According to my go-to source, the Oxford English Dictionary, “civil disobedience is defined this way:
Rebellion of the populace against a governing power; (in later use) spec. refusal to obey the laws, commands, etc., of a government or authority as part of an organized, non-violent political protest or campaign.
The three key aspects here involve deliberately breaking the law, doing it as part of a “political protest or campaign”, and doing it in a peaceful, nonviolent way. But I would add potential effectiveness: the actions must aim at achieving political results, and do so in a way that could reach those results.
The archetypal examples of civil disobedience that met these four criteria are the nonviolent protests of Gandhi and the Indian people that led the British to “quit India” in 1947, and the American civil rights actions of the 1960s that led to the nation-changing civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965.
Gandhi, of course, was one inspiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., who adopted Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent resistance. These were epitomized in his “Salt March” of 1930, which began when Gandhi led protestors on a three-week, 200-mile march to the sea, where Gandhi picked up a lump of salty mud, which was converted into salt. This violated the onerous “salt tax” that the British imposed on Indians buying the produce. Below is the moment that changed India; the caption is “Mahatma Gandhi at Dandi Beach 6 April 1930. Standing behind him is his second son Manilal Gandhi and Mithuben Petit.”
The Salt Satyagraha campaign was based upon Gandhi’s principles of non-violent protest called satyagraha, which he loosely translated as “truth-force” Literally, it is formed from the Sanskrit words satya, “truth”, and agraha, “insistence”. In early 1920 the Indian National Congress chose satyagraha as their main tactic for winning Indian sovereignty and self-rule from British rule and appointed Gandhi to organise the campaign. Gandhi chose the 1882 British Salt Act as the first target of satyagraha. The Salt March to Dandi, and the beating by the colonial police of hundreds of nonviolent protesters in Dharasana, which received worldwide news coverage, demonstrated the effective use of civil disobedience as a technique for fighting against social and political injustice. The satyagraha teachings of Gandhi and the March to Dandi had a significant influence on American activists Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, and others during the Civil Rights Movement for civil rights for African Americans and other minority groups in the 1960s. The march was the most significant organised challenge to British authority since the Non-cooperation movement of 1920–22, and directly followed the Purna Swaraj declaration of sovereignty and self-rule by the Indian National Congress on 26 January 1930 by celebrating Independence Day. It gained worldwide attention which gave impetus to the Indian independence movement and started the nationwide Civil Disobedience Movement which continued until 1934 in Gujarat.
A key principle of satyagraha is that the protest must be peaceful, and the protestors must take what punishment is dished out. One must, according to Gandhi, “Suffer the anger of the opponent” without retaliating. (As you see above, that happened: Gandhis and thousands of other protestors were beaten and arrested.
When adopted by the American Civil Rights Movement, these principles were adopted wholesale. Rosa Parks protested an unjust segregation law and was arrested for peacefully sitting in the front of a bus and refusing to move. The blacks and whites who demonstrated together at the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins in Mississippi and North Carolina were peacefullyt protesting an immoral segregation law, and, as the video shows below, the protestors were jeered, pushed, and had food dumped over them, but did not resist.
If this video disappears, see it here.
The most iconic instances of civil disobedience that provoked violence by authorities, leading to sympathy for the protestors and eventually ending in the changing the laws, were the marches and civil protests in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama in 1963 and 1965, respectively, which led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965. Two videos:
“Bloody Sunday” in Selma: March 7, 1965:
The sight of peaceful protestors, both black and white, being attacked by dogs, drenched by fire hoses, run down by horses, and battered with billy clubs—all this was too much for America, and bent the moral arc upwards. It was the visuals, and the knowledge that the protestors were peaceful, yet protesting unjust laws and getting injured for their actions—all this horrified viewers. It’s one thing to read about it, but another to see it. And in the end, this led to the greatest advance in civil rights in a century.
Protests like this one below are not peaceful. While the painting wasn’t damaged, the walls were, and we had simple vandalism.
NEW – Climate radicals attack the Mona Lisa painting in the Louvre Museum, Paris.pic.twitter.com/OP3AGiNe0W
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) January 28, 2024
From the NYT report:
Two protesters from an environmental group hurled pumpkin-colored soup on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday, splashing the bulletproof glass that protects the most famous painting in the world, but not apparently damaging the work itself.
