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?
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.
https://youtu.be/yzNxLzFfR5w
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.