 Welcome viewers to thinktechhawaii.com. The show is The Will of the People and I am your host, Martha E. Randolph. Today we will be discussing the nonviolent protest movements of the past and their effectiveness in causing change compared to more recent protest movements or demonstrations and why they accomplished more in the past than they do now and how they differ in organization. My guest today I'm happy to say is a professor of political science, Brian Hallett, who is part of the Matsunaga Institute for Peace at the University of Hawaii. I can't even say the university. That's terrible. University of Hawaii. He teaches a number of courses for that and it's under peace and conflict resolution studies which is PACE if any of you are interested. One of the courses I took with Professor Hallett was the course on nonviolent protest, exploring Gandhi, Martin Luther King and other events. He also teaches a course on the meaning of war which will be taught next semester I believe and he used to be or the semester after and he was a soldier during the Vietnam War and it caused him to become interested in the causes of war. So welcome Professor Hallett. Thank you for being on my show. I'm very grateful. Well, very happy to be here. Okay. Well, let's get right into it. We do know that the protests of the past, the demonstrations were movements and they caused significant change. The civil rights movement, the peace in Vietnam movement basically not having people have to be drafted and many other things were involved. Where protests today don't seem to work as effectively, they're on for a few minutes, they're off and nothing seems to change. Why might that be? What is going on? Well, the most important thing to start off with is to define terms and I make a distinction of a protest which is giving voice to the voiceless. Now if you're giving voice to the voiceless, you've been successful as soon as you've gotten your message out and to think that there would be consequences immediately beyond giving voice to the voiceless is just not to understand a protest. What made Gandhi and King so successful is that they did more than protest. Okay. In what way? Yeah. They had campaigns. The way Martin Luther King explained it is that first of all, he was not protesting, he was doing a demonstration. He demonstrated simultaneously what the injustice was and he demonstrated what the solution was. The paradigmatic example is the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins in 1960. So the injustice was that black customers could not go to the lunch counters and have a tuna fish sandwich and a chocolate milk. Well, that's a great injustice. The remedy for that injustice was to sit on a stool at the lunch counter, ask for a tuna fish sandwich and a chocolate malt and when it was not given to you, you just stay there until you get served or thrown out as the case would be. So what they did was not just protest. They simultaneously demonstrated what the problem was and what the remedy was. And was that true also of Gandhi when he had his great basically removal from the British Empire movement, independence? Well at key moments, the critical moment of course is 1933, Salt March. So he marched 260 miles to the sea and he made salt. So what did this demonstrate? First of all, this demonstrated an injustice because the salt tax provided a quarter of the government of India revenue, but it was paid by the poor people. It was an incredibly regressive tax. And what's the remedy to a regressive tax on salt? Well the remedy is to make salt and give it to people. So he demonstrated the injustice. He demonstrated simultaneously the solution and he, because it was a march of a very large number of people, he demonstrated that the Indian National Congress had the organization to actually do this. And I think that's also true with the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Wherever they started, they grew to be quite large. There was also a lot of planning. There seemed to be a sequential series of events where you went out and said what the problem was. And if you did not get a resolution, then you went out again. But if you couldn't show them the problem and the answer, you said to them, this is the answer I want. And eventually it seems that politicians were paying attention, at least in those days. They were more impressed by several hundred thousand people getting out on the street and saying this is what we want. Now the woman's movement originally had that kind of impetus. Right now there are additional woman's movements, for example, but they don't seem to be causing consistent change. They bring things to your attention, but they're not causing change. What might the significant differences be between these Occupy Wall Street protests against the world financial situation and the current, the time is now or it ends now. The woman's movement that rose up to say we're going to talk about this, it's got a publicity. But have we caused change? Well you see one of the implications when you talk about demonstration in the sense that King did is that some problems can be demonstrated and other problems can't be demonstrated. So during King's lifetime the great example was when he went from the south up to Chicago and they were going to protest against the housing segregation in Chicago, which was very blatant and very obvious, and