I’ve been watching the discourse about the protests in France, and I’m seeing all the typical propaganda about violence and property damage.
This is one of those cases where people really don’t understand their own beliefs, because if violence was really their problem, then they would be just as outraged about police brutality, war and even the less obvious ways that society hurts and kills many people. I think what they are actually mad about is the fact that the violence they approve of, the violence they think makes society work, is being challenged. And it’s being challenged in a way that they think threatens the natural order of things.
Riots and Revolutions
There’s a whole other conversation to be had about agent provocateurs and how the police instigate violence so they have a pretense to crack down on the protests. But most people aren’t really thinking about it that deeply. They just see the news and they don’t really fill in the rest of the pieces. They see protests turning into a riot, and they’re afraid that a riot might turn into a revolution, and they’re afraid of how that might change their lives.
To some extent that makes sense, because a riot is really like the threat of a revolution. It is a show of force that says we have the power in our numbers to reset this entire system. It’s kind of like a way of bargaining with the establishment.
Still, I don’t personally think this is a situation that will turn into a revolution. I think this is going to be very similar to the kind of movements we’ve seen in the past. I remember the time of the Egyptian revolution and the Arab Spring, and many of us at the time thought this was going to sweep across the world and become a global revolution that was really going to change things.
There were also protests in Europe, especially in Greece, in response to the financial crisis and how it was handled, and we had Occupy Wall Street in the US. So I was optimistic about a revolution then, but then everything was co-opted and just fizzled out, and people didn’t have any kind of plan for what comes next.
This is one of the reasons I think that we’re not capable of a revolution at this point, especially here in the US. The people who are most organized, and I feel most prepared and most armed for a revolution, are not people I would want anywhere near power. It’s the crazy right-wingers.
