For the people justifying destruction of buses and stores, consider…
The people who live above those stores that are getting firebombed. Is destroying their homes acceptable? What about if they are there when the stores are firebombed? Do their lives not matter?
What about the black woman on a news story tonight, lamenting that the people destroying the stores and attacking the buses are affecting her life? She lives in that neighborhood, but they destroyed the only store she can shop at. With the buses not running, she can’t go anywhere else.
Vandalizing and destroying the community is not helpful to your cause. Even George Floyd’s family is decrying the violence and pleading for peaceful protests.
Even if vandalizing ICE buses were acceptable, that doesn’t mean I support vandalizing all police cars or city buses. But I don’t necessarily agree even that is acceptable.
I don’t think it’s that simple. Police are given a lot of leeway for wielding force in the name of law enforcement. They are given incredible protection for situations where danger arises in the course of their duties. The need to use force to capture criminals and stop crime is undeniable. The question is how to evaluate situations to determine if the force levels are justified. The question is how to have impartial independent review of use of force situations. The question is how to break the mentality of “protect my brother even when he’s wrong” and build a mentality of “fighting crime even when it is by a police officer”. The question is how to get a jury to evaluate a situation and convict. We’ve seen cases where cops were prosecuted, taken to trial for obvious wrongdoing caught on video, only to have them acquitted. One that comes to my mind was a Houston cop caught on video stomping on the head of a suspect that was pinned down by several other officers. He was acquitted. How do we enforce the law when the judicial system fails?
I do agree with you that destruction and violence in the name of protest is counter-productive. I just don’t think the solution is as simple as “enforce the law” against cops and protesters.
You are correct, this is an important observation. Police officers are likely to see attempts to strengthen means of punishing them for wrongdoing as attacks on their security and safety. Look at the Buffalo cops who all withdrew from the special task force because two of their own were charged for pushing down a 70 year old man for no reason. Look at the cops cheering at them posting “not guilty” pleas. Police officers see themselves as a group under attack for doing a dangerous job and maybe they mess up in difficult situations when judgment has to be made quickly, but criminalizing their behavior will be seen as endangering their safety and giving the bad guys more leeway than they themselves have. Police unions will undoubtedly not take any proposed changes lightly. They will fight to ensure the strongest protections they can for their members, even if that means protecting them for malfeasance.
But we seem to be veering from the subject of this thread, which is supposed to be about Antifa and the legitimacy of their tactics.
FWIW, it may be helpful to address by name the people you believe are justifying this. For my part I’ve got no interest either in wagging my finger at “destruction of buses and stores” or at justifying it. I think that sometimes people respond to economic damage–whether that’s destruction of property, strikes, or other hits to the wallet–in a way that they don’t respond to protests that carry no inconvenience to them; and I think that these sorts of economic attacks sometimes bear fruit for the attackers.
My mind was changed in this regard by the brilliant book Blood Done Sign My Name, which I heavily recommend to anyone interested in the civil rights movement.
Whether the tactic works is a different question from whether it’s justified, and I think these two conversations are happening back-to-back and often getting confused with each other. I’m not interested in the “whether it’s justified” question while the “whether it works” question is still out.
Guys, I’m not writing a model penal code; I’m trying to state a general principle. I want the police to be subject to the law; not able to place themselves above the law.
I recognize that the police deal in circumstances that most people don’t. And sometimes they legitimately do need to use force.
I recognize that there are crimes that fall short of murder.
I even recognize that are legal system is not perfect.
But I think my principle of enforcing the law is a lot better than the idea of breaking windows until the problem stops. Or the idea of abolishing the police.
Do you think that woman needed somebody to come into her neighborhood and burn down a store to make her aware that a problem existed? She knew that problems existed and all the people who burned down that store did was give her a new problem.
The people who live a hundred miles away and saw it on the news aren’t going to be inconvenienced or experience any economic damage.
Yes, that sucks pure and simple. Our legal system is not perfect and sometimes guilty people go free and innocent people get convicted. I don’t have an easy answer that’s going to make things perfect.
But I do believe it’s the best system we have. What’s the alternative? When we see somebody like that cop being set free when we think he’s guilty, do we storm the courthouse and hang him? I think that’s a terrible idea on so many levels. (One of them being that if you want to end racial violence, returning to lynch mobs is about as far as you can go in the wrong direction.)
All I can say is we take what works and push to make it work a little better. It’s a long and difficult process but it does work.
I like it when folks answer questions, so I’ll answer yours: nope.
But your question is only responsive to what I said if you ignore the word “sometimes” repeated twice. It’s only responsive if you think I meant to type something like, “Every single person on earth refuses to respond to injustice unless they’re inconvenienced by a protest of the injustice.”
It’s no less “cowardly” that we live in a government that has unlimited power to find out anything they want about you while they operate increasingly in secrecy. That’s the point Edward Snowden was making, in fact. Self-governance depends on the people having the ability to regulate the people they’ve appointed to do the necessary work of governance. The more secrecy that they have and the more information that they can control relative to the people’s ability to check them, the greater the threat to democracy and liberty.
