I understand that instinct, but it was to critique and push against that thinking, crucially in love and solidarity with those who pursue it and with looters the world over, that I began this project. Many of them do so out of care for the struggle, worried about unfair media representation and hoping to advance the politically and ethically advantageous position. Even while a riot is going on, people in the streets often work to block looting. No one wants to be associated with the idea of riot, and this is doubly true for looting. They claim that those doing the looting are “not part of the movement,” that they are “apolitical” and ignorant, that their actions reflect “false consciousness,” or even that they are acting as con-sumers and therefore furthering capitalism.įrom within the movement, people tend to claim that what hap-pened wasn’t rioting but an uprising or a rebellion. They claim that these more extreme actions are mainly the work of outside agitators, “opportunists,” or out-of-step middle- class radicals. In the face of rioting and looting, even sympathetic self-identifying radicals sometimes balk.
#Riot civil unrest giveaway professional#
Conservatives, of course, oppose it utterly, rooting for the police to put down protesters, with the Far Right claiming riots are just professional troublemaking fomented by George Soros, Jews, and the “global elite.” Liberals oppose rioting, too: because their love for law and order is much greater than their belief in freedom, they claim that rioters are “hurting their own cause” or are led by police provocateurs-agreeing with the fascists that rioters are paid troublemakers, just disagreeing about who signs the checks. At home, the threat of un-employment, homelessness, starvation, and destitution, along with debt, taxes, fines, and fees of all kinds, are so naturalized as to rarely even be recognized as a form of political domination at all.īut rioting and looting have few defenders.
Economic coercion on the international stage, through sanctions, trade agreements, and development loans, is a matter of course. Liberals may oppose the death penalty, but they, like conservatives, believe in the efficacy of murder: they had little to say about Obama’s extrajudicial drone executions, his death lists and Terror Tuesdays, and Democrats mostly critiqued Trump’s 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani on procedural grounds: “He didn’t consult Congress!” Torture is celebrated a thousand times a day on television in police proce-durals and action flicks, and most people accept imprisonment-years of unrelenting psychic torture-as a necessary fact of social life. Both liberals and conservatives believe in war, considering it a necessary evil or a fundamental good. More extreme political actions also have widespread support. Liberals and conservatives alike grudg-ingly support demonstrations, at least when they’re nonviolent and their people are doing it. Community organizing is at least theoretically the founding principle for thousands of nonprofits across the country. Labor action, despite four decades of propaganda and federal action against it, still has strong support in many quarters. Voting and electioneering are widely respected as the baseline of political action petitioning and lobbying elected representatives are not far behind. Of the many forms of political action in twenty-first- century America, it’s hard to think of any less popular than rioting and looting.
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