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Pro-Hamas is not pro-Palestine. People need to be careful what they a spray painting.
I just got banned from all of ml for this sentiment lol.
Edit Palestinian civilians need help, they are experiencing genocide at the hands of the Israeli government.
ML will ban anyone arguing for the US in any way. They aren’t communists, they’re trolls and parlor pinks.
What’s funny is I was directly criticizing Kamala / the US gov for not acknowledging innocent Palestinians in this statement
These are the only people we should care about!
And for historical reasons they get to hold some of the largest communities hostage.
Well, that’s what we get for valuing subscriber size over community quality.
True, we’re part of the problem. My personal solution is just to use Lemmy less than I would otherwise
lemmy .Marxist-Leninist have the most overbearing mods. They’re on a power trip, I fucking swear.
Just because someone says they are pro-Palestine, does not make them a good person.
That was not a peaceful protest. When you’re flying jihadist flags, spray painting “hamas is coming” on shit and getting into fights with police, you are now a criminal. Any actual progressive knows better than to support terrorists like hamas or engage in violence, as that does not create progress, merely crackdown. We progressives have a responsibility to keep actual violent extremists out of our ranks, they’re no different from fascists and should be treated similarly.
That said, burning the flag is protected by the first amendment, and is a valid form of protest if someone wishes. Though Harris does have a right to her opinion I suppose. The violence and vandalism was not valid protest though, and it make us all look bad. If this is how we act, and these are the values we believe in, then maybe we deserve an authoritarian like Trump.
My issue here is that there’s another side that’s also awful. I hope she condemns pro-israeli terrorists (and the agitators they support) just as vociferously.
Progressive movements in America have historically had violent reactions.
Even more reason to remain nonviolent, as MLK Jr and Gandhi did to great effect.
MLK got killed and was constantly mocked by his colleagues because of his overly idealistic positioning doing nothing to materially impact the movement at large, I’m like 60% sure JFK got killed for being too friendly to him, and ganhdi also got killed lated on and in general was also not a nice person, iirc. It doesn’t matter how nonviolent you are in your protest, the news will still frame it as violence on your part for throwing soup on the glass that protects the mona lisa while in the same breath condoning your subsequent arrest and/or total beatdown by cops. If you shut down traffic, if you stand in front of a store, somebody will tell you that you’re causing economic violence in this hour and in this moment, and oh, what if someone needs to use this road or this space for some sort of sudden emergency, and oh, you’re the one causing violence, right before they bring out the hoses and the attack dogs and the rubber bullets and the tear gas, and then they’ll stand by and do fucking nothing while either the state or just private entities in a mob come in and drop a fucking bomb on your neighborhood.
There’s not really a “nonviolent” form of protest. The state always brings the violence. A “nonviolent” protest can hardly be called a protest, even, I’d say, that’s more just like a march, a demonstration, or a parade. Still maybe valuable, but they’re not really disruptive in any way. They tend to be coordinated with local city councils so they can hand out permits, and they tend to not really impact much as a result. That’s the ideal modern “protest”, the only socially acceptable protest, so neutered as to be totally ineffectual. Anything else would be rude, if you’re protesting, even if it’s about how you’re starving, how the police are killing people, how your country is funding a genocide overseas, you have to be polite.
Let’s go point by point.
Yes, people do get assassinated, no question. However, does this halt their work? If I’m not mistaken, both MLK Jr and Gandhi are still widely praised and admired, and many people still mark them as inspirations. Was their profile and influence reduced or increased by their deaths?
Mockery similarly should not scare you, anyone working for change will face mockery. Same with how the news frames you. If you’re being attacked, that’s happening for a reason, where people are trying to change your behavior. Do you just let that happen, give in to them? “Oh, they say I’m being violent, so I may as well be more violent.” or something?