That’s not a defense of antifa, I’m just responding to the specific point that you made above. Considering that they’ve long been regarded by people in power as “terrorists” when that may or may not be their objective, and considering further that since 9/11 the mere association with “terrorism” is a crime that can result in life imprisonment, it seems that accusations of “cowardice” are likely to fall on deaf ears.
So that particular woman already knew racism was a serious problem and didn’t need anyone to tell her. But somebody somewhere else didn’t know that racism was a serious problem so people needed to burn down a store in that woman’s neighborhood so they would be made aware of it. Am I following the argument correctly?
I’ll put aside, for now, the issue of how burning down a store conveys the message that racism is a serious problem. Other than to note that I don’t see the connection.
Is the difficulty caused to this woman justified? She now doesn’t have a place to buy her groceries. Was getting the message out important enough that this was acceptable damage? How much harm is it acceptable to inflict on people in order to get the message to other people that racism is bad? More specifically in this case, how much harm is it acceptable to inflict on black people in order to get the message to white people that racism is bad?
A store burning down leads to media coverage of that event, which leads to media coverage of why the store was burned down, which leads to more conversations about racism. I’ve seen a number of articles in the last week asking, what leads people to be so angry and frustrated that they would do such a thing? The simple Fox News-type answer might be because they are uncivilized animals, but more respectable organizations dig deeper, and the public at large ends up better educated and more aware.
Look at the Ferguson riots after Michael Brown was shot by police. Why was there such intensive coverage of this death when many others go relatively unnoticed at the national level? The Ferguson riots led to changes in the Ferguson legal system, prosecutor’s office, and police, that while woefully inadequate, are more than what happened after other events that didn’t receive that kind of coverage.
As I said above, I personally don’t condone the acts of vandalism and property destruction that have accompanied some of the protests. But I am a beneficiary of the increased awareness and changes that come about because of such events, so I also can’t say “never break the law when protesting” without being a hyprocrit. Yes, maybe the same changes could eventually result from a longer-term peaceful initiative. But I’m privileged that I can wait. For someone who’s under their oppressor’s knee, it’s patronizing to tell them to be patient.
I mean, of course you aren’t. Are you sincerely trying to, or are you trying to rephrase things to make what people are saying sound stupid?
Because none of your paraphrases have been close to on the mark. If all you want to do is to make other people sound dumb, that’s cool, but I’m not here for that. If you genuinely want to understand what other folks are saying, damn.
I think that the most effective movements tend to be those that are generally mostly non-violent but present the possibility of forcible resistance, civil unrest - whatever you want to call it - as a possible option. At the same time, any force is probably best used only as a last resort. Further, it should measured, and it probably should leave negotiation and cooperation open as an option at all times.
ETA: I’m not so much referring to the actions of antifa specifically. I think each individual example of resistance has to be evaluated individually. I’ve never been particularly thrilled with antifa, but they’re no worse in my mind than that which they are openly fighting against, which is white supremacy. It’s white supremacist organizations that have a long history of terrorism in this country.
Sounds a bit like some ex-law enforcement vigilantes who identify joggers with dark complexions they need to hunt down. And kill them.
Antifa seems to occupy higher moral ground, though. They act against anti-social organizations by helping to organize protests, rendering first aid, and using violence as a last resort. Actually I think they would make better neighbors than the Georgia vigilantes…
I appreciate you sharing your view but when I hear “through any means available” or something similar I start to check out.
That attitude almost always leads to acts causing pain and suffering. When trying to make the world a better place both the end and the means should be weighed.
For the following question, I’m interested only in the OP’s answer: What is fascism? That is to say to the OP, how do you personally determine if someone is a fascist?
Do clubs and bricks constitute arms?
Is it valid to conclude that, because the Portland authorities did nothing to stop Antifa, Antifa acted within the law, and therefore not fascists?
America is on the verge of chaos. Dirty cops and Potus himself are blatantly fomenting racist hatreds. Yet when some have the courage to stand up against fascism, we get tired memes (possibly posted from the comfort of an affluent suburb or even gated community) condemning those very heroes.
In a few years will Americans be echoing what Germans said 75 years ago?: “Yes, we should have acted differently, but we were confused and didn’t know better.”
So you’re swallowing the Trumpist propaganda that the looting is led by “Antifa.” Got it, I guess. What’s your stand on Obama’s long-form birth certificate? Was Hillary the puppet?
No, only by the OP’s (and several posters) insistence that all means necessary, including violence, are acceptable. I’m not the one saying that Antifa exists or that they can resort to those type of tactics, the OP does.
This will make the 140th post in this thread and i admit I haven’t read them all. Has anyone mentioned the 2nd Amendment yet? The NRA and others defend their right to bear arms. They will say to protect themselves from a despotic government, among other things. So. in their view it is ok to use firearms and form militias to protect themselves from the government but when anti-fascists challenge the government, its terrorism? Do I have this right?