Freedom’s Banner: How Peaceful Demonstrations Have Changed The World by Paul Harris

Abstract

Reviewed by: Freedom’s Banner: How Peaceful Demonstrations Have Changed The World by Paul Harris Victoria Tin-bor Hui (bio) Paul Harris, Freedom’s Banner: How Peaceful Demonstrations Have Changed The World (Crux Publishing, 2022), ISBN: 978-1-913613-10-5, 358 pages. Paul Harris’s Freedom’s Banner: How Peaceful Demonstrations Have Changed the World is a tour de force account of struggles for the right of demonstration, universal suffrage, and workers’ rights. As a former chair of the Hong Kong Bar Association, the author draws important implications for why the Hong Kong struggle has been crushed by the draconian National Security Law. [End Page 868] I. GLOBALIZED STRUGGLES FOR THE RIGHT OF DEMONSTRATION Harris’s book vividly illustrates that struggles for the right to demonstrate were global from the start. In the U.K., it was the French Revolution that provided “an inspiration and a model” for British reformers.1 In the American colonies, the freedom of assembly—though not originally including the right of demonstration— developed as resistance to King George III of England.2 American activist Henry David Thoreau’s essay on “civil disobedience” influenced not just British campaigner for Women’s Suffrage Alice Paul, but also Russian novelist Tolstoy and Indian Mohandas Gandhi.3 Gandhi met in London with the Women’s Suffragists Emmeline Pankhurst, whose violent approach he did not accept, and Charlotte Despard, whose “spiritual resistance” he admired.4 Martin Luther King and other black activists visited India to learn about Gandhi’s civil disobedience. More recently, Hong Kong’s “Be Water” protest style has been copied in Iraq, Chile, and the UK.5 Regrettably, while “some peaceful demonstrations have changed the world,” many have failed. Chapter 16 is specifically entitled “what makes a successful demonstration?” but the entire book addresses this question. The lesson is extremely sober: “no matter how large or well-planned they are, they can rarely, if ever, succeed, against a totally intransigent government prepared to use force to oppose them.”6 Everywhere, the uniformed forces—the military and the police—routinely met peaceful demonstrations with “a hail of bullets.”7 The police have also adopted the “unsavory practice” of using “agent provocateurs” throughout the long history of demonstrations. 8 Harris is at pains to distinguish between “two different approaches to demonstrations, between those which want to stay within the law, and those which deliberately set out to break laws . . . believe[d] to be unjust.”9 Yet, “[where] a regime is prepared to use unlimited force against unarmed protesters, neither the law-abiding demonstration, nor the Gandhian route of passive civil disobedience, offers much hope for political change, absent special factors such as international support or a regime which is deeply divided within itself.”10 How, then, did less intransigent governments emerge? Harris notes that “it seems to have come down to chance” and “timing.”11 The Magna Carta of 1215 could stick because John of England, who “had no plans to keep his promises,” died suddenly, so the succeeding boy king, Henry III, was forced by the barons to re-swear the agreement.12 The [End Page 869] Bill of Rights of 1688 was enacted after James II fled to France and was replaced by William of Orange as a condition of being crowned.13 Reform had a chance after King George IV, “a rigid opponent of any kind of Parliamentary reform,” was succeeded by William IV, who was “more respectful of the limitations placed on a constitutional monarch.”14 Earl Grey, who was appointed as Prime Minister, became “a tacit ally” of the reform movement. 15 Gandhi’s civil disobedience was not smashed because he dealt less with General Dyer’s “bloodthirstiness and savagery” and more with Viceroy Lord Irwin, who “had liberal views” and “preferred to play by recognized rules.”16 Moreover, “the greatest triumph of Gandhian principles since Gandhi did not occur in a tyrannical regime,” but in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.17 In contrast, in South Africa, where the coloreds were repeatedly massacred “with the apparent complete intransigence of the bulk of the white population,” “dismantling apartheid through non-violent civil disobedience was not a realistic strategy” for decades.18...