon’s operatives were very good at getting groups of people fired up about the dirty bleeping hippies and then arranging for those groups to counter-protest. For example, when Vietnam Veterans Against the War planned a march to Valley Forge in 1970, White House staffer Chuck Colson arranged for local VFW chapters to confront the VVAW. (A documentary of the march is said to contain footage of the VFW members spitting on the Vietnam vets.) Colson also had a hand in arranging the “hard hat parade” of May 1970. The parade got national television news coverage and helped Richard Nixon paint the protesters as “effete snobs” and privileged elitists who didn’t appreciate the virtues of hard-working “middle America.”
But let’s return to the present. BlondeSense was there:
… there was a significant anti-peace crowd who came to make their presence known, and a surprisingly high number were veterans. At the prior marches, the pro-war contingent had been pitifully small (and by pitifully small I mean maybe a couple dozen). I will readily admit I was wrong to think the anti-peace crowd this time would be roughly the same. I estimate between 2,000 and 3,000 “uber-patriots” showed up on this occasion, suitably wrapped in the American flag, as if they and they alone owned it. They were a pretty foul bunch, widely profain and abusive. One thing that struck us as we walked past them was that they were almost universally white men: very few women; very few people of color. Interesting that there were no African-American or Latino vets among their ranks, given the disproportionate numbers of these who served in Viet Nam. Still, I learned a few things from them that I didn’t know before. Along with the usual “I’m not fonda Jane” signs, I was informed that I am a parasite, and that Nancy Pelosi is owned by al-Queda. Hmmm, learn something new every day.
Third, some who visit here may recall that at the march in January, there was a bit of a kerfuffle on the steps of the US Capitol, with the MSM reporting that the steps had been “defaced” with some spray paint by some young punk anarchists. Now, the part about the spray paint may or may not have been true (and I only have my own lying eyes to believe that it was not), but as a consequence, rumors apparently abounded that the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial was going to be defaced. So the Gathering of Beagles, as the anti-peace crowd called themselves (okay, not really, they called themselves the Gathering of Eagles, but I couldn’t resist because they sounded like so many hound dogs baying at the fox to me), were there to “protect” the memorial from us Godless, filthy, hippie-lovin’, librul scum. I’m going to state this as succintly as possible: Bullshit. I have a 99.9999% confidence level that no threats of that nature came from the anti-war protesters. To the extent such a threat actually happened, I’d be willing to make a significant wager that it was someone from the pro-war group who actually manufactured the threat in order to rally the vets to protect their hallowed ground. And to get coverage from the MSM regarding their “noble” cause. (Naturally, it worked.) In any event, access to the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial was tightly controlled, with each person being hand-searched before being allowed to visit the wall.
And I’m 99.9999% confident that BlondeSense is right about who started the rumors. It’s a classic rightie propaganda move. I’m only surprised it’s taken the Bush White House this long to get a counter-movement going, although that may be because public demonstrations against the war haven’t been as common as they were during Vietnam.
One of the groups behind the counter-protest is Move America Forward, which you can read about here. In a nutshell, MAF is an “astroturf” organization put together by a political consulting/public affairs firm with many connections to the Republican Party, and MAF’s organizers and boosters amount to a Who’s Who of American Wingnuts and Chickenhawks — Melanie Morgan, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Rush Limbaugh. The counter-demonstration was organized mainly by A Gathering of Eagles, which calls itself a “partner” organization to MAF. And if the “Eagles” aren’t astroturf, too, I’ll eat my mousepad.
At the end of the day the “Eagles” had successfully guarded the Vietnam Memorial from the fantasy threat. Expect to see more of them a future antiwar demonstrations. No expense will be spared to ensure a big turnout. The danger is that the “Eagles,” who are utterly oblivious to the fact that they’re being used, will goad antiwar demonstrators into shouting matches and fights that will make for great television (flag-waving, uniformed veterans versus dirty bleeping hippies) and deflect attention away from the war itself.
Update: See Sadly, No.
You are right. I have refused the opportuinity to take part in several demonstrations and I don’t plan to go to any in the future. They are old school, knee-jerk and self-indulgent. The only purpose is to give the participants a faux sense of moral superiority over the people who aren’t there. There is absolutely no basis for believing that demonstrations in the current political climate can be a tool for change. People who are serious about ending the war will work either to mount a primary challenge against a pro-war Democrat or a support Democratic challenge against a Republican.
There were no threats against the Vietnam Memorial; I watched the meme grow on crazed righty sites from “what if they spraypaint the VM?” to “they’re going to spraypaint the VM!”
jpe — as I suspected. I really would like to know who arranged for the riot police.
Seeing how it’s Sunday… I have a word from the Lord for my fellow veterans….”Put away the things of your youth”
I love it, Chucky Colson. Here’s a guy who was clever enough to invest in Jesus and put on the coat of many colors..and it’s been paying him a dividend ever since.
Funny how, after years of being told that Iraq is NOT like Vietnam, (not a quagmire, not doomed to last for years, not a pointless foreign military misadventure) now the anti-protestors seem to be telling me it IS Vietnam.
‘Defending’ the Memorial, Viet vets, Fonda-bashing, and that 60s classic ‘America- love it or leave it’ :It’s such a perfectly staged throwback that I’d expect to see a TV crew shooting a ‘Wonder Years’ episode!
