Comment on I work long hour and make little money
Nalivai@lemmy.world 1 day agoWhen Russia was not in the war, protests were way more prominent. Some of them were not sad at all.
The thing is, protests don’t do shit on their own. They are tools that opposition use to organise and send a message, and Putin learned to strike where it hurts, so when you participate in a protest all you achieve is that you paint a target on your back.
This is one of the reasons Ukranian protest of 2014 ultimately prevailed, cops were targeting protesters and not the leaders, so it became an organised fight.
Mika@piefed.ca 1 day ago
Protest in a country with the rule of law and democracy is about sending a message. Those tools don’t work in authoritarian countries like Russia (or Ukraine in 2013, for that matter). I’m fairly convinced that russian opposition politicians don’t want to allow the real protest to happen, directing the protest energy into waste.
Otherwise, I can’t explain why the protest never evolves into action. As if the protest wasn’t about the goal (to change things), but about fixing self-consciousness (to say that you don’t agree & getting jailed & say you did all you could).
And I need to vocalize the unfortunate truth about the protests that resolve around the goal - you need to be able to answer the question “and what if they won’t?” at every step, and be able to escalate.
“We are on the streets for a month, what if they won’t go?” - take the gov buildings / their villas and make them go. “What if they beat those people?”. Organize the people so they are coordinated and can fight back. “What if they shoot?” Raid the military bases and shoot back. Etc.
Every next step is escalation into more violence. Every next step don’t add you new followers, but filters out the existing ones that can’t follow further. All the peaceful protest part is about getting the biggest amount of people on the streets. But if you can’t answer a single “and what if they won’t?” - you lose.
The Ukrainian revolution worked because it had no leaders. There were politicians who wanted PR and were telling speeches, but lots of people despised them. There was no single entity you could eliminate to make it fall. Sure, different groups had their authority figures, but there were dozens of those groups. And people used their time to self-organize into militia groups, new leaders emerged naturally from those who took action and responsibility.