Hundreds of Thousands Form 'Red Line' Around The Hague
(www.commondreams.org)
from pelespirit@sh.itjust.works to world@lemmy.world on 16 Jun 2025 17:38
https://sh.itjust.works/post/40289921
from pelespirit@sh.itjust.works to world@lemmy.world on 16 Jun 2025 17:38
https://sh.itjust.works/post/40289921
Hundreds of thousands of people dressed in red marched through the streets of The Hague on Sunday to demand more action against the “genocide” in Gaza.
NGOs such as Amnesty International, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), and Oxfam organized the demonstration, which ran through the city to the International Court of Justice. The protesters were all dressed in red, creating a “red line”.
Organisers described it as the country’s largest demonstration in two decades. Many waving Palestinian flags and some chanting “Stop the Genocide”, the demonstrators turned a central park in the city into a sea of red on a sunny afternoon.
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That’s a protest that might actually accomplish something.
Why We’re Organizing No Kings Protests on Saturday–A king is only a king if we bow down
howwefightback.com/…/why-were-organizing-no-kings…
If the numbers of 4-6 million are true then less than 2% of Americans showed up. The pictures of big crowds was impressive, but that’s not enough. To the outside world, it looks like you have bowed down.
Take inspiration from this protest in The Netherlands and chastise your neighbours, your colleagues, your friends and family, to march, or this time next year America may just be a fully fledged fascist state with no personal freedom.
Two percent of the population is actually pretty huge. Historically, 3.5% has been the threshold after which change has almost always happened.
Less than 2%. So at the moment, by your threshold, no change. America is still on the path of fascism.
What country are you from?
Not that it’s relevant, but Scotland. A country that is quite good at telling fascists and racists to fuck off.
scotsman.com/…/nigel-farages-previous-visits-to-s…
thelondoneconomic.com/…/solidarity-in-an-image-gl…
A country that is welcoming to LGBT people and immigrants.
www.gov.scot/policies/lgbti/
gov.scot/…/migration-helping-scotland-prosper/
A country, that despite being under the thumb of a colonial power, has still managed to gain its own parliament and enact progressive policies that Westminster opposes.
How? By fucking yelling from the streets! By not accepting what our supposed superiors tell us and demanding better.
FYI, the number ranges from 6 million to 13 million. People were yelling and one even needed a 4 hour surgery to fix his eye from being shot with a rubber bullet. Why aren’t you congratulating the huge number that did come out instead of spreading your negativity around? I guess I’ve heard your ballads, so that might explain some of that.
FYI, Americans prefer kudos over anger when they do something great.
The original numbers were 4-6 million, it’s only recently been corrected to 13 million by some sources.
4-6 million is pathetic. 13 million is a lot better.
Of course I’m negative when it looks like less than 2 out of 100 of you can be arsed to oppose fascism.
Well done for finally waking up, but you haven’t done great yet. Keep going. Until Trump and his ilk are gone you haven’t achieved anything but let off some steam.
Keep up the momentum!
Is that better? 🥕🥕🥕🥕
Nope, but at least you’re trying.
Edit: Remember, a huge number of people that would protest have either been deported or are afraid of being deported. We’re dealing with the baddies after all.
150,000 is 0.8% of the population of the Netherlands, and isolated to a single location. The American protests were far bigger, so I don’t know what you want them to learn from this.
For an issue that doesn’t effect the Dutch. And yet they still showed up in solidarity, because they have principles, and understand that to live in a democratic country means taking responsibility for its politics and not just voting every 4-5 years.
Americans are being kidnapped, assassinated, and having entire departments shut down, and their turnout isn’t much better than the Dutch outraged at what’s happening another continent away.
I want them to learn that if they want change they need to do something, instead of giving every excuse under the sun as to why they couldn’t show up as has been done in other threads.
This is a good start I guess, but it hasn’t done anything to stop Trump and co yet. They need to pump those numbers up.
4-6 million isn’t much better than 150,000? If we go by percentages of the population, it’s more than 3 times higher. If we go by numbers of attendees, it’s something like 30x higher. Also, remember that American college campuses have been protesting this since it began, often resulting in students getting expelled or deported. Sorry that’s not good enough for you.
