#1619 A Guide to Protests Against Injustice from the Peaceful to the Deadly
Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy
Jay Tomlinson
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2024
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Air Date 3/30/2024
We are living through an age of protest from the opposition to the Iraq war, the Arab Spring uprisings, Occupy Wall Street, through to marches against Trump, and now the war in Gaza. So, we thought we should take a look at the art and science of protest itself.
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SHOW NOTES
The 2010s saw a new era of mass protest, from Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, to Occupy Wall Street, EuroMaidan and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. Many of these movements shared a “horizontalist” or leaderless approach
Ch. 2: The Uncommitted Movement feat. Layla Elabed & Waleed Shahid - Chapo Trap House - Air Date 3-8-24
Organizers Layla Elabed and Waleed Shahid join us to discuss their recent successes with the movement to vote uncommitted against Joe Biden in the ongoing democratic primaries. They lay out their goals
Ch. 3: Why Peaceful Protest Won't Solve Anything - Second Thought - Air Date 8-12-22
Ch. 4: Gaza Protesters SHUT DOWN Schiff's Victory Speech - The Majority Report - Air Date 3-6-24
FINAL COMMENTS
Ch. 12: Final comments on the importance of building momentum over time with protest
MUSIC (Blue Dot Sessions)
SHOW IMAGE:
Description: A photo of a handmade protest sign taped to a chainlink fence that says "This is a movement not a moment." Taped to the bottom of the sign is a smaller sign that says "Jacob Blake" with hearts around it.
Credit: "18a.StreetArtFence.BLM.Plaza.WDC.27August2020" by Elvert Barnes, Flickr | License: CC BY-SA 2.0 | Changes: Cropped, slightly increased brightness, contrast and saturation.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast in which we look at the fact |
| 0:08.0 | that we are living through a sort of age of protest from the opposition to the Iraq war, the Arab Spring Uprisings, Occupy Wall Street, all the way through |
| 0:18.1 | to marches against Trump, and now the war in Gaza. So we thought we should take a look at the art and science of |
| 0:25.5 | protest itself. Sources today include Novar Media, Chappo Trap House, Second Thought, the Majorda Report, and Democracy Now, with additional |
| 0:35.8 | Members Only Clips from Outrage and Optimism, and millennials are killing capitalism. There's a conventional understanding of why left-wing protest movements fail, and I think that if you asked somebody who worked for |
| 0:55.6 | the Times or the BBC they'd say well the problem is is that they're two left-wing |
| 1:00.1 | they're two left-wing they're too left-wing they're too disconnected from where the majority of people are at, and that means there's a kind of right-wing backlash which operates as a sort of course correction. |
| 1:10.0 | It's because these people are too disconnected from where you know the median citizen is at |
| 1:18.2 | Don't really feel that that's your thesis in the book that yours is something else. Well that I think is what happened |
| 1:24.0 | very often throughout history. |
| 1:25.0 | I mean I protested the Iraq war in 2003 |
| 1:28.0 | and what happened at that point |
| 1:29.0 | it was a huge outpouring of opposition to |
| 1:32.0 | the invasion of and destruction of that country. |
| 1:35.0 | But what you can do as a government is simply ignore and that's what happened I think in 2003 and I think very often in history |
| 1:41.0 | we are not surprised to see that the people in power choose to see |
| 1:45.0 | whatever outpouring of sentiment on the streets as a minority that we already knew about |
| 1:49.1 | we're going to ignore them. What is very strange about what I call the mass protest decade, the period of |
| 1:54.1 | from 2010 to 2020, and just to summarize I try to write a history of the world in |
| 2:00.8 | that decade built around mass protests, treating the history of the world in that period as if the most important thing that happened was unexpected mass protests and their unintended consequences. |
| 2:13.2 | What happens in that decade is not that |
| 2:15.8 | they are fringe elements that are ignored by elites |
... |
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