I’ve been opposed to antifa riots and other violence since the election…and still am. However, a good friend who’s an atheist Jew from the former Soviet Union pointed out to me that maybe the problem in Germany during the early days of the Nazi rise is that the Germans didn’t riot enough.
It’s a striking point. Not one I’m willing to embrace, but she makes a truly excellent point.
When people used to order and plenty experience riot and disorder, they turn right, not left. Even in the face of evidence that the right was formenting violence to cause them to do that.
Some turn right, others (mostly the young and restless) are actually attracted by the excitement of the riots and seek to join that. We saw that during the 60’s.
My discomfort is along the lines of what’s right, but also along the lines of what’s effective. Martyrs are more effective than rioters. The massacred Kent State students spoke louder than the SDS. Images of lynchings are more effective than images of rioters or even of people fighting back. Heather was unarmed. We should be doing more with that.
This isn’t the shipping heiresses first rodeo in the White House. She was Dim Son’s Secretary of Labor under that eight year reign of error. Her families shipping company hauls most of the crap from China for Wall Mart. It’s why the National Guard was set lose on the striking Oakland dock workers before they had even gone into arbitration. Cost the corporation money and you get hurt.
President Trump’s two major councils of top CEOs disbanded Wednesday in the wake of his controversial remarks over the recent racially-charged violence in Charlottesville, Va.
Several corporate leaders had announced they were resigning from the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum as well as a separate manufacturing council in recent days after Trump was slow to condemn white supremacy groups.
But on Twitter, Trump said it was his decision to disband both councils. “Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum. I am ending both,” he tweeted.
The dissolution of the council is a major setback for a president who had cast himself as a business leader who could bring greater prosperity to companies and the economy.
I guess I find myself going even farther back to the fact that this country was basically born out of violent riots and protests that eventually escalated to all out Revolution. To accept the birth of this country as legitimate is to accept that there is a point where violent riots and protest as means of social and political change is legitimate. The question then becomes where is that point?
I mean every year hundreds of thousands of students in this country are tought that the Sons of Liberty were heroes for dressing in redface and destroying millions of dollars of private property to protest a tea tariff. But if a couple store fronts get damaged when Black Lives Matter protests the murder by police of yet another unarmed blackman it discredits the entire movement?
Sorry, the destroyed tea was only worth the equivalent of about $1.7 million today so I suppose I should have more properly said “over a million dollars in damages” instead of going with the plural.
I don’t know the exact math of the conversion rate, I’m just going by the amount given in the wiki article.
“stated that the destroyed tea must be paid for, all ninety thousand pounds (which, at two shillings per pound, came to £9,000, or £1.03 million [2014, approx. $1.7 million US]).”
And in fairness I should note that those actions were considered controversial at the time, although my point was more aimed at how they are treated today.