I thought we’d moved on. This war isn’t that war, these Republicans aren’t those Republicans, and ‘victory’ in Iraq isn’t going to make Vietnam any better. I though we were at least up to ‘Everybody Hates Chris.’
But I guess that, just as I still enjoy the classic Motown tracks, the ‘big hits’ of the 60s still carry weight. But my question is, if this war really IS Vietnam reprised, could we please just skip forward to the helicopters at the Embassy already? I’ve seen this show already, and I didn’t like it the first time.
Well, such dwellers in the past exist, biggerbox. In my little Georgia town we have one colorful character whose car is plastered with anti-Jane Fonda stickers and such – “America, love it or leave it”, etc. There must be many others over the country, who haven’t invested any new brain power for 35 years, preferring to remain in their old tracks.
Much of this is our fault. Letting people like ANSWER run Anti-war demonstrations that we supporti s a major disaster. According to Wikipedia:
“ANSWER characterizes itself as anti-imperialist, and its steering committee consists of socialists, Marxists, civil rights advocates, and left-wing progressive organizations from the Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, Filipino, Haitian, and Latin American communities. Many of ANSWER’s leaders were members of Workers World Party (WWP) at the time of ANSWER’s founding, and are current members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), a Marxist-Leninist organization that formed in 2004.
These people don’t represent me and I don’t believe they represent 98% of the Anti-war movement, yet their views are the one’s publicized as representing the typical liberal. We need to stop legitimizing the extremists. I won’t take part in any demonstration they organize and urge others who don’t feel this is the face we want to present to America to do the same. They can run their own events with crowds who endorse their positions, I won’t be there.
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Yesterday’s protest was organized by religious groups who are against the war. Their plan was to say that God is not necessarily on the Republican’s side or George Bush’s side. Nothing above describes what I saw, which was by accident because I was somewhere close and saw many protesters and signs just as the protest ending. Also, nothing above describes what I saw on the local news, which is that there was a small protest and a some antiprotesters. ANSWER was not involved as far as I know.
As a Vietnam vet, I am appalled at how some of us let ourselves be used. It’s really pathetic that people learn so little from experience. The conservative “war hawks” are not friends of veterans. And for us on the other side, the protests didn’t end the Vietnam war, it was a combination of a lack of voter support and the Vietnamese, who didn’t want us there. IOW, reality set in.
If antiwar groups want to have a big impact, find the families of deployed troops in your city or neghborhood, and find out if you can help. There are good organizations that can steer you in the right direction. Don’t preach like the religious nuts, just help. If and when you talk face to face over coffee, you may find out how much you have in common, and really get allies. Who knows?
Griff
Well, ANSWER says they were sponsoring it: http://answer.pephost.org/site/News2?id=8107
And CSPAN covered their speakers. So even if others were involved, the face of the March shown to America was ANSWER.
Unfortunately, ANSWER will continue to be the face of the anti-war demonstrations because losing in Iraq is the only remaining way to stop the vicious spread of capitalism and wealth creation in the Middle East.
Let me get this straight…
You’re essentially implying that “Stupid Activism” of those who “do more harm than good” is somehow “backfires” and is responsible for and encourages this sort of egregiously dishonest propaganda and abusive misbehavior.
And the sole undisputed provocation which resulted in this backfire is that someone put a pink tiara on a statue?
What are you smoking, and–more importantly–why haven’t you offered *me* any?
Blame the victim
Barefoot — It doesn’t take much. It didn’t take much during the Vietnam era to work up a backlash, and I’ve been surprised there hasn’t been much of a backlash this time. We’ve been lucky, so far.
Note that I have taken part in some antiwar marches in New York and Washington. I’m not against demonstrating, but I wish people would learn to be more disciplined about it. (See explanation of the Bigger Asshole rule here.)
Matt Taibbi nailed it some time ago: what the demonstrators need to do is show up in formal business wear. That would be far more effective than the pretty lame pageant wear currently favored for these things.
An excerpt:
“That’s why the one thing that would have really shaken Middle America last week wasn’t “creativity.” It was something else: uniforms. Three hundred thousand people banging bongos and dressed like extras in an Oliver Stone movie scares no one in America. But 300,000 people in slacks and white button-down shirts, marching mute and angry in the direction of Your Town, would have instantly necessitated a new cabinet-level domestic security agency.”
Maha, thanks for at least covering the topic (nothing but crickets in left blogistan), but your point seems to be that the astroturf counter-protest was somehow provoked by irresponsible anti-war marchers, one of whom may have placed a tiara on a statue. As if it wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Wingnuts will be wingnuts, no matter what our side does.
It’s like the abused spouse syndrome. The Abused thinks it’s their fault, that if they could just behave properly the abuse would end. Wrong. The Abuser enjoys abusing, they will always find an excuse.
[Deleted; commenter is an asshole who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. — maha]
Furthermore, my goodkins, the nature of a grass roots movement is that it is somewhat disorganized and draws in a broad spectrum of people. Just relax about that. Otherwise, the surest way to kill a grassroots movement is to try to impose discipline from the top down. Sure, you can try to get everyone to stay on message and behave “nicely” according to your definition of that, but you kill the movement that way. That’s just how it is. Recent demos have had well-planned strategies to avoid violence and stay within the law (except for some small-scale planned non-violent civil disobedience). They have been remarkably peaceful and positive.
