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this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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Would you not consider South Africa liberated through the abolition of apartheid? The white people in South Africa didn't get removed, they just no longer got to oppress the black South Africans. South Africa certainly wasn't free prior to that.
And I'd just like to point out that messaging criticisms like whether a particular protest sign says liberating "Palestine" or "Palestinians" is a very unimportant criticism relative to an ongoing genocide. These aren't people with power. Even if their protests were successful isn't not like their specific wording or viewpoint about what justice in Palestine means is going to translate to anything more than the actual protest demands - divestment from Israel, possibly at best less permissive US military support. You don't need to say "I oppose Israel's oppression... BUT".
I would consider the black population of South Africa liberated, absolutely. I'm iffier on saying that "South Africa" was liberated. But that's not a bad point at all.
But I think the thing that muddies this for me though is the use of "Palestine" instead of "the Palestinians." The issue is that there's a meaningful distinction between the two in the cultural zeitgeist, and they aren't therefore as interchangeable as "South Africa" in your above example.
But overall I don't hate that explanation/comparison. It works enough that I can reasonably interpret the person's intent with the sign through that lens. Thanks.
I do disagree with your second point though. A protest is, first an foremost, an exercise in messaging. The idea that the messaging doesn't matter is tantamount to saying the protest doesn't matter. I agree that this particular quibble is comparatively small, but I think nothing is more uncompelling than a protest that conveys "we don't know what we want, and we're mad as hell about it."
This is certainly just an opinion, but I think for a protest to be effective, it needs a fairly concrete set of goals, with well defined expected outcomes. Without that, the people you are protesting against have absolutely no incentive to change.
It's the Chick-fil-A problem to some degree. Exactly what steps does that franchise need to take to get people to stop boycotting? They took a lot of action in the wake of the bad publicity, and it made no difference to those who were boycotting it. (This isn't a defense of Chick-fil-A btw. Just an observation about the boycott.)
This is in direct contrast to something like a workers strike, where work is stopped until a concrete list of demands is met, and then people resume work. They act as a cohesive unit, and there are a concrete set of things that the target can do to make it stop.
And to be clear, I think that the student protests going on do have well defined goals. Get University money out of programs that support the state of Israel. I think the messaging was good on that front, at least at first.
Where it falls apart for me, and maybe this is just biased media coverage, but it feels like half the protestors don't know that that's the goal, as opposed to just general opposition the genocide. And that's why I think messaging is important, and needs to be policed, to keep the messaging clear. Anything other than that absolutely hurts your movement.
You have to realize this all just reads like someone who wants to "just ask questions" and meander about vague misgivings to downplay and discredit the protest right? You lead with focusing on messaging like you're at an ad agency critiquing a professional campaign, divert to a well-worn excuse that protest movements don't have clear goals, say that they do have clear goals, and then imply most of the protesters spending hours out there protesting somehow don't know them.
Like maybe you are just earnestly working through these thoughts and feelings, but this is basically the exact same things people who are JAQing off because protest makes them uncomfortable would say.
To give you context in case you've never experienced it, my first protest was against the Iraq war. It was seemingly well organized by a some major groups with institutional knowledge about setting up protests. People were bussing in to DC and the marching route was pre-planned and organized with cops along with way just to be sure that people stuck to the roads that were blocked off and there wasn't any confrontation with counter-protesters. And still, with all that structure, there were groups there protesting for marijuana legalization and communism and in-group sign wavers talking about Bush v. Gore. Trying to nitpick about "Palestine" or "Palestinians" or whether some people who are demanding divestment also calling for other more optimistic results is just misunderstanding how protests work.
This is a student protest. There isn't a protest boss who can go around and approve the wording on signs. Individuals can rally and self-organize to kick out someone saying something egregious like "death to the Jews", but this idea of "policing the messaging to keep it clear" is just not something you're ever going to get from a protest that isn't a single pre-existing activist organization with a hierarchy and top-down decision making.
There are no perfect protests, and people asking why they aren't perfect are often trying to discredit them rather than out of sincere support for the protest goals. That might not be because they don't approve of the goals themselves, just that they're a secondary concern to a desire for order or political concerns or just plain not liking protest as a means of change.
All fair points, and I don't disagree with any of them.
And yeah, I recognize my posts are rambly, but honestly, it's mostly just me jotting down thoughts. I'm not trying to write a dissertation, I'm trying to engage in conversation.
I do think there's levels to this though, right? Like, you list a bunch of other special interests that were at the Iraq protests that weren't policed, but there are certainly viewpoints that would have been, right? Like, if someone showed up with a, I don't know, a "just nuke'em, end the war, and get it over with" sign or something, that would have been policed, right?
Maybe not? Maybe anyone can join any protest for any reason? I tend to think there's some level of extreme that the group would self police, but who knows.
That said, the sign in question wasn't past that line by any stretch of the imagination. That wasn't even really the point of my original post though. I was more asking about what the messaging actually is.
I did go on a tangent about messaging because the guy two up basically said (to grossly paraphrase) messaging clarity doesn't matter, and I was just stating why I disagree. I did use the context of this protest though, so that's on me. I don't think this sign is out of line necessarily.
Ultimately my main point about messaging was that protests that don't have well stated outcomes (e.g. get troops out of Iraq or stop investing in Israel) are doomed to failure, as the group you are protesting against has no viable mechanism to capitulate.
There's probably a sub-point in there that if your stated goals are too fractured, it makes it impossible to capitulate as well?
Idk, I'm mostly just rambling again. I'm also not as invested in the conversation as I was three days ago.
We could have a whole dialog about which historical protests have led to meaningful change and which haven't and what distinguished the former from the latter. I'm no expert in protest philosophy (obviously) but I've seen protests make a difference and fall completely flat, and I think it'd be an interesting study to find out why, and to what degree coherent goals and messaging are correlated to success.
But, as I say, I'm not as invested as I was 3 days ago, so I'm probably gonna just do something else instead. Hope life is treating you well, and you've got an exciting weekend planned! :)
In most mass protests there isn't a source of authority that could decide who gets to be in the place the protest is. There's organizers and speakers who can ask them to leave, but if the problematic attendees don't just go along with that they don't have any inherent authority to kick them out. That doesn't mean saboteurs don't get kicked out, but it's more in the form of a bunch of people self-organizing to shout them down or put a human wall between them and the rest of the group. The student protesters have done this a few times when opponents try to infiltrate their ranks.
But it's not something you pull together because someone's sign isn't well tuned or one of hundreds or thousands of voices is demanding Exxon Mobile be immediately shut down when the actual goal is ending fossil fuel subsidies. Partly because you don't want to fracture a movement by kicking out your allies and partly because this is an entirely social endeavor organized among strangers and it's hard to get that arranged if people aren't instantly convinced it's necessary.
Yeah, no, for sure on all counts. As before, I'd imagine it'd have to be pretty egregious to rise to the level of removal. Makes sense.