Protests and demonstrations can at times be a little extreme in both method and message. For example, there are sometimes tragically far right Christians on street corners who spew verbal manure into bullhorns, the better to amplify their messages of judgment (and nothing else). Or sometimes, like at a 1995 NOW rally on the National Mall in Washington DC, there are women who display loud slogans on bare breasts—which has the effect of sending at least one other woman, who didn’t know she would stumble upon this while on family vacation, scurrying for a detour as she covers her children’s eyes.
Perhaps placards make for better mediums than bullhorns or breasts, but here too things can go array. A demonstration becomes more a spectacle than a message when jutting above the crowd are placards exclaiming “Exterminate Terrorists” (at a pro-Israel rally) or “2-4-6-8, Israel is a terrorist state!” (at a pro-Palestinian rally). Such demonstrations become pep rallies for those who already embrace the cause, but they don’t reach those outside.
And then there is the occasional placard that is factually problematic. This photograph, taken at a demonstration in the Palestinian village of Bil’in, offers an example. Mandela, unlike King and Gandhi, didn’t believe nonviolence was a moral imperative, and he was willing to employ violence when he thought it more effective. He writes in his book Long Walk to Freedom:
In India, Gandhi had been dealing with a foreign power that ultimately was more realistic and farsighted. That was not the case with the Afrikaners in South Africa. Nonviolent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do….For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.
Mandela had much respect for Gandhi, even choosing him when Time magazine asked him to write about one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. In 2007 he would even say that “Gandhi's message of peace and nonviolence holds the key to human survival in the 21st century.” But I wonder what he’d say about this placard?
