Hi. This Leo Volont.
This is Part Four
of my Seven Part Series
Democracy a
Bad Thing This is chapter “The Right to Riot”
(18)Oh,
speaking of all those Eternal Inalienable Rights that had been minted new at
the time, well, we hear a lot today in regards to "The Right of Peaceful
Protest". Huh!? Well that is new... VERY new! There are no precedents for
that in either American or World History.
It had been universally understood that when people collected together
nursing grievances and vocalizing complaints that it would inevitably result in
violent riots. We're not blind! We all know it typically plays out like that,
right? What we understand as the
"Constitutional Right" to 'Peaceful' Protest is actually a hodge-podge of the triple rights of Freedom
of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, and Freedom of Association. But one can Speak, Assemble and Associate in
hired halls. There is no explicit
Constitutional Right for taking it to the Street. For over 200 years no Court has ever
questioned ordinary everyday Disturbing the Peace ordinances, or Loitering
ordinances for that matter. Also, any cultural political moves to justify
or euphemize rioting came well over 50 years after the Constitution was
written. We have Henry David Thoreau who
started with Civil Disobedience, but note, he said nothing about Disobedience
being non-violent and with John Brown's Abolitionist Raid on Harper's Ferry,
well, Thoreau had advocated for what would have been one of the worse Genocides
in Human History, if only it had succeeded as planned, with the Blacks
murdering every White in the South, all while Thoreau would safely ensconce
himself in a Boston bunker. With the
Slave Revolts in Jamaica and Haiti the killing had only stopped at the Waters
Edge. Thoreau knew what he was
suggesting, didn't he? Yeah, I know,
White People are Bad, but Violence Always Has Its Excuses, right? Every Rioter must think so. But my main point is that the characteristic
"Peace before the Storm" that we see as prelude to any deadly riot really
shouldn't count as 'peace', right? Not
if there always follows the Storm.
(19)Then
there was Gandhi with his non-violent resistance, frankly a lawyer's trick. Gandhi presided over some the most bloody
riots of the 20th Century. Gandhi may
have himself been 'peaceful and non-violent', but everybody else showed up carrying
pitchforks and torches. His Rioters once
massacred an entire police precinct, trapping the cops inside and then torching
the place.
Yeah, here’s
an interesting story: quite a while back during my World Travels I was in India doing some Ashram Hopping and
paying my respects to the different Gurus and I met this dignified but cheerful
elderly man who was accompanied by a small entourage. Somehow he was comfortably wealthy and
relatively important. He introduced himself only as The Professor. Well, I must
have been a favorite of his as he would send his people to fetch me for
breakfast or lunch or some walk with “the Professor”. Anyway, the Professor told me the story of
"A Young Man" who had known Gandhi personally when they were both in
Internment during the War. As the story
goes the Young Man endlessly fawned on Gandhi, worshiping him like a God, and
Gandhi was increasingly annoyed with it, just wishing to be left alone. Finally Gandhi couldn't take it any longer and
burst out angrily "No! You got it all wrong! I'm no Saint.
I'M A LAWYER! Non-Violence was
only a ploy to keep me from getting hanged! The charge of Sedition can only
stick if I'm found to have been "INCITING VIOLENCE", so before each and
every one of my Bloody Riots I had myself filmed before hundreds of witnesses
talking piously about Peaceful Protest and Non-Violence. And look!
Voila! I'm still alive! My trick
worked!" Wow, what a story. I had no doubt but that the young man had
been himself.
(20)But,
yeah, Gandhi became a big Rock N Roll Super Star and certainly the
Establishment would wish to guilt the People into believing that they needed to
be peaceful, just like Saintly Gandhi, during their riots and not break so much
stuff, and so the News Reels kept
rolling. They made documentaries that
kids could watch on their new television sets.