So let the righties make fools of themselves. The peaceful nature of the peace movement and it’s genuine patriotism speaks for itself.
It’s like the abused spouse syndrome. The Abused thinks it’s their fault, that if they could just behave properly the abuse would end. Wrong. The Abuser enjoys abusing, they will always find an excuse.
That’s true; but the demonstrating thing is tricky. Martin Luther King understood that the civil rights marchers didn’t dare give the bigots ammunition. (See Protesting 101.) Until the antiwar movement is able to come close to the same level of discipline the civil rights marchers had, then it might be better not to march at all.
the nature of a grass roots movement is that it is somewhat disorganized and draws in a broad spectrum of people. Just relax about that.
In other words, we shouldn’t even try to shape the movement to be effective.
Otherwise, the surest way to kill a grassroots movement is to try to impose discipline from the top down.
Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi say otherwise.
Recent demos have had well-planned strategies to avoid violence and stay within the law (except for some small-scale planned non-violent civil disobedience). They have been remarkably peaceful and positive.
I’ve participated in several; I know what they’re like.
So let the righties make fools of themselves.
That’s a good plan, but it takes discipline. It takes being very careful and disciplined so that there’s no question the righties are the bigger assholes (see bigger asshole rule).
The peaceful nature of the peace movement and it’s genuine patriotism speaks for itself.
Not clearly enough. It could be better.
I’m sure glad I visited your site today, I had planned on attending a candle light vigil tomorrow, but to be honest , although I abhor the war in Iraq, being half Irish and half Italian, I’m not at all good at being the target of big mouthed assholes slinging insults.Perhaps I’d better stay away or cover my mouth with duct tape and bind my own wrists. In my humble opinion, these idiots are awaiting their own “Gulf of Tonkin” moment Those Sixty something year old former warriors have forgotten they are no longer twenty something hard bodies. They are now flabby old men with slower reactions, and longer recuperations will be required if they scuffle, which no doubt eventually, some will..Crap, someone could break a hip!I suggest a reality check for all.
I think you’re missing my point about the abused spouse thingy. There is nothing the anti-war left can do that will not incur the Corporate Media’s or the Right Wing’s criticism. Except maybe to shut up and stay off the streets entirely.
What they object to is the anti-war message, not the style in which it is delivered. But focusing on “mistakes” in style is a clever misdirection.
If MLK himself and an army of well-groomed, well-tailored adult professionals marched on the pentagon today, there would be some snarky columns tomorrow about their silly neckties or something.
And even at the time, for all the movement’s discipline, are you saying they were not criticised, told they were being too visible, that they were doing too much too soon?
I don’t agree completely with Barbara on this issue but there is a recent example tp support her position so powerful it made me cringe. Some transuexual kook showed up at the Valerie Plame hearings to protest Bush and the war. So the media interviews her (I think she is post-op) and some of the most powerful testimony of the past 6 years was diluted by a well-intetioned but deluded anti-war activist. Grandstanding at the wrong time IS counterproductive.
On the other hand, this is not the 60’s. Part of the backlash was an association that Nixon was able to exploit. He was able to link the anti-war movement in the minds of middle-America with a ‘counter-culture’ that mainstream America was petrified of. Timothy Leary, Black Panthers, free love, etc. That ‘counter culture’ does not exist and protesters usually look like you and me. The object has to be, if you want to protest, to consider the picture you might present to the audience (whoever that audience is intended to be) and ask yourself, does the picture help or hurt the movement.
Shystee is right that there will always be a backlash no matter how protesters behave. This post is itself part of the backlash.
Erinyes gets the maha message: “I’m sure glad I visited your site today, I had planned on attending a candle light vigil tomorrow…”
Great.
I think you’re missing my point about the abused spouse thingy
And you’re missing my point about the Greater Asshole principle, if indeed you bothered to follow the link.
I will break one of my own rules and explain briefly, even though I’ve written about this already. As explained at length here, the point of a protest is to gain sympathy among the undecided public. You’re not going to change the minds of people who actively oppose you, but you don’t need to. The objective is to grow overall public opinion in your favor.
And the way this is done is to make your opposition look like bigger assholes than you are. This is essentially what Gandhi did to the British and what Martin Luther King did to segregationists. On the other hand, Nixon was able to turn public sympathy against the Vietnam antiwar movement because too many of them acted like bigger assholes than Nixon.
Now, it ought to be possible for antiwar activists to use this principle against the whackjobs, and it would be a great thing if that were done. Indeed, it should be easy to do, since they go ballistic every time we so much as breath. But it would require extraordinary discipline on our part to pull it off — to take their abuse and not react, the way MLK’s marchers didn’t fight back against the bigots — and I don’t think our side has that kind of discipline.
Your abused wife analogy doesn’t work, because the point is not to change the husband or even stop the abuse. The point is for a disinterested observer, looking on, to feel sympathy for the wife and think the husband is an asshole.
this is not the 60’s.
Yeah, very likely I’m overreacting. Mostly I think marches and demonstrations are a waste of time. They aren’t changing minds.
The level of “discipline” necessary to keep *everyone* “in line”–to the extent that no one even puts a pink tiara on a statue–is completely impractical and unreasonable.
