WHEN PRESIDENT DONALD Trump announced on Saturday night that he would send the National Guard to Los Angeles to crush protests, a narrative emerged on social media that demonstrators had somehow given a gift to the authoritarian president by escalating confrontations with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
“Los Angeles — violence is never the answer. Assaulting law enforcement is never ok,” Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., posted on Sunday. “Indeed, doing so plays directly into the hands of those who seek to antagonize and weaponize the situation for their own gain. Don’t let them succeed.”
In reality, the protesters throwing rocks at heavily armed security forces or attempting to damage the vehicles used to kidnap their immigrant neighbors did not introduce violence. They are instead acting in militant community defense.
After all, would the situation somehow be less violent were ICE left to snatch and disappear people without impediment? Does Schiff imagine either his pronouncements or the empty condemnations of his Democratic Party colleagues will slow down the deportation of our neighbors?
Hearing the LEO parrots quack on about, “oh, the protesters are interfering with lawful action,” is so tiring.
Show one valid warrant signed by a judge, I dare them. Trolling Home Depot parking lots and restaurants is called stalking. Abduction and kidnapping is called abduction and kidnapping. All are unlawful crimes in a country that allegedly is “lawful.”
When the “lawful action” is plain clothes nazis black bagging people off the street because they failed a brown paper bag test they should be interfered with. With deadly force in my opinion.
For clarification is the idea that these people aren’t here illegally, or that we accept them being here illegally?
The idea is: dont snatch people from the streets in unmarked vehicels while heavily armed and masked
The idea is that there is due process and basic human dignity involved in the process of deporting someone. And masked unidentified people snatching people off the streets without signed warrants and disappearing people isn’t how that works.
“deporting”
I wonder: are people actually being “deported” to where they were born/have citizenship?
That doesn’t matter when ICE isn’t giving people their right to due process which they have regardless of their immigration status.
Kidnap vans need functioning tires, just sayin.
Caltrops pop them very easily
Apparently, rawlplugs make for better caltrops than simple nails. The hollow tube permits air, which keeps the caltrop from getting plugged into the tire.
Now, the question is how to get the plugs to stick together. Maybe wrap them with Play-doh? It isn’t like they have to last for more than one tire, long as they get the job done.
Epoxy clay for modeling is good for bonding metal kind of expensive for the task though I guess
Maybe dental floss or fishing line to make a bundle? And/or wrap in black masking tape to blend with asphalt but easily allow punctures.
If stealth is key, black play-doh and dunking the screws into black paint might do the trick. Biggest problem with that, is that civvies might walk onto them. As with landmines, caltrops don’t care who stumbles across them - be they cop or child, they are the same.
It is going to be a major issue with resistance and a civil war, that our efforts could potentially harm people who aren’t jerks. 😥
So if protests can’t be violent, and the authoritarian regime mows down the non-violent, how EXACTLY are we supposed to actually win this?
We’re not? One of our parties may be significantly less sadistic, but they both exist to lock the American people into a life of servitude for the rich. Our votes won’t get us out of fascism, they’ll only let us choose 4 years of “good cop” or “bad cop.” We’ll have to actually be okay with making our overlords mad at us in order to escape, and that includes the media; if the news is on your side, you can be sure the rich people who own it aren’t sufficiently concerned.
I think a really good lesson comes from the documentary “Winter on Fire” about the 2014 Maidan protests. The tl;Dr is that the protestors organized a peaceful march, and the police set up a sniper corridor and started mowing people down indiscriminately. They shot people who ran out with stretchers to carry the people who’d been shot. That night, the protestors regrouped and announced their plans to march again tomorrow, and to do so armed, all 90,000 of them. Like a Christmas fucking miracle, the cops found somewhere else to be the next day, and nobody got shot.
While definitely not the same level of violence of that, during the protests in 2020, I never saw the police riot and assault the group when there were armed civilian guards. Even five or so out 100+ people was enough to give the cops pause.
Just out of curiosity, what retribution was enacted on the cops for their indiscriminate violence? Because at this point I’d no longer be in a “shake hands and make up, live and let live” state of mind.
None, because the cops skipped town; I think it was said that they all left for Belarus, for the most part.
Non-violent protests capable of dissuading hostile official intervention through MAD. Peaceable ≠ peaceful.
Why we should scruple to call such a set of people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them. The sun is not about to stand still or go out, nor the rivers to dry up because there was a mob in Boston on the 5th of March that attacked a party of soldiers.
- John Adams, Founding Father, Patriot, later President of the United States, describing the violence of the crowd on the day that lead to the Boston Massacre.
He used this argument to defend the British soldiers in court, because justice demands due process for everyone. Even the enemy.
The Boston Massacre was:
The day that laid the foundation of Independence.
- Also John Adams.
LA is doing a great job of keeping everything calm. There was no reason to send the National Guard and now the Marines. Trump knows he looks like an idiot and is going to try and speed up the dictatorship early. Let’s not give him a reason to look like he’s doing anything and continue to be calm. Republicans, you’re in on this or I would hear something from you. You r’s better start speaking up mf’s.
Republicans, you’re in on this or I would hear something from you.
Always has been.
The cons hate America, hate freedom, and hate the Constitution. Always have.
Yeah, nobody’s been hurt except by the cops. Some waymos and cop cars got burned; that’s what they call Monday in LA.
Right? It’s the cops with the guns and the gas canisters, not the protestors.