And it all caught the attention of a young Martin Luther King. Well, King took the Ideal of Non-Violence
way past anything Gandhi did with it because
he was a Reverend and Gandhi had been a scum bag lawyer. King's view was that non-violence was
crucially necessary for two reasons: any
violence would provoke a hugely disproportionate reaction, getting a great many
Blacks killed. Secondly, he was aware of
the numbers and that Blacks were actually a SMALL Minority, and so in order to
ever arrive at any political change he would need to re-kindle the old
Abolitionist White-Black Coalition, but in order to do that Blacks would have
to present a very sympathetic picture, you know, an oppressed minority THAT
DIDN'T SOMEHOW DESERVE TO BE OPPRESSED, and that is not the image they would be
presenting if they were raping, looting and pillaging, right? SO, King held seminars, teach ins, and saw
that everybody would be drilled over and over again in the importance of
non-violence, and having practice sessions where they would do their damnedest
to try to provoke one another while remaining nonplussed, unruffled, calm and serene.
(21)The Holy
Grail they were seeking would be getting National TV coverage on the Evening
Six O'clock News of being brutalized by White Police with themselves projecting
an aura of noble innocence. Finally one
day during the Birmingham protests the evening edition of the New York Times
came out and it showed a front page photo of a White Police Officer siccing a
Police Dog on a young Black Man wearing a suit jacket and tie, well, King instantly
dropped to his knees with tears in his eyes and prayed thanks to God. Saved at
Last, Saved at Last, Thank God Almighty, Saved at Last. That was veritably the
high water mark for Non-Violent Protest in all the History of the Humanity. And it worked the way King had planned. White sympathy for the Civil Right Movement
skyrocketed and thus gave the Democratic Party the permission to run through
the Civil Rights Laws.
(22)But
notice, ever since the Days of King has ANYBODY ANYWHERE been trained, drilled
and systematically conditioned to be Non-Violent? No! Even
King in just a few short years would
live to see his ideas of non-violence being challenged, that while they got the
Civil Rights Laws on the books there was no active enforcement and very little
actually changed and so the younger Black Community Leaders thought it time to
ramp up the pressure. Then when King
was killed, God Rest His Soul, well, America's cities burst into flames. They tried to keep most of it out of the News
so the Soviets wouldn't catch hold of it and play it up before the World. Yeah, just talk to anybody who was alive and
paying attention back then and you will find that they all thought that THEIR
nearby City was the only one in flames and that they wondered at the time why
it was only covered by their Local News and that Walter Cronkite thought that
ordinary Man Bites Dog stories more important for the National feeds. But, yeah,
only then, with clouds of acrid black smoke billowing over America’s
cities, did the Blacks get Affirmative
Action which meant thousands of Government Jobs for Blacks who could pass the Civil Service Exams. And there was the Johnsonian War on Poverty
that came with all those Welfare Checks that would later become so
controversial, you know, once the fires were out and forgotten. So we got a mixed message coming out of the
Civil Rights Movement, didn't we? We know
both what we are supposed to do and we know what really works. Jeez, however will we chose, right?
(23) So,
yeah, I believe the reason we hear so much of a Constitutional Right to
Peaceful Protest, that actually isn't there, is because, again, the Unites
States wishes to be able to impose an impossible moral standard on all the
other Governments around the World in order to weaken and destabilize
them. It is THEY who must tolerate
hundreds of thousands of rioters clogging the arteries of their economies and
certainly and inevitably turning violent, bringing on either disastrous regime
change or civil war. But look at the USA
where there are plenty of instances of the government violently suppressing
protests. Look at 1932 where the Army
Bonus Marchers were very violently stomped out.
Yeah, it rebounded horribly on Hoover and may have been instrumental in
losing the election for him to Roosevelt
but NOBODY at the time was talking about how he violated any
"Constitutional Right to Peaceful Protest".
In our next
Video, Part Five, we’ll discuss how Hobbes State of Nature has been updated
with a new Theory on Human Evolution which sees it as Group Based and how
success in the Politics of Democracy can only be as good as our understanding
of Social Group Dynamics, the limitations they impose, and the possibilities
for their manipulation.
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