1.18 - 1.76% of Americans showed up to protest fascism in their own country.
0.82 - 1.09% of Dutch showed up to protest genocide thousands of miles away.
If you can’t understand how there’s a difference here, between standing up for yourself and standing up for others, I don’t know what else to say.
Or just shut the fuck up because you’re adding absolutely nothing of value and would find some other useless bullshit to complain about even if it was 20% of the country
There’s the American spirit!
Emotion and bravado instead of rationality and decorum.
Now go outside and show Trump that same attitude.
If it was 20% we wouldn’t be watching the country with the largest nuclear arsenal and the most military bases around the world descend into fascism.
This affects the world but only Americans can do something about it, the rest of us have to convince you to get off your arses and do it.
More people showed up for TACO’s birthday bash on Saturday than at the Hague. By your logic, that means the Dutch care less about the genocide in Palestine than Americans care about celebrating Trump’s birthday, and Americans basically don’t care about that at all based on the numbers.
So what principles do the Dutch have again?
Edit: Important addendum I just saw in another post:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/0aa69d3e-3af1-4a0f-9d39-d39f5d123bde.webp">
lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/27600754
That’s not how logic works. Jesus Christ. Absolute numbers aren’t how you compare these things.
Of course the country with 340m people can get a bigger crowd than the one with 18m.
I know the American education system is underfunded but why over the last two days have I had to argue this point to so many of you?
The Dutch are standing up for others, they could go about their day as if nothing is happening and nothing meaningful would change in their lives. But they chose not to.
Americans are only standing up for themselves, so they don’t lose their freedoms. The Dutch protest is therefore more impressive, even with it being a smaller turnout.
If 13m is the true number then that’s a lot better! That’s 3.86% of the population. Now keep it up! You still have a king as far as I can see, so why did you all go home on Sunday?
People are still being deported, people are still being snatched by masked men, the federal government is still breaking laws and doing what it wants, checks and balances be damned.
Keep the momentum going, depose these fascist fucks!
Absolute numbers absolutely do matter, because it becomes harder and harder to coordinate and handle the logistics involved the more people you have and the larger the area that you are coordinating across.
An estimated 2 million showed up in the city of Boston alone on Saturday, and these protests were coordinated across thousands of miles by ordinary people using social media and cellphones, not some sophisticated form of logistics network or something. Europeans don’t understand the sheer scale of the US. Americans are standing up for immigrants at home and thousands of miles away being kidnapped. There were protests in small towns all across the country where they’ve never had more than a deputy sheriff drive through. It’s closer to setting up simultaneous protests in London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, and the Hague than it is to setting up a protest in one city in a country that you can drive across in a single day. These protests made the top 5 of the largest protests in US history.
Europeans also don’t truly understand the conditions of the US. The government has spent every day since the death of MLK making these kinds of protests as difficult to pull off as possible. People are desperate but not so desperate that they have nothing left to lose, making them more desperate to hold onto what they do have. The majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck without access to medical care that won’t put them in massive debt or bankrupt them, or any other form of support network that Europeans take for granted. We’re dependent on our employers for all of those things. We aren’t even guaranteed the 2 weeks of vacation time that is considered the norm here. The average lifespan for an American has fallen for several years in a row now and is equal to the average lifespan of the worst county in the UK. An ambulance ride with no medical care expenses added on can cost you $600 after insurance. The average American has $300 or less in their bank account. Wealth disparity in the US today is higher than it was in France at the time of the French Revolution. We’re a 3rd world nation in a Prada belt. A coat of shiny paint over a society and culture built to keep the masses in check.
You might as well criticize the Arab Spring protests for not drawing big enough crowds.
<img alt="" src="https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cfr.org%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fimage%2F2020%2F12%2F-map_og.png&f=1&ipt=8be11a0ebca9f2668f502264615cb9a80ca51c5ad529d902ddbe7a8fb2542725">
Every one of your complaints stem from Americans not marching in the past. If you want a better life, a better country, more equal distribution of wealth, march! All the excuses you give for people not marching are conditions brought about because your population doesn’t generally march in the first place. As a culture, you’re so individualised that you forget how to stand up for each other, until it’s too late, and blood gets shed. None of us survive in a bubble alone, we all live in communities, we all rely on other people for various things. Unions work because alone we are weak, but together we’re strong.