As the customary crowd around the 16th-century painting by Leonardo da Vinci gasped in shock, the protesters, two young women, followed up their attack by passing under a barrier and standing on either side of the artwork, hands raised in an apparent salute.
“What is more important? Art or the right to have a healthy and sustainable food system?” the activists said, speaking in French. “Our agricultural system is sick.” They were led away by Louvre security guards.
It was not immediately clear how the women got the soup through the elaborate security system at the museum, which borders the Seine and contains a vast art and archaeological collection spanning civilizations and centuries.
One of the women removed her jacket to reveal the words Riposte Alimentaire, or Food Response, on a white T-shirt. Riposte Alimentaire is part of a coalition of protest groups known as the A22 movement. They include Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, the group that poured tomato soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London in 2022.
Does this help the cause of climate change? I doubt it. You might say it does because it calls attention to the problem, but I’m guessing that most of the people who saw this were angry at the protestors and not inclined to take a more salubrious view towards the idea that humans are changing the climate. This is not only not civil disobedience, but, in my view, ineffective and immature. Why, then, are they doing it? Your guess is as good as mine.
What about blocking traffic, bridge, and tunnels? This is the speciality of pro-Palestinian demonstrators; an example from Los Angeles is below.
Does this help the protestors accomplish their aims, which is either to bring peace in the Middle East, often to erase Israel and extend Palestine “from the river to the sea”? I doubt it: those whose cars are blocked may be more aware of the protests, but I don’t think they’ll become more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe impressionable young people, who are ignorant of history but impressed by the loud, aggressive demonstrations of those favoring Palestine, will come to favor their cause. After all, it is the young who most take the side of Hamas (or Palestine) in the Hamas/Israel war.
At any rate, this is the new form of civil disobedience, although the protestors don’t willingly take punishment. Often there is no punishment: when pro-Palestinian protestors illegally blocked the University of Chicago’s administration building, or, last Friday, did a lie-in in the Pret a Manger campus food-and-coffee shot, blocking entry, the University police stood by and did nothing. Protestors here were arrested last year for conducting a sit-in in the admissions office, but the charges were dropped. (I am prevented from learning if the University will exercise its own sanctions for violating university regulations.)
This is the new form of civil disobedience in which protestors publicize a cause, violate regulations and laws, but face little or no punishment. And often they resist punishment or feel that they don’t deserve it. Publicity may be all they want, but it seems to me that political protest must go beyond publicizing a cause, but, to paraphrase Karl Marx, must have a chance of changing the world.
Do these protestors actually accomplish the kind of change they want? I’ll leave it to the readers to discuss the issue, and I would appreciate hearing as many readers’ takes as possible.
Bravo
As usual, I’ll post these – literally – instruction manuals for communist revolution, which explain the dialectical political warfare at play :
Rules for Radicals
Saul Alinsky, Random House 1971
Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution OR books, 2012
The guiding principle is :
Your target’s reaction is your real action
I think there is a distinction to make from that and the cited examples of Ghandi and Civil Rights – and quickly note a mystical experience possibly derived from the protest in question – as a sacred praxis (I still have to find this in Marx’ writing).
BTW the Boston Tea Party is pitched to children as the same-in-kind protest as LGBTQ+ or “modern” protest in the comic book Act by Kayla Miller. Make if that what you will.
Another important protest activism manual – readers will have to find a copy on their own :
Prairie Fire
By, basically, the Weather Underground.
1970-ish. I had to find a reproduction online.
“Prairie Fire” refers to a Mao Zedong speech.
Interesting to know, the pamphlet uses the terms “anti-racism” and “anti-racist” that pre-dates Kendi.
“There’s no such thing as bad advertising”…
Here’s an article in Oxford Research Encyclopedias (2016) about “The Effects of Negative Advertising”:
https://oxfordre.com/politics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-51
And from Harvard Business Review (2012) — “Bad Reviews Can Boost Sales. Here’s Why”…
https://hbr.org/2012/03/bad-reviews-can-boost-sales-heres-why
How this all relates to politics and protest is not clear to me, but it seems that commercial advertising and political advertising share some memetic DNA.
(As an occasional amateur graphic artist, I’ve always assumed that advertising a political message is better than not advertising a political message, regardless of its slant — but maybe that’s too simplistic.)
