Why Mass Protests Don't Work These Days

This video on Washington’s Blog is singing my song.  He says that protests of the sort of classic sort- - don’t work any more.   He divides the causes of successful revolution into four categories.  One is the classic protest movement, which is called volunteerism in this essay.  But there have been some of the largest protests in the world that have done nothing to effect world change.  So Thom Hartman’s basic premise is wrong.  Thom was wrong in 2008 when he said that “Revolution comes from outside of government” and the theory is Barock Obama won over Hillary because Hillary preached that “For every Martin Luther King, you need a Lyndon Johnson to carry the vision through- - to bring it to fruition.  I was in agreement with Hillary on this issue and came to believe as the 2008 campaign unfolded that Hillary was the better candidate BECAUSE she was an insider and knew how to work with congress and knock heads.  (There is a lot I know now that I didn’t know then)  Of course “Occupy Wall Street” was a major failure.  The media didn’t cover it and the people simply gave up protesting.  The winter was coming on and there was talk of “even bigger protests in the spring”.  Those never happened.  Even Dodd Frank passed BEFORE the fall of 2011 - - was never put into full effect.  I only wish that it had.  Apparently there was a February 15^th 2003 world wide protest that was supposed to ut a stop to the Iraq War before it started.  But there are three other ways Revolutions can be successful.  One is - - changes in climate.  There are floods and droughts which can be remarkable molders of popular opinion in terms that measures government should take.  Then there is the Wayne Dyre method of just sit back and meditate and “Imagine the dream you have into Reality”.  They say “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at - - - Change - - before your eyes.  The final method of successful revolution is something like Christianity’s spread throughout the world.  It’s just considered “An act of God” or miracle, if you will.   We in the Federation would consider it a fifth dimensional standing energy wave intervention.  That is - - energy from another Universe gets trans-muted into this world we see.

 I had Norman Goldman on from three to four.  I would have handled that “Black lives matter” call differently from the way Norman did.   I would have demonstrated my belief in free speech by letting the guy speak his peace and then responded.  Norman was combative with this caller from the git go.  The plain truth is that protests that used to work fifty years ago don’t work today.  People have developed resistance to them.  The media doesn’t cover them and people’s beliefs are so hardened as some sign of machoness that nobody changes their minds.  I agree with the “producing discomfort” part but you don’t attack people who are on your side.  In this I agree with Norman.  Norman says the four right wing publications he reads every day are the National Review,  Brite Bart, The Drudge Report, and a thing called Red States dot com.   This Eric Erickson guy was the one who made it a point to say he wouldn’t invite Trump to any debates.  I think he’s trying to purge the party of outside influences and make sure every single candidate marches in lock step to the Koch Brothers’ beat.  Hartman says the health or one or both of them is in question and rather than repent of their deeds like Lee Atwater did, their notion is to double down and do as much damage as they can before they kick the can.  So they are “troopers to the end” for their cause.

[we join the paragraph in progress]  - - - We had mixed fruit for dessert.  I asked for and got more black coffee following Fernando’s lead since the cup was just half full.  They had sugar for the tea drinkers and even I, with lemonade, was asked if I wanted some sugar.  Shawn Hannity was on from twelve to one and I picked up after two and at that time Shawn had a lady guest from Assyrian Christians association.  She reminded me of that Star Wars scene where the holograph says “Help me Obe Juan Kenobe before it’s too late”.   She thinks the US has betrayed Syrian Christians and that groups pledge to protect the Christians have instead slaughtered them.  She named the Kurds in this.  While the Syrian Church dates back to the second (not the first) century in my book- - the Kurds have this strange religion which is a combination of Zoroastrianism and Judahism, which goes back many centuries earlier.  Bones said “She’s lying.  And she has her own agenda.  Everybody has an agenda”.   If the situation is as she says, I can’t imagine the media blacking out all news reports of Christians being “abandoned”.

Though Iran has been ruled by its Shiite clerics ever since the 1979 overthrow of the 1953 American-installed stooge there (the Shah), Shiia Islam is opposed to Islamic jihad, which is a strong component of Sunni Islam, including of the various Sunni sects that have been trying to overthrow the Shiia ruler of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, who is a member of the Alawite Shiia community.   Islamic jihad is based upon the Sunni emphasis on there being only one acceptable source of law, the Quran, and the Sunnah that’s based on the Quran (thus “Sunni”), and the Ulema that’s based on the Sunnah. Thus, Sunni Islam is itself based upon the conviction that there is no other valid basis for laws than Allah, or “God” as it’s called in the West. (The way the fundamentalist Roman Catholic Antonin Scalia put it is that “government, however you want to limit that concept, derives its moral authority from God.”)  With this as the foundation of Sunni Islamic nations, there is necessarily a conflict between the government and the clergy if a given Sunni nation, or actually its aristocracy (the people who hold the real power over the government), tries (unlike people such as Scalia) to base the given nation’s laws upon anything else than religious Scripture, such as upon a secular constitution, or upon some different religion’s holy Scripture or body of beliefs. (It’s one reason why many Sunnis have difficulty integrating into European or other non-Islamic-majority nations. Whereas Christian-majority nations tend to be secular, a Sunni-majority nation cannot be — that’s a profoundly different type of culture.) One result of this fact is that Sunni nations don’t merely require their own laws to comply with the Quran and its various traditions of clergy, but they also demand that other nations base their laws upon the Quran — thus, for example, the “Caliphate.”  This is the reason why Sunni Islam is often referred to as “the orthodox version of the religion.” Just as in fundamentalist (or “orthodox”) versions of Christianity, Judaism, and other religions, the fundamentalist version of Islam demands that the government derive all of its laws from its religion’s canonized Scripture, which is the Quran. (In a fundamentalist-Christian nation, it would be the Bible.)

By contrast, Shiia Islam is far more tolerant of non-sectarian (i.e. “secular”) bases for the laws, such as, in the United States, the U.S. Constitution. (“We, the People,” are sovereign here; no “God” is even so much as mentioned, notwithstanding Scalia’s particular theological conviction.)  Russia is (like the U.S.) a secular nation, one whose Constitution is no particular religious Scripture, but is instead, entirely and avowedly, “Man-made” or derived from humans, instead of from some supposedly inerrant “God” (or “Allah”) as embodied in that deity’s supposedly inerrant (and therefore non-amendable, unlike a constitutional republic) Scripture. The real basis for the laws in a Sunni Islamic republic is the Quran (and the Quran, of course, cannot be amended). A Shiite Islamic republic (such as Iran) is less extreme, even when a fundamentalist such as Khamenei is in charge, and the reason for this is that the sect itself is less fundamentalist: it doesn’t have the religious-imperialistic feature built-into it. The Sunni center, Saudi Arabia — specifically Mecca — is the center of all Islam, but only for Sunnis can it be also the center of global empire. For Shiias, it can only be the religious center, never the center of government.