zuky:

ssitara:

zuky:

blackamazon:

mybutbeautiful:

As political and social protests grip the Middle East, are growing in Europe and a riot exploded in north London this weekend, here’s a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent? “Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

The TV reporter from Britain’s ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. “Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

Straight up kung fu move… Pow.. Pow..! take that media person/s.

It’s getting louder and louder and more desperate

Anyone who’s been involved in organizing social justice protests over the past three decades knows that the only thing which gets mass media attention is violence. The most successful protest I’ve been involved with was the “Battle in Seattle” in 1999 which incapacitated the World Trade Organization in a massive cloud of tear gas, broken windows, blocked intersections, and thousands of arrests. However, it’s also important to note that mass media attention is not the only objective of protest. Protests are also good for their participants simply by virtue of creating space for connecting and empowering with combined energy, networking, skill sharing, direct physical outreach without media intervention, sending escalating threats to targeted parties, and more. But if the top priority for a given event is mass media attention, then there’s only one way to do it, and that is violence.

Hmm, out of curiosity, are you counting the property destruction in Seattle in 1999 (on the part of protesters) as violence, or other things? I wasn’t there, but all accounts I’ve heard talk about the violence on the part of the state/police… I know there are arguments about whether property destruction counts as violence or not and I don’t really want to start up an argument, I’m just curious to know if that’s the violence you’re referring to. :-)

It’s a good question, I should clarify. I personally don’t consider symbolic corporate property destruction to be violence in the sense of, say, the direct physically-injurious human violence regularly carried out by police, or the steady grinding violence of imperialism. In the context of mass media attention, I just mean the “violence” of “gripping imagery” and stories circulated in media; in the case of the original post, fires and “rioting”; or in the case of Seattle, well-coordinated direct action blocking intersections resulting in tear gas battles, broken windows, bloodied faces, arrest scuffles, that kind of thing. 

I should add that in my opinion one of the best actions of the Seattle protests were the human chains blocking strategic intersections using mass-distributed heavy cardboard tubes in which people interlocked their wrists. This is actually a totally non-violent act of civil disobedience, but it’s understood when thousands of people are undertaking such an action on all access routes surrounding a high-power international political-economic gathering, riot police will respond. Also, for the first time in Seattle, protesters were able to use cell phones to move human blockades to different intersections as they observed police setting up new routes to the meeting. In the social media age, there are far more sophisticated possibilities.

(Source: crowdsourced)