We don’t take things like free healthcare for granted, it didn’t magically manifest itself, it was fought for by our predecessors. By marching. The same conservative rich fucks that prevent you from having healthcare are consistently trying to remove it from us. We have regular industrial action, attempting to prevent them from taking it away from us.
Do the same.
We have bullshit anti-protest laws too, we still manage to enact change though.
…org.uk/…/uk-alarming-crime-and-policing-bill-yet…
American democracy tends to be passive. You vote red or blue every now and then and that’s it. The politicians handle the rest. In Europe there’s more to democracy than just voting for your representative. Learn from us, claw your freedoms back. For starters, demand a real democracy where you can vote for more than just 2 choices.
The Arab Spring managed to enact change at least, No Kings hasn’t achieved anything yet. I hope it will, but so far the fascists still run the country.
This is largely my point, but the more accurate description is that Americans were convinced that those things are bad and should be protested against rather than protested for.
You can’t come in here and disparage more than 3 million people (now corrected in the final tally to 13 million people) in an organized protest across a country the size of Europe with that background of stomping down people’s ability to protest because a country the size of a single one of our states organized 150,000 people to protest in one city in a country without all those barriers. It would be like me coming in here and saying that the UK doesn’t care about the genocide because they had 0 people protesting in London during this protest, or complaining that Russians and the Chinese aren’t protesting hard enough.
Historically, most major protest movements in the US since WW2 have come from college students, as they have the financial security to spend the time and energy of being activists while also being the youngest group usually to be politically active, but this is yet another area where the US has cracked down on protesting. Since the Vietnam War protests, the cost of college has risen something like 1,000x (not percent - one thousand times the cost) as a direct retaliation to the protests. Colleges across the US have been protesting the genocide in Palestine since it began and have seen massive police crackdowns including arrests, students being kicked out of college, police stealing or destroying students’ property, and students in custody being denied access to life-saving medication.
The last time major change resulted from social upheaval in the US was when MLK was murdered and billions of dollars was burned to the ground in riots that shut down entire cities for a week, and the government has spent the 50+ years since convincing the population how that change was the result of very peaceful and polite protests that didn’t inconvenience anyone. The Million Man March was a threat and a display of force that left white people all over the country shaking in fear in their suburbs, and today people think it was a jolly jaunt through the city like a Pride parade.
Let’s make a comparison: the city of Boston, Massachusetts had an estimated 2 million protesters on Saturday. Massachusetts is just about half the size of the Netherlands, with a population of about 6.5 million people (compared to the roughly 18 million who live in the Netherlands). That’s a protest roughly 1/3rd the size of the entire population of the state. Obviously, people were coming from all over the place (other states included, Boston is one of the major cities in the region), but that doesn’t count all the protests that happened in small towns across the state and region as well. We know for a fact that these protests were larger than just about any other time in US history.
protests accomplish a lot, but not by protests alone.
for example: sending a message to elected officials, increasing awareness, bringing like minded people together to work on the problem they’re addressing.
Elected officials do not care. But a protest at the Hague may actually move the needle on action.
you can’t put all elected officials in the same basket, at the very least, they care about getting elected again and a huge protest threatens that….
Trump does not care. Vance does not care. Johnson does not care. Thune does not care. The Supreme Court does not care. Netanyahu does not
caregive a single flying fuck.The only hope is to put pressure on independent agencies like the Hague.
How? We’ve been doing this for almost 2 years and the genocide is still ongoing
Protesting the wrong people. If the Hague enacts war crimes tribunals, takes Netanyahu and all of Likud into custody, it ends.
Honestly wouldn’t put it past Trump to then just attack the Hague to release them
www.hrw.org/…/us-hague-invasion-act-becomes-law
They’ve already issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu before the protest, what more can they do?
apnews.com/…/icc-israel-hamas-warrants-netanyahu-…
Actually arrest him?