“Bad reviews can boost sales [if the product is little-known]” – I find that all too easy to believe. That’s why I doubt that we can determine the effectiveness of the soup-throwing protests. I suppose it depends on what subgroup the protestors are trying to recruit people into.
Trump doesn’t need advertising to get his presence across, his fans do if for him. And so do his leftist attackers. (I don’t use the word “message” as he clearly say anything that comes into his head. It doesn’t matter.)
If you think of Trump’s public appearances as a collective dumpster fire, it makes sense. The Right fans the flame, the Left adds gasoline. Doesn’t hurt Trump one bit, he thrives on anything that’s thrown at him.
Heroes are not mean to be exciting, but great villains are. And he can play both.
In my youth, I was peripherally aligned with the Catholic left on the issue of nuclear disarmament. Numerous actions leading to multiple arrests, zero chance of changing the world. Don’t know if that made the actions worthless.
I suppose the other side’s total lack of interest in joining the disarmament movement had some contribution to your lack of effectiveness.
This raises a good point. Britain by 1947 was exhausted and lacked the will or the means to crush Ghandi’s independence movement. India, jewel as it was, was simply no longer tenable and hauling down the Union Jack was a matter of facing the inevitable. If England had thought it could have kept India by force it would have assassinated Ghandi in a heartbeat.
True about England and 1947 but also true that there were never really that many British troops in India either. My mother and her siblings were born in what is now Pakistan when it was still India in the early 1920s, children of a British Army Officer stationed there and commanding a small British detachment plus some
“ native” volunteers. The area covered according to my mother was huge and she often told of how calm and ordered everything was. Admittedly they were very privileged but the family kept contact with a number of their Indian servants and friends until well after WWII. My mother and family left India before WWII in early 1930 so had no or little experience of unrest. Mother always spoke fondly of the time growing up in India, not surprising really. The BBC comedy program “It aint half hot mum” about a British Army Concert Party supposedly I think located in India in WWII always made her laugh as parts of it rang memories.
This news account omits mention of the intense discussions at Riposte Alimentaire over what kind of soup to pour over paintings in museums. Did a reformist faction propose a traditional gratinée or soupe au pistou? Did a Leftist cadre denounce these ideas as “neo-colonialist” and insist, instead, on something indigenous, like African Peanut Soup? We need to know.
I think the message they are trying to send is that “nothing is more important [than the thing we think is important].” In its own way throwing soup on the Mona Lisa is a modern bonfire of the vanities (not the Wolfe one, the Savonarola one). Climate activists base their action on the ludicrous claim that the world is going to end, a claim that has never yet wound up being true. These extremist actions no doubt inspire the faithful and bring some new people into the fold, but the activists mostly wind up being seen as cranks and scolds, if not criminals. I would hope people would look at these acts and see them as an admission that their argument has failed to convince people. In fact, I think we have a new metaphor: “Throwing soup on the Mona Lisa,” as in “They haven’t convinced people so now they are just throwing soup on the Mona Lisa.”
What gets my goat is when protestors have to face the consequences of their actions, they act all surprised. Predictably, some social justice group or another will then DEMAND (always in all caps) the charges be dropped. If they’re not actually willing to sacrifice a fine or a few nights in jail for what the cause they so loudly championed just a few days before, what’s it even worth?
+1
+1
When protesting against the Vietnam war in 1969-1971 I expected to be arrested and charged. That was part of the process. Our actions didn’t mean much if there were no consequences. Today the expectation is no consequences which in my opinion is a massive step down. They are not risking anything for their cause and, therefore, are not serious.
+1
If you were arrested and charged (and convicted), would your criminal record have excluded you from the draft? I was thinking of the Group W bench in the Alice’s Restaurant movie.
+1
Part of the effectiveness of Ghandi’s salt march and civil rights sit ins was that they targeted injustices specific to those protests, and by implication, the general system of government endorsed injustice of which they were part.
But it is not all clear just how throwing soup on the Mona Lisa supports better farming practices, or how blocking highways supports Palestinians.
The Stop Oil campaign of blocking roads is perhaps better targeted, but without credible transport alternatives to the people they are inconveniencing, and the very high likelihood that the protesters are themselves beneficiaries of oil-based products, it is unlikely they will change minds.
The recent round of climate protests in the UK even got this wrong, disrupting people trying to travel to work ON THE TRAIN, precisely the kind of environmentally friendly choice the protesters ostensibly *want* people to make.
