Do you know of the history of riots in the USA? What's hampering them and why they are not happening now? The more I try to understand the what and the why, the more confused I am. They are attacking civil rights from all sides, yet people only think of peaceful demonstrations. - ThreadSky

embers7.bsky.social • 4 days ago

Do you know of the history of riots in the USA?

What's hampering them and why they are not happening now? The more I try to understand the what and the why, the more confused I am.
They are attacking civil rights from all sides, yet people only think of peaceful demonstrations.

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patmillerny.bsky.social•4 days ago

That's because, for the first time, we have a president who wouldn't hesitate to order troops to shoot them.

comtn1123.bsky.social•4 days ago

This.
Because Trump wants riots. He wants martial law.

Don't give him what he wants.

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

He doesn't need martial law now that they are giving it everything he wants, because they fear he can enforce martial law.
So people are accepting a fascist regime to avoid martial law?
A fascist regime is a perpetual martial law, fyi.
Come on, start thinking twice before succumbing to fascism.

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

I know of what I'm talking about. I was born in the last years of a 4-decades of a fascist regime.
Believe me, it's worth fighting to destroy fascism.

auska.esq•3 days ago

That’s actually when you definitely SHOULD be out on the street

(Also, that’s entirely baseless, lacks understanding of actual crowd strength, and the reluctance of militaries to act on their own people.)

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

In the history of riots, there has been many shootings from the police and troops against workers demonstrations, black people riots.
A rebellion is overdue, not only because the fascists are in power, but because supremacists, sexist, inequality-mongers have been in power for decades now.

sirelghinn.bsky.social•4 days ago

One of the reasons, I feel, is we don’t have a figurehead that is rallying the people. Sure we have a few small instances, but it’s very fragmented.

And I’m seeing a lot of discourse online causing infighting among groups. Bots helping admin to keep us fragmented, and Fox News to keep us dumb.

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

Don't underestimate what people can do by themselves if they have the will to do it.

sirelghinn.bsky.social•4 days ago

I do agree, we saw it back in Trump’s first term. But the will seems to be missing.

poisedmeerkat.bsky.social•4 days ago

Ever since the government went hard after the black panther party, it’s been challenging to aggressively protest. The CIA can dismantle the black panthers but not the KKK. It’s wild…

3k0bolds.bsky.social•4 days ago

American citizens don't want to get shot by our militarized police force.

bobottc.bsky.social•4 days ago

An effective suppression of the 2020 riots and lack of support from politicians helped convince a lot of people to stay home. I can't really blame them!

chrisneo.bsky.social•4 days ago

I think most who are younger than gen x are apathetic and afraid. They say no violence, no wars. Like any of us want that. But they refuse to do peaceful protests too. You have to do something, any little bit helps. So many intentionally uninformed and uneducated, which makes it all worse

forestjeffrey.bsky.social•4 days ago

It’s a bit of a powder keg right now waiting for a particular incident to ignite. Just wait for a protester killed during an arrest or a Bloody Sunday.

The images of ICE arresting students, or that cop who ran over a kid on his bike… the anger is growing steadily.

I think the guillotines come.

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

I hope so.

forestjeffrey.bsky.social•4 days ago

All that said, it feels like a trap. We know he wants martial law and they’re waiting for an excuse.

Still, if we surround these facilities with millions of people…

holmskjell.bsky.social•4 days ago

I've seen some military experts say the US is too large & populous to do martial law without HUGE numbers of (still-loyal) troops - if he invokes it, it will be on the assumption that people will just roll over with little use of force.

forestjeffrey.bsky.social•4 days ago

It would be messy. We might split into two.

holmskjell.bsky.social•3 days ago

Or more... But honestly, and this is a totally unqualified opinion, but: sitting tight & NOT taking to the streets resolves nothing.
The best chance of a peaceful resolution *is* massive demonstrations while there's still something of the system to salvage.

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

If people do not mobilize, breaking the rigged rules of the game, because of fear of martial law, they are gonna live through martial law for years to come.

forestjeffrey.bsky.social•4 days ago

I like the advice of Cory Booker, and the late John Lewis, of getting into “good trouble”. Unjust laws and an unjust government must be disobeyed.

There are nonviolent ways of doing this, but it does need massive numbers of people. Tomorrow might be our first test.

flpublicaffairs.bsky.social•3 days ago

Apparently sending an innocent father to a foreign torture prison isn’t enough.

forestjeffrey.bsky.social•3 days ago

School children are massacred here almost on a daily basis. To say that America is numb is an understatement.

auska.esq•3 days ago

1. Rugged individualism propaganda teaching generations of Americans out of collective action

2. Systemic, intentional eradication of collective power (political and labor) and examples thereof

3. Isolation of marginalized groups from one another

4. Gun propaganda entertainment

auska.esq•3 days ago

So you basically have an entire nation full of people who think guns are involved in any sort of problem solving and that it’s always single anointed heroes doing stuff.