it didn't work, it didn't work. The point is how do you demonstrate housing segregation? Yes, that's the problem. The remedy to housing segregation is to have the minority people buy houses in white areas. But of course to buy a house takes, well back then it takes what $30,000, $40,000? Well it took money that the people didn't have. So you cannot demonstrate the solution, you cannot demonstrate the solution to housing segregation and the problem at the same time. It's a different kind of problem that requires different kind of solutions, specifically it requires legislation. Exactly. It's a fair housing law and an agency that oversees fair housing. And some form of enforcement, you can have laws up the ying ying but if they're not being enforced as we've seen happens often here in Hawaii, it's just a bunch of empty words. So consequently the remedy to, I should say not just housing but also economic, paying justice is the inequality of distribution of wealth in the United and around the world. These require legislative electoral politics so you have to be organized to elect the people who will put into place the law and the enforcement to solve these economic problems. So there's a class of social problems that can be demonstrated and civil rights was obviously one of those, independence of India was one of those, the end of apartheid in South Africa was another one. But the economic issues just can't be handled that way. True, true. The other thing is we're using the term nonviolent protest and I'm going to have a break soon but we've discussed the fact that you can't really use that term because the demonstrations were certainly not intended to cause harm to outside people but many of the participants did suffer great violence, yeah? Well you see the problem with the terms violent and nonviolent is that you can only talk about violence and nonviolence after the demonstration is over. So no one ever planned a violent demonstration. If you planned a violent demonstration it wouldn't be a demonstration, well it'd be an attack, it'd be an attack. I mean that's what they did in Charlotte, Virginia recently, they attacked people. And a protest always begins as nonviolent and because of the circumstances and the people who are opposed to the protest, the protest may become violent so that the news broadcasts in the evening is going to say there was a violent protest. Yes exactly and when we come back from break I do want to discuss some of the events we've seen overseas because they tend to be aggressive protests. The ones in France recently were hardly what I would call nonviolent and there have been other similar events in Europe. They get much more aggressive but then they're older and they've been dealing with this stuff for a long time so I'd like to discuss that as well. For the moment I'm going to take a quick break because if we don't I'm going to get stuck with you in the middle of a wonderful response. So ladies and gentlemen this is going to be a short break in our show and then we will come back with Professor Hallett and we will talk more about this. This is a subject that would go on for quite some time but we're going to do what we can. So we'll see you shortly on the will of the people. This is Martha E. Randolph. This is Think Tech Hawaii raising public awareness. Choose to treat it with the help of a physical therapist. Physical therapists treat pain through movement and exercise. No warning labels required and you get to actively participate in your care. Choose to improve your health without the risks of opioids. Choose physical therapy. Everybody this is Martha Randolph on the will of the people for ThinkTechHawaii.com. My guest today is Professor Brian Hallett and we are talking about what we usually refer to as nonviolent protest for the cause of political change in the world and why it has been different in the past than it is now. When we went to break Dr. Hallett and myself were about to talk about the differences between protests we've seen in the news recently in Europe, in France we've seen them in Greece, we've seen them in Italy, which tend to be violent. They are not even pretending to be a peaceful demonstration and why they go that way over there and we usually at least start with a group of people marching peacefully regardless of their emotional commitment to the cause. So what is going on? Why are we so different? I think it's a cultural historical in the United States except for the Boston Tea Party. Most protests are exactly that protest. They organize and they want to give voice to the voiceless. In France in particular and other European countries they have a different culture and they react very, very physically. The farmers drive their tractors and the truck drivers park in the middle of the road and don't let anybody through and so on and so forth. But the critical point I think is that these protests that appear on television to be very aggressive and violent, all they're doing, they're not part of a campaign. They're voicing an opinion and that's all they're doing. Is there leadership involved or is this more spontaneous? Well there's a hard core that organizes these events. Actually the recent demonstrations or protests in France are really interesting because they're taking place in November when it's cold and the protest season in France is always May when the weather is