Nerulent wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 5:02 pm
MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2019 10:24 am
I wholeheartedly support Extinction Rebellion in their cause for a more radical approach against climate change, a major threat to life on Earth as we know it. Sal's post does not change this support, but enlightens me about a certain negative aspect of it, which has
since been retracted.
Sal's post seems to take the stances that protesting anything at all is not only stupid but laughable (since he doesn't mention why this protest in particular is stupid, and I'm assuming he's not a climate change denier), and/or protests are bad unless they cause no disruption and incur no arrests, and/or any members being inconsistent in their views and actions (e.g. using air travel) discredits the whole movement somehow. I take issue with all of these.
It's so good to know that even when I'm away from the board, people will leap up to invent objectionable things for me to have believed... although I think it's peculiar to assume that if someone mocks one X, they must think all X are stupid, unless they specifically say otherwise. The more charitable thing is to assume that people are talking about what they're talking about, rather than looking to get offended because they failed to list everything they
weren't talking about.
I actually have a lot of time for political protests of many sorts. But that doesn't mean that I have a lot of time for all protests simply because they're protests - just as I think the strike is an important political weapon when used wisely, yet at the same time think that many recent strikes in the UK have been foolish.
You may note, for instance, that I did not in that post mock the simultaneous #OperationShutdown, the protests demanding action on knife crime. It's far from my favourite protest - and not just because it has a hash in its name - but it's a very different beast from ER.
If you seriously want to use protest for political purposes - rather than just as a grand day out - there are four essentials:
- do something to get attention for yourself
- get the public on your side, with a sympathetic and coherent message
- harness your moment in the sun by focusing on clear, concrete and achievable aims
- don't do more damage than good
Both protests did the first - they shut down parts of London, forcing people to pay attention to them.
However, on the second part, the two diverge considerably. I guess I'd break this into three parts: who is protesting; how does their protest relate to their message; and how do the protestors relate to the public.
As for who: in one case, you have a movement of bereaved family members. It's really hard to argue against, or dismiss, crying mothers of dead children. In the other case, you have a bevy of drunken Bullingdon Club twazzocks and C-list celebrities looking for exposure. [I wouldn't actually put Thompson in that category, since she's shown a life-long commitment to political causes, even if not always conducted wisely]. This is not, to put it mildly, the most appealing face of the climate change movement.
In terms of tactics, OS's protest involved a candlelight vigil for a murdered police officer, followed by a march onto a bridge that was the site of a terrorist attack. This was clearly a very calculated approach, designed to maximise sympathy and make it as hard as possible to dismiss their message. Each part of it focused the public mind on the group's message: a vigil for the dead showed that people are dying; specifically respecting a dead police officer reminded us that knife crime effects everybody; the choice of Westminster Bridge calls attention to the disparity between the political response to terrorist attacks and the political response to (much deadlier) casual knife violence; shutting down part of central London reminds us again of terrorist attacks, and makes us think of the much greater disruptions caused to people's lives by knife crime.
[a similar London protest we could also point to was the cyclists' knife-crime protest back in December. It's a biannual event, and it makes its point by most of its participants being teenagers - not just because it reminds us who the victims are, but because it itself is a positive contribution giving at-risk teenagers a support network and a sense of purpose that helps, in some small way, to advance the cause the event promotes.]
By contrast, ER activists clearly had a great deal of fun (frankly, too much laughing and posturing in a protest undermines the alleged sombreness of the event), but very little, if any, sense of tactical purpose or organisation. How does, for example, specifically targeting trains and buses focus attention on the cause? It doesn't - it makes them look like hypocrites at best, if not idiots. Worse - it focuses attention on the class and wealth issues. "It's OK for us to take our private jets, but you mustn't use the train" is not an persuasive position statement. Boasting about wanting to be arrested and what fun you'll have in prison doesn't make you look dedicated to a serious cause, it makes you look like a protest-tourist (which, of course, many of them were in the literal sense) - OS shut down their bridge just as effectively through planning and paperwork as ER did theirs through hooliganism and abuse of the police, but OS looked a lot more sympathetic in the process. Getting Thunberg to speak was a coup; but coverage of her speech was considerably undermined by scenes of police grappling with yobs and idiots gluing themselves to Jeremy Corbyn's fence. I mean, what was that even about!? They looked like idiots for targeting the Opposition rather than the Government, and then idiots again when they claimed that they were targeting him because they supported him... not to mention every time one of them opened their mouths on TVs to show how delusionally privileged they were.
In terms of relationship with the public, the contrast was stark. OS' messaging was that we're all in this together, and that protesters were speaking for the public, whom they respected. They didn't talk about wanting to bring London to its knees; they protested and then left. They'll be back at some point, I'm sure, as they have been before, but for now they treated the public with respect and solidarity. ER, on the other hand, has revelled in opposition to the public, right from its name onward - its rhetoric of "rebellion" and "war", its contemptuous words for the unenlightened public is seemingly sees as its enemy, its gleeful targeting of the necessities of everyday working-class and middle-class lives. Make us avoid a bridge for a day? Fine, you've got our attention. Stop us using buses and trains for a week? That's not calling our attention to something, that's holding us to ransom as pawns. Which, indeed, they freely admitted, with their talk of needing us to "meet their demands" before they'd let their hostages go. [The attacks on public transport also emphasised, as I say, the social divisions, making the gulf between protestors and public bigger - they gave the impression of not even understanding how much pain they were causing, because people like that have so little understanding of ordinary lives]. There was no feeling of respect or solidarity, of being on the same side.