Yes, it does so happen that the state has a monopoly on violence, this is one of the purposes of a state. This is why actual, physical violence against it does not accomplish anything. Citizens have already granted that power to the state in years past, through laws, putting their violence is within the bounds of normal. If you try to unilaterally take that back, without negotiation, you become abnormal and a legitimate target for their violence.
There is absolutely nonviolent protest. You’re just agreeing with how the news frames things suddenly, I do not understand why. A march is a show of strength. In democratic governments they demonstrate civil unrest to the politicians, where voter dissatisfaction will hinder a specific politicians chances of winning re-election. In authoritarian governments you are more correct, though, and something stronger like a general strike is needed. These are not ineffective, though, otherwise they would not be routinely attacked as you have described. They’ve worked in the past, and can still produce results as BLM protests did in many cities through the country.
Yes, you do have to be polite. This protects you from the legitimate exercise of agreed-upon power by the state. If you are impolite, you can be dealt with, and then your protest genuinely fails. Look at the Netanyahu protests we are talking about, that is going to accomplish nothing due to the lines of politeness being crossed and the protestors being broadly viewed as criminals.
I think I discussed all your points, let me know if any were not to your satisfaction.
MLK, fred hampton, and malcolm X getting assassinated definitely set back their movements, and it set it back to this day. The civil rights movement after that point basically got disassembled and driven underground. What’s the classic MLK quote, something I’m paraphrasing from the end of his life, it was something like. They’ve given us voting and ended segregation, and that can all be done for free, but now they’re going to have to spend money to actuallt change things. And he was talking about reparations, iirc.
So his point was that it would get much harder after that. After they died, hell, even while they were marching, we got desegregation, but we also still had segregation in everything but name. White flight, redlining, the mass shutting down of public utilities like pools, huge amounts of homes getting demolished and split up under the guise of “blight removal” and the federal highway program, and now we’re seeing gentrification and the massive suburbanization of poverty as poles shift slightly. The progress wasn’t over, but after huge government crackdowns, the civil rights leaders either getting gunned down, bought out, co-opted and turned towards an islamic cult, or turned towards more illegal activities with the formation of more extreme inner city gangs, which is basically what the black panthers were contemperarily referred to as, those movements were then all gimped and made incapable of dealing with the problems and reframing that inevitably followed.
Your movement can be dealt with anyways, is my point. The state will use violence against you regardless of whether you’re “polite” or not, as we’ve seen historically. It’s also insane to ask people who have been writhing under the boot to be “polite”, and to be concerned with “optics” like that’s some sort of reasonable concern over the actual shit they’re protesting. The idea that every interval of every political term, you know, every four years, the voters are the ones that are solely responsible for leverage and change is insane.
You perform a protest, usually in a city, but sometimes that city basically is the entirety of the state’s GDP as oftentimes is the case in america. You perform a protest in that city because it causes a large amount of economic threat. to the city, state, and maybe the country. This can be in the form of direct property damage and cops calling in sick days uselessly and in the form of actual expenditures on police, it can less effectively come in the form of various shutdowns for days on end of particular corridors and maybe services.
You perform a protest near to some piece of legislation, near to its passing, its signing, because the city then knows that if they decide to stick to their guns and treat this as usual then there will inevitably be more protests and more property damage and economic cost to them doing so, which makes donors unhappy, it makes people sitting in the nosebleeds unhappy even if they’re the stereotypical scared white suburban voter, it makes everyone discontented, it threatens power, and it guarantees a kind of escalation unless the protest succeeds.
But the point is that protests aren’t for playing to the nosebleeds and playing to the scared white suburban voter that’s going to see like one city block of a walmart and some big box store going up in smoke, and then they’re gonna freak out. in the 60’s you would get black and white newspaper pictures of people getting hosed down and bitten by dogs and then thr papers would call those people horrible extremists. It doesn’t matter what you do, how polite you are, they’re going to show those pictures to those people and they won’t care. They might even send in a plant to go in and do violencr or act more extreme just so they can incite meaningless violence and get more pictures and more footage.
