In another time, Europe was a land of demonstrations. They appeared and disappeared like lights on a Christmas tree. Thus, in the eighties there were demonstrations against NATO, the repression in Palestine, the deployment of Pershing and Pinochet missiles. In the nineties there were protests to reject the first war in Iraq, the US intervention in Yugoslavia and, inevitably, Israel. In the early 2000s, floods of people flooded Europe in demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, so many that George Bush Sr. said: “We cannot determine our foreign policy based on the number of protesters in Barcelona.”
It is difficult to know what exact influence the manis had. Thus, Spain remained in NATO, Israel did not evict the territories, the Pershings deployed and Saddam Hussein was executed. But they were not homeopathy. In Spain there was a referendum, the Israelis held back and in the United States there is a strong fed up with Europe.
Let us remember that, in general, the crocodile that should be concerned is the one that we do not see. Thus, in the eighties and nineties we did not see protests against Tiananmen, the ayatollahs, the USSR or the perpetual dictators of sub-Saharan Africa. It is possible that this thematic asymmetry had to do with the self-loathing professed by part of the West, which took the hypocrisy, the inequality of opportunities and the shoulder pads of our societies badly. Some replied that this feeling was not nourished by knowledge, since the alternatives to the West were crueler and unproductive. It also happened that one manifests before who can and listens. So Gandhi could fight against the British Empire, but he couldn’t have done it against Putin; for him, the cat does not negotiate with the mouse.
Today in Spain and in Europe there are, sometimes, manis that are almost scrambled, we have seen it in France and before in Catalonia, and in recurring appointments. But outside of there the protest circuit loses audience, it seems that in Europe the demonstrations are less frequent, numerous and roaring.
Where are the protesters? Are they on Twitter? It can be: if you want to protest or criticize, now you can also resort to social networks, newspaper forums, WhatsApp or a Telegram channel. There it is composed with ease, graduating and qualifying the criticism as desired. It may also be that the protesters are still active, but in the eyes of this writer the new methods of protest are a blanket that covers them.
The protest has a key role in all democracies. In addition to being an inherent right, it is good for a compassionate society to know what concerns its mobilized sections, although there is no need to be self-conscious about them, or confuse them with the whole, since in a democracy all citizens count. In some cases, Sayre’s law applies: “In a dispute the intensity of the feeling is inversely proportional to the importance of the matter dealt with”; in others they explain to us that decaffeinated does not contain caffeine; but in others those who protest are right, there were the suffragettes, the democrats during the Franco regime and the first ecologists. Sometimes a mobilized minority can determine the electoral results by raising awareness about an issue without mobilizing the opponents, as is the case of weapons in the US, they are of great interest to few and little to many.
Let us, then, manage our protests with respect, observation and thank Twitter, which, although it does not always generate euphony, allows us to have much more information about what is thought and channels protests without the possibility of burning kiosks.
Today there are protests against Rubiales, but few protests, and the death (the murder?) of Prigozhin has produced noise, but no political protests, nor have there been protests against the morally and ideologically unjustified Russian intervention in the Sahel and Niger using mercenaries that they still have traces of Ukrainian blood on their boots. Let us remember that the most dangerous crocodiles are the ones we cannot see, so we must remember that political instability in one of the most unfortunate areas of the planet will generate suffering and human waves that could destabilize Europe and, at the same time, imperialist dictators such as Putin interfere in democracies is illegal and goes against our interests. It will therefore be necessary to contain and manage this crocodile correctly. If we do not act, we may find ourselves with a new and unfortunate metonymy.