Let’s also remember Thoreau’s work, which contains a summary of his punishment for disobeying the law.
https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/10/Civil-Disobedience-by-Henry-David-Thoreau.pdf
“On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” was its original title. I think that part should not be left out; it is more forceful than simply a discourse on civil disobedience. A beautiful essay that deeply influenced me as a kid.
I would add a another example to your list of “archetypal examples:” the Freedom From Hijab protests now occurring in Iran. These women know they are facing imprisonment, physical abuse and worse and will not back down. Those clowns at the Louvre are nothing compared to them.
Indeed! To use a word I typically cringe at, “privileged” is how I view the soup tossers.
I think the authorities have learned their lesson about reacting too strongly against these sit-ins. Ignoring them is the best possible reaction.
Why do protesters engage in these counterproductive actions? Freddie DeBoer answered that in a famous and highly persuasive essay: it’s the Iron Law of Institutions. See https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/the-iron-law-of-institutions-and-the-left-333c42c246af – briefly, people are more incentivized to do what helps their own status within an organization or movement than to do what actually furthers the aims of that movement.
The tenets of contemporary Activism-Exhibitionism call for a further kind of action: if any of the revolutionary vandals are actually charged with a misdemeanor, then the revolutionaries DEMAND that the culprit be let off without charge. In the present case, activists of Lutte Alimentaire can be expected to throw soup on The Raft of the Medusa to protest the arrest of the ones who threw soup on Mona Lisa. If I remember right, some of the campus and BLM demonstrators actually issued a precautionary DEMAND ahead of time that they not be arrested for anything.
Anyone remember “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” and tree spiking?
(A form of “eco-terrorism.”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey_Wrench_Gang
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_spiking
I participated once with the Billboard Liberation Front (BLF), which “improved” billboards that advertised a variety of bad things (cigarettes, sexism, autocratic governent). The group also modified billboards just for fun.
Even neon billboards were fair game:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/24301298@N08/2299339382/
http://billboardliberation.com/deadyet.html
http://billboardliberation.com/manifesto.html
I don’t know if I should admit this but I, too, participated in a little monkey wrenching. I did not put any lives in danger but I did my best to slow things down in pristine desert regions I desperately wanted protected. My missions failed.
I wonder if that makes me a once privileged soup tosser. Hmm
We’ll, you may have saved a butterfly, and you know about the “butterfly effect” — right?
So you wouldn’t necessarily know what your actions caused. They might even have been more effective than you think. (Hopefully positive.)
Yes, I am aware of that. Thanks for keeping me positive
In my more outraged moods, I think civil society needs to reassert itself and its values more forcefully. These protesters think that their bodies or their cause is more important than some of the most important artistic works in the history of the world. I don’t think so and while I abhor violence, I think security guards should absolutely respond and smash these protesters with a fist or taze them. During WW2, people risked their lives to recover famous artwork stolen by the Nazis. What gives some stupid protester the right to vandalize humanity’s cultural heritage? Nothing. If I saw someone, soup in hand, making a mad dash toward a priceless work of art or preparing to glue their hand to a painting, I would probably tackle them or punch them into submission. And what should be my punishment? Assault? So be it and I’ll beg for mercy from the court for trying to preserve our history from those who wish to destroy it for irrelevant reasons. Find a different way to protest that is relevant to your cause (eg. boycott a meat packing plant to protest animal cruelty).
Post a sign: “Our security has been trained and instructed to physically attack anyone who seeks to vandalize or destroy irreplaceable works of art inside this museum. No one has a right to rob humanity of our shared cultural heritage for any reason and you will be prevented from doing so by any means necessary. Protest somewhere else.”
These protests are nothing like the Civil Rights movement.
If the purpose is to persuade people on the fence or reach the uninformed, it seems to me these types of protests are counterproductive. The advocates look mean, deranged, and childish and that no doubt rubs off on their cause, making it seem trivial.
I’m sorry to say that my visceral reaction to people throwing paint on masterpieces and blocking important traffic areas is to find out what their cause is and do the opposite. I can’t personally bomb Gaza, but maybe I’ll go on an unnecessary trip to somewhere nice and pollute the air with jet fumes. So THERE!