The conditions where one can achieve even a MLK level of discipline are rare, and even then, it seems unreasonable to suppose that not a single individual *ever* stepped out of line.
We are fighting not just to end the war in Iraq, but also for a society that respects *full* freedom of expression. Yes, we should insist on responsibility and good sense, but I don’t see how making a federal case of every little deviation from The One Right Way of dissent is very helpful in the long term.
I am currently in Prague, where a gathering of the citizenery – a continual filling day after day of a public space the size of the Mall in DC – brought down an evil and oppressive regime. America is being weighed in the eyes of the world, and is being found wanting. We could stop this nonsense if we really wanted to, just by showing up.
At the same time, I have stupidity fatigue. At the time of the Vietnam War, I thought it was awful that protesters would do things that might be interpreted wrongly. Now, I frankly don’t care. Those that want to be bamboozled will be bamboozled. We are never going to get the likes of Karl Rove and the Washington Post to respect us. The focus needs to be on acquiring and using political power to fix the mess we are in, not worrying about what idiots will think about that.
[Comment deleted. Maha was challenged to kick ass; she did so. — maha]
America is being weighed in the eyes of the world, and is being found wanting.
Amen! I gotta admit I thought America was made of better stuff then what I’ve seen. How we laid down when they passed the torture bill shook my faith in America. We hit bottom with a little more than a whimper of protest. The same spirit of resistance that could be found among the inmates of Auschwitz.
The level of “discipline†necessary to keep *everyone* “in lineâ€â€“to the extent that no one even puts a pink tiara on a statue–is completely impractical and unreasonable.
It wouldn’t be if people were more committed to the cause than to their own egos.Big organizations in the past managed just fine. But I’m not holding my breath now.
The conditions where one can achieve even a MLK level of discipline are rare, and even then, it seems unreasonable to suppose that not a single individual *ever* stepped out of line.
It’s hard to say “never,” but they sure as heck didn’t do it much. I don’t know if you are old enough to remember the 1950s; I am. I assure you, had an African American stepped one foot wrong, then most of white America would have sided with the segregationists with attack dogs and fire hoses. The civil rights marchers gained sympathy only because they were so careful not to fight back.
Those that want to be bamboozled will be bamboozled. We are never going to get the likes of Karl Rove and the Washington Post to respect us.
No, but if you think protests are supposed to change the minds of the likes of Karl Rove and the Washington Post, you are, um, wrong. It is not and never was the point. The point is to gain sympathy among the public. But in our current political climate I’m not sure mass demonstrations have much effectiveness at all, no matter how well they are done.
The only antiwar demonstration that made a dent was Cindy Sheehan’s campout at Crawford in August 2005. That worked because she followed the Greater Asshole rule; Bush whizzing by in his motorcade, not acknowledging the peace mom, made him look like a bigger asshole than she was. I think it made a difference. Not much Sheehan has done since has been all that helpful, however.
The focus needs to be on acquiring and using political power to fix the mess we are in, not worrying about what idiots will think about that.
Yes, and mass demonstrations are fairly useless for that. That’s why the real work has revolved around other kinds of political organizing.
I totally respect this blog, and what I would really like to see is all elements of the left supporting each other. That’s why I don’t like seeing criticism of marchers by bloggers.
I read your protest 102 post and the bigger asshole theory. I call it Passive-Aggressive Politics.
It’s not the same as the non-violent resistance of MLK and Gandhi. They were going out and submitting themselves to establishment violence. Passive-aggressive politics is living in fear of what the right-wingnuts might say about you.
It’s never going to work if the outside observers are saying the Abused spouse was asking for it because they burned the roast.
In this case, buying the premise of the Wapo article that the Gathering of Wingnuts was a spontaneous, righteous reaction to one protester putting a tiara on a statue. You debunked the facts but you seem to be buying the larger premise?
How much bigger assholes do we have to let the Bushies be? Will the American people be sympathetic to a party who has the majority in congress, but still let the GOP get everything they want?
In the meantime, Here’s some pictures of protesters in LA doing silly things that someone somewhere migh object to.
Peace and buonanotte.
While I generally agree with the principles espoused by Maha in Protesting 101 and 102, I can see that even if we managed to be totally disciplined about protesting, I can also see the right manufacturing an outrage – getting someone to spray paint a pink tiara for example – if only to incite anger on their own side.
“As explained at length here, the point of a protest is to gain sympathy among the undecided public. You’re not going to change the minds of people who actively oppose you, but you don’t need to. The objective is to grow overall public opinion in your favor.
And the way this is done is to make your opposition look like bigger assholes than you are.”
Wrong.
This is the source of your frustration and your belief that protests don’t work: you don’t understand the multiple functions of a rally and protest in today’s context. I won’t bother to explain it, since you think you already know everything.
And I was there too, from the civil rights days onward.
This is the source of your frustration and your belief that protests don’t work: you don’t understand the multiple functions of a rally and protest in today’s context.
No, my belief that protests (usually) don’t work is based on my observation of their effects and results, which is pretty much zilch. There is an occasional exception, but where there are exceptions the Bigger Asshole rule is always a factor.
I also suggest you’ve got too much of your ego invested to see the truth. Now, get lost.
Every time you do one of these posts it depresses me a bit, maha. It seems clear to me what you are saying, and clearly correct too. But nobody wants to hear it.
