Snapshot

When repression makes protest too risky, turn ordinary acts — driving slowly, clapping, wearing black, or laughing — into protests, thereby ridiculing the authorities and forcing them into a decision dilemma.

If authority is stiffing you, ‘unauthorized’ is all you’ve got.

— China Miéville, The City and the City

In July 2011, public frustration in Belarus over a deepening economic crisis reached a boiling point. The authoritarian regime of President Alexander Lukashenko had outlawed any political protest, and police were cracking down on any vocal expression of dissent. In response, organizers calling themselves “Revolution Through Social Networks” began calling on people to gather in public and clap their hands, or set their cell phones to ring all at once, thereby turning these simple everyday actions into surprisingly profound public expressions of dissent.

When mass gatherings and public protests become too dangerous, simple everyday actions done en masse can be used to illustrate the ridiculous nature of repressive authority.

As the non-protests spread, the police cracked down hard. The regime rightly recognized that the clapping was serving to undermine their authority. If they did nothing and continued to allow people to gather and clap without punishment, then the population could openly oppose the regime in other ways. Instead, the world saw the absurd sight of large numbers of Belarus citizens arrested for clapping. The crackdown exposed the government’s deep irrationality, a perception only strengthened when it submitted to Parliament a bill to make “the organized inaction” of silent protesters illegal.

Many years earlier, in 1983, organized labour in Chile planned to kick off new resistance to the ten-year-old Pinochet dictatorship with a massive strike in the copper mines, the backbone of Chile’s economy. Before the strike could occur, the mines were surrounded by the military and it seemed a bloodbath was certain to follow if the miners went through with this plan. Instead, the leadership brilliantly switched gears to a National Day of Protest made of decentralized actions, calling on those who supported them to drive slowly, turn their lights on and off at night, and at 8 pm to bang pots and pans (see: TACTIC: Cacerolazo [noise-making protest]). Many participated, and these mini-protests helped to rebuild the confidence of the beaten-down opposition movement as people overcame their fear of taking action.

As both of these actions dramatize, when mass gatherings and public protests become too dangerous, simple everyday actions done en masse can be used to signal dissent, gather crowds, get the word out, illustrate the ridiculous nature of repressive authority, and force your foe into a decision dilemma (see: PRINCIPLE: Put your target in a decision dilemma), all the while avoiding or deferring violent repression.

This principle doesn’t only apply to repressive regimes, but to situations in supposedly more open societies where daily life has been criminalized for certain segments of the population. Think of the two queer women who kissed in front of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City until they were hurriedly pushed off the grounds by security. Or the Dance Liberation Front, which organized dances in the streets and unlicensed spaces of Giuliani’s New York to flout repressive 1920s era “cabaret laws” still on the books.