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100,000 people marched through London at the weekend at the Restore Nature Now March, and there was virtually no news coverage of it. Yet 2 people spray corn starch on a monument and it’s front page news globally.
It’s a dilemma.
It’ll take something like a big march ending at an airport, and a few people vandalizing a private jet.
There is no one universally right way to do activism. We need a diversity of tactics.
There is no one universally right way to do activism.
There are, however, many ways that are demonstrably wrong.
If you’re acting in a way that gives rise to credible speculation that you’re secretly funded by Big Oil, maybe it’s worth considering the possibility that you’re a counterproductive cosplaying fool.
We need a diversity of tactics.
Running unarmed at a machine-gun nest is a tactic. But a diversity of tactics is only a good thing when those tactics actually work.
Remember there is an actual intelligent force you are against, so they are working on making your effective tactics ineffective. In that case, how do you know if a tactic “works”?
A: you try a bunch of stuff AKA a diversity of tactics.
The boycott makes a innocent sufferer of the bus company. Had the company defiled city and state laws its franchise would have been canceled. The quarrel of the Negroes is with the law. It is wrong to hold the company hostage.
-The Montgomery Advertiser, Montgomery Alabama, Dec 8, 1955
The white man’s economic artillery is far superior, better emplaced, and commanded by more experienced gunners.
Second, the white man holds all the offices of government machinery. There will be white rule for as far as the eye can see.
Are these not the facts of life?
Let us be specific, concrete. What is the cost is the bus boycott to the Negro community? Does any Negro leader doubt that the resistance to the registration of Negro voting has been increased? Is economic punishment of the bus company - an innocent hostage to the laws and customs of Alabama - worth the price of a block to the orderly registration of Negro voters?
-The Montgomery Advertiser, Montgomery Alabama, Dec 13, 1955
What I’m trying to say here is, fuck off Washington Post with your “why don’t you protest the way I want, quietly in the corner” bullshit.
Link: Paywalled. Experts? Dubious.
A page from the civil rights era:
Chicago Tribune 1966
They could also read The Monkey Wrench Gang and start taking direct action against the real perpetrators and their assets rather than random soft targets.
I’ll note that the protagonists in that book only targeted things, and not people.
Maybe experts should tell oil companies to fuck right off, then there’s be no need to protest against oil companies
That happened in the late 1970s. The oil companies fired them and hired the tobacco-cancer denial machine instead.
The target audience for a protest isn’t the oil executives; it’s the politicians and the public.