It might be illuminating, I think, to explore why that may be. Simple ego, I think, is not a sufficient answer. A lot of it, I think, is black and white “thinking” … protests are good … therefore, if you have a protest, that’s good … and obviously since it’s such a good thing, it will work.
Another thing, I think, is simple helplessness. People WANT a revolution, they WANT to change the world, but how? The only way that most people know about is protesting … blogs are another tool for change, but most people can’t write well enough to actually blog (or at least well enough to have more than a handful of readers) … just giving money, just reading blogs, just voting, all seem too passive and consumerist.
So, if they can’t go to a protest … what CAN they do?
-me
If you look at nonviolent mass demonstrations in the past, there have been some that were very effective. You can go back to the suffragette marches and then move forward to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and count a lot of success. More recently, I think last year’s immigrant marches really did have an impact on public opinion, so you can’t say they are always a waste of time.
But what strikes me, looking at successful demonstrations in the past, is that the participants tended to be serious and behave in a dignified manner. But for some reason, since the late 1960s people got it into their heads that demonstrations were about dressing up in outlandish costumes and/or pulling off flamboyent publicity stunts. I’m not sure where that came from, but it’s the norm now. The big demonstrations I’ve been to were like street carnivals at best, and at worst could be pretty raunchy.
The message to the public should be, “we are American citizens, like you, and we are concerned about this issue.” Instead, the message is “we are a pack of circus clowns and you don’t have to take us seriously.”
I think the example that Doug Hughes brought up (comment 24) is right to the point. And Doug is right; that kind of display works against us, not for us. I don’t know what gets into peoples’ heads.
Mass demonstrations that are dignified and focused (not about 20 different leftie issues at once) could be very effective, but the people who show up for these things do NOT want to be told to leave the costumes and giant puppets at home. I’ve given up trying to talk to them. And there are a few people who think that acts of vandalism or use of naughty language is just the thing to get attention. Well, yes, it gets attention, but not all attention is good attention.
In comment #34 shystee provided some photographs of antiwar protests. Here’s the link.
The first photo is of some people (including Martin Sheen) carrying a flag-draped coffin. I’ve seen those in antiwar marches, and the display is pretty effective. But why are most of the people in the photo dressed as if they were going to the beach? Why aren’t they wearing suits, or at least something understated, as Sheen is?
The underlying message is “this is just a stunt; we don’t take it seriously.”
Other photos show a guy wrapped in a Che Guevara flag (what’s Che Guevara got to do with Iraq?) and some clown in a flag cape carrying a bucket of “blood.” This is what I’m talking about. These are not serious people; they are children playing dress up. At this point it’s neither clever nor effective communication. It trivializes the issue.
Demonstrations accomplish absolutely nothing.
There will be corruption of the ideal. There will infuriating things done that will enable the people who are being protested against to use for their uses.
Also, incidents will happen.
I saw an anti war radical in the 1960’s that did extremely insane things. There was a rumor that he had been making and selling LSD. Seven years later, I heard he was working at the Argonne National Laboratories.
Do I believe that he was arrested and turned into an agent provacateur. Absolutely.
Maha, do you know if anything besides pavement was spray-painted? That’s all the Capito Police press release refers to.
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/police-chief-defends-actions-during-protest-2007-02-01.html
Their language makes me think that the message was spray-painted on the black asphalt area, not the white steps.
Thanks again for this post and the blog. I’m in full agreement with you re the counter-productiveness of actions like this.
On the other hand, I saw a media picture of an event in Europe. This protest WAS a peace symbol, made up of many hundred – or a thousand people carying torches to make a statement. I giant cirle of light with the 4 lines to make the universal sign.That’s discipline; that’s a message, and it causes one to ask (and do not have the answer) who organized it? What do they believe (other than an end to the Western military involvement in the Iraq not-too-civil war.) I will particiapte in something that organized. Otherwise, Barnum and Bailey is based in Fla; I will catch their act.
Great post and discussion here
to read my personal account of the event check out Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/3/19/205752/755
Maha, you make some very good points. However, I think they are undermined by the fact that you are hostile to the notion of protests per se. You believe that the tactic is counter productive unless it is carried out in a highly disciplined, regimented fashion. As practical matter, this the same as saying no protest at all since there has never been a mass protest movement of the kind you describe. No, not even Dr. King’s.
What’s being overlooked in your referencing of the movement that Dr. King led is the fact that it was never soley or even primarily a movement of mass marches. This false impression has been bred by the yearly recycling of footage from the 1963 March on Washington that has become the hallmark of the annual King Day rememberance..
That was indeed a very disciplined action but it was not the essence of the movement or Dr. King’s strategy. The essence of the movement was confrontation. The strategy was civil disobedience. That is, the conscious, willful violation of existing civil laws in the service of a greater moral law.
It is only within this context that the aspects of the movement that you emphasize can be properly understood. Dr. King was not about pandering to the comfort zones of the complacent. He was not about soothing the bad conscience of America or showing respect for the status quo in hopes of extracting concessions. Had he been, he would never have taken leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, since that movement was a direct repudiation of such an approach. As an African American and a southerner Dr.King was well aware of the ramifications of organizing black folks in a direct confrontation with Jim Crow. He wasn’t seeking an accomodation with the white supremacist system, he was seeking its destruction.