The protest isn’t for those people watching the news, the protest isn’t aimed at them, so it doesn’t need to be “polite”. In these instances a protest is actually hampered by being overly polite because then it’s not actually disruptive, and if it’s not disruptive then nobody gives a shit and it’s useless.
I won’t argue that it did not set back the civil rights movement, but that wasn’t my question. Regardless though, you’re ignoring the rising prevalence of riots towards the latter 1960s and into the 1970s, and how that may have made progress much more difficult.
Is it any surprise that Hoover, as director of the FBI declared the Black Panthers to be the most dangerous domestic organization in the country in 1969? Does it not make sense that when you turn to violence and destruction, you will make people fear you, making concessions less likely? Or do you think white people in the country could have actually been suppressed by that fear? Connect the ideas. Government power WILL be exercised against violent actions, you WILL be defeated if you attempt those strategies, it’s just wishful thinking to imagine some world where this does not naturally result from any overtly fear-causing activities. You need the support of a majority to enact change in a democratic government, you cannot afford to alienate peaceful allies that do not share your ethnicity.
Don’t try to pretend that MLK Jr’s methods persisted steadily and peacefully after his death, as if peace loving, gentle black people were crushed under some bootheel. That’s not what the Black Power movement was. Maybe it does feel insane, but it’s reality. Thinking you can somehow violently overthrow state power and beat it at its own game is actually insane though. Simple sense dictates that will accelerate your crushing, driving away allies and allocating resources from placating you towards crushing you.
Disruptive protest is one thing, I think its debatably effective unless done at a very large scale. What is absolutely effective, though, is mass demonstration. It has nothing to do with some nebulous scaring people in power, their power is not threatened by inconvenience. It is absolutely threatened by wide-scale voting efforts though. People can get thrown out of office. That is a very direct impact on a specific individual who is at direct threat of losing something they care about–their job. That’s real power. You piss it away if you alienate allies, though, and that’s exactly what rioting accomplishes. They’re not scared of riots. Your enemies WANT you to riot. It’s stupid to give them what they want.
I am saying that you are originating from the wrong thing, here, your cause and effect is wrong. The black panthers and other black power movements were pushing for a different thing afterwards, after the civil rights movements, and that’s precisely why it escalated. It wasn’t up to them to simply be nicer, and then they would’ve won out. Being nicer wouldn’t have gotten them reparations or larger amounts of power in the political or financial systems, i.e., things they had to attain, and engaging in reformism wouldn’t have, either. Well, I can’t say it wouldn’t, because I’m not a guru, but I can say I do think that would be incredibly unlikely, because I don’t really think there’s going to be a reality in which you get a country with a vast amount of white people in it to voluntarily give up a systemic advantage that, in the first place, they can hardly even be convinced that they even fucking have. In fact there were a bunch of people engaging in reformism at the time in a very clear chain up until now, right, and again, they’re just going to have limited political power. Redlining dovetails nicely with gerrymandering, a war on drugs dovetails nicely with being able to arrest every dissident you want under trumped up charges. Reformism, if you’re correct, gets us about as far as we’ve gotten since civil rights, which is not very far at all.
Even throwing that out, right, reformism, I don’t think it’s generally in the interests of the powerful to give up their power. I think the reason they were willing to go along with civil rights wasn’t because civil rights was nicer, it was because civil rights both had a slightly larger amount of support as a result of being a more mainstream political idea than black power, but more importantly, I think it was because people in power could get away with handing them civil rights and then, as remains for all time, still continuing to run the system almost exactly the same way it’s always been run. Like how they instituted sharecropping after slavery, effectively just forcing them into slavery again, or how they implemented voting tests do the same thing, or how, right now, they make it harder to vote in those particular districts by putting the voting booths super far away and making sure they do the bare minimum so lines are going around the block.
