Posted on 04/29/2015 5:47:30 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Sophisticated thinkers want you understand that the mayhem unfolding in Baltimore is not a riot. It is an uprising, an intifada, a revolution, whichever hashtag works best for you.
Many quoted John F. Kennedy saying, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Variations of Martin Luther King’s “A riot is the language of the unheard” were also repeated frequently.
Salon published an article — “cross-posted with permission from the blog ‘Radical Faggot'” — defending the smashing of police cars as a legitimate political strategy. “I do not advocate non-violence — particularly in a moment like the one we currently face,” wrote Benji Hart, latter adding “Non-violence is a type of political performance designed to raise awareness and win over sympathy of those with privilege.”
Slate magazine tweeted out a story complaining that “CNN’s coverage of the Baltimore riots was shallow and sensationalistic,” capped with a “Baltimore uprising” hashtag.
The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates complains the “people now calling for nonviolence are not prepared to answer” questions about 25-year-old Freddie Gray’s unexplained death at the hands of the police. “Many of them are charged with enforcing the very policies that led to Gray’s death, and yet they can offer no rational justification for Gray’s death and so they appeal for calm,” Coates writes, in comments Vox described as “The most important thing everyone calling for nonviolence in Baltimore fails to say.”
Coates’ essay was titled, “Nonviolence as compliance.”
This type of commentary is nothing new. As Ferguson smoldered, Time published “In Defense of Rioting.” Author Darlena Cunha wrote, “Riots are a necessary part of the evolution of society.” Cunha went on to point out that the tea party was named after a riot in Boston.
But the American Revolution didn’t culminate in the colonists burning down Lexington and Concord. If anything, Baltimore resembles the ugliest phases of the French revolution. “The revolution is here!” Reuters quotes a demonstrator shouting at police officers. “I’m going to kill you! All of you — guilty!”
Parts of Baltimore have never recovered from the 1968 riots. Some of the businesses serving black residents of Baltimore that were ransacked and ruined in the latest upheaval will never reopen. Some of these buildings will likely remain boarded up for years.
Freddie Gray’s killing may well have been unjust and part of a broader pattern of law enforcement lawlessness in communities of color, just as Martin Luther King’s murder was surely unjust and part of Jim Crow’s last gasps. But the riots that followed the latter did nothing to improve those communities or lift their residents out of poverty. There is no reason to think the fire this time will be any different.
Instead, the riots accelerated the trends collapsing Baltimore’s tax base and perpetuated the cycle of violence. Gray’s neighborhood has a 52 percent unemployment rate among those aged 16 to 64, which cannot be solved by trashing a shoe store or burning down a CVS. The people romanticizing the violence in Baltimore are complicit in the city’s decline.
Revolutions are judged by their results, not their intentions.
“When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse,” writes Coates.
Are reporters covering what’s going on in the streets of Baltimore the aggressor? Is a store owner who is pulled from his business and stomped on the sidewalk the aggressor? Is a woman in a wheelchair who suddenly finds herself in the path of projectiles the aggressor? Are immigrant grocers the aggressor?
You don’t need much institutional power to smash someone’s head with a liquor bottle. And the power structure should be at least somewhat affected by the fact Baltimore’s mayor, police commissioner and a majority of the city council are black, just like the president of the United States and the U.S. attorney general.
Liberals have run Baltimore since the 1960s. The city hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Nancy Pelosi’s brother replaced Theodore McKeldin in 1967. How many of Baltimore’s problems can be solved by giving these same liberals more money and power?
Americans need to know the truth about what happened to Freddie Gray. Why was he arrested and what led to his death in police custody? But there is nothing revolutionary about yet even more self-defeating violence in a city with the country’s fifth-highest murder rate.
The issue isn’t the issue, the issue is the revolution.
S. Alinsky
” But there is nothing revolutionary about yet even more self-defeating violence in a city with the country’s fifth-highest murder rate.”
They want to be number 4.
Libtards are exposing themselves to all as the irredeemable scum we know them to be. They wanted to rumble. Time to shuffle them off to the Utopias they love. Send them all to Cuba o r Venezuela.
If you listen to the idiots on the street they clearly aren’t going to be happy with anything short of total “protected anarchy”. They want police to look the other way on anything they do and strictly enforce a whole range of liberal laws on the rest of us.
Yeah, it’s an uprising against CVS and a bunch of hair-supply stores and beauty shops.
Agreed... you can hear it in their chant: “No Pharmitization without Representation!”
Exactly. The rioters are manipulated into thinking that what they are doing is revolutionary, when in fact they are a means to those few who will step in and take over as slave owners.
Hothouse-cultured academics with big mouths love to style themselves professional revolutionaries. They are, in fact, would-be revolutionary celebrities. The real pros are anonymous and for good reason, because when it really does go down the visible catch the payback.
It’s all about Free S—t.
Unless the ‘revolution’ is definded as ‘Stealing Other People’s Stuff’ this ain’t no revolution.
It’s not revolutionary when it’s counter cultural, anti-civalisation, counter productive, anarchy.
Nazi socialism in the 1930s and during WWII.
This time it’s under a different name.
Not revolutionary, devolutionary.
Let’s get back to basics.
I call them criminals.
They should be shot.
It would only take one.
The rest would run off howling like...
Like what?
Hyenas? Or what?
Like M... Manatees?
Lol no no no, not Manatees
Like Aardvardks? Lol
No no no, not Aardvarks
Like Opossums? No, not Opossums
Like weasels? No not weasels
I cannot for the life of me think
Of the animal noises they would make.
Probably some kind of screeching
Howling and hooting. Throwing feces, etc.
Placed in the transport police vehicle, without a seat belt...sometime during the drive, Gray was making commotion in the back, and the annoyed driver administrated a measure of street justice,by forcefully applying the vehicle brakes, causing the unbuckle Gray fly forward and crash into the steel bulkhead that separates the rear prisoner compartment from the driver.
The baltimore riots are just another ho-hum since the L.A. Watts riots.
Same darn thing, same darn inactions, same darn tired old as the dead horse they whip again arguments, and the same darn dead whipped horse solutions.
Ain’t it funny that this nation never had a Nobel Prize for peace, given to a sitting President, until this one?
Ain’t it funny that with the elections of this present president, that the nation was to transcend all of the previous racial strife, and bring forward a new kumbaya moment of peace and love of all the races in the nation?
When this sort of thing happened in Jena, LA, I was sorta kinda waiting to see if the purported stories about folks bringing machine guns there were true, and if so, how quick would it have either escalated or dowsed the fire.
Half of Stamford, CT., my listing of domicile of years gone back, was burned down in the riots of the ‘60’s, to include all the hometown military veteran monuments dating back to the Revolutionary War.
People that destroy other folks homes and livelihoods do not deserve jail time, nor court. I believe a certain photogenic South Vietnamese general set the standard for that.
Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for mediating a treaty to end the Russo-Japanese War. He served as president from 1901 to 1909.
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