I bet I’m not the only one who would feel that impulse. It seems rather human. Perhaps the real purpose behind the protests is neither civil rights nor virtue signaling, but creating more enemies to be mad at.
The protestors throwing soup against the (fully encased and inaccessible) Mona Lisa are morons. When I first saw the video this morning, my thoughts were (1) And how will that save the world from climate change?, and (2) And why would these women waste a perfectly good bowl of soup?
No, the incidents you cite are not examples of peaceful protest. Just as speech has become a form of violence, violence has become a form of speech.
https://www.theonion.com/world-hunger-activists-throw-oil-on-pelican-to-protest-1849715860
Didn’t the original definition of civil disobedience—as proposed by Thoreau and refined by Gandhi and King—require, or at least assume, that the law being broken was itself unjust? Segregation was unjust, so you refuse to comply. If a salt or a poll tax is unjust, you refuse to pay; if a war is unjust, you refuse to serve. Laws regarding traffic, trespass, and defacement are not inherently unjust, so breaking them is not civil disobedience, but unlawful protest that infringes on the legitimate rights of others. Illegal protest is more likely to alienate potential supporters than legal protest, not to mention the substantial financial, psychological, and medical consequences that illegal protests incur when thoroughfares or bridges are closed.
From the videos posted about the protests in Alabama and Mississippi the idea that civil disobedience involves violation of an unjust law (to make it unenforceable) doesn’t seem to hold up. Actually the videos don’t make it at all clear what existing laws they were in fact protesting. They wanted new (federal) legislation (realized as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act) to recognize rights which they believed they ought to be able to enjoy, i.e., protection from discrimination and removing obstacles to voting. From the videos, the laws I see the protestors breaking are indeed laws that are, on their face, just and reasonable: unlawful assembly, marching in defiance of a Court injunction, and marching in the roadways, particularly the famous procession on the Pettus Bridge. These are exactly the offences that protestors against climate change and Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza are committing today but usually without any consequences. (I realize the videos are describing a montage of events.)
The decision to enlist children in the marches was, as they say, problematic and reminiscent of both human shields in Gaza and the participation of children in the Ottawa Trucker Convoy protest. The idea was clearly to shock the media who were getting bored with the protests where no one was getting beaten up and to “bring Birmingham to its knees.” A-G Robert Kennedy begged King not to involve children for fear they would get hurt. King is quoted as replying that “black children are being hurt every day.” Does this not strike anyone as cynical? One speaker beginning at 5:45 in the second video alludes to the shock value of a 9-year-old being fire-hosed, “who doesn’t comprehend”. Comprehend what, she doesn’t say, but he was being put in the path of the water anyway.
Fortunately the later Bloody Sunday wasn’t all that bloody as unlawful assemblies go when they get busted up and no children seem to have been hurt. So why did it bend the moral arc upwards while we roll our eyes in frustration or enmity when climate and Hamas activists fill the streets and block bridges? It is merely a matter of which causes you support and which ones you oppose? Or is it because the authorities in Alabama responded vigorously with more force than police use today and the images disturbed TV viewers? The police don’t whack Hamas protestors over the head for the TV cameras, which allows them to be dismissed as entitled nuisances instead of courageous victims of institutional repression and brutality.
Virtually all unlawful protests cause property damage, if only indirectly. Marches disrupt traffic; people get to work late. That’s not violence in my understanding of the word – violence requires pain or bodily damage inflicted intentionally or negligently.
Gandhi said (source) “I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence” – but he wisely advocated nonviolent resistance as a more effective path.
When other global warming protestors in London defaced the glass protecting another work of art, they should be charged for the damage (perhaps a few hundred Euros?). However, I’m more concerned about the UK’s Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022 and the Public Order Act effective in 2023. These Acts give police the right to impose time, noise, and location restrictions on protests, to arrest anyone deemed to be causing a public nuisance, and to stop and search anyone they want near a protest with no need to justify the stop. Freedom of speech will likely suffer.
Was that effective? Here we are, talking about global warming as a minor topic, along with protest as the main topic. The extremists will repel many, but also make mainstream climate protestors look good by comparison.
Which effect will predominate? As the saying goes, it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
Arson isn’t violence? Kristallnacht wasn’t violence?
