Sunday, May 31, 2020

Got Paranoia? Street Fighting Edition




One thing that's not being said sufficiently on the subject of the ongoing protests over the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd: nonviolence isn't easy. It's a discipline, and it takes serious training such as used to be offered in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. It's also been a policy from the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, but commentators don't always seem to have gotten that, for some reason suggested by Touré in 2017:

If BLM being described as nonviolent sounds strange to you, then you’re probably watching too much Fox News. The movement has been wildly misunderstood partly because of how it’s caricatured and demonized by right-wing media. “We absolutely don’t consider Black Lives Matter a hate group,” says Heidi Beirich, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence project, which tracks hate groups. “Black Lives Matter is not a racist group; anyone can join. It’s a movement to expand civil rights for the oppressed in this society. It’s a peaceful protest against oppression. There’s simply no equivalence between Black Lives Matter and a hate group. It’s truly offensive to equate them.”

The policy of nonviolence is shared by BLM activists around the country. “I refuse to cede the moral high ground to the supremacy we fight,” says Brittany Packnett, an activist and co-founder of Campaign Zero, which aims to end police violence. “We don’t need to become that which we are fighting.”

Also, BLM isn't necessarily organizing this week's demonstrations, and even when it is, as in Los Angeles on Thursday, it isn't necessarily in control of the enormous crowds of untrained sympathizers. Including, I'm sorry to say, an awful lot of white kids with good-hearted intentions who don't know what they're doing or how to do it and who consistently seem to be getting overexcited and breaking and burning things, and giving evidence to a rightwing suspicion that "Antifa" is in charge (they can't imagine any of the black participants being in charge) or dark allegations, reminiscent of Ross Barnet or George Wallace, of "outside agitators".


And it would be better if they were to accept a little discipline:


As Dr. King told the American Psychological Association in 1967, looting in particular needs to be understood

Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking. But most of all, alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, he is shocking it by abusing property rights. There are thus elements of emotional catharsis in the violent act. This may explain why most cities in which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal and in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity.

A profound judgment of today’s riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, ‘If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.’

But as a revolutionary tactic, as he put it in his 1967 The Trumpet of Conscience, rioting is bound to fail:
The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.
And when it's white kids doing the rioting in defiance of black organizers, in the belief they're making revolution, they aren't; they're merely, infuriatingly, making the story about themselves (see Gromet's comment below).

Meanwhile, the police provocation, including against white people, is pretty extreme:




The other, scarier question is whether there's a different kind of provocation going on, as Mia Bloom writes at JustSecurity:

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz echoed this sentiment in a press conference on Saturday alleging that the demonstrations that caused so much damage included provocateurs, likely from outside the area. State officials said around 80 percent of those arrested in the Twin Cities on Friday were from outside Minnesota. Former FBI agent and CNN commentator, Josh Campbell wrote, that Minnesota “authorities have been monitoring alleged criminals online, including postings by suspected white supremacists trying to incite violence.”

Before the rioting started in Washington DC, Brooklyn, Denver, Atlanta, and other cities, allegations emerged that undercover police officers might be to blame for some of the worst commercial destruction in Minneapolis. Experts on political violence (and not just Qanon conspiracy theorists) shared stories on social media that the May 27 looting and arson at AutoZone by an unidentified man in a gas mask carrying an open umbrella (dubbed #umbrellaman) was not necessarily a protester but could be an agent provocateur or member of the police. In video posted to YouTube, while this man smashed windows with a hammer, protesters at the scene accused him of being an outsider and began to film him.



Possibly identified as a St. Paul cop, Jacob Pedersen, though the St. Paul police have strongly denied that.


Then there was the unexpected attack on CNN headquarters in Atlanta, home of Trump's "enemy of the people"; what was that about?


There is some talk going around of rightwing "accelerationists" working to bring on a race war. And even, in the age of Trump and Bannon and Miller, the possibility of provocateurs under foreign direction, as when Minnesota Gov. Walz reported on his consultation with the Pentagon:
This is the second conversation in 24 hours with defense secretary Esper and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Milley. I was joined on that call by our leadership team, general Jensen, being the lead with military affairs. We’re looking at what are the resources they have or is there a signal intelligence that we can get from them? Are there things that they can provide us.... They also were able to provide their intelligence support of what they’re seeing, what their signal intercepting they have, obviously from NSA and others, massive support, to be able to see who these operators are.
Really? NSA? Signal intelligence from what country, I wonder? I'd think it was nonsense, if not for the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian active measures showing the Internet Research Agency apparently working to start street fights in 2016: 
After the election, IRA operatives orchestrated disparate political rallies in the United States both supporting president-elect Trump, and protesting the results of the election. A mid-November 2016 rally in New York was organized around the theme, "show your support for President-Elect Donald Trump," while a separate rally titled, "Trump is NOT my President," was also held in New York, in roughly the same timeframe.
And it seems truly paranoid to imagine that such pranks could seriously accomplish anything, but the IRA also wanted Trump elected to the presidency, and he was, last time. Just saying.

Update:

Some reporting from Minnesota Public Radio on Three Percenters (I"m a totebagger for Peter Sagal):

On his way home from a protest Friday night in Minneapolis, Jonathan Turner Bargen encountered a white man in a red pickup truck. The man was carrying an assault rifle and a handgun, Turner Bargen said. Then he noticed a symbol from the far-right militia group Three Percenters affixed to the truck.

“I circled back and took pictures of the vehicle. I was concerned about why they were present at the downtown protest, and had no idea who to notify,” said Turner Bargen in an email to MPR News. 

He added that he was afraid to confront the person, and afraid to call the police. 

State officials, protesters and residents say they’re alarmed by the presence of extremists who may be using Twin Cities protests against the police killing of George Floyd as cover to burn down buildings and face off with law enforcement. Hundreds of buildings have been damaged and many totally burned in recent days.



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