“Poke”, “Share” and “Like” others on Facebook all you want, but in protest, content is still king.
I’ve said this many times over, but nothing demonstrates its validity more than the bestsellers list in France.
The Fifth Republic has been swept up by a wave of indignation, all due to a 32-page book by a 93-year-old former diplomat and French resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel.
At just 13-pages of text, it’s more like a pamphlet, but Indignez-Vous!, which translates to Be Indignant!, Get Angry! or Cry Out!, has become a runaway hit.
It is a manifesto for all causes left, covering a mindbogglingly wide array of topics from Israel oppression to the treatment of Roma in Europe to the growing gap between rich and poor and the state of the environment.
The underlying theme is that “the basic pattern of resistance is indignation.” In a less complex world of World War II, it was much easier to find something to fight against – the obviously choice being Nazism. Today, you must seek out a cause. But “seek and ye shall find,” writes Hessel.
It’s a call to get riled up at some of the world’s injustices. Any one. Take your pick.
Reading the text (here is decent English translation), I couldn’t help think back to the toothless Facebook protests of recent times in Canada. Protests against progation, Rob Ford’s mayoral candidacy, college strikes, even the Facebook protest against Facebook – all of them turned out to be meaningless.
That’s because, as Hessel I think exemplifies, behind every protest, there needs to be at least some substance. Change requires some element of humanity, some thought, and most of all some passion. (And it need not be in real life only. Look at Canadian G20 and Wikileaks protest action – all online and all awesome.)
I wonder if the book will someday find relevance outside France, if the phenomenon will reach our shores, or if activists here will search out relevance in its themes. Either one would be preferable to the whimpering Facebook-driven protests Canada has seen in the past five years.