I general, I am not sympathetic to protestors such as those throwing soup on the Mona Lisa. However, during last year’s world snooker championships, play was badly disrupted when a protestor from Extinction Rebellion managed to throw orange powder all over the bed of the table. Like many, I was badly irritated and thought it was a counterproductive stunt. If the protestor had accused me of being more concerned about snooker than saving the planet, I would claimed that of course I was not; but it did occur to me that I had watched more hours of snooker that day than I have spent doing anything about climate change in my life, which certainly got me thinking…..
Here’s a SEP entry on civil disobedience: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/
The famous political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) defines “civil disobedience” as follows:
“I shall begin by defining civil disobedience as a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government. By acting in this way one addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the community and declares that in one’s considered opinion the principles of social cooperation among free and equal men are not being respected. A preliminary gloss on this definition is that it does not require that the civilly disobedient act breach the same law that is being protested. It allows for what some have called indirect as well as direct civil disobedience. And this a definition should do, as there are sometimes strong reasons for not infringing on the law or policy held to be unjust. Instead, one may disobey traffic ordinances or laws of trespass as a way of presenting one’s case. Thus, if the government enacts a vague and harsh statute against treason, it would not be appropriate to commit treason as a way of objecting to it, and in any event, the penalty might be far more than one should reasonably be ready to accept. In other cases there is no way to violate the government’s policy directly, as when it concerns foreign affairs, or affects another part of the country. A second gloss is that the civilly disobedient act is indeed thought to be contrary to law, at least in the sense that those engaged in it are not simply presenting a test case for a constitutional decision; they are prepared to oppose the statute even if it should be upheld. To be sure, in a constitutional regime, the courts may finally side with the dissenters and declare the law or policy objected to unconstitutional. It often happens, then, that there is some uncertainty as to whether the dissenters’ action will be held illegal or not. But this is merely a complicating element. Those who use civil disobedience to protest unjust laws are not prepared to desist should the courts eventually disagree with them, however pleased they might have been with the opposite decision.”
(Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. pp. 320-1)
Rawls : “… the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government.”
Excellent point by Rawls, when compared to what the objective is in the case of e.g. the soup – IMHO they want people’s minds to change – their consciousness.
That has a track record. We don’t need to get into that right now.
These types of protestors always strike me as little children throwing temper tantrums. I can’t jettison the feeling that they are more interested in earning in-group praise than they are in being effective.
I don’t believe that the following conditions are sufficient for a campaign of civil disobedience to succeed, but I do wonder whether it might be necessary that 1) most of the protestors themselves must suffer directly and disproportionately from the injustice they seek to end, 2) those watching must be aware that the protestors are—as a group or as individuals—the primary ones who suffer from that against which they protest, and 3) the protestors must also suffer to some noticeable and unreasonable degree from their attempts to correct the core injustice.
Topics like climate change and nuclear disarmament might be too broad for the civil disobedience approach to work. To the degree that anyone suffers from them, we all do. Contemporary protests on U.S. campuses against Israel fail on all the above points. The Vietnam-era protests on campuses might meet #3, depending on whether the “injustice” was the war itself or the draft. But the students aroused disdain in many circles, in part, I suspect, because it was the college deferments that seemed unfair to a public who mostly did not go to college, and the sight of campuses erupting, particularly after graduate school deferments were eliminated, suggested that self-interest was more salient than was any concern for broader justice regarding the draft. (There were obviously many factors at play, including staunch disagreement about the war itself, independent of the draft; I am simply suggesting some reasons why civil disobedience was so contentious rather than broadly effective. One could argue that the Iraq War was equally unjust, yet under an all-volunteer force, the campuses did not erupt.)
The women protesting in Iran would meet all three criteria; but it is possible that civil disobedience is a fool’s errand in the face of an authoritarian regime; it depends on how strong the rulers truly are in terms of physical force and public support. Nevertheless, this is the current cause for which I have the most respect. Most other cases of “civil disobedience” today seem nothing more than politics waged by other means. What they can’t achieve at the ballot box, they attempt by tantrums. Seems a bipartisan affair these days.
No. They mistake attention for agreement.
We always taught our children there is either good attention or bad attention and if attention was desired, recommended they choose the former. I feel confident that readers could cite numerous examples when bad attention yielded a net positive outcome (as often seen in advertising or celebrity). However, this may be the exception rather than the rule and individuals should weigh the risks/benefits of any course of action before proceeding. I do not believe the misguided soup protesters will end up as heroes.