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- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
I think teaching people how protests work is pretty important praxis and is not talked about nearly enough.
Moderates and liberals tend to think of protest and demonstration as the same thing and anything that is not a demonstration is generally though of as bad or counterproductive.
Most of the populace simply doesn’t understand that blocking roads or getting arrested have strategic value. They consider the goal of every protest to be to raise awareness and support and to convince people like them ™️ that any given cause is worth supporting and that their support is all it really takes to a make change happen. It’s a very self-centered view of how political movement work and it seems unfortunately quite obiquitous.
They see a road block and think “that just makes you look bad” and the thought process ends there because now your movement isn’t worth supporting in their eyes. If you try to explain that blocking off roads is often done to cut off supply lines to financial districts or big corporations and put economic pressure on them or the politicians they donate to, they refuse to engage with the idea entirely or claim that it doesn’t actually work and the only way to protest successfully is to win over people like them even though they’ve probably never been to a demonstration, let alone a direct action event and if they did they’d probably do more harm than good given how ignorant they are on the subject.
We really need to educate people about protesting tactics, how they work, what they actually seek to achieve, and how different methods put pressure on different areas to get different effects and I think you probably can’t teach this to older generations but younger generations are capable of learning and we really need them to learn this.
Teaching people to think in terms of systems and take a structural approach when trying to change a system is paramount because, in the current state of things, the common belief seems to be if enough people wave signs from the sidewalk, things magically work out in the end.
I thought we were getting to the blowing-up-oil-pipelines stage, especially now that Law Enforcement in Florida is attacking mutual aid organizations.
Someone did shipping lines, multiple countries want to intervene and label them (x backed terrorists)
While genocide is happening countries were like (well i cannot do anything about that - i cannot even say the word ceasefire)
Saboteurs will always be labeled terrorists, even if they are careful and don’t cause casualties, but that’s more about terrorist being a derisive term instead of being a technical military term. (Terror warfare is attacking general civilian population to reduce morale – contrast attacking military installations or factories that figure into the war effort. Terror weapons, for example, those that are too inaccurate to be used against hard targets, but are effective in terror attacks, such as railroad guns or the V1 flying bomb and V2 rocket) NATO engages in terror actions all the time.)
Part of the psychological operations strategy of states is to assert that non-state actors are illegitimate by fiat, even if they are militants formed from civilians and refugees who’ve been displaced or decimated by state action or state policy. Typically, a state has to be forced to bargain with non-state interests since it motivated from oligarchical interests to not.
This is one of the reason Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t want to see the legitimization of a Palestinian state, since then he’d be force to negotiate with them as equals rather than just massacre civilians as vermin. He disregards the legitimacy of the Palestinian people much the way the German Reich disregarded the legitimacy of the Jews and Romanians.