If you're trying to win people over to your cause by vandalizing a library, or Stonehenge, or an oil painting, you are not remotely helping your cause. "It raises awareness!" Yes, awareness that you're a fucking idiot. Nothing good.
My husband left his socks on the floor again, so I broke our neighbor's window. To be fair to me, our neighbor is a man who wears socks, and I did raise awareness for the whole neighborhood.
It cost the university $750,000. That's not awareness, it's $750,000.
Indeed it alienates potential and natural allies. Quite counterproductive.
It has a very useful outcome. It identifies that even those pretending to espouse the causes are in reality happier to condemn the protest rather than the things being protested. How often have you condemned fossil interests?
raising awareness without causing harm seems like an obvious goal yetraising awareness without causing harm seems like an obvious goal yet
Destroying priceless cultural artifacts in the name of their cause? Isn’t that why we had to go to war with ISIS?
Fight The Power*! * "The Power" meaning university librarians, those despotic hegemonic overlords who cause the strong to tremble and hide as they as they dispatch their teeming hordes of archivists to wield like a cudgel an unlimited budget dedicated to the maintenance of their book collections
But the best way to align someone to your cause is to get them to personally hate you.
I have way more sympathy for actions like Just Stop Oil orange spray painting oil companies' facades. Target the actual offenders. If they're mad about a war, perhaps your local Raytheon office.
I feel like talking about this too often becomes people claiming that you're pushing "respectability politics," when in fact INTENTIONALITY is what is under discussion.