Its difficult for people who have not experienced that system first hand to understand the profoundly radical, even revolutionary character of the challenge Dr. King and the movement he led posed. Just as it is difficult at this remove for people to comprehend that in his time Dr. King never commanded the degree of respect in the white community that he does today, however hypocritical that respect may be.
In his time, far from being celebrated, Dr. King was reviled by whites North and South. He was labeled a trouble maker, a subversive, a Communist dupe or an actual Communist as well as far worse things that I needn’t repeat here. In short, he was the target of the same sort of unreasoning anger and hatred that was on display on the Mall in Washington this past weekend.
How did he respond? As a Christian, Dr. King would not return hatred for hatred or violence for violence, but neither would he retreat in the face of them. You may search his writings and his speeches from now until judgement day and you will discover no instance where he ever suggested that the moral onus for such malignant hostility lay with those who confronted the nation with its sins. Nowhere will you find him arguing that the root of such hatred lay in the behavior of those who refused to be silent in the face of an overwhelming moral evil. He would not placate or temporize with the corrosive forces of oppression and saw no equivilance between them and those who opposed them, whatever the failings of the latter. He had no patience with any who would trim the sails of justice before the winds of popular dissapproval.
At the time of his death Dr. King was preparing to lead the Poor Peoples Campaign which sought to link the causes of racial and economic justice with a condemnation of the War in Vietnam and the national policy on which it was based. This had caused him to lose support in both the white and black community. The centerpiece of the campaign was to be Resurrection City, a shanty town erected on the Mall in Washington to be populated by the poor and dispossessed so that the Nation could no longer avert its eyes from them. Does this sound like the sort of person who would tuck up his skirts and flee from the prospect of a pink tiara being placed on a statue or paint being sprayed on some steps?
As I said at the beginning Maha, you have some good points, despite your hostility to public protest. I don’t agree with you because protests are not merely essays in public relations. They are a channeling of people’s righteous indignation at the crimes piled upon crimes committed by those who presume to rule over them. An indignation so profound that, left unexpressed, it will either choke the heart with dispair or erupt in a flood of violence. This is something that Dr. King understood. It is why he chose the course he did. It is why he would never countenence a policy of quiesence based on a fear of unpopularity. His entire life is a witness to this. Which is why I do not believe he would agree with you.
Maha, you make some very good points. However, I think they are undermined by the fact that you are hostile to the notion of protests per se.
No, I am not. I have taken part in several. And what you wrote proves to me you don’t understand what I said. In fact, much of it reinforces what I said.
Please note: I do not call for a retreat from public abuse; I’m calling for people to apply the principles of Gandhi in how they stand up to public abuse. Not retreating, but not retaliating, either.
If you didn’t read Holly J’s DKos diary about her experiences in Washington last weekend, I urge you to do so. It might open your eyes.
But when you write,
MLK’s marchers did not return the abuse hurled at them. They accepted arrests withour resistance; they walked past crowds of screaming, taunting bigots and did not scream and taunt back. They must have been seething with anger, but they didn’t give in to the temptation to respond to hate with hate, or to ridicule with ridicule.
Spray-painting a public building or putting a pink tiara on a statue are minor incidents, but such behavior is also childish and self-indulgent. People who are serious about a critical issue really ought to conduct themselves like grownups, IMO.
As I said, I’ve participated in some big anti-Iraq War demonstrations, and most of the other participants were sincerely dedicated to the cause. But there’s always a large contingent who try to turn the demonstration into an exercise in self-indulgence and who behave in ways that are disrespectful to other participants and humanity in general. That spoils the whole effort, IMO.
This is something that Dr. King understood. It is why he chose the course he did. It is why he would never countenence a policy of quiesence based on a fear of unpopularity.
Nor do I. I say again, the Right is going to hate us no matter what we do. That doesn’t matter. In fact, that could be used to our advantage, but I doubt the vocational protesters would stop using demonstrations as an exercise in ego gratification.
Actually Maha, I followed the link from Holly J’s article to your post. I not only read your post but I read the entire comment thread, including your exchanges. It’s certainly possible that I’ve misunderstood you. It’s also possible that you have misunderstood me or that you may have said more than you actually intended.
“That’s true; but the demonstrating thing is tricky. Martin Luther King understood that the civil rights marchers didn’t dare give the bigots ammunition.”
What Dr. King understood was that simply organizing black folks to confront white supremacy gave the bigots all the amunition they required.
“Yeah, very likely I’m overreacting. Mostly I think marches and demonstrations are a waste of time. They aren’t changing minds.”
Perhaps hostility was not the best discriptive for the attitude expressed above but it certainly isn’t inapplicable.
“I assure you, had an African American stepped one foot wrong, then most of white America would have sided with the segregationists with attack dogs and fire hoses.”
Maha it isn’t at all clear that the majority of white folks ever “sided” with Dr. King and his tactics of confrontation through civil disobedience. What can be said is that a majority of white folks got sick of the violence and disorder and concluded that it was not going to end until Jim Crow was terminated and the voting rights of African Americans secured. Even as they drew this lesson many, if not most, whites continued to oppose King’s strategy of non-violent civil disobedience.
The point is to gain sympathy among the public. But in our current political climate I’m not sure mass demonstrations have much effectiveness at all, no matter how well they are done.