There’s no concept or example of the power of crowds, the wrong-headed idea that protest=army, and fear of guns on the other side

auska.esq•3 days ago

This is evidenced by the lack of even those peaceful protests which pretty much everywhere else you look are 10x bigger (see Serbia or Turkiye for recent examples, and it’s certainly not like either regime would — or does — abstain from using force).

asamani.bsky.social•4 days ago

Because average American is chickenshit. Any other country, people would be in streets until they remove this cunt from power.

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

I think something has been broken, energy, anger, wrath, the desire of justice at any cost, the community spirit fighting for their community members, the honest courage, the need to stand up to power no matter what.

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

All seems gone, and people look like sleepwalkers, not taking risks, not feeling commitment like a fire inside burning the soul until the screams of rage become unstoppable.

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

Btw, on another note, for those willing to appease the fascists showing how peaceful they are, they should know that if the govt wanted to have an excuse to exert police violence, they would burst peaceful demonstrations with infiltrated cops.
With fascists, nobody is safe.

almahawes.bsky.social•4 days ago

Sarah Kendzior writes brilliantly about this phenomenon in an essay in The View from Flyover Country.

almahawes.bsky.social•4 days ago

She recounts all the previously unthinkable things that have been normalised.

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

Thanks for the recommendation. I still have to read Hiding in Plain Sight.

cynthia-vt.bsky.social•3 days ago

People who practice organized, non-violent resistance, as shown across thousands of years of global history, know this.

flpublicaffairs.bsky.social•3 days ago

Most Americans (even the highly educated ones) have no idea how government works or what it took to afford them the lifestyle they now take for granted. They’re not connecting the dots on what’s been lost, since they don’t even know how they got it in the first place.

readbooks-1.bsky.social•4 days ago

I would like to think civilized societies resolve conflicts in a civilized manner

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

Everyone of us has delusions to get by. But when things go real, you have to decide between what we like it to be and what reality throws at us.

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

Tell me what's civilized in a society that allows cops to practice their supremacism killing black people randomly, ICE sending innocent Nicaraguans to concentration camps, where people don't get the meds they need for the sake of hyperwealthy bastards, and trans and homeless people get degraded.

badseedrock.bsky.social•4 days ago

It’s spring. Hundreds of thousands have lost or will lose their jobs. Millions are losing retirement. Storms destroying the south w/o fema. Farms going bankrupt. It’s going to get ugly fast & soon & martial law won’t do shit to stop it

embers7.bsky.social•4 days ago

I hope so.

sarahksojourner.bsky.social•3 days ago

Our false memory of protests is that successful ones have been peaceful and legal. I was too young to remember that the successful ones *also* involved people breaking the law by sitting at segregated counters, marching where it was illegal to March, and sitting in the wrong part of the bus.

embers7.bsky.social•3 days ago

Remember the White Nights Riots in San Francisco. It triggered a huge change that rippled across the world.
Sometimes even a violent approach is justified when any other route is cut.

sarahksojourner.bsky.social•3 days ago

Okay - got it. I knew about the precipitating event and the Twinkie defense but not the riots. Interesting what I have missed in terms of my own history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Night_riots

sarahksojourner.bsky.social•3 days ago

Ha ha ha - no. Now I need to google. You are not USAian and you are no older that me and now you are sending me to learn my own d@mn history. I’ll be back in a sec

embers7.bsky.social•3 days ago

I'm a historian, but I have huge gaps too, it's the never-ending process of learning, and I have to google often. It's how we learn and rethink what we learn. Wikipedia, google are the equivalent of going to the public library when I was at the university.

sarahksojourner.bsky.social•3 days ago

We remember the *peaceful* part but forget the *cilil disobedience/illegal* part.

embers7.bsky.social•3 days ago

Exactly, a naive understanding of how cunning he was, and the breaking of the rules was fundamental in his non-violent approach. People struggled a lot but they understood it was civil disobedience what would defang and topple the British rule.
Any promulgated law by the govt was responded in kind.

sarahksojourner.bsky.social•3 days ago

Naive and also not accidental. The “memory” has been curated such that oligarchs can call on the memory of MLKjr to criticize modern day protesters for doing it wrong. I also wonder if MLK’s success was in part because Malcolm X existed as another option for those opposed to the status quo.

embers7.bsky.social•3 days ago

I'm always been more of Malcolm X, but both were important. MLK was really not a soft man either, he was determined, although maybe his speeches sounded more "moderate".

embers7.bsky.social•3 days ago

It's how he has been told to people, how they have manipulated the idea of MLK as a very soft peaceful person to keep people from fighting for their rights until the end.

sarahksojourner.bsky.social•3 days ago

And how both MLKjr and Fred Hampton were killed when they started unifying groups that had historically not had common ground.

flpublicaffairs.bsky.social•3 days ago

For all the talk of dying for the country, no one wants to be first. Or miss brunch if they are otherwise inconvenienced.

The monsters who mapped out this coup already knew the complacency would give them a cakewalk.

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