And it told. Before the protests, support for their cause was sky-high, and support for the protests themselves when they began was solid - an academic poll found that only 26% of people opposed the protests. But Yougov, at the end of the protests, found most people no longer supported them, and that only 13% 'strongly' supported them, compared to 30% who 'strongly' opposed them. [overall, a 46-26 support-oppose split had been turned into a 36-52 split, which is remarkably given how popular their issue is (that earlier poll found 83% agreeing that climate change was one of the greatest threats facing humanity).] Strikingly, they even lost plurality support in London, an area that should be their greatest stronghold (it's young, ethnically diverse, Remainer and concerned about climate change, all predictors of support for ER).
When your protest ends with people more hostile to you than when you started, you're doing something wrong.
And it didn't help that they had no real purpose. The OS protests had clear, concrete and achievable goals: a COBRA meeting; an investigation into school exclusion; more rehabilitation for low-level offenders; tougher prison sentences for violent crime. Whether those are good goals isn't really the question: the point is, they've put pressure on the government, and given the government a way to reduce that pressure (agreeing to some or all of those points). Next time they protest, the public can say "hey, the government could have avoided this just by doing XYZ like they asked!". The ER protests, on the other hand, had no goals. Oh, they said they did, but their goals were insane, which is the same as having none: zero emissions by 2025. This is physically possible, but not a single person who knows anything about the topic thinks it's achievable by any means. Just for a start, you'd have to end all flights, remove 40 million cars from the road (even replacing them with hybrids wouldn't be enough; indeed, I don't think even replacing them with fully electric cars would be enough, given the sources of electricity), and remove 30 million boilers and central heating systems. In a country of under 70 million people, for context. All in under 6 years. The government literally cannot do that. And because everybody watching KNOWS that it's literally impossible to meet the protestor's demands, and because the protestors have been so binary about the issue (anyone who says no to their demands is a scumbag murderer) that they won't accept anything less than the impossible, that actually takes all the pressure OFF the government. Next time ER protests, the public will think "oh, they're protesting again - I guess there was nothing the government could do to avoid that!". And if you make it so that the government don't get blamed for failing to meet your demands, you make it so that the government don't even try to meet your demands, because getting blamed is almost the only thing they care about...
Leaving us with the balance of cost and benefit. The ER protests have perhaps marginally raised awareness - but since it's such a high-saliency topic, even that's not clear. The public is already very worried about climate change, and the government is already one of the most active governments in trying to combat it, and the public already think the government isn't doing enough. So it's not clear that the protests actually helped in that regard. Instead, by making themselves so unpopular they undermined themselves and other climate change protestors in future, and if anything made the public more hostile to their agenda rather than less. They're in serious danger of their future 'rebellions' becoming outright anti-progressive: on the current trajectory, politicians are going to start avoiding making progress that looks like they might be caving to ER. That's bad. Meanwhile, by draining all the publicity oxygen from the room, they've made it harder for other issues to get attention - the Operation Shutdown protests against knife crime, for example, would have received far more attention, and hence had a greater chance of being effective, if they hadn't been so overshadowed by a much larger and less popular protest.
I don't actually know whether that means the protests shouldn't have happened, or shouldn't have happened the way they did. You'll notice I've not actually, in this post or the other one, opposed the protests. But I do think they weren't very good protests, at best. And a lot of that is because they were "planned" by twazzocks. And when a bunch of twazzocks shoot an important cause in one foot unnecessarily (leaving aside the question of whether they should have been holding a gun in the first place!), then yeah, I don't think it's inappropriate to mock them a little.
Frankly, I'm increasingly alarmed by how little tolerance of mockery there sometimes is in "progressive" politics today (and, N.B., ER has been criticised by a wide range of serious progressives, including those within the climate movement itself). Sometimes, our side messes up. We shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge that; laughing at left-wing people being idiots does not make one a traitor to the cause - quite the contrary.
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Another protest, while we're at it, that got some of its thunder stolen by the "Rebels" - the latest bloody wound in the long story of a
genuine rebellion. In Derry, where young journalist Lyra McKee was murdered by pseudo-IRA wannabes, supporters daubed the walls of New IRA-affiliated "party", Saoradh with red handprints, to indicate that Saoradh has her blood on its hands. Later, the leader of the DUP was applauded by a Catholic crowd. A planned Easter Rising march by Saoradh had to be abandoned; one that went ahead was denounced by Sinn Fein, and termed by the Taoiseach "an insult to the Irish people". The landlord at Saoradh's Derry office has now evicted them.
This is a protest I can stand behind.