Again perhaps hostility is the wrong word but your disapproval is plain.
Mass demonstrations that are dignified and focused (not about 20 different leftie issues at once) could be very effective, but the people who show up for these things do NOT want to be told to leave the costumes and giant puppets at home. I’ve given up trying to talk to them. And there are a few people who think that acts of vandalism or use of naughty language is just the thing to get attention. Well, yes, it gets attention, but not all attention is good attention.
From this I think it is fair to conclude that you do not approve of demonstrations that present more than a single point of view, where people wear costumes or carry giant puppets and that you view such behaviors as only slightly less objectionable than vandalism and naughty language . I won’t assume that by coupling these last two you intended to equate them because I’m sure you didn’t mean that.
Conversely, I think it fair, in context with your other remarks, to conclude that you will tolerate, if not endorse, protests where participants observe some sort of dress code, speak with a single voice and never give way to passion or flamboyance.
The first photo is of some people (including Martin Sheen) carrying a flag-draped coffin. I’ve seen those in antiwar marches, and the display is pretty effective. But why are most of the people in the photo dressed as if they were going to the beach? Why aren’t they wearing suits, or at least something understated, as Sheen is?
Possibly because it’s LA and temperatures were likely in the mid 70s? It was warm. Did the kid in the tie dyed shirt bring up bad memories?
If I’ve gotten any of this wrong please, correct me.
It’s pretty clear that you don’t think much of mass protest and you dislike much of what you’ve seen at them. You assume (and it is an assumption on your part) that your own bias reflects that of the larger part of the nation. You might be right but seeing as your primary reasons for thinking so are based on the experiences of fourty years ago I have to say that is a rather large assumption.
Returning to your initial post it’s worth noting that you entitled it “Stupid Activism”. Am I wrong in thinking that you’re not refering to the counter protesters? Were you not in fact referencing this passage:
But this is how backfires happen. I saw it time and time again during the Vietnam years. Some small number of protesters would do something stupid, such as vandalism or waving a North Vietnamese flag during a protest march. Then the Nixon Administration would use the incident to discredit the entire antiwar movement and stir up public anger against it. Thus, Nixon used the antiwar movement to deflect much public criticism of his handling of the war. Although the Vietnam War was unpopular, large chunks of the American public hated the antiwar movement even more.
Again, if I’m getting this all wrong please show me where I’ve gotten off track..
I may have been overly passionate in my earlier response to you. If so it is because I take Dr. King’s legacy very much to heart having been inspired by his example. You see I grew up in Atlanta and have been acquainted with and worked with a number of those close to him during the Civil Rights struggle. Like them I am dismayed by attempts to turn him into a plaster Saint or to substitute a sanitized, domesticated legend for his actual legacy.
If I have been unjust to you it is because it seems to me, rightly or wrongly, that your use of King’s life and legacy above partakes of this false iconography. Put simply, the notion that Dr. King’s advocacy of nonviolence was predicated primarily or even secondarily on soothing the fears of white folks is false. First and foremost it was the product of his personal faith. Secondly, it was the only practical course since any resort to violence would have invited the physical extermination of the movement by local authorities, irrespective of national opinion. Third, it was a means by which African-Americans, who had been trodden down by over three centuries of inhuman brutality, could assert their individual and collective dignity and humanity. Just as Dr. King recognized that slavery degraded the slave owner as well as the enslaved, he believed violence degraded those who resorted to it, regardless of the justification. Fourth, by linking non-violence to Civil Disobedience Dr. King was posing a militant moral challenge to a white community that would have, frankly, prefered that the issue simply go away.
None of this, in my opinion, is compatible with a notion of protest as primarily a means of persuasion. Dr. King’s goal was to sabotage the system through noncompliance. To rendered the status quo unworkable by actively violating its strictures. This was the core of Ghandi’s strategy as well.
The only way to reconcile these realities with a view of protest focused on a fear of giving offense, or of appearing less than respectful or respectable, is to ignore them altogether.
So let’s try to clarify things a bit. Maha, would you be happier if people left their costumes and puppets at home and engaged in active civil disobedience against the war effort? Would you support sit-ins at government offices? At military installations? The boycotting of corporations with interests in war industries? Student walk outs such those organized by the newly revived SDS? The non-violent blockades of recruitment centers?
If your answers to these questions are negative, I respectfully suggest that , while you are free to argue for your perspective as you see fit, you cease trying link your views to the examples King and Ghandi. To do otherwise is to appropriate their legacy while emptying it of all substance. Something that the political establishment has been engaged in for the past four decades.
W.H. — I don’t have time to respond to all of your comments. I will respond to a couple of them:
You are oversimplifying the dymanics of the MLK civil rights movement.
I grew up in a legally segregated town in southern Missouri, the sort of place where everybody hung a Confederate flag in the back window of his pickup. My high school’s team name was “the Rebels” and our pep squad showed up at games waving Confederate flags (I graduated high school in 1969). Some of my teachers in elementary school actually gave us lectures on the importance of segregation.
During the 1960s lots of the town folk lived in terror that MLK would show up there someday. If someone had tried to segregate the town then there would have been violence.