How much power do you think they have?
He’d need to be in a country willing to do that. And thus far, he has only visited countries that have refused to arrest him, because they want to keep Israel as an ally.
They can’t just invade another country to arrest the leader. That’s the kind of shit that starts nuclear wars.
Ahh but you see, if the world’s leaders sit idly by for another few years until there aren’t any Palestinian people left, they’ll be able to say “look the genocide has ended, we did it!”. All without having to even lift a finger to write a mildly worded letter.
Faux News: “the world’s largest collection of antisemites gathered around the Hague to demand the death of all Jewish people! Stay tuned to hear why they hate you specifically and want your family dead!”
I really question the hundreds of thousands, in a city of half a million of people - that would mean that half of the city. Thats definitely fake news. Even in the picture if the article it says suddenly tens of thousands. Sounds all a bit fish tbh
You know the Netherlands is about 16,040 sq m, where about 18 million people live.
For some Americans crossing the entire country is an acceptable daily commute
Why bring America to the discussion, if its about a protest in Europe about a war in Asia?
I figured it would be helpful to show how close everything together it’s in the Netherlands and how many people live in a small area.
If you just look at the stats for the Hague, like you did it is kind of hard to understand where so many people come from. I took it that it must be someone who is not from Europe. Hence the American metaphor for distance (and the milage instead of kilometers)
I am from Europe and know the Netherlands well. Even if all is close by, the number was a bit to big. And looking at other news outlets, it was. Not even the organisers say that number.
I was reacting to you saying:
People came from all over the Netherlands, it’s not a big commute to take. In 1983 555.000 people protested against nuclear weapons. That was back when there where 4 million fewer people in the country. So 150.000 is far from impossible.
I didn’t mean that 150.000 is impossible. I meant that 150.000 is not hundreds of thousands. That would only start at a full multiple of 100.000. But as I also wrote below by now, its probably not as important as I took it in my first comment
Aha that I can see. It’s a bit semantically difficult as saying tens of thousands instead is a bit diminutive.
But a demonstration of multiple of hundred thousand people is not unheard of, for example the 1983 example.
What continent do you think it is, if not Asia? :D
I agree with you but it’s a theme on Lemmy. Every story is linked back to America somehow (however tenuous) and I’m finding it frustrating to say the least. Even with blocking all US subs, the comments still circle back to American politics. It’s like Americans believe themselves to be the centre of the universe or something. They just cannot help making every story about them; the main character syndrome is through the roof
Illustrating the difference in country size is main character syndrome now?
I don’t think the Middle East is part of Asia
EDIT: I’m stupid “Palestine, officially the State of Palestine, is a country in West Asia.”
You’re doubting all major Dutch news organisations?
They all say 150.000 which is tens of thousands and not hundreds of thounds. Its an impressive number no need to pretend its more. That just makes the news outlet look bad
150,000 is 1.5 hundreds of thousands.
Tens of thousands is 15,000. Hundreds of thousands is 150,000.
I would understand hundreds of thousands starts at 200.000. At this logic 100.001 would already be hundreds of thousands, what makes no sense to me. But yeah, maybe its not that important as I made to be in my first comment.
The Randstad has over 8 million people that can all stand in Hague within ~1 hour or so. On top of that it’s organised by four major organisations that has mobilised people even outside of the Netherlands. I see no reason to doubt this.
Lovely to see.
Lol you know people can like move around. Also, it’s a Commuter City. Meaning kinda like NYC, during the day the number of people inside the city during the day is magnitudes grater than the cities offical population number. Grow up
Im sorry, marched around the what?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hague
Thanks
There’s a video around of a drone covering the length of the group, it took it like a minute of flying straight through to cover (what that video said) was around 150,000 people. Wonderful to see.
Unfortunately, the EU is nothing more than a cesspool of wannabe fascists in the pay of American-Zionist barbarism. It will do nothing for Gaza.
It can’t do less than nothing. Which is what you’re advocating.
Well, these days who the hell isn’t?
I sure hope this leads to action.
“the “”“genocide””" in Gaza"? “”“”“”?