much, much better. Well of course because if you're going to have a protest it's nice if the weather is lovely. Yeah you should have it on a sunny day. But they're not parts of campaigns. They're people who are semi-professional protesters and they organize these events around different causes and people show up and sometimes they're successful and sometimes they're not. They do tend to cause notice though. I mean I've noticed that governments that are experiencing these kinds of protests do recognize they must address them in some way. The civil rights movement and the peace movement from my memory were addressed because they were long-standing. They just didn't go away. They kept coming and kept coming and kept coming. But these days you have a protest as it were like this Occupy Wall Street. It gets a little coverage and it's generally peaceful but then something changes and it has to do with the way it's covered on television and I think it also has to do with the way the counter-forces infiltrate the protest and try to turn it into something that could be violent which would be great for television but does not accomplish any goal. Have you seen that and how important is organization and goal setting when you want to create a movement that will cause specific change? Well you cannot cause specific change without a movement that's well organized and the key to the organization as King said over and over again is to have the coherence of your ends and means. You establish a goal and then you develop means that will actually get you to that goal. It's like a five-year plan in the old days. Well no it begins with an analysis of the problem and to go back previously economic issues cannot be demonstrated so that the civil rights type of protest just doesn't work for economic issues. You have to do legislation and other things. The anti-Vietnam War movement one of the principle reasons it was successful is that the war in Vietnam was just plain nonsense. It just couldn't be justified after a certain period of time. We had the release to the public of information that exposed the lack of sanity behind that movement which I've noticed they don't let it happen anymore. I think sadly the government forces learned from that to make the underlying story very secure. Going back to France Macron and his government imposed a new gasoline tax which it's not the pocketbook of virtually everyone and especially low income people. This was the fuse that set off a protest against economic injustice in general in France. The government has to respond to it because the injustice is just so blatant. It has to be addressed. It's true. We have noticed that worldwide there seems to be an increase in extreme right wing thinking. I would call it a resurgence but you can't repeat the exact past. You go forward into something that brings up things that happened in the past. I don't know if it's a disconnect with the actual history of right wing thinking or if there is a legitimate complaint because in an effort to be fair some governments and some leaders have not really seen the overall effect in the situation where people are protesting migration or immigration in situations where basically people are fleeing for their lives and they don't want to leave their home, they don't see any choice. That imposes on the people in the country they're fleeing to. What is an answer here because all I can think of is you unite as a world and you go back to the countries that are screwing up and you overthrow them and try to create a government where you can say to the people you can go back now we're going to give you more money and we're going to help rebuild you and that's fine but we don't think that way as a world do we? No, no, no. I mean the immigration is driven by a number of economic and conflict reasons. So if you want to stop the refugees you have to solve the original problem and both in the United States and Europe you just can't have that discussion. It's too rational is what it is. The emotion of just being against other people is so much stronger than the rational approach. I mean we would have to tax ourselves a little bit in order to have the foreign aid that would solve some of these problems. And the foreign aid I think would have to be applied with some cleverness, some real understanding because we have money and we have thrown it at nations before. Unfortunately that money tends to go into the pockets of a controlling force and never gets down to the people and doesn't get used the way we were hoping it would. So money by itself is not the problem. It's the intention of how it is used and it seems to me we are confronting a very new situation where certain specific countries are taking actions which are going to cause damage to other countries and those countries don't seem to have the power to do anything such as global warming. We're going into a new era. Now in this era is there any way to use the protest techniques of the past, the demonstration or movement techniques of the past to cause some kind of change because one of the other things we seem to be missing are powerful charismatic leadership or leaders, you know, groups of leaders, yeah? Well it's a fraught question whether we need a charismatic leader in order to lead a movement or not. It seems to me that it's easier if you do have a charismatic leader but if you don't, you