This bullshit enrages me. Both Gandhi and MLK wrote at length about when, and why, and how to use nonviolence and when, why, and where it doesn’t work. What we’ve seen over the past 40 years is that it doesn’t work to protest police violence in America with nonviolence. IT DOESN’T WORK.
Moreover, the line about using nonviolence like MLK or Gandhi is inevitably used to suppress Black voices. Gandhi wrote that nonviolence only worked against British colonizers in India because he and his followers knew British troops would use violence themselves against protesters, including women and children, and that news broadcasts in Britain would shame the British public into withdrawing support for those troops.
In America, right now, the people who support and enable the police using violence against protesters revel in that violence, and it increases their support from those people.
Yup. But I was responding to someone who said the only language the police understand and respect is violence. If it were that simple, then they wouldn’t have bothered writing at length about nonviolence.
Hard to argue against that. But if nonviolence doesn’t work, is violence the answer? I’m not prepared to go there. YMMV. I would agree that protesting seems to go nowhere. I’ll support anyone’s right to protest, but street protests seldom seem effective. They seem to just harden attitudes. But that’s probably a good discussion over beers.
Yeah, it shouldn’t ever be used that way. There’s a gulf of difference between making yourself heard and being passive, but too many people confuse non-violence with being passive. i.e Lunch counter sit ins weren’t passive, but non-violent.
And that was working with BLM. It was finally getting some traction. Trump knows this and is trying to spin it as a violent movement. I see no reason to help him.
I absolutely agree. I just don’t want to help them or add more to their ranks. There are millions more that are ignorant, ambivalent, self-absorbed, or unaware that don’t know what to think. They see protestors being cleared from a church near the White House, they are going to condemn the police. They see protestors throw or break something, they are going to condemn the protestors.
It just seems odd to play to the strength of the police and those that would encourage their violence.
I think you misunderstood me. Admittedly, I was letting context do a lot of work there. What I meant was that violence by the police against peaceful protesters was red meat to the Blue Lives Matter base. Civil disobedience doesn’t work in that scenario. I’m not talking about passive protest. I’m talking about Civil Rights Era nonviolent actions. They won’t work right now.
Breaking shit seems to have gotten people’s attention. I’m not a supporter of pro-active violence against anybody. But you shoot poison (tear gas) at me, while I’m exercising my 1A right to protest? Yeah, I’ll throw that back atcha.
No, I understood and agree with you about it being red meat for the blue lives matter crowd. And you’re right, many of the Civil Rights Era nonviolent actions won’t work. Those were easy to target. Prohibitions were open and obvious. Repression now doesn’t come with a hand lettered sign. So it’s going to require different actions.
Breaking stuff has gotten attention, but not necessarily good attention. But damn right you should throw stuff like tear gas right back. Things have already gone sideways. That’s not escalation. That’s self defense.
But I think there are opportunities to make progress in other ways. Me, I try to change minds one at a time. And I run into what people see in the news, so I’m sensitive (maybe overly) to how it can be perceived. Thus my prickliness about violence during protests.
If you’ll be patient with me for a moment, BLM took me a bit of time to understand in a way I can explain to others. Not the goal, but slogan. It really is a natural response to think, hey, don’t all lives matter? I’m beginning to wonder if this is where an opportunity was missed. It was opening for dialog. People who understood didn’t have the patience to explain. But this the (abbreviated) way I explain it:
“Yes, all lives matter. But saying Black lives matter is meant to highlight that we are not honoring that.”
But I also try to connect it to them. That police we can trust to treat Black men fairly are police we can trust to treat everyone fairly.
That seems to resonate. That this isn’t a zero sum thing. That they aren’t being asked to give anything up. They are getting by giving.
Personally, I think the protests have been rather peaceful by historical standards. That’s made talking about root causes easier. I’d like to keep it that way.
Geez, sorry for the long posts. And sorry if I’ve offended.
You do know that Gandhi and MLK peacefully broke the law? They were right to do so, they were injust laws, but they still broke them.
But as you seem to think that the protestors should act more like Gandhi, then maybe looking at the Salt March is a good idea. What would happen if communities, maybe even entire cities stopped paying tax until the police are defunded and the government monopoly on violence is broken?
I also notice that whenever Gandhi and MLK are brought up in these discussions, no one ever mentions Leo Tolstoy (yes, the War and Peace author), who wrote the book on peaceful resistance.
Really? For years in the UK, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children ran a campaign with the slogan “Cruelty to children must stop”, but I never heard anyone say “No, cruelty to EVERYONE must stop.”
I do wonder whether this could be used as a talking point with the evangelicals: They never even talked with the pastor of the church about the photo-op. Just gassed her.
Here’s the fundamental disconnect with pro-police groups and the GOP trying to position BLM protests, especially the Portland protests, as “violent:” I’ve been in protests where there were 5000+ protesters facing off against a few dozen police. If the protesters had been violent, those police would have been easily overrun. The reality on the ground is that protesters have shown remarkable restraint; far more than the police have.
Both MLK’s and Ghandi’s images and public personas have been whitewashed by the history books to be used to get minority protesters to protest in ways that are easy to ignore. First they killed MLK, then they stole his memory to use to control Black people. Disgusting.
Which is why seeing period reports and reading their actual words feels so weird: it goes against the whitewashing.
I honestly believe the majority of the violence in the early days of the current BLM campaign was done by agents provocateur on the white supremist/cop side, and it stopped because it backfired and was working to help the BLM cause. Frankly, it has become apparent that there will never be justice through the system, unless the system is fundamentally changed.