Now, let me tell you what effect MLK’s marches had on my town. The folks there were racist before, and they were racist after, and they were still segregationists. But they watched on television, and I saw plainly that many of them (for the first time!) felt uncomfortable about their racism. They saw the marchers, just walking, in their good clothes. They saw them walk past screaming bigots without retaliating. They saw the attack dogs and fire hoses turned on peaceful people. And time and time again, when people talked about what they saw, they’d say something like “of course I don’t want them moving here … [then, in a lower voice] but, you know, that wasn’t right, what the white people did. The blacks hadn’t done anything to deserve that.”
And that, my friend, was the beginning of the end of Jim Crow. For the first time, a big chunk of the white middle class was confronted with the ugliness and unreasonableness of racism, and it made them squirm. There was a measurable change in the way people talked about race. The “n” word didn’t come out of peoples’ mouths quite so easily. Even when people said something in support of segregation, it was said in a defensive, even apologetic, way. The unrepentent racists suddenly found themselves in the minority.
This is what we used to call “consciousness raising.”
Now, pay attention: Had any of the marchers retaliated, fought back, thrown a rock, yelled an obscenity — the white folks of my town would have decided they deserved whatever bad treatment they got. No sympathy, no respect, no consciousness raising. I know these people through and through, and I promise you that’s what would have happened. It would have set the civil rights movement back years.
In 1970 a few African American students enrolled in the local junior college (they were recruited to play for the basketball team) and the student body accepted them. A lot of the townspeople stopped coming to the games, but the students themselves were cool with it. One of the young men (the star of the team) actually was elected homecoming king in 1971. This was huge. I remember the yearbook picture of a very black king and a very blond queen standing side by side, and nobody made a big deal out of it. Ten years earlier, there would have been riots. Well, ten years earlier, it wouldn’t have happened.
Yes, people were still racist, but the change in attitude from 1960 to 1970 was huge, Huge, I say.
It was clear to me that attitudes changed largely because of the way the civil rights movement conducted itself in the early 1960s. Yes, people were still racist, and they still didn’t like MLK, but they respected him. They recognized moral authority when they saw it, however they might have resented it. The civil rights movement raised consciousness and changed attitudes among white, and that made the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s politically tenable.
So when you say “What Dr. King understood was that simply organizing black folks to confront white supremacy gave the bigots all the amunition they required,” this tells me you don’t get it. You didn’t see what happened among the white bigots. I saw it.
In answer to your last question, yesterday I had a lovely conversation with a Mennonite peace advocate who was arrested last weekend for praying in front of the White House. I kid you not. I took notes and plan to write it up today or tomorrow, so check back. This was grand, and she had a lot of very wise things to say about demonstrations that I would like you to read.
Maha, I’m afraid I may have unintentionally misled you.
I am not African American, I am a white Southern boy whose paternal grandfather was a textile mill worker who at one time belonged to the KKK and whose maternal great grandfather served with R.E. Lee from Second Manassas through Appomattox. My family were all rural people prior to my generation. I spent 7 years first infilitrating Klan gatherings and later organizing against them. I think I can say that I am intimately acquainted with white racism, its dynamics and its many faces.
I have had the privilege, as I indicated above, to know veterans of the Civil Rights struggle who were trained by Dr. King and who, in turn, imparted their knowlege to me.
I have not and do not dispute the transformative power of Dr. King’s moral witness on white folks. What I do dispute is a narrowness of perception that focuses on this aspect of his legacy to the exclusion of all else.
I dispute this in particular when it is used to suggest that people attending peace marches wearing t-shirts and shorts, or costumes, or carrying puppets for goodness sake, are somehow at odds with his vision.
That vision and the means by which Dr. King pursued it, cannot be parsed according to our personal likes and dislikes or according to what seems politically expedient. Neither can the aspects of King’s legacy that you invoke be separated from his advocacy of moral confrontation through civil disobedience. It simply cannot be argued that Dr. King pursued a strategy of success through inoffensiveness.
I find your suggestion that I am simplifying the struggle rather baffling. How is recognizing the multifaceted character of that struggle more simplistic than viewing it from the perspective of a small town white community?
I understand your expressed concern that self indulgent behavior at Peace protests might spark a backlash. But in lumping flamboyance or exhuberance together with violence and vandalism I think you cast far too wide a net.
As I said, you can argue for your viewpoint anyway you choose but I don’t believe Dr. King, or Ghandi for that matter, would weigh matters quite as you do.
I dispute this in particular when it is used to suggest that people attending peace marches wearing t-shirts and shorts, or costumes, or carrying puppets for goodness sake, are somehow at odds with his vision.
MLK got his ideas from Gandhi, and I can promise you Gandhi wouldn’t have put up with it.
Marching around in goofy, sometimes raunchy, costumes and carrying signs ridiculing one’s opposition is several light-years away from Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance. I can’t believe anyone who pretends to know something about MLK
wouldn’t understand that. Non-violence means non-violence in one’s mind and speech, not just refraining from punching someone out.
I have not and do not dispute the transformative power of Dr. King’s moral witness on white folks. What I do dispute is a narrowness of perception that focuses on this aspect of his legacy to the exclusion of all else.
I’m NOT excluding all else. In situations where civil disobedience is appropriate (such as the Mennonite woman I mentioned, who got herself arrested for praying in front of the White House) then go for it. But it’s the demonstrators who are “excluding all else,” I say.
You are a gasbag, sir. Lots of words, no understanding. We’re done here.