At Nation of Change, Mark Engler and Paul Engler write
What Makes Nonviolent Movements Explode? Selected excerpts:
Why are some protests ignored and forgotten while others explode, dominating the news cycle for weeks and becoming touch stones in political life?
For all of those seeking to promote change, this is a critical question. And it was a particularly pressing concern after the financial meltdown of 2008. […]
By the fall of 2011, three years after the economic downturn had begun, political observers such as Krugman had long wondered when worsening conditions would result in public demonstrations against joblessness and foreclosures. Labor unions and major nonprofit organizations had attempted to build mass movement energy around these very issues. In the fall of 2010, the “One Nation Working Together” march—initiated primarily by the AFL-CIO and the NAACP—drew more than 175,000 people to Washington, D.C., with demands to combat runaway inequality. The next year, long-time organizer and charismatic former White House staffer Van Jones launched Rebuild the Dream, a major drive to form a progressive alternative to the Tea Party.
According to the rules of conventional organizing, these efforts did everything right. They rallied significant resources, they drew on the strength of organizations with robust membership bases, they came up with sophisticated policy demands, and they forged impressive coalitions. And yet, they made little headway. Even their largest mobilizations attracted only modest press attention and quickly faded from popular political memory.
What worked was something different. “A group of people started camping out in Zuccotti Park,” Krugman explained just weeks after Occupy burst into the national consciousness, “and all of a sudden the conversation has changed significantly towards being about the right things.”
“It’s kind of a miracle,” he added.
For those who study the use of strategic nonviolent conflict, the abrupt rise of Occupy Wall Street was certainly impressive, but its emergence was not a product of miraculous, otherworldly intervention. Instead, it was an example of two powerful forces working in tandem: namely, disruption and sacrifice. […]
The amount of momentum that a movement generates can consistently be linked to the level of disruption its actions cause. The more that a protest directly affects members of the public, and the more it interferes with an adversary’s ability to do business, the more likely it is to draw widespread attention. Snarling traffic, interrupting a public event, shutting down a convention, stopping a construction project, making a scene at the mall, or impeding operations at a factory—all of these reflect varying degrees of disruption. […]
While tactics that interrupt business as usual are the most likely to draw attention, this attention is not necessarily positive. Because these actions inconvenience people and create disorder, they risk inviting a negative response—backlash that can reinforce status quo injustices. Therefore, the use of disruption places activists in a precarious position. In crafting scenarios for political conflict, they must carefully cultivate sympathy, working to ensure that observers recognize the legitimacy of their cause. Strategic judgment is needed to maximize the disruption’s transformative potential, while at the same time minimizing backlash from the public.
It is precisely for this reason that disruption pairs well with a second key factor that works as kindling for mass uprisings: personal sacrifice. Movements are primed to flare up when participants demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment. One main way of doing this is through showing a willingness to endure hardship and inconvenience, to face arrest, or even to risk physical harm in dramatizing an injustice.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2002—
Americans hijack Iraq weapons doc:
As if the US wasn't already losing the PR war in its mad rush to war against Iraq...
Diplomats and U.S. officials said Monday that after an intense lobbying campaign, the United States received an early and uncut copy of Iraq's 11,807-page weapons declaration and whisked it to Washington for analysis.
The United States was then put in charge of making duplicates for its four fellow permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- Britain, China, France and Russia -- on grounds that Washington had the best photocopying capabilities.[...]
The Security Council had previously agreed to leave the report with U.N. inspectors until it was screened for material that might aid others in making weapons. All five permanent members are nuclear powers.
The decision upset several of the 10 non-permanent members of the 15-member Security Council, including Norway and Syria, as it overrode what the body had decided Friday.
|
And why would the Americans want first dibs at the document? Because it would allow it to scrub it clean of the names of foreign corporations that helped Iraq build its WMD programs.
Of course, there's an easy solution to this whole mess. Iraq should simply leak the document to the press. If the Bushies are insistent on starting this war, then I want to know what role American companies played in building Iraq's arsenal.
Tweet of the Day
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: The torture report continues to dominate the news today, and
Greg Dworkin helps round up headlines and more on the subject. The cromnibus bogs down under the weight of extraneous riders.
Time's Person of the Year: Ebola fighters. The "disastrous flaw" in the CIA torture program. Another cromnibus rider: block DC pot legalization, in the dumbest possible way.
Armando weighs in on a broad range of torture issues. But in the end, "we're awesome," so what does it matter?
High Impact Posts. Top Comments