Riots

queeranarchism:

queeranarchism:

While we’re on the topic of the kind of lawbreaking ‘civil’ society frowns upon, let’s say out loud for a moment that rioting in response to injustice works.

Is it dangerous? yes. Will the media lie about it? yes. Will people in our own communities tell us that we’re ruining it for the good activists? probably.

But when every police shooting is answered with riots, smashed windows, burned trashcans, the direct result is that police departments find themselves under pressure to not create more ‘incidents’ because riots are expensive, cost politicians votes and break through the illusion of total state control.

Riots actually make cops think twice about the consequences of their actions while politely appealing to recognition of our humanity and reforms and  sensitivity trainings generally achieve fuck all.

Further reading:

• How Nonviolence Protects the State
• The Failure of Nonviolence

skye-is-blu: Really? You’re advocating violence? Civil disobedience works, just look at history. Nonviolent protests work. Look at Ghandi, Montgomery bus bycott, women’s suffrage, MLK washington march. There are so many examples of peaceful protests that have either sparked conversation about the way we do things and treat others or have even contributed to the end of the injustice in question altogether.

I’m gonnna quote Peter Gelderloos
How Nonviolence Protects the State

here because he said it better than I ever could:

The pacifist history of India’s independence movement is a selective and
incomplete picture. Nonviolence was not universal in India. Pacifists white out those other forms of resistance and help propagate
the false history that Gandhi and his disciples were the lone masthead
and rudder of Indian resistance. Ignored are important militant leaders
such as Chandrasekhar Azad, who fought in armed struggle against the British colonizers, and
revolutionaries such as Bhagat Singh, who won mass support for bombings
and assassinations as part of a struggle to accomplish the “overthrow of
both foreign and Indian capitalism.”

The pacifist history of India’s struggle cannot make any sense of the
fact that Subhas Chandra Bose, the militant candidate, was twice elected
president of the Indian National Congress, in 1938 and 1939. History remembers Gandhi above all others not because he
represented the unanimous voice of India, but because of all the
attention he was given by the British press and the prominence he
received from being included in important negotiations with the British
colonial government. 

and

The common projection is that the movement
against racial oppression in the United States was primarily nonviolent.
On the contrary, though pacifist groups such as Martin Luther King
Jr.‘s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had considerable
power and influence, popular support within the movement, especially
among poor black people, increasingly gravitated toward militant
revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party.

Pacifist, middle-class black activists, including King, got much of
their power from the specter of black resistance and the presence of
armed black revolutionaries.

In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Birmingham campaign was
looking like it would be a repeat of the dismally failed action in
Albany, Georgia

Then, on May 7 in Birmingham, after continued police violence, three
thousand black people began fighting back, pelting the police with rocks
and bottles. Just two days later, Birmingham — up until then an
inflexible bastion of segregation — agreed to desegregate downtown
stores, and President Kennedy backed the agreement with federal
guarantees. The next day, after local white supremacists bombed a black
home and a black business, thousands of black people rioted again,
seizing a 9 block area, destroying police cars, injuring several cops
(including the chief inspector), and burning white businesses. A month
and a day later, President Kennedy was calling for Congress to pass the
Civil Rights Act, ending several years of a strategy to stall the civil
rights movement.
Perhaps the largest of the limited, if not hollow, victories of the
civil rights movement came when black people demonstrated they would not
remain peaceful forever. Faced with the two alternatives, the white
power structure chose to negotiate with the pacifists, and we have seen
the results.

And while we’re at it:

Privileged white people were instrumental in appointing activists such
as Gandhi and King to positions of leadership on a national scale. Among
white activists and, not coincidentally, the white-supremacist ruling
class, the civil rights-era March on Washington is associated first and
foremost with Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I Have a Dream” speech. Mostly
absent from the white consciousness, but at least as influential to
black people, was Malcolm X’s perspective, as articulated in his speech criticizing the march’s leadership:

“It was the grassroots out there in the street. It scared the white man
to death, scared the white power structure in Washington, DC, to death; I
was there. When they found out this black steamroller was going to come
down on the capital, they called in…these national Negro leaders that
you respect and told them, “Call it off.” Kennedy said, “Look, you all
are letting this thing go too far.” And Old Tom said, “Boss, I can’t
stop it because I didn’t start it.” I’m telling you what they said. They
said, “I’m not even in it, much less at the head of it.” They said,
“These Negroes are doing things on their own. They’re running ahead of
us.” And that old shrewd fox, he said, “If you all aren’t in it, I’ll
put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it. I’ll endorse it. I’ll
welcome it….

This is what they did at the march on Washington. They joined
it…became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost
its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to
be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a
picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all….

No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover….They controlled it so tight,
they told those Negroes what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs
to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what
speech they couldn’t make, and then told them to get out of town by
sundown.”

The end result of the march was to invest significant movement
resources, at a critical time, in an ultimately pacifying event. Demonstrators received premade protest signs with government-approved
slogans; the speeches of several protest leaders, including SNCC
chairman John Lewis, were censored to take out threats of armed struggle
and criticisms of the government’s civil rights bill; and, just as
Malcolm X described, at the end, the whole crowd was told to leave as
soon as possible.

And finally:

Even Gandhi and King agreed it was necessary to support armed liberation
movements where there was no nonviolent alternative,
prioritizing goals over particular tactics. But the mostly white
pacifists of today erase this part of the history and re-create
nonviolence to fit their comfort level.

King’s more disturbing (to white people) criticism of racism is avoided and his clichéd prescriptions for feel-good, nonviolent activism are
repeated ad nauseum, allowing white pacifists to cash in on an
authoritative cultural resource to confirm their nonviolent activism.

Further reading: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state