Gentle, loving black people were crushed under the bootheel, I don’t know what to tell you about that, they were. They were the ones who also suffered from redlining and all of those practices I described in the wake of that movement’s unraveling. You are putting the responsibility to not commit violence entirely on the protestor and not on the huge state force. One of these is the driving force in these engagements, one of these is causing the vast majority of the violence.
You don’t need a majority of people to be on your side in order to leverage against power, or else no revolutionary movement would ever succeed, and no reform would ever succeed outside of the most socially acceptable centrist styles of reform, which even then is looking increasingly unlikely as the overton window splits in half. We infamously live in a system in which a minority of people have a vast amount of political power, whether that be politicians, newscasters, business moguls engaging in lobbying, or even if I were to just point out the like, seven or however many suburbs in america that are the designated gerrymandered tipping point for their particular districts or local city positions. That’s not a majority of people, making those decisions. To seize or leverage such a system, it’s, as you say, also not necessary to get support from the mass of the people who can hardly even be convinced to care about any politics at all to begin with.
Again, the point of the protests also isn’t to play to the nosebleeds or to convert people with a mass demonstration, because the news is just going to show like two walmarts that have been lit up by some white suburban idiot kid, some undercover cop, or some groyper that decided to start shit, the suburban voters are going to turn their heads and clutch their pearls, and that’s pretty much gonna be it.
I dunno, I might just leave you with the link to cointelpro, which I think is interesting, and hit you with that, and then have my piece. I think at the end of the day you seem like you’re a reformist that believes voting matters and shit, and I really wish that’s something I believed at all, but I think our worldviews are just very divergent. Unless I actually want to get into citing shit and throwing a bunch of historical text around, which I don’t wanna do because it takes too long and nobody ever gives a shit about it anyways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO here, have that. Maybe also go read my other comment in this post, I dunno, you might get a sense more for what my positions are.
I’ve seen a couple images of it, as of now, with the world’s most obvious plant chuds holding up, like, isis flags, which doesn’t make any sense, as well as a flag burning and the replica liberty bell being drawn on with various graffiti, some of which was like, actual antisemitic shit. People give leftists shit for purity testing too much, but that’s cause whenever you don’t do that you end up with this shit, where very obvious plants will get perpetuated by the media endlessly even if you don’t do anything.
I dunno how people haven’t been turned onto this shit yet. You can repetitively see footage of like, at every single pro-palestinian demonstration, even the “jews for israel” ones, you’ll see some brainbroken zionist in a t-shirt that says “jew” on it in badly written marker trying to stir shit so they can get blown up and then call people antisemitic. You saw this same shit with very obvious cop-phenotype hog “off-duty” cops in the BLM protests that were also trying to stir shit, or like, how it would always be some white kid nobody knew that would be the one trying to burn some random storefront or whatever. Or it would just be people freaking out over the walmart burning down, but I don’t think it’s controversial to think the waltons should fucking burn along with their big box stores. Nobody’s burning down the Aldis, from what I’ve seen.
I won’t deny that there are some relative extremists and people who would like to enact violence or property damage in a kind of escalation and mutual arms race in which basically everyone loses, but they are very few and far between, and what you actually end up seeing a lot of the time are going to be plants. Praxis can look like that stuff, but obviously taking your chance to do so in the middle of a random protest, where the cops can easily just start blasting fucking anyone they want and arresting whomever they want, is not the greatest opsec, you’re only going to end up using your ideological allies, presumably, as cover for your own adventurism. It’d be better to do whatever shit you wanna do like that on your own so nobody else can get involved or taken down for it. Everyone knows this, it’s not big news, it’s why that violence specifically doesn’t happen. But in most instances, if you are watching the news snippets, you are seeing the like, two city blocks worth of protests that are going to be the most extreme by far so they can scare white suburban voters into doing whatever they want.
I get you. You’re the real deal. You probably understand what’s really going on better than most on here.
She’s still Biden’s VP. If she were to break from the administration’s stance, it could be very bad for her
Not that I actually expect her to differ from Biden much
