The Political Thread

[ZenArcade]

The very problem with riot is there is no focus or control. It is indiscriminate and truely frightening; it is for the want of a better word riot. Z

[Professor Bear]

Either the use of violence against our fellows and their property is wrong or it isn't.  If it's wrong to use violence, then cops shouldn't be murdering citizens, and if it's okay to use violence, then rioters are just using what they've been taught by the state to be an acceptable method of pursuing a desired result.

[TordelBack]

I know it's an old complaint, but riots attract the sort of people you don't want on your side, and repel those that you do.  Although they are good for getting your complaint on the news, they allow authority to equate legitimate popular opposition with unthinking aggression. 

[Professor Bear]

Another way to look at it is that appearing to have the moral high ground doesn't help you much when they drag you from your home and lynch you from the nearest lamp post.  I have high hopes that water protests in Ireland will soon help illustrate this point for me.

[TordelBack]

I have high hopes that water protests in Ireland will soon help illustrate this point for me.

Speaking as someone who has been mistaken for an Irish Water worker* and rather unpleasantly if verbally abused on several occasions, and whose work compound was burnt to the ground after one of the early water protest marches, I rather hope not.   That aside, I think it's the very fact that protests have been so peaceful that has allowed them to grow to the size they've achieved, and to a large extent made the state/media's criticism of them seem so pathetic - I don't condone my neighbours fecking a water balloon at an Tanaiste, but making it sound like it she was equivalent to being tarred and feathered and airlifted from her burning APC by Seal Team Six makes even the most right-wing Irish person laugh.  It'd be a very different story if someone had put in her windows or torched her car.  I'll always be more of a fan

All that said, our protests are about how the state gathers and wastes spends our money, not unpunished racist murders by the police.  I might have a different view were that the case.


*Anyone looking into a hole is suspect.

[Jimmy Baker's Assistant]

Rioting simply invalidates whatever point you were trying to make. When riots broke out in the UK following the death of Mark Duggan the public mood quickly changed from "why are the police executing drug-dealers?" to "why won't the police stop these bastards looting Sportsdirect?"

Peaceful protest is far more effective.

[Jim_Campbell]

Peaceful protest is far more effective.

Except that when a million people march on Westminster to demand that there is no war on Iraq, the government takes no notice. The fall-out of the Poll Tax riots, by contrast, was the end of the Poll Tax and the removal of Thatcher from No 10.

Jim

[Professor Bear]

I think you will find, Jim, that history records that The Poll Tax Peaceful Sit-Ins was what broke Thatcher's hold.

making it sound like it she was equivalent to being tarred and feathered and airlifted from her burning APC by Seal Team Six makes even the most right-wing Irish person laugh.

You are very lucky to know such people, TB, as I have personally never come across anyone in the political classes who had enough self-awareness or shame to care about looking foolish when they cry about being the victim in the equation.

[Jimmy Baker's Assistant]

I'm too young to remember the poll tax riots, although I heard Richard II came out of them quite well.

[ZenArcade]

Hear hear. We had civil rights marches in NI in the late 60's and early 70's (in which my parents and countless others participated). It looked as though we were going to get the basic rights due to us a human beings: but bang! The forces of reaction stepped in. Mobs led by Ian Paisley beat and kicked people off the streets and that nasty rotting old corpse called blood sacrafice republicanism stepped right in and 20 years of tit for tat murder heartache and loss ensued. We got the rights we were entitled to 25 years, 3500 corpses and thousands of maimed citizens later.
Now we were well on the way to securing all this in the early 70's through peaceful, organised protest; but when random violence entered the equation a generation (mine) got pissed into the sand before the psychos and religious nuts had had their fill and generously decided to cut us a break. Violence is nasty, obscene and gives you nothing but a void where your soul used to be. Z

[Professor Bear]

No-one is disputing that the Troubles were a totes bummer, though the enduring second-class status of various ethnic nationalist groups the world over might just as easily suggest that had things never progressed past the peaceful protest stage, there wouldn't have been any impetus to change things in Northern Ireland any more than for Native American or Australians.

[TordelBack]

To the tally you might add Ireland's 5 years of murder, destruction and the beginnings of decades of acrimony after good men like James Connolly somehow got it into their heads that a doomed armed insurrection was preferable to taking painfully slow steps towards Home Rule and beyond . 

Even if you stop short of occupying biscuit factories, parks and orphanages it's always hard for me to see how burning your fellow citizens' cars and smashing up people's livelihoods can be ever really be aligned with the objective to make things better.

[ZenArcade]

The point is well made. The people who are burning the cars and thrashing the livelihoods of ordinary John and Jane Doe's are part of an unrestrained mob, given licence by the sense of anonymity and 'freedom' bequeathed on them by being part of groupings such as these.
There is no ideal, pristine riot where the kids put it up to the rich and powerful; instead it provides cover and opportunity for pricks to intimidate and rip off other people struggling to get by. Z

[Professor Bear]

You won't sign petitions and you won't burn a Mickey D - is it any wonder things never change?

[ZenArcade]

Well I signed the Dredd Sequel petition! Z