still have to move forward. I think the missing element in a lot of the protest movements is that they are not paying attention to the electoral part of our government. You know, over the past ten years we have allowed the state legislatures to the gerryman. If we had been paying attention and electing, you know, officials that had a bigger commitment to fair elections, there would be no gerrymandering. So attention I think is often focused on the wrong problem. If we could fix the electoral problem, then we could fix the economic injustice issues, then we could fix the global warming, you know, have a tax on carbon, subsidize solar and wind and, you know, research into other types of energy. Well it is true. We've had recently had elections which show that even in the face of blatant untruths and behavior which can only be described as bullying, there are still people in America who will support the election of an individual and his supporters to continue in behavior like that which is interesting because they probably wouldn't accept it in the school yard. That requires an informed public. It requires an electorate that actually researches information and thinks. But it seems the electorate is voting more on emotion now than ever before. And there are things happening now that I haven't seen happen in the last 50 years. For people like ourselves who've been through the civil rights movement, I haven't seen this many African Americans killed by police who were completely innocent, unjustly, and the police get away with it since the 50s and the 60s when it was open season. The only difference is these are in police uniforms instead of in white outfits with cones on their heads and they don't make a statement about it. They just do it. So is it possible to have a political situation which will resolve itself? And we're coming to the end of this so let's see what we can end with that might be a positive note or at least a question people can think about. Well, Trump has captured 35 to 40% of the American population. And that 35 or 40% is totally dedicated to whatever he wants to do at the moment. That means that 60 or 65% of the American public doesn't agree with it. But the 65% is not organized. They're not organized. They're fragmented. They're fragmented into feminist groups, they're fragmented into different economic groups, different identity groups, and so on and so forth. And as long as the opposition is, I mean the rules divide and conquer, right? Right, of course. And as long as the opposition, as long as the 60% of the population is divided then they can't possibly beat. Okay. So is what King did, well, in Montgomery in the first place, he got all the Christian ministers to agree to do one thing at one time. Boycott the bus. Now the Christian ministers in, well, Christian ministers in general, disagree with each other. So my sect is better than your sect and so on and so forth. But how do we bring, I mean it's what King did is he brought these people who disagreed on the most fundamental theological questions, which for ministers is... Big deal. He got them to work together. And is what we're looking for is someone who will bring the 60% of the population together. Franklin Roosevelt did this in the 1930s. Absolutely. And Kennedy seemed to engender a great deal of public. And of course Barack Obama was a shock and surprise. But it seems to me we go back to the nature of leadership and I'm sorry to say it, but Trump has a certain charisma and obviously enough to cause people to completely dismiss the things he does and says that make no sense and decide that it's okay. Well, he's got 40%. He's got 40%. But the 60% have to get organized. That's true. And actually within the 40%, there are people who I really think are not thinking because I'd like to think that 40% of the United States of America are not fully supporters, are not blatant liars and are not quite that racist anymore or anti-female anymore. But I don't know. So we've come to the end of this show. And obviously this is something we could approach again. Dr. Halliott is teaching his course on the meaning of war that will be coming up in next year, right, in the fall semester 2019. For those of you who are over 60, you can attend it for free. Look into the Nakapuna program. And for those of you who simply want to learn something that you didn't know you need to know, please, I suggest you take this course. So ladies and gentlemen, we are at the end of this particular lecture. Thank you Dr. Halliott for coming along. My pleasure. And we are also at the end of a year. And we are approaching holidays. We all know what that means. So I want to wish all of you on behalf of my staff and this show and thinkTechHawaii.com a very happy holiday season. Merry Christmas. Happy Kwanzaa. Happy Hanukkah. We could sing all sorts of songs. My brother liked to sing, you know, Silent Night when we lit the Hanukkah candles. He was confused at the time. But I want you to have a wonderful holiday season. And when the new year comes, participate. There's a new legislative session coming in Hawaii. There are many organizations that are pushing very important bills. Look into them. Find out what you can do because they need your support. All right. Thank you very much. And I look forward to seeing you in the new year. Thank you, Professor Halliott. Thank you. Merry Christmas.