What Else Did They Expect?

 

There is a particular kind of political blindness that deserves to be studied. Not the everyday variety – the mild evasions, the half-truths, the press-conference fog – but the kind that looks straight at a crowd and seems genuinely shocked when that crowd reacts like a crowd.

Because at some point, you have to ask: what did they think was going to happen?

When a government invites the leader of a state widely accused by international bodies, human rights groups, and millions of ordinary people of systematic oppression into the country, this is not a neutral act. It is not administrative. It is symbolic. It sends a message – and symbols are never received politely by those already living with the consequences.

This isn’t about abstract geopolitics. It’s about lived moral awareness.

Large numbers of people across the world have already denounced mass civilian suffering, displacement, collective punishment, and the erosion of basic human dignity wherever it occurs. They have marched, written, voted, boycotted, spoken, and pleaded. They have done so peacefully, persistently, and often at personal cost. When those same people see their leaders roll out the red carpet anyway, the injury is doubled.

The act is offensive.

The dismissal is worse.

Because the real insult isn’t the visit itself. It’s the implication that public conscience is irrelevant. That the voices raised in protest were merely noise, not warning. That outrage can be ignored indefinitely without consequence.

History suggests otherwise.

People don’t protest because they enjoy disruption. They protest because they feel unheard. And when they feel unheard for long enough, the pressure doesn’t disappear. It accumulates. It finds expression somewhere else. This is not radical theory. It’s basic social physics.

The idea that leaders can publicly legitimize policies associated with widespread human suffering and expect calm acceptance rests on a fantasy: that people can be morally anesthetized by ceremony. They cannot.

Nor should they be.

What makes these situations especially volatile is the pretense of respectability. When power insists on presenting itself as morally neutral while exercising selective blindness, it provokes fury. People can accept disagreement. They can even accept hypocrisy. What they struggle to accept is gaslighting – the insistence that what they are seeing with their own eyes is somehow normal, defensible, or above criticism.

That’s when protest stops being symbolic and becomes existential.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth that politicians rarely acknowledge: the legitimacy of a state rests not only on law, but on moral consent. When enough people withdraw that consent, order becomes fragile, no matter how many laws are passed or how many police are deployed.

Which brings us to force.

There is a long and sorry tradition of responding to moral outrage with expanded policing powers. Governments call it security. Protesters experience it as intimidation. Each time this happens, the gap between ruler and ruled widens. The state begins to look less like a protector and more like an enforcer of silence.

That never ends well.

Violence, when it occurs, is tragic and wrong. It harms the innocent and corrodes the very principles protest is meant to defend. But pretending it emerges from nowhere is dishonest. Violence is not born in a vacuum. It is often the last expression of people who believe every other channel has been deliberately blocked.

This is not justification. It is explanation.

And explanation matters if we care about preventing the next eruption rather than merely punishing the last one.

There is a reason protests are rising across continents. It is not trendiness. It is not manipulation. It is not ignorance. It is a growing refusal to accept a world where power excuses itself while ordinary people are told to be patient, quiet, and grateful.

The public is not confused. It is morally awake.

The real question is whether leadership is.

Because pretending that deeply controversial policies, occupations, or systems of inequality can be normalized through diplomatic ritual is no longer working. The world is too connected. Images travel faster than talking points. Suffering is visible. Silence is legible.

Peace does not come from insisting everything is respectable. It comes from confronting what is not.

Until leaders understand that moral outrage is not a public relations problem but a warning signal, these confrontations will continue. Not because people are unreasonable – but because they are paying attention.

And attention, once awakened, does not go back to sleep on command.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell