There are people who, whenever there is a protest about anything, will join the crowd with the specific intent of causing mayhem. Not because they’re protesting anything, but because smashing things up is fun, and if there’s a crowd of people it’s much easier to get away with it.
So if a thousand people are marching, and four guys throw rocks at the cops, and then the cops pepper spray and baton and arrest everyone, that makes it a riot.
Since the next four years of Trump are going to feature a lot of protests, the “mainstream” protesters are going to have to turn professional. Back in the 60s marches had proctors on the lookout for troublemakers who would turn a peaceful civil rights march into a riot. Anybody caught at a protest with a mask, or an anarchist flag, should be given a severe beat-down by the other protesters.
Thus themselves engaging in illegal violence. Hell, you just turned the protesters into rioters. If the problem is that violence discredits the movement, how is that supposed to help?
Not that I agree. Yes, violence can be used to discredit. But it’s not as if non-violent protests aren’t discredited, too. The protests right after Trump’s election were heavily discredited. Occupy Wall Street, which was mostly non-violent, was discredited.
We have as a society pushed the myth of the non-violent protests changing everything. We ignore that the Civil Rights Movement was full of violent elements. You have as much to thank the Black Panthers as you do Martin Luther King, Jr.
I’m not saying I’m for senseless violence. I’m not even saying I’m for this particular “riot.” I’m just tired of this narrative, this idea that violence is always wrong and always counterproductive.
If people were reasonable and would listen to just people talking, we wouldn’t need protests in the first place. I’m rather confident that the Civil Rights Movement was won in part due to some people being scared of what would happen if they didn’t listen.
I believe that’s partially because those opposed to extending civil rights to black people in the South were so shockingly, excessively violent, that the violence from those promoting such rights are often overlooked.
Also, while I concede that the Black Panther Party had a positive impact, that wasn’t achieved through the violence they committed. A great number of health, social, and economic initiatives were achieved without violence by the organization.
That’s a 3rd grade History Book view of the US Revolution. Things are rarely that simple.
Having said that, if you are going to justify rioting, you should be willing to declare yourself a revolutionary-- someone seeking to violently overthrow the government.
To counter the imagined violence of Trump, aka Hitler part 2, the left is engaging in preemptive violence. To demonstrate how much they care and how much they love.
There is no excuse for it and it needs to stop. There are protesters who are engaging in this activity need to be arrested. I hope Trump is as vocal in condemning the violence on the right as he is there incidents.
Who is this “left” to which you are referring? How do you know the political philosophies of those who engaged in the violence or even if they have any? The only hard evidence that I could see from that video was an anarchist flag and I don’t really know if it makes sense to characterize anarchists as extreme left or extreme right.
A majority seem to be condemning the riots, but a part of me feels that the condemnation is a bit too simplistic, particularly those condemnations that give a blanket assessment that riots are just about people wanting an excuse to break and steal stuff for no particular reason.
Just a couple of thoughts that are floating around in my head I’d like comments on:
We like to uphold MLK as this paragon of non-violence, but his views with respect to rioting seem much more nuanced than the more blanket statements made above. A common refrain in his speeches was that “riot is the voice of the unheard.” He also, while speaking against violent riots, understood them. He would constantly turn the conversation towards the root cause of the riots instead of just condemning them outright. He would point out that those who cared more about property rights than the plight of those who caused the property damage were spiritually dead. He would blame the perceived need for riots on complacent middle-class white people who were creating and/or supporting a system of oppression rather than just those violent whites like the KKK who were a clear, direct target. I wonder if some of us are committing the common mistake of making a caricature of MLK that supports the status quo instead of the MLK who was a revolutionary.
If you perceive that redressing your grievances to the government, which many people have done for a long time, isn’t working, what do you do? If even protesting isn’t working because those people who do not have the same problems as you are voting against your interests, what do you do?
Connected to 2, should we differentiate our response to rioting based on the reasonings of the rioters? Can we even differentiate? There are those who think they are rioting for good reasons (ie. the government and many citizens aren’t recognizing that my rights are being violated) and those who are simply rioting for bad reasons (ie. simply wanting to cause chaos or steal stuff)? Even if with disagree with rioting in total, there’s surely a difference isn’t there? I understand that we do not want to encourage rioting by appeasing rioters who may not be rioting for just reasons, but would it be wrong to appease rioters if their cause is just?
When animals (including humans) are in a highly stressful situation where they don’t know what to do, they panic. There are sound reasons for this: If it’s stressful enough, then you can’t make it much worse, and if the things you know to do won’t work, you might as well try something you don’t know, because it just might. Stopping and figuring out a reasoned response is a bad idea, because you probably don’t have the time for that, and so even if you do come up with the right answer, it’ll still be the wrong answer because it’s too late.
So, an individual animal will panic. What happens when you put a whole bunch of animals in a stressful situation where they don’t know what to do? They all panic. And that’s a riot.
I don’t think that’s a very good definition of a riot. Some are planned well in advance, and are not just some spontaneous reaction to being trapped in a corner.
I was actually thinking of the Boston Massacre during which British soldiers wound up firing at a rioting crowd while shitting their pants. Despite the fact that it wasn’t really a British Government decision per se, nor a massacre really (5 dead, 6 injured. I mean, c’mon), the Patriots seized on the image and drummed up a **lot **of publicity & propaganda about it, both before and during the war.
Wrong way around. It’s counter-intuitive, but counter-revolution almost always precedes revolution. The Boston Massacre happened because the British regime attempted to quash possible unrest in the egg, rather than the other way around. Had there not been soldiers in the streets to enforce unpopular laws by force and intimidation there feasibly couldn’t have been a Boston Massacre, you see ?
Another thought that’s tied to 3: what is actually worth rioting for? In a democracy, we accept that decisions are made by majority rule, either the majority of all voting aged citizens or the majority of their representatives. But we also accept that there are issues that are not up to a vote. It would seem that if there is anything worth rioting for, it would be these issues that are not up to a vote, those issues that citizens have a right to demand be addressed immediately. But what are these issues?
I’m unhappy because life is unfair, so I thought I’d put more effort into social disobedience. Working, studying and trying to improve myself is just so much harder than demanding someone else do it for me.
