• AnchoriteMagus@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    Good. I’m willing to bet jackbooted thugs are less likely to shoot someone when there’s a visibly armed protestor nearby.

  • luciferofastora@feddit.org
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    11 days ago

    Remember: Peaceful protests are like barking - annoying, but by itself harmless. It’s the fear of the bite that makes the barking scary.

    You don’t have to jump straight to violence, and I believe that it’s more effective to start with non-violent demands. Once you escalate, there’s nowhere left to go. But the threat of it is what makes the peaceful option less destructive.

    As the saying goes: Nothing will meaningfully change until the rich fear for their lives.

    • SippyCup@lemmy.ml
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      11 days ago

      The only way to tell if your protests are working is if the state is restoring to violence to stop you from continuing to demonstrate.

      The only way protests are ultimately effective is for the beleaguered group to be easier to negotiate with then it is to further supress them with violence.

      The powerful give no ground willingly. It must be taken from them.

    • EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 days ago

      Unions are the peaceful alternative for negotiations that workers and their bosses agreed upon instead of dragging them out of the factory into the street and beating them to death.

      More people need to remember this history.

      Even MLK credited the success of his work during the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Panthers being willing to do what he could not, and the Million Man March on Washington - seen today as an example of successful peaceful protest - was a threat to every white American in a seat of power. If he could mobilize a million people to shut down the capital of the federal government peacefully, imagine what else they could do.

      • teslekova@sh.itjust.works
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        10 days ago

        This is the key point that many do not get. There must be the threat of violence AND the non-violent union/organised resistance option to defeat authoritarian governments. One or the other on its own will not work.

        • EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          10 days ago

          Unfortunately for the US, the rich have spent the decades since the Civil Rights Movement convincing the general populace that their rights were won by holding a snarky sign on a street corner and not by burning down entire city districts after the murder of MLK by the government (which his family proved in court, by the way. Unfortunately, no criminal court would hear the case so it was only in a civil court, but the judge was convinced well enough to find the government guilty).

          Years of protesting and nothing solid was accomplished. Within a week of billions of dollars in damage to property and big business, the Civil Rights laws were drafted, voted on, and signed into law.

  • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    This is so surreal.

    It’s like opening up your browser to be reading about The Weather Underground or the SDS or something…but then again, about 20 years ago, I don’t think I was thinking we’d have a Nazi sympathizer in the fucking White House, either, so I also thought Nazis were largely a part of history that would stay in the past.

    • 3abas@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Operation Paperclip. You’ve had multiple Nazis in the white house, the last one repeatedly lied about seeing 40 beheaded children to justify funding and shielding a genocide.

      Trump is just the first fascist Nazi. But America has been totally fine synopsizing with Nazis.

    • Know_not_Scotty_does@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Weather Underground is just a distributed/crowd sourced weather app now full of individual weather stations. I love it both in function and name.

    • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml
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      11 days ago

      SDS

      Funny you say that, there’s also a be SDS org that has been around since the US invasion of Iraq, but got a lot of press recently during the campus protests over Gaza

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        It’s really wild how all these things are coming back around again.

        It’s especially wild because it seems lately the mediascape has been practically saturated with stuff (most of it seemingly from very misinformed/uninformed people that are much younger than the boomers) that tries to paint “boomers” as one big monolith.

        In some moments, I actually start to nearly buy into this nonsensical rhetoric.

        And then I remember this is the generation where things like the Panthers, the Weather Underground, the SDS, and so much else was going on as well. The people kind of mindlessly spewing stuff about boomers would probably do well to zip their lip for a bit and actually learn something about that generation.

        • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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          11 days ago

          The animosity between generations is a lot like the animosity between races or most other us-vs-them bullshit in that it’s manufactured to keep potential allies fighting against each other.

          This is ultimately a class war - everything else is a distraction.

  • gerowen@piefed.social
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    11 days ago

    How much you wanna bet certain conservative people start talking about gun control, or imposing restrictions on being armed at protests or something?

  • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca
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    11 days ago

    good for them

    when somebody on the right says “this is just asking for trouble”, tell them that Kyle Rittenhouse went there to defend businesses (not even people) and they approved of his actions, and so they can shut the fuck up

      • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca
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        11 days ago

        in practice, yes this is what I actually say. fuck 'em, there’s no discussion to be had with them anyways. but the full form mention of Rittenhouse is clear cut and indefensible by their own logic (but yes we all know that their own logic is not actually logic yaddayaddayadda)

  • not_that_guy05@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    I understand black Panthers or for blacks folks. But it’s it also open to other folks like Hispanics?

    There’s a lot of vets that are Hispanic that could and would help, but again I understand if this is only a black folks only thing.

    • AnchoriteMagus@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      Hispanic protestors used to have the Young Lords and the Brown Berets, who the Panthers have partnered with in the past.

      Both, as far as I know, are no longer active, but I’m sure there would be support for reviving them today.

      • TwiddleTwaddle@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        11 days ago

        There was also the White Panther Party back in the 60s-70’s formed mostly of white college kids following the Panther model. Essentially a more explicitly revolutionary alternative to SNCC, which was itself highly influential in the anti-war movement at the time.

        These days there are several Panther groups doing smaller scale community self defence and mutual aid across the country, many of them led by second and third generation Black Panthers.

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Wasn’t MC5 part of the White Panthers?

      When people talk about “the boomers” as one big monolith, I have to chuckle because they are clearly overlooking things like this…

    • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml
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      11 days ago

      Historically, there were a few contemporaneous Panthers equivalents for other minority groups. The Hispanic one was The Young Lords

  • duncan_bayne@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    Historically, angry Marxist-Leninists with guns have been very useful allies in dealing with NAZIs! But history suggests that things didn’t work out too well afterwards, for those ruled by the angry Marxist-Leninists with guns …