From Civil disobedience is a tactic not a right by Jana Mills (The Comment Factory):
There is a real sense that protest, and relatively peaceful direct action has been ineffectual up to this point. Many more will no doubt resort, in desperation, to violence over the coming years. One of the choice chants heard on the streets of Westminster on Wednesday was "you say cut back we say fight back". But unless we learn the lessons of previous battles, no amount of protests or chants will make a dent in George Osborne's plans. There must be a fight back, but it must coordinated, imaginative and disciplined if it is to be effective.
The pioneers of civil disobedience had a sense of political theatre. Gandhi held the media in the palm of his hand. He knew what would make good copy on breakfast tables the next morning. As we operate in an altogether different media environment we must learn to present the issues which we care about though creative and illustrative protest in such a way that will look good on the Six O'Clock News. The well meaning men who, nearly naked, dragged their friend, tied to a wooden plan, through the NUS demo on Wednesday were certainly creative but they failed to appreciate that an effective protest must also be illustrative. How did their protest, imaginative as it was, dramatise a complex issue?
From Street theatre: the drama of civil disobedience by Sophie Nield (Guardian):
Demonstrators have often used theatrical devices to make their point, and the fact is that the supposed line between theatre and civil disobedience has never been clear-cut. Many this week have drawn attention to the suffragettes in Edwardian England, who, under the eyes of watching police, took out toffee hammers and smashed in plate-glass windows of the new department stores. Abbie Hoffman and the "yippie" movement in 1960s America deliberately used the tactics of theatrical display and culture jamming to maximise attention to their anti-Vietnam protests. In 1967, as 35,000 demonstrators surged towards the Pentagon, Hoffman (with the assistance of Allen Ginsberg, chanting helpfully), tried to levitate the building, later claiming it rose three feet. In May of the same year, several yippies took a tour of the New York stock exchange: once inside, they threw money over the rail on to the trading floor. Hoffman described what happened: "The big ticker tape stopped and the brokers let out a mighty cheer. The guards started pushing us and the brokers booed. Free speech," he added, "is the right to shout theater in a crowed fire!"
Hoffman's aim was to get the Yippie protests on to the television news, providing colourful material for the wacky five-minute slot after the more serious items. But it wasn't ever about pure theatre: two days after the Pentagon protest, protesters walked into an induction centre in Baltimore and poured a mixture of human and animal blood on files belonging to those facing conscription, while young men made bonfires on courthouse steps of their real draft cards. During reclaim the streets anti-roads protest in the late 1990s, figures danced on stilts wearing carnival costumes under which pneumatic diggers tore up the roads. In Sydney in 2007, the satirical comedy group the Chaser drove a motorcade with fake Canadian credentials through the high-security cordon surrounding a meeting of the Australia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group, and were only stopped when one of them emerged from the car dressed as Osama bin Laden. Their fake security passes were printed with the word "joke". But they were arrested by real police.
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