And the protests are well into the thousands, yet only a few dozen arrests, and no reports of serious police injuries or death (if anything like that had happened, news everywhere would have been plastered wall-to-wall with that story). On the other hand, plenty of reports of protestors and media being harmed by police weapons. That is less violence and injury than after a major sports game.
those that make peaceful protest impossible…
Don’t do anything and therefore agree with authoritarianism. Protest and therefore justify authoritarianism.
They are just beging for someone to hurt them. According to their own logic.
There is a reason that a country is not supposed to use its own army against its own citizens.
The national guard is not needed or wanted in CA. The governor of CA did not ask for you, and CA does NOT want you to be here.
It should be completely legal to shoot cops with rubber bullets whenever you feel like it. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
It should be completely legal to shoot cops
I like this better
If they’re always on edge fearing for their lives, maybe we should give them actual reason to.
Man, Schiff is such a fucking limpdick. Sometimes, violence is the answer. Otherwise, we’d all be speaking German and Japanese.
Don’t believe the doubters: protest still has power
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
There are, of course, many ethical reasons to use nonviolent strategies. But compelling research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, confirms that civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics – by a long way.
Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.
Working with Maria Stephan, a researcher at the ICNC, Chenoweth performed an extensive review of the literature on civil resistance and social movements from 1900 to 2006 – a data set then corroborated with other experts in the field. They primarily considered attempts to bring about regime change. A movement was considered a success if it fully achieved its goals both within a year of its peak engagement and as a direct result of its activities. A regime change resulting from foreign military intervention would not be considered a success, for instance. A campaign was considered violent, meanwhile, if it involved bombings, kidnappings, the destruction of infrastructure – or any other physical harm to people or property.
Daily reminder that the media of the time did not hail King as the paragon of non-violence as we do today. The rhetoric were that his protests were violent and disruptive, and that they ought to be stopped. It was only after he was successful that all that rhetoric was blown away and retroactively painted with the brush of acceptance and approval.
Also worth noting that in the 2014 Maidan protests, one of the only times nobody got hurt was when the group announced an armed peaceful march and the cops made themselves scarce.
The right wing called him a Communist, etc…
None of the right wing knows what a communist is, just like not of the ML know what communism is.
I’m not saying protest doesn’t have power. But the power of nonviolent protest diminishes sharply if there’s no implicit threat of violent protest if matters get pushed too far. One of the primary reasons MLK succeeded was because Malcom X was waiting in the wings.
Nonviolent protest against a status quo ante is one thing; nonviolent protest against an aggressively authoritarian regime that’s grabbing more power by the day is quite another. It is a very, very different context.
As an additional point to add to yours, every single political protest movement in history has included violent elements. It’s unavoidable. When these political “moderates” start pearl clutching about some windows being broken or whatever it is an attempt to de-legitimize the entire movement, and draw the focus away from the actual source of the majority of violence, the cops (including ICE).
I think I need to be clear, I don’t give a shit if windows are broken or they throw scooters off bridges onto cop cars, I’m talking about violence against humans. TBH, the looting sends the wrong message of greed instead of being for a cause, but not because they’re damaging shit.
I don’t even need to reach into the past for a very clear counterexample: do you really think Zelenskyy could have asked Putin nicely to not invade his country anymore, and it would have made a damn bit of difference?
This is not an invasion of our land, these are democratic protests. There is a huge difference between Russia sending bombs to bomb LA and Americans protesting. If Russia sends bombs, fuck them up.
And if America sends bombs to LA?
I see what you’re saying, but I live in Seattle. I saw how they spun our city as a “hellhole” and “it’s on fire” for months. I had family members calling to see if I was okay when it was very contained and our cops had been quiet quitting for years anyway, it was that fucked up. You have to have the people on your side, and not be on the side of the soldiers/agents/whatever.
They will say that regardless of how much violence protesters actually do. Purity testing demonstrations only makes the situation worse by allowing the right the ability to dictate the narrative.
What are you trying to say? That the demonstrators should start killing people, looting and setting everything on fire? I don’t think that’s a good solution. In fact, that would just get a lot of protesters killed.
There’s no purity testing. I’m counteracting a lot of people saying to bring their guns and start shooting. I wonder why people are calling for that? It doesn’t seem in the protester’s best interest.
I am saying that:
- the vast majority of violence perpetrated at these demonstrations is done by law enforcement
- if cops wanted people to stop throwing water bottles at them they would stop trampling people with horses and shooting reporters with rubber bullets
- framing these demonstrations as “violent” only serves the narrative of the right
I agree wholeheartedly with you. People are being mixed in to the comments that want violence and are promoting violence all over Lemmy. I apologize for somehow lumping you in with that.
I think the government has learned a lot about suppression of protests in the last 20 years.
Find (or create) an excuse to call the protest violent, apply less-than-lethal weapons liberally, and subvert the message of the protest to turn the public against it.
It’s textbook manufacturing of consent
I know this is quite easy to say from the comfort of my couch in Europe, but guys you need to shoot this fucker in the face already.
The people crazy enough to do something like that are the ones that voted for him. The guy that got his ear was a republican.
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When money has no bounds, the power it creates causes problems.
Tax the rich like we mean it.
It doesn’t matter what they say. As long as they’re congregating and throwing rocks, Trump can say “see I told you” and all his fans will believe him and agree. Whatever they choose to do is fuelling his ascension to dictatorship.
Whatever they choose to do is fuelling his ascension to dictatorship.
Which means the only strategy left (besides capitulation) is to play their game and beat them at it.
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Well when we fought the original Nazis it wasn’t limited to the officers and leadership.
